Realities and Nightmares
Space and Activity
Time and Bracketing
Body and Perception
Self and Sociality
Language and Communication
Consciousness and Attention
Joie de Vivre and Muted Suffering
The Emergence of a Civil Society
Endnotes
References

Realities and Nightmares

Kawabis Bayrut (Beirut Nightmares) belongs to the early Lebanese war literature. It was written and published in Beirut, in Arabic, in 1976, by Ghada Samman, a Syrian journalist and writer, and an old resident of the Lebanese capital. The book lists around 200 nightmares in which the author describes her experiences in Beirut at the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. It includes a social, economic, and political critique of the Lebanese reality of the time, as well as reflections on the place of intellectuals, particularly women, in that reality. Some of its stories are about nightmares in the proper sense of the term; others are narratives of Samman’s daily, waking life, which itself seems to be transformed into a continuous, never-ending nightmare, marked by fear and anxiety. These nightmares illustrate the irruption of terror and paralyzing violence into the various spheres of ordinary life: those of work and intellectual activity, private and social life; a terror and violence that affects individuals when moving, hearing, looking, perceiving, sensing, breathing, eating, sleeping ,dreaming, imagining, planning, remembering, wishing, forgetting, talking, and loving. [1]

The violence gradually imposes its law on the different domains of life, creating a new reality which threatens and transforms the old pre-war reality, changing the latter into a sort of “secondary reality”. The Beiruti is thereby thrown into a new situation of constant emergency in his/her daily life, one which gradually comes to coexist with normality, the latter forming enclaves in the former.

In her civil war memoir Beirut Fragments, Jean Said Makdisi writes:

Every now and then the nightmare seems to recede in the various parts of the city for a few hours, days, weeks, and, at times, months, creating “brackets” or “oases” of pseudo-calm and pseudo-normality in which life continues, however precariously and feebly. Yet this calm is always threatened by the outbreak of manifold forms of violence. Indeed, the outright violence, had become the “paramount reality” of Beirut for fifteen long years. The object of this paper is to describe this double reality of war and normality which shaped the daily life of the Lebanese for a decade and a half, and which left deep scars among the Lebanese.

Since the beginning of 1991, Lebanon seems to be quieter. The fighting has stopped. Beirut is no longer divided and the city center is accessible again. However, this easing of military tension is not the outcome of a constructive approach by the Lebanese to their conflicts, but rather a consequence of regional developments. The process of normalization remains precarious, however, especially as long as the Middle East remains unstable and a comprehensive settlement to its numerous problems is not reached. The fact remains that the Lebanese have been experiencing a certain process of normalization. They have been able to move around more easily, and to visit people and places they couldn’t have previously. The survival imperative will probably motivate most of them to suppress their memories of the past years and to instead look forward to a more positive and promising future. But even if suppressed, the war experiences will shape the emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and actions of the Lebanese for some time. Any understanding of their present and future will require an attempt to understand those experiences. This paper aims to make a contribution to this effort, by reconstructing the structures of daily life which prevailed under civil war conditions.

Acts of violence were generally carried out by a relatively small number of Lebanese and non-Lebanese. The majority of the people in the country suffered and endured their effects, searching all the time for a means of survival. This article will limit itself to the latter and focus on the city of Beirut, where much of the violence was concentrated throughout the years of war. When speaking of Beirutis, I refer to both the inhabitants of East Beirut and West Beirut. In fact, both endured more or less the same forms of violence and experienced the same “paramount reality” of the civil war. The interesting question is to what extent did their common experience of that reality bring Lebanese from different ideological and confessional camps closer together? Did they remain alien to each other, in spite of their having endured a similar fate? Or did these experiences create a common ground for them, one which allowed them to transcend their ideological barriers and meet for a constructive recognition of one another?

Much has been written about the geo-political, military, religious, and economic aspects of the Lebanese conflict. However, very few studies have been devoted to the way the Lebanese themselves perceived the conflict, and the way in which the various spheres of their lives, their attitudes, and visions were affected by it. The perceptions and personal experiences of people are relevant for the study of such conflicts for two reasons. First, because people themselves are relevant. Conflicts and wars and not carried out in abstract political, economic, or social systems, but in the concrete lives of people. They are their perpetrators and/or victims, and it is in their bodies and souls that the most devastating effects of armed strife are to be found. Second, the perceptions and lived experiences of people are also relevant because they play a major role in shaping their socio-cultural and political attitudes, actions and reactions, and thereby influence the military and political course of events.

