CHAPTER 1

The Public Plaza

·
T he green wooden benches are a fixture of these
gardens. The trees and flower beds and the
1 centrally situated marble pond with its brightly
colored fish are all enclosed by a fence of black iron
railings that look like rows of spears. This picture lin-
gered in my mind from season to season and from one
public holiday to the next. When I was a child, we
only ever came to visit the Plaza and its gardens on
feast days when the place took on the air of a gaily
, - ornamented carnival teeming with hordes of peddlers
and street hawkers.
When we walked onto the Plaza on the first Monday
of that long-ago summer month, it was not a holiday
and there were no celebrations. The mood in the gar-
dens-in the city as a whole-was tense. We came to
pick up what news we could, and the carnival past was
only a passing memory. In any case, it was a bad time
for reminiscing. Our anxiety was reflected in the faces
24 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

of passersby and it mushroomed, like a surreptitious

bacterium, along the damp spaces between the
buildings.
The final exam period had just begun, but when
1
the radio announced that war had broken out, the
board of education quickly decided to suspend all
exams. The war surprised no one. We had all, young
and old, expected it for years now and the sense of
anticipation had only grown heavier and more urgent
in the weeks preceding the end of term. In those early
weeks, we divided our time between our schoolbooks
and the radio bulletins. We anxiously followed the
news of troop mobilizations as the various fronts took
shape, and we listened to patriotic songs whose lyrics
got mixed up in our heads with phrases from the notes
we were obliged to memorize for exams. The front
lines were far away and nobody knew anything about
them. Journalists simply quoted official speeches and
sent their dispatches from distant capitals, but we
were certain that the war would reach our own city in
no time at all. The machinery of war was opaque to
us. The adults who had lived through other wars knew
better. War was first of all a tidal wave of enthusiasm,
We were delighted when our distraught teacher told
us that exams had been suspended, adolescenrs revel-
ing in the gift of an unexpected holiday but also in
the precipitous onslaught of eager patriotism and
martial fervor. The looks of grim determination on
 The Public Plaza • 25

the adults' faces made us uneasy though. They still

remembered the horror of those other wars.
The school unleashed us onto the street at ten
o'clock in the morning. None of the students knew
exactly what to do with themselves. Our little world
with its lessons and classroom schedules had suddenly
snapped open, and the farther we got from the gates,
the more we realized that the rhythm of the city had
subtly shifted. Large groups' of students aimlessly
prowled the sidewalks in broad daylight. We went
home to tell our parents what had happened, but they
had already heard the news on the radio, which was
turned all the way up.
It was a typical day in early summer, with a streak
of moody June heat. We agreed to meet in the alley,
.and since we had nothing particular to do, we headed
downtown. Like everyone else, we knew that the latest
'news was sure to make its way to the Plaza first. We
walked down Schools Street to the gardens. A great
misfortune seemed to have pitched its tents there, and
the immense Plaza prickled with menace.
The war unbalanced our daily routines and intro-
duced an element of chaos into our domestic arrange-
ments. No one could seem to keep still, and the sound
of the radio drew us all like a powerful magnet.
We went down to the alley in the early afternoon,
and from there to pick up the rest of our friends. We ,
took our usual routes through -the city but everything
26 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

was somehow different, strange faces everywhere,

inexplicable substitutions. The shops-particularly
the elegant ones-were mostly shuttered (no place for
luxury in the first days of war?) and the usual calm
had given way to the shrill whispers of hard-faced men
loitering in small groups. Pedestrians slowed down or
stopped in their tracks to follow the undertones of
these heated discussions. They lingered on till evening
as though reluctant to go home. It seemed that nobody
was where they belonged at that hour and yet that
everyone wanted to be someplace else. The rhythm of
the street had become disordered, unreadable. Peasants
in town for the day hurried back early to their villages,
and to our lasting chagrin, the knots of strolling girls
we often encountered along the avenue were nowhere
to be found. No doubt it was all thanks to the war,
still in its first day, and the afternoon of that day
seemed endless.
Evening fell darker than usual., In summertime,
people tend to go out after sunset and stay out late.
That night, the streetlights were turned down low,
their light almost imperceptible. The civil defense
measures had been broadcast on the radio and by
loudspeaker from the backs of municipal trucks. At
home, all the lamps and windows were painted blue.
The women and children had a part to play in this
operation. \ The women dissolved, indigo tablets in
water and the children washed the windows with the
 The Public Plaza • 27

