Lebanese Yawmiyat (diaries): Archiving unfinished stories of spatial violence

Hanadi Samhan and Camillo Boano

Hanging by a thread, Dana Hassan, 2020. Hanging by a Thread tells the story of a cut and torn city that is constantly struggling to regain life and stability amid political and social unrest.

Over the past three years multiple simultaneous and interconnected crises have unfolded in Lebanon. This ‘polycrisis’ manifests in the country’s entrenched socio-political dysfunctionality and more evidently in the everyday life of Lebanese citizens/denizens. Alienating and troubling, living in Lebanon, and particularly in the capital Beirut, has become a daily struggle where trauma and violence intertwine. A recurring fact of life, violence in Lebanon becomes the foundation for renewed conditions of destruction in the city.

In this blog, we try to capture some aspects of recent urban violence in Lebanon through stories of struggle and creative coping that are here spatialized as archives. Part of the ‘Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts’ research project, led by the University of Exeter, these stories foreground multiple forms of violence and their imbrications in the urban space of Beirut and Lebanon. As living archives they expand the meaning and imaginaries of everyday life, link between a shared past and present reality, and visualize the transformation of the urban space[i].

Our storytellers are ten people who survived traumatic events living through compounding crises in Lebanon (figure 1). Their stories are a critical resource of archival practice through which we draw our narratives: a present-oriented process that links between a shared past, present reality, and imagined future. They ground our understanding of violence and trauma, and their human and urban conditions. They show unusual city-making processes that are born from within “the material, affective and structural breaking points” of people’s struggle with violence and trauma[ii]. The process of drawing narratives was creative, subjective, and reflexive where boundaries between the researcher and researched, self and other, future and past, and life and death entangle[iii]. In a severely polarized context, a full picture cannot be portrayed and we acknowledge that other stories simultaneously co-exist, intertwine, and clash.

The stories explore multiple interconnected narratives that emerged across varied geographies and distinguished solidarities. They discern particular spatial patterns and trajectories across Beirut and beyond. They elaborate on coping strategies and emerging solidarities through which people navigate their spaces and lives. They delve into specific patterns of invented detachment and/or intimacy. Without aiming to be comprehensive, this blog post concludes by examining how the urban in Lebanon can be “an exhausted territory, predated by the absence of the public, brutalized by the fragility of the common and vandalized by the preclusion of a thinkable and imaginable future”, but still archiving hope and future imaginations.

[i]A comprehensive view of the project and the emergences are available on www.Yawmiyetarchives.com and an extended reflection is available in Society&Space.

[ii] Tatiana A Thieme, “Beyond Repair : Staying with Breakdown at the Interstices,” Society and Space 39, no. 6 (2021): 1092–1110.

[iii] Kanafani and Sawaf, “Being , Doing and Knowing in the Field : Reflections on Ethnographic Practice in the Arab Region.”

Poster designed by Luna Akil and Nanor Der boghossian. Figure 1: In order-Carina and her son (a survivor from the port explosion), Hiba (a survivor from Tarik el-Jdideh explosion), Mahmud (injured during the Revolution protests), Mona (lost her job in Beirut because of the economic crisis and moved to her village of origin), Sami (unable to access bank savings), Ahmad (facing housing insecurity and displacement), Lamia (affected by the Ain Qana explosion, Leen (a survivor from the Shouf forests fire), Ziad (unable to access medication), and Joyce (an activist)

Daily violence is making space: Is it a cold civil war?

Cyclic and repetitive, recurrent memories of the civil war intensify throughout people’s narratives and along their spatial trajectories. During the war, people queued and moved in and out of their localities for survival. Today, queues and trajectories are longer and more frequent: people are moving in/out of Beirut, in/out of their neighborhoods, to/from banks, pharmacies, bakeries, and gas stations. The war’s violent spatial practices resurface today in a sort of perpetuated cold civil war.

After losing a newly secured job, Mona’s sole refuge for social and economic support was her native village Shheem. In her perception, Beirut transformed from a “mixture of everything” into a “city of ghosts” where striking feelings of insecurity, sadness, and destruction govern.

