A Memory of Forgetfulness

A paragraph in the official history book; an old building in a capital’s side street; old stones from a city’s distant history. It is the story of a country that keeps forgetting itself. It is a country afraid of its own image. A country whose memory is doomed to be constantly forgotten; each time it surfaces it must again be engulfed in the missing sentences of that history book, the high walls of its rapidly multiplying luxury towers, and the soil of a new coastline rich with mass graves.

As a young student studying the history of modern Lebanon at school in preparation for the official exams I always wondered about that oversized picture of some modern leader occupying the space that should have been given to a more elaborate explanation of what happened in the not-so-distant past. I could not understand how the civil war that characterized the sounds and images of my childhood for the first 9 years of my life and more than 15 years of the country’s post “independence” could be explained in a paragraph of 5 lines. It was a paradox to see that what defined and still defines people’s lives in this country and would be evoked in every discussion about life, memories, and politics (itself one of the most common topics to be heard in a Lebanese small talk) is confined in one paragraph of denial.

I grew up to see that forgetting is not a specific feature of the history book; already in my early university studies I was talking in the past tense about landmarks and places that were rapidly turning into shopping malls, clothing stores, and huge luxurious buildings devoid of any warmth or identity and feeding on the city’s social fabric. The war had taken away whole quarters and had left others with beautiful scars reminding its inhabitants of their deeds and ordeals. Even before most of them had disappeared behind new paintjobs or makeshift plastic surgery, it was striking to see how unnoticed they were in the capital’s daily chaos.

The bullet holes quickly melted into the walls they had decorated. Abandoned buildings seem to have been made for the purpose of being abandoned; what happened to the people who once lived here? Does anyone even realize that they were once inhabited? Some of the wartime graffiti (an understudied and unexplored art) still linger despite the fading colors of their cheap paint. This is a history that will probably never manage to invade any book.

After the end of the war that had already destroyed part of the country’s history and transformed it into a mythical narrative of a fictional golden age now lost, the reconstruction process was announced. The city was now a huge construction site for a huge urban farce to revive what would be called Beirut, “an old city for the future” (or so the slogan could be translated).

Archeology never befriended business, and this was one of the reasons for the destruction of Beirut’s archeological treasures. An old roman bath would be more economically viable as rubble to enlarge the coastline rather than a witness of an old historical period, or so it seems. Monument upon monument and landmark upon landmark soon disappeared to give way to new and empty luxury buildings that supposedly retraced the capital’s architectural traditions (and feed on the national shortage of electricity in order to be visible even at night).

While the distant history of the city is devoured by its new image as an example of the power of capital, its less distant history is in turn subjected to a similar, less systematic (or geographically concentrated) destruction. 19th century houses, old urban landmarks, and middle and lower class social spaces are replaced by cold, aggressive, and ugly luxurious concrete behemoths.

Stones are not inanimate figures devoid of meaning; they are social spaces encompassing social ties and stories that should be explored before they are relegated to the past tense of memories or the non-existent tense of forgetfulness. Evolution, development, and future are a process that entails an understanding of the past in order to design and define the future. Remembering is a learning process; history and war – the history of war - are one of its most important lessons. In Lebanon, however, we strive to learn how to always forget so that at no point we would ever come to realize our responsibility for our own forgotten past.