When the Lebanon emerged from its fifteen year civil war in 1990, it had essentially adopted a new constitutional framework in the form of the Taif Accords and a series of ensuing amnesty laws. Instead of representing relief and hope at the end of conflict, however, Ta'if presented the Lebanese with a mechanism that would allow them to largely ignore the traumas of their past and in doing so offer the nation a path around any active transitional justice programs. Instead of an "official" history of the war presented by the state, the state imposed a nationwide amnesia regarding the crimes committed and endured by all facets of Lebanese society that has already lasted over two decades. Many Lebanese elites have pushed this narrative of forgetfulness, ignoring the gravity of history itself, to say nothing of the wartime memories that contribute to the renewed bouts of violence. Still other politicians spin those memories to their advantage. By waxing prophetic on this situation, the civil war, or any perceived outcome of the conflict in general, they endear themselves to the different governing blocs or appease the interests of the actor(s) du jour who typically offer “unique” interpretations of wartime and postwar Lebanon. In 2003 a group of friends decided it was high time to respond actively to the decomposition that had continued to chip away at what remained of Lebanon’s national core since the “official” end of the war and established UMAM Documentation and Research (UMAM D&R), a private archive whose core philosophy derives from the general belief that acknowledging Lebanon’s violent past is fundamental to enabling Lebanon to extricate itself from a persistent deadlock. Unlike most independent archives, UMAM D&R does not stand "against the monumental history of the state" as the state itself has yet to adopt an official or authoritative representation of the events in Lebanon's recent past through either the creation of a national history curriculum or the opening of a national library or archive for public use. Rather, UMAM D&R's work stands against the act of forgetting history and the indoctrination of citizens with personal histories of war as communal history. Instead of undermining state sponsored "strategies of control," the archive must compete with scores of "disciplinary mechanisms" used by Lebanon's various elites to control their community. In essence, UMAM D&R is struggling against the desiccation of Lebanon caused, in part, by a lack of history.

The impulse to preserve a legacy vies with a counter impulse to embellish or edit it. Sometimes whole swathes are omitted from stories handed down generation to generation. While the desire to preserve may override other impulses including caution, the human capacity to re-write a storyline is limitless. The terrain between the need to preserve and the impulse to edit is fraught with conflict: paranoia, resentment, self-aggrandizement, shame, irony and disappointment. Nothing is “simply forgotten” as if by accident. These opposing tendencies to preserve and discard issue from the same need: to control the narrative and write a facet of history. But the narrative is quite impossible to control in the end. My point of departure for this discussion is the legacy of my late grandfather (1892-1955), an influential Egyptian Romantic poet, scientist and journalist active in the 1920s-40s. A builder of institutions and libraries, essayist and publisher of politically charged tracts, my grandfather was a compulsive bibliophile, archivist and hoarder, an author and thinker whose motivation to preserve his legacy was fueled by his sense of the broad value of his contribution and the desire to prevail against hostile forces both perceived and real. The materials he amassed and passed to his three children reflect an expansive moment between the Egyptian revolutions of 1919 and 1952, and the two World Wars. In his bid to control his position in this narrative, my grandfather took pains to secure the connections between his work and the cultural geo-political landscape. The desire to preserve his legacy was in turn absorbed by his three children, none of whom had an apparent plan or goal beyond the act of hoarding and storage. And while these three compulsively held onto a large amount of ephemera, letters, books, photographs, manuscripts, and other materials left behind by their father and from their life in Egypt, they hid most of this material and seldom spoke of it. After many years of searching for my grandfather (who I never met), obstructed by the official family narrative, I, often by accident, discovered the hidden caches that each of his children left behind. I have gathered those materials together, to organize them once again into a continuous whole: an accidental archive that I call The Bee Kingdom after my grandfather’s eponymous journal published in Alexandria in the 1930s.

In March 1986, Lieutenant Issa from the Algerian armed forces accompanied Samih Shbeib, head of the Archives and Documents Section at the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center, to Tsebe military base in the Algerian desert. Lieutenant Issa pointed towards rows of white boxes covered with tents and said, “this is the Palestinian Archive.” Little did they know that the archive would still be there nearly three decades later. This paper is an inquiry into the curious fate of the PLO Research Center’s archive. It reconstructs the way in which this archive was lost and why it was never repatriated, highlighting Israel’s seizure of Palestinian archives, the Palestinian leadership’s abandonment of their own records, and the ramifications of this archival absence on the writing of Palestinian history. In analyzing these ramifications, the paper turns to the archive established under the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Agreements. This new national archive was established as the basis for the history of a re-imagined Palestine. The paper presents a reading into the difference between the pre-1993 archive and that of the quasi-state to explore the difference between two archivally constructed Palestines: the metamorphosis of the national movement from a liberation project into a state building enterprise. It aims to reveal that what is at stake in silencing one archive and championing another is silencing the history of one national project, and giving voice to another, thereby reshaping the boundaries of the production of modern Palestinian history.

While in countries such as Egypt, where the state has been playing a dominant role in cultural production and infrastructures, one can speak of a “monumental history of the state” and a fairly recent development of independent and alternative archives, the opposite has been the case in Lebanon. Private and independent archival initiatives have proliferated in Lebanon since the 1990s, and cultural production has often been marked by its engagement with archival practices, leading some to proclaim that “the investigation and appropriation of archives is the favorite recipe for artists here” and “Archivisme is a local disease” (Peeping Tom Digest, No.3, Beirut). Taking independent archives such as the Arab Image Foundation, the Arab Center for Architecture, UMAM Documentation & Research and IRAB Association for Arabic Music as a point of departure, this paper examines the relationship of the Lebanese National Library (LNL) to these alternative institutions. Having been closed to the public since its activities were frozen in the course of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) in 1979, the LNL is currently in the process of being reconstructed and is supposed to re-open to the public in the near future. The LNL sees two of its main functions as “collecting national works and developing the collections of the Library in order to become an institution of national memory”, and “conserving memory and intellectual production”. In a fragmented environment such as the Lebanese one, with many private initiatives and little state presence, does the LNL have a unifying role to play? How does it complement civil society and private initiatives, many of which have been active on the scene since the end of the civil war, how is it received by those independent institutions? Who determines its vision; to what extent does it provide a space for debate about knowledge production and national memory? Sources include interviews, grey literature from relevant institutions, legal documents, news reports and the existing literature on the Lebanese cultural sector.