Ghostly ruins: conflict memories, narratives, and placemaking among Lebanese diasporas in Montreal

ABSTRACT The memory of past conflicts remains largely obliterated among the Lebanese diasporas in Montreal. Nonetheless, it invariably resurfaces in public performance of the Lebanese identity in the city as well as in people’s life stories. This ambivalent interplay underlines the role of remembrance and forgetting among diasporic populations in the construction of their local attachment to their places of residence. Stories as well as silences become ways of negotiating one’s presence and belonging. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Montreal between 2017 and 2019, this contribution approaches war memories from a renewed perspective. Instead of examining their role in the mobilization and transformation of group boundaries, it resituates the politics of traumatic memories among Lebanese diasporas in the everyday negotiation of their presence in Montreal. In doing so, this article unravels how memory practices in diasporic lifeworlds also open creative imaginations that contest essentialized conceptions of identity and belonging.

In the summer of 2018, after meeting with a Canadian-Lebanese writer, I discovered a small book intended to introduce Lebanon to the children of the diaspora. 1Flipping through the pages, my attention was caught by the picture of a half-destroyed house.The script described the return of a man with a baby in his arms to the home his family had fled many years before because of the Lebanese wars ."I will rebuild this home", the man says in the book."I will make it vibrate again so the past reconciles with the present […]". 2 Immediately, the reading reminded me of another encounter I had in Montreal the previous year.Rami, then in his forties, was born and raised in Beirut until the age of 12. 3 During our conversation, Rami evoked an old house that belonged to his grandfather.During the later phase of the wars, in 1989-90, when the central region of Keserwan was devastated by the fight opposing two Christian warlords, the house served as a refuge for the entire family.Sixteen years later, in the summer of 2006, Rami, and his sister were trapped by the Israeli attack on Lebanon.The sounds of warplanes bombing the capital echoed in their childhood memories.With a group of friends, the siblings found shelter in their grandfather's house once again until their return to Canada.Since then, Rami had tried to spend at least one day in the house every time he visited Lebanon, despite the worsening condition of the structure."Nobody wants to take care of it, unfortunately […].[But] for me, it's like it's my house. N one in the family has the same attachment to this place".
The trope of the destroyed house, simultaneously populated by the ghostly presence of happy days and marked by the destruction of the 1975-90 wars, epitomizes ambivalent relationships with the memory of past violence expressed by many of my research partners throughout my fieldwork.An image of the senseless destructions pushing so many to leave their country and build a better future elsewhere, the idea of ruination also evokes the nostalgic longing for harmonious relations that still supports people's sense of belonging among diasporans.As such, the ghostly ruins depicted above symbolize more generally the paradoxical bond diasporic populations are said to entertain with change: How is it possible, especially for the postmigrant generations, to "move on" from traumatic memories of violence without losing their ties to the past constitutive of their sense of identity?(Chernobov and Wilmers 2020, 915) Considering that "Memory, rather than territory, is the principal ground of identity formation in diaspora cultures" (Fortier 2005, 184), diaspora studies have underlined "the complex relation of personal experiences, the shared histories of communities and their modes of transmission" (Baronian, Besser, and Jansen 2006, 11).This centrality of memory has been deemed particularly meaningful for populations who have fled violence and performed their sense of collective identity through the commemoration of "chosen trauma" (Müller-Suleymanova 2023a), manifested in public marches and demonstrations (Gül Kaya 2018), the materiality and place of monuments (Orjuela 2020), or collaborative exhibitions (Karabegovic 2014).
However, while they appear to be unifying and stable, these commemorations are contested and moving.They are contested because, as Stuart Hall (1995, 5) points out, "questions of identity are always questions about representation.[…] they almost always involve the silencing of something in order to allow something else to speak".They result from a politics of memory, establishing a demarcation between people who can insert their personal experience into the collective narrative and those who are excluded from it (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013, 689).They are moving because, although they present themselves as fixed, "ahistorical" representations of collective identities (Redclift 2017, 501), they are the product of constant reinterpretations, never stable through time and across generations (see also Féron 2023).Memory always operates from the perspective of the present (Halbwachs 1997, 84-85) and, as such, implies a paradoxical relationship.When we remember, we project "a no-longer-existing world (…) into the experience of the still unfolding present" (Trigg 2012, 33).Therefore, memory, like diasporic experiences, proceed from a double displacement, operating in both time and space, upsetting the meaning of these two fundamental dimensions of identity (Trigg 2012, xiii).
From this perspective, Esther Peeren (2006, 72) defines diasporic experiences of memory in terms of a double vacillation.Inspired by Bakhtin's (1981) concept of chronotope-time-place-she argues that diasporic memories are located in between the local contexts of the diasporic places of residence and the temporal contexts of their perpetual re-actualization.Their emergence in reference to both the homeland and the society of residence hence creates a confusion of places and times that requires people to negotiate the continually evolving meaning of their location (Peeren 2006, 71).It is in this experience of dischronotopicality that I am interested.Constitutive of the diasporic condition, understood as "a way of being in the world and a way in which the world comes to be" (Hage 2021, 2), dischronotopicality also exposes existential struggles.Beyond studying the role of telling or silencing the history of violence in collective performative representations of the Lebanese diaspora, I intend to consider how narratives and memories of past conflicts play out in people's contrasted experiences of place and belonging in their society of residence (see also Müller-Suleymanova 2023a).What are the different modes of being touched by past violence, and how do they contribute to (or impede) people's efforts to negotiate their place in the world?What relations between time, place, and belonging can we infer from these experiences?
