Lebanon, the Endless Catastrophe...

In seeking to understand what is happening to us, to understand myself and to recover some equilibrium in the face of what we are living through, I turn to books and novels about peoples who have known the ravages of war as we know them. Japan, with what it endured during the Second World War and in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, offers in this regard a model that may help us locate our own pain. Let us note, in passing, that the quantity of weapons poured onto Lebanon over the years now amounts to more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Two works stand out here, Urashimasō and The Silent Cry. The first was written from within the event itself; its author witnessed the ruins with his own eyes, bearing testimony and describing the tragedies, the mutilations and the wandering he observed. The second was written after Japan’s defeat, and bears witness to the inner devastation of the human being. Comparing what they describe with what we live through, I found that the Lebanese situation brings together both sufferings simultaneously, with no separation between them and no temporal interval of any kind.

These two books help to dismantle violence, to understand it, and not merely to survive it psychologically.

This kind of writing does not diminish the pain, but it gives it shape and offers it a language, drawing it out of chaos toward something that can be grasped. In wartime especially, this capacity constitutes almost an act of resistance.

For war reduces the human being to a reaction, to a body that survives, suffers or flees; whereas writing — and the reading of this kind of literature — restores us to our place as conscious subjects, rather than mere victims of circumstance.

In short, some peoples have known wars, others have known defeat, and others still have emerged from the rubble to rebuild themselves.

But what Lebanon is living through resembles neither a war in the traditional sense, nor a defeat one could date, nor even a catastrophe one could contain within a defined timeframe. It is something else entirely.

In the Japanese experience, as reflected in works like Urashimasō and The Silent Cry, there existed a trajectory, however painful. Shock first, then silence, then awareness, then reconstruction.

Even in the most terrible moments, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, the catastrophe had in some sense a finality. The strike had ended, and it was from there that a history was born.

In Lebanon, nothing ends.

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There exists here no moment one could say marks “the after.” Everything happens at once: a permanent trauma that cannot be absorbed, a forced reckoning that never reaches its conclusion, contradictory narratives that settle nothing, and a daily life that resumes above the rubble as though denying its very existence.

Lebanon does not live the aftermath of war.

It lives inside the war, inside its interpretation and inside its own denial, all at once.

Elsewhere in the world, catastrophe produces memory, memory produces consciousness, and consciousness produces, even after a long delay, change.

Here, the chain is broken: a catastrophe, then cries, then divisions, then partial forgetting, then a new catastrophe.

No memory is completed, no consciousness accumulates, no change comes.

In Urashimasō, the human being is broken, but honestly so.

In The Silent Cry, he tries to understand, or to conceal himself behind narratives.

In Lebanon, the situation is harsher still: a broken being, deprived of the right to express his brokenness, compelled to choose a narrative under the pressure of fear, of belonging or of accusation.

It is here that the particularity of the Lebanese condition resides, and perhaps its unprecedented character: not merely a plurality of opinions, but a plurality of reality itself.

Each community lives a different war, tells a different story and builds a different memory.

There exists, consequently, no unifying “national event,” only parallel events that converge solely in pain.

What makes the Lebanese situation without precedent, particularly within the framework of the modern nation-state, is that the state itself no longer fulfills its role as the ultimate reference of meaning or of decision. In most countries, the state declares war or ends it, holds the monopoly on violence and forges the official narrative.

In Lebanon, the war unfolds both within the state and outside it, violence is dispersed throughout, and the narrative is contested to the point of existential rupture.

Thus, the Lebanese do not live merely a political crisis, but a deep referential void.

It is this void that causes the catastrophe to repeat itself without ever becoming a turning point.

Every strike, every explosion, every tragedy is added to a long chain, without ever closing its circle or laying the ground for what might come after.

Graver still is what one might call the normalization of the absurd: death becomes a number and an image on a wall, blood a news item, catastrophe a part of daily routine.

Not because people no longer feel anything, but because they have been so thoroughly exhausted that they can no longer convert feeling into action.

Lebanon today resembles neither postwar Japan nor any country that has emerged from any conflict, because it has not even been granted the chance to emerge from one.

It is a country where the war has not ended, where peace has not begun, where nothing has been resolved, yet where everything replays itself, again and again.

Perhaps this is why the pain in Lebanon seems different: not only because it runs deep, but because it unfolds without horizon.

Not because it comes unexpectedly, but because it returns.

And not because it remains incomprehensible, but because it is fully understood, without anyone possessing the power to change it.

This is not simply the tragedy of a nation. It is a complex human condition, rare and perhaps without precedent: a state living within its recognized borders, yet deprived of the natural time of states, that time made of beginnings, endings and transformations.

Lebanon is not merely a country in crisis.

It is a country removed from all sequential logic.

And this, perhaps, is the most cruel form of catastrophe: that it does not end… and that it does not begin again.