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jad baaklini
Fixing the Fabric
I'm very impressed with AUB's Welcoming City design studio, which held a 'public action' yesterday:
The work reflects upon how the city can be a place of investigation. The full scale sites of interventions will address architectural and urban problematic under new light as the first seeds of sustaining, transformative public appropriation.
Make sure you read Habib's summary of yesterday's event to learn more. Wish I could have participated in the walk!
Thoughts in/of Motion
As I mentioned in my last post, I was in London this weekend. While I was there, I met Karl Sharro whom many of you know from twitter and whose essay on Warspace I've cited several times. Our chat at the Brewdog in Camden was great fun, and a better stimulant than all the caffeine pills I took to keep me awake after a sleepless night on the National Express.
As most people who read this blog know, this whole thing started with a simple desire to see public transport improve/exist in Lebanon. But even before that inclination, my current research materialized out of a growing uncanny awareness in me of place and geography, before even knowing that 'human geography' was a thing (I was studying media, after all). It was a concern I felt, then thought, and only very late in the game conceptualized and formulated.
Most things happen this way, to be honest.
At first, I wanted to combine my usual interest in identity with this new spatial awareness I was fostering. This approach was encouraged by my involvement in the Isqat al Nizam movement, particularly with a small cabal of Matni activists I helped organize with the irrepressible Hadi Mounla, whose efforts during this period should be better known. We had no theories of place, but our lived realities and the demands of negotiating identities and congealed interests in our locale lead us to reject the somewhat disembodied secularism of our Beiruti comrades. The difficulties we faced and the eventual fragmentation of our efforts (due mainly to conflicts over the uprising in Syria) pushed me to obsess over what I started calling "the mechanisms of sociality," or the micropolitics of conversation, argument and (refusal of) understanding.
When I read Amin and Thrift's Cities, these thoughts began to gel well with ideas of urbanity as a project; the capacity for interpersonal understanding and the notion of urban (versus anti-urban) values began to resonate with each other. In time, a very stark position began to form based around the concept of 'identitarianism.' This term caused a lot of fuss with my supervisors; they found it to be something between a 'red herring' and a needless new -ism, and though I still find it useful, I tired of ploughing through 'identity politics' as a literature to justify its use. Eventually, I realized that I was also driving myself into an intellectual rut. Though I had ingredients of an interesting project, my approach was becoming somewhat legalistic and I was overburdening my thesis with too many conceptual battles. I was also walking straight into an overly-cognitive model of interaction that demanded too much of people and clashed with my other sensibilities.
Over Christmas, I managed to clear out the mess in my head and shifted my focus from 'identity,' which I saw as an obstacle to 'connection', to 'connectivity' itself. I had been assuming that identity came first (though I knew I didn't really believe that) and anyway, I cared more about the latter. Eventually I narrowed down my topic to three main, interconnected areas. Here are the slides of the presentation I gave at the Postgrad Conference introducting my project:
And now the hard work could actually begin. My interest in the discourses of transport reform advocates begins with a critique of urbanism and urban planning as an inherently political process. This was both a simple idea to accept and a difficult pill to swallow, especially given how strong the critique can be. Here is how I articulated the position in one of the many internal documents I've written in this year:
"...what is one to make of the struggles and frustrations of the citizens of Beirut, a city cited in Splintering Urbanism as one example of “catastrophic” infrastructural collapse due to war (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 23)? What are we to make of common calls for infrastructural reform that imply a mobilization of the modern infrastructural ideal they critique, and which assume the unifying effect of infrastructure on both the urban and national scale to be a positive feature of modernity? What about the “struggles resisting the processes of splintering and those who work to fulfil the dreams of the modern ideal” (Adey, 2002: 502)? Or as McFarlane expresses it:
“Surely the broad project of critical urban thought requires in part an attempt to find, as Mbembe and Nuttall (2004, p. 349) have put it, a ‘language with which to describe people’s relentless determination to negotiate conditions of turbulence and to introduce order and predictability into their lives’?” (McFarlane, 2011b: 281)
