Memory and Conflict in Lebanon

Remembering and Forgetting the Past

Craig Larkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136490613
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book examines the legacy of Lebanon's civil war and how the population, and the youth in particular, are dealing with their national past. Drawing on extensive qualitative research and social observation, the author explores the efforts of those who wish to remember, so as not to repeat past mistakes, and those who wish to forget.

In considering how the Lebanese youth are negotiating this collective memory, Larkin addresses issues of:

• Lebanese post-war amnesia and the gradual emergence of new memory discourses and public debates
• Lebanese nationalism and historical memory
• visual memory and mnemonic landscapes
• oral memory and post-war narratives
• war memory as an agent of ethnic conflict and a tool for reconciliation and peace-building.
• trans-generational trauma or postmemory.

Shedding new light on trauma and the persistence of ethnic and religious hostility, this book offers a unique insight into Lebanon's recurring communal tensions and a fresh perspective on the issue of war memory. As such, this is an essential addition to the existing literature on Lebanon and will be relevant for scholars of sociology, Middle East studies, anthropology, politics and history.

1 Introduction

Beyond the War?

Memory of the war: I don’t know if I can even talk about it. I mean, if there is something in society that helps you to think about it – but everything encourages us to escape. Nothing encourages you to deal with it, to face it, nothing! They don’t even talk about it anymore and even if they do it’s from different perspectives: a theory and idea – not specific facts. I mean, it’s very dangerous to awaken something that is not yet ready to be awakened . . . It’s not easy to remember, and it’s such a blessing to forget sometimes. But if you want to remember and you want to deal with it – and I hope each one of us will want to face something, and when he is ready, then it will help.

Rola, 22, Lebanese University (LU) student¹

In a crowded Beirut café, the air thick with the sweet scent of arguile smoke² and the heady beats of Arab pop, Rola asks to stop the interview. ‘I’m not too sure I can help you with your research maybe my older sister would be better. She actually lived the war. I was young, too young to remember.’ I momentarily pause the recording explaining my interest is not in the survivors of the fifteen years of civil violence or those who personally recall the traumatic events but in the next generation, the ‘post-conflict’ youth, how do they actually remember Lebanon’s past? Rola sips her latte and looks pensive. ‘The answer is simple’, she replies. ‘They don’t.’

An awkward silence passes and Rola turns to more familiar topics – Lebanon’s recent ‘Independence Intifada’ or political uprising,³ looming parliamentary elections and the plight of women in society.

You know I work as a volunteer in the Palestinian camps, in Bourj al-Barajneh mainly. Growing up I used to think Muslims were bad people but now I’ve realised Muslim girls are just like me. They have the same emotions, the same needs; but my friends they don’t understand, instead they say do you know what the Palestinians did to us? One, two, three, they start listing.

The past, it would seem, is not always so easily forgotten. Indeed, as Rola continues to recount daily experiences in Lebanon, stories repeatedly find

comparative value or interpretative analysis in a revisitation of the war. Recent car bomb attacks targeting leading politicians and popular commercial districts of Beirut evoke ‘fears of the unknown, just like the war’.⁴ A street riot in the predominantly Christian neighbourhood of Ashrafieh sparked by Muslim protest over the Danish cartoon controversy⁵ stir memories, ‘of when we used to be religiously separated like during the war’. Popular mass demonstrations in response to the 2005 Valentine Day assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri empower long-silenced voices, ‘we all spoke – it helped us to face the past and the war’. The incongruity of Rola’s belief in a Lebanese youth absolved and relieved of all war memory and her everyday narratives implicated by historic violence and residual trauma, remains unacknowledged and unresolved. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t really help you. Our society encourages us to forget or escape from the past but never to remember.’

