Judi jiab first year

The Post War Anti-Nostalgia: An Anomaly judi diab

Tutor: Theodosia-Evdori Panagiotopoulou Cover Photo: Don McCullin: Christian gunmen in the Holiday Inn, battling with Palestinians in the adjacent hotel, Beirut, Lebanon, 1976

The 1975 - 1991 civil war in Lebanon transformed identities into territories. The propulsive impulse of this occurrence was the lust to emphasise, and in some sense, preserve identity by ascribing it to geographical space.The consequence was, however, a profound destabilisation of the fragile multicultural coexistence and "a geography of fear”. In 1975, at the starting point of the Civil war, there existed a particular point in Beirut which was a demilitarised area, “a geographical point of terror”. This theoretical border segregated Beirut geographically - into eastern and western halves; as well as religiously - into Muslim and Christian factions.

Varying trees and peculiar plants found life within death; sprouting relentlessly throughout the empty streets in the center line of the land that split Beirut, hence becoming renowned as ‘the Green Line’. Ultimately, ‘the Green Line’ expanded and spanned to Beirut’s suburbs and further - essentially separating the Muslim sects in West Beirut from the majorly Christian East dominated by the Lebanese Front.1

The Green Line, 1978, Beirut

Instantaneously, Beirut became a chess board. Religions were diminished to Black and White. Lebanese citizens found themselves as pawns on the front line - the leaders of their government seemingly embodied the roles of the “Kings and Queens”. However, the players of the game, who remain unaffected by the fallen pieces, were the leaders Syria and Palestine - who transformed Lebanon into a proxy.

The war was a multifaceted civil war spanning across a total of fifteen years - until 1990. It resulted in an estimated 250,000 fatalities - including women, children, and elderly. A survey taken in 2012 concluded that in that year approximately 76,000 people were still discovered to be displaced within Lebanon. Furthermore, a total of one million people were forced to leave the country in consequence of the war. Prior to the conflict, Lebanon was considered multi-sectarian. Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians constituted the majorities of residents in the coastal cities; Shi’a Muslims were mostly established in the Bekaa to the east and the South; and the residents of the mountainous areas were essentially Druze and Christian.2 The Lebanese government was mainly dominated by Maronite Christians. The connection between political control and religious sects had been augmented under the French mandate from 1920 to 1943, favouring a leading position for the Christians. Despite this, Lebanon had a significant Muslim population, and several PanArab and Left Wing groups opposed the pro-western government.

1

"Morphogenesis of the Beirut Green-Line - Ole Møysted - Al Mashriq,”, accessed December 3, 2017, http://almashriq.hiof.no/ lebanon/900/910/919/beirut/greenline/moystad.index.html 2

Hiba Akar and Mohammed Hafeda, Narrating Beirut from Its Borderlines (2011).

Lebanon’s civil war, young Christians with the body of a Palestinian girl, Beirut, Lebanon, 1976, Don McCullin

In the eyes of the nostalgic, those who had the privilege of inhabiting the streets of Beirut prior to the destruction, Beirut is the home of arrays of bordeaux roofs on Ottoman villas softly flowing downwards towards the sea. To our dismay, this image of Beirut is unfamiliar and dreamlike to the minds of the youth. It exists solely within the photographs their parents commemorate of their own adolescence. Photographs which resonate as dream-like film sets to todays youth - who have no memory of that time; and hence latch on to a memory of that memory - only alive within the surfaces of imagery and within fleeting thoughts that swarm around them. While the deterioration of historical architecture in Beirut can be attributed to the impact of the civil war, its disappearance is inarguably the consequence of developments lead by private construction companies owned by political figures. Ultimately, in the aftermath of the relentless shelling and plummeting grenades, property developers were the main instigators behind the plethora of irreversible damage on the city.

“It was politics that destroyed this city, not just tanks or shelling during the war – it was bulldozers and politicians,” says Giorgio Guy Tarraf, the spokesperson of Save Beirut Heritage, an organisation which promotes the prevention of the demolition of Beirut’s old buildings.3 As the smoke resided at the end of the Lebanese Civil War, developers dove into the redesign of Beirut’s cityscape. Their primary focus was the city centre - the home of the green line. Prior to 1975, the city centre was a populous network of souks where Beirut’s diverse sectarian bodies coincided to purchase and trade.

However, due to its existence as a front line between Muslim and Christian factions of the city, central Beirut found itself ridden with shattered shells which once stood as buildings - now fragmentally scattered among and its densely vegetated streets.

