Conflicted Identities: Negotiating Belonging among Young People from the Lebanese Diasporas in Montreal

Abstract

To elucidate the reproduction of antagonist relationships between diasporic populations, conflict transportation theories tend to focus on societal and transnational contexts. This approach often neglects the complexity of people’s lived experiences and risks essentializing diasporic identities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young people of the Lebanese diasporas in Montreal, this contribution reconsiders the interplay between diasporas and conflict by pondering the shifting nature of existence. It argues that everyday encounters and life trajectories play a critical role in how the diasporic youth relate to identity categories, inspiring them to continuously renegotiate and transform what being Lebanese means in their existence.

In the spring of 2017, a few months after I settled in Montreal to conduct fieldwork among diasporic youth from the Middle East, I decided to visit Marcelin-Wilson Park. There, a sculpture was erected to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the arrival of Montreal’s first ‘Lebanese immigrant’. When approaching from the main avenue, the monument was still invisible. I wandered deeper into the park and started to discern the dark 3-meter-high monument. As I came closer, I could discern a pyramid-shaped sculpture, crowned with a Cedar tree, the national emblem of Lebanon. An engravement of the Phoenician alphabet stretched vertically from the bottom of the Cedar. On the sides, a rank of three-vessel oars and a print of an old statue both evoked Lebanon’s alleged Phoenician past (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The ‘Daleth’ monument (Art Public Montreal, 2010, by Gilles Mihalcean). Photo: B. Lefort (2017).

The monument, commissioned in 2009 and inaugurated the following year, is entitled Daleth, after a letter Phoenician alphabet that also means ‘Door’.¹ For whoever is familiar with Lebanese history, the story behind Daleth is puzzling. First, the reference to so-called ‘Lebanese’ national symbols ignores that Lebanon as a country did not exist when the first immigrants landed in Montreal during the 1880s. For the Canadian authorities, these people, categorized as ‘Asians’, were considered Ottoman citizens, but also designated as ‘Arabs’ or ‘Syrians’, sometimes ‘Levantines’ (e.g. Abu-Laban, 1980, p. 87). It was only in 1920, after the creation of the state of Lebanon under a French mandate that the former Ottoman citizens from greater Syria living in Canada were asked to opt for either Lebanese or Syrian citizenship. In case they failed to choose in due time, they would automatically become Turkish nationals. Afterward, the denomination ‘Lebanese’ imposed itself gradually in the second half of the twentieth century following new waves of migration from Lebanon.

More importantly, the limited vision of the Levantine heritage in Montreal expressed by Daleth also resonates with political conflicts that have structured ideological debates since the creation of Lebanon in 1920. The foundation of the state rested on a political pact sealed between France and the elites of the Christian Maronite community (Traboulsi, 2007, pp. 76–77). It was also imposed by force after the French military victory over the self-proclaimed Arab ruler of Syria, Faysal al-Hashemi. In this context, the reference to the Phoenician origins of Lebanon was an attempt to legitimize the invention of a state separated from the rest of Syria and its Arab surroundings. Although historically fallacious,² this narrative could be compared to other mythologies that are at the core of almost every national imaginary. However, in the case of Lebanon, this myth became the heart of a symbolic struggle between two visions of the country: on one side, a view defining Lebanon as integrated into the Arab world, with which it shared a common historical and cultural heritage; on the other side, an exclusive conception of a Lebanese identity strictly embedded into a Maronite political and religious ideology. This tension, often summarized by the over-simplifying opposition between Arabist and Lebanonist movements, has played a central role in the conflicts that precipitated the Lebanese civil wars between 1975 and 1990 (Picard, 2002; Traboulsi, 2007).

The symbols and narratives put forward by Daleth hence illustrate how past conflicts can be transported into the everyday of diasporic lifeworlds. However, it also raises more questions. While the conflicted nature of the Lebanese national identity is materially translated into Montreal’s landscape, it does not affect everyone similarly. Having lived in Lebanon and studied the politics of belonging among the student youth in Beirut (Lefort, 2017, 2020), the disputed nature of Daleth was striking for me, as it was for several of my interlocutors of Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian descent in Montreal. However, many others simply ignored the existence of the monument altogether. The transportation of the Lebanese conflicted identity is therefore at the same time manifest and ignored, embedded in homeland history but inspired by the city of Montreal, and—importantly—interpreted through people’s subjectivities, including my own. In a word, Daleth underlines the need to incorporate lived experiences when thinking about the connections between diasporas and conflicts.

The understanding of the diaspora-conflict nexus has traditionally focused on the capacity of diaspora organizations and/or populations to influence ongoing struggles in their country of origin. This perspective, encapsulated in the alternative between peace-makers and peace-wreckers (e.g. Collier & Hoeffler, 2000; Østergaard-Nielsen, 2006) has been progressively complemented by studies of the maintenance, reproduction, or recreation of conflicts raging in diasporic homelands in diasporas’ countries of residence (see the introduction of this collection). However, the underpinning of this abundant literature remains problematic as diasporans tend to be defined based on the existence of past or present conflicts in their regions of origin (Féron & Lefort, 2019, p. 6). This locks people into ethnic, religious, or national categories and presents diasporas originating from conflict areas as latent security threats, hence stigmatizing entire populations. In Canada, this tendency is manifest, for example, in the discussions on the alleged split between the country’s Jews and Arabs over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (e.g. Regan Wills et al., 2022). These debates reveal the persistence of methodological nationalism, claiming that citizens of a same state or ethno-cultural background would necessarily share a mutual history and political positioning (Glick Schiller, 2009, p. 4). Such an assumption also inevitably risks reproducing presumed divides in the analysis through sampling methods or data collection techniques (Bretell, 2003, p. 104; Fox & Jones, 2013, p. 386).

