This is an excerpt from my unpublished thesis, Lost and Found in Beirut: Memory and Place in Narratives of the City
To cite: Dados, NN (2010) Lost and Found in Beirut: Memory and Place in Narratives of the City (Sydney: University of Technology Sydney), pp.31-33
<https://www.academia.edu/37054440/Lost_and_Found_in_Beirut_Memory_and_Place_in_Narratives_of_the_City>
How to proceed towards a map of place
The number of times Beirut has been rebuilt and destroyed, like the number of gates in the old city, are questions given over to the same speculation which ensures that even today, there is still no consensus on the past, on history and on the war. ‘After a committee of historians repeatedly failed to produce a narrative of the war satisfactory to the country’s sectarian factions,’ Sarah Rogers writes, ‘the national curriculum concluded Lebanon’s history in 1946’ (2007, p.9). In the empty space of Lebanon’s contemporary history it is the novelists, Hashim Sarkis tells us, who have to ‘fill the archival void’ (2002, p.135). It is not only the novelists, however, who are left with that responsibility. It is also the artists and the film-makers who take on the immense task of excavating the past.
Source: Ghassan Tueni and Faris Sassine (2003) El Bourj: Place de la liberté et Porte du Levant
One example of how the past is negotiated in today’s Lebanon can be seen in the invented archives of The Atlas Group, ‘an imaginary non-profit research foundation established in Beirut to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon’ (Raad 2007, p.68). By locating an artistic project within the frame of an archival endeavour, the work of the Atlas Group attends to the ‘slippage between historical and fictional narration which occurs in the performance of memory’ (Rogers 2002, p.70). With a sardonic nod to the Atlas Group, we could say that today’s historians cannot come to a consensus on the war because they were busy throughout it making wagers at the racecourse, not on the winning horse, but on the flash of the photograph of the winning horse (this is discussed in detail in chapter 6 of the thesis; see Raad 1999; Rogers 2002; Al-Kassim 2002). The utter contingency of writing the past is not so different from the wagers that the historians make on the moment of the flash. This process, Dima Al-Kassim tells us, is ‘writing history in a speculative mode’ (2002, p.157).
Writing the past makes speculation necessary since, Al-Kassim asserts, ‘historical memory is not self-evident but a stranger exiled in his native soil’ (2002, p.148). The catastrophe of the civil war, Al-Kassim suggests, ‘makes us accountable to the unseen stranger in our midst without our knowing how to be responsible before this invisible trace of the other’ (2002, p.151). That stranger, or outsider, or other, not unlike Khoury’s ‘outsider’, is also the body that continues to haunt the present, the body that is destined to wander, to remain lost without ever being found. Five, seven or ten – no-one knows with any certainty how many times Beirut was built and destroyed or the number of gates the city had at any given point. Nor can we decisively conclude how many years our ‘outsider’, the modern Ulysses of our tale, is destined to wander as a beggar in the wilderness, an alien in his own city. Unlike Homer’s hero, lost at sea for seven years and exiled for ten, our Ulysses cannot return home because there is no home to return to.
As Iain Chambers notes, history commences with the mythical Ulysses as the figure of the traveller and the stranger, yet, it is also through the figure of the traveller and the stranger that history today ‘continues’ (Chambers 2008, p.39). Taking a cue from Chambers’ exploration of the Mediterranean as ‘a post-colonial sea’, we might add to these two figures, that of the sailor, navigating that physical and metaphorical space (2008, p.23ff). As a literary trope, the sea is often synonymous with the journey, but it can also be, as Chambers notes, ‘a more suitable frame for recognizing the unstable location of historical knowledge’ (2008, p.27). ‘To be at sea is to be lost,’ Chambers writes, ‘and to be in such a state is to be vulnerable to encounters we do not necessarily control’ (2008, p.27). The sea, like the impossible location of The Atlas Group’s archives, requires that we remain attuned to that which is always slipping away from our grasp, splitting in multiple directions, being reconfigured at ‘n-1 dimensions’, and destabilising the ground on which historical knowledge and certainty take root. The gap at the centre of representation finds a suitable image in the figure of the object that is always receding into the distance. This absence at the centre is also what ensures that representation is both terminally incomplete and haunted by an excess it cannot contain. Jacques Derrida refers to that excess through the notion of ‘trace’ – that which haunts presence (2004), and the ‘supplement’ – the left-over of representation (1998).
In Lebanon today, the emptying out of space is inseparable from the excessive circulation of memory. ‘The buildings and streets, it turns out,’ observes Sarkis in relation to Houda Barakat’s acclaimed novel The Tillers of Water, ‘are more fragile than the memories that inhabit them’ (Sarkis 2006, p.10). If today’s artists, writers, architects and film-makers write about the void at the heart of matter (see Sadek 2007; Sarkis 2006), then that void, like the lacuna of representation, also signals an accumulation elsewhere. In the cyclical destruction and reconstruction of Beirut, memories circulate, dispersed and floating, around, above, below and beyond the spaces where matter has been emptied out. Those memories and ‘the outsider’ are one and the same .The work of writing Beirut today must necessarily contend with this excess that spills out of the city, and out of language. Writing the city, then, requires ‘registering the “stranger” suspended in language’ (Chambers 2008, p.22), or, acknowledging ‘the stranger in our midst’ (Al-Kassim 2002, p.159).
