JANE MOSS
Quebec theatre has frequently been a site for dramatizing trauma–whether we mean the collective historical trauma of the Conquest or the more personal traumas related to dysfunctional families or violent acts. In a group of recent plays by Lebanese immigrant playwrights we see a different kind of trauma being staged–the overwhelming historical trauma of the Lebanese civil war as performed in plays by Abla Farhoud, Bernard Antoun, and Wajdi Mouawad. This different kind of "théâtre engagé" bears witness to the national tragedy of Lebanon, works through the trauma it caused, and offers hope to the survivors. Instead of inspiring dread, fear, horror, and pity leading to catharsis, these plays re-enact violence, memorialize the victims, and perform mourning work in order to renew our shattered faith in humanity.
Le théâtre québécois a souvent été un site pour la mise en scène des événements traumatisants-qu'on parle du traumatisme collectif et historique de la Conquête ou des traumatismes intimes liés aux familles dysfonctionnelles ou aux actes violents. Dans des pièces récentes écrites par des dramaturges d'origine libanaise on voit une différente sorte de traumatisme mise en scène-la catastrophe historique de la guerre civile du Liban comme elle est représentée dans les pièces d'Abla Farhoud, Bernard Antoun, et Wajdi Mouawad. Ce "théâtre engagé" différent témoigne de la tragédie nationale pour assumer le choc qu'elle a causé et donner de l'espoir aux rescapés. Au lieu d'inspirer l'épouvante, la peur, et l'horreur qui mènent au catharsis, ces pièces recréent la violence, mémorialisent les victimes, et accomplissent le travail du deuil afin de renouveler notre foi perdue dans l'humanité.
Since the classical tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all serious theatre has performed traumatic events and their effect on the people who live them. Quebec theatre is no exception and has frequently been a site for dramatizing trauma—whether we mean the collective historical trauma of the Conquest or the more personal traumas related to dysfunctional families or violent acts. In a group of recent plays by immigrant playwrights we see a different kind of trauma being staged—the kind of overwhelming historical trauma that affects our collective consciousness as did the Nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot's reign of terror, or the Rwandan genocide. I am speaking of the Lebanese civil war and how this historical trauma is performed in plays by Abla Farhoud, Bernard Antoun, and Wajdi Mouawad. In this different kind of "théâtre engagé," Lebanese-Québécois dramatists bear witness to the national tragedy of Lebanon, work through the trauma it caused, and offer hope to the survivors. Instead of inspiring dread, fear, horror, and pity leading to catharsis, these plays re-enact violence, memorialize the victims, and perform mourning work in order to renew our shattered faith in humanity.
In her brilliant study, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth follows Freud in defining trauma as "the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena" (91). Caruth's analysis underscores the incomprehensibility of the event (58, 92), the belatedness of its registration on the mind (6), and the ethical burden experienced by the survivor (108). Surviving trauma creates a crisis because the traumatized person witnessed unthinkable horrors that he or she failed to prevent and did not fully understand (102-08). The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder—recurring dreams and hallucinations —are involuntary returns to the horrific events in which the person experiences the anxiety not present before and confronts the enigma of survival (58-59). To work through the trauma, the person must speak of it, bearing endless testimony to the impossibility of survival (62, 108).
The psychoanalysts, historians, cultural critics, and literary scholars working in the burgeoning field of trauma studies have concentrated on traumatic narratives but have paid very little attention to theatre, despite the obvious dramatic nature of the nightmares and flashbacks that constitute traumatic memory. This is particularly ironic given that the vocabulary of trauma theory borrows theatrical terms. Dominick LaCapra speaks of "acting out" and "working through" trauma (713); Mieke Bal says that "Re-enactments of traumatic experience take the form of drama, not narrative, and are thereby dependent on the time frame of the 'parts' scripted in the drama" ("Introduction" ix). These "acts of memory" are ways of countering the destructive effects of collective and individual trauma according to Bal (xii) and LaCapra, who says that, for victims, acting out is necessary in the wake of extreme trauma and an important aspect of mourning (699). If mourning is to be socially engaged "memory work," it must be a ritualized, performatively relived version of the past and it must be done for secondary witnesses who will respond with what LaCapra calls "empathetic unsettlement" (699-713).
