We Are the Children of the Children of War w/ Justin Salhani

Elia Ayoub and Lebanese journalist Justin Salhani have one thing in common: their parents lived through the Lebanon wars (1975-1990). Claude Salhani was a well-known photojournalist United Press International and Reuters. The photo featured in this episode shows him in the middle, injured after an Israeli strike on Beirut in 1982. We also talked about a recent gallery of Claude’s photographs published by Al Jazeera.

For this episode of The Fire These Times, and to close off our discussions on the Lebanon wars – check our the recent episode Elia did with Ayman Makarem on our sister podcast ‘From The Periphery Podcast’ – we thought it meaningful to add one more layer: if the wars aren’t really over, where does that leave us, the ‘children of the children of war’?

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The Fire These Times

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Social Media: TFTT is on Bluesky and Instagram.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠

Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

For more:

Justin Salhani is on Bluesky and Instagram

Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics).

Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

There’s a shadow that hangs over that period. It is a heavy and dark period. That’s happening in the foreground, but you still have moments of human life happening in the day-to-day, because you still have to live your life. You still have to wake up. In a lot of people’s cases, you still have to go to work.

Elia J. Ayoub: April marked fifty years since the Lebanese Civil War (or in our opinion, better known as the Lebanon wars) started. I’ve done an episode with Ayman Makarem on the From the Periphery podcast reflecting on the past fifty years.

The Lebanon wars have been an ongoing focus of mine—the doctorate that I talk too much about on this podcast is about the postwar, but of course you cannot talk about the postwar without talking about the wars. But I haven’t had much opportunity to talk about more personal aspects, and specifically, the fact that I’m the child of two parents who would count as the children of the war. They would be “the war generation”—the ones who grew up during the war. Justin has a similar story with his father, Claude Salhani, who was a journalist during the war.

The purpose of this specific episode is to talk about what it means to be the children of the children of war, because I think that’s a very specific positionality. It’s like we’ve inherited something without directly experiencing it. But ultimately, it’s going to be a typical The Fire These Times episode in which we mix the personal and the political.

Justin, you recently shared a piece on your father’s legacy and role during the civil war as a journalist. Can you tell us about that to get us started?

Justin Salhani: We published a piece in Al Jazeera on my dad’s work, particularly the early stuff he did in the mid-seventies. He was a photographer and photojournalist from 1975 until 1984 when he left the country. We were limited to what was on Getty Images, which was a small part of his archive, from 1975 to about 1977 or ’78. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, but that photo was unfortunately not in the Getty Collective.

Honestly, I was a little bit hesitant to participate in this episode, because my father passed away just under three years ago and it’s still a thing I’m dealing with. Additionally, my father had a really fantastic career, and I want to step outside of his very large shadow at times, if I can. But this is an interesting opportunity to talk about something; the way you approached it in the sense of being the children of the people who are primary actors, not as fighters or politicians, but as people who lived and experienced the war on a day to day basis. I found it an interesting time for reflection in a way that we might not get the opportunity to do in a lot of other spaces.

EA: On that note, I do appreciate you taking the time to talk about this. My parents, luckily, are still with us. They experienced the wars as Red Cross volunteers. My father became fairly high-ranked within the Lebanese Red Cross, and as such, he witnessed some horrors, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when they were allowed in towards the end.

This is something that I grew up with, not necessarily as an active thing, because the wars were not something that we talked about a lot, but as something that was in the background. For example, we would go to this yearly get-together of people who were Red Cross volunteers during the wars. You would see people meeting and sharing memories, laughing over drinks and whatever. It took me a long time to really comprehend the fact that the thing they were primarily talking about is the wars: violence, bombing, and witnessing horrors. They’ve lost people, friends of theirs. But I’ve experienced it as a secondhand thing.

There is this concept of “postmemory” by Marianne Hirsch, which applies to us, the postwar generation: kids who were born either after the war or were too young to remember the war. We might still experience elements of it, but mostly because our parents experienced it before they had us. My parents were fifteen when the wars started and thirty when they ended, and I was born when they were thirty-one. It’s very much like the end of a chapter in their lives, and I’m symbolically the beginning of a new one. But it didn’t end—when the new chapter starts, the previous one didn’t finish. It stayed with us in many ways.