The following is one account of the everyday experience Beirut’s catastrophic infrastructural collapse:
“Beirut then was very dark. Even today, whenever I think of Beirut in the 1980s, I only recall darkness...I used to feel desolation especially when I came home late at night to my huge apartment building and had to ascend five flights of stairs by the light of a single burning match until it scorched my fingers, and another one was struck...There was always the roar of the electrical generators, and the wires hanging in dangerous and complicated ways between the buildings...while the garbage was mounting everywhere...The telephone ceased to function and so did the post office...We had been pushed downwards to a basic form of survival, familiar to inhabitants of all cities under long sieges. We suddenly became alert when water unexpectedly arrived at four AM, collecting and filling as many empty bottles and containers as possible...The city became an extension of the village. Bodies moved in the streets in slow motion. People from the countryside who were used to seeing only the cars of their relatives came to Beirut confident that the cars in their rear-mirrors belonged to their brothers and cousins and would avoid smashing into them. Spatial relationships changed. It became commonplace, for example, to see someone selling cassettes on a make-shift table on wheels, struggling to pass it between two cars with no more than a quarter of a metre between them.” (Saghie, 2004: 117-120, my emphasis)
While there is certainly an undertone of (classed) condescension in the above fragment, and an implied hierarchy that places urbanity above suburban and/or rural life, this account can help us reconnect the ideal that Graham and Marvin describe with its everyday experience. What does this perspective of infrastructural collapse tell us about the 'on the ground,' lived meaning of modern urban planning and its promise of order and predictability? Splintering Urbanism demonstrates that the unitary city had to be actively engineered and socially constructed with a bias towards modernist ideals, but does ‘the good urban life’ necessitate some measure of this normativity? Is there a baseline ‘urban-ness’ to the urban, and can a ‘splintered city’ even be called a city?
As I discussed with Karl on Saturday, the idea is to start from my starting point(s) and find a way to put them into conversation. Human geography has a few disciplinary borders it knowngly or unknowingly polices (geography versus planning, mobility studies versus transport geography, etc.), but the issues it raises are important, especially when one is determined 'to be of use.' Karl told me about an author called Tom Robbins who he described as 'a hippy who isn't dismissive of Coca-Cola,' saying that his writing may be useful for my project. I was very happy to hear that because it meant that I'd been able to communicate the core of what I was trying to do: to use critique not as a hammer, but as a soft mallet. Or, as Latour masterfully puts it:
"...while the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions, it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus. After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off, and some sort o...f darkness appears to have fallen on campuses. My question is thus: Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality? To put it another way, what’s the difference between deconstruction and constructivism?" (Latour, 2005)
Put in yet another way, must critique choose between the Republic and The Scarlet Pimpernel? What could one teach the other? What could the 'chaos' of Lebanon teach the urbanism of the West, and what would the regularization of life implied by the other teach us about the hidden order of urban life within that 'chaos?' What could geography teach urban planning, and vice versa?
I was also happy that Karl used the words 'not dismissive' when describing RObbin's work, as dismissiveness was the key element in my understanding of identitarian thinking or practice:
"...identitarianism can be understood as the process through which people reify identity categories. It is a term that allows for more nuance than has been afforded within the debates surrounding identity politics; it is now possible to conceive of a political group with an explicitly anti-identitarian political platform, like Queer Nation, which nevertheless acts in identitarian ways. Contrariwise, we can now see how a group like Transition Liverpool, for example, can be normative in its ideas* but still act in non-identitarian ways**
[...] Is an identity being mobilized in order to denigrate that of another? Is there an element of dismissiveness in how an Other is approached? The more these factors increase, the more enlarged and reified the circles of differentiation become, the more invested in an identity one is, the more identitarian the identity."
