ALHAWIAT
THE PROJECT
Rebuilding Lebanon's memory through its women's resilience.
Alhawiat is an association founded in June 2017, exploring memory and identity transformations of women in times of conflict in the Middle-East through their resilience.
Establishing the first chapter in Lebanon, Alhawiat is gathering the testimonies of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian women and empowering them through story-telling, in order to promote peace-building and construct a collective memory.
Women are the first witnesses of the jolts of history, and their role in conflict, either as victims or actresses, is too often underestimated. By creating a bridge between women from different communities that all share a common territory, it will be thus possible to relate 50 years of conflict in the region, and show the different repercussions of conflict on the civil population. This work also highlights on what extent conflicts is a factor of identity alteration, and the role of memory in its reconstruction.
It will lead to a photo exhibition reinforced by historical archives and soundscapes composed of the interviews of the women and audio documents.
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Finally, through its pole of research, Alhawiat will organise conferences and workshops based on each women's stories, by establishing partnerships with local universities and associations. Furthermore, the workshops will be addressed to the youth or women, and will be based on activities linked to each issue faced by the women of the project. Acting upstream of the violence and anticipating mistakes that could be made is the goal of Alhawiat. We also tend to develop the project in the future in other countries such as Syria, Irak, or Palestine.
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Building a collective memory from individual stories is necessary for the identity construction of a society, in order to prevent the mistakes of the past to be repeated. Alhawiat believes that story-telling has the power to impact people and act as an effective vector of change.
Resilience
rɪˈzɪlɪəns/
noun
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1.
the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
"the often remarkable resilience of so many British institutions"
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2.
the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
"nylon is excellent in wearability, abrasion resistance and resilience"
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Why Lebanon?
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After undergoing two wars these last forty years, killing more than 150 000 people and putting the country to fire and sword, the Lebanese, far from having healed their wounds, are now welcoming over a million of Iraqis and Syrian refugees adding to already settled 80 000 Palestinian. At the heart of this growing phenomenon, we tend to ignore a striking data: 75% of these refugees are women.
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Genuine refuge country, Lebanon has indeed built itself from several waves of migration, that it faced difficulty to integrate and legitimate. This particularity makes the Cedar country a particularly striking observatory of consequences of the war on the civilian population.
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Observing what happens in Lebanon, it’s drawing up a panoramic view of the wounds of the Middle-East that spans on more than fifty years. The collective post-war amnesia, the non-renewal of the political class, the 2006’s war and henceforth the Syrian conflict are all factors that tend to affirm that, contrary to appearances, the country hasn’t emerged from its conflict period yet.
On the contrary, the internal disruptions persist and express the vivid reflections of the current regional conflicts. It cristallise it in a fragile balancing act, despite the intensity of the disorders.
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Behind this conflict continuity, fed by periods of internal tensions, such as the waste crisis in 2015, Lebanon remains therefore the stage of foreground manoeuvre.
Successively occupied and crossed, then become place of daily survival; Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqis women therefore remains the first witnesses of the upheavals of the History of the Middle-east. In the center, their identities evolve, assert or construct themselves.
If Lebanon has the merit of reuniting them within a shared territory, it is urgent to show that they don’t have as only common point a vulnerable space.
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It’s Rabbih Alameddine, in Lives of paper, that finds the first words towards healing when he says “Lebanon isn't going any better, but it dances”.
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