Solidere, a development company founded by the late prime minister Rafik Hariri, directed the reconstruction of Downtown Beirut post 1990. In the eyes of the masses, Solidere had stripped Beirut of its identity permanently. The redesign had given birth to an artificial, soul-lacking playground accommodating the lifestyles of tourists from the affluent Gulf, rather than the needs of the average Lebanese citizen. What emerged was the antithesis of the melting pot that Central Beirut had once been; a replacement which lacked "Fifteen Years of War Couldn’t Destroy Beirut’s Heritage, But a Construction Bonanza Might," Next City, , accessed November 26, 2017, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/fifteen-years-of-war-couldnt-destroy-beiruts-heritage-but-a-construction-bo.

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credibility in the context it was set in. The center, now transformed into a luxury commercial hub prevalent with ostentatious open-air restaurants and on-trend boutiques, became a distant cousin of the Champs Elysees, a desperate imitation of a lifestyle which the war ridden citizens of Beirut could not afford to replicate, nor did they want to.

Hotel St. George, Beirut

The reasoning behind the destruction of Lebanese pre-war architectural heritage has been argued extensively, but to no avail. Political greed, inconclusive planning, a desperate attempt to reinstate Beirut as an iconic Mediterranean capital - these factors and many more all entail valid explanations. However - there is one theory that is not discussed extensively but solely through subtle remarks in passing conversation, lyrical references, and in between lines of controversial Arab literature.

Post-war Beirut was a victim of the implications of its politicians’ “Anti Nostalgia”. Beirut, particularly central Beirut, once existed as a multi-sectarian, coexistential melting pot. It was a city of the people, by the people. In the aftermath of the civil war, a scorching realisation dawned on Beirut. Its “people” could no longer be referenced as a collective unit. Beirut was only “multi-sectarian” in its population, but not in its “people”. The war-ridden capital could not revert to its essence as a meeting place that disregarded the social, political, or religious context to which the people belonged. Hence, the Lebanese government attempted to regress Beirut to its “Tabula Rasa” - the notion, popularised by John Locke, that the human mind receives knowledge and forms itself based on experience alone, without any pre-existing innate thoughts that would serve as a starting point.4 The definition of Tabula Rasa coincides ironically with the manner by which Beirut was redesigned. Tabula Rasa is somewhat a paradox. Since its direct definition is “Scraped Tablet” this implies that certain underlying information, or matter, existed upon that tablet prior to its removal. Paradoxically, in terms of psychology, we refer to Tabula Rasa as “A Blank Slate”, implying that human thought and perception attains no preexisting innate ideas. Post war Beirut was treated with the same logic of Tabula Rasa. In an attempt to 4

E.J. Lowe, Locke (London: Rutledge, 2005)

“scrape the tablet” of the last fifteen years of trauma, Beirut was approached in terms of an empty vessel. In the eyes of the Lebanese government; in order to erase the wounds of the war, Beirut needed to shed its skin completely. It could not continue to exist if it did not molt. What the leaders of Lebanon failed to realise was that one cannot disregard the past - as the past is intrinsically tired to the other members of the triad: the present and the future. The dialectical movement of history permits occurrences of the past to resurface as flashes, in abrupt juxtaposition with the present, fracturing of our impression of time as merely a continuum.

Hence, with the case of Beirut, the past, along with its craters of memory, makes its way into the social fabric of the present, and is borne forward into the unknown future.

At some point amidst the postwar confusion, the Lebanese replaced “the need to forget” with “reconstruction” . However, one particular building, which lies amidst the chaos of Central Beirut, refuses to forget - and forbids Beirut from doing so through its existence. Bullet ridden and vacant, The Holiday Inn remains evidence of the period that Lebanon would never recover from.

Holiday Inn, 1975, Al Jazeera

The design of the Holiday Inn was created by André Wogenscky, a pupil of Le Corbusier, in association with Maurice Hindieh. Construction spanned over three years, from 1971 until 1974, and the hotel was officially in business for less than a year before finding itself on the front holds of the conflict.5 Spanning across a six month period between the Winter of 1975 and Spring of 1976, oppositional military clans battled for command of the Inn, which provided an advantageous shooting point during the period of the war entitled the “Battle of the Hotels” - one of the war’s primal and most brutal episodes - which pitted Lebanon’s Christian military against the Muslim Military and its allies, the Palestinians and Leftists.

Decades after the ceasefire, the building’s future remained uncertain due to a disagreement between the two shareholders in the firm in ownership of it: ‘Saint Charles City Center’. The Lebanese property developers , ‘Compagnie Immobiliere Libanaise’, strongly pushed for renovation, while its Kuwaiti shareholders strongly advocated its demolishment.

