Beirut:
Grudges, Walls, and Riot Police
Master thesis in RMA Cultural Analysis
Erica Moukarzel
Supervisor: Daan Wesselman
University of Amsterdam
June 19, 2018
Table of Contents
Introduction...4
Chapter 1 Bayn Al Baasa wa Al Shakhtoura or How a Line Becomes a Livable Space...10
1.1 Introduction...11
1.2 Visible In-visible: Two Sides of the Same Façade...13
1.3 The ‘Suspended Now:’ Urban Imaginaries and Nostalgia...22
1.2.1 Urban Imaginaries and Competing Narratives...22
1.2.2 Nostalgia and the ‘Suspended Now’...26
1.4 Volatility and Demolition...29
1.5 Conclusion...32
Chapter 2 Bayn Jidar el Aar wa Khatt el Tamas or How Concrete Becomes Transparent...35
2.1 Introduction...36
2.2 Walled In and Out: Us and Them in The Ghost Town...38
2.3 Heterotopia of Division: Avisual Ruins and Present Absences...45
2.4 Heterotopia of Contact...52
2.5 Conclusion...55
Chapter 3 Bayn Dawla wa Dahaya Dara’ebouha or How Bodies Become a Between...57
3.1 Introduction...58
3.2 Up Close: Precarization and Disposability...59
3.3 From Afar: Vulnerability and the Space of Appearance...65
3.4 In-Between: Riot Police...70
3.5 Conclusion...72
Conclusion...74
“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.” ̶̶ Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
“… and so I took a pen, and I drew a line on the map, all the way from the Martyrs Square to the port.” ̶̶ Late leader of Lebanese Communist Party George Hawi, quoted in Fregonese (200)
Introduction
The launching pad for this thesis is a no-man’s land. Wedged between enemy fronts, the land in its entirety belongs to neither, in undisclosed parts to both. Despite its spatial vastness, it is marked down as a line on the map, advancing or receding with territories gained and lost. Entire spaces vanish within the bounds of its trace, the land condemned to erasure by the imprint of a line.
The specific location of this no-man’s land is Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990). Known as the Green Line, so-named for the “shrubs and bushes [that] sprouted from its tarmac after years of neglect” [CITATION Kha06 \p 115 \l 1033 ], it split the city in two, eroding from memory the city center that resided within its boundaries and collapsing it into khatt el tamas – this demarcation line. Its sides, East and West, predominantly Christian and predominantly Muslim respectively, reflected the two largest groupings of the conflict, which was fought among religious sects and political parties, and driven by the geopolitical climate and diverging imaginaries of a Lebanese national identity. At the time, khatt el tamas witnessed violences that ranged from harassment to sniping to unfathomable ways to kill or to die. It remained deserted: no one frequented it, save for scavenging dogs who sometimes became target practice. And though it may have been the most prominent, it was not the only one.
During the Lebanese Civil War, public spaces emptied out and places all over the city where communities intersected lost their connective functions and instead “became ‘Green Lines,’ treacherous barriers denying any crossover…. [ordinary crossings, junctures, hilltops, even shops,] became fearsome points of reference and demarcating lines, part of the deadly
logistics of contested space” [CITATION Kha06 \p 115 \l 1033 ]. As a result, territories were boxed in, “protected by increasingly organized militias” [CITATION Fre09 \p 314 \y \t \l 1033 ], and communities segregated from each other, fearful of crossing to the other side of khoutout el tamas. Different militias gradually destroyed and reshaped the city’s built
environment in what Sara Fregonese, scholar in geography of Lebanese urban conflict, terms the urbicide of Beirut, where urban space was segmented to reflect the groups’ shifting territories and sectors [CITATION Fre09 \p 310-314 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
On today’s maps of Beirut and Lebanon, the lines have been erased, but the city remains divided; the marks used to draw the lines left traces behind, dents in the surface. These scars are a result of stunted recuperation from an amnesiac political climate and further post-war urbicide in the name of reconstruction. Where the scars linger, the wounds run deep and re-open on occasion. When they do, they appear as lines in space, dividing it where there is no evident – or presently evident – boundary. These re-emerging lines in contemporary Beirut are what I look at. They appear where borders – or elements of borderization, like checkpoints, walls, fences – may not, perhaps where borders used to be or still are, bringing with them spectral reflections of society and memory that carry deeper meanings than just their nature as a border.
Here, I use the term ‘line’ due to the figure’s representation of borders on maps, and its discrepancy with how that border is expressed physically, as an area between the two spaces it divides, visibly occupied by a wall, fence, checkpoint, or any alternation or alternative – an observation that stemmed from the spatial manifestation of the no-man’s land. Following Thomas Nail’s description of the border as ‘between’ states, simultaneously within them and at their edges [CITATION Nai16 \p 2 \n \y \t \l 1033 ], helped me frame the line, its trace, as inherently double. It sparked the idea of an English translation of the Arabic word khatt which
literally means line or trace, and the inadvertent double meaning of el tamas, where the addition or removal of an accent (from سامتلا – el tamas to سامتلإ – iltimas) can change the word’s
meaning from demarcation (el tamas) to contact (iltimas). In the case of its physical expression, just as the no-man’s land and the border, it is a space assigned as separative, ignoring its
potential as a contact zone. Using the symbol of the mapped-out border in its blind spot, this thesis is an effort to merge contested spaces on the precise streak that divides them: the line.
By making the line itself a contact point, I situate this thesis within border studies at a crossroads with protest and urban studies, enveloped in conceptual constellations of memory and visuality relating to each of my chosen objects. In my analyses, I retain my focus on the divisions the lines create – reading both sides for every object – and seeking moments where they falter, openings for resistance where I can dive into the in-between. The concept of the in-between was inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, where one can simultaneously be a native, an outsider, and their resulting hybrid when located in “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary”[CITATION Anz81 \p 3 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]: the borderlands, “the juncture of cultures.” The trajectory I take follows my personal encounters with the objects and their
progression of visual transparency, from opaque to transparent, rigid to fluid.
I start with Bayn Al Baasa wa Al Shakhtoura1, where I work my way towards answering
the question, how does a line become a livable space? With this question, I analyze an object I encountered years ago, an abandoned narrow building that was perfectly livable although one of its edges was less than a meter wide, a vertical line. I aim to tangibly establish the concept of converting a line into a space, first by observing the building’s visual aspects using Derrida’s visible in-visible, as explained in Esther Peeren’s The Spectral Metaphor, and façades according
to Venturi et al.’s Learning from Las Vegas. By drawing on a discursive analysis of its stories, and passing through urban imaginaries (Huyssen, Other Cities Other Worlds) and nostalgia (Boym), I place the building in Judith Naeff’s ‘suspended now,’ where its void (Huyssen, Present Pasts) creates a space.
From there, I move towards Bayn Jidar el Aar wa Khatt el Tamas2, a censorship wall
installed to diffuse clashes between protesters and riot police during the YouStink protests, later appropriated by protesters as a canvas. This object moves into the space of downtown Beirut, where layers of trauma and spectrality are part of the line, and where the protesters’ intervention visually responded to the government, giving new life to the ghost. I ask, how does a line
become transparent?, to echo the materiality of ghosts and the effect the graffiti had on ‘explaining’ the wall’s location. Using Michel Foucault’s concept on heterotopias, as well as Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Border, I establish two spatial sides of the line (us/them), as well as two temporal ones (past/present).
