Walking through the streets of Lebanese cities or driving through the countryside, one is confronted with diverse images of people: male and female models in advertisements living up to the latest conventional Western and/or Arab beauty standards; Christian and Shi’a holy men and the occasional Virgin Mary or Christian woman saint; revered Arab singers, both male and female; as well as international football heroes, powerful political leaders and their foreign, regional backers – these latter categories all being exclusively male. Depending on where one strolls or drives through, one might also encounter depictions of men – and very occasionally women – in uniform, sometimes armed and sometimes not, some looking serious, some laughing, some shy, some defiant. These are, for the most part, the war dead – though some military men (but not women) may be revered in a similar way even if they do not die on the battlefield, as discussed further below.

The pictures of the dead, of the martyrs, mingle with those of the living, occasionally creating juxtapositions that at times seemed odd for me with my Western gaze. A photo of a recent casualty of the Syrian Civil War next to an advert with Lionel Messi touting Pepsi; a commemorative portrait of a Lebanese army officer on a wall, flanked by a poster in honour of the famed female Lebanese singer Fairuz (Nouhad Wadie’ Haddad) on the one side and Ashoura flags depicting Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, carrying a massacred child at the seventh-century Battle of Karbala on the other; a wall of photos of recent martyrs around the corner from a men's hair salon sporting adverts of metrosexual male models and the slogan (in English) ‘between heaven and earth’. The walls are a palimpsest onto which memories of different wars – wars of the early Islamic age, the Lebanese Civil War, the wars with Israel, the Syrian Civil War – are projected, mingling with civilian messages. However, in spite of visiting Lebanon several dozen times and actively seeking out these posters of martyrs, I have yet to see any depictions of the visibly war-wounded or war-disabled. Even the dead, in these representations, are able-bodied.

This chapter seeks to explore the hypervisibility of some war dead in Lebanon and the general public invisibility of the war-wounded and disabled, who in fact should be more numerous than the dead.