Not, Not Nation
by Panos Aprahamian
‘Andar de Cima’ or Upper Floor by Renata Lucas—Image taken by Panos Aprahamian.
Prologue
In artist Renata Lucas’s piece ‘Andar de Cima’ or Upper Floor, a flag pole pierces through two stories at the Casa de Povo, House of the People cultural center in São Paulo, allowing the Brazilian flag to show up on the upper level where it is stuck indoors, away from the glory of waving in the blowing wind, and with much of it spread on the floor. The site arises a feeling of nostalgia for future possibilities that could have been. A symbol of anti-colonial struggle and national liberation, the Brazilian flag re-emerges to solidify and reterritorialize the nation-state it represents into a bastion of racial capitalism and oligarchic rule.
Not much different than the cedar-plastered flag of Lebanon, both a symbol of national sovereignty and of continuous neo-colonial relations. Cedrus Libani or the Lebanese Cedar is as much the symbol of the Maronite Project as it is that of Lebanon the nation-state. A state whose borders were drawn by the residing colonial power, France, and the Maronite Eastern Catholic Church. The borders themselves were an attempt to include all Maronite communities within the nascent nation. Each generation has witnessed, in some way or another, the fight to re-articulate the contemporary nation-state and, consequently, the fight over the history, identity and politics of those inhabiting Lebanon. A string of failed national projects by different ethno-religious communities spanning various geographies have left Lebanon a graveyard of lost futures and a battlefield of interpretations of its history.
By examining the many failures of Lebanon’s many nationalisms, it becomes apparent that these visions of the future have never transcended imaginary geographies and mythical timelines. So far, a truly radical anti-Capitalist and anti-state project has never been able to be theorized, let alone materialized, and if we are to envision an anti-Capitalist emancipatory project, it must be divorced from the violent and reactionary temporal-spatial myth-making that has dominated our past and structures our present.
1. Not, not Arab
Where the edicts of a definable identity thrive there thrives as well a profound disjuncture between place and time. Identity can build a place into a fortress in spite of temporal contingencies, squarely in the face of history's multi-directionality. Identity can also saddle a preferred mythical timeline and trample irreplaceable built environments and painstaking dwelling practices. Identity, in other words, is a reduction of the dynamic and labile dyad of time/place into the haughty domination of one term over the other.
In his short essay ‘Not, not Arab’, Lebanese writer and artist Walid Sadek declares his refusal to take part in the diametrically opposed pillars that fueled the protracted Lebanese Civil Wars. Sadek claims: “There lies in the double negative ‘not, not Arab’ a disinclination to side with either of the two reductive poles of identity’s machinations.” On one side you have the reactionary Phoenicianism or Lebanese nationalism led by the Maronite Christian sect—to whom the French handed power during the process of decolonization in order to sustain their influence. On the other side, you have the reactionary, albeit a little less so, and identitarian born-out-of-the-anti-colonial-struggle Arab Nationalism, led by Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim sect. This conflict of power generated two national myths that both claimed one form of historical continuity over the other and presented the country as either Arab or not.
The “not” Arab, or Phoenician, is some sort of a pre-Arab, pre-Islamic, Eastern Mediterranean identity that had more in common with its maritime Western counterparts than its terrene Eastern ones, with whom it shares a language. Centered around Maronite ethnocultural nationalism, Phoenicianism naturally pushed Lebanon’s Druze, Shia, Orthodox, and Palestinian populations to side with Arab Nationalism. The Arab Nationalist promise was that of a secular and post-ethnosecterian supranational body, free of its colonial ties—including that of the existence of the settler-colonial State of Israel, who in turn ended up supporting Phoenicianism in Lebanon.
Despite its claims to post-ethnic and post-colonial secularism, however, Arab Nationalism was an ethnocultural Arab Sunni supremacist entity in a vast region populated by non-Sunni, non-Arab, and non-Arabic-speaking communities. The fate of the Assyrians, Kurds, Copts, Amazigh, and other indigenous North and East African communities has consequently been a slow but steady process of cleansing, assimilation, and repression. Arab Nationalism's largest backers, the Soviet Union and Maoist China, similarly employed the guise of post-ethnic secularism as a facade for Russian and Han Chinese ethnocultural supremacy.
