I remember that after the Beirut port explosion, the concept of collective memory was brought up in a revolutionary way. There was a strong focus on the need to heal from the explosion in a healthy way. To this day, we still come across initiatives for collective trauma and healing, artistic expression, and more. What’s striking is that Beirut—the city whose collective memory after the civil war no one preserved—is now, through a new generation, learning to understand these expressions and states. These initiatives became a step toward healing, even from the way our parents dealt with the civil war. They also served as a step toward the justice we were deprived of after the war.
After the blast, there was a collective fear that we would lose the city again, just as we did after the civil war due to a reconstruction vision that didn’t reflect Beirut and turned the city center into a ghost town. Many in my generation found their own version of Beirut, one that resembled them, perhaps one they even reimagined. As we mature, our view of the city changes. Some of us seek a more tame and less chaotic city than Beirut, while others surrender to the chaos.
Five years have passed since the Beirut blast, and just months have passed since the destruction of my second city: the southern suburbs, Dahieh. I was born, raised, and lived in Burj al-Barajneh, my mother’s village, where her ancestors lived. Many of the residents of Burj considered it separate from the larger Dahieh because of its village-like character, full of farmland and original inhabitants. Over time, Burj took on the urban character of Dahieh and lost much of its communal memory, even my grandfather’s plot of green land turned into a parking lot.
As for me personally, I stepped out of Burj for the first time into the wider Dahieh, getting to know the area street by street. I would walk from my school in Mraijeh or later from my high school in Ghobeiry to Burj. I met friends who lived across Dahieh, and this city became the entirety of my memory.
Four years after the July War, I visited Bir al-Abed for the first time. It was a shock. I remember visiting my cousin there as a child and playing in that area, though somehow I had no visual memory of what Bir al-Abed looked like. When I went back after reconstruction, I didn’t recognize anything. It was like visiting the area for the first time. A new memory of Dahieh formed, slowly erased again by new buildings, investments, and businesses. Now that memory is gone entirely, with no one having noticed the collective shock, or spoken of memory or expression. None of those terms meant anything after the latest war, as if this city had grown used to destruction.
Dahieh is an ugly city—not in terms of architecture, power lines, traffic, overpopulation, or motorcycles—but in the very nature of life there. The ugliness is a child dying from food poisoning after a rat died in a barrel of pickles at the neighborhood snack shop. The ugliness is a man dying by mistake in a fight he wasn’t part of. Or our friend Zainab’s house in Ouzai flooding with sewage water.
Poverty is ugly in every sense, and Dahieh has always been home to the poor, refugees, outlaws, and war fugitives. Perhaps that’s why collective memory there doesn’t matter to some in Lebanon. What initiative could gather all these characters to speak of memory?
The destruction in Dahieh is heartbreaking. I remember driving there the moment the ceasefire was announced, and I started crying at the devastation, at how the landmarks had changed, just like I cried when I saw Beirut after the port explosion.
I don’t know what it means to have my collective memory killed like this. I don’t even know what constitutes my collective memory. I remember that when Harkous Chicken was bombed, I felt like my memory had begun to unravel. I don’t know why, but “Harkous Chicken” felt like it brought me together with everyone who lived there.
This is what Israel does: it kills collective memory and destroys the landmarks of the city we knew. It’s part of cultural erasure, obliterating the memory of those who remain, so they remain imprisoned by the trauma of loss and destruction, a trauma that mirrors abandonment. I remember how the people of Burj were shocked when the Sayyad Bakery was bombed—a bakery established in 1950. Its destruction was painful because it was part of the collective memory no one seems to care about.
Five years have passed since August 4, and healing from that explosion has been difficult for me. The memory-related initiatives were admirable, though they latched onto a fragile idea and distracted from the core demand: justice. How many of us joined a protest or a “solidarity vigil” for the blast victims in the past few years?
What’s painful is that the latest war defeated me. It broke my attachment to cities. The destruction in Dahieh made me realize that cities can be erased and rebuilt, and as for collective memory—I don’t even know what it means or how to define it. Is it a bakery? A chicken shop? The alleys I walked in Ghobeiry on my way to Burj, discovering shortcuts each time? My grandfather’s house in Haret Hreik that Israel marked for bombing but somehow didn’t? My childhood home that was destroyed anyway? The Raduf Cemetery that meant little to me until my mother died? My grandmother’s garden that became a parking lot? The Ghobeiry school where I met a thousand girls and fought with half of them? Or that chance encounter with Hassan Nasrallah in a friend’s parking lot? Is it the CD shop on Abdel Nour Street where my sister and I used to buy computer games? Or the driver of Van #4 who kicked a harasser off the van?
I don’t know what it is. But I do know I’m afraid to walk past these places now—afraid my memory will betray me, like it did with Bir al-Abed after the July War. I know there’s a chance they’ve been destroyed. And if they have, I can do nothing but accept the loss quickly, erase them from my memory, without any collective healing or even speaking about it. I don’t even have friends in Dahieh anymore.
Perhaps that’s Israel’s victory over me: that I no longer grieve. And maybe defeat sometimes means admitting you have no feelings left because the destruction is too vast to repair, too overwhelming to believe anyone who says “It’ll return better than before.” What will return? Who will restore it all? Even my childhood home has become a parking lot, as if the entire neighborhood had been waiting for new space because there wasn’t room for the cars anymore.
My father says our house, which was destroyed on Hatoum Street, will come back, with underground parking, no less. There’s a plan, apparently, to rebuild it even better. Who told him that? I don’t know. Maybe his way of resisting a new kind of defeat is to dream of underground parking as a victory, if the Tramal runs out.
With all this talk of becoming more “aware,” we are left with little more than despair and a sense of defeat. There are cities we know we’ll never rebuild as they once were, and we say this without emotion, either because they were ugly or because their residents’ feelings were monopolized by a particular class. Or maybe because we’ve simply been drained. Other cities, of course, deserve public holidays and better initiatives.
On the day of the ceasefire, the French organization I worked for didn’t give us the day off, an order from “the foreigners,” of course. They don’t understand what it means for a city to be erased. They don’t understand the need to go and see what happened to your city. It’s as if I was forced to feel like Dahieh is a strange city far removed from Beirut.
Beirut’s suburbs are not usually referred to as “suburbs.” They’re part of the city, except for Dahieh, which feels like a different planet, with its own wars and its own people.
I miss the old Dahieh, before the death and destruction. I miss the faces of my family when they weren’t so tired. I miss the Beirut I knew before I matured, when I hadn’t yet felt this chaos and injustice. It’s hard to understand what I want from either city now. Both are disfigured by destruction, exploitation, politics I don’t like, and a storm of traumas we pretend we’re healing from, while in reality, we’re just growing accustomed to them.