To answer these questions, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Montreal, Canada, and unpack the tension between displacement and re-emplacement that memory practices make perceptible.For those who-or whose families-have fled the violence of the Lebanese wars, remembering the past takes multiple forms, but remains essentially connected to the re-inscription of intimate experiences of past time and lost place into the here and now of their everyday life.While the public representations staged in collective diasporic events obliterate the memory of the wars to perform an image of Lebanon that appears, at the same time, ahistorical and utopian, in the literal sense of the term, personal practices of memory can be intrinsically seen as attempts to recreate a meaningful link between manifold places and times of existence.For those who endured war and conflict in their country of origin, this operation of sensemaking is muddled by the distressing nature of the violent past.
Traumatic experiences, Aleida Assmann (2001) argues, are impossible to make sense of.She differentiates between three processes that support the inscription of events in our memory: affect, symbol, and trauma.Affect enables the recovery of emotional memories separated from ordinary experiences.Symbol refers to the narrative reconstruction of the signification of memory as we insert an episode into our ongoing life story.Finally, trauma arises when a hypertrophied affect obstructs this process of sensemaking.It is a failure to integrate a painful story within a coherent narrative, leaving a sense of meaninglessness.If, as introduced above, memory diffracts itself between personal experience, shared histories, and their transmission, then traumatic episodes become a triple impossibility.They evade "a direct entrance into the narrative of recollection" (Trigg 2012, 265), opening a rupture between the remembering self, located in the present, and the past self, who experienced the trauma.This disjunction, theorized by Agambem (1999) as the impossibility of bearing witness of traumatic experiences, correspondingly makes them impossible to articulate into stories that can be shared with others.Finally, the impossibility of sharing these experiences creates a gap between generations.
Traumatic memories hence reveal a paradoxical experience of disconnection that defies the image of temporal continuity at the heart of the "biographical illusion" (Bourdieu 1986) foregrounding people's sense of self.As such, dealing with violent past experiences acquires an existential meaning.It constitutes a disruptive force that Dylan Trigg (2012, 267) theorizes through the notion of ruins.The ruins, Trigg argues, represent for traumatized subjects the interior trace of a voided experience (268).As the house described in the opening story, the ruins are the persistent presence of an unresolved past, a "phantom zone" (282) populated by ghostly shadows.For the people I met, dealing with a violent past was not asserting a coherent collective identity.Rather, contrary to public demonstrations of "chosen traumas", the ways through which they personally related to the memories of Lebanon's troubled past in their own existence were part of what Annika Lems (2018, 9) defined as a process of placemaking, that is, people's active efforts to compose a sense of homeliness and rootedness in the locations where they lived.Throughout our encounters, they used a variety of narrative tactics to restore the essential connection conceived by Halbwachs (1997) between memory and place.These tactics, understood in a sense inspired by De Certeau (1980, 77) with the notion of faire avec, shed light on people's agency and imagination.Struggling with the ghostly ruins of their past to make sense of their presence in Montreal, my interlocutors recomposed dwelling places for themselves that escape identity categories as put forward in public representations of diasporic belonging.Because it underlines ruptures and disconnections between places and temporalities, memory of violence can inspire a conception of identity in constant movement, nourished by people's floating experience of self throughout the course of their existence.
After introducing the public performances of "one" Lebanese diasporic identity encountered during my fieldwork, in which the country's violent past is largely suppressed, I turn toward three personal narratives to underline the interconnection between war memories and how people intend to make sense of their presence in Montreal.First, I discuss the silencing and uncovering of traumatic memories across generations.Then I examine the avoidance of violence to create nostalgic evocations of the past.Finally, I present how war stories can be used to ground one's desire to move on from the legacy of one's nominal homeland.Despite their differences, these three modes of relating to the past all play a crucial role in allowing people to build their present lives in Canada.Ultimately, they reveal the "tension between place, memory, and change […] at the heart of human existence" (Kirby 2011, 1).

Encountering contested memories in the public performance of a Lebanese collective identity
In today Montreal, more than 68,000 people self-identify as "Lebanese" (Canada Census 2016).They are part of a larger population originating from the mashreq, 4 whose families have emigrated to North America in successive waves since the end of the nineteenth century.At the time, the "Levant" was part of the Ottoman Empire.It was only after 1920 and the San Remo Conference that the region was divided between distinct national entities, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and the kingdom of Transjordan, and people were summoned to opt for a specific citizenship. 5Empirically, my exploration of these diasporic lifeworlds started from student milieus before expanding its scope.The initial focus was motivated by practical and analytical reasons.Practically, the presence of high-profile student associations in several of Montreal's main universities constituted an accessible entry-point to what was for me a new field site.But this choice was also analytically driven, as it enabled to probe into the transmission of Lebanon's violent past to the "generation after" (Hirsch 2012, 5) and unpack how this postmemory impacts the experiences of young people raised in diasporic contexts (Bloch 2018;see also, in this issue, Baser and Toivanen 2023;Müller-Suleymanova 2023b).