At the earliest signs of the economic crisis in 2019, Sami hurried to withdraw daily amounts of bank savings. Waiting in line, accepting the humiliating amounts of money they’re allowed to withdraw, and experiencing the controlling procedures imposed by the banks are another violent facet of life in Beirut where suffocating injustice and helplessness rule.

“We don’t need their charity, it’s our own money… I have worked all my life and now I have my compensation salary, and I have my money, I can live with dignity.” (Sami, 2021)

Coping through patterns of detachment

Beirut has an uncanny ability to bear and reproduce signs of violence and trauma. The civil war, Israeli raids, sporadic armed clashes, and the series of eruptions culminating with the port’s explosion keep their traumatic evidence in the city[i]. Beirutis and Lebanese bear multiple forms of physical and emotional trauma in their bodies and minds.

At times, these traces of trauma are blurred into one narrative where violence and survival, spaces and bodies, life and its absence intertwine[ii][iii]. The story of Mahmud, a survivor of physical violence, is illustrative. During the Revolution’s most violent weekend (17–18 January 2020), Mahmud and other protesters were beaten with inexplicable violence by the Lebanese internal security forces (ISF), detained at the police station for 12 hours, and denied basic human rights (Figure 2).

[i] Sharp, “Urban Violene in War and Peace: Lebanon’s Reconstruction.”

[ii] Thieme, “Beyond Repair : Staying with Breakdown at the Interstices.”

[iii] Werner, Let Them Haunt Us: How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable.

Figure 2: “Five or six of the security forces started beating me severely. They pushed me on the floor, held me down and hit my face until my jaw broke.” (Mahmud,2021)

Mahmud’s trauma matched in intensity his perceptions of material damage in the city. The blurred identification of his own body with the city was blown up to the point where the explosion of the port and the aftermath of the protest matched in intensity. Furthermore, for Mahmud, downtown Beirut’s heavy destruction caused by the port explosion, just a couple of kilometres away from his residence, was not “that huge” compared to the damage resulting from the Revolution’s violent events.

“…after the Port explosion and after the protests were terminated, it [downtown] was the same. …It became a touristic site, a place for people to come and observe what happened. The signs, the people, the road, and the drawings that were made on the roads. The effects of all the protests and now as well as the explosion are the same”. (Mahmud, 2021)

Through destruction, injury, and pain, Carina undertook a long journey to save herself and her family after the port’s explosion. Her physical trauma was externalized to unfold at different scales of the house, the neighbourhood, the city, and the world around her as she sought medical care and protection (Figures 3,4,5).

Figure 3: “The 2nd explosion blew us, and we did not feel what happened, we all flew across the room. […] Once in the street we saw an unprecedented amount of destruction. Everything was demolished, broken, buildings, streets, people injured, holding their children, and aimlessly running. That’s where we understood that it’s not just our building, it’s the whole world around us. (Carina, 2021)

Figure 4:Carina’s family before, during, and after the explosion (Mekkaoui,2020)

Figure 5: Carina’s family trajectories of survival during the explosion (Mekkaoui,2020).

Her perception of the crisis has changed after the destruction of her house. Nothing made sense to her, and nothing seemed to be true anymore. Asking her about the electricity provision and how she is coping with the current crisis, her response showed another pattern of detachment wherein she saw herself particularly targeted, different from ‘others’.

“Frankly I don’t get it that in some areas the electrical current does not go away at all, and in some others we have just few hours per day. I think there is no crisis, they are just lying to rob us more and more”. (Carina, 2021)

The intensity of physical and emotional trauma in both stories constitute what Laketa (2016) calls ‘affective landscapes of everyday life’ while generating a sense of numbness and blunt detachment from the city, the space of trauma (Lahoud, 2017; Laketa, 2016; Werner, 2020). For Carina, who survived the civil war, the magnitude of violence and its induced feelings were familiar. The civil war’s memories were triggered by the explosion’s sights, voices, smells of horror. They profoundly shattered Carina’s perceptions of her “safe, vibrant, and communal” neighbourhood.