* As part of the green movement, the group maintains that there is a right/‘sustainable’ way to orient oneself towards the environment, and a wrong/‘unsustainable’ way, and hence, may be expected to hold steadfast to certain identity boundaries
** During a presentation at Identities in Transition, a seminar held at the University of Leicester on the 14th of October, 2011, Michelle Bastian described how the group did not even have a stable name, sometimes referring to itself as Transition South Liverpool, for example, not did it claim any rights over the name ‘Transition’ or its logo, as it sees in the ‘brand’ a process rather than a fixed identity.
And while this conceptual terrain isn't my focus any more, it's nice to see my thinking go full-circle so that my anti-identitarian convictions can slip into this project through the back window, with little fuss.
Hopefully, more of these thoughts will find their way onto this blog. In the meantime, you can follow my research tumblr to get links and snippets of transport matters.
Traces of Places
I have been neglecting this blog, but 'place rules everything around me' ...
So if you are on Pinterest, follow my 'Traces of Places' board for a geonafsi photostream. 'Maps' may also be of interest.
Tangentially, this weekend I went to London by bus; 8 hours to London, 9 hours back, overnight. The experience was not the most comfortable, for sure, but it did make me think more about the specificity of non-places, like the bus itself, or the station, as public spaces. Do we think of their significance the way we think (and care) about other urban spaces?
William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - The Street Corner from MAS on Vimeo.
Small fragment of William H. Whyte's witty and original film about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others do not.
One interesting pattern I saw on my trip was the seemingly universal denigration of the bus in comparison to the train. In Edinburgh, Waverly is a fancy place, as is St Pancras in London, or London Victoria. But in both cities, the bus station is close to the train station, yet is more cramped, and looks and feels less inviting. Is this the same in other cities? And what does this tell us about how the bus system is valued socially?
More on this and my transport culture research in the next post.
Beirut Fragments
One of the consequences of the new Facebook timeline is the exagerrated prominence of photos, which, while turning many newsfeeds into 'endless spam,' as some has described it, seems to have nudged people into a more favorable disposition towards sharing their quick snapshops, whether they make up an "album" or not (in the old Facebook, the album-based structure tended to encourage bundled and event-, trip- or narrative- bound photo sharing).
The Last Days of Jal el Dib Bridge | made from photos taken by Nabih Baaklini
An unexpected consequence of this is the affective 'closeness' I now have with various Beiruti minutae, even though a similar dissolving of distance was always available to be through other means (twitter, email...) — it seems Facebook's hit a sweet spot between intimacy, aleatoric co-occurrence of positions, and networked feelings of commonality that, at least for me, feels different than Twitter's public hashtag/spaces in its immediacy.
Friday's Rainbow | made from photos taken by Ahmed Ajam, Sana Tawileh and Wissam Najem
These graphics are fragments of Beirut I stitched together out of such pictures.
And this is something I took in another fragment of "Beirut," a restaurant with the same name, right here in Edinburgh:
Geddit?
In lieu of words—memetics!
Spécial Dédicace
Sometimes there's nothing clever worth saying...
...but if you do want something clever, go here.
Making Peace With Beirut
I am writing this in Beirut, a few days before leaving again. My whole first semester in Scotland went by without my posting anything here; I started a 'research blog,' but even there, I've posted relatively little of interest and certainly nothing emplaced. I'm not sure why that happened; that's not how I saw it going when I left in September. While in Edinburgh, I rarely felt the need to document my being there, only taking pictures (mostly un-uploaded, not even on that sinkhole Facebook) when really struck by something. If you know me, you know that that's definitely not how I interact with new environments; usually I'm taking pictures left and right, in an almost desperate attempt to capture everything around me, to make the experience last forever, perhaps.
Maybe the second time studying abroad (though this is technically my third time) changes things, or maybe it's just plain social media burnout (2012 seems like the year for that) -- whatever the underlying (de)motivation, this blog's been neglected like many of the projects documented within it which bloomed and withered too quickly.
Down but not out.