To avoid these shortcomings, I propose to rethink how identities are mobilized in the study of the nexus between diasporas and conflicts by placing the pluralistic nature of diasporic experiences at the center of the focus. I adopt an empirical approach that seeks to explore how young diasporans make sense of the transportation of antagonistic identity narratives in Montreal.³ This empirical emphasis draws on the phenomenological tradition that aspires to ‘understand phenomena from how they are experienced and made sense of in the everyday, prior to theoretical abstraction’ (Lems, 2020, p. 117). Whereas most discussions on the nexus between diasporas and conflicts underline intergroup relations and their ethno-cultural underpinnings, the everyday enables imagining the social without falling back on conceptions of identities that portray diasporic groups as fundamentally distinct from one another. Here, the everyday becomes an epistemological foundation that performs a double analytical operation, reintroducing the density of life and the plurality of its temporalities (Guillaume & Huysmans, 2019, pp. 292–293). It enables to shift the attention toward the manyfold relationships unfolding in daily life, as well as the inequalities and power relations organizing these relations. Likewise, it untangles the temporal complexity made of back-and-forth movements derailing people’s sense of belonging throughout their lives.

Looking into the entanglement of lives and temporalities in the everyday, I intend to move away from assuming connections between diasporic identities and conflicts. Instead, I incorporate manyfold everyday arrangements to grasp how conflicted identities re-emerge in situations that highlight the agency of the diasporic youth. While the everyday includes identity narratives inherited from past conflict as Daleth illustrates, it also encompasses other forms of belonging. Far from being entrapped in antagonistic identity narratives, the youth I encountered practiced self-reflectivity, questioned their attachment to their supposed homeland at the intersection with their claim of locality in Montreal, and explore alternative boundaries in the definition of their sense of belonging. By complexifying the discussions of and around identity in diasporic contexts, I propose an analytical detour to stress the importance of rethinking the nexus between diasporas and conflicts through local, everyday configurations and existential trajectories.

While advocating for the significance of life trajectory in the analysis of diasporic identities more generally, I believe that the focus on the youth allows to better grasp how biographical self-reflections and people’s sense of direction in their existence shape their sense of belonging. It is because young people are positioned at specific junctures of their biographical trajectories, characterized by the openness of their life prospects and the navigation between attachment to and separation from their family. Moreover, they have no or very limited direct memories of the Lebanese conflicts. It implies that their experiences of the conflicts are entangled into a complex web of relationships involving their relatives, their fellow diasporans, as well as the majority populations in Montreal.

After introducing the empirical context and the analytical choices on which I ground my argument, I discuss how the societal context in Canada and the collective activities within the diasporas both contribute to the reproduction of antagonist visions of Lebanese identities in Montreal. Then, I show how these frictions more precisely emerge from everyday encounters and biographical trajectories of the youth, who, in their identification practices, cultivate creative ways of navigating the complexity of diasporic experiences. Standing against essentialized narratives of identity, their fluid understandings of belonging compel us to rethink ‘identity’ in the relationships between diasporas and conflicts.

Grasping Diasporic Identities Narratively

Focusing on the heritage of the Lebanese civil wars (1975–1990) among the diasporic youth, this contribution draws on participant observations and interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 in Montreal. The second major urban center in Canada, the metropolitan area of Montreal is home to more than 4 million people and concentrates a large majority of the residents with foreign backgrounds in the French-speaking province of Quebec (Canada Census, 2016). As demonstrated by the Daleth monument, populations from the Levant region have been present in the city since the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the first comers were Christians from greater Syria (Abu-Laban, 1980, p. 72), who predominantly established themselves in Notre Dame Street, known as an ephemeral ‘Little Syria’ in the 1920s.

Overall, the history of the Arab presence in Canada is the result of the interplay between the country’s immigration policies (essentially the restrictions against ‘Asian immigration’) and a series of crises in the Levant region throughout the twentieth century.⁴ In today’s Montreal, more than 68,700 people self-identified as Lebanese (Canada census, 2016), to which it is possible to associate those who elected to define themselves as Egyptians (27,000), Syrians (24,500), Palestinians (6,300), Iraqis (4,600), Jordanians (1,300), or more generally Arabs (39,000). Despite the longstanding presence of Middle Eastern diasporas in Canada, 70% of them were constituted after 1970 (Eid, 2007, p. 7). The 1975–1990 wars in Lebanon played a key role in this acceleration of migration, especially in the later phases of the conflict. Canada opened its borders to Lebanese Christians during the bloody strife between Samir Geagea and Michel Aoun, two Maronite warlords fighting for hegemony in 1989-1990. The same pattern of migration continued after the war, fueled by what has been called ihbat, a general feeling of discouragement among Christian populations (Picard, 2002, p. 177). Since then, the political deadlock and the economic precariousness have pushed more and more Lebanese of all religious backgrounds to emigrate, specifically among the youth (Kasparian, 2009).