In a collection of essays on myths and politics in Lebanon, Nawaf Salam underlines the importance of these perceptions, writing that the vision of reality becomes itself reality, and in its turn confronts reality (Salam 1987:7). Theodor Hanf, one of the foremost experts on Lebanon, devoted his recent book Koexistenz im Krieg: Staatszerfall und Entstehen einer Nation im Libanon to this very aspect of the conflict. In it, he emphasizes the importance of understanding the perceptions of those involved in conflict, be they politicians, military leaders, militiamen, or simple citizens, for the study of internal conflicts in multinational and pluralistic states (Hanf 1990: 64).

Interviews with Beirutis and novels on the Lebanese war have served as access to this “paramount reality”. Both transmit a vivid picture of that reality and offer an insight into its various aspects. The literature analyzed here includes social science studies as well as fiction, memoirs, and diaries/accounts which were written throughout the war years by Lebanese and Beirutis from all sides. The literature succeeds, to a large extent, in putting into words experiences of extreme situations which, for many, were often difficult to express. If the war in Lebanon appears to be over, the literature of the war instead transposes us into an actuality which this paper will try to replicate. For this we have to return to a time period between 1975 and 1990.

Space and Activity

The shouf mountains overlooking Beirut offer a breathtaking view of the city and the seaside to the East and West of it. Ever since the beginning of the war, however, the view they offer is a sad one. In times of fighting, one can watch the shelling in the city, which appears like a macabre projection of a sound and light show, a city lit by gruesome “fireworks.” On relatively calm days, when the electricity is not cut, the city shines quietly with a million sparkling lights, and breathesslowlduring its precious moments of reprieve.

A huge black hole stands out at the very center of it, however it is what was once the old city center, with its innumerable souqs, fountains churches, mosques; with its historical squares and monuments, its modern commercial and banking centers, its hotels, restaurants, cafés, brothels and cinemas. It was the active heart of the city, indeed of the whole country, where Lebanese from all social and religious groups mingled and contributed to what was called the “Lebanese miracle,” the quick ascension of the young Republic to economic prosperity after its independence in 1943. Since the early years of the war it has been a vast terrain of ruins invaded by wild vegetation and guarded by various fighting factions. With the outbreak of the civil war, the city center was emptied of its inhabitants and businesses, its buildings were confiscated, destroyed, and burnt down, whereupon the whole area was transformed into a dangerous military zone, a frightening no-man’s land. People no longer had access to their shops and offices, nor were they able to meet with their colleagues and neighbors.

In a sense the city embodied a certain view of the Republic, albeit a controversial one, as a prosperous free market built on individual initiative, and as a harmonious haven for many different religious and ethnic minorities. The war ruined and depopulated the old city center, and transformed it into a “black hole,” erasing it from the surface of Beirut with all that it stood for. It instead became a kind of forced black-out in the memory of the Lebanese and of their Republic.

This huge terrain of ruins is located in the middle of Beirut along the “Green Line” between the two divided sectors of the capital. Along this line, the “steady” fighting front between East and West Beirut, streets and bridges connecting the two parts of the city are closed most of the time to civilian traffic, forcing inhabitants to make interminable and often dangerous detours to reach the “other side”. These crossing points are blocked with barricades or made fatally dangerous by shelling, sniping, or kidnapping. However blocked routes do not solely exist at the crossing points between the two Beiruts; they are also found within each part of the city and its surrounding areas. This implies a considerable restriction of the Beirutis’ vital space and a drastic limitation on their freedom of movement. Indeed, Beirut looks like a huge labyrinthine prison. In her long poem, Ila rajol lam ya`ti (To a Man Who Did Not Come), the Lebanese poet Nour Salman writes: “We are the inhabitants of the cages” (Salman 1986: 24). [2]

Not only is free movement heavily restricted, it is also dangerous. In fact, the war does not take place “out there”, on some front, away from civilian life, but in the heart of it: in the city and its streets, in its commercial and residential areas, in the apartments and houses of its inhabitants, in its schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, synagogues, shopping centers, cinemas, theaters, market places, swimming compounds, in its university campuses, museums, seaside promenades and forests. The ever-present threat of violence, in its multifarious forms (random and sudden shelling, sniping, kidnapping, car bombs), is everywhere and nowhere.

