The Wrench and the Ratchet: Cultural Mediation in a Contemporary Liberation Struggle

Ken Seigneurie

Colonialism is also a psychological state rooted in earlier forms of social consciousness in both the colonizers and the colonized.

—Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy

So if Nandy is right, genuine decolonization would imply a change in social consciousness.1 From here two questions loom. The first is, what would changed social consciousness look like? The easy answer points in the direction of precolonial nativism, which in the twentieth-century Arab world opened the door to a house of mirrors. Pan-Arabism, regionalism, nationalism, Islamism, Pharaonicism, and Phoenicianism all appeared plausible, depending on which mirror one stood before. The second question is no less vexed: how can social consciousness be changed? Nativism pulled toward a culture of nostalgia, which was coercive if it had content or stagnant and kitsch if it did not.2 Baathist Syria today, managing to land on both horns of this dilemma, is a good example of the twenty-first-century fate of pan-Arabism.

There are alternatives. The Lebanese Shiite Muslim movement, Hezbollah, has attracted much attention for its efforts to promote a pious Muslim modernity.3 Another alternative, also Lebanon-based, emerged in the span of ten weeks in spring 2005 in the form of an ethics-based national movement under the name Independence Uprising (Intifḍat al-Istiqlāl). If we define resistance as struggle for liberation from political tutelage or oppression, both began as resistance movements from strong ethical bases. Hezbollah continues today to resist what it sees as U.S.-Saudi-Israeli regional hegemony. The uprising, some elements of which subsist in what is known in Lebanon today as the March 14 movement, began as mass mourning for the victims of political assassination and grew into an uprising against Syrian occupation. Both harbor sectarian and feudal elements but also a will to embrace modernity and meet its challenges, which is especially clear in the realm of cultural politics. Since numerous scholarly studies have been devoted to Hezbollah, this essay will analyze the Independence Uprising as a culturalpolitical movement with particular attention to the discourses that make up its rhetoric.4 While focusing on the uprising, this essay makes a broader claim as well, that its cultural politics bear relevance to contemporary struggle elsewhere. I argue that cultural representations produced in Lebanon during the spring 2005 uprising reveal a rhetoric of resistance to armed coercions and legitimating discourses that mark contemporary history, not just in the Arab world. I aim to show how the graffiti, chants, popular songs, video clips, signs, banners, and dramatizations produced during the uprising wrench everyday discourses into an effective rhetoric of national resistance.5 Through an elegiac transformation of intimidation into ethical and national consciousness, the uprising formed a spiritual node around which a renewed sense of national identity could accrete. To cast into relief the argument for this claim, the essay also analyzes the dominant cultural rhetorics of the Syrian regime and Hezbollah (Party of God), arguing that their characteristic authoritarian and “pious modern” discursive regimes can offer nothing more vital, unifying, and therefore potentially stable than the uprising’s “postmodern humanism.”6

An Intra-Arab Colonial Struggle

To frame the contemporary conflict between Lebanon and Syria as a “colonial struggle” may be counterintuitive to those who find the concept difficult to apply to neighboring Arab countries sharing deep cultural affinities. From this standpoint, an independent Lebanon implies a further fragmentation of an already splintered Arab world as well as the creation of a de facto outpost of Western influence in the Arab world, an antechamber to Israel where the Zionist entity could plunder water, dump its industrial wastes, and expel its surplus or troublesome Palestinian population. Such a view is no more sinister than the historical record supports, and it is always prudent to be prepared for the worst. Yet the problem with this particular scenario is its thralldom to empirically discredited ideologies and its consequent blindness to facts. To complain about a “fragmented” Arab world is to accept a pan-Arabist or pan-Islamic ideology as normative. To think of a free Lebanon as a pawn of the West is to ignore the current reality and twentiethcentury history of this feisty nation. Whether one defines colonialism as the exercise of political, economic, and military control over a dependency, or as the implantation of settlers, or as the ideological homologies that buttress dominance of one country over another, the term plausibly describes the role Syria played in Lebanon from 1976 to 2005.7 Thus, in keeping with this preference for observation of phenomena that actually occur and in the conviction that the highest stakes in colonial struggles are usually local, this essay will leave others the task of arguing that the Lebanese movement to throw off twenty-nine years of Syrian tutelage was a proxy struggle in a greater global game.8

Murder and Mourning

This study of representation during the Independence Uprising begins with the massive explosion that destroyed former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri’s motorcade on February 14, 2005, killing 23 and injuring 135. Some considered the unacknowledged crime a punishment for Hariri’s plan to take Lebanon out of the Syrian fold and his putative role in promoting U.S. and Saudi domination over Lebanon. Others, citing more oblique motives, pointed at Israel or al-Qaeda as the culprit. Few Lebanese citizens of any stripe needed to be told who exactly did it to grasp that the elimination of the nation’s most powerful figure dramatized their vulnerability and subordination in the Middle Eastern hierarchy.

