The administration of the Beirut theater “Masrah Al-Madina” has announced that it will hold a gathering under the title “Reviving Hamra Street: Memory and Life.” The fact is that there is a need and demand for such an effort, especially since Hamra Street is unlike any other street in Beirut, nor any other city in the region. For decades, it had been the capital of the capital and the first cosmopolitan space in the region. Lebanese, both urbanites and migrants from the periphery, have long resided there next door to Americans, Britons, Palestinians, Iraqis, Bahrainis, Indians, Pakistanis, and Nigerians...
With its transition away from the raw state of nature- where cactus, sand, and foxes are sovereign- Hamra Street shaped the highpoint that Lebanon had reached before 1975. It was the product of collective and transnational human action that built cinemas, theaters, libraries, hotels, cafes, restaurants, commercial offices, and banks... Hamra’s commerce- in solidarity with its sectarian diversity and the freedoms, denied by closed communities, that it offered women- gave rise to this new entity frequented by intellectuals, tourists, and businessmen arriving from all kinds of faraway places. It constituted a space of freedom where books, plays, and films were not prohibited, nor, of course, was expressing wholly opposed and divergent opinions.
This new entity would not have been Hamra Street if it were not for the American University of Beirut. Its establishment gave rise to a growing need to meet the demand of its professors and students (housing, food, and bookstores), and landlords emerged to rent homes to incoming tenants. More substantially, it transformed Hamra Street, as well as the entirety of Ras Beirut, into a space where residence was not dictated by a traditional Eastern kinship system. One’s "neighbors" were not necessarily siblings or cousins; they could be from any country on the planet.
Hamra Street became what it is because, on one hand, it is "us," and on the other, it is "not us." And on one hand, it resembles us, and on the other, it does not resemble us. Our voices and the voices we like can be heard there, and so can voices we dislike and wish- deep down in our crummy selves- we wouldn't hear. That is to say, it is the ideal city where tongues meet and become muddled along with faces, complexions, and opinions, whereby we find and lose ourselves at the same time. It is the antithesis of the ideal village inhabited by people with whom we do not get lost, and if we do, we get lost among them as they all voice sentiments that we all share.
All of that could only be achieved, however, in a country that neither wages war nor glorifies war and resistance, nor imposes an official ideology on its citizens that points them to the correct ideas they are to embrace and the harmful ideas they are to avoid.
In other words, that is precisely what is needed to revive Hamra: the death of war, violence, militarism, and the delegitimization of all by a single "correct" opinion, which is ultimately tied to reviving Lebanon’s pluralism, if that remains possible.
The state of war has, decade after decade, been undermining everything that had made Hamra Street what it was. It is the reason for the displacement of residents along sectarian and ideological lines. This displacement, in both its visible and invisible forms, has continued to expand, with the latest (though not the largest) wave coming in 2008, when Hezbollah and its subordinates seized control of the capital.
Another outcome of the war and its expansion was the rise of kidnapping and assassinating foreigners, which aggravated when Lebanon became tied to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Among the many victims was the political scientist and American University of Beirut president, Malcolm Kerr, who was murdered in 1984.
Amid the perpetual state of war, various forms of local fanaticism became increasingly widespread, as did inflammatory nationalist and religious claims, rendering Hamra's cosmopolitanism superfluous to requirements and granting national and moral legitimacy to suspecting "dubious" outsiders and labeling them "spies."
Boasting of anti-modern, xenophobic, and traditional identities has always gone hand in hand with our pride in our wars, which prevented any harmony of urban life and unleashed chaotic waves of displacement whose costs were borne by the wars’ victims, culminating in the suffering enduring during the "war of support." It soon became evident that these boasts announced the impossibility of the city and the impossibility of a street like Hamra.
After the Syrian regime's censorship of newspapers and magazines, a similar sort of censorship was applied to books and films that did not fit this (fantastical and authoritarian) conception of patriotism.
Pursuant to this eradicative culture, Hamra Street- with its history, people, institutions, achievements, and symbolism- was reduced to a single young man who we thank for firing two shots at invading Israeli soldiers in 1982. Until very recently, Hamra Street would witness paramilitary parades on the special occasions of a certain political party- a party that continues to raise swastikas that have been slightly modified so they can be called "whirlwinds."
"Reviving Hamra Street" also requires a state monopoly on armament and, to the same extent, rescuing "memory and life" from this mendacious reductionism that erases the former and falsifies the latter.
