Read an Excerpt
Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon
Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power
By Joanne Randa Nucho PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8300-4
CHAPTER 1
ALL THAT ENDURES FROM PAST TO PRESENT
Temporality, Sectarianism, and a "Return" to Wartime in Lebanon
It was an excruciatingly hot August afternoon, and Araxi, an Armenian architect in her forties, suggested we go out to the balcony of her apartment in a wealthy, mainly Christian suburb north of Beirut. I was intrigued by Araxi's perspective as one of the returned expatriates who had spent many years abroad. Given her general optimism, and her decision to move back to Lebanon in 1995, I was surprised to hear her say: "I know it could happen again at any moment. At any second, it could all fall apart again." Araxi's observation that "it could happen again" underscores the insights of many of my interlocutors about the inevitability of a return to war and violence in Lebanon. While some might attribute the return of violence to unresolved sectarian tensions, the open-endedness of her remark, "it can happen again," leaves some room to ask: what exactly is it that "returns" when violence erupts once again? Why are various conflicts perceived as repetitions even when the conditions, stakes, and positions of actors involved are novel and emergent?
I argue that it is essential to delink the notion of sectarianism from rigid and immutable forms of identity and instead focus on the ways in which various municipal technologies, nonprofits, and lending institutions help to produce notions of sectarian community or exclusion. In this chapter, however, I take a closer look at the way in which political actors and popular discourses mobilize sectarianism as an explanation for conflict as well as justification for actions taken in the aftermath of violence, creating a sectarian narrative that appears rigid, intractable, and deeply historical. Moreover, the sectarian explanation appears to give it a sense of unending repetition.
The aftermaths of three violent incidents that took place in Beirut in recent years shape my analysis: a 2009 fatal shooting in a Beirut neighborhood that was quickly forgotten, a larger street clash in Beirut in 2010 that was perceived as a harbinger of political instability, and a fight in 2011 in Bourj Hammoud that launched a large-scale eviction of Kurdish and Syrian migrant workers. This final example, the one I explore in most ethnographic detail, reveals just how a wholly new kind of "sectarian conflict" (between Armenians and Syrian-Kurds) emerges as an explanation in the aftermath of a violent incident. This sectarian explanation incorporates some traces of the past, as though causality for violence can be found in an immutable, repeating history. The explanation is a retrospective one that is novel and emergent, though it immediately appears as evidence of a generations-long animosity.
Through the unfolding of a violent incident, government officials, the military, sectarian political factions, and ordinary people take up the traces of various pasts into the folds of projects in the present. Such an incident, when refigured in familiar sectarian language, is instrumental in creating a dangerously bounded sense of community with clearly defined "outsiders." Of course that very act of exclusion is highly productive, not only in terms of producing boundaries about who and what constitutes "community" but also about the boundaries in and of urban space and notions of the "neighborhood" as the (sometimes violent) expression of that sense of community belonging. While there are other forms of belonging at play, all are made secondary to the discourse of awakened sectarian conflict. Nevertheless, the traces of the past that are used to create a solid sense of community in times of perceived crisis cannot be interpreted as the remnants of an ever-repeating primordial past. While violence in Bourj Hammoud, and Lebanon in general, may look cyclical, it is nonetheless also a new and emergent occurrence. In the incidents I will describe later in the chapter, enduring pasts like the Armenian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Lebanese civil war are evoked in order to shape action toward the future. Even when a past as solid and real as these catastrophic incidents appears to serve as evidence against which the present can be understood and evaluated, it is always read through the lens of the present and an intentionality to shape the future and is thus full of its own layers of representations. This is not to suggest or downplay the very real affective response to the evocation of this past, nor does it take away from the reality of the still present and enduring traumas of genocide and war. Rather, it is to suggest that the affective responses are part of the way in which people actively understand and shape their present actions and imagine the future. Memory is not a singular, unitary force acting from a fixed point in the past to manipulate people in the present.
