Haugbolle 125The autobiographies of three Lebanese women
Lina Tabbara wrote her memoirs as early as 1977, a time when many
people thought that the civil war had come to an end. Tabbara’s book
is a breathless account of the political events of the two-year war, seen
through the eyes of a young, well-off woman from the liberal end of West
Beirut. Like most other stories of the civil war, she starts her narrative
with what psychologists call a “flashbulb memory” of 13 April 1975.^20 Her
narration picks up the pace in synchrony with the pace of events, as ordi-
nary citizens like her and her husband find themselves encroached upon
by a conflict which they do not support and whose murky sociocultural
driving forces they fail to grasp. Yet the war gradually imposes its own
logic on people, and Lina and her husband watch with bewilderment and
fear as the first passport-murders^21 are reported close to their home in
‘Ayn al-Muraysa^22 and friendships in their circle break along sectarian
lines. In the frenzy of this climate, the author herself finds it increasingly
difficult to maintain her neutral place between the pro-Christian and pro-
Palestinian positions, and after the massacres on Black Saturday,^23 she
loses control of her emotions:
Today, 7th December 1975, no one in Lebanon can pretend
any longer not to have taken sides. Noble humanitarian feel-
ings and sanctimonious pacifism have had their day. I am
Lebanese, Moslem and Palestinian and it concerns me when
three hundred and sixty-five Lebanese Moslems are murdered.
I feel the seeds of hatred and the desire for revenge taking root
in my very depths. At this moment I want the Mourabitoun or
anybody else to give the Phalangists back twice as good as we
got. I would like them to go into offices and kill the first seven
hundred and thirty defenceless Christians they can lay their
hands on.^24These memories illustrate how the enforced representation by political
parties and militias could seem strangely alien to the represented at one
point, only to make all the sense in the world when one’s own commu-
nity comes under attack. At the same time, the book paints a portrait of
people who fought with all their might to resist this logic. Tabbara does