However, determined to avoid the magnifying-glass effect implied by the "ethnic association fetish" (Glick Schiller 2013, 29), I developed alternative networks and rapidly encountered people outside of diasporic organizations, who nonetheless struggled in their daily life to make sense of their relationship with Lebanon and the memory of its troubled past.In total, I conducted a series of interviews with around thirty people from successive generations, including within the same families, in order to better grasp the interplay between the exilic memory of those who fled violence and the diasporic memory of the following generations (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013, 687).These interviews were collaborative in nature, consisting of composing timelines to support life-story interviews, as well as mental-maps conversations. 6In addition, I engaged in participant observation, joining activities organized by student associations and attending major diasporic events to understand how my research partners created a sense of home and rootedness in Quebec's largest city.
Of all these public events, the Festival Libanais de Montréal seems to be the one most perfectly illustrating the concept of "diaspora aesthetics" (Werbner and Fumanti 2013, 149), a multi-sensual and performative demonstration through which diasporic populations construct a sense of emplacement in the society they live in.With alleys made of stands of falafels or "flatbread from the village" [saj al-day'a], on-stage spectacles of traditional dance [dabkeh] with performers in colorful folkloric costumes, vivid discussions between participants, or even young people waving Lebanese flags in front of a giant screen showing the FIFA World Cup tournament on a calm Sunday morning, the Festival's aesthetics created an ambience that enables people's "sensual participation and affective belonging" to the diaspora (Liebelt 2013, 262).Unsurprisingly, any reference to the Lebanese 1975-90 wars or, more generally, to the conflicted history of the country and its national identity were carefully avoided.
Created in 1920 under a French mandate, the state of Lebanon has long been a contested entity.Described by the historian Kamal Salibi (1990) as a "House with many mansions" because of its religious, linguistic, and social pluralism, its foundation rested on a political pact sealed between France and the elites of the Christian Maronite community (Traboulsi 2007, 76-77).Far for being consensual, the creation of a separate state was imposed by force after the French military victory over the self-proclaimed Arab ruler of Syria, Faysal al-Hashemi.This original divide between, on one side, a vision of Lebanon as integrated into the Arab world, and specifically Syria, with which it shared a common heritage, and, on the other, an exclusive conception of a Lebanese identity strictly embedded into a Maronite political and religious ideology has pervaded the modern history of the country and was instrumental in precipitating the Lebanese 1975-90 wars.Often described as an identity conflict between Christian and Muslim communities, the wars were in fact a succession of different episodes of violence combining regional tensions, internal political and economic imbalance, and militia warfare during which rival factions tried to establish their domination over disputed territories.
While violence occasionally took a communal form, reviving memories of previous confrontations, it erupted within sectarian boundaries too, as rival political factions were fighting for supremacy.As a result, the Lebanese society was socially and physically fragmented into multiple fault lines, as symbolized by the fate of the capital city, Beirut, divided between what was called khut ût  al-tammâs, the confrontation lines-in plural.The "house" was turned into rumbles and, at end of hostilities, hastily reconstructed in the name of reconciliation-and neoliberal reformation (Leenders 2012).A state-sponsored system of amnesia, manifested in the 1991 amnesty law, prevented the emergence of a shared story about the events."Lebanon's wall of public silence" (Larkin 2010, 615) enabled narratives inspired by political factions and sectarian imaginaries to thrive (Haugbolle 2010).Until today, the memory of the wars-and more generally the modern history of the country-remains extremely contested.Fragmented war memories, often centered on personal and family histories, participate in the affective constructions of belonging (see, e.g.Lefort 2019), even more efficiently since the main actors of the 1975-90 wars continue to dominate the country's political landscape.
A comparable silencing of the violent past was observable in public diasporic events in Montreal.Active avoidance of potential conflicts was a conspicuous feature in many of the collective activities I joined throughout my fieldwork.It was particularly true during those organized by the Lebanese student associations whose bylaws invariably forbid them from engaging in any political or religious debates.This imposed "public silence", though, may as well relate to the long and complex process of diaspora formation.The presence of people originating from what is today Lebanon is "the product of quite different migration with their own very distinctive relationships to societies and to contemporary Lebanon" (Humphrey 2004, 33).Despite the weight of the 1975-90 wars in the constitution of these dispersed populations, the funding myth behind their existence revolved for a large part around a narrative that is not related to the history of past violence.In autumn 2018, during the opening ceremony of the Lebanese Diaspora Energy (LDE) in Montreal, an official event sponsored by the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora, the ambassador of Lebanon to Canada provided a perfect illustration: [I]f you were a new immigrant, enduring a difficult situation, desperate, and your family stripped of its wealth, because of the war in your country, then you have the drive and the hunger to succeed.You don't foresee what you might lose; you see what you could win.That's the attitude of the Lebanese immigrants across the world, and that's the attitude of the Lebanese community in Canada. (Fieldnotes, 15.09.2018)Rather than the product of war, the publicly proclaimed narrative about the Lebanese diaspora is thus composed as a success story of capitalist expansion over the globe (see, e.g.Hage 2021, esp. chap 1).This storyline presents the advantage of composing an image of the Lebanese identity that can be easily integrated into the dominant values of neoliberal societies, as analyzed by John Tofik Karam (2007) in the case of contemporary Brazil.It also evades the securitizing vision of problematic identities that is often attached to populations originating from conflict areas (for a critical take, see Féron and Lefort 2019).However, the silencing of past violence does not suppress the tensions cutting across competing representations of the Lebanese collective identity.In Montreal, these tensions were manifest.For instance, the community organizers of the Festival Libanais are closely associated with the Maronite Church and, during my visits to the 2018 event, a mass was celebrated on Sunday morning, as it is custom.Likewise, the dominance of this narrative in the public representation of the Lebanese cultural identity was striking in a monument commissioned by the city of Montreal in 2009 to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the arrival of Montreal's first "Lebanese immigrant". 7Located in the Marcelin-Wilson Park, the 3-meter-high pyramid-shape sculpture is entirely inspired by the alleged Phoenician ancestry of Lebanon, a myth at the heart of an exclusive conception of a Lebanese identity strictly embedded into a Maronite political and religious ideology.Named Daleth, after a letter Phoenician alphabet that means "Door", the monument obliterates the conflicted nature of the symbolic reference to the Phoenicians in the Lebanese national identity and silenced its violent heritage since the establishment of the state of Lebanon in 1920 (Lefort 2023, 1-2).
