Forgiveness and Memory
Alexandra Asseily lives both in London and Beirut. Russian-born, English-raised, she married a Lebanese businessman and raised her children in both the UK and Lebanon. She is fluent in English, Arabic and French and she moves around both the Christian and Muslim Lebanese worlds with aplomb.
She became increasingly aware of the effect that the memories of our parents or grandparents, passed down through observation and conversation, have on us and on perpetuating emotional and psychic pain. She could see the role such painful memories still play in Lebanon’s history - ruled first by Phoenicians, then conquered by the Roman Empire, then a site of the bloody Crusades in the Middle Ages, later home of warring sects of converts to Islam and Christianity and more recently a flash point for Britain, France and Russia with the Ottoman Empire. Since World War I the violence has continued. Today warring factions are at a dangerous stalemate.
Alexandra is overseeing, through the help of the construction company re-building war-torn Central Beirut, Solidere, a Garden of Forgiveness on a site where archeological excavations show historical layer after layer of ruins from all these invasions and conquests. The Garden will be a place where people can confront these ancestral memories and rid them of the pain they still contain through the act of forgiveness.
Alexandra believes that we can keep our memories, indeed, that they are a core part of who we are. But, through forgiveness, we can rid those memories of the pain they hold. In doing so, we pass on to the next generation only the memories, not the pain.
