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Violence, Camouflaged: Portraits of Lebanese Women - The New Yorker
It is a point of frustrated pride among most Lebanese that they’ve learnt to adapt to their nation’s particular brand of instability and mismanagement. The sliver of a state, wedged between Syria, Israel, and the still blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean, has weathered the violent upheavals roiling the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean that it has remained unscathed. The war next door has propelled at least 1.2 million Syrian refugees across the border into Lebanon, a country of only four million. Bickering among the nepotistic political class has left the nation officially rudderless. (It has been without a President for almost a year, and recently went just as long without a government.) Politics periodically spill onto the streets, in sporadic explosions of violence. Car bombs are a favored method of settling scores. The thuggery is fed by other deeply lurking tensions, sectarian and socioeconomic, which burst noisily in the open before returning to a subterranean simmer.
This stable instability, and the threat of violence underneath, is the subtext of the Lebanese photographer Lamia Maria Abillama’s “Clashing Realities,” a powerful series of portraits that will be published later this month as part of a book series devoted to the work of Beirut-based female photographers. In the photographs, Lebanese civilian women are shown in their homes, wearing military uniforms—a symbolic representation of the encroachment of political violence into personal space. Some of the portraits are shot in rooms adorned with stained-glass windows or leather-bound libraries, others in humbler homes. But the conformity imposed by the military uniform makes it clear that the members of this sisterhood share an experience that transcends markers of class or religion.
Each of her subjects’ lives has been touched by violence, Abillama told me, although she has chosen not to include captions identifying their names or describing their traumas. Instead, it is their common identity, the burden they wear like a “second skin,” that she wants to call attention to. As the daughter of a storied political family whose life was shaped by Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, Abillama grew to despise her country’s system of governance. And she knows that the second skin is not easily shed. “Even if you go to Paris or Milan or wherever, ultimately you carry within yourself always the spectre of war,” she told me.
Despite the lack of captions, some of Abillama’s subjects are recognizable faces in Lebanese society. May Chidiac, for instance, was one of the most prominent broadcast journalists in the country before explosives planted in her car claimed her left arm and leg, in 2005. Abillama photographed her standing unaided, her walking stick cast aside, her prosthetic arm immaculately manicured. Staring into the camera, Chidiac seems to dare us to acknowledge that she, like so many Lebanese women, is still here, despite the trauma that she has suffered and the persistent instability of her homeland.
Source: www.newyorker.com