This public narrative not only risks indirectly reinforcing both the inter-religious gap between Lebanese and the exclusionary structures that push Muslim populations in the margins of Canadian society.It also promotes an exclusive conception of belonging and encourages an integral, timeless reading of the past that solidifies the image of the "lost home" through extreme formalization and ritualization (Boym 2001, 41-42).Yet, despite its overwhelming presence in public events, this image is regularly challenged.An exhibition entitled "Min Zaman, la présence syrienne-libanaise à Montréal entre 1882 et 1940 [A long time ago, the Syrian-Lebanese presence in Montreal between 1882 and 1940]", organized in the Centre d'Histoire de Montréal, (10.10.2002Montréal, (10.10. -25.05.2003) ) was intended to reintroduce the plurality of identities into the story of the Levantine diasporas in the city.Its curator, Brian Aboud, whose family arrived in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century, denounced the dominant public representation as a reappropriation that "revisits the past in a nationalistic and chauvinistic way, […] excluding all Arab and Syrian experiences that are coexisting along the Lebanese story in Montreal" (interview, 23.05.2017), which does not allow pluralistic family and personal memories to inscribe themselves into its oversimplified narrative template.This criticism was shared by many of my interlocutors, who often voiced their reluctance to participate in public diasporic events that they considered too reductive and, as such, alienated from their ways of living out their Lebanese heritage.
It becomes crucial, therefore, not to limit our vision to the public invisibilization of the wars and, following the invitation of this special issue (Müller-Suleymanova 2023a), delve into the ways violent memories resurface in personal narratives.For people, the traumatic nature of conflict and exile is such that their memories are rarely confronted frontally.It may be silenced, avoided, or mobilized as a negative example that justifies "moving on".Still, I argue that these tactics, as different and imperfect as they are, remain fundamentally connected to people's struggle to assert their presence in the world, that is, to be able to make sense of their being here in Montreal.Ultimately, people's ways of coping with Lebanon's violent past can be understood as attempts to reconcile the double chronotopical interpellation of the diasporic condition (Peeren 2006, 74): emplacing the lost home in the new one on the one hand, and, on the other, linking the past, the present, and the future to keep moving forward in existence.
In the following developments, I zoom into personal narratives to conceptualize three different usages of memory.Although I distinguish them analytically, these tactics often coexist in people's everyday lives.In reflecting on these modes of memorializing the Lebanese wars, I do not intend to generate an exhaustive depiction of how people deal with a violent past.Instead, I wish to propose situated understandings to illuminate how people's struggles with traumatic memories are also efforts for reconnecting their here and now to a there and then, and, in doing so, composing a sense of belonging and direction in their lives.
Ruins: silencing and uncovering traumas across generations I met Marina and her mother Salma in the summer of 2018.During our conversation, Marina, 27 at the time, presented herself as mostly attached to her city, Montreal, where she was born and raised after her parents fled the Lebanese wars in the middle of the 1980s.I first got in touch with her mother who was in her mid-fifties and an influential figure in one of Montreal's most prestigious universities.Salma had left Beirut with her fiancé, who would become her husband in Canada.Confronted with the collapse of the state and the reigning chaos of the militia order, the two young people, originating from upper-middle-class families, could not foresee any future in Lebanon."The war would last for four more years.Of course, we did not know it then, but we were realizing that it was a dead end".(Salma, 12.06.2018)Once in Montreal, other difficulties arose.Salma was unable to pursue her original profession.Fortunately, she found a stimulating opportunity in another field that would lead her to a successful career.Yet, while her husband and herself were settling into their new life in Canada, Salma remained deeply affected by the tragedy she lived in her homeland.For years, she refused to return to Lebanon.And when they started visiting the family again to ensure their children got to know their relatives, Salma suffered from anxiety and a continuous feeling of alienation: "Every time, I just wanted to be back to Montreal".The rejection that she experienced also materialized with her children: Salma's words are imbued with a sense of guilt, nourished by a feeling of loss, rupture, and even betrayal often perceptible in diasporic families.Despite Salma's impression of being at odds with most other families, her experience was shared by several of my research partners.Parents who left Lebanon during the 1975-90 wars were usually incapable or reluctant to talk about past experiences of violence and the reasons that forced them to emigrate.Their desire to shield their children from the atrocities they went through is doubled with the difficulties of making sense of their traumatic memories, as conceptualized in Aleida Assmann's model ( 2001), and the ensuing "impossibility of bearing witness" (Agambem 1999, 39), muting verbal articulation as well as intergenerational transmission.The violent past turns family history into scattered fragments that re-emerges unexpectedly in everyday life, as Marina recalled: My father was a volunteer in the Red Cross in Lebanon, and in secondary school, I had a project to do.We had to interview someone with a humanitarian experience.So, I told some friends that we could talk to my dad.We arrived with a camera and everything, and we interviewed him.He told us about his wartime experience with the Red Cross.I had never heard the stories he told then.[…] I could not believe my father went through such difficult episodes in his life.It was really touching and surprising.Then, when my friends had left, I found my father crying in his room.That's when I really understood what my parents had lived through.It was something I never, ever felt before at home.Otherwise, it was just frustrating when we were trying to talk about [Lebanon].They were totally disconnected; they didn't want to hear about it.(Marina, 27.06.2019)When Marina's school project triggered the memory of distressing experiences for her father, she realized for the first time the difficulties that her parents had faced during the war.Years of silence and ignorance gave way to stories and pain that Marina could not have imagined before, leading her to better grasp the reasons behind the silence prevailing in the family.
