Entre Amnistie et Amnésie : Ashraf Osman

Dans le cadre de notre Dossier "Entre Amnistie et Amnésie, où est passé le souvenir de notre guerre civile", nous publions des témoignages, mais aussi des articles, études, essais, publications sur ce sujet.

Osman, Ashraf (47) art curator & doctoral researcher in art history

Memory for Forgetfulness

"I do it so it feels like hell.  

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call."

- Sylvia Plath, from 'Lady Lazarus'

The title of my Master of Architecture thesis was "'Memory for Forgetfulness': Registering/Effacing the Memory of theLebanese War," after Mahmoud Darwish's novel (subtitled "August, Beirut, 1982". As you can tell from the Plath and Darwish references, I also dabble in poetry.) I am currently working on a doctorate in art history, of the Sursock Museum (in the second half of the twentieth century). Most recently, I was writing an article for an upcoming issue of Manazir Journal on "Lebanon’s Visual Arts in the 1980s ". As I researched the history of the museum during the war, war was getting closer to home, again. The genocide in Gaza was starting to knock on our doors. War kept seeping in, of course, into my writing; it was getting personal, and felt like it. I had to cut out passages, but kept feeling like they needed to be out there, somehow. And then came this call, so here they are…

I am a child of war. (Or rather, was.) That war, the fifteen-year war in Lebanon, the "Lebanese Civil War".[1] My first memories were in Beirut of the eighties. I was born two and a half years into the war, two years after the Karantina and Damour massacres, a year and a half after the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, the year of the Chouf massacres... I was a couple of months old when the Hundred Days' War began. And I was four and a half in the summer of 1982, the summer of the Israeli invasion, the Siege of Beirut, and the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

I am writing this more than nine months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza. A child created then would have been born by now. Or not… In that time, less than a year, more people have been killed than in Lebanon’s 15-year war, [2]  less than 300 kilometers away. You can almost smell it in the air…

That fall, on the other side of town, in East Beirut, the only art museum in town (named after a patron from an aristocratic family) reopened to the public for the first time since the war began, after the longest closure in its history (since it opened in the early sixties). They thought the war had ended; they were wrong. It went on for eight more years. I was almost thirteen when the war actually ended. I never went to the museum as a child. (It was on the other side of town, which we went to only for emergencies. As we did that summer…)

I realize now, I brought this upon myself. In the mid-nineties, a few years after the end of the war (after “National Reconciliation” and the Taif Agreement, after Parliament members passed the General Amnesty law absolving themselves of their war crimes), in our last history class of high school in Beirut, our teacher asked if we still had any unanswered questions. We could ask anonymously, he said; so, I did. I thought I was being smart. (I was valedictorian, and the youngest in class; I was full of myself, and knew nothing.) “What happened in the war? I just finished my schooling and I still don’t understand anything,” I asked. To be fair, in the Lebanese curriculum, history ended somewhere in the mid twentieth century, after Lebanon’s independence from France and the end of the Second World War. The teacher turned red. (Actually, it was more of an aubergine.) I thought he might have a heart attack. “Who is this naïve— This is a naïve question from a naïve student who thinks there is a simple answer to it… Nobody understands that, not even God!” I was starting to turn aubergine; I hoped no one noticed… That teacher passed away a couple of years ago, around the time I was applying for PhD. I think he may have wished this upon me, to finally get some answers to my naïve question.

Last year, the Museum reopened for the fifth time in its history, after a near three-year closure following the explosion of August 4, 2020, which heavily damaged it. For the occasion, the Museum’s new director curated an exhibition titled “Beyond Ruptures, A Tentative Chronology”. The exhibition explored three chronologies in the history of the museum: that of its building and institution, that of its collection and exhibitions, and that of the socio-political events around it, “drawing parallels with the artistic production of the country.”[3] I researched and wrote the timeline of that exhibition.

“You’ll see the beauty and the horror,” Jessica tells Paul in “Dune: Part Two” (the film). “You cannot see the future without seeing the past.”

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[1] Martha Wenger, “Primer: Lebanon’s 15-Year War, 1975-1990,” Middle East Report, January 1990, accessed July 30, 2024, https://merip.org/1990/01/primer-lebanons-15-year-war-1975-1990/.  

[2] A study “Counting the dead in Gaza” just published in the British medical journal The Lancet, citing measures set out by the International Court of Justice in January, 2024, regarding “acts within the scope of … the Genocide Convention”, estimates that “up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.  Lebanon’s 15-Year War resulted in an estimated 150,000 fatalities:

Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,” The Lancet 404, no. 10449 (July 20, 2024): 237–38, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01169-3.

[3] “Beyond Ruptures, A Tentative Chronology,” Sursock Museum, May 26, 2023, accessed July 26, 2024, https://sursock.museum/content/beyond-ruptures-tentative-chronology.