I build on the second chapter’s concept to carry my third into the bodily realm by analyzing the line riot policemen trace between protesters and a politician, in Bayn Dawla wa Dahaya Dara’ebouha3. By asking how does a line become bodily?, I aim to analyze the effect of
the border on the vulnerability and precarity of bodies on each side, and show how its ‘between’ is constituted in the context of a protest. I frame my analysis using Isabell Lorey’s concept of precarization (State of Insecurity), as well as Judith Butler’s work on the space of appearance (“Bodily Vulnerability”; “Bodies in Alliance”) to mark the exchange of vulnerability and precariously imposed disposability in this specific protest, then zooming in on the line in between, whose performance of a between was double.
2 “Between The Wall of Shame and the Demarcation Line” 3 “Between a State and Those It Precarizes”
I look at lines because of their abundance in an increasingly securitized world. With intensifying global efforts for cutting up spaces – which often breaks apart families and
communities, securitizing and fortifying borders – especially in the wake of refugee and migrant eviction crises, and borderization – where setting up a border becomes visualized, there comes a need for two separated places to make contact. This necessity is set in motion by the alienating character of borders, that creates an ‘us’ opposed to a ‘them,’ two entities that are not on equal footing from the start: those within the border dominating and othering those outside. In a sense, then, I switch the perception of dividing these two sides from a line creating two positive spaces to a line as positive space wedged between two negative spaces.
The aim of this thesis is to open up the line into a space for communication – not to solve the divide, but to confront it where it exists rather than at its edges, where the other is imagined as hostile and imposing, or not worthy of a voice. Knowing that relations at the border are riddled with complex power dynamics that vary from place to place or even one side of the border to the other, I take this open space as an opportunity for resisting the dominant entity, to let the other look back or speak back, even if momentarily. Even in these small moments, these small resistances, ‘others’ are seen and heard, and their battles recognized; in accumulating these moments, there is potential for full resistance to and exposure of the dominant’s hegemony. It is all facilitated by the line as mediator, as belonging to both and neither – not neutral space, but as neutral as it can get when there are forces at work on each side.
On a personal note, the driving force behind this thesis is a question of self-exploration: to understand the borderlands between the disjointed facets of my identity as a Lebanese person. It is split between my own perceptions, peppered with the many imaginaries of what it means to be Lebanese – with orientations towards the ethnic, ancestral, spiritual, political, territorial and
regional – and how those imaginaries are projected onto the world outside – to a world that continues to sensationalize and exceptionalize Lebanon through somewhat of an orientalist lens as a religious crossroads, multicultural and westernized, Arab, but not quite, consistently conflicted yet peaceful enough for a chaotic adventure – perceptions that the country identifies itself with as well. Yet among these perceptions are layers of trauma and histories I do not understand; that I see materializing in urban spaces and behaviors whose lineage escapes me and an entire generation born into a nation handed down to us in fragments after the end of the Civil War. Partially, it is nostalgic, for a time I am told was prosperous, where these lines did not exist, and had not left the space injured. It is also yearning for a future of unity and prosperity many are fighting for against and despite the tides, a future that appears in these moments of resistance, between these lines.
Chapter 1
Bayn Al Baasa wa Al Shakhtoura
or How a Line Becomes a Livable Space
“Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” ̶ Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Fi
g.
1
1.1Introduction
From a balcony rail entirely decorated with plush toys, to a lighthouse boxed-in by buildings, the curve at the end of Bliss Street in Beirut’s Manara neighborhood is no stranger to peculiarities. This chapter is about one such candidate: a wall dressed as an abandoned building, known colloquially as Al Baasa, The Grudge. Al Baasa blends so impeccably with its
surroundings that its distinctive character goes unnoticed by many. Taking the shape of a curve on the one-way street, it comes off as a derelict low-rise building to those driving towards it, for its slim side faces their rear-view mirror as they pass it by. The building next to it is too close to expose The Grudge’s thin end, and the two buildings are painted in the same pale salmon-pink color, keeping it ambiguous to those walking uphill in its direction.
Meeting somewhere between a semi-ellipse and a Pythagorean triangle if looked at from above, the part that makes Al Baasa look like most other buildings takes up 3/4 of its sides. This part is its most façade-like feature, tracing the curve along Bliss Street with protruding balconies and large windows; it looks to the sea. At its widest, at the start of the curve, it measures
approximately seven meters, and connects to the back side, an unpainted concrete wall with smaller windows than the front. The Grudge’s thinnest edge appears only to those who turn around after rounding the curve and heading downhill, a mere sixty centimeters wide
[CITATION Ris14 \p 144 \l 1033 ]: the intersection of façade and concrete wall into one long ledge, a vertical line.
This vertical line, and the two sides creating it and created by it, are the focus of this chapter’s analysis. The two sides, its façade and its back wall, are each the subject of a story that constitutes how the building is imagined, where memory is contested between what people say
about it and what those around it say. One of the stories, focusing on the wall, has been written down and published online and in an anthology of forgotten stories about Beirut. This is the story that is most known, an urban myth which has been, in its own way, historicized or etched as truth in the memory of those who encounter the written piece. Upon further digging, another story from oral memory, silent as it may be in face of the other, reveals an alternate perspective which focuses on the façade and how it was inhabited. For this reason, I find it important to tell Al Baasa’s stories as I eventually uncovered them, by way of reading each one discursively in order to frame the building and build concepts around its line.
The intention here is neither to evaluate nor validate the truth of one story over another, for there are two sides to this line, both of which are affected to some degree by what memory leaves untraceable. The stories influence how we see the building from the outside, closing into the line, without focusing on life inside it. The aim, therefore, is to understand Al Baasa’s shape as a building, and to study the larger concept of a line, whose space has the potential to be occupied or filled. For this purpose, my trajectory follows my encounter with this building from the outside, guided by its stories, and going from the vertical line to what it houses. I look at it from outside-in rather than inside-out to explore the question, how does a line become a livable space?
The two stories unfold with my analysis, which sets off by making sense of the entanglements of what is visible and invisible (Peeren, after Derrida) according to the urban myth, to show the property of a line as concealable but still present in space. This is a visual approach that looks closely at how I came to notice the building, through the urban myth, which made the line visible to me. From this perspective, the building looks like it has nothing to hide until the line appears, however, following the logic of oral memories, the façade takes on another
life, one in which the line resides. By conceptualizing façade with Venturi et al.’s duck and decorated shed, I hope to understand the double character of this building, its double vision, which explains how it hides on a spatial level. From there, I examine how the architectural façade of the building participates in urban imaginaries, in Andreas Huyssen’s terms, riddled with nostalgia, as defined by Svetlana Boym. It flashes back to what is imagined as the Golden Age of Beirut, longing for this simpler time and its value of the built environment. However, Judith Naeff’s “suspended now,” the sense of a temporal suspension of the present, complicates the implications of this nostalgia, from being stuck in the past to being stuck in the present, as echoed by Al Baasa’s abandonment with no future in sight. This suspension leads me to the void (Huyssen) created by this building, which I locate on the inside. This void (re-)presents the open space of the line, what is inside Al Baasa, hidden by its façade.
