Remember Lebanon’s dead, even if names are unspoken

Lebanon is rarely a place of neat finalities. Reality can often be relative, with the memories of the Lebanese an accumulation of irreconcilable versions of this event or that.

Take the current dispute in the country over the assassination in 2005 of the former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. It was and remains fairly obvious who was behind the crime. Yet today, as political interests have taken over and animosities kicked in, the Hariri killing has been sucked into a maelstrom of self-serving, deceptive interpretation. Low-level Hizbollah members may be accused of facilitating the crime (though this will not explain who ordered it), but the Lebanese will likely never reach any consensus about what happened.

Nor would that be unusual. When the Lebanese civil war ended two decades ago, the government of the time issued a general amnesty for all war-time crimes. This officially-sanctioned amnesia, despite some condemnation, was acceptable to a majority of Lebanese. They understood that their fractured sectarian system, at the top of which sat leaders who had for the most part played crucial roles during the war, could not readily absorb the consequences of imparted guilt.

These thoughts come to mind because I have just finished reading an important novel whose theme is memory and its elusiveness. In 2006, the Lebanese author Jabbour Douaihy published Rain of June, which was later short-listed for the Arabic version of the Booker Prize. The book has received recognition outside the Arab world, particularly in France and Italy, and now cries out for an English translation.

Mr Douaihy’s story is built around a historical event with much resonance in Lebanon, namely the armed altercation in June 1957 at a mass in the northern village of Meziara. The main protagonists were members of rival leading families from the nearby town of Zghorta – on the one side the Franjiehs and the Mouawads, on the other the Douaihys. When both sides had finished firing at each other, 24 people were lying dead, many inside the church.

The rivalry was exacerbated by the concurrent Lebanese parliamentary elections, with the Douaihys siding with the president then, Camille Chamoun. He had fashioned an election law designed to bring in a favourable parliament that would amend the constitution and allow him to renew his mandate a year later. This law, in turn, threatened to bring about the parliamentary defeat of the leader of the Franjieh family.

What makes the novel so fascinating is that Mr Douaihy had to wrestle with his story at several levels of reality, frequently those that Lebanese wrestle with when considering the country’s past, and their own. For starters, as a Douaihy who was a young boy in 1957, the author is both a protagonist and interpreter, a son of the family that paid the heaviest blood tax in the Meziara massacre. However, among those who encouraged him to write the book were two close friends from the Franjieh and Mouawad families – indeed the very sons of the individuals at the heart of the standoff in 1957.

At a second level of reality, Mr Douaihy had to deal with the uneasiness of the inhabitants of Zghorta, who at first wondered why he had chosen this topic. Like most Lebanese, they preferred a veil over their past, particularly one so bloody and divisive, since Meziara soon led to all-out conflict in Zghorta during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, with neighbourhoods “cleansed” of rival families. However, once the book was published the townspeople accepted it, even recognising the characters, sometimes themselves. They saw that Mr Douaihy was not out to settle scores, but, rather, wanted to address historical memory.

A third level of reality derived from the irony of the story itself. One of the characters tries to uncover the details about the Meziara incident, in which his own father was killed. But all he collects are different narratives, bringing him no closer to the truth. So, what we have is Mr Douaihy implicitly encouraging the elucidation of historical memory as a means of coming to grips with the past, even as his characters are adrift in a sea of ambiguity, quite incapable of doing so.

And finally, Mr Douaihy plays with a fourth level of reality, no less ambiguous: he never mentions Meziara, Zghorta, the Douaihys, Franjiehs or Mouawads. All the characters, family names and places in his novel have been changed; yet what he describes is based on events that actually occurred. Readers, like the characters, navigate between fact and fiction, which is perplexing and exhilarating because memory can absorb enthralling falsehoods when worn down by time.

Mr Douaihy was also encouraged by a third person to write his novel, Samir Kassir, the historian and journalist, to whom the work is dedicated. Which allows us to return to the prosaic reality of Lebanese politics. In June 2005, Mr Kassir was assassinated outside his home – the first in a wave of killings that followed the Hariri assassination, all evidently perpetrated by members of the same political coalition. That Mr Kassir’s assassins have yet to be arrested is a testament to Lebanon’s gift for imprecision, even as Mr Kassir, in his own books and by encouraging those like Mr Douaihy’s, displayed an incurable appetite for historical comprehension, for decoding events and signs.

This exercise is vital in a Lebanon built on lies or half-truths. Mr Douaihy is too modest to see himself in the exalted light of truth-seeker. But he is part of a group of Lebanese – scholars, writers, activists and others – not satisfied with leaving the past be. Their endeavours limit the room the Lebanese have to escape the painful struggle with themselves.