Malek Abisaab and Michelle Hartman, What the War Left Behind: Women’s Stories of Resistance and Struggle in Lebanon (Syracuse University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Malek Abisaab and Michelle Hartman (MA & MH): We set out to write an oral history of the Lebanese Civil War that specifically highlighted and underlined the multiple roles and experiences of women. Too often women are left out of histories of war. What the War Left Behind: Women’s Stories of Resistance and Struggle in Lebanon is the eventual shape of one part of this larger history project about the war. As we were preparing for this interview, we were reminded once again that the war we talk about in this book never really ended. We have sat down several times to work on this interview; in one version of it we talk about the technological attack that killed and injured thousands of people in one day, and then another few weeks later, it is experiencing air strikes, a ground war, and murder of civilians, day after day. So though perhaps this was not an explicit reason that we began working on this book, the reality of war in Lebanon is something everyone lives with, and we wanted the experiences of women—especially women of the resistance—to be more visible and well known.
Also, Malek is an oral historian and wanted to address a gap in the scholarship. There are so few oral histories of Lebanese, Palestinian, and other Arab women, and few works focused on the lives and work of ordinary women who played such a crucial part of the resistance. He approached Michelle, whose work on literary works and translation offered another perspective to the project. Working together, we developed what we hope is a fresh approach to the history of Lebanon, this war, and women who lived and struggled there.
It not only is built around the stories of specific women, it also deals what they were most interested in talking about.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MA & MH: This oral history of the Lebanese Civil War highlights the stories of eight women who are “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” Based on our interviews with around fifty women, we put this book together in conversation with other writing on and by women during the war. As a history, the book engages other histories of the Civil War and Lebanon more broadly, as well as works that deal with women’s lives in different ways. Though the book deals with the question of how women live and struggle in war time more generally, we chose to focus on resistance and struggle. The book features not only women who were fighters and/ or combatants—we think about resistance and struggle in a broader way. Therefore, the range of women whose experiences and analyses are highlighted were involved in the war and various struggles in a wide range of different ways.
Our methodology was developed out of feminist theory and practice of oral history. It not only is built around the stories of specific women, it also deals what they were most interested in talking about. This is how the overall theme of the book emerged and how we developed the framing. It also informs the other topics covered. For example, all of the women discussed the Israeli invasion of 1982 at length, so this emerges as an important topic. Another issue that weaves throughout is how women balance their lives as political people during the war and their commitment to private and family life. They discuss their membership—or non-membership—in political parties, what it is like to be a woman in structured political parties, and/or in other kinds of community activism and organizing during the war.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MA & MH: This book is part of our larger project, Women’s War Stories, which we have talked about here before. We have published four books from this project in which we met, talked to, and interviewed about fifty women, who shared stories about the war with us. We have worked with these stories in a number of ways. What the War Left Behind is actually the book we imagined producing when we started the project! All of our works can be read together to give a much fuller picture of the lives and struggles of women during the war. We want to mention here that we have worked with an excellent translator, Caline Nasrallah, on moving these stories into English from the spoken Arabic used in our interviews.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MA & MH: We genuinely hope that a wide range of people will be able to access this book. The oral histories that are contained with it are too important for us not to read and share as widely as we can. The stories women tell highlight their struggles and talk about resistance in all its forms. These inspiring stories are at times difficult, but so relevant today. As we witnessing an ongoing genocide in Palestine, attacks on Gaza and Lebanon day after day, we are compelled to think about resistance. We see women in Palestine and Lebanon resisting bravely and courageously every day. The parallels with the kinds of stories told in our book are striking, down to specific details that we see on our screens every day. We hope that our book is a contribution to research and study on women and war, as well as resistance and struggle.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MA & MH: We have published four books from this large project about women and the Lebanese Civil War, but there is still a great deal of material left that we would like to work with and use to make more of the stories—the histories, political analysis, and biographies—available to as many people as possible. In the summer before the now-ongoing genocide in Palestine, which has taken our attention, we had started working on recording episodes of a podcast, drawing mainly from interviews that we were not able to include in this book. We plan to continue to work on and publish more material in both written and oral form.
