Regarding the Memories of Others by Sofi Naufal
Is it possible to communicate an experience as painful as war? Journalism and photography often fall short, failing to capture the subjectivity of the victims. For the victims themselves, psychological repression can make communicating their stories near impossible.
In Lebanon, repression exists at a state level. The militias of the Lebanese war still dominate the political arena and have awarded themselves impunity for all war crimes. How can a community hope to communicate and process their trauma in this climate of forgetting?
In this suffocating environment, artist Lamia Joreige attempts to draw out the subjective experiences of the Lebanese people. Her projects operate around the collection of testimonies in various contexts. Her film, ‘A Journey’ collects testimonies from her immediate family, ‘Here and Perhaps elsewhere’ collects testimonies from strangers on Beirut’s streets. In her ongoing archive, ‘Objects of War,’ friends, family and acquaintances present Lamia with personal relics from the war. In these works Lamia triggers what she describes as ‘a performance of memory’. The very act of remembering holds valuable information. At the heart of her projects is an exploration on how our relation to the past affects the emotional landscape of our present.
My fascination with collective trauma started early. At seven years old a documentary on the sinking of the Titanic left me crying for hours. I became obsessed with the details of the tragedy: the number of lifeboats, the time it took for the ship to sink after impact, the time it takes to die in -2.2 °C water. In the years that followed I started to obsess over different events. Famines, plagues, natural disasters, pogroms –any event in which people’s lives were suddenly and tragically transformed by catastrophe. I wanted to know the subjective experiences of the victims, to imagine what it was like to experience an event like that. I would fantasise about being there. As I grew older, I came to see my fascination as an attempt to understand an unspoken trauma that the Lebanese war had left in my family.
The fifteen year long Lebanese war lasted from 1975-1990. As a child, I understood that there was war in my family's past but we never spoke about it. My mother immigrated to Europe during the conflict. She settled in the UK in the 80’s and began a life-long project negotiating her place here. For many escaping war, Europe is a double edged sword; a place of refuge for those permitted entry, whilst also being a place of humiliation and struggle. A poor environment in which to process trauma and grief. Later, two of my mother’s sisters joined her in the UK. All three started families with English men. They spoke Arabic to each other, though never much to me or my cousins. My grandparents visited regularly. We ate Lebanese food. In many ways, I had a Lebanese upbringing in London. The war was seldom mentioned. Understandably, no one wanted to talk about it. Things made more sense when my grandmother visited. At the time I didn’t question why her presence was so soothing. She contextualised the trauma that was present in the fabric of my reality. We didn't speak much, just cuddled. I asked her questions. She would smile and squeeze my hand or bite my fingers.
When I visited Lebanon I would trawl through faded family photographs. My grandma had many. Her and her four daughters dressed in beautiful clothes that she would make by hand. My grandfather was a pilot. They threw wild parties in their beautiful home on the outskirts of Beirut. The house was always full of flowers. Eventually, the photographs stop. A gap in the archive that mirrors the gap in spoken memory. Sometimes, the past is something to forget. My grandmother died two years ago of complications related to dementia. During the last years of her life her memories became fragmented and nonsensical, her autobiographical memory non-linear. Moments from the past suddenly and unexpectedly entered the present.
My grandmother Amal, 1956, Beirut
In ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, Susan Sontag expresses the impossibility of communicating the experience of war. She describes how in the absence of first hand experience photography proves an inadequate tool for shaping our understanding of the suffering of others, “We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes.”
I found myself wondering if in a family context, there might be more hope. Could the effects of trauma on a family be contextualised in the absence of the cause? Discussions on communicating war often revolve around awareness. The logic goes that if people understood the magnitude of suffering they would act. But what of the victims? What healing can come from communicating their experiences? Psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose speaks of war’s 'brute ability to smother our psychic repertoire’. For many victims of war, years of memories have simply disappeared, their psychic repertoires smothered for their own protection. The Lebanese state’s decision to smother the past is not for the protection of its people. Instead, it protects the corrupt war criminals' that still hold positions of power. Despite all this, is there a way to salvage a collective narrative from these smothered repertoires and create space to understand and grieve?
It was in my search for an image of Lebanon's past that prioritises human experience that I came across Lamia Joreige. In June, I spoke to Lamia over zoom about her work with testimony and memory. Lamia is very clear, almost scientific. She doesn’t embellish or exaggerate her words. Nevertheless, her portrayals of Lebanon and its inhabitants are emotionally rich and deeply sensitive. There is an honesty in Lamia’s method, she provides a space for testimony and lets the content of the work speak for itself.
