5 - Excavating the City: Exterior and Interior Relics

Summary

Let the Dead Bury the Living.

Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1997: 72)

Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.

de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: 108)

Beirut is a gigantic burial place for memory.

Humaydan cited in Ṣidānī (2010: 113)

He couldn't help it if the bones poked through the pavement under his feet.

Duffy, Capital: A Fiction (1975: 17)

This chapter deals with three novels: Jābir's Bīrītūs, Hoda Barakat's Ḥārith al-miyāh and Reneé al-Ḥāyik's Bayrūt 2002. In these works, Beirut is a place where ghosts of the past represented by the destroyed city and its ruins fill the spaces, where specters of wars and natural disasters haunt the city. Bīrītūs is a novel where the protagonist takes recourse to fantastic elements in order to convey an otherwise inexplicable experience of pain. The narrator's sojourn in the underground city of Beirut is his own confrontation with the past and his way of coming to terms with the trauma of violent death. Underground he encounters archaic and spectral figures, phantoms that represent the palimpsestic past of the city. The ghost haunts the present, “meddling with taken for granted realities” (Gordon 1997: 8) and forcing the characters and narrators to evoke the lives of those who have gone, notably his own young cousin who was kidnapped in the war.

In Ḥārith al-miyāh, the devastated Downtown area is a sign of a world faced with annihilation that the protagonist continues to hang on to, uncov-ering a palimpsestic city burdened with history, creating nostalgia as well as awesome dread. The ruins that fill the city are concrete manifestations of a convoluted relation with the past and with the meaning of life and death. The two works express fascination with the ruin that marks the city with an uncanny aura of spectrality.

This preoccupation with the past is juxtaposed with Bayrūt 2002, which focuses on a city without memory, where young characters are preoccupied with the present as a strategy of evading the past. This much desired forgetfulness and erasure is not complete. Nevertheless, the war that they did not experience personally continues to be felt in the present, leaving a traumatic sway on their lives and producing a numbing and depersonalizing effect.