J: Have you presented this book yet at launches or other events? How has the material been received so far?
MA & MH: We recently presented the book at the Coordinating Council for Palestine inaugural conference in Montreal, but before this we were honored to present our first “book launch” for What the War Left Behind at the “Montreal Popular University” encampment that existed for seventy-six days on the lower field of McGill University. It was a sunny spring day, we sat in camp chairs, and a crowd of people from a range of different communities attended. We read out sections of the book and discussed them. It was meaningful to us both that students wanted to hear these stories in this setting where they were educating people about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle day after day. The book was relevant within this setting because it is about how every day, ordinary people do extraordinary things when compelled to in war time. This message and the strength, resilience, sumoud, and resistance, are important take-away messages of the women’s oral histories collected in this book.
It is a privilege to be able to share the stories of these women—and all women—in Lebanon during the civil war with people who otherwise might not have had access to this. The intellectual and educational space of the encampments, as well as the political space they opened, have been overlooked because of the repression and violence against them. Building connections between the students in North America, especially diaspora Lebanese and Palestinian students, and the women who resisted and struggled in the Lebanese Civil War was moving. It is a way for us to honor those women who led the way and connect them to the youth are pushing us all forward to confront the war, militarism, colonialism, and violence.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 9, Sanaa Ali Ahmad, “You do what you have to do,” pages 188 to 191)
Resistance and Militancy, Political and Personal Reflections
I’m tough. It’s all the suffering. . . . First of all, two of my brothers were martyred. It was hard on us as a family. We used to see how devastated my mother was, crying out for her two martyred sons. We’d go demand that their bodies be returned to us, and they’d tell us, “They’re not here. Leave.” This all creates a lot of hatred and hostility and makes you want to take revenge on the enemy. They only returned my brothers’ bodies to us in 2000, the year of the liberation of the South. They had been kept in the Marjaayoun barracks—there were around twenty-three young men that the enemy had buried there in the area. By nature, I’m quite courageous, and I have been since I was much younger. When I was being held in Khiam prison, my courage only increased. All that suffering makes you stronger.
But I’ve always been courageous. Had I not been, I wouldn’t have marched into the office of one of Lahad’s South Lebanon Army officers and told him I wanted a man’s uniform. I didn’t even know him, and he had no clue who I was, either. I said to him, “I want you to bring me some uniforms from storage. I need two that have the Israeli star on them.” The guys had sent me to his office, and he ended up helping me. But he was wearing Lahad’s army uniform, after all, so he could very well have reported on me. He handed me the uniform, and I took it and left. This officer was from my village, from Blat. After I took the uniform, I hid it in the lining of my suitcase and crossed through the Kfar Tebnit checkpoint on my way to Saida. I had taken a risk and told the taxi driver who went to Saida what I was doing. He refused to take me and told me he didn’t want any trouble. He seemed to be a patriotic man since he didn’t report me; I think he was afraid. I reassured him that I wasn’t going to cause him any problems. I’ve always been courageous, but I became more so in Khiam. My bravery multiplied tenfold. I became stronger, and I’m still standing tall today despite all the suffering I’ve endured. What do you think? Am I strong or not?
You say I am the model of strength? I’ll tell you something, I’m not afraid. I’m bold and frank. I don’t lie. If you hurt me, I don’t vent to a third party about it; I confront you to your face. You know? Like, for example, when the ladies told me that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah had honored a girl who’d been a collaborator in prison. I didn’t hold back. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about his turban or his title. “Why would you put us in such a situation? Why would you honor her, specifically? There are so many Communist women infinitely more honorable than her. At least they were arrested and released with their integrity intact.”
Even if these women didn’t belong to any party, the fact that they were arrested and suffered at the hands of the enemy should be enough. Even though I was active, my party never really followed me closely. But now I feel like they wanted me to join their ranks because they saw how tough and brave I was. Even though there are many women in the party, there aren’t many like this.