The picture above is one I took on Raneem's camera, on her last day here before heading back to London. We had some good conversations while she was here about what 'being here' feels like. Did we miss it? Would be want to come back 'for good'? Raneem's answers when she first arrived fluctuated a little on her last day, perhaps because she was just about to leave; either way, I should let her decide if and how she shares them with the internet. As for me, I think I've reconciled with Beirut.
Yes, living in Edinburgh's been great; it's a beautiful city and I am yet to be bored of the sound of bagpipes playing around my street. I've also been priviledged to revisit friends in cities I've known before, of which I feel an appreciation only someone in a country without trains could feel.
Byerouth/Summer '11
A regular reader of this blog asked me what I've been up to, and here is my response. This will be my last post before heading over to Edinburgh for the start of my PhD program at the School of GeoSciences, and I want it to be a sunny one; "In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine," so I'm taking a break from my usual concerns (for more of that sort of thing, see Nasri's Nation Blanding: Hedonism and the Underselling of Beirut) -- in this post, I will indulge in the cliches:
Beirut, city of contrasts? It can be. DJ Spooky one night, Ramadan party with Ahmad Doughan and a whirling dervish the next.
Lebanon, mosaic of believers? That too; looking down the Sacred Valley of Qadisha then looking back up from the bottom makes a pious man out of any; even the tomatoes in the tabboulé at the restaurant below threw me into a fit of (secular) awe with the universe.
I didn't expect to reinvigorate my sense of belonging just before I leave, but then again, that's exactly how that works: it's only a prison when there's no way out.
Funnily enough and even after all these years, I did a lot of things this summer for the first time... like actually paying for* and entering the Crusader Castle in Byblos:
...and taking the iconic 'bosta' bus to my own hometown, to explore it freely for the first time as well:
I'd upload more pix but the internet here is... not something I'll miss. Yalla, I should start packing; I'll see you on the other side!
* did you know that non-Lebanese get a discount?
The New Corniche
A few days ago I ventured down towards the very edge of the New Waterfront district to see what the sea looked like from there, and was surprised to find a new corniche had already been built. It's been said many times before that the better-known Corniche is one of the last remaining public spaces in Beirut, a "transient space of co-existence" where "early morning visitors [...] belong to diverse classes, confessions and political tendencies." Karl Sharro outlined the history of this 'alternative public space' -- developed "partially in response to" the loss of a urban center (i.e. Bourj Square/Downtown Beirut) -- saying:
...the city developed sea edge into a functioning urban space as one form of the persistence of the urban culture. [...] The 'Corniche' was even before the war a destination for strollers but the loss of the more established public spaces of Beirut in the centre allowed the Corniche to develop into a genuine public space, the most popular one in West Beirut. Due to its linear nature, the Corniche can cater to a variety of stationary or moving activities [...]
The importance of the Corniche as a resistive space is that it was the only public space in Beirut that did not have a communal identity: throughout the civil war the Corniche retained the characteristics of a public space that was reinforced by the relocation of vendors that were displaced from the downtown to it. Several factors helped the Corniche retain that character, one of which was that it was on the edge of Ras Beirut, one of the most mixed areas of Beirut that retained that nature throughout the war. The spatial nature of the Corniche also contributed to its nature as a public space: the fact that it was the only 'breathing space' of the city and its intersection with the sea meant that it cannot be contained with the same ease with which a closed neighbourhood can be.
Naturally, the Corniche was mostly accessible to those living in the west part of the city. However, this this did not make it less successful as a public space in which the public nature overcame any communal identity. Indeed, within weeks of the end of the war and the lifting of barriers between the different parts of the city, East Beirut residents began frequenting the Corniche long before they started going to resteraunts or cafes in the other part of the city. The Corniche had resisted the war and was reborn as a public space for the city.
Solidere's plans for a corniche running along the New Waterfront were explicit from the start, and I'd heard the critique of its potentially-exclusionary nature (i.e. its being a 'sanitized' version of the Ras Beirut Corniche -- for the rich) before I even realized that construction had begun. Stumbling upon it that day was hence doubly surprising.