1.2Visible In-visible: Two Sides of the Same Façade
To understand Al Baasa’s façade, we must first understand how its structure escapes notice. I turn to the concept of visible in-visible, according to Derrida and interpreted by Esther
Fig. 1.2. Aerial image of Al Baasa and neighboring buildings on the Bliss Street curve, 2017.
Peeren, to break down how the story, or urban myth, that introduced me to the Grudge allowed me to perceive its presence. After showing the revelatory mechanism of the urban myth, I analyze it through maps and oral history of those in its immediate vicinity, where the façade was another way the building was physically imperceptible by functioning as a space to live in. Depending on the story we focus on, different facets of the building appear. I mark the stories’ starting points from the two sides of Al Baasa, its slim side (where the line is) and its wide side (where it was habitable). This does not mean that each story ignores the other’s starting point in its own narrative; it only sees it from its own perspective or frame corresponding to its plot.
Having been among those walking uphill, approaching the building from its slim side, Al Baasa had not appeared to me until I read about it. I stumbled upon a story about a wall parading as a building in Ras Beirut, the materialization of a grudge between two brothers. They had inherited a piece of land from their father, split in two, but one brother's piece was trimmed when the road connecting Bliss to the seaside road was paved. Unable to find a development solution with his brother, the one who had inherited the dissected land decided he would do so himself, on his tiny plot. His share’s strong suit was its sea view, a significant real estate asset in Beirut, and whatever his brother would build on his larger plot would be susceptible or even dependent on what stands in front of that view. Knowing that, the brother with the smaller plot made sure that whatever his sibling planned to do with the larger land would decrease in real estate value by blindsiding him, literally. He built a wall to cast out his brother’s chances at a sea view which he could also benefit from financially, by making it a narrow building [CITATION Ris14 \l 1033 ]. Al Baasa is a spite building, or at least that is how the first story paints it.
I became aware of the line and the building through this story. They had previously been undetectable, governed by the order of the visible in-visible. Derrida (qtd. in Peeren 35) defines
it as “an invisible of the order of the visible that I can keep in secret by keeping it out of sight.” Esther Peeren interprets this concept by explaining it as “something that would be visible if it were out in the open, but that remains unseen because it is physically concealed” [CITATION Pee14 \p 35 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. What differentiates the hyphenated ‘in-visible’ from ‘invisible,’ then, is that it is imperceptible because it is inside a visible object; in other words, a visible object hides another within itself. What is concealed can be exposed or partially exposed by a subject [CITATION Pee14 \p 35 \y \t \l 1033 ], and once it is, it cannot fall back to concealment [CITATION Pee14 \p 46 \y \t \l 1033 ].
However, Al Baasa’s line is not physically concealed, it is already “out in the open,” but the space around it makes it inconspicuous. The Grudge’s vertical line remained discreet due to the close proximity of its edge to the salmon pink building: the impression of two buildings side-to-side. This illusion kept it hidden from view until the story directed me to it, which is when the act of drawing out the in-visible from the visible happened. Reading the story allowed me to retrieve Al Baasa’s visibility in my perception. The building is therefore not hidden by another visible for it to be “exposed by a subject;” it is simply exposed, or existing in space until then. Rather than be exposed by me, a subject, the line was exposed to me via the story, bringing the building to my knowledge. In other words, what exposed me to Al Baasa was not my position as subject, as Peeren’s reading of Derrida would suggest, but another object that pointed it out. In this case, it was the story that made me aware of the building.
Perhaps then, another expression of the “in-visible” emerges with the visuality of Al Baasa’s line: instead of being inside a visible and hidden from sight, as Peeren infers, this in-visible can be said to work in-visibility, rather than invisibly. In other words, the in-in-visible is hiding in plain sight, a visible object that has escaped notice until it is called to attention. The
Grudge is visible from the start, but it is not perceived; it could be seen, but it is not until it is exposed by the story. Peeren says, “the visible in-visible cannot be hidden again once it has been revealed” [CITATION Pee14 \p 46 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Similarly, once this in-visible becomes apparent, it claims its place in the field of vision; it no longer blends into its surroundings. And since one of the in-visible’s characteristics is its detectability, its visibility means that it could still possibly conceal an in-visible, making it a container for a visible in-visible. In other words, precisely because the in-visible is perceptible (whether currently or eventually), it can still disguise a visible in-visible.
Standing at the base of The Grudge’s vertical line, we see the profile of its wall, which reasserts the story of its spitefulness. According to this story, the wall preceded the volume of the building, primarily aiming to block what was behind it. This perspective explains the in-visible line’s thin edge which looks completely uninhabitable (see Fig. 3), while the rest of the building is indiscernible (see Fig. 1). The line appears in space, coming into visibility by its story, which renounces the rest of the building as mere façade. The façade as seen from the line is meant to hide the wall, parading as an ordinary building. In this scenario, the wall is the visible in-visible façade of the building as seen from the line.
However, as the rest of the building cannot be seen from the line, the wider side’s potential function is obscured. Like the line, it comes into being as an in-visible along with the line and the building, via the urban myth, but it quickly falls into the category of an inactive façade. Seen from the curve, it bears semblance to a building of standard width: there is no sign of the blocking wall, as it is flanked by the German School on Bliss Street. They are back-to-back, making the school complicit in Al Baasa’s perceived mundanity. Yet it is precisely the building’s apparition as ordinary, its form which initially made it in-visible, that contradicts the function of image projected onto it by the line. The façade itself houses six apartments, its illusion disoriented only by the edge, the only give-away that something about this building does not quite fit.
Even with such a betrayal, however, going downhill along the curve, the line is not visually authoritarian, rendering the building unimposing. It continues to be familiar to the environment even as it gains visibility. In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi et al. study the signs and symbols of modern architecture along the Las Vegas strip. They emphasize image, which they claim often has symbolic and representational characteristics that contradict forms and structures, arguing that “architecture depends in its perception and creation on experience and emotional association” (87). In other words, while Al Baasa’s line, informed by the urban myth, dictates a division at a point in time, it implies that the façade was applied to the wall as a cover-up, an image. It distracts from its function as a wall by referencing a building. Yet the building’s form as seen from the top of the curve tells a different story, of how the width of its volume was completely livable despite its slimness, ascribing a history to its façade.
Al Baasa first materializes on a map of Beirut in 1940[ CITATION Bur40 \l 1033 ], absent from those drawn in 1920 and 1936, on a quasi-triangular land of 235.8m2. According to
the map, few buildings populated the Manara neighborhood at the time, none of which stood behind The Grudge. Based on the legend, The Grudge was only blocking “Jardins4.” Bliss Street had already been drawn
out by 1922 [ CITATION Bur22 \l 1033 ], so the land must have been chopped long before The Grudge surfaced.
According to the urban myth about The Grudge, the brother’s building was supposed to be where the 1940 map shows gardens. Not only do gardens clash with the intention of Al Baasa, but they also do not seem a strong enough motive for a spite building, further reinforcing the façade’s formal function.