Palestinian military men in the devastated Holiday Inn, after dislodging the Christian forces, Al Jazeera

Former military men recall the Inn as a “tower of death” which existed as a temporary benchmark segregating Beirut into its Christian and Muslim factions.

“They chased us from floor to floor, hall to hall, from column to column,” explained Milad, a former military man from the Phalange, the primary Christian party during the war.

“Two comrades and myself were the final few to exit,” continued Milad, explaining the events coinciding with the Palestinians take over of the hotel.

“We remained concealed until dusk, then dressed ourselves in keffiyeh - traditional Palestinian scarves - that we removed off of fallen Palestinian military men,” he said, utilising the scarves to camouflage themselves in order to flee the Palestinian base point safely.6

5

India Stoughton, "The scars of war on Lebanon's Holiday Inn," News | Al Jazeera, December 30, 2015, , accessed December 08, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/scars-war-lebanon-holiday-inn-151219082356997.html.

The National, "Towering symbol of Lebanon’s civil war up for auction," The National, May 03, 2014, , accessed December 2, 2017, http://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/towering-symbol-of-lebanon-s-civil-war-up-for-auction-1.242513.

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Holiday Inn, Ieva Saudgaraite, 2014

Today, the ground floor of the building consists of a military base. Army men and tanks guard all main entry points, prohibiting access to the building without a permit from the military.

Over the years, the interior has been stripped of all furniture. Only the walls remain; prevalent with inscriptions made by Christian and Palestinian military men, that dominated the Inn at various lapses of time.

Despite, or due to, its devastastion; the Holiday Inn embodies an indispensable aspect of Beirut’s contemporary heritage and dissimilar landscape. For almost half a century now, the skeletal remnants of the Inn have hindered over Beirut’s central district, an inveterate reminder that time did not manage to erase. The building attains a dual-significance to Beirut’s history - its early years symbolise cosmopolitan prewar Beirut, accompanied by all its wealth and glamour. Its physicality - now existing as a derelict, shell scarred building, conveys the manifestation of the damage that could not be reversed. The structure, with its layers of significance plastered across its cratered facade, could be defined as Beirut’s accidental monument.

During the first ten year postwar period, prolonged discussions were instigated regarding the building’s future; but to no avail. As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for its shareholders to come to a mutual decision on the matter, and hence one was never taken.

As generations pass, Beirut’s adolescents attain a weaker connection to the Civil War - and hence, a weaker connection to the Holiday Inn. Therefore, artists and architects have produced work and conversations in an attempt to constantly reinstate the building’s perpetual relevance.

On December 30th, 2015, Lebanese artist Jad El Khoury, rappelled down the side of the Inn and painted a series of cartoonish figures on its facade, placing them around craters and cavities resultant of the war’s relentless shelling.

Jad El Khoury painting on the Holiday Inn, DesignBoom, 2015

This was followed by an unexpected show of passionate fury from Beirut’s citizens at the alteration of the landmark building. The level of controversy the building instigated, even forty years later, reminded the Lebanese people of its monumentality within Beirut’s history, and Beirut’s presence.

Ieva Saudargaite, a Lebanese-Lithuanian architect spoke to Lebanese publication Al Jazeera about her opinion on the artwork; “I’ve studied the hotel’s history. The building is an icon. It’s a sacred monster, in the manner that it carries extensive historical meaning while contrastingly holding its terrible past. I would argue that it deserves something with meaning, layers, specificity to itself … It's a beautiful and very imposing structure," she said. "[ElKhoury's work] is is similar to a tag. Some referred to it as vandalism and I somewhat agree, although it was vandalism with consent, which is really strange. This is the kind of thing that would occur in Lebanon.” 7 Gregory Buchakjian, a Lebanese/Armenian art historian and artist, who researched the Battle of the Hotels extensively, said, ”The Holiday Inn holds an extremely strong presence. It cannot be diminished to a sole place of bloodshed like Qarantina or Til ElZaatar. These hotels were symbols of Cosmopolitan Beirut, hence, their destruction caused intense trauma. There are iconic images of the Inn aflame. It burned for months. It's immensity meant that several fires occurred simultaneously, while different wings remained intact. A journalist who managed to enter during the war claimed that not only was the elevator working, but the music in the elevator was still playing.” Buchakjian immediately spoke out when Khoury shared images on social media of the art work, writing, “This is an outrage! An outrage to Beirut! An outrage to memory! An outrage to everything!” 8

7India

Stoughton, "The scars of war on Lebanon's Holiday Inn," News | Al Jazeera, December 30, 2015, , accessed December 08, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/scars-war-lebanon-holiday-inn-151219082356997.html.