The space had quite a few people utilizing it (including several security guards hovering around the 'entrances'), and yet, given how most of the district is still vacant lots and rubble, there was still an eerie quiet and a feeling of disconnection in the place. And since the whole landmass is basically a man-made reclamation of the natural seabed, the Waterfront breaks the usual gradation of depth that one generally expects when land meets the water, bringing freight ships closer to the stroller than they would be along the rest of the coast. This generated a sensation of being on a strange, floating platform or ghostly vessel. Indeed, walking along the new corniche felt like being in a dream-scape; the concrete shapes seemed too crisp and repetitive to be real, the sun too large and the sea too textured to be natural.
~
I quite enjoyed this sensation, but the eeriness can turn dark when one recalls what is intended for this district and the possible splitting of the Beirut 'corniche experience' along class lines. But I don't wish to repeat the same old anti-Solidere lines here: a few days later I was back on the original Corniche, keeping my eyes open to the interactional space we all love. I looked down towards the sea-level platform seen here and wondered if this really was a space for all Beirutis.
Unfortunately, it's not. All around me I saw men staring at young ladies in disturbing ways. Below, where Yasmine of 'Beirut, I Love You' sits with Abu Ali so effortlessly, where Tarek just happens to walk by while she waited, where the city is as silent as at the new corniche, other shirtless men in groups stare openly at women who 'dare' to relax on the rocks. "Invite her over," I heard them laugh to each other, leering, one of them even going as far as taking a cellphone photo of her over his shoulder. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but it felt especially disturbing to see here.
All the men I saw that day were working class, and it was especially annoying for me to think of the push dynamic happening that is but the obverse of Solidere's pull dynamic, tearing public space in two.
What's worse is that the publicness of that space is a myth. The back of one of the men was covered with tattoos that indicated a certain sect: symbolic back imagery that conjured up not-so-symbolic images of political backing that may complicate any act of 'justice' in face of his microviolence. Whether the images evoked were correct; whether thinking the man would actually resort to such backing is fair -- all this comes from the same 'place': civic space is fragmented in Lebanon & each fragment runs under its own rules. This logic applies even when the physical space is shared and seemingly "neutral."
Indeed, there can be no "neutral," non-identitarian place where there is no common civic space of rights and responsibilities. There can be no public when the people don't exist (yet):
Having a space in common is the first step to reaching common ground, which is fundamental for the construction of a shared civic identity that overcomes our communal tensions and wartime fragmentation. Social media has been offering youth an alternative space to interact and hence side-step the fragmentation of physical space, but this is not enough. Opening up a space for more incidental interaction is the first step towards more spatially-aware civic engagement. However, these spaces can be just as fragmented as geographic space if the fundamental mechanisms of civic life within public space are not addressed. Territoriality need not be a strictly geographic phenomenon and fragmentation of space is not based solely on distance or proximity; the way we communicate can also be marred by territorial thinking that creates borders between people, even if they are physically next to each other: common ground and shared space are not synonyms. (Public Space & Civic Interaction)
The way we communicate can also be marred by disrespect for the humanity we share with others.
ADDENDUM: I've been meaning to write a follow-up to this post, but this addendum will do for now; I've visited the Corniche many times since posting the above and have noticed a large demographic variance depending on the time of day and day of week you go for a stroll, leading me to contemplate the notion of 'public spacetime.' More later.
Accidental Geomoshing*
This happened by mistake; a clash of the Googleplex's virtual proximity to anything-and-everything with the very Real of geography (i.e. accessing Google Maps from Lebanon).
The result is pretty though, don't you think?