The general atmosphere of constant insecurity transforms the spatial environment of the Beiruti into a mine-field: car bombs or other devices can explode anywhere, shelling can start at any time, any armed militiaman can allow himself to impose his “right” on any other militiaman or on any civilian, and infighting among militias of the same “side” can break out any moment. Beirutis are permanently conscious of these dangers and thus try to reduce their movements to a bare minimum. The Beiruti feels like a hostage in his/her own city.

The total unpredictability of the situation makes planning virtually impossible and long-term projection hardly conceivable. The frequent interruption of activities due to a sudden outbreak of violence jeopardizes continuity and efficiency. Loss of energy, loss of potentiality and productivity, discouragement and apathy, characterize the relation of Beirutis to their activities. Any undertaking is a high-risk enterprise undermined by innumerable factors of uncertainty.

Uncertainty has become the horizon of the Lebanese, writes the Lebanese journalist and literary critic, Sami Anhoury, in a collection of his newspaper articles entitled Un enfer familier (Anhoury 1985: 13). The book reads like a war diary spanning the years 1983-1984. The Beiruti has had to learn to cope with unpredictability, and to be always ready to improvise because he/she knows that this unstable situation is a long-term one, and that life has to go on, that food has to be provided, that money has to be earned, and that schooling has to continue. Indeed, the chronic character of the situation plays a crucial role in shaping the adaptiveness of Beirutis. For the Lebanese psychoanalyst Mounir Chamoun, this attitude leads to a “double-bind” situation: people try to adjust to the conditions they are confronted with in order to survive. But in so doing, they indirectly contribute to upholding these conditions from which in fact they would like to liberate themselves (Chamoun 1990: 34). [3]

Every now and then, during lulls in fighting, this disturbing situation offers enclaves of pseudo-peace, where conditions of war seem to recede, and where undertaking activities seems plausible. The Beiruti is always conscious of the possibility of a shift from a situation of pseudo-calm to outright violence and vice-versa. In Beyrouth ou la fascination de la mort, Lebanese anthropologist Issa Makhlouf says that the Beiruti lives in a state of permanent contingency, with nothing reliable to count on (Makhlouf 1988: 32-33). The Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf writes; “People live, so to speak, situationally” (Khalaf 1987: 244). [4]

However, this permanent state of contingency is not only due to the frequent outbreak of violence. It is also brought about by the general malfunctioning of basic public services: electricity and telephone networks often break down or are simply out of order for long periods of time. Periodical shortages of gasoline occur, garbage is left uncollected and piles up on the streets side by side with protective sandbags under the burning sun of the summer or the pouring rain of the winter. Streets and public buildings are not taken care of and repairs are often limited to what is strictly necessary. The city is dirty, neglected, half abandoned, and bears the scars of shells and bombs. To the Beiruti, it offers a depressing decor of desolation for his/her daily life. Children leaving Beirut for “normal” and “peaceful” cities abroad often express their amazement at finding “non-broken” houses and “intact” cars. Salman says: “We have become the guardians of the ruins.” (Salman 1986: 88). Elsewhere she writes: “This destruction destroys me.” (ibid: 122). Makhlouf compares Beirut with a “death sculpture” (Makhlouf 1988: 38).

Time and Bracketing

Constantly caught in a contingent situation, always fearing the unpredictable, never able to plan anything ahead, the Beiruti feels trapped in the present and alienated from the future and past. But even the present seems to lack consistency. The permanent obsession with immediate safety and survival robs, as it were, the present of its potentialities, and renders the future alien and irrelevant. It is as if time lost its density, writes Anhoury (Anhoury 1985: 25). In his book, he quotes a Lebanese saying: “We are people without a future; how can we have a future when our present is already stolen away from us?!” (ibid: 91). The future of the Lebanese, says Anhoury, is absorbed in their present (ibid: 141).

