‘When the war ended in Lebanon, it was like it never happened’, the mother of my adopted Lebanese family told me back in 1998 when I was first getting interested in stories like that. Hunched over the kitchen table, she would describe to me that spring of 1991, when they and thousands of other Lebanese families were rediscovering parts of the country from which they had been barred for more than a decade; how they would go on picnics to the Christian areas in the North and Kisrawan, and how they would almost feel like tourists in their own country. The moment the war was over, she explained, it suddenly felt unreal, as if it were a distant memory or part of a film. The war did not dictate all aspects of the way she and other people lived their lives, nor did it determine the process of living, perceiving and remembering history in the aftermath. At the same time, the war clearly provided the narrative framework for both the family story I was listening to and the larger national story since 1990 in postwar Lebanon.

The family's house, where I had rented a room, was situated a few metres from the former front line in the neighbourhood of Ras al-Nabʿ. Several times during the war, heavy shelling forced them to relocate further into West Beirut.