It was precisely in these youth milieus that I started my observations in Montreal. Although not of Lebanese descent, I lived and worked in Beirut extensively, which granted me a relatively favorable position for my endeavor. I contacted student associations, including, without being limited to, the Federation of Lebanese Student Associations in Montreal (Tollab) as well as several other university-based groups, mostly in two French-speaking institutions. I joined events they organized both inside and outside of their universities, for example, to celebrate the Lebanese Independence Day (November 22), for Lebanese food or movie nights, as well as other collective activities. I also participated in larger diasporic events such as the yearly Lebanese Festival in Montreal, or communal and religious gatherings. During these activities, I focused my attention on the aesthetics of diasporic identities (Webner & Fumanti, 2013, p. 149), that is, how the youth asserted a sense of belonging through multi-sensorial displays, including narratives, food, music, dance, or images. In addition to participant observations, I realized 18 interviews with both women and men. Most were degree students at the time, but others were doctoral students, post-doctors, or even young professionals. The interviews were collaborative—i.e. following an interview practice that ‘deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration […]’ (Lassiter, 2005, p. 15, emphasis in original). They consisted of map-elicited, timeline, as well as mental maps interviews.⁵

Using this material, I emphasize the narrative form of lived experience (e.g. Bruner, 2004; Ricoeur, 1984) and define identities as narratives that people compose to make sense of and act in their lives (Somers, 1994, p. 618). In other words, identities are interpretations, understood as both sensemaking practices and performative acts (Farrugia, 2009, p. 270). As such they are the products of human efforts to understand and therefore cope with the complex realities of existence. In the everyday, narrative interpretations conveying knowledge about identity remain elusive and incomplete, expressed in multiple forms, including gestures or visuals. Still, they provide the substance people living side by side use to comprehend this life in common and act accordingly (Romashov, 2022, p. 110). Identities are therefore composed in relation to others. They are also unstable as they are contingent upon people’s changing self-perceptions throughout the flow of their existence.

Inspired by diasporic experiences, Stuart Hall (1990, p. 227) argues that identities are never static, but constructed through a relational and ambivalent interplay between similarity and difference. Drawing on Derrida’s conceptualization of difference as an open-ended process whose meaning is always deferred, Hall (1990, p. 229) rethinks the relationship between identity and alterity. Far from delineating a pure sense of otherness, like in closed categories such as national or ethno-cultural markers, difference relates to an everchanging condition, rooted in the dynamic process of making sense of one’s position in the presence of others (Hall, 1990, p. 230). Likewise, people’s interpretations of their identity remain in flux, in tension between belonging and difference, without any final resolution.

If we wish to take seriously the centrality of identity in the process of conflict transportation in diaspora settings, it is hence necessary to explore people’s interpretations of their sense of similarity and difference present in their everyday experiences. These interpretations are realized in interaction with others, either fellow diaspora members, people identified with the majority populations or with different minorities. As such, they are influenced by the social structures that delineate which identities are empowered and which remains in the margins. Like it is the case in neoliberal Brazil (Karam, 2007), in Paris, New York or Montreal (Abdelhady, 2011), what being Lebanese could mean for the young people I met not only depends on these local power relations, but also on the internal dynamics at work within the diasporic populations as they claim their right to belong to the Canadian multicultural society. However, the importance of these contexts can only be fully appreciated when related to ways people navigate them in their everyday to assert their sense of self. Adding this existential take enables to grasp how ‘the unsystematic, complex, and confusing experiences of living’ (Jackson, 2019, p. 21) implode identity categories. Besides—and beyond—homeland identities being transformed or re-invented in diasporas, I am interested in kaleidoscopic re-arrangements of how, when, and where Lebaneseness and its associated divisions are interpreted by ordinary young people.

In the next sections, I detail how the young people I met alternatively make visible and deny their difference from the majority populations in Canada, at the same time asserting their locality and their distinctiveness. These claims are both relational and directed toward the affirmation of their right to be present in the places where they live, made of complex social entanglements and hierarchies. When discussed in connection to the nexus between diasporas and conflicts, this has two consequences. First, it serves as a powerful reminder to consider identity conflicts in the diasporas not only as displaced but also—and maybe even more importantly—as emplaced, that is, defined by the asymmetrical relationships that exist in a given societal context between the majority populations and those, like the Lebanese in Canada, locally perceived as cultural minorities. Second, it also pictures diasporic youth as agentively moving between multiple (and often interconnected) possible interpretations of their identity to construct their sense of self. Their shapeshifting abilities blur the relations between conflicted identities and force us to look beyond identity categories to understand conflicts in diaspora settings.

From Imported Conflicts to Local Power Asymmetries

In 2014, the Mosaic Institute in Canada published a report on imported conflicts and their transformation in the context of Canadian multiculturalism.⁶ Despite the numerical importance of the populations originating from Lebanon in the country, the report does not include any discussion of the legacy of the Lebanese civil wars (1975–1990). When I discovered the document in the spring of 2017, I was intrigued by this absence and took advantage of a meeting with Mona, at the time a student in one of Montreal’s English-speaking universities, to raise the question. Mona grew up in Lebanon before settling in Canada after her Bachelor studies. As I asked her about the perpetuation of the divides among the diasporas, she replied:

Yes, Lebanese people would carry [these divisions] wherever they go! […] But because there is no opportunity to talk about it here, then you don’t feel it and you mingle with people. […] Maybe the people you know here wouldn’t be the ones you would feel the most comfortable with in Lebanon, but here, they are. […] Here, we have more interests that are common: we are Lebanese [laughs]! We speak the same language, we eat the same food, and we have the same traditions […].