blue liquid. The men did the same to the headlights

of the few cars that were still moving about the streets
in the early hours of the evening. In those days, indigo
powder and bars of fragrant soap were used to bleach
white shirt collars, but the adults and the old people
who had lived through the Second World War over a
quarter of a century ago were well acquainted with
the ancillary function of those blue tablets carefully
wrapped in white paper.
The municipal authorities finally turned off the
streetlights altogether, and the city was immediately
plunged into a gloomy, breathless twilight in which it
ceased to be itself. The houses glowed with quiet panic
as families rushed to carry out the instructions.
Because of the early summer heat, most people chose
to turn off all their lights rather than keep their win-
dows shut. The war seemed more real at night than it
had by day. Nerves were strung to the breaking point,
and we understood that the coming days would be
long and tedious.
Though the window-painting ritual was at least a
way to pass the empty hours, the lengthy operation,
repeated in every home, sent a shadow of gloomy fore-
boding slinking down the streets and alleys. The city
hungrily clutched at news of distant battles made yet
murkier by the approaching dark. The' indigo-washed
glass was a set piece borrowed from the decor of the
Second World War; a historical play summoned forth
28 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

from the collective memory of the authorities to

remind the people that they too were part of this new
war. But this reminder seemed quaint to the adults,
and their memories now reached back to the night-
time air raids and bomb shelters of another era. There
were no shelters in our neighborhood or its vicinity;
none in any of the old quarters of the city built on the
layers of centuries, nor in the modern town that had
quickly sprung up and expanded without the slightest
heed for wars and such. To remedy the situation, the
local authorities asked the landlords of buildings with
cellars to fit them out as shelters clearly marked with
signs hung out front, but only a few complied.
We woke up the next morning with no clear idea of
how to spend the second day of our very first war. It
had ta~en us school kids by surprise and we were woe-
fully unprepared. We sensed that the adults had also
been caught off balance. Planning-whethe~ domes-
tic or military-was a mystery to us, but that morning
my father decided to stock up on ri~e and sugar, just
in case. He was probably thinking of the shortages of
the last war, twenty-five years ago. We were also eager
to do our bit for the war effort. Besides the glass tint-
ing of the night before, we copied elaborate maps of
the front from textbooks or from the morning papers
onto the covers of\our school notebooks, and we
exchanged heated analyses of everything we heard on
the radio.
 The Public Plaza • 29

We decided to go downtown for a change, in search

of more news. The papers always roll off the presses
and directly into the Plaza. Vendors catch them up
and hawk them up and down the nearby streets and
avenues, rows of them hung up on the iron railing of
the cafe that had witnessed history reel past its tables
since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Pedestrians who stopped to read the headlines blocked
the foot traffic all around. The crowds milling abour
the cafe were a familiar part of the Plaza's scenery .
.During the brief days of that surreal war, we wandered
endlessly around the Plaza, and when we grew tired
we ;walked into the gardens and sat down to rest on
one of the wooden benches.
I developed an intimate relationship with the Plaza
during those days. 1'd only been a casual visitor up
until then. When I was a little boy, my brothers and
sisters would take me there on colorful feast days. In
my imagination, the gardens were just that: a place
'consecrated to festivals and celebrations, overflowing
with peddlers and itinerant photographers. It was dif-
ferent now.
On most days, the Plaza was full of old men who
idled away the time on its benches, smoking and
drinking coffee served by vendors who carried their
kit around from one spot to another, or by people
seeking shelter from the blazing noonday sun in the
shade of its huge trees, by loafing boys, peasants who
30 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

gaped in wide-eyed astonishment at its size and artful

geometry, nimble beggars from vague, faraway places
by the looks of their clothes and accents. Then there
were the established beggars who occupied the same
corner of the park day in and day out, or who camped
out on the edges of the Plaza and at the entrance of
the fancier shops. People hurried across the gardens
on their way to work, taking some shortcut or other
through one of its five main gates instead of walking
all the way around the wrought-iron railings. The
whole park, including the fountain in the middle of
the pond, was visible through those railings.
Back then the gardens boasted a battalion of munic-
ipal guards whose job was to prevent kids from tram-
pling the flowers, climbing the trees, or hunting the
goldfish in the pond. One of them was a mute who
had the terrible power-or so we thought-s- of being
everywhere at the same time thanks to his zealous and
indefatigable defense of the flower beds. Feast days
were especially hard on the guards, for the breathless
swarms of new visitors were blithely unfamiliar with
the regulations. They blew their whistles furiously at
sunset to warn those still inside that the five gates
would soon be locked. They were as strict as ever in
those first days of the war, and this unflagging dili-
gence drew looks of silent approval from visitors and
passersby. But the city's:malaise, most palpablein the
Plaza, quickly crept through the gardens. The profile
 The Public Plaza • 31