Entrapment or intimacy?

Living in a reality of entrenched violence, feelings of entrapment intensify and the need to seek refuge becomes obsessive. When physical escape is not possible, skewed perceptions and imaginary constructs animate the comforting imagination of possible futures (Lahoud, 2010; Thieme, 2021). The sense of intimacy to place, before, during and after the crisis, is one form of such skewed perceptions which are dominated by the denial of real danger as well as percolating shadows of the civil war.

During the Shouf Forest wildfires in September 2019, the conflagration spread across the mountains and reached residential areas. Leen’s father refused to move. He’d rather suffocate to death than leave his house to vandalism, looting, and squatting. Years later, the war’s traumatic memories still made the act of leaving the house a more significant danger than death itself (Figure 6).

‘You feel you are trapped and in despair, where to go? What to do? […]. We stayed in the house till 5 in the morning, when it felt obvious there is no way we can stay in the house anymore (Leen, 2021)’

Figure 6: Fires, destruction, and suffocation yet Leen’s father won’t leave the house ( Leen, 2019).

The feeling of surrender to destiny coupled with strong religious faith was Hiba’s unique protective shield. She did not feel the need to leave her neighborhood despite the deadly explosion of a fuel tank in the crowded residential area of Tarik al-Jdideh in October 2020:

“There is nothing that you can do. We are fatalists and believe in destiny, and that you cannot run away from what is predestined to you? Maybe if the day of the explosion I was still in my place, I would have not even been harmed, even if I was sitting in the salon” (Hiba, 2021)

Figure 7: Explosions and/in/of bedrooms — the Tarik al-Jdideh Explosion ( Hiba, 2020)

Unfinished stories

The selected narratives of everyday life in Lebanon do not tell a singular story. They are illustrated by images, captured by memories, and contested by hopeful aspirations for a better future. Read as a whole, they constitute city diaries which give a voice to alternative desires and ambitions revealed through moments of contestation, survival, and resistance.

Ultimately, people’s stories come to an end. But in the end, they are becoming archives. Our invitation remains to read beyond the end, beyond the story, and beyond the storyteller.

Figure 8:After the stories of trauma, violence and hardships, can we still find spaces for hope and healing? Despite the disaster, Leen remained appreciative and open to life. She described the beauty she found in photos she managed to take after the fire. She used some of them in her art class ( Leen, 2019).

References

Atallah, Sami. “Lebanon ’ s Parliamentary Elections : How Did the Opposition Win ?” The Policy Initiative, 2022.

Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Polity press, 2013.

Kanafani, Samar, and Zina Sawaf. “Being , Doing and Knowing in the Field : Reflections on Ethnographic Practice in the Arab Region.” Contemporary Levant ISSN: 2, no. 1 (2017): 3–11.

Lahoud, Adrian. “Post-Traumatic Urbanism.” Architectural Design 80, no. 5 (2010).

Sharp, Deen. “Urban Violene in War and Peace: Lebanon’s Reconstruction,” 2020.

Thieme, Tatiana A. “Beyond Repair : Staying with Breakdown at the Interstices.” Society and Space 39, no. 6 (2021): 1092–1110. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211013034.

Werner, Anna-lena. Let Them Haunt Us: How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable. Vol. 168. transcript Verlag, 2020.

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[i]A comprehensive view of the project and the emergences are available on www.Yawmiyetarchives.com and an extended reflection is available in Society&Space.

[ii] Tatiana A Thieme, “Beyond Repair : Staying with Breakdown at the Interstices,” Society and Space 39, no. 6 (2021): 1092–1110.

[iii] Kanafani and Sawaf, “Being , Doing and Knowing in the Field : Reflections on Ethnographic Practice in the Arab Region.”

[iv] Sharp, “Urban Violene in War and Peace: Lebanon’s Reconstruction.”

[v] Thieme, “Beyond Repair : Staying with Breakdown at the Interstices.”

[vi] Werner, Let Them Haunt Us: How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable.