The Paramount Reality
of the Beirutis:War Literature and the Lebanese Conflict
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab*
Continued
The permanent concern with physical security and elementary necessities, like water, food and electricity, as well as the innumerable obstacles to one’s productive capacities or to planning one’s life-projects, reduce the self to its lowest level. It is as if the self has shrunk to its minimal dimensions, that of a trapped target-body, one obsessed with survival. This often leads to problems of self-esteem. And yet, the Beiruti desperately tries to transcend the level of mere physical survival level, using every opportunity to make room for his/her creative and productive faculties. Hence, every possible day of work, every possible day of school, every possible family or social gathering, every concert, lecture, art exhibition, picnic, etc. becomes a precious and highly appreciated event. Indeed, the survival of the self appears to be almost as important as the survival of the body.
Caught in the present and alienated from past and future, trapped in a small and limited space and deprived of safe and free passage, Beirutis are forced to live in the narrow confines of the here and now. The war has upset and narrowed their social life. The displacement of population due to deportation, flight, or emigration, as well as communication breakdowns, due to the impossibility of free and safe movement and the disruption of telecommunications, have generally made contact among family members, friends, colleagues, business partners, and people living in different quarters of the city, very difficult. Isolation and distance characterize social life in war-torn Beirut (Beydoun 1986: 24).
Ever since the outbreak of the war, geography has come to play a major role, albeit not an exclusive one, in shaping the social life of the city. One is restricted to maintaining or creating relationships with people in the immediate and accessible spatial environment. Even though Beirutis try hard, and at great risk to themselves, to transcend barricades, check-points, and demarcation lines to meet family members, friends, or business partners, the geo-politico-military elements shaping the face of the city impose themselves very strongly. This has led to the discovery and development of a new social life within one’s immediate spatial environment; but it has also led to the loss or disturbance of another social life , based on familial, personal, professional, intellectual, or other affinities.
The geographic factor has also become significant in another respect: the distribution of violence in the city creates a feeling among inhabitants of a particular quarter of somehow sharing a common destiny; the common horror of violence, the same feeling of being innocent targets, the same fear of being killed or injured; in other words, the same moments between life and death, between life and apocalypse. This feeling is particularly strong among inhabitants of the same street, of the same building, or of the same shelter. This shared destiny creates a strong collective awareness, particularly in small groups like families, and the self loses some of its primacy in favor of the group.
The geographical distribution of violence isolates quarters from each other and alienates their inhabitants from one other. In spite of this isolation and alienation, and beyond the specificity of each quarter’s experiences, Beirutis share a more or less common reality which alienates them from those who do not know that reality. And here arises another major problem of sociality for them: that of communication; not on account of blocked routes or cut telephone lines, but because of the ineffable, crazy, reality they are trapped in and which a non-Beiruti cannot even begin to imagine. This problem becomes particularly acute when Beirutis are confronted with non-Lebanese, especially abroad. No matter how open and eager they may be to establish relations and friendships with those “foreigners”, they often feel a gap they cannot bridge because of the burden of the dramatic experience they carry within them and which they cannot share with others. When asked to describe the crisis of their country of their daily life in that dangerous city, Beirutis often do no know where to start, nor how to express and communicate their experiences.
The difficulty in talking about the war lies, on the one hand, in the pain and sorrow which often accompany the experiences lived through during the war. One prefers to forget rather than to recall them. On the other hand, these experiences are so dramatic and so traumatic that they are removed from the usual and expected range of experience, thus lying beyond the framework of normal verbalization and expression. They push the Beirutis to the limits of the unspeakable, and make them realize that they cannot find adequate expressions for them. Words lose their force and show their limits. Anhoury writes:” the words fall apart emptied of meaning and consistency” (Anhoury 1985: 17)
And yet, because of this very traumatic character of the war experiences, the Beirutis feel the urgent need to talk about them and to express their shock, pain, and exasperation. They remain torn between the wish to forget their war experiences and the need to communicate them to others. It is interesting to hear them conversing at social gatherings. No matter how hard Beirutis try to discuss other issues and topics, the events of the war dominate their conversations. Often one hears: “Well, now that we have finally managed to get together, let us not talk about bombs and shells, but rather about happier things.” The proposal is, of course, favorably received. But soon the Beirutis find themselves talking about war again. They try to stop perpetuating the reality of the war in their conversation, but find it difficult to do so. They need to express and liberate themselves from the traumatic burden, and yet they are confronted with an anemia of words, and are thrown into the mute frustration of the unspeakable. In an interview, the Lebanese writer Emilie Nasrallah says:
What can I tell you about the war? Maybe it has a beginning and no end. One has always the feeling that what one says is not what one wants to say. We have too many words in us which struggle to come out. The events exceed our language possibilities. (Osman 1985: 62)
And, concerning her writing activity, she adds:
Many times I tried to flee from the war so that I wouldn’t keep writing about the tragedy all the time; but we are forced to do so because the war haunts us. It sucks our blood and the light of our eyes and deprives us of the basis of our existence. How can we free ourselves from it? (ibid: 60)
In her study on the Lebanese war literature, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War, Miriam Cooke notes the often employed literary form of the “staccato ellipse” (Cooke 1988: 115). “Exaggeration,” says Eddé, “is the only faithful expression of reality” (Eddé 1989: 47). And the Egyptian-Lebanese poet Andrée Chédid evokes the bankruptcy of language in the face of violence by lamenting the vanity of writing and the derisive character of words (Chédid 1976: 17).