The second bit of representation was also the fruit of a murderer’s creative afflatus, a piece of theater delivered on videocassette to al-Jazeera within hours of the explosion (see fig. 1). The video showed a young man, the putative driver of the bomb-laden truck, wearing stereotypical martyr’s black and claiming responsibility for the crime in the name of an Islamic extremist group. It later emerged in one of the story’s many absurdities that the man did not know how to drive, which suggests that his actual role was that of a talking head claiming responsibility for the murder before, in all likelihood, being himself executed.

Even though nobody to this day has bothered to indict any member of the Syrian regime for the crime, the explosion unleashed a massive popular upheaval against the Syrian presence in Lebanon.9 The two-and-a-half-month uprising began with the three-day mourning period for the former prime minister. Political assassinations have not been uncommon since Syria and Israel began occupying Lebanon in the late 1970s, so mourning periods have come to unfold according to a “grammar of grief” that spans visual, dramatic, and discursive representations. Generally, following an initial period of shocked silence, angry graffiti slashes across the deceased’s sectarian fiefdom as generational visions of vengeance are born. Almost simultaneously, dignified pictures of the victim, often with a brief eulogy, appear throughout the communities he or she served. Candlelight vigils bring friends and supporters together for quiet commiseration, while the media toll with eulogies and denunciations of the crime. The funeral is usually held in the deceased’s ancestral village and unfolds according to the rites of his or her religious community. Periodic religious-political gatherings follow, commemorating the death and reinforcing the sense of shared sorrow and protest. With little hope for any investigation into the crime, the aggrieved settle for such dramatic transformations of slaughter into tragedy as mourning can offer.

The mourning period for Hariri began according to ritual as silence blanketed the country. Soon, however, the crime beyond the pale led to the idea beyond the pale. A shred of graffiti epitomized it. The name Hariri scrawled in Latin letters began to appear with a cross and a crescent dotting each i, a wild and blasphemous metaphor if taken literally, but acceptable during a time of sorrow. To say that Hariri’s murderers killed hope for interfaith reconciliation was an instance of the transformation of pain into tragedy that has marked modern Lebanese cultural history. Yet this meaning was unstable. Since the end of the civil war in 1990, the sight of crosses and crescents together had always signified starry-eyed idealism. The depth of loss, however, temporarily leveled this highly fragmented, individualistic society such that the unthinkable — national interfaith unity — was experienced before being conceptualized. The name Hariri with a cross and a crescent dotting each i slipped from meaning “hope expunged” to meaning “hope reborn,” and the media marveled at the semiotic transformation, declaring that Hariri was not dead.

The notion that interfaith solidarity in the face of injustice could redeem the nation from its 1975 – 90 sectarian civil war quickly caught on. The Hariri funeral, which is not diminished by recognizing that it was also a staged dramatic representation, drew on the grammar of grief, only to exceed it as a national spectacle. First, the organizers chose not to have the funeral in the slain man’s ancestral city of Sidon, where it might have been perceived as a clan or sectarian affair, but in Beirut, the nation’s capital. Second, the organizers opted for a popular rather than a state funeral, thereby excluding members of the compromised Lebanese government and reinforcing the link between Hariri and the people of all communities. Third, Hariri and his dead companions were to be entombed next to the massive mosque that Hariri himself had endowed adjacent to Martyrs’ Square, a place steeped in national history, where the first Lebanese patriots were publicly hanged by the Ottomans in 1915. Finally, church bells and Muslim calls to prayer throughout the country were coordinated in a show of unity. All of these unusual measures transformed the funeral from what could have been a stodgy tribute into a 250,000-strong dramatization of national conscience and interfaith reconciliation, the largest public funeral in Lebanese history.