“For if identity operates through the disjunction of time and place,” Sadek continues, “then this double negative does not seek the wholeness of their concordance. Yet, neither does it shun the complexity of time bearing place and of place in time”. As mentioned in the above extract, those who defend places and identities, attach to these spaces and groups a vertical temporality that generates a mythical past in an ahistorical continuum with the present. A present reality whose ethnocultural, religious, and linguistic makeup is much different from said mythical pasts and so is this past’s sectarian socioeconomic structure. For a Phoenicianist, Lebanon is part of a continuum of a Mediterranean culture stretching its tentacles all the way back to antiquity and forward towards the gates of the Atlantic. For an Arab nationalist, it is part of an Arab continuum stretching its tentacles back to the Islamic golden age of the medieval Caliphates and forward towards the gates of the Atlantic.
2. Not, not Levantine
A third way for Lebanese nationalism, albeit allied with the Arab Nationalist camp, was the least popular, Syrian Nationalism. Syrian Nationalism does not refer to the present-day nation-state but what the chief ideologue of the movement, Antoun Saadi, called the ‘Natural Syria’. A geographic entity that engulfs the modern-day nation-states of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, as well as parts of Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, and the whole of Cyprus. We can call this one, Levantine nationalism, for clarity and as opposed to the two poles of nationalism, Lebanese/Phoenician and Arab, that were ripping the country apart. Despite probably being the most ‘historical’ of national myths, secularist Antoun Saadi’s Rum Orthodox background betrays an identitarian urge to reject both the Lebanese nationalism of the Maronite Christians and the Arab Nationalism of the Muslims. Saadi advocated for a secular state based on Christian and Islamic values but conspicuously, not Judaic ones. Saadi’s Levantine nationalism at the crossroads of Phoenicianism and Arab Nationalism was the slightly less ahistorical but more anomalous third option that led to nothing but laying bare the inherent contradictions of all three nationalisms.
A Speculative Map of Greater Syria, which includes current day Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Cyprus, Cilicia, as envisioned by Antoun Saadi, founder and chief ideologue of The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, Image from Wikipedia.
Levantine Nationalism presents a synthesis between Arab Nationalism’s thesis of a unified cultural-linguistic Arab nation and Phoenicianism’s antithesis of a nation built in the image of a Pre-Islamic, Pre-Arab past. This unholy union proposed by Saadi reveals nothing but the aberration that is nationalism. A parasitic import from the West, only able to solidify itself through ethnic cleansing and genocide. Nationalism in West Asia or the Middle East has proven itself to be disastrous more often than not. The failures and shortcomings of various nationalisms and secularist ideologies inevitably paved the way for Islam’s entrance into the political sphere. Through both its populist form, exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood and its derivatives, or its elitist petro-monarchic alternative—currently, the most successful form of Arab statehood for various reasons—political Islam has filled the void left by the anti-colonial nationalisms that dominated the twentieth century.
With the failure of the Phoenicianist, Arab Nationalist, and Levantine-Syrian Nationalist currents, the end of the protracted Lebanese Civil-Wars, and the advent of the so-called ‘End of History’, Lebanon’s oligarchic elite looked elsewhere to re-establish its authority. A new yet old political model that focused on cities rather than nations and relied on another kind of historical continuity was brought from the Arab Gulf by a repatriated Lebanese businessman. The businessman, Rafic Hariri, who would later become Prime Minister, initiated this new era by founding Solidere. Solidere was a self-defined “Lebanese joint-stock company in charge of planning and redeveloping Beirut Central District following the conclusion, in 1990, of the devastating Lebanese Civil War.” Solidere re-branded Beirut as “the Ancient City of the Future.'' They transformed the cityscape into a hyper-privatized, real-estate, and financial tourism hub. As is the case with prior nationalist myth-making, this model also relied on an imagined historical continuity that linked the present with the ancient past of the Lebanese coastline as a mercantile, seafaring, and semi-autonomous arrangement of port city-states. The cosmopolitan Neoliberalism of the “city-nation” easily ignores the hinterlands, which are considered but a burden on the mercantile-financial economy. The city-nation model’s exclusive interest in the city generates “sacrificial landscapes” out of which only touristic destinations stand out as beacons of prosperity.
3. Not, not Lebanese
While "the Ancient City of the Future" model was successful—for the time being—in the coastal city-states of the Gulf, the model proved unstable and unsustainable even in the short run for Lebanon. The ahistorical continuity that turned pearl divers into oil barons in the Gulf, was doomed to fail in a country like Lebanon that lacked the Petrodollars and Western-backing that the Gulf states enjoyed. Instead, the country relied heavily on real estate, finance, and their unholy, short-lived alliance. Real estate sells something that everyone needs to be able to buy. Therefore, real estate has an interest in people being able to afford a house. The deal between real estate and finance, however, affirmed that general prosperity is not needed, finance can just lend the people the purchase money for housing. The bursting of the real estate bubble, the scarcity of natural resources, and the volatility of financial capitalism brought this model down quite quickly.