4 The French word for “gardens.”
Fig. 1.6. Legend of Ras Beirut map, 1940, emphasis on
“Jardins” (Bureau Topographique des Troupes
du Levant)
Andreas Gedeon inherited the plot of land behind The Grudge from his Bekhazi grandmother, who was the owner in the 1940s. She had a house with gardens at the time – the same “jardins” on the map. While the house remains, the gardens have been replaced with the German School on Bliss Street. The Grudge must have looked much more imposing when the school was merely gardens, which might have made it look like a wall. Nonetheless, Andreas Gedeon explained that its owners, the Daouk family had sought after buying his grandmother’s land to expand theirs. When she rejected their offer, the Daouks proceeded by developing their building in the land provided, resulting in Al Baasa. Gedeon concluded our meeting stating, amused, “my grandmother used to say the building ‘might have blocked the sea view, but at least we don’t have mosquitoes anymore,’ because there were plenty coming in from the sea front” [CITATION Ged18 \l 1033 ]. His story disclosed the difference between the urban myth and oral history: the fact of an argument remains ambiguous and uncertain, but if it did happen, it was definitely not between brothers, rather between two families.
Both these perspectives, as told by the urban myth and oral history accounts, are different interpretations of the same façade. The former focuses more on the image of the façade, what it hides – the wall – and the latter, on its form and the façade’s habitability. The façade contradicts and reinforces both discourses on this building, due to its familiarity as a modestly-sized old building, through which “conventional elements [are] used unconventionally” (Venturi et al., 91). Venturi et al. distinguish the image-form contradiction through the duck and the decorated shed, where the former – inspired by a duck-shaped building on a highway in Long Island – represents the form of the building molded into its sign, becoming the sign, and the latter alludes to the more common ornamented building structure, “conventional shelter that applies symbols”
(emphasis in original)[CITATION Sco77 \p 87 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. The signs and symbols in question are the mechanisms perception relies on as a form of architectural reminiscence or familiarity. The decorated shed, however, continues to evade décor for “articulation,” a desire to evoke what its sign would say in its ornamentation rather than speak out the sign explicitly. Its ornamentation becomes its sign, and the shed becomes a duck in the process [CITATION Sco77 \p 103 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. And though the duck is not explicitly seen, it is the sign. By wearing the sign, the decorated shed merely performs its function, which is that of the duck, of a “building-becoming-sculpture” [CITATION Sco77 \p 87 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
In this light, then, and in its in-visibility, The Grudge is a decorated shed. It initially cannot be seen due to the qualities that render Al Baasa inconspicuous, signs of an architecture that is not working on a grander scale, but merely serving a function of shelter – and boasting that through its ornamentation. Its façade has all the tropes of familiarity – the thick side and the profile, which look like a mundane building, the apartments that somehow fit, the balconies characteristic of Beirut, the large windows facing the sea, the salmon-pink color – all except for its revelator: the vertical line. This line is equated to the façade that hides the wall without taking note of the formal elements that make it familiar. When perceived, or made visible, its edge is indicative of the duck-ness of this decorated shed, the sign that The Grudge is not all that it seems, remarkably fitting the forms into its façade, which permeates beyond its image as narrated by the urban myth and seen through the eyes of passers-by.
The Grudge’s only active resident is a blacksmith whose workshop is on the ground floor, Istaz Walid5; he is also the building’s caretaker. He said it used to be a yellow-white color,
later painted salmon-pink. Its last tenants were internally displaced migrants during the Lebanese
5 The Arabic word istaz means teacher, or mentor. It is used as a title or formality when addressing those who are masters at their craft.
Civil War and it has been boarded up since they left. In response to the urban myth of the brothers, Istaz Walid shook his head and took me across the building into a small bystreet intersecting the end of the curve. He pointed to Al Baasa’s profile, the façade that connects the line to the wide side, and exclaimed, “this is the Queen Mary! In its heyday it was known as Bineyet el Shakhtoura!6” [ CITATION Ist18 \l 1033 ]. The Grudge was modeled after a ship,
bow pointing towards the sea, which the slim side references. The wide side along the curve is starboard, the concrete wall is its port side, and the stairwell in the building’s façade, whose tip protrudes from the otherwise-flat roof, is the deckhouse where the captain steers the vessel.
According to Venturi et al., the shed becomes the duck [CITATION Sco77 \p 103 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. In Al Baasa’s case, the line from which it was determined as a shed becomes a duck by framing it through oral history as Al Shakhtoura, where it becomes part of the façade, the bow of the ship. The duck represents what is inside – an apartment building, which the shed functions as, by way of parading as this building to hide its wall. Al Baasa is a
“building-becoming-sculpture”[CITATION Sco77 \p 87 \n \y \t \l 1033 ] of the urban myth, but through this sculpture reproduces the function it had as the boat-shaped-building.
Al Shakhtoura is a duck, while Al Baasa is a decorated shed. As the latter, the building had its sign exhibited in its architecture and its nickname. That was at a time when Ras Beirut was not as populated, before the gardens became the German School, when Al Shakhtoura’s function as a screen would have been clear for all to see. However, it seems to have crossed into common knowledge after the mushrooming of buildings around Al Baasa: the grudge that supposedly spurred it became visible as the building became invisible. The shape of the
decorated shed came to be associated with what it may have looked like as a duck, rather than its
sign, the boat, seeming like a cover up. In the realm of the urban myth, the same building transformed from duck to shed, from sign of potential conflict to suggestion of conflict – a suggestion apparent even in the literal meaning of the word ‘baasa’: ‘to be fucked with’ in a sneaky way, where one does not see it coming.
This transformation brings out the visible in-visible of the façade according to the wide side, framed by the stories of Walid, Gedeon, and its maps: the line. It is the meeting point of urban myth and oral memory, wall and façade, shed and duck. They are interchangeably part of its façade and part of its wall’s cover up, depending on which story one follows, guiding the starting point from where we see them, and revealing the double nature of the line and its façade.
1.3The ‘Suspended Now:’ Urban Imaginaries and Nostalgia
1.2.1 Urban Imaginaries and Competing Narratives
The building’s two perspectives as wall or façade, as seen from the different starting points, follow their corresponding stories. Respectively, the accounts of Al Baasa and Al Shakhtoura conceive of the building as the outcome of a fight between brothers or as eccentric architecture in a delimited plot of land. These are two ways to imagine the same building. Therefore, it can be said that the stories supply two urban imaginaries ascribed to the same line and façade.
In the introduction to Other Cities, Other Worlds, “World Cultures, World Cities,” Andreas Huyssen defines urban imaginaries as “the way city dwellers imagine their own city” [CITATION Huy08 \p 3 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. He builds on the title of Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities to explain that anywhere in the world, different perspectives and subjects yield different urban imaginaries, since “no real city can ever be grasped in its present or past totality
by any single person” (“World Cultures, World Cities” 3). This concept can also be applied to spaces within the city, such as buildings, instead of the city as a whole, for they are imagined differently and on different levels. Al Baasa and/or Al Shakhtoura’s two accounts inform the way its past is imagined, translating to the way its present (and presence) is understood.
Consequently, their imaginaries temporally are characterized by the past steering the present. Even the same person constantly reproduces the way they visualize the city’s locations by moving, recognizing, and interacting with spaces (Huyssen, “World Cultures, World Cities” 3), just as the story of Al Baasa made me encounter it in space as the line, through its in-visible mechanism, and the story of Al Shakhtoura later made me recognize its façade, which I saw doubly – having known about the line before. However, my perception of the building differs from those who have heard about Al Baasa, and theirs differs from those who know it as Al Shakhtoura, who themselves have different versions of the story. For instance, Gedeon knows his grandmother’s version of events and Istaz Walid knows it from his experience in the building and from being in contact with the owners. Nevertheless, those who discover Al Baasa spot it as remarkable, and those around Al Shakhtoura place it as an ordinary building.