One playwright and theorist who has recognized the relationship between the historical traumas of the twentieth century and contemporary theatre is Karen Malpede. In an insightful essay entitled "Theatre at 2000: A Witnessing Project," Malpede claims that "Listening to the victims of the century's rage produces a new way of seeing, called witnessing, compelled by an unflinching ability (the opposite of psychic numbing) to face the enormity of genocidal suffering and from within this terrible knowledge to somehow offer up surprising new, unsentimental affirmations of the human spirit" (299). In response to our fin de siècle obsession with collective genocidal death, Malpede says "witnessing becomes the new dramatic action" (300). What she calls the "theatre of witness" dramatizes the stories of those who suffer history; it reflects post-Freudian insights gained from testimony psychotherapies and trauma work with survivors of atrocities (300). "Theatre of witness," as Malpede describes it, "dramatizes moments of speaking the unspeakable, hearing the unbearable" (301). It demands that the playwright avoid becoming a documentarian, that the victim reclaim and recount the trauma, that the audience members become a compassionate community (302-03). The goal, according to Malpede, is to combat apocalyptic thinking by fostering "the understandings required to reshape and remake history" (301).
While those of us who study Quebec immigrant writers have spoken at length about the tension they express between memory and forgetfulness (see Nepveu, L'Hérault, Burgoyne, Moss), in re-examining immigrant theatre we need to recognize its relation to a larger body of work written in response to the historical violence of the twentieth century. The "blessure initiale" identified by Pierre L'Hérault as "le départ" (77) is often a deeper psychic wound caused by witnessing and surviving violent acts. In my article "Multiculturalism and Postmodern Theatre: Staging Québec's Otherness," I noted that in plays by immigrants, plot structure and linear chronology are often exploded by a traumatized memory that refuses to be forgotten and returns to disrupt the present (77). The past intrudes in the form of flashbacks to scenes of violence in the country of origin, a clear symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.
If we read the plays of Farhoud, Antoun, and Mouawad as trauma plays, dramas of survival, it is clear that they participate in the witnessing project described by Malpede. Whether they are set during or after the war, in Lebanon or Quebec, they testify to the destruction of a country and the deaths of thousands. They do not do so in the manner of traditional history or political plays or testimonials; often they even lack geographical and chronological specificity and there is never any attempt to identify the warring sides or explain the underlying geo-political and religious origins of the conflict. What they dramatize is the disruption of normal life, the devastation of cities, the decimation of the population, the departure of people caught in the middle. In other words, Antoun, Farhoud, and Mouawad speak for and about those who suffer history, not those who make it. The nonrealistic theatrical strategies they employ are suited for the dramatization of trauma and grief: often dead victims share the stage with the living because the past co-exists with the present and the survivors refuse to forget the victims; the noises of exploding bombs, grenades, machine guns, and sniper fire punctuate the dialogue; fog, smoke, and fire often engulf the stage. What the audience witnesses is the irrationality of war, the absurdity of history, the tragedy of the postmodern condition. The search for new ways to represent historical traumas reflects the postmodern crisis in representation. We might say that the stage becomes the site of trauma: instead of experiencing the catharsis associated with classical tragedy, the audience shares the anxiety and bewilderment that accompany unexplained violence, dispossession, loss, and death. There are no gods, villains, or enemies to blame and no easy lessons to be learned. But in order for the human spirit to survive and life to go on, trauma must be acknowledged and remembered. Post-Freudian theories of grief and mourning also help us understand the importance of what can be called mourning dialogues: that is, the survivors' need to maintain a relationship with the lost loved ones and to engage actively with other mourners and survivors (Hagman 23-25). The bereaved express grief in an effort to preserve the connection with the dead as well as to find comfort and a new vision for the future.