One of the things that is a recurring theme in this podcast, and we also talked about in that FTP episode with Ayman, is that the “post” in postwar is something to be questioned. Especially in the case of a “civil war” like the Lebanese one, at what point did it actually end? 1990 is contested, 2000 is contested, 2005 is contested, and so on. It wasn’t as clear cut of an end for them.

JS: The civil wars could also be called a series of wars, because it also drew in international and regional actors, and there were a number of people, either funding groups or physically present on Lebanese land during this 1975 to 1990-ish period.

My dad was twenty-three when the war started. My mother was present from 1982 to 1984—she lived through the siege of West Beirut, the expulsion of the PLO post-Sabra and Shatila. She was present for all these things. And then in 1984, I think my parents decided they’d had enough. So the war in that sense “ended” for him. He would have been thirty-two when he left, but this nine year period was probably his formative period as a journalist, and arguably even as a person. During my childhood, these were the definitive stories, that I didn’t live through (I was born in ’87, so the war was still ongoing, but I was born outside and didn’t visit Lebanon in that period at all), but the stories of the civil war stay with me.

A lot of the stories were laughs; a lot of them were kind of romanticized, but there were also the serious horrors, the awful things they had seen. I think any kind of first aid worker, or person in civil defense, obviously Red Cross, or media, as well as the fighters themselves, are seeing almost everything that there is to see in those instances.

In my case, there was a kind of romanticism about it because it’s the thing that propelled my father’s career forward; it was the thing that made him the person that he was. Like I mentioned, he was nominated for a Pulitzer, but he was also on covers of multiple newspapers and magazines around the world. All these things were incredibly formative for his career and his life and everything that came later. So there’s a fondness for maybe who he was able to be in an otherwise very horrible period.

The other legacy of that was the fact that he left and never went back to live in Lebanon again, apart from a very short period in the mid-2010s. I think for us, this was a formative period of learning about the horrors of the country in a way that isn’t widely taught or passed around, and obviously isn’t taught in textbooks or Lebanese schools.

I think you are exposed to a bit more if you are a journalist or an aid worker or in civil defense than the baseline inter-communal networks of receiving information and perspectives. For example, you mentioned that your father was in Sabra and Shatila. My father had a broken ankle at the time because the Israelis had bombed a building near his office, but he was on scene at Tel al-Zaatar and Karantina, two other major massacres. They had a certain view that maybe the common person, other than the people who were the victims or the perpetrators of those crimes, were not able to see. Today, we’re living with the aftermath of those events.

EA: If I’m not mistaken, the cover photo we’re using for this episode is what you mentioned, right? After the Israeli bombing, there’s two people carrying him because he’s injured.

JS: Yeah, that’s him in the middle and my mother is on the right side.

EA: I had seen some of the photos during my doctorate. There’s a photo of a Palestinian nationalist fighter (fedayeen) with a gun aiming at something at the PLFP camp in 1975. There’s also a few photos from Karantina, which was one of the big massacres that defined how things would happen afterwards, in the sense that you would have these massive bouts of violence (in this case, a literal massacre), and then in the days, weeks, or months that followed, you’d have a progressive emptying out and ethnic cleansing of the camp. One of the photos is of a woman with her three kids and there’s a fighter behind them, from the Kataeb (Phalangists), clearly overseeing their expulsion.

As much as I can try and take some distance from it, which is not easy for me, his photos are powerfully shot, to the point where I can lose myself in individual frames.

JS: Obviously photography has changed a lot, and the ability to take a photograph has become way more democratized and accessible, but I think a lot of what it was at the time was just being on scene. For example, in that particular instance, my dad told me that Michel Samaha (who was a student leader with the Kataeb at first, and then later on went on to have some role of prominence within the organization) called my father and told him something was happening in Karantina, so my father went down there and got a number of shots. He then was threatened by the Kataeb when he left, and was basically told to give up his film and they said, If you publish anything, you’ll be in trouble.

He refused, and that’s exactly what happened. He published and asked to withhold his name, but his name was [mistakenly] included, and then he couldn’t go to East Beirut for at least a couple of years.

So essentially, part of what he was doing here was just being on scene and bearing witness. I asked him why Michel Samaha would have called him and told him to look at what was happening in Karantina. He wasn’t sure; he really didn’t know why somebody would want to advertise this sort of thing. Who knows if they thought it was some to be proud of, or if there was something else at play?