Judith Naeff discusses urban imaginaries in Beirut’s Suspended Now: Imaginaries of a Precarious City, expanding on Huyssen to demonstrate how they come about. She says the city is perceived differently by sectarian identities that are territorially situated in the city’s
neighborhoods, simultaneously expressing their affiliations to the political blocs that represent them locally and their attitudes towards regional affairs [CITATION Nae16 \p 18-20 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Their imaginaries are disjointed in part due to the repercussions of the Civil War on memory, characterized by its state-sponsored amnesia and silence regarding the war’s violence. Consequently, collective memory is in limbo, and different sub-categories of the Lebanese
population recall the war differently, giving rise to competing narratives which in turn perpetuate myriad urban imaginaries of Beirut [CITATION Nae16 \p 40-41 \l 1033 ].
Naeff says, “the tensions between competing narratives and the various interests at stake have complicated the working-through of the more painful and traumatic episodes of national history” [CITATION Nae16 \p 41 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. In the absence of an official historical timeline and a national history curriculum – which either way would impose a hegemonic narrative over the many existing interests [CITATION Nae16 \p 41 \l 1033 ] – these competing narratives fragment the war’s unresolved traumas while simultaneously filling each others’ gaps.
What characterizes competing narratives is their incompleteness, their inability to tell the whole story through their individual fragments. In the case of Beirut, the fragments left by the partial timeline of the war and the laws that govern its inhibition are unresolved traumas, which Naeff unfolds into a space of experience. The space of experience is sustained by its
unresolvedness [CITATION Nae16 \p 41 \l 1033 ], the same discontinuity that comes from trauma and amnesia [CITATION Hau05 \p 194 \l 1033 ]. The traumatic event “slips from the space of experience” to fall back into the present, belated and splintered due to incomplete narratives in discourses on the past [CITATION Nae16 \p 40-43 \l 1033 ]. As the past affects the present, but remains inaccessible in the present due to its traumatic attributes, its unresolvedness is an underlying reason for sociopolitical tensions that have prolonged themselves since the end of the war.
Unlike the competing narratives Naeff discusses, the building is unaffected by trauma, yet its imaginaries are still not remembered proportionately; the stories that project them compete. Having been published online and in a book, the story of Al Baasa has spread to a wider audience than Al Shakhtoura. As a result, the building is now colloquially known as Al
Baasa, when referred to at all. To retrieve the story of Al Shakhtoura, I sought out personal accounts of the people in its vicinity. Left unregistered, their oral memories of the Queen Mary risk vanishing in time, leaving only the imaginary of The Grudge. As the recorded version, Al Baasa’s narrative competes with Al Shakhtoura’s, imposing itself on the building’s imaginary, and consequently its visual field, or how it is seen.
However, the effect of seeing the building’s line followed by seeing the rest of the façade characterizes Al Baasa’s story as incomplete. The same goes for Al Shakhtoura’s, the other way around. Although these two competing narrativesdo not originate from the traumas shaping the space of experience, they act quite like it by remaining unresolved, showing the tensions between them as indicated by the façade’s double vision. The narratives around the building return to the present through a past that is irretrievable, that could possibly be retrieved in some way if these incomplete competing narratives gave each other insight. Holding their own this way however, they continue to disseminate two diverging urban imaginaries around the building and its line, both of which are built around nostalgia.
1.2.2 Nostalgia and the ‘Suspended Now’
After a digression into how much simpler life was before the War, Walid squinted at The Grudge through the January sun, nostalgic, reminiscing. “It’s a shame; it has the charm of Old Beirut. They could make a small fortune from renting all six apartments, and I’ve told them this, but they still do not want to fix it” [ CITATION Ist18 \l 1033 ].
By “the charm of Old Beirut,” Istaz Walid echoes a nostalgic trope among Lebanese people from the generations that remember a pre-war Beirut. It seeks out the return to “The Golden Age,” a prosperous time after Independence (1943) [CITATION Hau05 \p 194 \l 1033 ]
when Beirut was a shining beacon of modernity where East meets West. Sune Haugbolle says the insistence on the Golden Age’s affluence is a sign of wanting to make sense of the unsettled present, to overcome the Civil War trauma’s trou de memoire7, and the feelings of discontinuity
from its amnesic aftermath [CITATION Hau05 \p 194 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. It resonates with Svetlana Boym’s definition of nostalgia as “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for a continuity in a fragmented world” [CITATION Sve01 \p xiv \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Through reminiscence, generations attempt to transhistorically reconstruct what was lost [CITATION Sve01 \p xviii \l 1033 ]; they hold on to the past Golden Age as an origin and long for the return of its once-promising future, one that did not resemble Lebanon’s despairing present.
Where nostalgia works to make sense of this disoriented present [CITATION Hau05 \p 194 \l 1033 ], its time period remains among the most recent moments in modern Lebanese history imagined as peaceful and prosperous by the generations who lived through the Civil War and the conflict-riddled years that followed. The ‘paradise lost’ as Naeff calls it, has such a strong gravitational pull that a brief civil war in 1958 is overlooked to sustain this imaginary’s legacy [CITATION Nae16 \p 23 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Boym warns of nostalgia’s danger and its tendency “to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one” [CITATION Sve01 \p xvi \n \y \t \l 1033 ], which implies no sight of the future, but a focus on the present where the past’s flourishing future is juxtaposed. The risk is getting stuck in a loop of perceiving the past as what could have been. Yet those who look back at the Golden Age retain their realism for the now-future, remaining hopeful or optimistic, but knowing the promised prosperity of that time is intangible [ CITATION Nae16 \l 1033 ]. They
look to the past, nostalgically, to draw what could be. The difference lies in nostalgia’s role in visions of the future: what at first seems like looking back at the past through a nostalgic
imaginary of a thriving city, becomes an outlook to the future through an imaginary of unrealized potential. Istaz Walid echoes this sentiment when he says, “they could make a small fortune from renting all six apartments” [ CITATION Ist18 \l 1033 ], imagining what Al Baasa could be.
Between cigarette puffs, Istaz Walid revealed that the Daouks, do not want to invest in remodeling and refurbishing Al Baasa. He pointed to two skyscrapers, both recently completed and towering over Manara: the Daouks own them as well. But if they can afford developing skyscrapers, what about Al Baasa? “They see it as useless,” he explained, “since they cannot demolish it and build something else instead” [ CITATION Ist18 \l 1033 ]. In fact, the size of the building’s plot is too small to develop according to updated zoning laws in Lebanon; Rishani writes, “leaving The Grudge the way it stands is more profitable for its owners than tearing it down, as they would not be able to sell the land to developers” (“Inhabiting a Grudge”). In other words, with the Grudge’s land at its current cumulative size of 235m2 – where its average
possible building width is 5 meters, demolishing it would mean deserted land unprofited by, “useless” as Istaz Walid so directly illustrated it.
