Introducing the chapter
An injured man stands with his wounds covering all of his back and arms. In the background, glass, debris, destroyed infrastructure, smoke, post-explosion scene. This photograph23 captured by Lorenzo Tugnoli got awarded first place in the Spot News Stories category of the World Press Photo 2021. I look at this picture and I ask myself: What can wounds do? How are wounds in post-explosion Beirut different? My engagement in the “field”
started shortly after the blast, when I started actively observing and collecting photographs, comments, posts, publicly displayed messages of people, exhibiting their or other people’s wounds and scars to make statements. These displays pushed me to further investigate in what forms are wounds in post-explosion Beirut complex entities, acting as beyond things-in-themselves.
In the previous chapters I observed how first wounds are relational entities, shifting, changing, moving in and out of sight, being mobilized in different practices revolving around their care and attention. I explored how the “being” and “becoming” of wounds develops and gets constructed through their relations with diverse materialities. I then studied, in the second chapter, how wounds are affective social entities, that not only become various objects aesthetically valued or pushed to be concealed, but they also “do” and act, specifically mediate relations. I showed how they mediate kinship and community relations, tying together, bodies, objects, ideas, movements and actions.
With each chapter, I introduced a new layer to my findings on wounds. I started with the things in themselves at local daily practices, then went to observe these same entities at the level of social relations between people and finally in this third and final empirical chapter I will introduce another level, a material-political one. I will look into how wounds become politicized, turning into affective political statements, then explore how they mobilize actions, movements, relations, stir up debates, accusations, making the city of Beirut, making the city of Beirut wounded.
Wounds in a chain of crises
One of the hurdles I faced in my thesis project was deciding when to stop collecting data, specifically from digital observations. This is partly because of how alive the event still is in current communal and societal debates through the ongoing investigations, protests by the families of victims and the absence of closure due to the unclarity of “what happened
23 See page 9
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actually?”24. That being said, I received a message from a friend a couple of days before finalizing the edits on my chapters, noting that she has noticed a few posts on Instagram that have made her think about my project; a Lebanese visual artist has launched a new series, photographs of wounds. The people posing are individuals who were wounded in the Beirut blast around a year ago and they still carry their scars. The caption of the series reads:
A few years ago, a friend told me that she’ll never hide her wrinkles and scars as they tell her story. The physical scars of the August 4th explosion tell the stories of how our city got destroyed by our own government, our houses stolen from us, our bodies disfigured and killed.
[…] One year later, no one is held accountable, the same people who scarred us are still in power. As long as our scars remain, we will never stop fighting for justice…
As the photographer captions through his images and words, wounds of the Beirut explosion are narrators of how “the city got destroyed by our own government” and how “our bodies [got] disfigured and killed”. Not only are they narrators of this particular devastating event but they are also translators of the ongoing crises happening in the country. Wounds in post-explosion Beirut are political entities as they are intertwined with local political crises.
Before I left for Amsterdam in September 2020, Beirut was unrecognizable. Mar Mkhael and Gemmayzeh25, two neighborhoods that were present almost always in my daily whereabouts, were left completely destroyed as they were located right across the highway from the Beirut port (locus of the explosion). I returned to Lebanon to conduct my fieldwork in February 2021. I went on lots of walks in Beirut, either by myself or with close friends. On a sunny, “fieldwork-y” day mid-March, I met a friend and we walked together from Mar Mkhael to Gemmayzeh to grab coffee. 7 months since the explosion and the city was partially reconstructed and there was life again, something that was surprising to me. In my imagination, the city was ruined and the image of a reconstructed, recovered city was absent from my mind.
Perhaps living abroad was the main reason as to why the visual of a destroyed city had governed my mind as opposed to one being reconstructed. Through my walks, however, I noticed how, naturally, a lot of the infrastructure is left in ruins. Studying a landscape of ruin helps to grasp the "tangible effects" of living among ruins, "how ruination produces a series of political dispositions and imaginaries, and how populations build new futures out of the debris of futures past" (Bonilla 2020: 150).
