Today, we live in a mixed paradigm, a paradigm that is a combination of the offline and the online, digital world. In this mixed environment, it is mostly technology that defines our behavior, technology that unites people achieving the status of “monoculture”, and that could also be a dividing factor.
But, did our history in other words go online?
What does it mean: Online or digital history? This means unprecedented instant access to vast stores of human knowledge and culture, simply a mountain of digital stories. Future generations will be faced with an ocean of a well-preserved “past”. But ultimately, viewing something that was never “meant” to be viewed does not sit right with many.
The two thirty-year-olds Anthony Tawil and Cédric Kayem, personified through their podcast “Maabar” how we could use the digital paradigm to deal with our past. Claiming to be neither historians nor political scientists, they wanted to favor speech over silence, with the sixty testimonies, fragments of life in wartime that they collected.
“Maabar” dealt with the dinner-table kind of past, the one you hear nothing about in the streets. “Maabar” touched on memory, because It’s hard to imagine something more personal and human than memory.
The general attitude: do not talk about the war. Why open old wounds, why get tense and uncomfortable, all is in the past, why not just agree to disagree and never deal with it again?
Dealing with past trauma doesn’t work with avoiding the thought of it. The weight of the war’s memory still lingers on everyone’s mind, even on those of us who did not live in the war.
The history diffused using digital mediums can move stories from the past to the present, and give them meaning and relevance while sharing them across generations, communities, and geographies.
Why “Maabar”? “Maabar” is a technical word used during the Lebanese civil war to designate the areas where the many military checkpoints were located throughout the territory. In Arabic, it also refers to the action of crossing, from one point to another.
And it is this idea that guides the work of Tawil and Kayem: helping each listener to move from a vague idea and a unilateral perception of the conflict to a more enlightened knowledge. Propose keys to “cross” to the other.
This, resulted in a 12 episodes podcast series, cutting across two genres: Oral History and Documentary, diving through layers of what was experienced, remembered, and what therefore still exists.
The podcast traces themes and shared experiences, removing time and space, and giving room to the opening of a different conversation about the war. One is not preoccupied with what our names might be, where we might be from, and who we might be with, but instead exploring what we have lived together, and what it means to us today.
Anthony considers that “Maabar” came as a statement from the post-war generation to say that we cannot move forward in rebuilding and addressing nowadays societal issues without looking back and talking about what happened previously.
“Maabar” achieved its goal by simply existing, Anthony says.
Digital mediums such as podcasts, play a huge role in inspiring future generations in using them to build up in academia whether in projects, research, theater plays, or others, breaking the fear from the other.
“There is no other, the other is a political personnel created to serve a certain propaganda,” the co-creator believes.
Our generation should discuss Lebanon’s modern history because no future will be made without looking back to the 15 years of wartime that Lebanon and the Lebanese people went through, simply it’s inevitable to talk about the past, and to deal with it it’s essential to take advantage of what many creators are making in today’s digital paradigm.
The “plus” of using digital tools in discussing “spiky” topics like the Lebanese civil war which are mostly filled with sectarianism and politics, is that we can experience the real freedom of speech overcoming any political-based censorships or limitations.
“We’ve tackled through Maabar the Lebanese civil war topic in a novel way where there’s no narrator following a certain scenario nor a certain chronological timeline and always with anonymity conserved.”