The past is also subdued. In an article devoted to the experiences of space and time in Beirut, Lebanese historian and writer Ahmad Beydoun describes the difficulties that the Lebanese have in reconstructing the recent past in their memories and in locating past events in time (Beydoun 1986: 27). In spite of the successive anoften very dramatic chof political and military events, as well as their consequences on the lives of the Lebanese, the years of the war seem to be interminable time of stagnation, a vicious circle without an exit. Whereas these years constitute for the country and the region an intense, accelerated period of history, for the individual Lebanese they represent a frozen time, stolen from their lives. It is a time during which they are constantly prevented from elaborating their life-projects. It is also a time towards which the Lebanese have a feeling of alienation and estrangement.

Time, writes Beydoun, progresses in a zig-zag fashion (ibid: 25), with periods of total paralysis of life due to the outbreak of “disturbances,” when time seems to disappear; and other, quieter moments when life seems to be possible once more, when conditions of civil war seem to recede enough to allow the undertaking of “normal” activities. Memory too seems to run in a zig-zag line. Indeed, the problems of memory mentioned above seem to be necessary for the Beirutis in order to lighten their consciousness of a too heavy load of unpleasant and painful events. In a book entitled Beyrouth, Beyrouth à vif: 3653 jours et nuits, French journalist Eric Sarner says that the evacuation of one event from memory seems to be a way of wanting to resist the next one (Sarner 1985: 138). [5]

The years of war are spent waiting, waiting for the war to end in order to live again, to return to one’s own endeavors and interests, waiting for a solution to the country’s crisis, or at least for a lull, for a few precious moments of reprieve when one can catch one’s breath before the next round of violence. The attitude of waiting for the end of the war, says Beydoun, is not based so much on a concrete expectation of an end, as on a refusal to accept the war as the definite frame of life (Beydoun 1986: 27). Indeed, as despair grows year after year, the notion of “after the war” has itself lost much of its credibility. It is too good to be true, too far away to be reached. people rarely envisage or talk about post-war plans. They are too absorbed in surviving the war itself, and too exhausted and discouraged to dare to believe in an end to it. And yet, the war remains an unbearable reality that pushes the Beirutis to the limits of exasperation. They cannot help wishing it to be a parenthesis in their lives, a horrible and cruel parenthesis which must be closed and forgotten as soon as possible.

A special issue of the French journal Maghreb-machrek was devoted to the challenges of daily life in Lebanon (Liban: Les défis du quotidien, No. 125, 1989). In it Lebanese political scientist Ghassan Salamé examines this notion of parenthesis or bracketing. The Lebanese, he says, live in two parallel times: that of their daily confrontation with violence, and that of their impatient waiting for a utopian peace. For most Lebanese, he says, the war is like a noisy and indecent neighbor who imposes himself on them, ruins their properties and threatens their lives in spasmodic outbursts of violence (Salamé 1989: 10). Not able to get rid of him, they try to carry on normally with their lives as if he were not there, drawing as much benefit as possible from every moment of his absence, wishing he did not exist.

The rhythm of time itself is shaped by the dramatic flow of military and political events, and is organized around news bulletins and ceasefires. It is as if the city lived in a time of its own, isolated and “bracketed” from the rest of the world. Beirutis themselves feel alienated from “normal” reality the reality of peace. They feel trapped in a madhouse, caught on the stage of a surrealist horror theater. The Lebanese writer and literary critic Alaouia Sobh writes, “surrealism, strangeness, and madness are all strongly present in reality”. (Sobh 1989: 30) Indeed, the notion of madness often turns up in the Lebanese war literature, [6] in which the fantastic genre occupies a significant place. [7] In her book entitled Lettre posthume, the Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé says: “We miss reality” (Eddé 1989: 114). In fact, the horrendous “surrealistic reality” of the civil war in which the Beirutis are condemned to live, inspires in them the feeling of living ‘outside reality”.

Beirutis tend to regard the war as a dark bracket in their lives. Within this bracket they practice various forms of bracketing in order to go on living. They try to carry on with their activities, bracketing the conditions of the civil war, especially when these seem to recede. Shelling, sniping and fighting do not occur continually. In times of truce, lasting a few days weeks, or even months, the direct causes for the paralysis of activities vanish behind a pseudo-normality. So the Beirutis take their children to school, go to work, repair their houses, go shopping, go to the movies, go out for dinner, go to concerts and lectures. They try to enjoy and benefit to the maximum from their precious moments of reprieve. yet they remain constantly aware of the possibility of renewed outbursts of violence. This awareness never vanishes from the back of their minds and strongly characterizes their consciousness. They walk in the street knowing that any of the cars around them might explode. They take their children to school knowing that shelling might start while they are on the road or on their way home. They sit in a cinema hoping that a time-bomb will not go off. They visit friends or go out for dinner and hope that they will be able to reach their homes safely. They know they can be catapulted, within a split-second, from a state of pseudo-normality into a state of apocalypse where totally different rules apply.