Even beyond Lebanon, ethnic or sectarian conflict is often cited as a go-to explanation after violence breaks out. In the aftermath of violence, agents, observers, and analysts revive a set of scripts to explain what is underway. That said, once activated, discursive formations of ethnic hatred or vengeance are not just reenacted. Rather, actors evoke various pasts in different ways to justify certain kinds of responses to violence in the present, as well as to mobilize particular visions for the future. Recurrent violence between sectarian political factions does not express fixed, unchanging relations between the past, present, and future (Bergson 1929, 1984; Mead 2002). Recurrent conflict is neither repetitive nor predictable — even if it draws on established scripts — because it is not the manifestation of eternal, primordial sectarian hatred or vengeance rooted in a distant unchanging past. Henri Bergson's notion of duration (durée) can help us here. Popular collective narratives of past events endure and serve to justify particular notions of the present and to set in motion particular futures. Indeed, Bergson's notion of duration helps us rethink the cause-and-effect relations given by prevalent discourses about sectarianism, in which an ancient, violent past creates the inevitable conditions for the present. It is particularly useful when considering the relationship between the multiple histories of the past and individual memories of violence in the construction of identity in the context of Lebanon. Focusing on the subjective experience of time and memory is an important aspect of understanding processes of violence, particularly those that are portrayed as repetitive (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997). As George Herbert Mead shows us, the past is always interpreted through multiple layers of other "pasts." The past, in other words, can be experienced only through representational layers that build over time and accrue other significances. Every emerging present creates new pasts, and there is always a reconstructive element to understanding the past in relation to the present. This is not to deny the past's "irrevocability." Rather, it unsettles the permanence of particular interpretations of the past, the state of "what it was" that can change in relation to the emergent present (Mead 2002).
Perhaps because of the lack of an official state history of the civil war, the politics of memory are an intense focus of debate in Lebanon. Memory work and memorialization function in a way that makes history or "histories" available and real again, though the ways in which they can be resurrected are, in some sense, contingent. What looks like a pattern of sectarian violence, a cycle of endless evictions, displacements, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, is called into vision, seemingly out of thin air, from a repository of violence. While maintaining this concept of repetition, it is still possible to imagine violence emerging, repeatedly, in the same place, even potentially involving the same actors, without it being the same violence. What looks like a pattern, like a "return" to war, is more likely a return to "wartime," a kind of temporality with productive capacities to rework, dissolve, or intensify different kinds of relations or realize certain futures. This familiar temporality may look like the same, endlessly repeated loop of retribution or vengeance doled out in cycles, what some call "sectarian violence," an explanation that seems to emerge from the past and is always used to describe conflict in Lebanon.
HISTORIES OF SECTARIANISM, TRACES OF CONFLICT
Like most places in Lebanon, Bourj Hammoud bears the scars of violent conflict. Bullet holes pockmark the sides of buildings, and splatter-shaped masses of brick plug up the holes left by shells, rockets, and mortar fire. During the first few months of my fieldwork, I found it was easier to notice these scars on buildings and walls. Whenever I would look at a cluster of bullet holes, I would imagine the sounds and sights of the moment they were made. What kind of battle was taking place when the person holding the machine gun fired on this mass of lifeless concrete? Even when I couldn't imagine a complete kind of scenario, I would think about the time that these battle scars point toward. On the one hand, bullet holes in Bourj Hammoud are signifiers whose interpretation depends on context, on who is seeing them, on who is seeing past them or ignoring them as part of the normalized landscape. On the other hand, however, as indices of the bullets that made them, they maintain their signification — they always point back to the moment of their making by an instrument of death or war. Charles Peirce (1902, 2.304) uses the bullet hole as an example of an index, which is "a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant." While the bullet holes indicated that something violent had transpired, the context of that incident and the sign of the bullet hole could refer to a number of different objects depending on the viewer's knowledge, position, and sense of cause-and-effect relations. For example, the bullet hole could serve as a sign of the breakdown of a state, the presence of a particular political faction or militia, a Russian-made Kalashnikov or an American M16, and all the broader connotations of these competing technologies of war in the Middle East in the context of the 1970s and 1980s. The sense I had of trying to piece together the moment when those bullet holes were made was facilitated not only through a careful reading of visual "evidence." Photographs, anecdotal stories, films, and my imagination filled in the gaps of experience and my understanding of cause-and-effect relations — what sort of object produced this sign? Whatever past was there, it was immediately compounded with a number of other representations.