In her account, Marina's compassion cohabits with the frustration she ordinarily felt when trying to learn about Lebanon and the past of her family.A feeling that, according to Salma, her children similarly experienced regarding the loss of the Arabic language in the family."Both of them blame me for this today […], but at the time, they were not interested".The impossible transmission of traumatic memory reveals how parents and children are haunted by the same ruins left behind but from radically different perspectives.The former experienced a sense of guilt for those left behind and for not doing enough to protect their "Lebanese heritage", as already perceptible in Salma's previous account when she says that "we were not good … ", without finishing her sentence.At the same time, they could not distance this heritage from the atrocities they escaped from.
In the family, the obliteration of the past coexisted with its unexpected, yet palpable persistence, taking the appearance of the ruins.As Dylan Trigg (2012, 269) exposes, ruination is a form of preservation of the past, but through decay, opening a paradoxical relation between absence and presence, between void and traces (270).The silences and fragments that the children received in response to their questions were constitutive of their present.These ruins deeply affected Marina's sense of identity.For her, trying to piece the past life of her parents together was at the same time struggling to make sense of her personal trajectory.While for Salma, leaving Lebanon and its violence behind was needed to build her life in Montreal, understanding this past became part of her daughter's placemaking efforts.Marina's imaginary of Lebanon had therefore continued to evolve as her life trajectory unfolded, like her changing attitude toward the Arabic language illustrates.However, her mother's perception had remained locked on her memories of violence and destruction.The resulting gap in experience suddenly shrunk during a family visit to Beirut in the summer of 2006: When the events started in 2006, it was during our last family trip to Lebanon.There, the children experienced war for two weeks.Suddenly, it was as if I didn't have to explain to them anymore what happened.They understood what a bomb falling down is […].It was as if I didn't even have to explain what war is anymore.They had understood.(Salma, 12.06.2018)I couldn't get what was going on.I was so surprised by the attitude of the people around.My grandparents were stoic.I remember we were playing cards in the living-room, and a helicopter flew by the window.We were hearing bomb blasts.[…] At night, my mother started to be scared, so we all got scared as well … we were watching TV, live broadcasting the bombing.You could see the bombs falling on TV and hear the blast for real, with the walls and windows shaking.It was a nightmare.[…] But, in a way, it was something to see a little of what my parents went through.(Marina, 27.06.2018)Despite this shared experience, the ruins left in the family history remained.Silencing the past was the tactic deployed by Salma and her husband to relocate their lives in a new place, freed of the violence they had suffered in Lebanon.It enabled them to start anew and build a successful existence at the price of a lingering sense of guilt.Voiding their memory of devastation was an existential necessity.The very same, however, left gaps in Marina's quest for her sense of self, considerably impacting her life's choices and exposing the biographical impact of traumatic postmemories (see also Müller-Suleymanova 2023b).Here, the breaches in intergenerational transmission transformed the family storyline into a dotted line, with voids and blanks.It is precisely to reinvest the link between the past and the present with meaning that some of my interlocutors deployed other ways of remembering wartime Lebanon.They did so by subduing violence through nostalgic memories, as the next story elucidates.