The Lebanese civil wars (1975-1990) Mona alluded to mostly revolved around political movements and their respective militias, which articulated distinctive political projects with religious identity narratives. Their power arose from their local implantation, in which they actively attempted to create homogeneous identification between their territories, their vision of the dominant religion among the populations, and their political project for the country (Picard, 2002, pp. 150–151; Traboulsi, 2007, pp. 231–234). However, despite their efforts, these politico-military organizations failed to fully achieve these objectives. Concurrent identity narratives coexisted during and after the war, transforming Lebanon into ‘a borderland’ (Haugbolle, 2013, p. 428), a territory in which engaging in interactions supposes the continual crossing of boundaries, both physical and symbolic. People’s sense of belonging and difference have hence been perpetuated in everyday encounters, including through university activities among the youth (Lefort, 2017). However, according to Mona, the location of the boundaries shifted with migration. For her, the everyday life of the Lebanese in Canada is marked by a shared identification rather than by the perpetuation of past divisions. This experience of communality, which has to be understood from the perspective of the differentiation from the majority populations, sheds a different light on the potentiality of conflict transportation.

In Canada like elsewhere, the process of racialization against populations arriving from the Levant started with the settling of the first migrants, through stereotyping (Abu-Laban, 1980, p. 83) and policy decisions to apply specific categories to the incoming migrants. Prejudices against Arab populations became stronger with the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the 1960s and unsurprisingly worsened after the 1991 Gulf War and the 9/11 events (Moghissi et al., 2009, pp. 172–173). It was in this post-9/11 context that, in 2002, a group of Lebanese Christians decided to launch the ‘Festival Libanais de Montréal’ during World Youth Day, a global event organized by the Catholic Church (Zakhia, 2015, p. 98). The idea was to distance Lebanese from the negative stereotyping of Muslim populations in Canada—and more generally North America.

When I visited the Festival Libanais in the summer of 2018, this objective was immediately perceptible. At the entrance gate, a poster indicated that only the Lebanese, Canadian, and Quebec flags were authorized inside (Figure 2). The message immediately brought the memory of my fieldwork among Beirut’s universities, where the interdiction of flags targeted the Lebanese political movements. I hence assumed that the objective was the same here, with the aim at preventing the emergence of political conflicts among the attendance. However, when I asked one member of the organizing committee, she refuted my interpretation. While preparing bakery rolls on the table in front of her, she added: ‘It’s to tell our brothers from Syria or Iraq that, if they want to parade their flags, they could very well organize their own festival!’

Figure 2. Sign at the entrance of the 2018 ‘Festival Libanais de Montréal’. It reads: ‘Regulation. Authorized flags on the site: Lebanon; Quebec; Canada. All other flags are forbidden. Offenders will be expelled. Thank you for your collaboration, the organizers.’ Photo: B. Lefort (2018).

The message was clear. Rather than the risk of transportation of political antagonism, what mattered was the affirmation of a specifically ‘Lebanese’ identity, detached from the threatening images associated with Arab and Muslim populations by policy and media discourses. This attitude was also present among many of the young people I met, like Christiane. When I asked her whether she had felt prejudiced because of her origins, the young woman, who was born and raised in Montreal, replied:

I’m not associated with that so much, because I don’t have any accent. (…) People just don’t know I’m Lebanese. (…) Otherwise, because I’m a Christian, I don’t feel these prejudices too much. I’m not identifying with what we see in the news (…). But it is true that when I say that I am Lebanese or Arab, people immediately think I’m Muslim. (…) They ask me if I eat pork. I tell them: ‘but I’m Christian’. They make me laugh so hard, asking if we’re celebrating Christmas. I always say: ‘more than you!’ […] Sometimes, I tell them: ‘My mother’s name is Marie. My name is Christiane, come on!’ My friends from school, even though they know all these things, they forget where Christianity comes from!

In this extract, Christiane adopts what Ranita Ray (2017) coins an ‘identity of distance’ to avoid stigmatization by playing on her proximity with the majority populations. She uses religion to make sense and perform an identity that counterbalances difference with sameness. She contests her marginal and racialized categorization, even if doing so meant indirectly reinforcing the boundary between Lebanese Muslims and Christians. To negotiate her inclusion within the majority populations, she also performed a distinction between newcomers and more ancient diasporas, for example in the context of the contemporary refugee inflows from Syria:

I wonder how they are going to make it … when my parents came, they spoke French and English … they went to a French school, it was just a matter of accent here. But those who came without speaking the language […], I don’t identify 100% with them. […] My boyfriend’s family comes from Syria, and they are sponsoring some refugees. […] They are much closer to them than we were.

The adoption of identities of distance illustrates the dominant position of the majority populations, whose gaze tends to homogenize all populations originating from the Middle East into a single category. Playing on her religion and the French education of her parents in Lebanon, Christiane reasserts the diversity among diasporic populations to escape racialization, the grouping of people into homogenizing categories (Murji and Solomos, 2005). However, it also bears the risk of simplifying the divides existing between the Lebanese themselves, by adopting a religious grid in the memorialization of the 1975–1990 wars, like in this quote from Anna, a Bachelor student in a French-speaking university:

[…] I believe that Lebanon was Christian at first. Then, the Palestinians came and therefore Muslims started to be present as well. People mixed and, somehow, it created conflicts […]. I am a Christian, and for example, my parents don’t want me to marry a Muslim […], because of this conflict, because of religion. […] I’m proud to be Lebanese because I feel that we have our own culture, which is different from the others.

Many factors play in this process of simplification of the Lebanese wars into a religious antagonism, from the failure of both developmentalist and pan-Arab identity narratives in the Middle East (Eid, 2007, p. 14), to the global rise of identity politics following what is often referred to as the ‘local turn’. It can also be traced back to the process of settlement undergone by diasporic populations from the Levant in Canada. Since the first arrivals, churches and more generally religious institutions have played a central role in providing support to the incoming populations (Abu-Laban, 1980, chap. 6). However, a deciding factor is the tendency of Canadian multiculturalism to encourage the formation of self-referent communities ‘rather than probing into the structures and institutions that marginalize and discriminate against Muslims in important areas such as the job market, housing, and access to social services.’ (Moghissi et al., 2009, p. 88).

Religious identification is therefore strongly related to the everyday dynamics of isolation and prejudices against Muslims as well as the attempts of some Christians originating from the Middle East to distance themselves from this negative ascription. Canada’s ‘multicultural nationalism’ (Kernerman, 2005, p. 5) hence fuels the debate about the definition and relationships between the different components living in the country, but in a manner that has precisely been criticized for its tendency to oversimplify and lock difference into rigid frames (e.g. Fox & Jones, 2013, p. 386) and reproduce hierarchies between them based on their alleged compatibility with the dominant societal model (Korteweg, 2017).

In that perspective, the interpretation of a Lebanese identity rooted in Christianity could be seen as a way to negotiate belonging to the Canadian multicultural society. Some of the young diasporans I met found themselves trapped in-between a racialized identity imposed on them because of their Middle Eastern origins and a religious proximity that they perceive with the majority populations. As a result, their desire to escape racialization urges them to take their distance with Islam and Arabness. In doing so, their interpretations of their similarity with Quebec’s mostly Christian society and difference with Lebanese and Arab Muslims reframe the complex history of intergroup relations in Lebanon into a religious divide. The hierarchies existing in Canada that reject Muslims to the margins of the society hence contribute to give a simplified signification—essentially religious—to antagonisms existing in Lebanese. This autonomization of the conflict (Féron, 2017) emerges from the impact of everyday experiences of racialization on people’s sense of (non-)belonging. However, even if religious identities are stressed in everyday interpretations of identity and difference, they should not be naturalized. They are not the only ones influencing how people identify in their everyday, as the next section elucidates.

Diaspora Aesthetics, Self-essentialization, and the Meanings of Conflict

The young diasporans I met did not only negotiate their belonging in relation to the norms and hierarchies imposed by the majority populations. They also composed interpretations of their Lebaneseness during collective events centered on the diaspora itself. The first of these happenings that I attended was a movie night organized in one of Montreal’s main French-speaking universities. The event gathered around 25–30 students. In a room decorated with balloons, Lebanese flags, and pictures from famous touristic sites in the country, from the Jeita caves to the Roman ruins in Tyre and Baalbak. While eating homemade typical food, the students were listening to Lebanese music and discussed in small groups, sometimes speaking in Arabic, sometimes in French, and often mixing both. The movie itself only started two hours later, highlighting sociability as the main objective of the night.

Throughout the following years, I joined several similar events. Their scale was variable, yet all revolved around the multi-sensual and performative composition of identity. A typical example came from the celebration of the Lebanese Independence Day in November 2017. Contrary to the movie night, the event was convened by the federation of Lebanese students in Montreal and therefore was not limited to one specific university. The party, which took place in Laval, was also much fancier. Tickets had to be booked in advance and cost 38,10 CAD, approximately 25 euros at the time. The venue was a gigantic Lebanese restaurant specializing in the organization of major celebrations such as weddings. More than 100 participants joined, generally dressed up with great care, evening gowns for most women while the vast majority of men wore suits. People could book their place and specific table to be seated with friends and family members. A band performed live music and the serving of drinks and Lebanese food was interrupted by interluded dedicated to singing and dancing ‘dabkeh’ [folk dance] to the loud sound of traditional Lebanese ambiance music.

