When a nation is afraid of having a memory...

Sunday, March 5, 2006

  Is reason sufficient in itself to create well-ordered and well-functioning societies? Can you design a society or a city the way you would design a jigsaw puzzle or word game? Is culture a tabula rasa? Can it ever be? European Enlightenment was notoriously confident in the thinking, acting and willing human individual, and in his capacity to change himself and his society. Against this background Goethe, for instance, argued that the elite could not create laws and regulations by pure rationalism since eventually the land shaped the people. Without knowing folk traditions you could not know the people. Geography (space) and history (time) had a deep effect on people s habits and customs. Hence the greatest puzzle in front of any group of innovatory, radical or avant-garde elite who want to make a difference in any culture whatsoever: What to do with space? What to do with time? How to trigger social change without forgetting the heritage of geography and history?

  This could have been the very question the unconventional Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury mulled over, albeit perhaps not exactly in these terms. Khoury knew firsthand the multiple dangers of living in a city with no memory. After the long-drawn-out civil war (1975-90), Beirut had swiftly turned into a large construction site with a building boom. Beirut was again to become the “Paris of the Middle East.” As the residents found themselves surrounded by an adamant process of reconstruction, renovation and modernization, some proved eager to achieve all this by erasing the traces of the past as rapidly and radically as possible. Solidere, the leading firm in this process, saw the whole city as a tabula rasa. No landmark buildings were kept. No historic remnants. No traces of the city s Ottoman past. The major architecture that they had chosen as worthy was the colonial architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. The rest of history was not worth remembering.

  Khoury bitterly criticized this ongoing “urban amnesia” project. Alternatively, he wanted to keep “the scarsé.” Every city, every nation-state, has scars. The choice is between those who resort to plastic surgery and pretend those scars were never there to begin with and those who want to embellish without pretending the scars ever happened, without putting an immaculate mask on for a face! Khoury could not realize his memory project for Beirut. But he managed to build a discotheque that would be legendary in a short span of time. Club B018 s name came from a former music studio in Christian East Beirut -- a studio that had played music so loud so as to drown out the sounds of bombshells. The discotheque was situated underground, accessed by a narrow, dark corridor, the tables were designed as coffins and the servers were in white uniforms as if this could be a sanatorium. The whole place and every detail in it was part and parcel of a memory manifesto. Against the ongoing amnesia, Khoury was inserting his memory project:

  “Remember, my city, for memory is a responsibility. Remember, my streets, both the atrocities and the beauties you have witnessed. Remember, my neighbors, what you have been through and also what you have been capable of doing to one another! As you walk into the future, into a better and brighter future, do not be afraid of having a memory, do not be afraid of taking the past with you…not to repeat it endlessly or be stuck in it, but to embrace, change and eventually improve it.”

  The question people like Bernard Khoury have asked themselves when reconstructing Beirut is a question we the children of Ottomans have been tackling for a very long. And after turning our back to our Ottoman past and pretending to have started history from scratch the day the modern nation-state was established, we now know that Goethe had a point, and history and geography does shape people. Not determine, but shape them. After feeling uncomfortable, if not embarrassed, about our “Eastern” ways and pretending to be Western and nothing but Western, we do know now that indeed Turkey is a Westernized and Western country that embodies myriad elements from the East and culturally, socially and politically combines its Muslimness and Westernness. After so many years of resistance and insistence, it is only now that the Turkish elite are accepting the fact that we are a synthesis, an interesting, if not unique blend, and we are a hybrid culture, and that in itself is an asset.