Even if you gave me a million dollars, I would never betray a fellow activist or give up a resistance fighter. I wouldn’t even say a word about them. I was interrogated numerous times in prison, and I never said one word about the people who had helped me. I never gave them up, and I wouldn’t have sold them out, no matter what. I knew a lot about them, and I used to see them in action. Still, I never said a word. I had gone into that field willingly, and despite the beatings I endured, I knew I wouldn’t talk. I still suffer to this day from pain in my feet, rheumatism, and backaches. I suffer from so many different pains. I really suffer. They tortured me. They used whips and electric shocks and water. You name it. I suffered so much, it’s a wonder I’m still in my right mind and have the ability to talk to people and understand them. Alhamdulillah, it’s a blessing.
They used many methods of torture—electric shocks, whips, they’d make you kneel, and then they’d stomp all over your feet . . . but the psychological torture was even worse than the physical pain. Sometimes you’d be withheld food for a long time. . . . They always used to threaten you while name-dropping your family members—“I’m going to bring your mother and father and sister, and I’m going to do this and this and that”—pure psychological torture. But that didn’t break me, I swear to God. It didn’t work on me. I’d taunt him back, “Go ahead, bring them in. Do what you have to do!” He’d say, “We’re going to bring your sister in,” and I’d tell him, “Bring whoever you want! This is all the information I have. I have nothing else to say!”
They would threaten, but there was no sexual assault. No, no, no. Let them try! It was just empty threats. They’d threaten that they were going to do this and that to me, but I knew they wouldn’t actually do those things. I knew they wouldn’t sexually assault anyone because they didn’t want to risk getting anyone pregnant and then have children to deal with. They just wanted information. The rest was just lies. There was this interrogator I could tell was Druze from his name: Yahya Abu Qamar, from the village of Mari. I had been beaten up really badly, and he’d witnessed the beatings.
He asked me, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Nothing.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No.” I said to him, “I don’t feel pain when I get hit. Even if you were to beat me with a whip”—and then he interrupted me and said, “I didn’t hit you.”
I continued, “You think if you beat me with a whip and make me kneel on the ground, you’re hurting me?! Think again! I never once cried out in pain, and I never once cried any tears. Not one tear! Or haven’t you noticed?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“It didn’t hurt. You might as well have been hitting the wall. I swear to God.”
“Let me ask you something. With how much they beat you with that whip, how come you didn’t once cry out in pain? Others, men, would scream and beg for the beatings to stop!”
I told him it hadn’t hurt and that actually for me it felt like nothing more than a passing breeze. I swear to God, he then told me, “I don’t want to interrogate you.” I swear on my mother’s grave, he unlocked my handcuffs and took the bag off my face and said, “I want to talk to you. For heaven’s sake, just tell me what your deal is!” And I wondered what his deal was—he’s an interrogator!
Then he said, “Do you want some water?”
“No, thank you. If I want to drink, I’ll drink in my cell. I won’t take one drop from any of you. Not one drop. I could be dying of thirst, and I wouldn’t take any water from you.”
“Coffee?”
“No, thank you. And you’d better not think that you can buy me off with a cup of water or coffee.”
“God, no. It’s just that yesterday my own skin hurt from watching them beat you so roughly. And you didn’t even flinch.”
“Why do you think that is? It’s because I don’t give a damn. Do whatever you want, wallah.”
The interrogator was telling me that just watching me get beaten up and whipped the day before had been painful for him and that in the next room there were young men screaming for their own torture to stop. If only you could’ve seen the blood and whips on the floor. I don’t blame those men for screaming out in pain. You should’ve seen the size of those whips.
After he undid my handcuffs and lifted the bag covering my face, the interrogator said he wanted to ask me something. “With all the torture that rained down on you yesterday, I kept waiting for you to just ask them to stop.”
What he doesn’t know is that when you’re arrested, you go to prison to die, not to collaborate with the enemy. You don’t go to prison just to be weak and to stoop to their level. Right? People were humiliated, and for what? I’d die with my dignity, or I wouldn’t have joined the resistance in the first place. Do you see what I mean? Why would you join and struggle with the resistance and then change sides and work with the enemy once arrested?