In the study of diasporas, the role of such events in producing empowering ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1996, pp. 211–216) is well documented. Food, music, and dance constitute multi-sensual and performative means to assert both diasporas’ distinctiveness and their locality (Webner & Fumanti, 2013, p. 149). Such moments of ‘intensification’ (Hage, 2021, p. 102) compose everyday interpretations of Lebaneseness. They aim to define and perform what being Lebanese means in Montreal, through the enactment of interpersonal relations and mutually shared practices that generate a sense of reciprocity and belonging (Fumanti, 2013, p. 204). Self-essentialization limited to such folkloric performances also represents a relatively safe way to claim alterity (Lim, 2015, p. 200). Therefore, it fulfills a double purpose: on the one hand, participants can overcome their feeling of alienation and invisibility by engaging in meaningful practices of sociability (Fumanti, 2013, p. 220); on the other, this affirmation of difference is made in a way that does not contest the social order as it turns its focus inward, toward the diasporans, instead of protesting against the inequalities and discrimination that affect populations originating from the Middle East in Canada. In other words, participation in these events asserts people’s ‘diasporic right to the city’ (Finlay, 2019, p. 787) acceptably. It also feeds into the market centered visibilization of ethnicity promoted by the globalized neoliberal order, as analyzed by John Tofik Karam in the case of the Syrian-Lebanese identity in Brazil (2007, p. 166).

Precisely because they aim to assert a shared sense of belonging, the aesthetics of Lebaneseness perform in these events project a consensual identity. For this reason, these activities are limited to unproblematic celebrations, as the example of Independence Day illustrates. By contrast, events that could evoke the disputed nature of the Lebanese identity throughout history are left out of the picture. For example, there was no student activity scheduled to commemorate Victory Day on the 25 of May, the date of the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from South Lebanon in 2000. The event is strongly connected to the Islamic party Hezbollah, which, over the years established itself as the main actor in the armed resistance against the military occupation that started in 1978. It also risks highlighting the collaboration of other political factions with Israel at the time of the 1975–1990 wars. The commemoration of South Lebanon’s liberation is hence problematic both regarding the memory of past conflicts in the country and the present-day political struggles, all the more since Hezbollah has been listed as a terrorist organization in Canada since 2006.

Despite these efforts to neutralize problematic topics, the potential for conflict resurfaces in more subtle ways. Students told me that some of their fellow Lebanese refused to join the Independence Day party because alcohol would be served in the restaurant. Muslim students with strong religious beliefs hence find themselves alienated from some of the collective activities. During the event, I also noticed in the bar an altar to the Virgin (Figure 3), discretely marking the religious identity of the place. Despite their apparent neutrality, all these activities thus act as binders or, on the contrary, borders between students, bearing the risk of fueling antagonist interpretations of the Lebanese identity, especially along religious lines.

Figure 3. Altar at the venue of the Lebanese Independence Night organized by a Lebanese student association in Montreal. Photo: B. Lefort (2017).

The dividing nature of these performances runs even deeper than the question of religion alone. Because they display homogenized identities, these events also rigidified what being Lebanese could mean, creating feelings of non-adequation among many students. It was visibly the case for Anna, a Bachelor student I met during the Lebanese movie night. We agreed to meet for an interview the following week. There, in the middle of the conversation, she unexpectedly started to talk about the event:

Because I have never been in the Lebanese culture, I have a tendency […] not to understand my own culture. […] For example, I have no idea how to dance and I humiliate myself when I try [laughs], compared to the others. […] And I was a bit tired the other night at the party, I didn’t give my best. Still, I felt how I feel whenever I am with other Lebanese in a group. […]

The conflicted nature of the Lebanese identity performed in collective events touches people’s deep sense of self by creating essentialized representations that bind as much as they alienate. Understanding the autonomization of the Lebanese conflict among students hence necessitates exploring the youth’s experience of their Lebaneseness beyond the legacy of past antagonism. Another episode perfectly illustrated this point. Once, I participated in the general assembly of one of the Lebanese student associations in Montreal. In front of a full amphitheater, the executive board presented its actions and future plans, with the hope of gaining a vote of confidence for another year. Presentations followed each other in a calm atmosphere until the discussion turned toward one of the main events that was organized the previous year, a three-day retreat that took place in the countryside during spring break. Suddenly, the tension rose. One student in the audience was particularly vehement against the board. According to him, there was not enough Lebanese food served, nor enough Lebanese music played during the stay. ‘The event was absolutely not Lebanese’, he concluded.

After the event, Michel, the president of the board, explained to me that he had been fighting against this kind of accusation for the past two years. According to him, the tension originated in a rift between a ‘Westernized’ and an ‘Oriental’ vision of the Lebanese identity. The divide, he said, reproduced a constant struggle throughout the formation and the development of the Lebanese state opposing the Lebanonists, reputed close from France and led by the Christian Maronite elites, and the Arab nationalists, politically associated with the Left and stronger among Muslim political milieus. This antagonism played a major role in the first phase of the Lebanese wars, known as the two-year war (1975–1977) that saw the Lebanonists fight the Leftist Lebanese National Movement, allied with the Palestinian revolutionary organizations. For Michel, maybe encouraged in this direction by his understanding of my own knowledge of the Lebanese political history, the agitated discussion during the meeting was a transportation of this strife. Educated in a prestigious Catholic French-speaking high school in Lebanon, he distinguished himself and his former schoolmates from other students, mostly Muslims, whose backgrounds were allegedly more closely related to an Arab identity of Lebanon. He insisted that his mission during the past two years had been to bridge this old divide and explained how meeting with Muslim students in the association had also helped him in this endeavor.

