Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

120 Between Private and Public


of the arguments developed about war memory may apply equally to the
period after 2005, the scope here is restricted to the specifics that charac-
terized the public sphere in the 1990–2005 era.


The multiple voices of war memories


—You know, Lina, one day we’ll be looking back at all this with nostalgia.
This is what a friend of Lina Tabbara tells her as she is leaving Beirut at
the end of the “two-year war” in 1975–76,^5 after she has given up on “sur-
vival in Beirut,” the title of her war memoirs from 1977. The idea that any-
one would think about a bloody civil war in nostalgic terms may seem
uncanny. But in fact, nostalgia for the war was not an uncommon senti-
ment in postwar Lebanon. This was partly due to a sustained social, politi-
cal and economic crisis in the postwar period, which made some people
look to the past rather than to the future. Lebanese intellectuals, artists,
academics, activists and politicians have offered various explanations for
the apparent lack of historical consciousness. Some point to the failure
of the state to encourage remembering and teach the younger generation
what happened in the war, while others look for an explanation in the
inconclusive end to the war. Whatever the explanation, the idea that a “col-
lective amnesia” was plaguing society gradually became a common sense
notion in itself, to the effect that most attempts to make the memory of the
war public in postwar Lebanon, and particularly after 1998, were formu-
lated in response to this so-called “collective amnesia.” Silence was seen as
hegemonic, and remembering and commemoration as “truth telling.” As
we shall see, this dichotomy between silence/forgetting/death and speech/
memory/life, which prepared the ground ontologically for the popular slo-
gan of “the truth” in the Independence Intifada in 2005, glossed over the
complexities of the public sphere in Lebanon by ignoring the existence of
multiple memory narratives and their precarious interrelations.
n Lebanese war and postwar literature and films the attempt to I
come to terms with the difficult relation between personal memory
and national history is a common theme. The prominent novelist Elias
Khoury and many others like him describe reality as it appears through
the blurred filter of memory. Compared to novels, memoirs represent a

Free download pdf