FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

As of the summer of 1994, indeed, whatever one wants to say about the reconstruction plan currently being put into effect in central Beirut is almost (but not quite) beside the point. For the object of discussion--the center of the city--virtually does not exist any longer; there is, in its place, a dusty sprawl of gaping lots, excavations, exposed infrastructure, and archeological digs. Critics of the reconstruction plan mourn the loss of the old city center; but its supporters claim that the old city center had been left beyond salvation by the end of the war and that not only was reconstruction on this scale inevitable but, for any number of reasons, this particular reconstruction plan was and is the only possible option. The debate has centered for the most part on how or why or whether the current plan is the only option. In the meantime, we are losing sight of how it came to be the only option, how other options were foreclosed long before the reconstruction effort officially began, how the whole process has been presented to Lebanon and the world by Solidere and others as an accomplished fact. Now the city center appears as a blank slate, as an "inevitable" problem with an "inevitable" solution, and the "solution" itself appears as the fulfillment of its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Blank or not, the city center is a surface that will be inscribed in the coming years in ways that will help to determine the unfolding narrative of Lebanon's national identity, which is now even more open to question. For it is in this highly contested space that various competing visions of that identity, as well as of Lebanon's relationship to the region and to the rest of the Arab world, will be fought out. The battles this time will take the form of narratives written in space and time on the presently cleared-out blankness of the center of Beirut; indeed they will determine the extent to which this space can be regarded as a blankness or, instead, as a haunted space: a place of memories, ghosts.

Saree Makdisi is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Universal Empire: Romanticism and the Culture of Modernization (forthcoming). He has also been writing a series of essays, including this one, on the politics of culture in the contemporary Arab world.