Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

124 Between Private and Public


n the postwar period, statements like these could still be heard I
in private settings, but were severely tempered in any national context.
During the war the national public sphere fractured and particularistic
ideas of Lebanese identity were given free reign within “policed” com-
munitarian spaces. As representatives of certain fractions and sects, the
leaders spoke on behalf of “their people,” often no more than a synonym
for their sect, even when that sect was dressed as “the Lebanese,” like in
the quote from Chamoun. A certain ideological standpoint translated into
a specific collective memory, which in turn translated into the ethos, or
common sense, of the sub-national group in question. Such was the pre-
vailing logic when the war was at its most divisive. After all, this was the
time when Kamal Jumblatt, who led a movement to break down barri-
ers between sects and unite the Lebanese people in a popular revolution,
allegedly declared that in case of a war in the Shuf-mountains, “one-third
of the Christians would be killed, one-third forced to emigrate and one-
third subjugated.”^18 Daily retributions, intimidations and petty violence as
well as actual massacres in the “two-year war” (1975–76) induced many
people to rally behind the party of “their” neighborhood and sect. Later
in the war, as the militias became entrenched and increasingly mafia-like,
people largely rejected these particularistic representations, albeit to no
great effect, since the war carried on until 1990.
vilian memoirs present a more complex and often more human Ci
reflection on the past than those of political leaders, who are strictly con-
fined by their role as representatives. One of the many transformative
effects of the civil war was that it altered public representation in Lebanon
and made way for the subaltern voices of Shi‘a, Palestinians and women
to express and represent themselves independently of interlocutors in
the political and cultural realm. While the militias gave this released
energy a military expression, Palestinian writers, the poets of the South
[shu‘arā’ al-janūb] and female novelists rendered new voices to parts of
the Lebanese which had previously depended on representation by others,
the others principally being zu‘amā’ [traditional political elites], bourgeois
cultural elites, husbands and fathers.^19 The next part of the article exam-
ines women’s war memoirs as examples of civilian voices and new coun-
terpublics that emerged as an effect of the war.

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