The authoritarian state-backing that Neoliberal reform requires—even though its ideologues claim complete detachment from the state—originally came in the form of a joint endeavor between Lebanese and Syrian military intelligence at a time when Syria was de facto occupying Lebanon. This fell apart as the Neocon-era color revolutions swept the global east and the Syrian forces had to withdraw from Lebanon following Prime Minister Rafic Hariri’s assassination. This void was replaced by a different form of security apparatus run by non-state actor, Hezbollah. Since Hezbollah was regarded as a terrorist organization by much of the trans-Mediterranean and Gulf trade partners of Lebanon, the mercantile model on the ancient Lebanese coast failed further.
The failure of yet another attempt to link Lebanon’s deep past to create its future came crumbling down and left a barren landscape where different ideologies, from nationalist to Islamist to globalist compete as our violent ‘Return to History’ brings a return to ideological competition. The country faces the question of whether to regress to an industrial-agrarian hybrid economy, re-solidify the nation-state and re-territorialize the Lebanese economy or to forever rely on foreign aid and neo-colonial relations to survive. An inherently contradictory question, of course, as Lebanon is nothing but a colonial project in the first place and shall remain as such until it is radically restructured, or dare I say, abolished. The abolition of Lebanon is something, neither the Phoenician, Levantine, or Arab nationalists were able to do, nor were the neo-mercantilists, the Islamists, or the tiny and fractured Liberal-Leftist (non-)alliance. A colonial project and a nation-state can never be anything but that and neither neocolonialism nor neoliberalism require the nation-state in its traditional form as did older forms of colonial power and capital accumulation.
Christmas greeting card signed by Samir Geagea, chairman of the Lebanese Forces and by Party MP, Sethrida Geagea—Image taken by Panos Aprahamian.
In Conclusion
"The most painful state of being is remembering the future; especially the one you'll never have." – Søren Kierkegaard
Whether they be nation-states, city-states, or semi-autonomous ethnosectarian enclaves, the structures depend on the modern state as a political organizational body and therefore need to create temporal-spatial myths that link the state’s present-day territory to its deep past in order to fashion its future in a way that is sustainable and long-lasting. The future it conceives of is seen as inevitable. The past and the future are equally concrete and immoveable within the logic of nationalism. Nationalism constantly pulls the nationalist back and forth between an awareness that they must work to achieve the destiny of the nation and the belief in the insistence of the nation being natural, time immemorial, and thus already set. Similarly, anything in opposition to that nationalism must be perceived as foreign; yet it is almost exclusively foreign models that provide the shape and structure of nationalism. Capital, however, with contemporary technology, with the ability to constantly outsource, and with global communication and shipping networks, no longer needs the state as we know it, something that was fundamental during Capital’s infancy but seemingly not for its future growth and further accumulation.
In other words, to say in near Bartlebyesque manner not, not Arab is a retreat, but only to glance obliquely at the possibility of a critical chronotope that could give a working form to struggles that seek to defend the many tenants of a material world and their durability within mobile and emancipatory political projects.
Any mobile-emancipatory political project devised by an anti-Capitalist Left whose aim is to capture the state to curb the global flows of Capital is a project doomed to fail as it attempts to rely on the very political structure that helped birth Capitalism. Even a non-racial and secular-democratic state cannot but duplicate the myth-making necessities and such tools as closed-borders, that earlier reactionary forms of statehood and nation-building required. Therefore, a truly anti-Capitalist Left cannot rely on any particular place and should link a temporal horizontality to a radical future that extends its tentacles back in time and erupts in temporal-spatial disjunctions within the present.
عشتم وعاش لبنان
Original artwork by Olivia Chapman (@bugdumb).
Panos Aprahamian writes, teaches, and works with film, video, and digital media. His practice explores ethnographic fictions, temporal disjunctions, nonhuman agency, implanted memory, speculative taxonomies, and lost futures. His writing has appeared in Funambulist Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, Journal Safar, 17Teshreen, Khabar Keslan, and The Public Source as part of their Dispatches from the Revolution series. His endeavors have been supported by Ashkal Alwan, the Doha Film Institute, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Art Dubai Writers Fellowship, the Middle East Media Initiative, Temporary Art Platform, and the Goethe Institut. He studied the moving image at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London as a Caspian Arts Scholar, and at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. He is currently an instructor at the American University of Beirut.
This article will be featured in Khabar Keslan’s upcoming Issue 5. Contradiction.