IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section B

Abstract

The aftermath of the 1975-90 Civil War in Lebanon was marked by a process of forgetting the war which was initiated by the political amnesty passed in 1991 and perpetuated by the successive post-war governments’ refusal to promote any public debate or commemoration of the war. The reconstruction of downtown Beirut by Solidere, a private company founded by Lebanese businessman and then-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, which involved a tabula rasa where whole neighbourhoods were destroyed after the end of the conflict in an effort to clear the area of any war remnants, equally contributed to the amnesic impulse. With post-war amnesia not only affecting the official discourse of Lebanese authorities, but also the population itself, breaking the silence on the war experience therefore became the challenge of intellectuals and artists since the 1990’s. This article will investigate how the mobilisation of urban space is at the heart of Mazen Kerbaj’s expression of war trauma in his graphic work, Lettre à la mère (2013) – an ode to the city of Beirut. Drawing on Rachel Pain’s (2021) concept of ‘geotrauma’ and Maria Tumarkin’s (2019) conception of ‘traumascapes’ which encompasses the collective in her theorisation of the relationship with physical sites inscribed with trauma, I will argue that the urban sites represented in Lettre à la mère stand, not as mere remnants or ruins of the war, but rather as traumascapes and sites of memorialisation in the author’s affective cartography of Beirut. Kerbaj’s work ultimately offers a critical reflection on urban restoration and the role of the wounded city’s traumascapes as sites of heritage and identity.