Bonilla (2020) writes how, long before hurricane Maria, “the Puerto Rican landscape was already dominated by signs of ruin: bankruptcy, default, foreclosure, displacement, dispossession, exile, decay, and neglect" and she explains why there are more signs and slogans denouncing colonialism than the "inefficiencies of the Federal Emergency Management Agency" (Bonilla 2020: 147) that was unable to prevent the disastrous damage caused by the hurricane. This resonates with the Lebanese situation; more people denounce the corruption
24 I elaborate more on this in the limitations and recommendations section of my conclusion
25 Refer to the map of Beirut (annex 1)
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and criminality of the Lebanese state than its incompetence to prevent a disaster such as the Beirut explosion. And this is because of the many events that precede the explosion. One could go back until 1975 to start with the Civil War and then to the 90s when the post-war agreements resulted into a government led by the same warlords who were fighting each other in the streets of the city. Then came an era of neoliberal developments, a reconstruction of the destroyed city that caused the displacement of its residents and further marginalization of the lower-class citizens. After that, came the 2000s, an era of violent assassinations and bombings and wars.
The country still witnessed instability, avoiding total market crashes by bizarre miracles, which leads to 2019; the beginning of the fall of the Lebanese lira (national currency) and the collapse of the banking sector. After that, the country started to witness the horrors of inflation and, subsequently, hyperinflation, the complete destruction of people’s purchasing power and a deadly pandemic. And then, in summer 2020, on August 4, the city got hit by one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in modern history that killed 220 people, left thousands injured and homeless. All these reasons are behind a feeling of unprotectedness among many people, causing many of my informants to call out the cruelty of the state as a whole, rather than just its incompetence in managing explosive chemicals.
Studying the ongoing crises that have hit the city of Beirut, I argue how the explosion could not be seen as an event in itself but a shackle in the chain of crises. The explosion is part of a series that define the complete political collapse. And following that logic, the consequences of this event, in this case, the physical wounds of explosion survivors, become intertwined with the political crises. Many of my participants expressed their anger towards the situation in Lebanon, which has affected how they view their wounds and live with them, and how they face many burdens in their recovery journey.
Raffi26 was at home in Karantina27, along with his sister, mother and toddler niece when the explosion happened. Everything was shaking and the windows snapped out of their spot.
He does not remember those few seconds when it felt like death. He got up and saw his sister and mom covered in blood but did not even notice his own injury. A thick shard of wood had penetrated his face, from the back of his right ear, and coming out of his cheek. When I met Raffi, I couldn’t tell that he had been through such a painful experience. He showed me pictures of his recovery journey and talked about his surgeries and checkups. Through his stories, it became clear that he had forgotten about his own wounds, as he said, and had cared for his sister and mother, and the reconstruction of their home. He explained to me how hard it was to be injured during a time when Lebanon was in collapse. “Corona didn’t make it easier, nor the lira situation”. One cannot even take a flight to a different country to run away from the wounded city. For him, his wounds were a reminder of what had happened not only to the city but also to his home and his family. His wounds were a reflection of the wounds carried by his sister and mother. Their wounds reminded him of his. And the healing process of these entities had become intertwined with the difficulty of navigating a life in a city full of crises.
26 pseudonym
27 A neighborhood adjacent to the region of the port.
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From less-than-private to public, political entities
… I can compare it to a car accident but if a car accident happened I would not have talked about what happened this much openly, and talked about it on social media, and expressed myself, but because it was this huge crime that happened, I felt that I needed to talk about my injury and my wounds…
Comparing her injury from the explosion to an injury from a car accident, Racha powerfully describes how wounds in post-explosion Beirut are unique. These entities have not resulted from an accident. They were the consequence of a “huge crime”, hence, they become proof of a political disaster. Moreover, this excerpt not only shows how these wounds are political entities by being the outcome of a crime and existing in a wounded ecology, but also highlights how Racha and many others felt that their wounds must be talked about and must be shared with the public.
In the chapter Living with wounds and wounds that are living, through the examples of mirrors and clothes, I examined how the wound could become invisible to the person wounded when for example we take a particular thing, the mirror -that allows for its visibility- away. In the chapter Social lives of wounds, I explored how people give care and attention to wounds and become part of wound-assemblages, including photographers who had displayed photos of wounds online, supporters, commentators, protesters who had also shared these pictures, expressed their thoughts, and admired the beauty of wounds and the strength of wound carriers.
I examined how wound carriers and photographers have created a visibility of the wounds by taking photographs and sharing them on social media, which is a particular version of making them public. Through these acts, wounds, which are personal entities have become, public.
Hence, also making them political. It is interesting how wounds could turn from being less-than-private things28 to public entities, but they could be made public, shown off, displayed, to be used as a political entity, a complaint or even an accusation.
