The fifteen-year war in Lebanon was over in 1990, and the Lebanese are still trying to remember it. They are trying to gather together the shards of that war by patching together days and dates. But in their focus on time they have overlooked the crucial role of space. According to Robert T. Tally Jr. (2011, 8), “The ways in which we are situated in space determine the nature and quality of our existence in the world.” The French professor Bertrand Westphal (2011, ix), the father of geocriticism, reminds us: “For a long period, time seems to have been the main coordinate . . . of human inscription into the world. . . . Space only a rough container.”
Indeed, in the case of the Lebanese war, space was not merely a rough container but a protagonist. The Lebanese conflict, like any civil war, has redefined...
