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Memory of the war: I don't know if I can even talk about it. I mean, if there is something in society that helps you to think about it--but everything encourages us to escape. Nothing encourages you to deal with it, to face it, nothing! They don't even talk about it anymore and even if they do it's from different perspectives: a theory and idea--not specific facts. I mean, it's very dangerous to awaken something that is not yet ready to be awakened . . . It's not easy to remember, and it's such a blessing to forget sometimes. But if you want to remember and you want to deal with it--and I hope each one of us will want to face something, and when he is ready, then it will help.
--Rola, 22, Lebanese University Student1
Despite the recent cracks to emerge in Lebanon's wall of public silence concerning the civil war (1975-90)--whether due to activist calls for disclosure and healing, politicians championing the search for historic truth,2 or scholars concerned with nostalgia and historic imaginings3--little attention has yet been given to how Lebanese youth are negotiating both the historic silences and private anguish of their nation's bloody past. Academic research on Lebanese war memory has tended to privilege elite production and cultural agency, focusing on war-related literature, films, artistic installations, heritage disputes, rebuilding projects, and memory entrepreneurs rather than engaging critically with everyday processes of social transmission and internalization.4 This article, drawing on Marianne Hirsch's concept of "postmemory," seeks to explore the memory of a generation of Lebanese who have grown up dominated not by traumatic events but by narrative accounts of events that preceded their birth.5 This is an inherited form of memory, which carries and connects with the "pain of others,"6 suffusing temporal frames and liminal positions. The complex and ambivalent position of Lebanese youth, caught between the contradictory forces of collective remembrance and social forgetting, is demonstrated in Rola's entreaty to face the past and her fear of rousing "something that is not yet ready to be awakened."
The article examines how members of the Lebanese postmemory generation reproduce, reimagine, or erase memory traces in order to...