Trauma and Memory
I would like to distinguish between three mental processes related to memory of the past: i) amnesia 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; secondary causes take the place of primary 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, 20-25) reminds us that oblivion is ‘a component of memory itself”. One does not remember everything and one does not forget everything. One is always forgetting, in that sense. Repression of memory does not apply to the event, to the remembrance, or to the isolated trace in our brains as such, it severs the connections between memories or traces. Here is where the question of causality comes in as we shall see in a moment.
Why remember a civil war? The “simple” answer: in order to avoid another one. But for the answer not to become simplistic, one has to define what to answer and what to forget.
Two phenomena followed the Lebanon civil war: officialized amnesia and amnesty.
Amnesia is a process that exploits a general tendency among the survivors of the wars to repress the memory of the trauma. It is usually the second generation that is more curious and demanding in terms of memory. This manipulation produced an officialized amnesia.
The alliance of businessmen and warlords that took over power after the war, was especially keen to blur any discussion of the responsibility for the crises that led to the war. The question not to be asked was and still is: Could the war have been averted? Presenting the war as an obvious fatality, with all the allusions to ‘conspiracies’, was the way to simply kill the question? At the same time, this officiliazed amnesia blurred the responsibility of the warlords for the war, as they have become the country’s present rulers.
There is another reason for officialized amnesia: the need to rebuild the Lebanon economic, social, and political system on the same bases as before the war: sectarian sharing of power and unbridled free trade economy based on finance and trade. Economically, 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. That begged another question: if the situation in pre-war Lebanon was such a ‘golden age’ why then did the war occur in the first place?
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 ‘for the others’ over Lebanese territory. Both formulas innocent the Lebanese at large from any guilt, responsibility or accountability for the war. The ‘others’ are to blame: you can fill the blank with your own scapegoat.
Amnesty. The amnesty law of 1989 took care of accountability and punishment. It amnestied all criminal acts from April 1975 to the end of 1989 and contained an additional aberration to further humiliate the hundred thousand victims of the war. It made exception of the death of a dozen politicians or religious dignitaries killed during that period; those crimes – called ‘crimes against the security of the State’- are still liable to persecution.
On the basis of the above, let me suggest et me suggest this anti-formula: The obligation of memory and the need of forgetfulness.
Presently, the process of remembrance is focused mainly on war as violence, guilt and reconciliation included. What is suggested is the memory of causes. Once enough distance has been taken from the trauma, the war can be narrated as a past. 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 to 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.
Inasmuch as memory is needed so is forgetting which should be pitted against amnesia, that is living the trauma in the present, permanently reenacting it. Forgetting is to remember causality and live the present, live in the present, distanced from the past.
Ernest Renan has coined an interesting equation: a nation is built upon shared memories as well as shared oblivions. In the case of Lebanon the horrors of the war, the killings, the vendettas, massacres, different forms of violence, physical, ritual or symbolic, had better been forgotten, to use Renan’s words concerning the massacre of Sainte Barthelemy.
But let me insist: we can only forget what we remember. ‘A memory of forgetfulness’ is the title of Mahmoud Darwish’s memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut summer 1982. The title says it all for our concerns: you can willfully forget only what you remember, that is what you have recuperated from oblivion and amnesia. You can also choose to forgive. That is if the idea s for people to continue living together. An Arab proverb informs us that man is called insan because he is nasin, oblivious. Forgetfullness can be constructive, even human.