Journalists often present photographs of Beirutis lying on the beach or having dinner in restaurants as evidence of their unshakable pursuit of the “dolce vita,” indifference, or habituation to war. But such photographs cannot show the apprehension and awareness of a double-reality. They cannot tell how precious those moments of calm enjoyed by a woman on the beach can be, perhaps after the night of shelling that she endured. Nor can they show her nervous exhaustion, her permanent anxiety for her loved ones, and her acute worry about tomorrow. Engaging in their activities under the most difficult conditions is, for Beirutis, almost the only way of defying the rules of the civil war. Besides, they do not have much choice. A cynical statement in Beirut goes: “You have to go on living until you are killed.”

Worry, fear, and sadness, are themselves managed by bracketing. These emotions are so overwhelming for Beirutis under the given conditions, that they soon realize that they must be strictly selective with them: they tend to be limited to one’s self, to one’s immediate family and close friends, to one’s immediate environment. The rest is put into brackets. When listening to a news bulletin reporting the explosion of a car-bomb, the first thing one wants to know is the location and time of the explosion to estimate the probability of having a close acquaintance killed or injured by it. The lower the probability, the more quickly is the event, together with the worry, fear, and sadness caused by it, bracketed from one’s heart and mind. At the beginning of shelling one hopes that one’s own quarter will be spared and brackets the rest out. To use one’s own quarter will be spared and brackets the rest out. To use ones nerves and emotions sparingly becomes a necessary strategy for survival.

Body and Perception

Under these conditions, the Beiruti has the feeling of being trapped and of being reduced to a target. The body suddenly becomes a fragile and cumbersome load, its integrity constantly threatened. During stays abroad, Beirutis rediscover with amazement and great comfort the absence of that constant threat: the wonderful feeling of not having to worry about being shot at, or torn to pieces by a shell, or disintegrating in a bomb explosion. One no longer feels the contraction in the muscles of the neck at any sharp sound which may recall the sound of an incoming rocket. It seems an unbelievable pthat one can walk in the stand lie in bed without fear. If family members and loved ones accompany Beirutis, they experience the precious feeling of not having to fear for them and their physical security.

In Beirut one develops particular body images. The frequent sight of mutilated bodies and the permanent fear for one’s physical security give rise to images of one’s own mutilated body or of those of loved ones. These macabre representations terrorize Beirutis and evoke in them the feeling of being reprieved victims and/or mourners (Beydoun 1986: 22). Makhlouf says: “It is as if everyone becomes the voyeur, the spectator of one’s own impending death.” (Makhlouf 1988: 34).

In this situation of permanent threat, perceptions develop into defense mechanisms and strategic systems of survival. Sight and sound become particularly important to estimate potential or actual dangers. Apartments, rooms, and offices are perceived in terms of their exposure to possible shells, walls are checked for their resistance to possible blasts and squares and seaside promenades, once recreational areas, are now looked upon as highly exposed and dangerous places. The sight of running people often inspires panic, and empty streets provoke uneasiness. One becomes nostalgic for traffic jams and the state of normality they symbolize, in spite of all the anger and inconvenience they cause.

The generally tense atmosphere also gives rise to perceptual errors. Umbrellas, for instance, can be mistaken for machine guns. Auditory perceptual errors are more frequent still. The most common case is confusing the sounds of banging doors or thunder with exploding shells or bombs. In times of shelling, it becomes vitally important to listen for exploding shells and rockets and to identify their direction, in order to be able to approximately estimate the temporal and spatial potential of danger one is exposed to. Indeed, the war creates a sonic landscape in which the Beirutis need to orient themselves. It offers times of outbursts and times of silence which are often no less uneasy, and which create alarm and apprehension at the next outbreak of violence. Beirutis live in a state of great nervous tension, and suffer from disturbed sleep much of the time, particularly during periods of night-fighting. They then try to recover by using times of lull to sleep. Dominique Eddé calls them “chronic somnambulists” (Eddé 1989: 121).