The problem of expression becomes particularly acute and difficult when communicating with people who are not familiar with the Beirut reality. Beirutis feel themselves isolated, unable to do more than stammer about their overwhelming experiences.
These difficulties are also portrayed in the frequent inadequacy of journalistic reports from Beirut: It becomes a problem of reporting a very special reality to non-Beirutis, one that is often beyond the imagination and lived experiences; beyond verbalization. In Lettre posthume, Eddé writes:
One can always say that a hundred families were massacred on such a day, at such a time; but how can one describe what goes on in the look of a survivor? (Eddé 1989: 114-115).
It is in the face of such problems of expression and verbalization that the importance of the Lebanese war literature comes to the fore. In such literature, scholars, writers, and poets attempt find words, sentences, images, and concepts, for those lived experiences. They express and what the rest of the Beirutis and Lebanese cannot. They become the speakers of those left speechless. The writers and poets have the privilege of possessing a special means of communication, that of poetry and fiction, which enables them to translate experiences from one reality to the other, that is, from the surreal reality of the war to the more usual normality of linguistic reality. In his famous work on survival in extreme situations, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Terrence Des Pres underlines the importance of fiction for the approach of experiences lived in such conditions:
Although in a strict sense I am concerned only with the experience of actual survivors, fiction serves here as it has always served: it provides images whose formal purity brings some part, at least, of the world’s confusion to focus. Existence in extremity is not an easy subject, it is hard to approach and harder still to understand. Through fiction, however, some start can be made, some framework fixed which mediates the difference between that world and ours. (Des Pres 1980: 6)
Modris Eksteins does the same in his analysis of experiences related to the First World War:
It is noteworthy that among the mountains of writing built up on the subject of the Great War, a good many of the more satisfying attempts to deal with its meaning have come from the pens of poets, novelists, and even literary critics, and the professional historians have produced, by and large, specialized and limited accounts, most of which pale in evocative and explanatory power before those of the littérateurs. Historians have failed to find explanations of the war that correspond to the horrendous realities, to the actual experience of the war. (Eksteins 1990: 291).
Scholars, on the other hand, have the merit of being capable of rationally reflecting on their social reality, of finding concepts and categories which allow them to grasp the reality of their environment. They are challenged by the difficult task of placing themselves at a distance and observing with possible objectivity what affects their lives so dramatically. Thus the Lebanese war literature, whether in the social sciences or fiction, constitutes an important means of access to the lived experiences of the Lebanese. Last, but not least, the war literature, in the form of diaries, memoirs, or fiction, often constitutes the most poignant anti-war manifestos, bringing to light the impact of war on the lives of people. [8]
The attention given to life in Beirut is attention torn between life and death. It is characterized by the awareness of a double reality: that of outright violence and pseudo-normality; and the permanent possibility of shifting from one reality to another. The field of consciousness is dominated by the instinct for survival. Body perceptions, memory, and attentional bracketing are all oriented towards and organized into survival strategies. Forced optimism becomes a therapy. More than the joy of living (“joie de vivre”), says Anhoury, it is the bare living itself which is sought in the first place (Anhoury: 1985).
In an article devoted to the cultural production of women during the war, Alaouia Sobh writes: “Everyone carries their corpse on their shoulders. The artist carries his/her corpse and the corpse of his/her dreams” (Sobh 1989-30). Death then ceases to be a metaphysical problem and becomes a very concrete and imminent reality.
In Beyrouth ou la fascination de la mort, Makhlouf analyses the confrontation of the Lebanese, and in particular of the Beirutis, with various forms of violence, which are also various forms of death. He begins his book by describing how violence becomes the “master of games” and how death seems to be hidden in every moment and in the simplest gestures (Makhlouf 1988: 23). Everything in the city, he says, is an exercise in death : whether walking in the street , going to work or collecting the children from school. The randomness of violence, its range, timing, and target, makes any defense system vain and derisive. The imminence of death makes life more precious and more intensive, but at the same time more futile. Nihilism, the eclipse of meaning, becomes a reality of everyday life. Beirut, says Eddé, is the city where children discourse on the senselessness of life (Eddé 1989: 10). In an environment transformed into a minefield, Beirutis develop attitudes of apathy and fatalism. But they also develop an attitude of perseverance and resilience and learn to live day by day, with a fake sense of habituation and indifference. Cynicism and black humor form important outlets for their overwhelming anxiety.
About irony, Makdisi writes:
In Beirut, of course, irony and literalness are often indistinguishable, for the primary quality of irony, improbability, is one of the qualities of Beirut realities (Makdisi 1990: 50)
The experience of war is also an experience of loss. After the civil unrest of 1958 in Lebanon, the Lebanese poet Khalil Haoui wrote to a friend saying, “Lebanon is the land of lost bloods.” In 1982, as Israeli forces surrounded Beirut, he committed suicide.