* see datamoshing
(De)Territorializing Hamra
What happened in Hamra on Tuesday was, to say the least, unacceptable:
Last Tuesday evening at around 8 o’clock, a group of people gathered at the Syrian Embassy in Beirut in order to protest the ongoing atrocities committed by the Syrian regime against the Syrian people. Earlier that day I had received an email, part of a “secret email chain,” informing me that the protest would take place and that I should only share the email with people I trust. The secrecy with which the protest was planned was in response to previous protests which, when announced, were met with counter-protests which, with their sheer numbers and threats of intimidation, ensured that the anti-regime protests did not reach the embassy. The Syrian Embassy is bordered by two parking lots, a bank, two popular cafes, and an alley filled with bars regularly packed with people drinking the evening away.
Ras Beirut is a stronghold of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP), and since the Syrian people have risen against the Ba‘thist regime, the SSNP’s presence on the streets of Ras Beirut has emerged full force and in ways unseen in nearly two decades. In particular, Makdissi street has been dubbed “the capital of their fiefdom,” the latter of which is has been infused with intimidation, machismo, and an aura of defensiveness due since the uprising erupted in Syria. Within this fiefdom, there is a café run out of a parked minibus where the “shabab” of the SSNP gather, there are party flags hoisted on electrical poles and off of buildings, and everywhere, there is the arrogant confidence of boy-men who have been told that in order to “defend” their political party, they have full (and politically protected) reign over the streets.
The bold text in the passage above is my emphasis, and I'd like to start with the second highlight: "stronghold." I'm not sure that this term is accurate. It is true that, as Asaad Thebian has pointed out, the Hamra area has gone down in history as the first site of resistance against the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, with the 'Wimpy operation,' named after the restaurant where it happened, now replaced by a retail store. The attack on Israeli soldiers that sparked the resistance was carried out by an SSNP member, and for as long as I can remember there has been a sign there commemorating this act (and location) which used to feature the SSNP symbol quite prominently. Post-2005 -- I'm not sure exactly when, but I remember disliking the change as the sign lost its wartime grittiness -- it was replaced with a more 'modern' version featuring a sillouete of the resistant's face and a smaller party logo, perhaps to appease the post-Pax Syriana climate that reigned in Beirut in those years.
Elsewhere, on the streets around Hamra, you can still see faded zawabe'e (maelstroms), as the Fascist-looking* symbol is called, revealing traces of the party's presence there during the war. And yet this presence never reached the level I'd say is required to warrant the term 'stronghold,' an ugly term we hear most often in Western accounts of Dahyieh, the southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah is powerful. West Beirut** as a whole had a certain progressive/nationalist climate throughout those years, but the competition between the various factions was too strong for the area to fall under one party banner:
The media offices of the various parties held networks of power distribution within their own areas of control. The posters in that sense also acted as a symbolic affirmation of a party's hegemony over a certain territory [...] Media officials recount how posters they put up on walls would often be covered the next day by posters from a different party [from the same front]” (Maasri, 2009, p. 52).
While that may have weakened the front, this dynamic thankfully saved Hamra from a larger dynamic which still affects Lebanon as a whole. And although Hamra still generally leans to the left, the two universities that flank it and the dense juxtaposition of 'hangouts' described above keep regenerating its demographics, making it impossible to ever pin down a single, overarching Hamra culture*** (though we still try to, as shorthand).
When questioned about these allegations, the director of the SSNP Media Department, Maen Hamieh, denied any party members’ involvement in the attack. “There is a campaign against the party and our reputation,” he told NOW Lebanon, “and we are the guarantors of people’s safety in Hamra.” Instead, he questioned the intentions of the demonstrators and called on “government security institutions to take serious steps to protect the citizens from these so-called activists.” (via nowlebanon.com)
The SSNP's renewed presence in recent years is a direct result of a prior attempt at territorializing the area, from Quraytem to Caracas Street and beyond. For about three years after the Syrian withdrawal (a historic accomplishment), Ras Beirut developed into an area controlled and policed by the Future Movement; several incidents attesting to this fact happened to me personally during this period, and I was aquainted with a few young men who would also "reign over the streets" at night in certain hotspots.