While Michel’s story seems to indicate the strength of conflict transportation, an opportunity to understand the clash from another perspective presented itself. During a conversation with another student originating from the Lebanese diasporas in West Africa, I learned that the student complaining about the lack of Lebanese food and music was named Sami and was her cousin. From this fortunate encounter, I was able to learn more about the incident. Sami was from a Christian family long established in Canada. He only visited Lebanon a few times in his life. For him, the absence of Lebanese music was not a manifestation of conflict transportation, but rather a question of fulfilling a diasporic identity.

Like the Ghanaians diasporas in London described by Mattia Fumanti (2013, p. 214), Sami seems to have filled the alienation from his ‘homeland’ with the omnipresence of Lebanese multi-sensorial aesthetics. Playing Canadian or American music during the retreat would not make sense for him, not because of the identity conflict between a ‘Westernized’ and an ‘Oriental’ Lebanon, but because his sense of self was rooted in the performance of his Lebaneseness, especially in collective events. Without the opportunity to express his belonging, he felt out of place, lacking the recognition of his distinctiveness in the Canadian context. His experience serves as a reminder that conflicted identities are always interpretations. These interpretations are realized in the light of people’s subjective experiences. Conflict transportation in diasporic populations occurs when enacting antagonistic identities makes sense for the people involved. In that perspective, close attention to the dynamics shaping people’s sense of self is crucial to unpack the nexus between diasporas and conflict.

The Shifting Meaning of Identity and Conflict

Far from abstract and all-encompassing entities, for the young people I met, identities were embodied realities materialized in everyday situations. Their life stories perfectly illustrate this, as exemplified in Anna’s words about her concomitant feeling of attraction and inadequacy toward what she names her Lebanese ‘culture’.

Similarly, Christiane and her mother both told how the shame the young woman experienced at school when her lunch box filled with Lebanese dishes made her different from the rest of her friends suddenly turned into pride when, during a field trip, the whole school was served ‘shish taouk’, a Lebanese chicken meal. I also collected countless accounts of young people who refused to learn Arabic when they were younger and were now taking courses to reconnect with their past. From their childhood, these young people have had to balance between what Neriko Musha Doerr (2015) has theorized as commitment and refusal to commit to categories of belonging assigned to them. They have practiced this navigation based on temporalities (life phases, moments of the day, etc.), places (home, school, work, university, or public places, etc.), and encounters (with other young people or, on the contrary, older people, among migrant or diasporic circles, with the majority populations, etc.).

Taking seriously the dynamics of identification hence necessitates delving into these young people’s shifting interpretations of what being Lebanese can mean or not in their everyday existence. This is what the current discussions on conflict transportation and autonomization often fail to grasp. Focusing on societal and transnational contexts to understand the recomposition of identities, they tend to neglect the elusive and shifting nature of being (Jackson, 2005, p. xiii). People are not locked into their identities. Diasporic populations present the paradoxical case of, at the same time, having inspired critical reflections on the hybridity and fluidity of identity, while still being grasped through fixed national, ethnic, or religious denominations. The study of the interplay between diasporas and conflict remains trapped in this paradox. Too often, it ignores the plasticity of the dynamics of identification, not only because of processes of hybridization or transformation of identities but even more fundamentally because of the continuous temporal movement of existence, which, permanently unsettled, emphasizes becoming over being.

Elsewhere (Lefort, 2022), I discussed the story of Elsa and her husband, two doctoral students at an English-speaking university in Montreal. After the birth of their first child, the couple, very attached to their Lebanese past, decided to shift the trajectory of their life. Instead of returning to Beirut as originally envisioned, they opted for taking another direction and establishing themselves in North America. One year after our first encounter, they had both found a job in the same US university town. As we were discussing their hopes and apprehensions in front of their upcoming move, Elsa finally declared that, ultimately, ‘we will be from where our child will be.’ Their story encapsulates the critical importance of direction in people’s sense of belonging. Privileging their ‘existential mobility’ (Hage, 2005, p. 470), which, simply put, refers to their feeling of going somewhere in their lives, they did not lose their attachment to Lebanon, nor their desire to connect with fellow Lebanese or Arabs, but rather re-interpret their identity in the light of the new direction that their existence took. By choosing becoming over being, Elsa reverted the typical sequence between the two homophones ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. For her, the direction of her life (routes) overrides her origins (roots), and not the other way around, underlining the plasticity of identification and belonging.

The stories I have reproduced here outline the ability of the diasporic youth to reflect on and agentively move between multiple, often interconnected, changing interpretations. In doing so, they appear as shapeshifters, able to reinvent their sense of self in front of various life situations. These reinventions are sometimes constrained. In other circumstances, they are fully embraced. Overall, their lived experiences stand against essentialized narratives of belonging and compel to rethink diasporic identities and, therefore, also the relationships between diasporas and conflicts. When considering conflicted identities, it is necessary to go beyond the labels or categories they designate, be they ethnic, religious, or national, and unpack how and why these identifications remain meaningful in the here and now of the people we are working with. This requires considering not only the societal and political contexts, but also everyday situations, encounters, and bac-and-forth movements in people’s life trajectories. In a word, not losing sight of the messiness and confusion of existence.