of its visitors began to change, and rules so fastidi-

ously upheld now seemed forced against the backdrop
of brooding anxiety generated by news of the coming
war. The scrupulous order of the gardens came
unhinged, and by the end of that summer they had
taken on a wild and anarchic look that grew more des-
olate with time. A profound and mysterious change
had come over the gardens and their serenity gave way
to a sense of ragged strain.
The Public Plaza, the very heart of the new city, was
most sensitive to the incidents of history. Its pulse was
hardwired to politics, both local and national, and any
kind of emergency, from the death of a local boss to
news of a coup, sent shock waves rippling through it.
Even private disputes were shot through with deep
conflicts and inflexible resentments that often spilled
out onto the Plaza. At the outbreak of local tensions,
traffic would cease for a short time then quickly
resume its natural cadence as though nothing at all
had happened, while crises of national proportion suc-
ceeded in stamping it out completely. Depending on
the occasion-the festooned thrill of feast days and
military victories, or the rolling fury of defeat-the
air would become dense with wild elation or anxious
silence, with grief or excitement. On the Prophet's
birthday, the surrounding buildings were hung with
strings of colored lights. Swarms of hawkers and ped-
dlers of every stripe invaded the Plaza with their carts,
32 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

and flags were raised high above the crowds on state

holidays. So many generations, so many celebrations
engraved in the city's memory, from the first-ever
landing of an airplane on the enormous, dusty patch
of land to the arrival of the French army and the with-
drawal of the Ottomans; from the forty-day strike to
the popular defiance of Mandate tanks.
In its days of glory, when it was like a blossoming
young woman inviting the spellbound gaze of the
city's entire population, the Plaza was guarded by
rows of policemen fanned out in front of the old pal-
ace with its late Ottoman architecture and its yellow
facade and red roof tiles. The police were tolerant of
minor infractions so long as the peace was not dis-
rupted, and so they were inclined- to overlook the shoe
shiners and hawkers who hung about for hours with
their wares spread out in front of them on the Plaza's
pavements. They even ignored the purveyors of sun-
dry sidewalk entertainment, provided they kept to the
back alleys and side streets. The policemen weren't at
all bothered by the crowds-their primary source of
diversion after all-but some days they would grow
impatient with the throngs milling about in front of
the iron fence that separated the sidewalk from the
terrace of the cafe at its center. The headline-readers
made them uneasy.
On trouble-days, tension rippled through the Plaza.
People hurried across, rushing through their errands
 The Public Plaza • 33

then rushing back to their neighborhoods in the west.

The sudden disappearance of women (themselves rela-
tive newcomers to the public way) was another sign
that some unusual event had taken place, as was the
steadily dwindling number of vehicles in the surround-
ing streets, especially the taxis that hustled the last
passengers to their homes in the eastern and southern
parts of the city or to the villages beyond, well before
they had managed to finish their business in town.
Once their inhabitants were safely reunited at
home, the back streets and inner quarters of the city
emitted a collective sigh of relief, and everyone ear-
nestly set about discussing the forces at work behind
.the sudden disruption of the Plaza's placid surface.
On particularly serious occasions, it emptied out
completely. Only the police and soldiers who stood
guard remained, and no one without a permit stamped
by the authorities dared to venture across. Some light
traffic would resume just before sunset, as though
people assumed that the really dangerous hours had
passed. Veteran news-gatherers stole onto the Plaza to
glean some bit of new information to take back to
their neighborhoods. They came from the market-
place toward the old mansion, and from other direc-
tions too, the Plaza spread out luxuriously before their
peering eyes and hesitant steps. Slowly feeling their
way, they would venture out toward the cafe with the
iron railing, abandoned after sunset. The expedition
34 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