This was an ethnic cleansing operation. There was a number of poor people of different sects and ethnicities: Armenians, Palestinians, Shia, and other groups. A lot of them were pushed out so there could be a Christian pathway from East Beirut up the coast. And then Tel al-Zaatar was a Palestinian camp that is not there anymore. These were the things that were captured and the things our parents lived through. The city that we see today has changed undoubtedly since you and I have been alive.

I think if you came back today, you’d notice some things have changed and other things are beginning to change as well. That’s something to keep in mind when we go further back, that the makeup in terms of where you think you’re going, where you’re comfortable going, and who is from where are continuing to change.

I wanted to add one thing to the idea of the stories that we grew up with, because I think it’s an important point regarding this idea of romanticization. Our first ideas of the civil wars, before we get into books and documentaries, usually come from stories from our families. I think that’s universally true.

I think the Lebanese wars are romanticized a little bit. It was a place where there was this idea of Palestinian resistance, and on the other side there’s the idea of Lebanese resistance, or essentially what the Phalangists called the Lebanese resistance, until today. Out of that also came resistance from different sides—the resistance to Israel, and later on an Islamic resistance. Different ideas and concepts came out of this; the general thing is really romanticized.

So why do people who have a clear-eyed view, or at least a certain perspective on this period, still tell jokes and stories of bravery? I haven’t lived through something as complex as the Lebanese civil war, but I was here during this last iteration of war, especially the intensification from September to November. There’s a shadow that hangs over that period. It is a heavy and dark period.

That’s happening in the foreground, but you still have moments of human life happening in the day-to-day, because you still have to live your life. You still have to wake up. In a lot of people’s cases, you still have to go to work. There are a number of people who were going to work throughout the civil war, and not just as first aid workers or civil defense or journalists. You had people working at banks, or trying to teach schools when the schools were open, or doing a number of interesting or mundane jobs.

In a sense, these stories are a highlight reel. It’s passing down the highlights from those times, the things that they can remember most, but it’s also just the human condition, to try to encapsulate all the different parts of the human experience in a complex period they lived through. They were still alive, and could tell jokes and find humor in otherwise dark circumstances.

EA: Absolutely. There’s really good film called Phantom Beirut by Ghassan Salhab that came out in 1998. It’s one of those films that you can see was created in the immediate aftermath of the end, or at least the “official” 1990 end, of the wars. There is a powerful scene that has stayed in my mind. One of the actors talks to the camera and says something along the lines of, At least during the war I knew who I was, but now who am I? At the time, there was a sense of looking forward to the end of the war: When the war ends, I’m going to learn the piano; when the war ends, I’m going to become an architect. You have something to look forward to.

But the war ended in a pretty unspectacular way: just a signing of a thing, and then it progressively died out—and not even entirely, especially in southern Lebanon where the war went on until 2000, and then 2006 happened…anyway. The so-called postwar wasn’t entirely “post,” and wasn’t entirely peaceful, and that affected how people remembered that period. At the very least, in the period between 1975 and 1990, we knew there was a war—there was a name to it. You didn’t have to ask too many questions as to why we were in the situation we were in.

If you’re in Dahieh in 2006, you might have a similar experience to someone who was in Beirut in 1982. It’s like a window into what someone else experienced decades before you were born.

I’ve felt a sense of familiarity not just listening to my parents’ stories, but in general seeing the productions of people who were around my current age during that period of the seventies and eighties. In some ways, their experiences may not be that different than how I experience the postwar, and of course, in other ways it would be very different. But even then, it depends on when and where—for example, if you’re in Dahieh in 2006, you might have a similar experience to someone who was in Beirut in 1982, where it’s like a window into what someone else experienced decades before you were born—whereas your experiences before and after that event would be different.

For the purposes of this conversation, trying to understand what they went through is interesting for me to understand my own relationship with Lebanon today. There is something to be said about how they were the children of the war. Many of them were teenagers or in their early twenties when it started, and what happened in their formative years other than the civil wars? What happened in your childhoods? You have these stories because they have best friends from those times who are still their best friends today. Things other than “just the war” happened during that period.

JS: And who are you after the war? Who are you, now that you’re an adult in a period where there’s not a question of daily survival anymore?

