Haugbolle 121more formally historical approach to personal history, where the narra-
tion stays closer to an ostensibly objective concept of “what happened,”
and where the alterations between several voices—internal, external, dia-
logical—typical of the Lebanese war-novel are filtered out to give room for
straighter narratives of the war. This is not to say that a straighter narra-
tion produces a more realistic rendering of the past. Rather, the existence
of several voices in one and the same discourse is often the norm rather
than the exception in both oral and written accounts of the past.^6 Using
Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia or “differentiated speech,” anthropolo-
gists have described how internally contradictive narratives of the past
are formulated differently depending on context and audience—in social
interaction as well as in a literary context, which is where Bakhtin’s ideas
were first formulated.^7
e negotiation of multiple voices and multiple truths offers a key to Th
understanding the formation of social memory. Bakhtin argued that indi-
vidual speech and thinking responds to preceding utterances, recycling,
as it were, bits and pieces of current world views. The common sense
of social groups, he believed, is essentially made up of disparate voices,
including “other voices” of often dominant discourses such as that of the
nation-state. People can communicate with each other because they iden-
tify and understand the multiple world views or voices that are necessarily
present in any form of communication.^8
ebanon, a country with confined space and an intensely diverse L
and conflicted population, is so to speak packed with voices. This necessi-
tates extremely flexible strategies of code-switching. In the public negotia-
tion of the civil war, existent themes and prior points of view mingle with
politically and emotionally charged personal experience and interpreta-
tion. For example, most Lebanese juggle narratives of communitarian
solidarity together with narratives of antisectarianism and all-inclusive
nationalism, simply because they experienced both of these sentiments
during the war and are torn between the different voices and the stories
of self and society they provide. The focus of the following examination of
war memoirs and testimonies will be to sort out why certain voices were
privileged in public and others blotted out.
e should not assume too much structure in narratives that are, On
for the most part, fragments of memory. Because individuals who have