Al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq. Memórias de um bairro em ruína no centro de Beirute

Abstract

What is living in a city where the damages of the civil war (1975-1990) are still visible for its inhabitants? The description of the use of memory in a wounded district of Beirut aims to analyze the construction of urban temporalities in connection with the period of the Lebanese wars (1975-1990). The city space is approached here as the frame of everyday life and common and ordinary practices. It constitutes both a support and a vector of the expressions of memory. By creating monuments or by forgetting ruined buildings, society qualifies the war traces which very often symbolize what was one of the main issues in the civil war: the coexistence of communities in the urban space. However, if these traces supposedly refer to the war, their suggestive strength does not limit itself to it. The analysis of what takes place around buildings in ruins of the district of Khandaq al-Ghamiq, a former multicommunity district of Beirut, aims to understand the construction of the contemporary urban collective identifications. The practices of memory transmission, inheritance and the representations of these buildings reveal the complexity of the relations between good souvenirs and forgetting that can appear as the negative of the work of memory. Therefore, what could appear at first sight as a gap related to the particular conditions of the field investigation reveals, in the analysis, the tensions that govern the way and the power to talk (or not to talk) about the war.Key words: Al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq, ruins, collective memory.