Lebanese Wars: Memory and Forgetfulness
1. Memory: a delicate subject with many ramifications
It is now in fashion in post modernity. For valid and not to valid reasons, it is on the agenda for the peoples of the peripheries alongside human rights; civil society; gender empowerment; minority rights; environment; etc.
Rather than talk about memory and forgetfulness, I would like to distinguish between three mental processes related to memory of the past (as all memory is related to the past):
i) amnesia which I would like to define as a failure of memory and/or a form of repression of memory that follows the same logic of substitution and displacement as in the individual psyche: less important events and narrative replaces the more important ones)
ii) memory and iii) forgetting. A naïve juxtaposition posits memory versus oblivion/forgetfulness. Marc Augé in a rich little essay L’oubli (Oblivion, 2004) defends the case that the two processes have the same relationship to each other as that of life and death. He makes the following points: i) Oblivion, is ‘a component of memory itself” (2004: foreword ix) “Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the coast are created by the sea” (2004: 20) to sum it up: “oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance is its product” (2004:21) ii) One does not remember everything and one does not forget everything. “tell me what you forget and I will tell you who you are” (2004: 18) iii) All our remembrances are screens for traces they both contain and conceal (22-23). Repression of memory does not apply to the event, to the remembrance, or to the isolated trace as such, but to the connections between memories or between traces. (23) iv) Our relationship with the present passes through oblivion (25)
2. Why remember a civil war?
There is a “very simple” reason why it is necessary for the Lebanese to remember their wars of 1975-1990 and talk about it, and that is to avoid another war. Traumatic historical events have that nasty habit of repeating themselves. Two phenomena followed the Lebanon civil war: amnesia and amnesty. Amnesia manipulated a general tendency among the survivors of the wars to forget the trauma. It is as if the he cost of their survival was forgetfulness. [It is usually the second generation that is more curious and demanding in terms of memory]. The manipulation became an organized, officilaized official amnesia. The pre-war rulers and business oligarchs as well as the new rich and the war lords, share a common interest in this officialised amnesia in a number of ways.
Now the function of officialized amnesia is to suppress any rememoration of the war. In a multiplicity of ways.
+ The alliance of businessmen and warlords that took over power after the war, was especially keen to blur any responsibility of the pre-war ruling from any responsibility for the crises that led to the war. The question never asked is the following: Could the war have been averted? Or was war a fatality? There seems to be a consensus, even among those calling for reviving memory and accountability, to evade such questions. And consequently to imply that yes the war was bound to happen and had to last exactly at long as it lasted. At the same time, officilaized amnesia blurrs the responsibility of the war lords who have become the present rulers of the country.
But there is another reason for this officialised amnesia: the need to rebuild the Lebanon economic, social, and political system on the same bases as before the war: sectarianism and unbridled free trade economy. Officialised amnesia went hand in hand with the promises of the post war period resumed in one word: reconstruction as symbolized by the reconstruction of Beirut’s devastated centre into an international world trade center of some 2 million square metres of office space. The message: new Lebanon symbolized by the reconstruction of downtown Beirut would be a simple return to the pre-war golden age of sectarian coexistence and economic prosperity. Nevertheless, if the situation in pre-war Lebanon was such a ‘golden age’, as the late Prime Minister Mr Hariri had wanted us to believe, why then did the war occur in the first place?
The answer to this question is ready. In order to break any causal linkage between the pre-war period and the war itself, the war is presented as ‘the war of others’, or its modified version the ‘war for the others’, both coined by mr. ghassan tueini. Both formulas confirm the innocence of the Lebanese at large from any responsibility and accountability for the war. The ‘others’ are to blame. The forbidden question of course is: how come so many Lebanese were keen to kill each other over some fifteen years for those ‘others’? but who are the others? A dominant version of this officialized amnesia is quite current these days with new champions. Tawteen is the codeword: ‘the Palestinians’, the only protagonist of the war who was no more represented on the negotiation tables to end it, are being held responsible for the war of others, accused of a conspiracy to implement themselves in Lebanon as their final homeland. There is no amnesia without an alternative causality for the trauma.
Amnesty. The amnesty law of 1989 takes care of accountability. Since the war was the war of others, no one is responsible and no one punishable. The law contains an additional aberration to further humiliate the more than a hundred thousand victims of that war. A militiaman/militia leader responsible for killing a few hundred civilians, can benefit from the amnesty law and acquitted of any persecution. But one implicated one way or another with the murder or attempted murder of a dozen politicians or religious dignitaries- is still liable to prosecution.
3. What to remember?
Contrary to prevailing wisdom, where the process of remembrance is focused mainly on war as violence, I would like to submit that what we primarily need is to remember are the causes of the war and and the lessons of the war. The war needs also to be represented as a narration, i.e. as an objective chronological sequence of events and developments. It is a “human right” for the Lebanese to know what happened in the war in the form of a chronology, and to be able listen to, read, watch and be acquainted with, all the narratives on the causes of that war, its development, actors, local, regional and international, how it came to an end and what lessons can be drawn from it.
4. What to forget?
Amnesia is living the trauma in the present, permanently reenacting it. Reliving the trauma without its cause. Or by inventing secondary/presumed/mythical causes for it. To forget = to live the present. You can only forget and be cured of the trauma by discourse.
Though I am not a fan of Ernest Renan for French and Lebanese reasons, I still believe he coined an interesting equation for our topic: a nation is built upon shared memories as well as shared oblivions/forgetfulness. In my opinion, the horrors of the war, the killings, the vendettas, massacres, the different forms of violence, physical or ritual or symbolic, are better forgotten. As Renan says that the massacre of Saint Barthelemy is better forgotten. But let me repeat: We can only forget what we remember, what we know.
‘A memory of forgetfulness’ is the title of Mahmoud Darwish’s memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut summer 1982. It is both a love song to Beirut and a way of presenting the poet’s excuses to the Lebanese people in the name of the Palestinian people and the PLO organizations for all the mistakes during their Lebanese experience. The title itself says it all: you can willfully forget only what you remember, that is what you have recuperated form oblivion and amnesia. An Arab proverb informs us that man is called insan because he is nasin, oblivious. Forgetfullness can be construstive.
5. I wish to conclude on two notes concerning Time.
i- memory and history: collective memory cannot be the product of a collection of individual memories, however important those are. It can only be a construct. This is to propose that there is no collective memory without and effort at historization. In other words, History is a component of collective memory.
ii- memory and the future. Memory is about the past. But what about the present and the future? We made a distinction between the need to survive in the present and the need to forget. There is more. How much effort, intellectual or otherwise, is to be allotted to settling accounts with the past and how much to imagining the future? in his monumental The Principle of Hope, the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch offers an original critique of Freud, as he distinguishes between dreams and day dreams: dreams (night dreams) are about the past, daydreams are about the future. In so doing, Bloch juxtaposes two intellectual activities: memory and Hope. Daydreams express hope; they represent wishes and desires to be fulfilled. Hope requires as much intellectual and psychic effort as memory, yet Hope requires something more: will and imagination. We need daydreams at least as much as we need (night) dreams in a world dominated by a postmodern jargon that wants us to believe that progress has become a dirty word!