The popular actualization of the funeral agenda continued the semiotic reversal of Hariri’s death and formed an elegiac core for the events of the following weeks. Although political parties participating in the funeral brandished their own flags, calls to replace them with the Lebanese flag made sense to the majority commemorating the death of a national leader, not that of a party, clan, or sectarian chieftain. The number of participants also contributed to transform the sense of despair and helplessness into popular empowerment. For the first time, masses of all stripes dared to chant anti-Syrian slogans publicly. It was also at the funeral that the powerful images of Christians and Muslims praying together in common grief cemented the conviction that unity might be possible (see fig. 2). In these ways, the masses themselves transformed the funeral into a national movement. The following days were crucial. The mourning period was drawing to a close, and so was its capacity to structure opposition. The ephemeral unity provided by grief would eventually wane, to be supplanted by a resurgence of sectarian and class interests. The size and oppositional profile of the funeral were indeed astonishing, but the nation’s overlords doubtless bet that the status quo would soon return. After all, the Lebanese are often accused of political cynicism as well as of being faddish, fickle, and easily influenced.

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Notes

I thank Lebanese American University for granting me a sabbatical year in 2005 – 6 during which the first draft of this article was written. I would also like to thank Hala Daouk, John Donahue, S.J., Patrick McGreevy, Marianne Marroum, and Susan Stanford Friedman for assistance and advice. Transliterations of the Lebanese vernacular in this article are modified from the guidelines for formal Arabic established by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Song titles, for example, are transliterated for ease of referencing, but names are rendered in their most common spellings.

1. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. Numerous recent books make note of exclusionary nativism in the Middle East. Walter Armbrust shows how Egyptian films strive to construct a normative ibn al-balad (Egyptian salt-of-the-earth) figure in Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 204 – 20. Lila Abu-Lughod extends and develops the analysis of the ibn al-balad figure to television serials in Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 135 – 61. Joseph A. Massad shows how Jordanian authorities mobilize culture to exalt “Bedouin life” over alternatives in Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 250 – 58. Lisa Wedeen shows how popular imagery ensconces Syrian identity in a patriarchal model with Hafez al-Asad at its head in Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 32 – 66. Yael Zerubavel traces the discursive indigenization of the European Jewish settler in Palestine in Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
3. The term pious modern is borrowed from Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi3 i Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 30.
4. The work on Hezbollah includes Joseph Elie Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program (Leiden: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Abdallah Balqaziz, Ḥizbullāh min al-taḥrīr ilā al-rad‘: 1982 – 2006 (Hezbollah from Liberation to Deterrence: 1982 – 2006) (Beirut: Markaz dirāsāt al-wiḥda al-‘arabiyya, 2006); H. E. Chehabi, Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last Five Hundred Years (London: Center for Lebanese Studies/Tauris, 2006); Judith Palmer Harik, Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism (London: Tauris, 2005); Emile El-Hokayem, “Hizballah and Syria: Outgrowing the Proxy Relationship,” Washington Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2007): 35 – 52; Sabrina Mervin, ed., Les mondes chiites et l’Iran (The Shiite Worlds and Iran) (Paris: Karthala, 2007); Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Naim Qassem, Hizbullah: The Story from Within, trans. Dalia Khalil (London: Saqi, 2005); Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto, 2002); and Waddah Sharara, Dawlat Ḥizbullāh: Lubnān mujtam‘an islāmiyyan (The Hezbollah State: Lebanon as an Islamic Society) (Beirut: Dar an-Nahar, 2006).
5. The role of cultural mediation in the Independence Uprising has not received focused scholarly attention outside of Lina Khatib, “Television and Public Action in the Beirut Spring,” in Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community, Legitimacy, and Public Life, ed. Naomi Sakr (London: Tauris, 2007), 28 – 43. Scholarly and journalistic work on Rafik al-Hariri’s assassination, the uprising, and the aftermath is sparse but includes Jacques Beauchard, Beyrouth, la ville, la mort (Beirut, the City, Death) (La Tour d’Aigues: Aube, 2006); Beirut Diaries: Truth, Lies, and Videotape, dir. Mai Masri, 79 min. (Beirut: MTC Production, 2006); Nicholas Blanford, Killing Mr Beirut: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East (London: Tauris, 2006); Peter Grimsditch, ed., The Beirut Spring (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar/Quantum Communications, 2005); Marwan Iskandar, Rafiq Hariri and the Fate of Lebanon (London: Saqi, 2006); Samir Kassir, Intifāḍat al-istiqlāl kamā rawāha (The Independence Uprising as He Narrated It) (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2005); Kulunā lialwaṭan (We Are All the Nation), dir. Jean Aoun, 365 min. (Beirut: LBC1, 2006); Ziad Majid, ‘An rabīa‘ bayrūt wa-al-dawlat al-nāqiṣa (On the Beirut Spring and the Incomplete State) (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2006); Chibli Mallat, March 2221: Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution; An Essay on Nonviolence and Justice (Beirut: Gubernare, 2007); “Inside Syria and Lebanon,” Middle East Report, no. 236 (2005); Béatrice Patrie and Emmanuel Español, Qui veut détruire le Liban? (Who Wants to Destroy Lebanon?) (Paris: Actes Sud, 2007); “Beyrouth XXIème siècle” (“Beirut, the Twenty-First Century”), La pensée de midi, no. 20 (2007); “Le printemps inachevé” (“The Unfinished Spring”), special issue, L’Orient-Express (Beirut), December 2005; and “L’espoir en lettres de sang” (“Hope in Letters of Blood”), special issue, L’Orient – Le Jour (Beirut), February 13, 2006.
6. For a more detailed study of Hezbollah’s cultural policy, see esp. Deeb, Enchanted Modern. In the interest of transparency, it is necessary to clarify my stance toward Hezbollah and its allies. The following actions taken by the Party of God from 2005 to this writing in June 2008 ground my view that the party is functioning against the interests of a sovereign Lebanon: (1) its support for the Syrian occupying power following the Hariri assassination; (2) its paralyzing the national government and legislature by twice walking out of the government and out of Parliament, the second time beginning in December 2006 and continuing to May 2008; (3) its unilateral decision to send a commando unit across the border into Israel in July 2006, unleashing a thirty-four-day war; (4) its paralyzing the Beirut central business district and effectively laying siege to the government from December 2006 to May 2008 by setting up a massive, empty tent city; (5) its paralyzing the entire city of Beirut for several days in January 2007 by manning dozens of roadblocks on major arteries with heaps of burning tires and sand berms in an effort to topple the government; (6) its declaration of a “red-line,” no-go zone around the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, where the killers of dozens of Lebanese soldiers were holed up; (7) its triggering a constitutional crisis and power vacuum by blocking the election of a new president from late 2007 until May 2008; and (8) its unleashing with its allies a militia assault on Beirut and numerous regions of the country on May 7, 2008. The attack included the closing or ransacking of offices belonging to three newspapers, a magazine, two radio stations, and a television station, along with the intimidation of numerous, especially Shiite Muslim, anti-Hezbollah activists. See Hazem Sayegh, “Al-Kirāhītān” (“Two Hates”), www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArchive.aspx?Author=saghiy&keyword=&CatID=0&from date=05-06-2008&todate=05-30-2008 (accessed May 17, 2008). This stance in no way implies support for Hezbollah’s political opponents or especially for the U.S. government’s allowing the Israeli Defense Forces to pummel Lebanon in summer 2006, a decision that confirmed the widespread conviction that the United States is an unfair arbiter. The Israeli military failure, however, also vividly illustrates a claim made here that coercion — whether by the Israeli Defense Forces, the anonymous bombers, or Hezbollah — cannot solve Lebanon’s problems.
7. Nor does the fact that at various times most Lebanese factions welcomed the Syrian presence excuse the Syrian regime’s strategic vision to control its western neighbor. See Fawwaz Trabulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2007), 194.
8. A representative sample of this camp includes Charles Ayoub’s writings in the Beirut daily Al-Diyār since February 2005; Alain Gresh, “Offensive concertée contre le régime syrien” (“A Concerted Effort against the Syrian Regime”), Le monde diplomatique (Paris), December 2005, 12; Charles Glass, “An Assassin’s Land,” London Review of Books, August 4, 2005, 15 – 18; the late Joseph Samaha’s writings in the Beirut dailies Al-Safīr and Al-Akhbār since 2005; and Trish Schuh, “Faking the Case against Syria,” Counterpunch, November 18, 2005, www.counterpunch .org/schuh11182005.html (accessed January 30, 2009).
9. Paragraph 9 of the report of the International Independent Investigation Commission established pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolution 1595 (2005), (Mehlis I), October 19, 2005, states, “Building on the findings of the Commission and Lebanese investigations to date and on the basis of the material and documentary evidence collected, and the leads pursued until now, there is converging evidence pointing at both Lebanese and Syrian involvement in this terrorist act. It is a well-known fact that Syrian Military Intelligence had a pervasive presence in Lebanon at the least until the withdrawal of the Syrian forces pursuant to resolution 1559. The former senior security officials of Lebanon were their appointees. Given the infiltration of Lebanese institutions and society by the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services working in tandem, it would be difficult to envisage a scenario whereby such a complex assassination plot could have been carried out without their knowledge.” Paragraph 123 of the same document states, “Conclusion: There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate [the] former Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security official [sic] and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services” (quoted in Mallat, March 2221, 104, 106).