Lebanon's Lost Communist Future
What Maher Abi Samra's "We Were Communists" (2011) says about the present
This is a long one folks, but I hope you'll enjoy it. There is a lot more that I wish to write: consider that the following is an expansion of one section of my PhD, so roughly 6 pages out of around 440. Each section raises interesting questions (if I may say so myself) that I would like to explore. There aren't many people out there who take something so niche - Lebanese cinema - and explores its global implications, so I hope you appreciate how difficult it is to fight the urge to archive that entire dissertation. Pitching it to various sites is difficult because it's rarely seen as worthy enough. If it is, it is more often than not unpaid. If you wish to publish or translate this or similar content, feel free to reach out.
If you would like to listen to the audio version of this, it is at the bottom of this article and is for paid subscribers only. If you already subscribe to From The Periphery media collective you will find the audio on the Patreon as well as of tomorrow.
Anyway, I look forward to reading/hearing your thoughts.
In We Were Communists (2011) by Maher Abi Samra, the director and three of his ex-comrades of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) - Hussein Ali Ayoub, Bashar Nadim Abdel Saad, Ibrahim Mohamad Ali Amine - get together to reflect on their past as young communists during the Lebanese civil wars of 1975-1990.1
The film uses strategies of re-enactement as a way of putting the past into productive conflict with the political present. Basically: They remember by, quite literally, placing themselves in positions in a room to facilitate a process of collective thinking.
In We Were Communists, we get to witness the crumbling of a vision of the future that was still dominant in the 1980s, one that was nominally communist or at least broadly left-wing: it allows us to ask what does it mean to lose the future? I’ll try and answer that here. At the very least, it is an answer among, I'm sure, many.
Most of the story occurs after the Israeli invasion of 1982, cited by all attendees as pivotal to their decision to join the LCP. At the time, prior to the rise of Hezbollah, the LCP was the most organized anti-sectarian Lebanese group involved in the resistance to the Israeli invasion and occupation. As a result, it attracted a lot of young men2 from both working and middle class backgrounds and from all parts of Lebanon, among them our protagonists.
The first scenes are of the four of them introducing themselves. Notably, three of them include their sectarian affiliations: two Shias and one Sunni.3 These affiliations, we soon learn, are believed by our protagonists to be one of the main reasons behind the LCP's decline, a sort of sectarian elephant in the room that would end up haunting this explicitly anti-sectarian group of people.
The LCP, however, did not just resist the Israeli occupation. They also fought against other Lebanese factions, which they call the ‘internal wars’4. Maher identifies this as one of the main reasons the LCP declined as it put them in a position of defensiveness. Most importantly, the LCP was no longer in the business of proposing alternative visions for the country.
This weakened them relative to Hezbollah, a movement with far better funding and weapons to be used in the resistance against Israel, or at least contributed to it.
Indeed, the urgency of the Israeli occupation even pushed communists like Ibrahim to join Hezbollah, a group antithetical to communist beliefs. Maher and Bashar, meanwhile, identify Hezbollah as the reason behind the resistance's sectarianization - literally: the processes that create what is called sectarianism.
I will focus on what Ibrahim had to say because I think it reveals much more than what he likely intended:
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