Rola’s interview, conducted during a year of field research between June 2005 and June 2006 amongst Lebanese students, provides a fitting frame to begin to probe the tensions and controversies that surround generational remembrance of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990). Her dialogue captures the complex and ambivalent position of Lebanese youth caught between the contradictory forces of collective memory and social forgetting. The moral obligation to recall, redeem and learn from yesterday’s failings, and the latent fear of awakening irreconcilable divisions and passions, a past ‘not yet ready to be awakened’. Her responses demonstrate both the pervasive and discursive power of official silences and yet the persistence and resilience of Lebanon’s ‘memories of violence’ or rather the ‘violence of memory’ (Makdisi and Silverstein 2006:7).

At the heart of this book is an attempt to explore the multiple and polyvalent nature of Lebanon’s residual war memory – its inscription, mediation and transformation in and through the lives of subsequent generations. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s (1997, 2008) concept of postmemory, I examine the memory of a generation who have grown up dominated not by traumatic events but by narrative accounts of events which precede their birth. This ‘inherited’ or ‘belated’ form of memory (Lury 1998) carries and connects with the ‘Pain of Others’ (Sontag 2003); suffusing temporal frames and liminal positions. Postmemory forges both mnemonic bonds to the past through ‘imaginative investment, projection, and creation’ and repressive binds within the present – to be dominated by hegemonic narratives is ‘to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation’ (Hirsch 2008: 107). The book examines this complex and dynamic mnemonic process; exploring how Lebanese postmemory is produced and reconstructed, erased and subverted, transformed and transmitted, to fit shifting social contexts, political circumstances, spatial boundaries and personal experiences. In so doing it raises significant questions concerning the limitations and potentiality of traumatic memory and its impact on identity formation, historical consciousness and social interaction. How do Lebanese youth integrate and rework such memory tropes and traces within their own everyday encounters? To what extent are postmemory narratives shaped by public silences, competing war memory discourses and the threat of recurring violence? Finally, does Lebanese postmemory present a significant obstacle to future reconciliation and national recovery or are Lebanese youth able to assimilate, redeem and transform their tragic historical legacy?

These questions are difficult to fully address within traditional perimeters of bounded memory sites, mnemonic practices and discourses but rather must rely on fluid intersubjectivist approaches (Misztal 2003) which recognise memory as ‘multiple, multivocal and mutually conflicting’ (Makdisi and Silverstein 2006:11) and acknowledge, as Robert Werbner (1998: 2) points out, ‘the processes by which memory lives, gets realised or ruptured, is textualised, becomes buried, repressed or avoided, has its effects, and is more or less transformed’. This book therefore relies on three constitutive mnemonic frames, most commonly used by Lebanese student interviewees in situating and explaining their postmemory accounts: pedagogy; material and immaterial landscapes; and oral narratives. Attention is first directed towards how the history of the Lebanese civil war is taught or ignored in public spaces of education – school syllabus, history textbooks and classroom discussions as well as the private realm of the home, through family stories, rituals and memorials. Emphasis is then placed on the dynamic production of ‘memoryscapes’ (Nuttall 1992: 39) – memories of violence localised in particular sites or empty spaces; and finally on narrative constructions of the past implicated in the ongoing search for meaning, historical truth and identity. These polysemic frames provide a means of contextualising the postmemory experience in Lebanon yet still probe wider post-conflict dilemmas over traumatic memory and civic education, post-war reconstruction and national imagining.

The goals of this book are threefold. First, I seek to challenge the notion of Lebanon’s generational amnesia – of a forgetful youth detached from the residual effects and future implications of war recollections. I contend that beyond popular discourses of social forgetfulness and youthful indifference is a postmemory generation struggling to reconcile public censure and private anguish, to come to terms with a history that resists either explanation or annihilation, and to situate their life stories between an unredeemable past and an unimaginable future. I suggest Lebanese youth may not suffer from a deficit but rather a surfeit of war memory; embedded and normalised through daily narratives and urban imaginaries (sites, spaces and absences) which inform and impact spatial patterns, social encounters and self/other perceptions. Therefore the issue is less about memory recovery but the ongoing contestation of social history in a post-war setting – its meaning, representative forms and interpretative power.

