SHELTER/HOME COMPLEX: A STUDY ON THE DAR IN BORJ AL-BARAJNEH CAMP

Abstract

This thesis studies physical space as a medium for meaning from a media studies perspective. It relies on oral history interviews with eight families to investigate the spatial practices that the Nakba generation performed in Borj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut since the first years of their displacement. I analyze these practices that led to the establishment of the dar to understand how Palestinians saw the camp and the houses in which they resided. Following De Certeau’s notion of space as a practiced place, I unfold Farah’s (2011) interpretation of home/shelter through unpacking Palestinians’ history in the camp. The formation of village quarters and the establishment of the dar signify how Palestinians transformed the camp from a shelter into a home. Furthermore, I utilize McLuhan’s definition of media to argue that the dar is a medium of communication. I read this medium using Huyssen’s metaphor of the urban palimpsest to argue that the dar has changed physically and conceptually from the period of the PLO to its departure from Lebanon. While the dar mediated security, strength, and the homeland under PLO’s control over the camp, the withdrawal of the Palestinian resistance forces and its aftermath created memories of violence and disappointment that brought back fragments of the Nakba memories. By shedding light on the oral history tradition and the mediated memories through the dar, I grapple with the concepts of nostalgia, trauma, and postmemory to examine the different relationship Palestinians have to the past and to suggest that nostalgia emerges as a need to cope with trauma. Traumatized by the Nakba, the first-generation longed for the homeland through replicating, to a certain extent, the landscape of their villages. However, the traumatic past was passed on to the following generations through the structure of postmemory. I present two exposures for experiences of a second and a third-generation members to elucidate how fragments of the past leap into the present and affect the succeeding generations. Nonetheless, I highlight the traumatic experiences of second-generation members upon losing the dar after the departure of the PLO from the camps. Finally, I illuminate the experience of a second-generation member who recreated the lost dar on his rooftop to tolerate his loss.