Haugbolle 127Reflecting on her neighborhood in Hamra, she bemoans the fall from
grace of prewar Ras Beirut. Whereas the public space before the war was
ordered by the values (and power) of what she calls “bourgeois cosmo-
politanism,” it is now a cacophony of lowlife refugees brandishing cheap
copies of Western products.^26 This comment should not be taken as an
attack on the intrusion of socially marginalized groups onto the stomping
ground of Beirut’s liberals. The real source of her spleen is the permeation
of sectarian values and sectarian representation in all of Lebanese society.
If anything has changed because of the war, she finds, it is this: that the
narrow strip beyond sectarianism that she and her peers inhabited has
been reduced to a patch. She, as a Leftist Christian, feels branded by her
religious background and in perpetual danger of being misrepresented by
the political parties, and misunderstood by outsiders who buy into that
representation:
People use the word Christian too often when referring
to certain political parties. I squirm. It is not the same, you
know: political ideologies and religious, cultural heritage are
two different things ... For years, foreign journalists spoke of
“Christian Rightists” and “Muslim Leftists,” and we chided
them for their simplistic reduction of complicated history to
these clichés in which we were caught, branded.^27Her memoirs also include riveting descriptions of the Israeli invasion in
1982 and of the last part of the war in 1989. These chapters are power-
ful renderings of civilian suffering: of the jagged rhythm of personal life
during the worst fighting; of the constant concern with al-h.awādith [the
events], of shattered nerves and broken human relations, but also of the
survival mechanisms which carried people through the war, not least of
which was a black, black humor.
oha Beshara’s S Resistance was published thirteen years after
Makdisi’s book was written, and a quarter of a century after Tabbara’s
Survival in Beirut. Beshara’s story of the war is written from a more sub-
altern perspective than those of the two bourgeois, even if socially com-
mitted, Palestinian women from liberal West Beirut. What also sets her
apart is that, rather than being of interest as a documentation of the typi-
cal, her tale is a rather unusual one. As a young Greek Orthodox girl from