What I have called the urban imaginary of unrealized potential – looking to a better (uncertain) future while pining for the pre-war past, with the two interrelated and reinforcing one another – leaves the present hanging in a transitionary phase which Judith Naeff calls the
“suspended now.” The present, she says, is volatile and precarious, “an eternally stretched out present, now, which is suspended between a past and a future that remain out of reach”
(emphasis in original) [CITATION Nae16 \p 37-46 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. She characterizes this suspended now as the combination between the space of experience, and the future or its horizon
of expectation, marked by its volatility. The horizon of expectation’s volatility is indicated through an “anxious anticipation of a radically uncertain future” [CITATION Nae16 \p 38 \n \y \t \l 1033 ] which cannot be built in the suspended now, as it is constantly and precariously threatened to fail by imminent violence [CITATION Nae16 \p 53 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]8.
The unresolved fate of Al Baasa, both spatially and narratively, echoes the status of Beirut’s temporality, the ‘suspended now.’ In a space as volatile as Beirut, where the state of the city’s permanence is untrustworthy [CITATION Nae16 \p 50 \l 1033 ], Al Shakhtoura is static, despite the moving image it mirrors, the ship. It lives “on the verge of leaving” [CITATION Nae16 \p 50 \l 1033 ], but simultaneously cannot vanish; a ship that cannot dock, but has no destination, suspended by a disputed past and no future on the horizon. The ship is its duck and the grudge, its shed, and they are constantly resignifying each other – becoming and implying one another – re-perpetuating these imaginaries in this suspended now.
Nostalgia for the Golden Age thus displays a thirst for a time when Beirut’s horizon of expectation was not under the mercy of looming conflict. In a sense then, both those who recall the Grudge and the Queen Mary see it through a nostalgia that looks back on a time of
innocence, a simpler time before the war as Istaz Walid puts it. Built during such a time, the conflict that potentially spurred Al Baasa was simpler in comparison to the atrociously violent Civil War. Alternatively, those who recall Al Shakhtoura are reminded of a time when
everything was innocent, duck-shaped, and they did not think of grudges, of divisions, of lines in space.
8 An example is the mythical symbol often used to explain Lebanon’s condition of cyclical rebirth: the phoenix, sustained by the national narrative of Beirut having been destroyed and rebuilt seven times in history. Naeff argues that, while the main focus on this symbol is a phoenix’s re-birth after it bursts into flames, it remains a cycle in which another death hangs in the future (55).
1.4Volatility and Demolition
With Istaz Walid’s response on Al Shakhtoura’s uselessness, a quote by Huyssen comes to mind, “what we think about any city and how we perceive it informs the ways we act in it” [CITATION Huy08 \p 3 \n \l 1033 ]. Devaluing buildings like Al Baasa and regarding them as ‘useless’ or ‘wasteful’ is part of a larger attitude towards pre-War buildings, ruins, and real estate in Beirut. This attitude comes in part from a drive to erase signs of a traumatic past, integrated within a larger process of urban development[CITATION Nae16 \p 63 \l 1033 ].
During hiatuses in the Civil War, buildings were demolished, especially in the Beirut city center, purportedly to “clean up the damage” despite prospective plans to rehabilitate areas that had taken hits. Most demolition happened in phases to “some of the most significant surviving buildings and structures,” without an official plan for reconstruction, by perpetrators yet unknown[CITATION Mak \p 667-674 \l 1033 ]. Saree Makdisi writes, “more irreparable damage has been done to the center of Beirut by those who claim to be interested in salvaging and rebuilding it than had been done during the course of the preceding fifteen years of shelling and house-to-house combat” (emphasis in original), suspecting that the perpetrators are those behind modernization efforts and, subsequently, linked to the amnesia law [CITATION Mak \p 674 \n \l 1033 ].
Judith Naeff argues that this erasure is not solely based on trauma, but also
redevelopment and consumption. She says, “opponents underline the lack of function and efficiency to argue that preserving ruins is a waste. Their lack of use-value constitutes a loss of potential profit in a period of economic relapse, and their derelict appearance compromises the aesthetic pleasure that the renovated cityscape offers” [CITATION Nae16 \p 85 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. In other words, they see ruins as occupants of plots whose high value could be used for
better profits and economic development. Along with trauma, ruins come together to form “a coherent imaginary of Beirut as a squandering city that is capable of violently disposing of itself, in order to make room for a newer version” [CITATION Nae16 \p 65 \l 1033 ].
Not seeing value in the old is a cog in the consumption machine, geared towards making everything shiny and new, and justified by an urgent need for erasing all signs of the past, which also reiterates the nostalgic imaginary of what could be, from those opposed to demolitions. As a result, modestly-sized old buildings are considered worthless, their remodeling expensive, and their function completely impractical; conclusively, they get torn down to make way for larger, more profitable – and more imposing – buildings. Al Shakhtoura cannot reach this fate, so it hangs in a limbo where it occupies space while remaining in-visible, simultaneously empty and full of implications of its past, and the urban imaginaries that stem from it.
Al Shakhtoura is suspended in the present, a remainder from a time remembered
nostalgically. Rem Koolhaas has given a name to such spaces: Junkspace, “the residue mankind leaves on the planet” [CITATION Koo02 \p 175 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. He claims this residue is unremarkable, junk – what Venturi et al. would characterize as sheds – abandoned and taking up space. Koolhaas writes, “when we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible” [CITATION Koo02 \p 176 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. His remark points to space inside Al Shakhtoura not yet acknowledged.
Every floor in the building contains two apartments. The long hallways behind their front doors share a wall with the outer concrete edge of the Grudge – its ‘wall’ side. The rooms of every apartment stem from the side of the hallway that is closest to the sea, and they are more spacious than they seem on the outside. The corridor of the apartments to the right, towards its thin side, culminate in a doorway with a tiny triangular room which most tenants seemed to have
used as a closet or storage (see fig. 1.7.). This spot is the inside of the thin ledge seen on the outside: a space that expands from what seems nil at first look. From outside, the line's livability is fathomable only from the way the wide side of the building stems from it, where it looks less like a façade. On the inside though, its spatial potential is made clear, as the outside line opens up a dimension that can be seen and made tangible inside.
Indeed Al Baasa is spacejunk in its uselessness and its limbo, taking up space where no other building currently can, and hanging in time with no clear end in sight. However, to make such a claim as “we have only looked at [space’s] containers” [CITATION Koo02 \p 176 \l 1033 ] disregards work done on urban memory and voids, such as Andreas Huyssen’s “The Voids of Berlin.”
Examining the spaces of Berlin throughout history, Huyssen designates two types of voids: urban spaces that have suffered traumas and destruction, and “architectural space, consciously constructed and self-reflexive to the core” (“The Voids of Berlin” 69), the latter of which is relevant to the Grudge. He observes Libeskind’s zigzagged Jewish Museum expansion of the Berlin Museum. Its structure has an in-between space dedicated to crossovers between the contents on its two sides: a spatial line crossing straight through its zigzag structure which Libeskind termed the void (“The Voids of Berlin,” 66-68). It separates the contents of Berlin’s history and Jewish history in Berlin, and is left void to “[foreclose] the possibility of
re-harmonizing German-Jewish history along the discredited models of symbiosis or assimilation” while also “[foreclosing] the opposite view that see the Holocaust as the inevitable telos of German History” (“The Voids of Berlin” 69). Huyssen says the void’s “very presence points to an absence that can never be overcome, a rupture that cannot be healed, and that can certainly not be filled with museal stuff” (“The Voids of Berlin” 69).