(Gregory Buchakjian’s continued interview with Stoughton, Al Jazeera): “My reaction was spontaneous”, recounted Buchakjian.

“One commenter responded, 'Why do you accept the art on the Berlin Wall and the Palestinian wall but not on the Inn?' But it's simple. The Berlin Wall is urban art. It's graffiti, the artists didn’t request permission from authority … What's frustrating is that this Inn is completely inaccessible. It's very difficult to enter, and this guy requests privileged permission, and he gives himself the privilege of painting it from top to bottom. Street art is not an art of the privileged.”

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The voices of artists, architects, and citizens of Beirut alike echoed in defence of protecting the unaltered state of the Holiday Inn - specifically condemning the unequal accessibility granted to specific individuals.

They advocated against painting over the Inn’s history sporadically. They acknowledged the blatant notion that the Holiday Inn was more than a concrete canvas or a majorly empty military base.

The passion behind their advocacy reinforced the regard of the Holiday Inn as an accidental monument, a forgotten artefact awoken by contemporary actions. In fact, it is not only an accidental monument, but an accidental metaphor to the city in itself. And in that sense, it reflects the dichotomy of the past and present Beirut embodies - in the sense that it is both unavoidably remembered through its physicality, but painstakingly forgotten in terms of its memory. In the elaborate structure of seeing and not seeing lives the idea of memory, of what we remember and what we forget, demonstrating how memory and forgetfulness are not oppositional entities but two lovers with everything in common, but nothing at all. While the focal point of the essay appears to be the holiday inn - the building itself is not the protagonist by any means. The holiday inn is one of the many settings of Memory’s encounters with Forgetfulness. It carries the weight of both of their sentiments towards one another while existing idly as backdrop to their behaviour.

References: Akar, Hiba, and Mohammed Hafeda. Narrating Beirut from Its Borderlines. 2011.

Daou, Rita, and Raoul Wootliff, Judah Ari Gross and Agencies. "Beirut eyes future for famed hotel turned civil war relic." The Times of Israel. Accessed November 29, 2017. http://www.timesofisrael.com/lebanon-eyes-future-forfamed-hotel-turned-civil-war-relic/.

Darwish, Mahmoud. Memory for Forgetfulness. 1982.

"Fifteen Years of War Couldn’t Destroy Beirut’s Heritage, But a Construction Bonanza Might." Next City. Accessed November 26, 2017. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/fifteen-years-of-war-couldnt-destroy-beiruts-heritage-but-aconstruction-bo.

Fordham, Alice. "Beirut's Holiday Inn: Once Chic, Then Battered, Still Contested." NPR. May 27, 2014. Accessed December 08, 2017. http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/05/27/313960524/beiruts-holiday-inn-once-chic-thenbattered-still-contested.

"Jad el khoury adds colorful doodles to beirut's scars of war." Designboom | architecture & design magazine. January 03, 2016. Accessed December 2, 2017. http://www.designboom.com/art/jad-el-khoury-war-peace-art-attackbeirut-12-28-2105/.

Lowe, E.j. Locke. London: Rutledge, 2005. Print.

"Morphogenesis of the Beirut Green-Line - Ole Møysted - Al Mashriq." ----------------. Accessed December 3, 2017. http://almashriq.hiof.no/lebanon/900/910/919/beirut/greenline/moystad/index.html.

National, The. "Towering symbol of Lebanon’s civil war up for auction." The National. May 03, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2017. http://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/towering-symbol-of-lebanon-s-civil-war-up-forauction-1.242513.

Nayel, Moe-Ali. "Beirut's bullet-riddled Holiday Inn - a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 28." The Guardian. May 01, 2015. Accessed December 08, 2017. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/01/beirut-holiday-inn-civil-warhistory-cities-50-buildings.

Sharif, Amani. "Why Beirut's Bullet-Scarred Holiday Inn is a Symbol of War." Culture Trip. September 22, 2017.

Accessed December 08, 2017. https://theculturetrip.com/middle-east/lebanon/articles/why-beiruts-bullet-scarredholiday-inn-is-a-symbol-of-war/.

Stoughton, India. "The scars of war on Lebanon's Holiday Inn." News | Al Jazeera. December 30, 2015. Accessed December 08, 2017. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/scars-war-lebanon-holiday-inn-151219082356997.html.