Absence in the Mirror: Beirut's Urban Identity in the Aftermath of Civil War

Abstract

This article compares two metaphors of mirrors used to describe postwar Beirut. The first compares Beirut to a broken mirror, shattered by its reflection of socio-cultural developments in the region. The second takes up the mirror in vampire films as a metaphor for the role of art after catastrophe. Like the mirror that reveals the absence of the vampire who is nevertheless physically present, art should reveal the inaccessibility of cultural tradition after a disaster. The article argues that both metaphors approach the post-civil-war identity of Beirut in terms of absence, and that both are implicated in a mythical discourse of regeneration.

Latency in Lebanon, or bringing things (back) to life: A Perfect Day (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2005)

“…This corresponds to the photographic sense of latency as the moment between the taking of an image and its display (to which I will return later). For Westmoreland (2010), following the work of Toufic (1993Toufic ( , 2009 on vampires in Lebanon, this concept of latency captures the absent presence of the war in the films of Hadjithomas and Joreige -'like vampires, the phantoms of Lebanon's wars bear no reflection and they cannot be imaged directly' (p. 183) -and functions as 'an allegory of postwar subjectivity ' (p. 192; see also Naeff, 2014). My own reading, however, suggests that we understand latency not simply as a return of the non-reflected undead of the war, invisibly stalking the streets of Beirut and allegorically present in affective behaviour, but also as a moment of becoming for the future.…”