Ghosts: acquiring a sense of home through nostalgic storytelling
During the summer of 2018, I met with Josiane.In her early fifties, she seemed to have already lived several lives.She grew up in South Lebanon, where her family was originally from.She went to school there as the 1975 war erupted.In 1982, the Israeli invasion forced her to suspend her studies and move to Beirut, where she finally became a nurse.After the Syrian raid on the Lebanese presidential palace that marked the end of the wars on October 13, 1990, she had the opportunity to travel to Paris to pursue a specialization.Her trip was supposed to take a few months.It lasted for seven years.In 1997, Josiane returned to Lebanon, a country for which she feels "an inexplicable love.[…] Until now, even when you watch the news, and you see that things aren't going well.You never stop loving your country".Nevertheless, five years later, after she married a man who had been established for years in Montreal, she emigrated once again, this time to Canada.This second experience was radically different from the first.While Josiane described her life in Paris as "a time of liberty", rhythmed by a challenging but rewarding professional activity in elite hospital services, her existence in Montreal revolved around her home.Quebec's health institutions required her to take additional courses to continue her nursing career.She refused, arguing that it was too late for her to return to school, and, instead, started to help her husband in the small neighborhood convenience store he owns.Josiane recalled "difficult times", as she had to "readapt to a completely different life, a new marriage, a country that I didn't know, except for the language, new people, away from the family".At this stage, Josiane hoped to establish a family but could never have children.Between a couple of other small jobs, she continued helping in the convenience store, getting to know the residents of the neighborhood who used to questionably nickname her husband "Saddam", because his mustache reminded them of Iraq's former dictator.Josiane told how she found comfort in Montreal's strong diasporic presence, which offers unlimited access to Lebanese products, and, even more, in her books and papers."My network here is very limited", she said, "but I like it that way"."Still", she added, "I love the world, and during my career, I used to create strong bonds with colleagues, doctors, and patients."She continued: I have a routine life, but it's better for me.I don't want hassle anymore … at this point, you don't build strong friendships.My circle is very narrow, but I have this ability to stay with myself, with my books, my computer, and my pen.It wasn't easy, as I come from a family in which we always had people visiting, but you have to adapt.[…] It's clear that I miss my parents.I would like to be with them, to be reunited with my family.Some time ago, I felt I was missing all these years, so I started writing.I wrote on the neighborhood where I lived my childhood, even during the war … on all the people I knew.It's nostalgia for the good life that I miss.[…] I miss real life, so I write … little by little.And people started to wait and asked: "When are you going to write more?"A lady from Ottawa, who grew up in the same village, told me that I reminded her of people she had forgotten.[…] It's about a time when people were spending time with each other.[…] I started with a title: "[Name of the village], I remember."Then, I wrote about more and more people, my grandparents … I posted my stories on Facebook.People who lived there as well, or even their children, started to contact me, saying that it was like returning years back in time for them.[…] I am very nostalgic.(Josiane, 17.06.2018)Josiane's writings take the form of "memory field trips" (Boym 2001, 55) in a village life that, according to her, "disappeared with the war."While violence was equally absent from her evocations, Josiane did not set the past aside.Her narrative is not composed as a dotted line, but rather as an ellipse, literally an "omission" that restores the happiness and sense of security in a war-torn period.Inspired by the name of her village, Josiane's evocations of a peaceful past amid troubled times revive a lost place and blur the boundaries between temporalities and locations.It creates a connection between the past and present, as well as between different places, which is crucial in people's aptitude to make sense of their present existence.Through her writing, the wartime village in South Lebanon becomes part of present-day Montreal.Both time places merge into a continuum to support Josiane's placemaking efforts.For migrant and diasporic populations, nostalgic feelings of past and ordinary places are often ways of feeling at home in the present, argues Ghassan Hage (1997, 104), stressing that there is no contradiction but rather complementarity between nostalgia and acquiring a sense of home in a new environment.Remembering here operates as an "empowering guide" (Bayeh 2015, 14) for displaced people like Josiane, reinscribing her present life into past personal and family stories.
The sense of nostalgia that Josiane points out radically differs from the nostalgic reconstructions performed in public events such as the Festival Libanais.While the latter emphasizes the lost image of Lebanon, trying to compose the perfect picture of a national homeland, Josiane's longing relies on an imperfect and creative memory work.Svetlana Boym (2001, 41) develops the concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia to theorize this distinction.Restorative nostalgia ignores time by creating fixed images.On the contrary, "reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual times" (49), as it surges from human inspiration to shape an alternate reality.The one created by Josiane is populated by numerous characters who constitute the heart of her memorialization.Places become meaningful through the presence of others, writes Annika Lems (2018, 99), and it is this intersubjective fabric of existence that Josiane, isolated in her new life in Montreal, recreated amid ghostly figures from the past in her childhood village.Preserving the memories of these times in her stories is not, however, equivalent of being there.Rather, it involves a playful reworking of that past that uncovers the intimate relationship between memory and imagination, where self-reflective intentionality of the remembering subject is key (Trigg 2012, 46, 47-48).In turn, her imaginative writing enables her to share her stories, constituting a community of memories in which people can mutually find their place.Remembering thus emerges as a tactic to recognize and be recognized by others and hence support Josiane's acquisition of a sense of being-in-place despite her relative loneliness.For Josiane, like for Adorno (1974, 87), writing becomes a place to live, populated by the ghostly presence of a pacified past.
Ultimately, Josiane's elliptic narratives of the past are the product of her displacement and uprootedness.Her imagination does not only silence the violent past that pushed her into the world.It also maintains a sense of existential unity evoked by Gaston Bachelard (1994, 7), a dwelling place that joins her three different lives into a single biographical trajectory.Her creative stories augment past experiences through the interplay of memory and imagination (8), emplacing and contemporizing distinctive times-places into her present.Yet, the dischronotopicality of this memory imagination, linking wartime Lebanon with the present day of her writings in Montreal, paradoxically reveals the passing of time and how it disrupts one's relationship with places left behind, exposing the illusion of belonging to one specific identity: We are citizens of the world, because we love where we are now.[…] People don't get that you can love two countries at the same time.For sure, the love is different.My love for Lebanon is inexplicable.My love for France is the love for its great principles.And my love for Canada is made of a new life.It's like you can love several people at the same time.It's not the same kind of love, but it's still love.(Josiane, 17.06.2018)While it streams from a desire for home, Josiane's nostalgia is equally rooted in a criticism of identity thinking, a tendency that she associates with "wartime discourses."Vehement against the religious divisions that still exist in Lebanon, Josiane rejects the idea of a single home, finding her place "in shared longing without belonging" (Boym 2001, 252).Her creative nostalgia portrays a memory of the past that keeps moving forward, accompanying, and indeed supporting the transformation of her existence.In the last section, I more specifically turn to this movement forward.

