In 2013, a rural Syrian community living not far from the Syrian-Lebanese border, involved in the revolution, was violently expelled from their home during a counterinsurgency campaign led by the Syrian regime and its allies. Displaced in Lebanon, the community built a camp and a school, adorning them with lush gardens that recalled their lost land, while shrouding the horrors of the war in silence. However, memories of the war spontaneously resurfaced in children’s paintings and nightmares, as well as in adults‘ recollections of their past everyday lives, requiring a renewed effort to tame and mould this past into a specific historical knowledge for the community.

In this talk, I ask: Why is this past so crucial in shaping survival in the aftermath? I examine what type of history/story this collective wartime predicament requires and why it is essential when crafted for the community’s youngest generation, who lived through, witnessed and survived the violence of the counterinsurgency and expulsion. Survival, I argue, requires not only a retrieval of the ordinary (Das 2007), but also a serious engagement with questions of responsibility and complicity, history and historicity, even in the immediate aftermath of war or disaster.