The concept of politicizing wounds and wounded bodies through public staging is certainly not new. Dawney (2019) explores the public staging of wounded military bodies in the UK during and after recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan building on Elaine Scarry’s work on bodily injury and pain during wars, in which the author opens her arguments with the powerful statement: “the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring” (Scarry 1985: 1).
Dawney notably employs Scarry’s concept of substantiation which “refers to the way in which the matter of wounded, maimed and dead bodies works to enflesh ideas” (Dawney 2019: 50).
Wounded bodies function as tools of substantiation and make ideas “visible and palpable to publics” (Dawney 2019: 50). Moreover, by applying this concept, Dawney studies the political-affective work that bodies in war can do and how “the force of the wound is called upon in a
28 Less-than-private things was a term suggested by prof. Mol when I wrote an essay on wounds and things for her class, Materialities in Practice. Wounds can become less-than-private things when even in private, daily lives their visibility is taken away by for example hiding the mirror away, or not seeing them as they are on one’s back or covered by clothes.
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mediation of public affect” (Dawney 2019: 51) which means that rendering wounds of war visible to publics draws them into the affective ideals of war-as-politics and creates a relation between the bodies of publics and the bodies of wounded soldiers. Most importantly, however, is how these wounds of war become diffused to the public eye through institutions, screen and live events and everyday objects (Dawney 2019: 52).
It is clear of course that a political context of war is very much different from the context I am working with, however my inspiration from Dawney and Scarry lies in their thinking about the process of how making wounds public in specific situations and methods, turns them into “affective political technologies” (Dawney 2019: 60). In the context of post-explosion Beirut, with the online exposure of wounds, community initiatives giving care to wounds and the ongoing protests and debates, wounds turn into these affective political entities providing
“substantiation” of the tragic even and making public statements.
What makes a wounded city?
…It is obvious that our system is paralyzed and has no capability to protect, nor help us, and it is only by small personal efforts that we will be able to pass this…
A reconstructive surgeon shares this statement on his public Instagram page along with the photographs of a few wounded people he has helped out of hundreds of other patients.
Reconstructive surgeons during working on wounds of the Beirut explosion, deal with the fleshy affairs of a bruised and cut skin, reworking and rebuilding it to bring it to close to its initial look. As Livingston (2013) studies what is revealed in untreated cancer wounds in a Botswana oncology clinic, she uncovers how the region is full of politico-economic crises where the inequality of access to free cancer care, is shown through the fleshy materiality of the wounds in the ward. This shift from material to political is a powerful conceptual tool to study how the wound becomes a material-politic entity, turning from the damaged skin to a public statement showing how “the system is paralyzed” and “it is through small personal efforts that we can pass this”.
On the submission of this thesis, the first anniversary of the explosion will already be marked. Prior to August 4, 2021, many pictures and photographs of wounded and injured bodies resurfaced on social media, through which, there was a large number of people calling citizens to action. “Remember what they did to us? Time to protest”. As I studied community initiatives in the second empirical chapter, I gathered advertisements that call Beirut blast victims to seek help and treatment at private clinics. In one of these advertisements, the usage of #FaceofBeirut is captivating. “A call to Beirut blast victims […] help us in finding the faces of Beirut… #FaceofBeirut”. Here, the faces of wounded citizens become the faces of Beirut.
The faces of scarred citizens become the face of Beirut. Beirut is its citizens, its wounds and scars. Wounds, these personal material entities, turn into affective political tools creating relations and interactions, inciting movements and actions, mediating communities, that
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collectively make what we call a city. If wounds make the city of Beirut, then what does this tell us about what kind of a city Beirut is?
As I described above in the theoretical framework, Till (2012) lays out the concept of a wounded city, a locale harmed by histories of physical destruction, displacement, collective trauma and state-perpetrated violence (Till 2012: 6). Beirut is a wounded city if we follow Till’s conceptualization. But how does it become wounded in the context of after the explosion? In post-explosion Beirut, wounds tie together relations that make the city. From the individual households, to community treatment initiatives, protests, digital posts of scars with captions like “as if his face contained the pain of Beirut”, wounds assemble a city. A city that is wounded, through its infrastructure. A city that is wounded through its political instability.
A city that is wounded through its residents. A city that is wounded through the weaves and stitches of wounds. Unweaving the wounds reveal a wounded city.
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