Born in Beirut in 1972, much of Lamia’s work deals with the memory war. During the conflict her family moved back and forth between Lebanon and France. Her interest in memory is very much informed by personal experience, including her family's personal trauma - the disappearance of her uncle, Alfred Junior. “My interest came from a necessity to recount this very personal experience in my family and to deal with my own recollections of the war. The bombardments but also the displacement, changing neighbourhoods and countries, being in exile.”
Lamia’s 2006 film ‘A Journey’ is a deeply personal document that pulls apart her family's complex relationship to identity and war. A collage of old home videos, photographs and interviews with her family, the film’s non-linear narrative mimics a fragmentation of memory. At its centre is the question of her missing uncle. His presence, or lack of, haunts many of her projects.
The film begins with Lamia’s grandmother, Rose, pulling old photographs from a cardboard box. A photo of her brother, Wadih. Christmas at Habib’s house. A picture of her father’s tomb in Jaffa, “who knows what it has become? We can’t even go and see,” Rose laments. Rose was born in Jerusalem, Palestine and moved to Lebanon in 1930 at twenty years old. Her family followed after they were expelled from their home in Jaffa in 1948. As a Christian family they were adopted into the Christian community in Lebanon, a community that sided against the Palestinians in Lebanon during the war.
‘A Journey’, 2006, Lamia Joreige
In the film, Lamia interrogates her mother on Palestine:
“Tell me why you never spoke to us about Palestine and never told us that you were originally Palestinian?” Lamia asks her.
“I am not originally Palestinian, I am Lebanese” her mother responds simply. She is stuffing numerous letters into envelopes.
We move to a shot taken from a moving car. Lamia reflects on the conversation as the Lebanese coastline flies across the screen. “Were my questions revealing my phantasm of Palestine, the phantasm of an origin of a community, of a cause?”
Sixteen years after the making of ‘A Journey’ Lamia reflects again on this scene.“I realise now that it’s not that she denies being Palestinian. She knows where she comes from but she simply feels Lebanese.” Lamia explains, “Palestine is not just a land. It is also a concept, an idea. I wanted to reflect on the question of identity. To question what is real and what is fantasy.” Throughout the course of the film we see her grandmother's memory deteriorate and with it a large part of Lamia’s link to Palestine. I am reminded of my own grandma. In climates of forced amnesia and patchy narratives, memories are even more precious and their loss even more tragic.
In another scene, Lamia films her cousin and parents in their dimly lit home in Beirut. They discuss the details of Alfred Junior’s disappearance and fixate on the date of his kidnapping. They argue over it. Lamia’s cousin reads from a pile of official documents and notes. In the absence of clarity, she has become a proxy lawyer. The past and present mingle in an unnerving way. Junior is one of the approximately 17,000 Lebanese nationals that disappeared during the Lebanese war. Their families still search for clues as to their fate, demanding answers from officials. Their cries largely fall of deaf ears.
Lamia’s 2003 film, ‘Here and Perhaps Elsewhere’, explores the legacy of these disappearances in Lebanon today. The documentary takes us along the green line that divided east and west Beirut during the war. Once a major battleground, it was also the location of many checkpoints, each one controlled by various militias. At these checkpoints the majority of kidnappings took place.
Lamia is methodical. She trawls the green line armed with a camera and a simple question; ‘do you know of anyone who was kidnapped or disappeared here?’ Determinately gathering the psychic remnants of the disappearances, she asks anyone willing to interact. Shop keepers, men leaning on beat up cars. Locals talk of lost neighbours and brothers. The summer sun floods the grey streets with a blinding light. One woman invites Lamia into her upstairs apartment. Some refuse to talk, eyeing the camera distrustingly. “Why bring this up again!?” One man exclaims. We cut to a scene of him engrossed in one of Lamia’s photographs. It depicts the area following a bombardment. He describes his street as a barricade to which he would always return when possible. Outside again. An animated taxi driver is more than willing to speak. The sun glints off his purple shades. He tells of a time he was kidnapped while transporting goods across the line. Set free on account of a work connection. Another captive wasn’t so lucky, “there was a guy who was with me. They took him down,” he recalls, “I didn’t see a thing after that.” There are children who laugh and joke. They know nothing first hand of the conflict but everything of the trauma that saturates the city. More shops. “Go to the militias they have a list but unfortunately three quarters of those kidnapped: no one ever admitted to having them” says one man of around sixty. He stands next to a younger man who tells of his kidnapped grandfather. He attempts to hide it, but his voice is heavy with grief.
