Jon Calame on Divided Cities

Jon, we’re going to talk about divided cities – a subject you know quite a bit about having written a book by that title yourself. A book which took you several years to research and in which you look at five cities – Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia - where physical barriers have been implemented to keep hostile ethnic communities apart. Could you describe briefly what you were attempting to do in that book?

Ever since World War Two, any observer can see that the nature of warfare in general has changed very quickly from conflict between nations over territory in a ‘winner takes all’ fashion to intra-state conflict and civil war. Conflict of a kind where you have different ethnic groups, different identities, duking it out perhaps over territory but perhaps not; for political control or just to wipe one another out. So what you have is a shift from the piled up corpses being guys in uniforms to something else. If you look at the statistics now for those who have died in war since 1945 you see that a growing majority, a shocking majority of those corpses are civilian non-combatants.

We looked into divided cities not because we had a morbid fascination with these traumatised cities, but because they seemed to be a keyhole through which you could glimpse this larger phenomenon relatively clearly. Of course there’s a whole parallel conversation about cities as their own subject, about urban development and urban decay – which is why I’ve also put Lewis Mumford’s classic book on my list. But I’m talking about actual residents of divided cities. Talking about them as the victims and actors of a broader conflict.

In the bibliography you prepared for me you’ve chosen books which illuminate your subject from several points of view and you’ve characterized them as different voices, starting with Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. You call this ‘the expansive voice of the scholar of systems’.

I’d say of all the books the list I gave you, if one of your readers were thinking about just picking up one, this would be it. Anderson created a whole new genre of historiography with this book. He’s just a wonderful guy, still teaching at NYU I guess, who decided in the early eighties to go back and do the archaeology on where nations come from. He didn’t just accept France as France or Britain as Britain. He went back and put dates and names on the origins of these things which we call nations. He talks about how capricious the beginnings often where, how unlikely, and gets under the skin of the whole concept known as nationalism. Now the reason why this book is on my list is that one can’t talk intelligently about the nature of war or civil war unless one grasps how powerful the influence of the nation really is. Everybody thinks love of country is great. It’s great to be patriotic. And to die for your country is of course traditionally considered to be noble. But for your ethnic group or your tribe or, god forbid, for your family – that’s considered to be pretty low brow, a low level affiliation. But here’s Benedict Anderson with his brilliant book and he’s saying essentially that the nation, for which it is noble to die, is a fantasy founded in accident. I called him the ‘expansive voice of the scholar of systems’ because he’s looking at the underlying trestle upon which Britain and France, for example, rest upon.

He’s also saying that the idea of nation and patriotism emerged with the printing press? Simply because even in very small nations one does not meet most of one’s fellow countrymen. One reads about them or watches them on TV.

Exactly. Books are written, newspapers printed, and of course maps drawn. Somebody, at some point, gets out his pencil and the question is always who’s behind that pencil? Which takes us back to the divided city. Who draws the line? In the divided city you always have a line or lines and somebody drew those too. Somebody comes down and fiddles around with the map redistributing identity and territory – and somebody like Anderson is saying, ‘I want to know who was holding that pencil before I get too worked up about what happened after they drew that line.’ So that’s the view that Anderson provides.

Which is, as you say, an expansive, global view. Who would you choose from your list to zoom in on a particular instance of what you’re talking about?

Let’s go to Tabbara’s book, Lina Tabbara, because she’s at the other end of the spectrum – what I call ‘the private voice of the eye-witness’. She’s the woman who consciously decided to stay in Beirut for the entirety of the conflict. Her book is called Survival in Beirut: a Diary of Civil War… It’s expansive in the opposite direction. It gives you the psychological texture of that trauma. And here’s the thing. Anyone in these war-torn cities – anyone with the wherewithal – gets out, if not before the really awful violence starts then very shortly thereafter. Tabbara and her husband were both highly educated professionals; thoughtful, middle class, cosmopolitan Beiruties who ordinarily would have been nowhere near that city by the time the Lebanese army gave up completely on trying to control the warlords that effectively took it over for the best part of fifteen years.