I’ll speak to photographers from my dad’s era, and some of them will tell me things that you might be shocked by, because they’ve seen the most horrible things. They’ll be like, The war was a great time, because all I would do was take my camera and go down there. There was always work, unlike now, unless there’s tragedy. That is a pitfall of working in this kind of media: when horrible things happen, you’ve got a stream of work, but when it’s common mundane daily life, you’ve got to figure out how to survive, and you’ve got to get creative in ways to tell stories or to even stay employed. Part of that is understandable.

You mentioned earlier that people would say things like, After the war, I’ll learn the piano. I think there’s also simple things like, After the war, the bar will be open, the nightclub will be open, it won’t be dangerous to visit my friend. After the war, I won’t have to listen to this drone above my head.

This isn’t a perfect comparison, but I think sometimes people have a similar idea about migration: if I could just be in a country that has stability, everything would be perfect without realizing that having everything that you feel has been stopping you out of the way does not necessarily mean liberation. You’re still carrying that baggage into the future. You’re still having to live through and process everything that you’ve gone through.

In the case of our parents who have lost years—in my dad’s case, nine years, and in your parents case, fifteen—within that, they’ve got these internal lives that they’re building, meeting loved ones and having children. Sometimes there’s a feeling of, Khalas, we don’t want to reflect or deal with the past, we want to move forward. I think one thing you see a lot in Lebanese culture is this joie de vivre, this idea of, We want to enjoy the moment because we don’t know if the next one is going to be here.

I find myself thinking about this quite often. I’ve recently been in the process of relocating to Beirut. I got an apartment where I’m recording from now, and my partner came more permanently a little over a month ago. Part of me is always thinking, How long until the next big thing? We’re only five months out from the last signed ceasefire. The Israelis are still attacking around the country. They hit Dahieh (in Beirut) just a few weeks ago. We are coming up on five years from the Beirut port explosion, which might be a once-in-a-lifetime event.

But how many once-in-a-lifetime events have we lived through here? We’re six years out of the economic collapse, the banking crisis. We’re ten years out from the “You Stink” movement. We’re fifty years out from the start of the civil war, but we’ve had a number of incidents here and there.

Now, there is a level of optimism in the country, in some ways and in some quarters, where there may not have been before. But on the other hand, there was a similar feeling in 2010. There was an idea that the economy was going in a certain direction and people were moving back. Part of me is trying to take it in.

I think about something that Lina Mounzer told me: she used to walk around the streets and try to remember different details—the different balconies and street corners and shops and people walking by. This is a privilege, but the likelihood of me living here in ten or twenty years is not guaranteed. I guess the best way to put it is that there are no guarantees here.

There is a non-remote possibility that there’s a time in the future where I find myself reminiscing about Beirut the way that my dad did. For the rest of his life, he dreamed of coming back in one way or another, and it never worked out for him for a number of reasons. Maybe the place changed. Maybe he did. There were times when it wasn’t safe to bring a family.

In the back of my mind, there’s a non-remote possibility that there might be a time in the future where even visiting Beirut will not be an option for me. How many people around the region are in exile? Some of those are in self-imposed exile or a nostalgic exile, but there are a number of people who are in genuine exile and cannot return to the country because of a certain regime or reality on the ground.

To get through the war, you think about something that will happen after the war, but that moment never really arrived. Not because the wars never ended, or the reality has not changed, but there’s a real possibility that there’s no happy ending. My father passed away. He never came back. That story was left open.

There’s a realization that our parents were young when the war started, and it ended when they were relatively still relatively young, but what about the people who were in their mid-sixties when the war happened, or towards the end of their life? We know that there are tragedies every day, but this narrative really has the opportunity to go on, and it will carry on beyond us.

EA: Absolutely, and thanks for those reflections.

I think a lot about a woman who was featured in one of the documentaries that I studied. Her name is Mariam [Saidi], and she talks a lot about how the postwar in Lebanon is basically a lie. That’s how she described it because there is no room for her or her missing son. Her son went missing in 1982, so now it’s been forty years, and at the time the film came out almost thirty years had already passed. She would paint him as a way of remembering him, because they didn’t have many photos at that time.

