Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

122 Between Private and Public


lived through violent conflict tend to remember the past in fragments
it also often appears fragmented in public renderings.^9 The nation-state
will often seek to straighten the bended fragments and create national
history out of their confusing disparities. In fact, many studies of social
memory highlight how hegemonic state-sanctioned discourses of the past
are received, reformulated and countered by civil society.^10 Since there
was little or no state-orchestrated attempt to create homogeneous his-
tory out of the disparate parts of war-memory in postwar Lebanon, the
debate was shaped in a way that reflected the elements of society and their
power relations. The result was not silence or amnesia, as some Lebanese
claimed, but a dislocated discussion in various tempi and various spheres,
each with their villains and heroes, and each their conclusions on the
Lebanese Civil War.
utobiographies—“self life stories”—and related genres (testimo-A
nies, diaries, letters) have been studied mostly by literary critics who
show how structured narratives help people make sense of existence
on the individual level by telling their lives to themselves.^11 On a more
critical note, Bourdieu has argued that the creation of self through the
re-creation of the past is nothing more than an “autobiographical illu-
sion.”^12 What seems to be an organized life in the rendering may in fact,
on closer inspection, have been a series of chances and random opportu-
nities. At best, he suggests, this is a case of ex post facto explanations; at
worst, self-delusion or even a deliberate cover-up operation. Other writ-
ers have noted that autobiographical writing tends to substitute historical
time with a subjective concept of time, in which objective criteria for what
is important to tell are overshadowed by the situation of the writer and
restricted by the finality of the time span of his or her lifetime. Within
this personal time, a linearity is often invented which may not have been
visible (or present) in the lived moment. Life, if told in hindsight, seems
to have been lived towards a goal, a telos, creating a narrative imbued with
“retrospective teleology.”^13
n autobiographical accounts of the Lebanese Civil War, the per-I
sonal level of self-creation is invested in the re-creation of the country’s
feeble national history during and after the war. There is much truth to
be found in these texts, but also a fair share of retrospective teleology on
behalf of the nation. Memoirs and testimonies, like all public statements,

Free download pdf