The speed with which Beirut is being rebuilt suggests that some Lebanese want to wipe out the memory of civil war. Others see the blanking out of the past as a mistake and are fighting to keep it alive. But as the experience of Beit Beirut shows, it’s an uphill struggle.
Beit Beirut is the new name for the Barakat House, a restored wreck of a building that was on the frontline of the battle between Christian and Muslim fighters during the war. But the dream of turning it into a museum that commemorates this tragic period in Lebanon’s history has faced one hurdle after another and today it’s a shadow of what it could be, perhaps because those with the money and the power to make it happen would rather forget.
It’s by no means the only building still standing that bears the scars of civil war, Israeli invasion and Syrian occupation. There’s a strange egg-like former cinema close to Martyrs’ Square that must be one of the oddest derelict buildings in the city, the old Holiday Inn hotel down by the Yacht Club that’s pock-marked with bullet holes, and countless other structures, large and small, that remain derelict and abused. Some have been patched up on the cheap, others left to rot.
Behind the modern and sterile Beirut Souks shopping complex we stumbled across the former l’Orient-Le Jour newspaper offices, with its gorgeous limestone façade full of architectural flourishes and style. Beside it an exciting new Zaha Hadid Architects shopping centre was being built. The newspaper building is a shell but the fact that it was hosting an exhibition by artist Jean Boghossian gave us the opportunity to have a nose around, and extraordinarily atmospheric it is too. Walking between the rooms, some blasted by missiles, most riddled with bullet holes, it was easy to imagine snipers holed up in the gloom, periodically firing their automatic weapons or sheltering from incoming missiles. An old lift shaft stood full of shattered masonry, tangled metal, dust and rotting wood.
We climbed from one floor to another, peering into shattered rooms and what was once a bank of toilets that, despite everything, were still pleasantly tiled. Where once men and women bashed away on typewriters to bring the Lebanon the latest news, no doubt many lost their lives or suffered horrific injuries. And yet on our visit it was so quiet, as gallery spaces always are, with just the distant rumble of traffic and the background noise of people going about their business outside to fill the void. Up on the heavily damaged roof we looked out over the city’s rooftops to a collection of cranes, a symbol of the rebuilding of Beirut. It was a sobering, fascinating place.
Later in the week we took a walk up Rue Damascus in the sweaty heat to Beit Beirut, at the junction with Independence. It was another day of dreadful traffic and sickening fumes and we had no idea whether it would be open or not. As our hotel concierge had warned, it was impossible to get anyone to respond to queries, the website was wildly out of date and they never picked up the phone. And sure enough we arrived to find it closed. An indifferent security guard shrugged and suggested that it might open at noon, with the air of a man who couldn’t give a shit whether it did or not. We were saved by a woman called Sadika Kebbi, who’d organised a temporary exhibition on its top floor and let us in.
The house was built on the orders of Nicholas Barakat in the 1920s and included a number of shops and spacious apartments, and a central axis open to the sky. But with the civil war it became key to controlling an important road junction close to the Green Line that divided the warring militias, a great vantage point for snipers. It suffered tremendous physical damage over the course of the conflict and it was only saved from demolition when, in the 1990s, architect Mona Hallak and other campaigners fought for it to be saved as an important heritage building. They won the backing of the authorities, who agreed that it should be restored and turned into a museum. Sadly, the dream has yet to be fully realised and much of it was empty during our visit. Apparently it only opens when rented out for temporary exhibitions. However, the restoration has been handled sensitively, inside and out, and while the scars do show it’s a lot ‘tidier’ than the newspaper offices. Here and there are old bits of tiling, paintwork and wallpaper, and hints of what was once a bathroom.
There’s a small exhibition based on a photographic studio that had space on the ground floor until war broke out in the mid-1970s. Beneath the rubble, the Beit Beirut team found a series of old negatives along with various other odds and ends of daily life. Many of these are on show and are incredibly poignant. There are, for example, old photos of families innocently enjoying their holidays. Did the outbreak of war mean they never got round to picking them up? Most of the negatives that survive are portraits, of individuals and families sporting 70s hairdos and fashions. Some have been enlarged and stare down at visitors from the walls. Nobody knows who they are or what they did…
There were no staff around, other than the security guard, and no other information about the history of the building or the plans for its future so we climbed to the top floor through the modern extension, to where Sadika Kebbi was hosting an exhibition. Her newly established NGO Kun Ensan brought children from the different religious traditions of northern Lebanon together, to help break down the barriers that exist between the communities. I couldn’t help but be moved by what she’s achieved and her story, that of a woman from a Muslim background whose family had been sheltered during the civil war by a Christian pastor at no small cost to his own safety. Today, as well as her charity work, she’s a public speaker, writer and trainer.
The exhibition – the result of a project called Little Picasso – featured paintings the children had created during their art therapy sessions with her and an artist. Some were typically childish, others very good indeed for such young kids. The imagery spoke to their dreams and were both fascinating and touching. I left, perhaps naively, full of hope for the future of those kids and their country. Whether the politicians will let them live their dreams remains to be seen…