Second, the book seeks to contribute and expand upon the emerging research on Lebanese war memory – offering an anthropological snapshot of memory from below as opposed to a top-down analysis. Scholarly interest has tended to privilege elite production and cultural agency, focusing on war-related literature (Cooke 1987; Kassab 1992; Salem 2003), films (Barak 2007; Khatib 2008; Westmoreland 2008), artistic installations (Wilson-Goldie 2005; Saghie 2004), martyrs’ memorials (Volk 2010), heritage disputes (Fricke 2005; Hanssen and Genberg 2002), rebuilding projects (Sawalha 2010; Makdisi 2006; Nagel 2000; Rowe and Sarkis 1998) and memory entrepreneurs⁶ (Haugbolle 2010), rather than engaging critically with everyday processes of social transmission and internalisation. This study addresses this imbalance, exploring how Lebanese youth imbibe, consume and subvert these cultural memory productions producing dynamic and multivocal responses and encounters with the past. While the delineation of Lebanese youth or shabab is not unproblematic (Meijer 2000), my focus is on a specific post-war generation between the ages of fifteen and twentytwo, distinguished by their lack of personal recollections of the civil war which officially ended in 1990.

Finally, I seek to situate this study on Lebanon within wider transnational debates and global discursive trends concerning the role of memory in postconflict contexts. Lebanese postmemory is affected by both the emergence of universalising discourses championing transitional justice models, such as truth commissions and international inquiries, as well as popular critiques warning of the dangers of ‘active remembering’ (Devine-Wright 2001) and its potential for reigniting ethnic and sectarian hostilities, such as those unleashed in the Balkans, Africa and most recently Iraq. Michael Rothberg (2009), in his book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, provides an intercultural and globally intersectional analysis of social memory, which acknowledges ‘transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance’. The language, framing and diverse trajectories of Lebanese postmemory accounts reflect ongoing global and local encounters with memory and conflict.

Framing and Taming the Past: Global and Local Responses

The recent proliferation of transitional justice studies confirms three distinct, and at times antithetical, state-sponsored approaches to dealing with the legacy of civil conflict. The first involves the pursuit of justice through war trials and legal prosecutions. The second seeks national reconciliation through a collective forgetting and forgiving, invoking a general amnesty and the ‘politics of amnesia’ (Makdisi and Silverstein 2006). The third approach privileges truth-telling – embodied in truth commissions, a declassification of war files and public inquiries as a means of recounting the past and providing public space for victims’ voices, perpetrators’ confessions and the emergence of new national narratives (Rotberg and Thompson 2000; Barahona de Brito et al. 2001; Humphrey 2002). Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have become perhaps the preeminent model for post-conflict resolution; popularised by the South African TRC experience of the 1990s, and now with over thirty-two variants established in twenty-eight countries since 1974.⁷ Amidst increasing international support for TRCs as a catalyst for democratic transition and national rehabilitation after civil violence there is however an emerging body of critical research reflecting on the moral, political and conceptual dilemmas surrounding such procedures (Hayner 2002). Scholars and practitioners raise concerns over the dangers of a politicised and internationally contrived process; the obfuscation of national interests and individual needs; and the conflation of notions of truth and reconciliation, justice and peace, forgetting and forgiving⁸ (Hamber and Wilson 2003; Phelps 2004; du Bois and du Bois-Pedain 2009).