Ghostly ruins: leaving a violent past behind
While the war was present in its absence in both Salma's and Josiane's stories, their narratives did not take the same form.Salma's silence sketched a dotted line that her daughter tried to make sense of.Josiane's story, on the contrary, was elliptic, avoiding the war to better embrace the past and make it resurface here and now.During my fieldwork, I encountered yet another way of dealing with Lebanon's violent past.Unlike the two others, this third tactic confronts war memories more directly.Nonetheless, it relates to a comparable process of placemaking, deeply connected with people's existential trajectory.It was the most explicitly formulated during my encounters with Hani throughout 2017 and 2018.Hani was born and raised in wartime Beirut before moving to Canada in his thirties.His father was Palestinian, from a Christian Maronite family who escaped violence in Mount Lebanon during the 1860s.Following his expulsion from Haifa in 1948, he moved to Beirut where he married Hani's mother, a Sunni Muslim from Northern Lebanon.From his childhood, Hani learned to distrust identity discourses: [D]uring the wars the Palestinians were despised.[…] In our neighborhood, the kids were always asking where we are from.My father told us that to say we are from Beirut.Even though I remember that I used to think that his slang was different from my mother's.[…] My father wanted us to have this disconnection from Palestine.He once said: "why let them live a lost war?" (Hani, 12.06.2017)Passionate about history, Hani had to piece together the stories that his father wasn't willing to tell him about the events that first forced the family to leave Mount Lebanon before being thrown on the roads again several decades later after the Palestinian nakba.In many ways, the history of his family was emblematic of the succession of crises throughout the modern history of the Middle East.Amid this story of movement, Canada was at first only a temporary project for Hani.After landing in Toronto, where he worked for one year in financial services, the young man moved to Montreal with his fiancée to pursue doctoral studies.Although the couple had planned to go back to Lebanon, the birth of their first child changed everything: When you have a child, your perspective changes.I was born in a country at war.[…] I don't want my child to face this conflict, to which there is no solution in sight … it's not going to be solved.[…] I didn't want them to go there and have this narrow thinking that people always have prejudices or hatred.[…] I didn't want my child to experience this, and all the instability in Lebanon … the unknown.The unknown, and for what?You only live once, so it's better to do it well from the beginning.[…] Originally, I always wanted [my child] to be an Arab.But now, I don't feel that need.I had hoped that one day, they will learn [Lebanese] history.But then, I started to look back and changed my mind.Especially after I did my Canadian citizenship.[…] You can see that here, they are building, brick-by-brick.In our case, we pick a brick, and we throw it, take a new brick, and then throw it again!It's building on failures.Why teach them this?(Hani, 12.06.2017)Reproducing the reaction of his father, Hani viewed the troubled past and uncertain future of Lebanon as a burden for his child.This absence of prospects in their homeland has continuously nourished emigration among Lebanese youth, even more so after the deep economic crises that struck the country in 2019.In one of his examinations of the Lebanese diasporic condition, Ghassan Hage (2005, 470) proposes the concept of existential mobility to account for the need to "move physically so we can feel that we are existentially on the move again or at least moving better."Simply put, existential mobility refers to a sense of "going somewhere" in one's life.While the pursue of such a sense of direction and purpose motivated Hani's decision not to return to Lebanon, it also altered his plans for his child.For them to go somewhere without hindrances, the past had to be let go.
