Standing on Rue de Damas

Sana Malik

I live in East Beirut on the former Green Line that once divided the city arbitrarily into East and West; Muslim and Christian. Every morning, as I eat my breakfast of labneh and olives, three white doves visit my terrace overlooking Rue de Damas, once the bloodiest site of Lebanon’s internal conflict. They are regular patrons to an area still in need of healing.

This was a sector that neighbors, living mere streets away, would overlook for years. It was not a place that you crossed in your daily business. It became a psychological and physical marker barred from memory.

In Beirut, you cannot physically escape the reminders of a civil war. Shrapnel is still attached to barely standing structures, covered in bullet holes and crumbling under the weight of their bombed foundations and shelled windows. But the Lebanese have become experts of adopting forgetfulness of war into the very character of public space.

You can eclipse the reminders. You can turn off the lights at night and shine the attention onto the Nouveau Beirut. You can delineate the areas of the city that have a “traditional feel”, nostalgia for an outdated Parisian Beirut. You can redevelop a downtown core catering to expensive designers and Saudi guests emulating a pre-1975 city centre, but you cannot give it an authentic soul. You can try and cover the still standing Holiday Inn, a famous bullet-holed and burning sight of the civil war, in the shadow of a new, prestigious intercontinental hotel, but you cannot make it disappear.

However, memory is a volatile object that can re-emerge no matter how much superficial tendencies wish to filter. Every now and then, Beirut’s cultural scene sees a few projects pushing memory to the centre through installations, movie screenings and exhibitions. Luckily, the emergence of public art spaces and curators looking to search for memory is helping this work build and progress. The Beirut Art Centre and The Hangar - UMAM are two sites that are making the discourse viable.

The seven-month-old Beirut Art Centre (B.A.C.) has gained international attention because it is the first public contemprorary art space of this scale in the country. The most recent exhibition, The Road to Peace: Paintings in Times of War, 1975-1991 explores the personal relationship of twenty artists and the trauma of war. Artists such as internationally renowned photographer Fouad El Khoury portray the innocence of children playing in front of a destroyed Place des Martyrs. Other paintings, such as those by Abdel Hamid Baalbaki, Aref Rayess and Rafic Charaf evoke imagery of the crusades with Knights battling on horses, surely a play on senseless inter-religious destruction. The B.A.C. is a promising space for artists to express and onlookers to share in the experience even if the government is unwilling to provide little to no money to support the creative arts.

A second site, conspicuously located in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh - the area bearing the heaviest brunt of Israel’s artillery in the July 2006 war - is The Hangar. Three years after its completion, the space, a project of Documentation & Research, suffered significant damage by Israeli raids losing irreplaceable documents and archives. Now rebuilt, it is hosting an exhibition part of a recurring project entitled Confronting Memories. The photographs are part of a series entitled The <<War>> Through Its Memorials capturing monuments for martyrs, deconstructing the way the Lebanese hand pick and choose what to memorialize. The message is to view the images as part of Lebanese dialogue and how different groups choose to represent themselves within and outside their own sectarian communities.

Publicly, Lebanon’s physical space still struggles in a patchy display of crumbling reminders and barricades. Mentally, the blocks are being picked up and constructed thanks to the emergence of much needed permanent homes for artistic expression.