Imagining Imminent Erasure in Beirut This paper argues that the urban imaginary of contemporary Beirut is haunted by imminent erasure due to recurrent violence. Central to the discussion is the Ouzai landfill, where the debris of bombed out buildings of Southern Beirut was disposed of after the 2006 war. A comparative analysis of two artistic responses to the site demonstrates that the shock of the 2006 destruction produced a renewed awareness of the precariousness of the city as a whole. In a sequence near the end of the feature length road movie Je veux voir (Hadjithomas and Joreige, 2006), one of the main characters, Rabih Mroué, switches to interior monologue when driving past the landfill - apparently unable to convey directly to his French visitor, Catherine Deneuve, his sense of “a town that had to be discarded, hidden, buried under the sea.” The sequence ends with images of the sea rolling ashore, followed by a drive through a long tunnel. In the tunnel, Mroué resumes “Sure, we’ll start all over again.” The imagery and narrative of the sequence thus position the fear for Beirut’s potential erasure within the traditional narrative of a city that was destroyed and rebuild seven times since ancient history. In the art magazine Peeping Tom, visual artist Rayyane Tabet reproduced a front page of the New York Times showing endless lines of trucks carrying rubble to the Ouzai landfill. The contribution stated “If I were to write a text on sculpture, it would probably begin with this image.” This statement should be viewed in light of Tabet’s own works. Many revolve around an awareness that everything can be torn down, and that the only thing permanent is a sense of being on the verge of experiencing the unexpected. Rather than a cyclical conception of time, he approaches imminent erasure as a permanent condition that is close to what has been theorized as precarity (For example Puar, 2012; Butler, 2004; Berardi, 2009). In conclusion, contemporary Beirut is imagined as a city that does not last, and can be violently wiped out. The imminence of erasure is traditionally conceived of as a stage in a mythical cycle of death and rebirth, but some of the younger generation interpret it as a permanent condition not unlike what has been theorized elsewhere as precarity.

Published in 2006, Lebanese novelist Alawiyya Subuh’s Dunya portrays a society that has just emerged from a lethal civil war and is attempting to heal from its long history of intense violence. In this context, women struggle the most to deconstruct and dismantle deep-seated constructions of masculinities shaped by patriarchy and sociocultural influences. Gender-based discrimination and violence, which were intensified by the war, continue to mold post-war life. However, Dunya reveals that men become trapped by these forces as well. This paper aims to investigate the ways in which social and cultural expectations of masculinity constructed during times of war harden and cultivate men’s bodies, strengthening and energizing them. Male virility is linked to violence and oppression, both psychologically and physically. When the male body is disabled and rendered impotent, however, as often occurs in the very contexts that stimulate the negotiation of new masculinities, men’s bodies lose their strength, while their minds cling to the hyper-masculinity that previously invigorated them. This paper argues that the main male character in Dunya, Malik, continues to safeguard the privileged construction of the male body he first formulated during the war even after the disappearance of his own strength and virility. He persists in expressing his hyper-masculinity in a variety of ways, including through his constant insistence on engaging in sexual activities with his wife. Malik’s nostalgia for his uninjured body demonstrates that he is also a victim of the patriarchal structures that previously empowered him. He attempts to negotiate his masculinity in the same ways he did before his injury by resorting to fantasy. The cultural imaginings of manliness and male prowess can be oppressive for men, especially when disability limits agency. At the same time, women who are the victims of patriarchal structures of exploitation find themselves even more trapped once their oppressors are disabled. In the novel, society expects Dunya, the main female character of the text, to adhere to externally assigned gender roles and express her femininity by becoming a caregiver to her husband, who must be looked after and attended to like a small child. The only hope that remains for the women in Dunya lies in dreaming and writing. They gain agency and voice by escaping into their imaginations and narrating their stories, which allows them to cope with their social entrapment.

Writing about Englishness, Stuart Hall talks about the “English Eye” that “sees everything else but is not so good at recognizing that it is itself actually looking at something… It is… a structured representation… that is always binary. That is to say, English identity is strongly centered; knowing where it is, what it is, it places everything else” (Hall, “The Local and the Global”). This implies that while identity might be shared history, place, and repeated system of rituals that produce a sense of belonging, identity is also a structure of vision. It consists of the position of looking and a sight. While the way the position of the looking eye places “everybody else” is problematic, how is it constituted and what does that process say about the supposedly unified position from which “everybody else” is seen? Furthermore, how does this structure of identity normalize the way of looking at everyone else and the way of perceiving one’s looking position as “right” and unified? Given the context of the Lebanese civil war where different groups warred to assert one’s own position of looking as the Lebanese identity—the “Lebanese Eye”—the narrative structure of Etel Adnan’s French novel Sitt Marie Rose discloses how identity is manufactured as a position of looking. The story is told by at least seven different narrative voices that watch and narrate the kidnapping, interrogation, and murder of a woman named Marie Rose. Interestingly, all the looking and narrating eyes are male while the object of sight, the “everybody else”, a woman. How, then, does the narrative structure of the novel expose the violent workings of identity construction, its anchoring in positions of looking, and being looked at, and the sexualized and necessary gendering of those positions of looking that are embedded in the constitution of identity?

Adopting a geographical/spatial approach to Beirut in contemporary Lebanese fiction, this paper deals with the city not as a passive and static physical space, but rather as interactive, mobile, and historical, a place that is created from the factuality of the street, building, or monument as well as through performance and social interaction (de Certeau, 1984). In this paper, I will show how the spaces of the city are negotiated, and how they become gendered within diverse relations of power. If traditionally women have been aligned with the house and private space and men with the outer public space, the novels reverse this hierarchy. In view of that, I will show the fluidity of the public/private divide and focus on masculinity and femininity as socially-constructed within particular frameworks linked to class, age, sexuality, religion etc., all of which inscribe and are re-inscribed by spatial differences. To illustrate this gendered notion of spatial trajectories, I will deal with two novels: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayati sharhon yatul (2005, translated as The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story), and Hassan Daoud’s Sanat al-automatik (1996, translated as The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine). In these works the focus is on how sexuality otherwise perceived as private and personal spills into the public sphere and is discernible in the outer spaces of the city, destabilizing the ideology of patriarchal control. In these works, the performances of pedestrians and voyeurs, both male and female, across the city are divergent and contradictory, depending directly on their quotidian experience of the city. In Daoud’s novel, the city is feminized and eroticized by men who indulge in voyeurism or “scopophilia” (Laura Mulvey, 1975). The public sphere controlled by patriarchy is also central to feminine resistance, where the boundaries between public male and private female spaces become blurred. Al-Shaykh’s novel shows that as early as the 1940’s, women roamed the streets of Beirut to buy commodities or go to the cinema to watch Egyptian romantic films of the period. Their participation in the voyeuristic spectacle afforded by the cinema empowers them and serves as a source of knowledge and power. These early nomadic movements around the streets give women as well as men access to shortcuts and other hidden locales that provide them with autonomy and freedom from patriarchal authority.