Conclusions: Rethinking Diasporic Identities through Existence and Agency

In this contribution, I have attempted to reconsider the nexus between diasporas and conflict by examining the everyday dynamics of identification among diasporic youth in Montreal. My encounters with these young people have underlined the critical role of their search for belonging in their interpretations of their identity. Both their aspiration to escape local power relations assigning them a marginalized position in the Canadian multicultural society and their desire to claim their right to belong while expressing their distinctiveness as Lebanese played a key role in their navigation of similarity and difference. While these two parallel tracks carry the potential for reproducing conflictual visions of Lebaneseness and, beyond, social hierarchies, the ways these conflicted identities were experienced compels to take seriously the unresolved nature of identity.

The tensions that arose during my fieldwork between antagonist interpretations of identity were not only autonomized from the context of the Lebanese wars. They were embedded into the successions of lived situations whose implications went beyond identity understood in cultural or national terms to touch on people’s efforts to negotiate and make sense of their presence among others. These interpretations are, at the same time, intersubjective—defined in social encounters through the interplay between similarity and difference—and subjective—composed against people’s interpretations of their life trajectory. They also reveal the complexity of the temporalities that make the everyday: First, the micro-temporality of encounters, affected by the power relations existing between people, which creates the horizons of events where people’s interpretations of their identity are reshaped in relation to forces like assignation, racialization, or self-essentialization; Then, the overarching movement of people’s life-trajectory that, while only moving forward, may inspire changes in people’s sense of existential direction, altering their commitment to certain categories of belonging without obliterating what stood before. Emotions like shame, pride, hope, or determination cut across these plural temporalities, further underlining the embodied and ever-shifting dimension of identity.

Along with the self-reflective, agentive ways of navigating the ambivalence of diasporic experiences that my interlocutors cultivated, the focus on the everyday encourages to stop thinking of diasporic practices and imaginations as translating pre-existing cultures, even in an altered form. On the contrary, it is necessary to bring people’s unresolved interpretations of their identity into the heart of the analysis. From that perspective, the relations between diasporic identities and conflict should never be naturalized. Against the schematic model that presumes the conflictual heritage of people based on their region of origins, it is important to invert the logic and examine how the reference to identities and differences are endlessly recomposed, reclaimed, rejected, or recovered in people’s pursuit of meaning and attachment to others while moving forward in their lives. Concentrating on an emergent and ever-coming-into-being understanding of belonging, this endeavor could open new avenues of research inspired by the idea that, instead of continuity, diasporic experiences should always encourage us to think derailment.

Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes to all the people who agreed to share parts of their lives with me during my fieldwork in Montreal. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments, which helped improve my manuscript. Likewise, I am grateful to my colleagues at Tampere University, and particularly in the DIASCON project. This research was financially supported by the Academy of Finland project, ‘Diasporas and Transportation of Homeland Conflicts: Inter-group Dynamics and Host Country Responses’ (no. 324621, 2019–2023). Fieldwork was conducted as part of a postdoctoral fellowship entitled ‘Existential mobilities: Politics of belonging among young people from conflict generated diasporas in Finland and Canada’ and funded by the Academy of Finland (no. 308359, 2017–2020).

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Bruno Lefort

Bruno Lefort holds a doctoral degree in social sciences from the University of Tampere (Finland) and Aix-Marseille Université (France). His work draws on ethnographic and collaborative approaches to examine the questions of belonging and coexistence, with a particular attention to the interplay between life-trajectories, collective memories and local environments in the ways people compose identities and social boundaries to make sense of their existence. His recent publications include articles in journals such as Political Geography, American Ethnologist, and Ethnography.

Notes

1 Accessed 28 May 2022. https://artpublic.ville.montreal.qc.ca/en/oeuvre/daleth/.

2 See, e.g., the work of the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi (1989).

3 To investigate the relationships between diasporic identities and conflicts, I focus here on the case of the Lebanese civil wars (1975–1990). However, in my work, I more generally use the outdated notion of the ‘Levantine’ diaspora. Although no neutral choice is possible, I do so for historical as well as methodological reasons. Historically, the diasporic communities were often constituted before the emergence of nation-states in what is called in Arabic Mashreq (Levant) and include what are today the states of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, and, in some cases, Egypt. Methodologically, the notion enables me to avoid predefined national frameworks and prevent some of the effects of methodological nationalism.

4 The economic hardship and political turmoil during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the subsequent Suez crisis in 1956, the civil wars in Lebanon in 1958 and 1975–1990, and the conflicts in Iraq and Syrian in the twenty first century, followed by the economic crisis in Lebanon, all contributed to successive waves of migration.

5 In map-elicited interviews, participants were asked to pinpoint three to five places they deemed meaningful in their lives on a digital map where they could zoom in and out to play on different scales. In timeline interviews, participants could mark on a line representing their life a succession of events or moments significant for them, whether they experienced them directly or not. Finally, in mental-map interviews, participants could share their understandings of three successive conceptual combinations presented to them on a paper: ‘past/ present/future’; ‘home/world’; and ‘sameness/difference’.

6 The Mosaic Institute is specialized in the contribution of diasporic communities to Canada’s foreign policy. The report, entitled ‘The perception and reality of ‘imported conflict’ in Canada’, was redacted in response to the constitution by Canada’s ministry of Public Safety of the Kanishka project to support the fight against terrorism in Canada. Accessed 23 June 2022. https://www.mosaicinstitute.ca/research/perceptions–realities-of-imported-conflict.