Gloria Robberto
In 1997, Lebanese director Akram Zaatari published a documentary, Al Shareet bi-khayr (All Is Well on the Border), which comprised many clips of life filmed in Lebanon both before and after the civil war. Testimonies of Lebanese resistance members from the Israeli occupation, read by actors, document not only their experiences in war but also their societal marginalization. While the main purpose of this documentary is “to represent the experiences of disenfranchised former resistance fighters without valorizing or objectifying their suffering”, it also brings up the idea of collective memory and its significance. This is clear when Zaatari asks schoolchildren to write and read aloud descriptions of their parents’ villages. As they read their compositions, the viewers are invited to ask themselves, what influences the collective memory of a young post-conflict generation, and how does it impact the way they think? The children’s words in All Is Well on the Border provide context for how stories and experiences of dislocation and territorial occupation can shape inherited memory.
The Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990, and to prevent more conflict, the government instituted a general amnesty law which absolved nearly everyone who had committed any sort of crime.
Unlike most countries after a civil conflict, Lebanon did not create a national narrative of the war, which is typically done to promote a sense of national identity. Communities since then have relied on collective memories, which can be defined as “… a recollection of [events] not personally experienced but socially felt, a traumatic rupture that indelibly scars a nation, religious group, community, or family”. They serve as the interactive framework for generations of a society. All is Well on the Border presents the children of survivors as inheritors of a “transmitted wound”, and shows how territorial occupation can impact future generations. The way in which collective and generational memory can be shaped by family context is clear when Zaatari asks the children to describe their parent’s villages in their own words. One boy begins, “I’ll try to describe it through my mother’s eyes, in tears, every time I ask about our village. Her heart is full of grief. She feels nostalgic for her childhood and brings a photo album with photos of the green valleys, the hills and old mud houses of her relatives”. A similar sentiment is felt in the following essay, where a girl gives her description; “In my village there are five ponds…streets are clean… houses have red roofs. Its people work in agriculture[.] Its alleys are narrow…” Although neither have personal memories of these ancestral villages, what they imagine is “mediated not only through language but also through images in family photo albums”. Despite these recollections of peaceful villages, children of post-conflict generations carry trauma and a sense of immense loss. Another girl mentions her village “whispering… a bitter history”, and the boy states, “I was deprived of…my childhood due to the horrible war led by the Zionist enemy”. The girl even adds that she longs to return to this village, even though she has never seen it. The feeling of loss of not only a former way of life but also a former sense of self, is a common theme among members of collective memory in a post-traumatic environment. These clips of All Well show that the collective memory of children is deeply rooted in their parents’ stories and that these memories can create a genuine sense of both pride and loss.
What these children have inherited from their parents and the surrounding society reveals how many Lebanese post-war memories have been coded with “repeated references to the master signifiers of the Islamic resistance”. In All Is Well, this is evident when the first boy mentions the “Zionist enemy”, as well as the second to last clip of the documentary, which features a young boy about 6 years old standing on a chair in the school courtyard. With his finger in the air surrounded by an air of confidence, he proclaims, “The enemy might slaughter us, but we follow the line of our Imam Al- Khumayni. We believe in the base he set us. Kill us, thus our people will be more conscious”. This shows that the narrative process involves the Lebanese youth, “imbibing and transforming family stories and local histories to affirm social identities, political discourses, and temporal continuities”. Besides families, the school system plays an important role in a child’s inherited memory. Although the Ta’if Accord laid out a curriculum based on openness, the content of history classes often depended upon the school’s religious affiliation and the present teacher’s political alignment. Schools since the war has left “students ill-equipped to process or engage with the past”.
As a result, the classroom is subservient to family history, values, and attitudes, which is clear in All Is Well; children relate their nation’s history to personal affiliation, which has been shaped by and will continue to shape their collective memory. Regarding filming, Akram Zaatari also makes directorial choices about how these children’s stories are presented that are equally as effective as their essays.
While the first child reads, the words of beauty are juxtaposed with footage of a road leading into an occupied zone. Zataari digitally alters this footage by rewinding and speeding it up. As part of more extensive work in which the creator is aware of its technological mediation and lack of access to a referent, “the video also asks us to think about the young boy and his testimony as equally manipulated, if all too human, forms of media”. The way memories are formed and history is remembered is relative to the context in which it is taught, and the testimonies Akram Zaatari presents in his documentary are perfect examples.
The Transcribed Essays:
CHILD 1 TRANSCRIPTION: 24:20- 25:26—— 26:36-
27:14
In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. What shall I say? How shall I write about it? How shall I describe it? The village is like a mother. Words would never do her justice. How shall I start, describe its beauty, its location, or its glorious resistant history that led to massacres, the first of which led to 90 persons being martyred in one house. But I don’t know, I’ll try to describe it through my mother’s eyes, in tears every time I ask about our village. Her heart is full of grief. She feels nostalgic for her childhood and brings a photo album with photos of the green valleys, the hills and old mud houses of her relatives. She says: look, this is your village that we were deprived of by occupation. Sometimes I ask my father why we don’t go to the village…so many Interesting things were said about my village. I wish to go visit it to compensate myself of what I was deprived of during my childhood due to the horrible war led by the Zionist enemy, and at last, I wish that this whole thing and the occupation ends so we could go back to our village, get to know it, enter its schools, live in the way my parents lived with its kind of people who cheer to our joy and weep to our sorrow. Oh how much I miss you my dear village.
CHILD 2 TRANSCRIPTION: 25:27- 26:36
In the name of God Most Gracious, Most Merciful. My village is named Houla. It is located on a green hill overlooking Palestine, whispering to her a bitter history. In my village there are five ponds. The streets are clean. Some of the houses have red roofs. Its people work in agriculture and are very few because of the occupation. Its alleys are narrow. There is a mosque in the middle of the village, a small square, a hussayniyah, two schools and three cemeteries. One of them is a martyrs garden with by cypress and pine trees that purify its air and make it good for healing respiratory diseases. Oh how I love my village and how I wish this ravishing occupation would end, so I can live there happily with its people.
CHILD 3 TRANSCRIPTION: 43:23- 43:45
The enemy might slaughter us but we follow the line of our Imam Al-Khumayni. We believe in the base he set us. Kill us, thus our people will be more conscious.
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