‘Here and Perhaps Elsewhere’, 2003, Lamia Joreige
The final scene takes place in a convenience store run by an elderly couple. They tell Lamia of the kidnapping of their neighbours, “Kamal Gedah, his nephew and the son of Kettaneh was with them, Alfred Junior.” the man recalls. Suddenly a familiar name, ‘Alfred Junior’, emerges from the sea of fragmented memories that make up the film. In her matter of fact tone Lamia responds: “He was my uncle.” The man doesn’t believe her at first. When he does, he says simply; ‘Ahlan’, welcome in Arabic. Lamia tells me of the moment she heard this new information on her Uncle. “I treated it as I did the rest. I didn't make it the centre of the film which remains very much about the collective.” This is Lamia’s method, to collect as many stories as possible, giving each the same space and value. The resulting picture of Lebanon is as honest as it is complex.
The title is a riff on the Godard film ‘Ici et Ailleurs’ but Lamia cites the universality of the film's subject as the primary reason for the title. “It could happen anywhere, in any country and on either side of the conflict. It's not a matter of us versus them. There is this idea of the very specific, very local and the universal at once.” In this way Lamia’s work comments not just on the Lebanese war but on the universality of this experience. An experience that embodies how the suppression of truth lays the ground for stagnancy and frustration.
‘Performative memory’ which Lamia describes as the act of finding, recreating and transforming a memory in real time, is central to the project. She explains, “I ask this question ‘do you know of anyone who was kidnapped here?’ The response is a performance of memory. They must dig into themselves in that very moment and recall the past.” This very act with all its gaps and discrepancies contains an emotional relationship to the past, “it comes out with reminiscence but also with gaps. The act of forgetting is just as important. Some people don’t remember, some people have fear, some people remember all the details.”
Lamia also employs objects as memory triggers. ‘Objects of War’ is an ongoing series that she began in 1999. Each participant sources a relic that reminds them of the war. The method is always the same. Lamia sets up a camera before the participants, they say their name, show the object and explain its meaning. The footage is unedited. The objects are labelled and shown alongside the footage. Again Lamia's methodical approach gives each testimony the same weight. There is no hierarchy or selection process. Everything counts towards the archive. The archive includes wallets, torches, packs of cards- objects related to war through the subjective memories of people who experienced it. Almost invariably the conversation drifts beyond the object into the participants' emotional experience of the war.
“There is a sort of feeling of fear that racks your nerves all the time, shortens your breath all the time.” Here, curator and programmer, Racha Salti describes to the camera her anxiety during the war. Her object: a walkman. During the war it had provided some relief from the anxiety. Particularly when listening to the plays of Ziad Rahbani. Son of Lebanese singer Fairuz, his plays combine political satire with everyday depictions of Lebanese life. “The idea that someone was trying to create a play under the shelling resembled everything else we were doing. Like one trying to go to school, a woman trying to buy a pretty dress, one struggling to put together a nice dinner.” Racha explains, “The idea of one fighting to find space, not just to survive, but to enjoy life just a little. How much the ideas of a play were superfluous but at the same time how fundamental for us it was to accomplish these things in this insane reality.”
Racha Salti’s Walkman taken from Objects of War, 2003
‘Objects of War’ is an archive of the war with human experience at its centre. The object functions as a synthetic memory trigger and the participants use it to trigger their own memories. Much like a therapist Lamia gives them the space to do this. In this space, the memories are re-invented, they morph and adapt before the camera. This is what Lamia embraces in her work. She accepts the impossibility of solidifying memory and explores the possibility of growth and regeneration that can come from processing these memories nonetheless.
Lamia’s historical documents produce an image of the past shaped by testimonies that are uncorroborated, fragmented and at times contradictory. Instead of using testimony to decipher objective truths, Lamia includes everything. The excess of information creates a vacuum of knowledge. In this space the emotional fallout of the war is brought to the forefront. Aside from being a direct response to the state of legislative amnesia in Lebanon, her work also recognises the power that these memories, distorted or otherwise, can have. These intergenerational hand me downs that shape our identities and emotional worlds.
A Journey, 2006 by Lamia Joreige
‘Here and Perhaps Elsewhere’, 2003 by Lamia Joreige