I really disliked this period because it felt like the Beirut-that-is-multiple -- the Beirut-for-all -- was being territorialized before my eyes. Then came the "events" of May 2008.
While people generally think of Hezbollah when recalling this period, there were plenty of SSNP fighters taking part as well, one of whom, I later found out, happened to be my barber at the time. When the skirmishes broke out (others will call it 'the invasion of Beirut'), I was as shocked as everyone else; I was also particularly distressed that this had occurred on the back of a legitimate labor strike. As the fighting spread to the Chouf area, and as talk of heavy artillery being used began to spread, we all held our breath and hoped it would die down soon even though the demons of the civil war hovered over us: "We thought the fighting would end quickly in 1975," my father said ominously.
Photos by Stephy Nouneh
After everything was said and done, I resolved to look at things with a cold and calculated eye; what had happened was terrible (a good overview of that period that I followed in real-time is Zurayk's Land & People blog), but at least it meant Beirut was finally 'liberated,' I thought; for example, fighting had broken out at the bottom of the building where my best friends lived at the time (RePlacers reading this: it's where we had that dinner together on the last day), because, it turned out, a secret Future Party office was there which (allegedly) contained weapons. And though SSNP and Amal youth lingered in these areas, they kept to themselves and it all felt quite temporary.
Given what has happened, this feeling was very naive. Of course, I didn't just wake up to this fact; I've been talking about it for months now, as friends and I walk past the above-mentioned "shabab," or during that blistering stroll that I blogged about. I can't even visit my friends' building anymore without being asked if I'm waiting for someone, and though I'd often feel uncomfortable there, the Future Movement people would only eye me -- this direct questioning is new.
The party's presence has created a territorialization much more oppressive than the one I disliked before, and this is coming from someone who, like Thebian, never felt fear**** around the party or its symbology; now I speak with a hushed voice when pass by its members.
This situation is now beyond unacceptable; the party denies beating up the protesters but even their excuses far from absolve them of guilt. The very idea that they think they can legitimately use vigilante 'guarantees of safety' while questioning the intentions of protestors well-known in Hamra social circles (i.e. actual 'locals'), driving a fake wedge between 'citizens' and 'demonstrators,' would be laughable if it weren't so awful.
That night, there was a man in the counter-demonstration whose sole function was to take pictures and record everyone who was protesting against the Syrian regime’s criminal suppression of a popular uprising. After the protest, we were told in no uncertain terms that we will be attacked if and when we return to Ras Beirut. We have been profiled, and threatened with further violence if we enter “their area,” filled with cafes run out of minivans, flags, and posters of martyrs who are used as tokens of past glory. Hamra is not a safe place for those who are conscientious, progressive, and politically active. But I, and others, will not stop going to visit Hamra, Makdissi, or other parts of Ras Beirut. Our friends and families live there, we go to school there, we work there, we live there, and we frequent bars, restaurants, and cafes there. And we will continue to be politically active there as we are in the rest of this country. They have my picture. I dare the Lebanese government to do its job and protect me. (via jadaliyya.com)
Hamra must be deterritorialized again; it is one of the very few spaces left where (bourgeois-bohemian) people of my generation feel free. Indeed, it was the street where many of us learned how to be "conscientious, progressive, and politically active." It would be a shame to lose this place, in a place where we always lose.
* The party has roots in 1930s era nationalism, as did its main ideological competitor, the (Lebanese nationalist) Phalange. The party had a brief left-wing turn during the 70s and by the end of the war was hollowed out of any significant ideology; they are now basically pro-resistance and pro-Syria.
** Itself a construct imposed by the war, as the city was split along the so-called Green Line (which was actually several lines) dividing the Lebanese National Movement (West Beirut) from the Lebanese Forces (East Beirut).
*** Funnily enough, I've been thinking of Hamra culture for a while; it was the reason I wrote the post on nightlife, though I didn't get around to discussing Hamra itself. And this is not yet that post either.
**** My family comes from the town where the SSNP was founded.
