Publics, Politics and Participation

Haugbolle 119119

Counterpublics of Memory: Memoirs and

Public Testimonies of the Lebanese Civil War

Sune Haugbolle

The climax of the social scientist’s concern with history is the

idea he comes to hold of the epoch in which he lives. The cli-

max of his concern with biography is the idea he comes to

hold of man’s basic nature, and of the limits it may set to the

transformation of man by the course of history.

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

In the reconstituting publics of postconflict societies, memory can func-
tion as a realm of counterhegemonic discourse in which defeated and
excluded elements speak against the grain. Lebanon after the Civil War
from 1975 to 1990 is a case in point.^1 This article discusses the nego-
tiation of Lebanese identity in counterpublics of memory^2 —by which I
refer to discourses about the past and particularly about the civil war that
Lebanese groups and individuals use to mark off their social identity vis-
à-vis each other—through a reading of autobiographies and testimonies
of the war. The analysis focuses on how personal narratives of violence
and suffering interact with “common sense” narratives of national history,
and what this interaction meant for the possibility of national reconcilia-
tion in the postwar period, defined as the period under Syrian hegemony
from November 1990 to May 2005.^3 More broadly, postwar Lebanon pres-
ents an opportunity to explore consensus and deliberation in the context
of identity politics and social memory in a stratified society.^4 While many