I stopped noticing the bullet holes and other war damage after a time, like most people who live or work in Beirut. I did not willfully ignore them; they simply receded to the background along with all the other sights and sounds of the everyday. When things started to become mundane, it wasn't that these traces became invisible to me. Rather, I didn't make an attempt to see them. They were always visible, though they just didn't seem as relevant as other sights, sounds, and smells in my immediate vicinity. They didn't prompt me to imagine what had transpired to create that scar; I simply didn't try to access that imaginary. The traces, in a sense, seemed to lose their urgency through daily viewing. Noticing the bullet holes again would require some kind of event or effect that would draw my attention back to their probable causes.
Sometimes the evidence of war is made visible again through the mundane structures of daily life. The physical infrastructure of Bourj Hammoud, which never fully recovered after the war, is one such example. It is impossible to walk through the district without noticing the abundance of electricity cables, low-hanging wires crisscrossing above narrow intersections, snaking along the sides of buildings and coalescing dramatically into boxes where one can access ishtirak, a subscription to a privately owned generator. The enormous garbage mountain directly adjacent to the fisherman's port, where garbage was hastily piled up during the war, is another highly visible (and smelly), example. Both the proliferation of ishtirak electricity cables and the ongoing presence of the garbage mountain are not only a result of the Lebanese wars but also perpetuated through forms of bureaucratic theft that continue to compromise systems like electricity distribution. Decades after the start of the war in the 1970s, constant electricity and water shortages and pollution of the seafront and the air have become mundane realities. The electricity cables, and their relationship to wartime, are made invisible through routine and habit. At key moments, however, municipal officials can again make things like the garbage mountain visible by drawing attention to them to do certain kinds of work, such as attracting funding or expertise from transnational bodies like the EU, the World Bank, or Euromed for environmental improvement projects.
Most traces are not hidden from view, their histories or underlying relationships obscured from an unknowing public. I suggest that we can think about Beirutis' or Bourj Hammoud residents' relationship to those traces not as a direct visual clue but as part of a broader "field of consciousness" (Mead 2002). Their relationship to such traces includes an excess of associations to different pasts evoked by memories of personal experiences, stories told by others, as well as photographs and films. For Mead, there is no stable past of which to speak. Rather, "this past extends indefinitely, there being nothing to stop it, since any moment of it, being represented, has its past, and so on" (6). Thus, even when these traces are made visible at particular moments, and can appear to serve as evidence of the repetition of sectarian conflict, it is not a stable past repeated but a past with its own excesses and layered histories of representations.
The ability to see, to not see, or to ignore the traces of conflict is based on different sorts of lived experiences of being in the right (or wrong) place at the right time — a time in the past, a time in the continuously emerging present, a time in the imagined future. A trace might be patched up and made invisible to others, but more often, things could be made explicit through a story, a memory recounted to another, which would make the trace visible. One longtime Bourj Hammoud resident pointed out the corner of a now repaired ceiling where a shell had broken through the wall, destroying half of his apartment. After he pointed it out, I could see where the wall had been patched, a thin crack remaining as the only evidence of the great violence that had brought down that wall. It then became impossible to not see it, even if it did not always have the same effect on me; it was no longer invisible. In other instances, the invisibility of war's traces did not depend on a trompe l'oeil of plaster and paint. A friend of mine could not cross the old bridge connecting Bourj Hammoud with Beirut without recalling how his father, a taxi driver who risked his life to collect the large sums garnered by a fare across this once deadly bridge, was killed by a sniper's bullet. Visibility, in this instance, depended on having been present at a certain place and time.
The traces of conflict are always there, densely multiplied and layered, accessible, not locked into a distant past but not always brought together or all simultaneously made visible. It takes a certain kind of moment, a particular sort of trigger, to awaken these various temporalities and make them coalesce, if only for a short time, to make things visible and suddenly all too clear. Moments of cohesion are marked by times when actors share a sense of casual processes, of what caused the bullet holes in the first place, though even these explanations can and do shift and change. Clarity, however, can sometimes be more destructive than murk, particularly when it makes visible and material the histories of displacement and ethnic cleansing so abundant in Bourj Hammoud and makes them available and real again. Some argue that the lack of an official accounting of Lebanese history disables the possibility of any real and lasting peace between various groups who participated in the war. However, the nature of the recent conflicts has shifted away from the configuration of the civil war era. While some of the same leaders of militias who fought against each other during the war have returned to lead sectarian political parties, the factions and their political alignments have changed considerably. It is unlikely that a state-sanctioned, official attempt at civil war reconciliation would be able to assuage these factional shifts between different sectarian political parties.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon by Joanne Randa Nucho. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
