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Beirut Journal
After War, Lebanon Turns to Art, Asking: Who Are We?

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 30


But after Hezbollah�s war with Israel, Beirut got busy with art, too.

There was a surge of music, video, sculpture, poetry and theater. Each artist sought to examine the issues raised by the 34-day war and the ensuing political clash among Lebanese leaders. Each set out a position, and each in its own way asked of the Lebanese: Who are we?

It was a question that cut to the core of much that troubles Lebanon, the most pluralistic society in the Middle East, not always comfortable in its own multisectarian skin.

�My own identity was put at risk in many ways by this war,� said Ziad Abillama, whose lifelong exploration of an Arab-Christian intellectual identity has infused his work. Mr. Abillama likes to say he was reborn in 1991, the year of the Persian Gulf war, when despite his Christianity, his Western orientation, his fluency in French and his Jewish friends, he realized that no matter what, he was an Arab and would always be seen that way by the West. How did that feel?

His piece stood in the entrance of the Espace SD gallery, and it represented what Mr. Abillama was feeling about himself and, to some extent, his Lebanon. It was a metal signpost with arrows pointing in multiple directions. Each sign pointed the way to �Arabes,� French for Arabs.

Who are we? Some Lebanese insist they are descendants of the Phoenicians, not Arabs at all.

In the gallery exhibit, there was a sound installation that harmonized bombs falling with a jazz trumpet. There was a sculpture of personal belongings, books, papers and pictures, covered in the pulverized dust that was someone�s home. There was the pink Warhol-style portrait of Hezbollah�s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

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