In the aftermath of Lebanon’s prolonged internal conflict a truth and reconciliation process was rather precluded by the partisan and volatile nature of the political recovery. The post-Taʾif order founded on Syrian military governance (Pax Syrianna 1976–2005) and dominated by former Lebanese militia leaders and traditional elites (zaʿim/zuʿamaʾ) had little incentive or interest in opening war files that could lead to their own indictment or undermine their current position of power. Similarly, a critical reckoning of the past was deemed virtually impossible due to ongoing sporadic violence and instability caused by the Israeli occupation of the south (1982–2000), Hizbullah’s armed resistance, and external interference (tadakhal) through patron-client dynamics. Instead Lebanon’s postconflict transition was forged around what some critics have termed a ‘state-sponsored amnesia’ (Kassir 2002: 204), encouraged through the culmination of a general war amnesty in 1991, media censorship laws (the 1994 broadcasting law), and the complete absence of criminal tribunals, compensation schemes or truth and reconciliation committees. The legislative pardon and exoneration for those guilty of politically motivated war crimes was, incredibly, Lebanon’s fifth general amnesty in its brief national history (1949, 1951, 1958 and 1967). For Lebanese lawyer and humanitarian activist Muhamad Mugraby (2008: 175–176) such a historic precedent reveals a culture or ‘environment of impunity’ founded on almost absolute immunity from prosecution or any form of public accountability. The official justification, on the other hand, has been reliance on the expedient doctrine of la ghalib la maghlub (no victor, no vanquished): the war was deemed to result in political stalemate, with neither victor nor defeated, enabling society to forgo the past and instead forgive, forget and move forward together. This pragmatic well-worn Lebanese political formula provides a strategy of oblivion in the aftermath of communal violence and a reversion to the established social order of sectarian power-sharing (Khalaf 2002: 150; Haugbolle 2010: 70).

Lebanon’s official policy of post-war silence and denial should not, however, be mistaken for ‘collective amnesia’ or substantiate the idea of a national ‘culture of forgetfulness’ but rather represents one discursive approach to the past amongst competing and conflicting historical narratives (Young 2000: 42–45). Indeed the initial post-war silence has given way to what Jens Hanssen and Daniel Genberg term hypermesia – the proliferation of seminars, conferences, workshops, films, books and art work, ‘confronting and rethinking’⁹ war memories, and creating an environment where ‘memory is constantly present, multiple and celebrated’ (Hanssen and Genberg 2002: 233). These public memory discourses can be briefly delineated within four broad trends: healing, engagement, resistance and revolution. The first trend is ‘revealing is healing’; this therapeutic approach, championed by victims’ groups and civil-rights activists, seeks personal closure and national unity based on truth and reconciliation. The second trend stops short of the ambitious aims of catharsis, instead content to explore and examine the violence through literary and artistic mediums. War-inspired personal memoirs, novels, plays and installations wrestle with themes of pain, guilt, forgiveness and identity.¹⁰ The same struggles are dramatised in films – from Ziad Doueiry’s groundbreaking West Beirut (1998) to Joseph Fares’ more recent Diasporic account Zozo (2005) – and in historic documentaries such as al-Jazeera’s vast fifteen part series The War in Lebanon (2004) or Mai Masri’s intimate portrayal of Children of Shatila’ (1998) in which the accident-induced amnesia of Issa, a young Lebanese Palestinian boy, serves as a metaphor for a ‘generation which have lost a past and are desperately seeking a future’.¹¹ The third trend is the growth of Lebanese nostalgia as a means of resisting post-war change and the globalising and homogenising forces of reconstruction. Samir Khalaf (2006: 35) explains this trend as an impulsive reaction to the erosion of familiar landmarks and icons, resulting in a ‘heritage crusade’ evidenced in the revival of folk arts, poetry and storytelling, and the increase in films, novels and autobiographies recalling past times, places and experiences. The fourth trend is memory recovery as a vehicle for political revolution, a popular approach of leftist intellectuals and of political opposition and civilsociety groups seeking to challenge Lebanon’s ruling elites and confront the inherent culture of sectarianism (Haugbolle 2007: 121–133). The recent ‘Independence Intifada’ campaign attests to the potential for war memory discourses to be used in bolstering claims for political change, freedom from Syrian hegemony and the revelation of ‘al-haqiqa’ (the truth) concerning the latest assassinations but also the details of the war (Safa 2006). Equally, the horrors of past sectarian violence have also been evoked as an apocalyptic warning to bolster political support for continuity, stability and maintenance of the current status quo. This emerging debate over the politicisation of war memory has sharpened with the creation of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in June 2007 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Language
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Locating a Postmemory Generation
• 3. Contesting Lebanon
• 4. (Re)imagining the Nation
• 5. Space, Place and Site
• 6. Time, Story and Myth
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index