For that matter, Hani's memories of wartime violence played a crucial role, in particular two traumatic stories, recounting circumstances in which his parents almost got killed.The first one took place in the 1980s, when Hani was a young child.He remembered that, invited by a neighbor to his home village, the family was stopped at a checkpoint.The situation escalated, a gunman pulling his weapon on the family.Fortunately, Hani's father was acquainted with Palestinian leaders connected to the local militia that had stopped them, ultimately saving the family.The other story was even more violent.It happened before Hani's birth on December 6, 1975, a day remembered as the "Black Saturday."Because the militia of the Phalangist party was perpetrating massacres against Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims in East Beirut, his father tried to escape his factory located in the area with some of his employees, the majority of whom were Palestinians.Stopped at a roadblock, they witnessed the murder of a man right in front of them, betrayed by his Palestinian accent: [The militiamen] asked him his name."Elias," he replied, which is a Christian name.But he said it with a Palestinian slang, "Ilias."The militiamen told him to come with him.The man protested that he was a Christian.The militiaman replied something like, "Damn your Christ" and shot him.Then it was my father's turn; he was really scarred.They asked for his paper … only him, not the others.But at this moment, a truck arrived, and the militiaman got an order: "Let them move, let them move!"It was just a coincidence that my father was not killed![…] These stories, I learned them when I was in secondary school.And that's why I didn't want to stay [in Lebanon].(Hani, 12.06.2017)Here, war memories are composed to support Hani's existential movement forward.Their use can be seen through the lens of the guilt that people often experience when leaving their homeland in time of crisis (Hage 2021, 115).The violent past may ease the painful rupture implied by the decision not to return, particularly regarding Hani's obligation toward his mother.More fundamentally, these memory tales are constitutive of the foundations of Hani's home-building process in North America.In that sense, the home in question is "no longer a dwelling but the […] story of a life being lived" (Berger 1984, 64), following the direction of Hani's existence.The foundations of this constantly changing sense of home are rooted in the ghostly ruins of the Lebanese wars, but these memories serve as protection against sedentary visions of belonging.They imprint Hani's sense of identity in a disruptive manner, sustaining a radical digression from stories of unique identity: I would like to tell them the rich history that we have but I don't want to be affecting their future.I want them to be able to continue his life in North America.Even now, his mother tongue is not Arabic, it's English.[…] Of course, I want them to learn Arabic, but I know that in the end, they will be thinking in English.[…] I want my child to know about our identity as Lebanese, about the big holidays like Easter or Christmas.[But] I don't want them to be imprisoned, believing they must think always as a Lebanese.[…] I want our child to be fluent, culturally.(Hani, 30.04.2018) Hani's existential direction does not go against his attachment to Lebanon.But his war stories demonstrate another arrangement of the paradoxical relation between absence and presence evoked by the image of ghostly ruins.They still include "sediment of unfinished personal history", with their past shadows that have "yet to move on" (Trigg 2012, 283).If, contrary to Josiane's elliptic narratives, they are anti-nostalgic, these stories still connect Hani's past to his present and give a direction for his future.They open new potentialities to rearrange the linkage between the multiple time places of his existence, with a forward-looking orientation.Hani's existential location is reminiscent of other diasporic subjects who "are never wholly part of either the home or the host chronotope; they do not move from one to the other without the inference of memory, but are always in negotiation with both."(Peeren 2006, 74) Through war memories, Hani uses the shadows of violence as a repulsive force to envision his present place into the world.Be it for a moment only, he derails discourses of roots and fixed origins, projecting his sense of self as well as his child's identity into an open-ended yet-to-be future.

Conclusions
In "The Confiscation of Memory", Dubravka Ugrešić (1996, §8) writes that "war […] is by its nature a human activity that encourages amnesia."She details how the lived past of the populations of Yugoslavia has been confiscated by political ideologies and identity narratives that erase their memories to substitute them with homogenized nationalist storylines.In this article, I intended to show how people's relations to a violent past could also work against this confiscation of memory and disrupt the illusion of fixed belonging.Instead of examining the role of war memories in the perpetuation or transformation of intergroup boundaries, I shifted the focus toward the existential process of placemaking to resituate the traces of past violence among Lebanese diasporas in the everyday negotiation of their presence in Montreal.Throughout my fieldwork, my interlocutors composed distinct narrative tactics to deal with, or faire avec, the remembrance of a violent past.For Salma, the memory of Lebanon had to be temporarily forgotten so her life could restart in Montreal.But the meaning of this silence changed for her children.Ultimately, the relics of wartime Lebanon reemerged, taking the form of a gap-filled story that the next generations had to confront.For Josiane, avoiding the violent past had become a way to support her struggle for belonging in Montreal.In the face of solitude, stories rooted her life in personal and family memories, repopulating the everyday with reassuring shadows from the past.Such tales of the happy days that predated and survived the eruption of violence gave an elliptic shape to her storytelling.Finally, Hani confronted traumatic memories and used them as tangential stories to move forward in another direction, away from predefined identities.
All these narratives relied on a certain shape of the past to achieve presentday existential meanings.Composed to reconcile my interlocutors' shifting sense of location, their stories reveal how much memory is crucial in how people experience their places of existence and vice versa.Contrary to mythicized images of a timeless past displayed in public performances of the Lebanese identity in Montreal, silencing, avoiding, or leaning on a violent past were tactics that had in common not to imprison people into confined places and homogenized identities.On the contrary, despite their harshness, these stories encouraged self-reflective imagination that questioned people's sense of belonging, unlocking avenues for them to negotiate their presence in the world.These negotiations expose experiences of dischronotopicality that ultimately shed lights on existential interrogations shared beyond diasporas alone, questioning the ambivalent power-at the same time destructive and creative-that difficult memories, lost places, and ghostly figures exercise in our lives.
Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK).Following these guidelines, my research did not meet the requirements for approval from an independent ethics committee (see: https://tenk.fi/sites/default/files/2021-01/Ethical_review_in_human_sciences_2020.pdf, pp.19-20).Following these regulations, the consent procedure systematically included a two-step procedure.The process started with providing my interlocutors with detailed information about the purpose of the research process and the type of data being collected.People were also explicitly informed about the possibility to withdraw their participation at any point without justification.Then, the informed consent was dully collected in a second step.Names have been pseudonymized and some identifiable details changed to protect the anonymity of the participants.
know it's quite different from other families, even close friends who kept much stronger bonds … who told much more stories … no, we were not good … but we lost so much there […].It was like we didn't want to hear anything about [Lebanon] anymore.[…] My friends were even telling me: Oh you, you don't like to return [to Lebanon] […].But it was so difficult … (Salma, 12.06.2018)