Looking at the closet within Al Shakhtoura expresses especially this void. From this perspective, the building springs from its narrow edge, the point from where its duck-ness and decorated shed, competitive yet incomplete memories, and urban imaginaries diverge. Although it may not be “consciously construced and self-reflexive” (unless perceiving it from a point where its competing narratives complete each other), it does give the chance to bring together all its derivations, while also remaining autonomous. For Huyssen, the absence expressed by the void cannot be overcome, and its space cannot be filled. While this rings true with the
abandoned, suspended, and ever-double Al Baasa, we must remember that it was once inhabited as Al Shakhtoura, with life happening between its walls.
1.5 Conclusion
I entered this chapter with the question, how does a line become a livable space? The line – and the building – is an in-visible, whose façade can be doubly perceived depending on whose story one focuses on. Although it is remembered nostalgically by both, longing for a time of the city’s prosperity, the building’s stories compete to form its urban imaginaries.
The Grudge has many doubles: visions, façades, urban imaginaries, narratives, which are remembered nostalgically. These are all characters stemming from perceiving the building’s oddity: the line, whose livability today is nearly impossible, according to Huyssen’s void, yet projected into the past through the suspended now – with its doubleness set on the boundary between inside and outside, the line most definitely can be a livable space.
Early on, when establishing Al Baasa and its corresponding line as an in-visible, I said that since an in-visible is still visible – though not perceived – it can hide a visible. On the outside, from the side of the line, the hidden visible was the rest of the building, and from the
wide side, it was the line. What lies between, precisely the void on the inside, is the visible in-visible of Al Shakhtoura, who itself is in-in-visible until its story emerges.
By writing the story of Al Shakhtoura, I hope to have registered it in a place where it appears just as much as Al Baasa. Its two stories are what make the building visible in the first place, imagined as a grudge or a ship accordingly.
Chapter 2
Bayn Jidar el Aar wa Khatt el Tamas
or How Concrete Becomes Transparent
“A border is instituted most violently when it is under threat” ̶̶ Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Fi g. 2 .1 . H u ss e in B ay d o u n , “ B e h in d t h e w al l.”
2.1 Introduction
On Monday, August 23, 2015, following a bout of intense clashes between riot police and Tol’it Rihetkom (YouStink) protesters over the preceding weekend, the Lebanese government rolled in with a truckload of concrete blocks and erected what came to be known as the Beirut Wall. Nicknamed Jidar el Aar, the Wall of Shame, the wall blocked the Grand Serail, an Ottoman-era building functioning as headquarters for the Cabinet of Ministers, from the protesters on Riad el Solh square. Made of concrete slabs lined next to each other, it replaced rows of fence and barbed wire that were the original partition between protesters and riot police, preventing the former from seeing the Serail [CITATION Leb151 \l 1033 ] in attempt at curbing the dispute [ CITATION Mac15 \l 1033 ]. People immediately began to mock it, drawing
parallels to the Berlin Wall and the West Bank apartheid wall, from which they drew the nickname. They covered it with graffiti, tags, and posters that mocked the government’s censorship and refusal to listen, embodied by the wall, prompting its removal 24 hours later.
The wall came onto the scene after Prime Minister Tammam Salam had promised to hold those responsible for police violence accountable [ CITATION Bul15 \l 1033 \m Saa15]. The previous week, one month into the garbage crisis, parliament had once again disagreed on the location for a new landfill, and additionally, which company to award the new waste
management contract [ CITATION Rif15 \l 1033 ]. The former, unsustainable solution of another landfill, combined with more than 22,000 tons of refuse festering in the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon [ CITATION Woo15 \l 1033 ] had been the root cause for the YouStink movement9, which defined a new wave of secular protests that overtook its predecessors in 9 The premise for the YouStink protests is the Naameh landfill shutdown by local activists on July 17, 2015 (Kraidy), nearly two decades overdue. As a result, the contract of Sukleen, the monopolized private company tasked with waste collection and management, terminated with the landfill; with no end point to take the trash to, they “simply stopped collecting trash” [ CITATION Woo15 \l 1033 ]. The government, who was pressured to approve the
exposing the deeply entrenched sectarian political system, by preaching nonsectarian and
nonpartisan values and condemning the ruling class’s neglect, dysfunction, and corruption when it came to running Lebanon’s political affairs. The latter angered the demonstrators, who saw it as a direct indicator that their demands10 were of no concern, and the government aimed to
benefit financially from the crisis [ CITATION Rif15 \l 1033 ]. On Saturday, August 22, approximately 4000 people joined the protest[CITATION Man15 \l 1033 ]. Although YouStink insisted on remaining peaceful [ CITATION Bul15 \l 1033 ], the state reacted brutally, launching tear gas cannisters onto the crowd and rubber bullets at them in attempts at dispersal
[ CITATION Saa15 \l 1033 ], injuring at least 100 people [ CITATION Bul15 \l 1033 ]. The following day, even more people showed up, and again, clashes occurred, this time injuring both protesters and riot policemen, as some groups in the former retaliated with rocks and clubs [ CITATION Bul15 \l 1033 ]. When the disarray died down, protesters rallied to condemn police violence, after announcing they would regroup on Monday. Little did they know that by then, a new obstacle would have come their way.
Jidar el Aar – in its location, fleetingness, and intervention – is the central focus of this chapter. Besides my interest to close read it in the context of the Tol’it Rihetkom protests, I want to place it within a larger context of urbanity, spectrality, and reclamation of space. Riad el Solh square, where the Beirut Wall was installed, is loaded with traumatic history and tightened, forbidden space. In its transience, the wall revealed a heterotopia of this unresolved past that
shutdown, did not agree on an alternative solution beforehand despite having postponed their decision from January 2014.
10 On the YouStink demands, Judith Naeff writes,
This demand [for a proper response to the immediate garbage crisis] was quickly followed up by demands for functional electricity and safe tap water, and subsequently for the fall of the government and an end to the sectarian political system…. Their demands, moreover, are not framed by redemptive narratives of future release, but rely instead on relational notions such as care and sustenance, dignity and accountability [CITATION Nae16 \p 238-243 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
became more visible despite its concrete material. The concrete itself was only temporary, reclaimed by one side before turning volatile, ghostly; it reproduced a specter only to become one itself, affected by a different set of meanings due to its placement and the politics behind that. Yet this wall, with its cluster of meanings, highlights the instance when a line appears: a boundary that allowed a defiant, non-verbal retort to flow, permeate, from the protesters to the government, inciting the elimination of this barrier. Therefore, the main question motivating this chapter is, how does a line become transparent?
To achieve this, I use Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces,” for which a number of concerns must be addressed on the way. First, the question of how to perceive the line, using cues from visual and border theories, such as Peeren’s The Spectral Metaphor and Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Then, after establishing Jidar el Aar as a heterotopia through the line that divides protesters and the Serail, I carry that idea to another articulation of the wall as a contact zone, using the concept of ‘between’ from Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Border.