Makdisi writes:
It is not only the waste of human life that one deplores, although that more than anything. A beautiful old house -- or even an ugly new one -- is destroyed and a city is diminished. A shop is blown up, even a shabby one owned by a greedy and less than scrupulous merchant -- does it not represent years of labor? Trees are cut or burned down; forests are destroyed. Whole villages, towns and portions of cities have been leveled; churches and mosques have been gutted; schools and hospitals wrecked; factories have collapsed. Time has been wasted; years have passed; loneliness and emptiness have encroached. (Makdisi 1990: 214)
Hobbes, who knew the English Civil War, describes the “incommodities” of war in a way that renders quite faithfully the Beirut reality:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them with all. In such condition, there is no place of Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, no use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes 1651/1984: 60/186)
Joie de Vivre and Muted Suffering
Towards the end of Lettre posthume, Eddé writes “Of all Lebanese fanaticisms, the fanaticism for life remains the strongest.” (Eddé 1989: 125).
It was not, however, a fanaticism strong enough to put an end to the war; the war was dominated by too many powerful forces of conflict, capable of holding down any popular will for life and peace.
Indeed, observers of Lebanon have time and again pointed out the “joie de vivre” of the Lebanese, before but also during the war.[9] How is it, then, that such a people tolerated all the years of brutality and misery, without rising up? In fact, several mass rallies and demonstrations, especially after 1984, were organized by trade unions, peace organizations, artists, women’s groups, relatives of the kidnapped and the handicapped, against the continuing fighting. But every time these demonstrations were neutralized by the many local and regional “warlords” who had an interest in pursuing the war. Even though these demonstrations were unable to stop the war, they were to lay the foundation for a new consensus.
In an article entitled “Besieged and Silenced: The Muted Anguish of the Lebanese People, “Samir Khalaf analyzed the causes of this mutedness (Khalaf, 1989). [10] He referred to the normalization of evil: violence became a form of lif, indeed the only effective means to assert oneself. The enemy was anonymiz, dehumanized, and de-individualized. This facilitated the use of violence against each other, in a social landscape marked by isolating barriers. Under these conditions, wrote Khalaf, people witnessed “a progressive erosion of their capacity to empathize with other victims and a general desensitization to indiscriminate killing” (ibid: 16). This led to a demoralization of public life, plunging the country into a socio-ethical crisis (Khalaf 1987: 357).
He saw three further reasons for the lethargy of the Lebanese: the intensity of the suffering which left them speechless; the anonymous and arbitrary character of the violence which made the identification of perpetrators virtually impossible; and the bewildering number of armed groups involved in the conflict. The fragmentation of society into isolated parts hindered the formation of a public space for protest. United by terror and grief, wrote Khalaf, the Lebanese “remain[ed] divided and powerless in identifying and coping with the sources of their anguish” (ibid: 20-23).
The Emergence of a Civil Society?
In spite of this demoralization and lethargy, Khalaf saw indications of a more constructive attitude among the Lebanese; namely, the homogenization of society through common grief; the recognition, after 15 years of war, that no party could eliminate the other; that if living together was difficult, separation was even harder (Khalaf 1989: 26-27); and finally, the questioning of the various ideologies which the conflicting parties used to justify the fighting.
The Lebanese sociologist Nabil Beyhum described this process, and saw a chance for the emergence of a civil society, a society founded upon the mutual recognition of basic human rights, in the bankruptcy of the war ideologies (Beyhum 1990: 58). Finally, Khalaf (1989: 19-20), Beyhum (1990:59), as well as Hanf (1990:755-759) saw in the mass demonstrations mentioned above a significant basis for a new consensus in Lebanese society.
This consensus still remains to be built; but not through sentimental pathos accompanied by a renewed occultation of the problems which nurtured the Lebanese conflict. Between shooting one another and falling in the arms of each other, there must be more fruitful alternatives. The first duty of the Lebanese today is to be honest towards themselves, for what is at stake is their lives and their future. The regional and international game of power has offered us a break from the madness of violence. It is up to us to take advantage of this opportunity and make it a new start for a healthier future.
The war started and ended without the explicit will of most of us, but it fed on our fears, wishes, and dreams. Now is the time to examine these together and make this a primary issue of our society if we wish to become less vulnerable to the demons of collective aggression and collective suicide. It is the time to set up civil forums of debate about our past, our present, and our future. It is also time to cry out our wounds and fears. We live in a region where ethnic and religious conflicts have caused cumulative wounds and injuries throughout the ages, and Lebanon seems to have inherited most of them and become their epitome. Unless we open up our wounds to ourselves and to one another and be honest about our fears and fantasies, we won’t be able to take the first step towards democracy. The biggest challenge to Lebanon today is to move from the ancient and recent wounds of its different groups, to the democratic duty of mutual respect and understanding. This is a work that no one else will do for us. It is in our vital interest to do it as properly and thoroughly as we can.
* Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut.