Al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq. Memories of a wounded quarter in the center of Beirut

Authors

  • Sophie Brones Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain

Abstract

What is living in a city where the damages of the civil war (1975-1990) are still visible for its inhabitants? The description of the use of memory in a wounded district of Beirut aims to analyze the construction of urban temporalities in connection with the period of the Lebanese wars (1975-1990). The city space is approached here as the frame of everyday life and common and ordinary practices. It constitutes both a support and a vector of the expressions of memory. By creating monuments or by forgetting ruined buildings, society qualifies the war traces which very often symbolize what was one of the main issues in the civil war: the coexistence of communities in the urban space. However, if these traces supposedly refer to the war, their suggestive strength does not limit itself to it. The analysis of what takes place around buildings in ruins of the district of Khandaq al-Ghamiq, a former multicommunity district of Beirut, aims to understand the construction of the contemporary urban collective identifications. The practices of memory transmission, inheritance and the representations of these buildings reveal the complexity of the relations between good souvenirs and forgetting that can appear as the negative of the work of memory. Therefore, what could appear at first sight as a gap related to the particular conditions of the field investigation reveals, in the analysis, the tensions that govern the way and the power to talk (or not to talk) about the war.

Key words: Al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq, ruins, collective memory.

Downloads

Published

2011-12-22

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 3 (2011): September/December

Section

Dossiê: Os males da memória

License

I grant the journal História Unisinos the first publication of my article, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (which allows sharing of work, recognition of authorship and initial publication in this journal).

I confirm that my article is not being submitted to another publication and has not been published in its entirely on another journal. I take full responsibility for its originality and I will also claim responsibility for charges from claims by third parties concerning the authorship of the article.

I also agree that the manuscript will be submitted according to the journal’s publication rules described above.