The downtown center of Benghazi and the city’s nearby historic Birka district is connected by a 3.3 km arterial road.
This street has gone by several different names in the past, depending on who is in power at the time, but for local Benghazi residents, it’s known as Jamal Abdul Nasser St., named after the leader of the Pan-Arab movement that captivated Gadhafi.
This passion for Pan-Arabism extended to most of Benghazi’s streets, with the main highway connecting Benghazi to East and West Libya named ‘Arouba’ (Arabism) street, and most members of the Arab League will find a road in Benghazi with their name, from Yemen to Sudan to even the historic Andalus.
However, the only name that stuck with the locals was Jamal Street (the highway is known as Tripoli Road).
The naming of streets in Libya is serious political business.
During the 2011 revolution, there was conscious willingness to rename all the streets, plazas and public buildings from symbols of Gadhafi’s Fateh revolution, with the new names representing the new era of Libya.
This occurred throughout the region, with multiple ‘freedom squares’, ‘martyrs plazas’ and ‘revolutionary roads’ appearing across MENA cities.
The 2014 civil war, which saw a shifting of political alliances, meant that names had to be changed yet again. The people of Benghazi, who could understandably not keep up with these constant changes, eventually reverted to the pre-revolution names.
Jamal Street retained its name in all this turmoil, despite losing the eponymous statue which marked its Western entrance. One year after the revolution, a group of “officials” ordered the statue to be torn down.
News reports claim that the reason was unclear for bringing down the statue, but everyone in Benghazi knew why. After certain political groups co-opted the revolution, they began doing what Gadhafi had done before them; remove all symbols of past power.
This is a trend that seems to be particular to Benghazi; it is one of the few cities where history is difficult is commemorate spatially.
Gadhafi had a field day ordering the removal of any public icon that wasn’t linked to his ideology; the shrine of Omar Mukhtar was destroyed, the ‘souq al-Dhalam’ in the downtown demolished, the King’s Parliament building razed into a parking lot, the lion statues on the Cornish mysteriously vanished overnight.
What couldn’t be removed was left to decay. Piece by piece over 42 years, the landmarks of the city were erased, perhaps his own attempt at trying to control a disgruntled city that never really recognized his authority.
And after the revolution, this mindset of erasure was inherited by the winners; the statue of Jamal taken down, the ‘revolutionary bases’ burned to the ground, and new statues put up.
Among the very grotesque and aesthetically horrifying symbols was an abstract mini-replica of the Benghazi lighthouse, a strange 10 meter skeletal box (?) with a neon hand and the words ‘God is Great’ written over it, and a particularly hideous clock with the colours of the flag placed on the face of the lighthouse itself, which elicited much rage from the architect community.
Among less hideous statues were the fighter jets and tanks placed at various roundabouts, commemorating the Libyan air force and military.
Other symbols were instead appropriated, such as the ‘pipe roundabout’ which was a celebration of the Man-Made River project. A grouping of several large, dusty white pipes, they were given a new coat of colourful paint after the revolution, and again re-painted after the war in the shape of book spines.
I think the aim here was more about rejuvenating the spirit of Benghazi after a particularly difficult historic period (something difficult to appreciate when you are stuck in the traffic of the roundabout and yelling at the guy who just cut you off).
Because of the lack of any real pedestrian routes in the city aside from the city center, these statues invariably are placed in the city’s numerous roundabouts.
Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find a roundabout in Benghazi that doesn’t have some icon in the center, including in some cases the burned out cars of notable fighters during the war, statues representing rural life such as jars and wells, and of course more fighter jets.
These symbols, while failing to actually reflect anything symbolic, instead offer some insight into the various power struggles; of religious ideology, military force, and the confusion that many of the local artists and residents have about what the city truly represents.
Benghazi is more than revolutions or wars, and yet we don’t have anything to prove it except faded memories. It is a city that is doomed to repeat its own history because it can’t hold on to it.
The only way to live through the city’s past is through old photographs and memories of the people.
It’s an invisible city, one that is superimposed onto the real one but which can only be viewed through the eyes of its residents.
That’s where the Italian theater used to be, this is where the Benkato mosque once stood, here’s the building I once took classes.
A city that ‘used to be’.
________________
Brave New Libya Writings from Benghazi, the spark that started it all