I think about her because she represents a lot of people in Lebanon who have relatives who were forcibly disappeared, left forever, or died. There were lots of different experiences, mostly negative. The way people usually dealt with their experiences postwar was an attitude of, Just move on and look to the future. On one hand, the need to do this is understandable. I would imagine my parents, turning thirty, thinking It’s finally over as far as their personal experience went. I can barely imagine it, so I cannot blame anyone for saying, I don’t want to think about the past fifteen years anymore. I want to move on.

At the same time, there were many who did not have that option. For many, it did not end in 1990 because, for example, they were in South Lebanon or they had relatives who were forcibly disappeared. I thought about her again when the Assad regime fell, because as part of that collapse, we saw people being released from prisons, and there were a number of Lebanese and Palestinians [released] who were publicly declared to be dead by the Syrian regime and the Lebanese state. Their families went through the entire bureaucratic process, and they were treated as though they were no longer with us.

The episode that I did with Ayman was more analytical, but there is a deeper element that is not talked about as much, because it’s messier or more liquid, less concrete. I did not experience this thing myself. I didn’t even experience the occupation of South Lebanon, because I was not in South Lebanon. My experience of the postwar was relatively privileged, but even then, it didn’t stop me from being a few cars behind the car bomb that killed Gebran Tueni. And I could see the 2006 war from where I lived, because Lebanon is hilly, and I had the bizarre experience of seeing the jets and not fully comprehending the severity of it until after it was over. So I imagine, what if those experiences were happening over a longer period of fifteen years, or if it’s ongoing and you don’t even know when the end is?

JS: I think you’re right that there was no end, because the effects are ongoing: a lack of justice, reparations, or setting conditions that would prevent anything like that from happening again. Not just the inter-sectarian fighting, but the lack of justice and the lack of answers. That’s the thing about about living in Lebanon, and to an extent Syria and other places in the region: there are ghosts among us. There are ghosts of the disappeared, the people who were killed during the war, or the people who were killed in “mundane” circumstances like a car accident during the war. That’s still a casualty that didn’t have to happen otherwise.

I’ll go one step further and say: there are ghosts of ourselves. There are the ghosts of all the possibilities that could have been. I think our parents notice that in particular: What kind of person could you be if there was a stable society? Until today we have friends who are leaving the country, not only because of repeated conflict, but also, What are the possibilities for my children here, in a place that is not stable and hasn’t had time to build its society and flesh itself out with diversity that would be conducive to well-formed human beings? That’s not to say that good people are not raised here. They absolutely are, but they may not have the same same opportunities.

This summer, I was visiting a cousin on my father’s side, who was born in Beirut but his family left for the Arab Gulf right afterwards, and he’s never lived in Lebanon. He was born in ’75, so he’s a bit older than me. I was visiting him in San Francisco, where he lives with two young children, and he said to me, Sometimes I think about, what if we had grown up in Beirut together? He mostly grew up in Paris and then in California, and I was in Washington, D.C.

We’ve been lucky to have a relationship still, but to step back to the idea of ghosts, although this is a minute example, my cousin and I could have had a closer relationship and lived next to each other, but we had that feeling of community and family ripped apart. That’s for us in the diaspora, and that’s also for the people inside who had family flee, who had cousins who grew up in Australia or France or in the Gulf or in Africa, or wherever else. This is absolutely connected to the fact that the war is not over, because these specters continue to live among us.

Those stories from our parents illustrate that more than anything else, in terms of the people they were and the people they could have been, as well as the possibilities that we could have had. And that carries on. We are the children of the children of war, and our children will also have baggage and bear repercussions of this in one way or another.

EA: There are people who you would one day describe as “the children of war” as well, if they were in Dahieh or southern Lebanon. Even if they weren’t the same, there was that thing that happened for a good chunk of their life already—not to mention the one-month-long war in 2006, which was very intense, for example. All of these different things have defined parts of our childhood, even those of us who did not experience the 1975 to 1990 phase of it, because it never really ended.

There is also continuity, and in that continuity, there is a lot of trauma, a lot of ghosts and hauntings, but also a lot of possibility of trying to talk to people and understand their experiences. That is what I’ve tried to do with the story of Mariam. These people are all around us. Lebanon is quite literally filled with these stories, and there is an unending number of them. I hope this conversation is a short contribution to that end.

Justin, as always, thank you for being here.

JS: Thanks, Elia.