2.2 Walled In and Out: Us and Them in The Ghost Town
At the time of the protests, downtown Beirut, where Riad el Solh square is located, had been a ghost town for years. The area was barren during the 1975-1990 Civil War, as most of it was part of the (moving) demarcation line, the Green Line that cut through Beirut, splitting it into East and West. Although the city is no longer geographically divided, war-time population movements homogenizing predominantly Christian East and Muslim West Beirut “hardened the lines of division” [CITATION Sal02 \p 2 \l 1033 ], and deconstructed heterogeneity in peripheral neighborhoods and cities, making these spaces “separate, exclusive, and self-sufficient”
The city center had the potential to make room for a renewed expression of national identity that could deconstruct the war’s “spatialized sectarianism” by giving members of divided zones and sects a space to come together [CITATION Sal02 \p 2 \l 1033 ]. In other words, it could reprise the role it played before the war as an animated place where Lebanese people from all walks of life and social standings would mingle, an inclusive and common place they called ‘Al Balad11,’ microcosm of the country’s social fabric, the heart of Beirut. However,
left uninhabited for fifteen years – spatially void – it “remained an emptied-out site marking the graveyard of national dialogue and reconciliation” [CITATION Mak \p 666 \l 1033 ]. Then came the reconstruction project by Solidere12. The private companymanaged to skip complications
such as fragmented property rights and inheritance disputes by expropriating all the land in the city center (approx. 1.2 million square meters) and taking on the rebuilding project as the sole supervisor, manager, and financer of reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts. One main outcome of this operation was the prioritization of private interests over public ones, a move that
translated into Lebanese policy and affairs in the years following the Civil War, especially after the election of Rafik Hariri, Solidere’s largest shareholder, as prime minister in 1992
[CITATION Mak \p 670-678 \l 1033 ].
Instead of re-creating the buzzing melting pot Al Balad used to be, Solidere reconfigured the now-rebranded ‘Beirut Central District’ into an exclusive luxurious space where most Lebanese feel unwelcome, sometimes referring to it as Solidere to emphasize its privatization. Investigative journalist and heritage activist Habib Battah dubs it an “island for the rich,” that feels more like a spectacle for foreigners than a locally-driven and -oriented place for
coexistence [ CITATION Bat14 \l 1033 ]. As a result, Beirut’s city center has been called a ghost
11 “The country”
12 Solidere is the French acronym of the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central District. [CITATION Mak \p 667 \l 1033 ]
town, remaining spiritless long after it was polished, lacking the people presence that could bring it back to life [ CITATION Bat14 \l 1033 ], and elsewhere “territorial and confessional identities more so perhaps than at any other time, [have begun] to converge” [CITATION Kha06 \p 114 \l 1033 ].
The Beirut Wall landed in the midst of all this spatial tension in downtown Beirut, adding its own layer onto it. Since the wall itself has two sides, it should be read rhetorically from both. It stepped in to settle an argument between two parties, the concretization of a solution to a disagreement. However, that solution was imposed by one side on the other defensively, despite its use of offensive tactics through a bout of police violence. From this contradictory reaction, I read the wall visually and territorially, through Wendy Brown’s conception of walls in the age of globalization. I focus especially on the protesters’ perspective of the wall, within its locus of a near-deserted downtown Beirut. In what follows, I will address the two facades of the wall to examine its utterances from each of its sides, referring to it first as Jidar Beirut (The Beirut Wall) and then as Jidar el Aar to designate the government’s and the protesters’ perspectives
respectively.
Investigating tensions between globalization and border fortification, Wendy Brown (2010) notes that walls “[facilitate] a conversion of subordination and exploitation into a dangerous threat neither produced by nor connected to the needs of the dominant,” absolving those who build them from any form of obligation or responsibility by ontologically re-ascribing “(victimized) goodness to the dominant and (agentic) hostility, violence, knavery or greed to the subordinate” [CITATION Bro10 \p 123 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. That under threat is the Serail’s historicity, a fragility that can only extend itself to the institution it supports, the very institution that installed the wall. The members of that same institution exculpated themselves from the
urgency of solving the garbage crisis, while setting up a barrier that excused them from people’s anger, that placed them under attack. Brown says the wall simultaneously blocks the
impoverished conditions of the outside while framing everything there as an invader, which “facilitates denial of the dependency of the privileged on the exploited and of the agency of the dominant in producing the resistance of the oppressed” [CITATION Bro10 \p 122 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]; the two are connected, denial and agency producing and reproducing each other cyclically.
Supposedly meant to protect the Grand Serail, The Beirut Wall made visible, and clear, that the protesters’ voices were not unheard, yet it shielded them from sight, framing them as a threat. In fact, during the second round of violence, the day before the Wall was erected, protesters broke store windows in their attempt to cross over the barrier to the ministry
[CITATION Leb151 \l 1033 ], which interior minister Nohad Machnouk was quick to frame as vandalism by rioters the next morning. His air of competence was betrayed by a viral video of him dancing at a bar in Mykonos while the previous night’s chaos ensued [ CITATION Mac15 \l 1033 ], as well as YouSink’s insistence that police violence was not provoked. Laying blame on the protesters allowed Machnouk to deny his dependency – to use Brown’s phrasing
[CITATION Bro10 \p 122 \n \y \t \l 1033 ] – on damaging protesters’ image to keep his own untarnished. Referring to the demonstrators as rioters denounced the government’s responsibility in perpetuating Tol’it Rihetkom, which was triggered by its irresponsibility in dealing with the garbage crisis. Jidar Beirut also renounced the government’s power to find a solution,
highlighting instead the protests’ capacity to distract, interrupt, and hijack the process. The wall dismissed the government’s power to change the garbage collection system by representing its “(victimized) goodness” [CITATION Bro10 \p 123 \y \t \l 1033 ]. In the immediate aftermath of
police brutality, the Beirut Wall relinquished the government’s responsibility for any violence occurring henceforth; if it happened again, it would be the fault of protesters, for they did not back away when they were (both aggressively and passive aggressively) told to.
Nonetheless, the wall’s locale set it up for another type of message, which exposes the exploitation of power and its compromising dependencies in ways that aligned with YouStink’s rhetoric. For years now, Al Balad’s status as a ghost town was not only due to its exclusionary reconstruction, but also because of a security ring around Nejmeh square, dwelling of the Parliament building. The ring was not a fortified barricade until the YouStink protests, but it did have checkpoint-style entries at each of the square’s six arms. Karim Mattar and David Fieni say that checkpoints serve to “divide contiguous lands and to reproduce politically and legally encoded distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Thus performing sovereignty, the checkpoint appears to be symptomatic of fears of catastrophe, whether economic, political, or social, in various national and global contexts” (qtd. in Apter 106). The us-them distinction had already been drawn up with the reconstruction, only to be more borderized through visible motifs of territorial demarcation (fences, checkpoints, etc). These motifs are there in the first place for protecting governing bodies, as well as securitizing their urban markers of sovereignty, like the Parliament and the Serail. Besides the space’s alienating character, the checkpoints had already disrupted downtown Beirut from the rest of the city, limiting access to an entire area. With excessive fortification around Nejmeh square including barricades, barbed wire, and concrete blocks came the governing class’s chokehold on Al Balad, sealed by Jidar el Aar.
The Wall of Shame, like a checkpoint, marked the line between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the government and the protesters. It curtailed assembly by stepping on the scene, and disrupted the protest’s focus from the garbage, directing it to this wall. In form, though, it was not a