filled them with a special feeling of entitlement. They

were the brave envoys who would return to relate
what they had seen and heard.
On such days, the Plaza took on the aspect of a
sturdy and impregnable fortress. The ranks of police
who normally kept order swelled and multiplied
throughout the entire area. Their mission was to keep
an eye out for rioters, protect government buildings,
and prevent general anarchy. It was a fragile space in
spite of appearances, quick to anger and even more
quickly wrecked. In its second post-Ottoman manifes-
tation, it became a plastic monument to the emerging
state apparatus.i and it frequently played host to the
violent confrontations of the Mandate period.f
By those first days of the war, the grand old Plaza
with its abandoned mansions, its stricken clock tower
and its bedraggled gardens had witnessed half a cen-
tury of open-ended conflict begun with the Mandate.
The physical and symbolic struggle for mastery of the
Plaza concealed a complicated web of politica! and
religious quarrels. During the Mandate period, the
population would regularly burst out of the old city to
clash with French soldiers and police. The French usu-
ally left the task of dealing with these furious crowds
to their Senegalese units, and this is how the memory
of these men came to be written into the history of the
place. There were many of these pitched battles. If
they ended in a general rout, the people retreated into
 The Public Plaza • 35

the belly of the city and barricaded themselves in the

marketplace. If victorious, they triumphantly claimed
the Plaza as their own. The parades and celebrations
organized by the regime were displays of outright
domination, while the spontaneous decorations that
filled the Plaza on feast days represented a kind of
claim to popular title. Contests like these endowed the
Plaza with its special connotation. It was the face of
the city itself, and the passage of its most eloquent
expressions. Whoever controlled the Plaza controlled
the entire city.
The Plaza was under constant surveillance, for it
was the nucleus of the regime and its army. Order and
decorum were preserved at all costs, except for those
few festive days of the year when we turned it into a
vast private theater for our games and pranks. The
regime imposed a curfew on the entire area, but this
only doubled the activity in the Market and back
alleys. This was the Plaza's fatal vulnerability. It was
never able to match the stubborn vitality of the old
city.
It was normally forbidden to us children, as though
in the deep folds of our parents' consciousness it was a
dangerous, faraway place, another city altogether. We
ignored this injunction as soon as the war broke out,
bidding farewell to our childhood and going out to
meet our youth. We explored its every corner and the
surrounding streets as though these were our own
36 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

private kingdom. We were no longer afraid of the

place, or of those who guarded it. The war had robbed
it of its fearsome aspect.
On the fifth day of the war, the Plaza was no longer
able to enforce the curfew, nor to protect itself behind
the open space that separated it from the old city.
People of all ages massed in the market and back alleys
and surged out in furious waves, pressed on by the bit-
ter shock of the Defeat. They came from all directions
and from every quarter, till late in the night. They
came in the thousands, and they filled the Plaza as
never before. The same crowds came back the next
morning too, tireless and irrepressible.
On the fifth night of those indigo nights, and after
half a century of struggle, the Public Plaza fell to the
livid crowds. It was an event that had no record in
living memory. The guards and sentinels vanished
into thin air, and the people-stunned and heartbro-
_ken by the devastating news-took their revenge on
the place that had defied them for over fifty years.
They sought the ghost of their enemy everywhere.
They hunted down his image and swept away 'his
symbols. They smashed suspicious display windows,
destroyed commercial placards and set fire to some of
the shops, as though to purify the Plaza of its uglier
sins. In this pitched battle between rival halves of the
city, they were determined to conquer, with nothing
but hate on one side and contempt on the other. And
 The Public Plaza • 37

conquer they did. Hatred vanquished contempt and

took its revenge on arrogance and pride. For two days
and two nights they stood their ground, and their
numbers steadily increased and spilled over into the
side streets. They came to declare their fury and to
settle their scores with the past and the present.
Nothing could cool the blaze of this passion, from
the fifth night to the evening of the seventh day, in
the annals of the war.
By the beginning of that second week, the Plaza had
been utterly transformed. All the shops and buildings
that had solidly stood their ground for decades took on
a new, haunted aspect. Within the space of a few short
days, they had suddenly entered upon old age and would
never recapture their spent brilliance. The old Plaza had
vanished forever.
The dim indigo-blue lights still cast a depressing glow
on the streets and the steadily increasing summer tem-
peratures spread an oppressive blanket over the city. The
heat was most intense in the Plaza, which lay bare to the
sun's rays. By the naked light of day the scars left by the
angry crowds were all too visible. The humid breeze
stirred up the dust and left behind a stifling stickiness
in the air. The mansion with the twin staircase was
abandoned. The government offices that used to occupy
it were moved to the new building that rose at the edge
of the city, far from the hubbub. By day it was a hollow
shell; by night, a ghost. It was as though this precipitate
 The Public Plaza • 39

