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Yesterday: The Amnesia of Amnesty – Save Beirut: today
The unfinished nature of the civil war has hindered the capacity of the nation to deal with the memory of the conflict. More than fifteen years after the end of the civil war, the Beirut city center is yet to be completely reconstructed. Despite the major renovation and reconstruction efforts deployed by Solidère, the vast majority of the Down Town area remains empty, almost ghostlike. Beirut is a vacant terrain vague, a voided center that’s physical and political structures were dismantled by a dual tabula rasa resulting from a destructive civil war and the subsequent reconstruction efforts. Those unfilled spaces in the urban structure only reveal the gaps that the unfinished civil war left in Beirut’s history.
The Lebanese state’s attempt to suppress memory through a systematic de/reconstruction of the urban heritage reveals that the wounds have not healed. There is no official memorial, apart from a monument erected somewhere in the mountains that was offered to the Ministry of Defense in 1995 by the French sculptor Arman. And there is no reason to expect any official initiative to remember the war.
There have been, however, numerous initiatives in the public sphere to engage in the construction of a national narrative and to work a way towards collective memory. Before the war even ended, an aesthetic movement has taken up the task of inscribing the trauma that the Lebanese society has been through: prolific literature works account for invaluable memories of the civil war and are certainly crucial in the formation of a certain narrative to remember the civil war. Examples of such artistic work include the novels of Elias Khoury and Hoda Barakat, only to cite a few, and their numerous attempts to romanticize the civil war in their writings.
Moreover, a number of young artist and architect have centered their works on the topic of post-war memories and amnesia among them Lamia Joreige’s videos, Walid Raad’s multimedia art work and Ziad Doueiri’s cinematographic work (Cooke, 2002). However, that type of remembrance fails to confront the larger public sphere with the necessity to critically approach emotionally and politically charged memories. The growing sectarian divisions within the Lebanese society are a clear signal that the national Lebanese identity has yet to be shaped and that the state’s unresolved political problems need to be addressed. It doesn’t matter if the reconstruction of the city center has erased the traces of the war because the scars, the real scars, are still visible.
The war has yet to end.
Extract from a thesis titled “The amnesia of amnesty: The reconstruction of collective memory in post-war Beirut”, By Dara Mouracadé, Written under the supervision of Professor J. Rosen, April 5, 2007, McGill, Montreal; Revised on March 21, 2010
The following selection of books discusses the collective memory of the civil war and examines the tension between the process of forgetting and remembering in the context of the urban reconstruction of the Beirut city center. Furthermore, they explore the relationship between the capacity of the nation to deal with the memory of the conflict and the unfinished nature of the end of the war, in particular the transition from war into peace through a law of general amnesty justified by the formula of la ghalib la maghlub (no victory, no vanquished) and how it contributes to a culture of amnesia. Finally, they attempt to justify that examining recent history as well as the role and responsibility of the Lebanese in the civil war is an important process in creating a national narrative and critically facing Lebanon with its past to make sense of what happened during the war.
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At the Edge of the City: Reinhabiting Public Space toward the Recovery of Beirut's Horsh Al-Sanawbar by Fadi Shayya
This book is an edited volume on public space in Beirut, featuring the work of over 25 scholars, professionals, journalists, activisits and artists. It is a contemporary critique of urban governance and spatial production in Beirut. Its tone is threefold as it is advocating in scope, multisciplinary in approach and journalistic in style. It focuses on the case of Beirut’s park Horsh Al-Sanawbar.
The book is supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS. For more information, check their blog: includes detailed introduction and table of content |
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War and Memory in Lebanon by Sune Haugbolle
It is hard to find a consensus among the Lebanese on the exact date of the end of the war. Lebanon came out of the war with a number of political problems unresolved. The Taif agreement signed in 1989 under the formula la ghalib la maghloub (no victor, no vanquished) marked the country’s transition from a state of war to a state of peace. Shortly after that, a law of general amnesty that pardoned all “crimes against humanity and those which seriously infringe human dignity” was passed in 1991 (Haugbolle, 2005). The majority of the Lebanese warlords were pardoned and none were compelled to assume their role and responsibility during the civil war. That violent period in history conveniently became La guerre des autres (The war of the others). Consequently, those that destroyed their own country were now responsible for its reconstruction; those who killed now ruled. By default, the war had to be forgotten to be able to move on, thus installing a “state-sponsored amnesia”. |
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Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City by Aseel Sawalha
At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city's historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism. In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut. |
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Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction by Howayda Al-Harithy
After the ceasefire, a group of architects and planners from the American University of Beirut formed the Reconstruction Unit to help in the recovery process and in rebuilding the lives of those affected by the 2006 war in Lebanon. This book is a series of case studies documenting the work of the Unit discusses the lessons to be learned from the experiences of Lebanon after the July War, and suggests how those lessons might be applied elsewhere. The cases are diverse in terms of scale, type of intervention, methods, and approaches to the situation on the ground. Critical issues such as community participation, heritage protection, damage assessment and compensation policies, the role of the state, and capacity building are explored and the success and failures assessed. |
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Untitled Tracks - ÊÓÌíáÇÊ ÈáÇ ÚäæÇä by Tanya Traboulsi, Ziad Nawfal, Ghayla Saadawi
Daily Star, Wednesday, March 17, 2010 Over the past couple of years, Tanya Traboulsi has assiduously photographed the performances, studio sessions and off-duty moments of a specific segment of Lebanon’s music-making community. These images form the foundation of “Untitled Tracks,” a new book edited by Ziad Nawfal and Ghalya Saadawi. |
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Beyrouth by day by Tania Hadjithomas Mehanna
BEIRUT | iloubnan.info - January 19, 2010
The texts by Tania Hadjithomas and photos of Ghadi Smat reveal a different Beirut. The capital is shown as what it could be under its best light, with its astonishing beauty, far from stereotypes. "It's like a woman, a queen of the night that would appear in daylight, with no makeup or blush”. That’s how Tania Hadjithomas talks about Beirut, how the city appears in Beyrouth by Day, the book she has just published at Tamyras, her publishing house. She’s the author of bilingual French-English texts of this book, illustrated by images from photographer Ghadi Smat. Looking at the map, we get a feeling that Tania and Ghadi have had a quite the journey. These few weeks have completed several years of work done by Tania, during which she wrote about her city, “For someone like me who loves the city, I noticed thanks to this book that I didn’t know enough," she said. "I discovered many things. During these months of walking, I sometimes walked in streets without knowing exactly where I was heading to. Then a few meters away I realized that I was close to familiar places." Poetry that prevails comes from outside, from each stone, from each acquainted face. These walks in the capital are simply realistic. It is surprising to see how these factual photos and texts make you want to go walking for real. Along the pages, we listen to what people told her at street corners. We learn and we understand why Khalil decided to destroy his beautiful traditional house in Geitawi to build a five-storey building instead. We discover what’s hiding inside a bookstore in Basta, where Mohammed the bookseller sits amid overloaded shelves. In Mar Elias, we meet Safa, the 64 years old coach of a sports center, proudly parading a picture of himself in his vigorous youth. We also discover here and there a garden, a fountain, hidden behind walls marked with shrapnel.
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