desertion was a harbinger of the events to follow; a hasty

retreat before the proprietary onslaught of the city's riff-
raff. The empty mansion gave off a forlorn air. The tor-
tuous demolition took place little by little, a leisurely act
of revenge on all that the building had stood for, for
upward of three decades.
The structure was dismantled by the municipal
authorities at the same time that the demonstrations
were taking place. A feeling of sudden elation took
hold of us when we arrived at the spot where the
dreaded police used to stand guard out front. Our
chants grew louder and the clamor was deafening. We
wanted to be absolutely certain that this place finally
belonged to us. In those last days, when the mansion
had become an empty carcass with nothing but a few
of its outer walls still standing, we steeled ourselves for
a twilight invasion. We had already stormed it by day,
and it was now time to capture its night. As soon as it
got dark, we hid in the shadows of the ruined walls
and prepared to wait for the signal to mount our
attack. The police had abandoned the field and left
the Plaza without a master.
By demolishing the mansion, they had erased one
line of history and inserted another. This form of
rewriting had always been their goal. They now calmly
set about destroying the city's landmarks so as to free
it for the specious and hollow modernity that would
take its place.
40 • Neighborhood and Boulevard

When the old mansion was removed, the Plaza

looked naked and grimy. The site was never rebuilt in
spite of all the municipality's grand plans. During the
following two decades it lay exp?sed to all kinds of
careless abuse, and the authorities gave up trying to
impose curfews no matter ho~ grave the situation.
The city had taken back its Plaza and forced it open.
160 • Notes

1 The Public Plaza

1. The Six-Day War of June 5-10, 1967 between Israel
and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. As a result of the war,
Israel gained control bf extensive Arab lands: the Sinai
Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East
Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and approximately
350,000 Palestinians and Syrians were permanently
displaced. The Arab defeat -led to the eventual col-
lapse of the Nasser regime in Egypt. The war and its
aftermath is known in Arabic as al-Naksa (the set-
back).
2. The author's use of the nouns maydan (arena; square)
and ramz (symbol) in combination with verbs connot-
ing emergence, growth, and transformation in this sen-
tence is part of his larger deployment of the Plaza as a
metaphor for the city's rapidly changing landscapes.
The Plaza here is a contested political site shaped by the
collision of vertical successions of state power, and hori-
zontal, popular readings of its metonymic possibilities.
3. In the aftermath of World War I and-with the collapse
of the Ottoman Turkish rule, the century-old growth
of Anglo-French hegemony in the region came to frui-
tion in the form of "mandates" that gave either the
British or French de facto sovereignty over the majority
of AraB peoples. The two powers formalized the
arrangement in their Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
Lebanon~as a part of Syria-was officially under the
control of the French Mandate from 1923-1943. French
 Notes • 161

troops had been in place since the war had ended in

1918 and only left Lebanese soil after 1946. See Hosam
Aboul-Ela's introduction to this volume for a brief dis-
cussion of the historical connotations that Ziadeh reads
into this history of the city. It has been argued by the
series editor that the rearrangement of the Ottoman
past continues to be part of today's news in the twenti-
eth and twenty-first centuries.

2 The Ottoman Cafe

1. Notables (a'yan) is a term that has typically been used
in the historical and social science literature on the
Middle East to refer to a class of rural landholding
elites. In the nineteenth century, with the intensifica-
tion of major commercial links between city and vil-
lage, and the rapid expansion of urban centers into the
surrounding countryside, as well as the growing phe-
nomenon of absentee landlordism, the notables came
to comfortably straddle the urban/rural divide and to
exercise social and political authority in the expanding
cities as well as in their ancestral lands. It is worth
noting that there is no singular noun of the plural,
a'yan,
2. Muslim legal scholars trained in the Islamic sciences of
jurisprudence, philosophy, dialectical theology, and
Quranic hermeneutics.
3. Between 1839 and 1876, the Ottoman Porte instituted
a series of empire-wide modernizing reforms-including