In a brief essay published with his dramatic poem, Bernard Antoun explains clearly that Ombres de ruines (1993) was written to testify to the horrors of the Lebanese war:
Bouleversé par tout ce qui se passe au Liban, ému et déchiré à chaque reportage que je vois, ayant vécu les trois premières années de cette guerre, ayant vu, entendu, senti l'odeur des bombes qui sifflent, éclatent, ravagent, tuent, ayant souffert de l'atrocité et de l'absurdité de cette guerre, étant moi-même plusieurs fois survivant, ayant été vivement blessé par l'indifférence et le silence du monde, ayant vu les gens souffrir, mourir, perdre biens et enfants, se traîner misérables, réduits à rien, jusqu'aux abris, je ne pouvais faire autrement qu'écrire et dire l'horreur, la sainte horreur que j'ai de la guerre. (7)
His description of the play underscores the fact that by staging the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, he hopes to work through them: "Ça ressemblerait à un rêve qui revient souvent et hante la mémoire d'une rescapée. Seules la pureté et l'espérance en atténueraient la douleur et en assureraient la survivance" (77).1
The fragmentary, nightmarish memories that are played out on the stage recall the personal tragedy that has befallen one of the protagonists, a Young Girl, in the midst of the national tragedy of the war. As images of bombardments flash on large screens at the back of the stage, the Young Girl returns to her ancestral home, now a bombed out ruin, accompanied by an Old Man. They are determined not to lose hope despite the horror they have witnessed. The Young Girl recalls the violent death of her mother, killed by a bomb explosion while standing in line to buy bread, and the death of her father, killed by a rocket when he went out to buy her a dress (24). She also recounts the event that resulted in her blindness—the school bombing that killed all of her classmates and teachers:
Elles sont toutes mortes, quelques-unes brûlées vives. Ils avaient lancé des bombes incendiaires. Et moi, j'ai perdu la vue. J'étais la seule survivante. J'ai tout vu. J'ai assez vu. Je ne veux plus voir.
Tenant la tête entre ses mains.
J'entends encore tout ça, avant de dormir. Même dans mes rêves, ça me hante et me poursuit: le sifflement des bombes, les cris, les cris, puis les déflagrations et l'écroulement des maisons.... La nuit, c'est l'enfer. Je ne fais que des cauchemars. Je me réveille brusquement et je pleure, je crie, j'ai peur. Je vois des soldats qui tuent, qui violent. Je vois des enfants en sang qui meurent.(33)
Antoun wants the audience to share the horrors so this speech is followed by the sounds of a rocket attack, machine gun fire, and the screams of bloodied victims (33)—disturbing sound effects that continue throughout the play.
Despite her blindness (which we suspect is meant to signify a subconscious refusal to see more death and destruction), the Young Girl refuses to give in to despair and the war. The character of the Madwoman, however, seems to incarnate the collective insanity that engulfed Lebanon. She gleefully identifies different forms of weaponry supplied by foreign powers while collecting body parts found in the rubble (37-42). Antoun uses this character to rail against the war: she celebrates the spectacle of destruction while condemning those who profit from the war and those who watch with indifference (42-52). The Old Man explains that she lost her mind after her husband and three sons were killed at the front (52).
In Ombres de ruines, the didiscalia indicate that the terrible violence of the Lebanese war is meant to be re-enacted as a grotesque shadow play behind a giant screen that magnifies and distorts the figures of those responsible for the war. A seated man gives one brutal order after another—to attack schools, universities, hospitals, holy places, ancient ruins, government buildings; to plant car bombs; to torture prisoners (55-58, 62-65). The orders are carried out by an officer whose crisp military salute and dispassionate voice confirm the deliberate destruction of a whole nation. The shadow play is accompanied by continuing gunfire, rocket and bomb explosions, and funereal music. The relentless noise and devastation of the war reaches a paroxysm in the play's dénouement, in which, with divine intervention, Goodness finally triumphs over Evil. The Young Girl prays for peace (67) and regains her sight as she takes up arms to fight for her country's liberation. As we hear a disincarnated voice lamenting the suffering of the Lebanese people, the Man in Black ("l'homme en noir"), an allegorical figure representing man's violence, dies while the Woman of White Light ("la femme toute de lumière et blanche") disappears in a bright cloud (68). This is Antoun's way of acting out and working through the trauma he experienced. It is his way of expressing his hope for an end to the violence and the restoration of normal life in Lebanon. The play is a form of grief work, a dramatic construction of violence and loss which allows Antoun (and his characters) to begin the process of healing.
While Bernard Antoun's poetic drama has not been performed, the Lebanese civil war has been brought to the stage by Abla Farhoud's Jeux de patience2. In her earlier plays, Quand j'étais grande (1983) and Les Filles du 5-10-15c (1986), Farhoud had touched upon violence against women in traditional, patriarchal Lebanese society from the perspective of immigrants in Quebec, but in Jeux de patience she deals specifically with the war from the perspectives of victims, survivors, and observers. The published version of the text makes it clear that she has written this play as an act of memory and mourning, to bear witness to the loss caused by war:
J'offre cette pièce à toutes celles et à tous ceux qui ont perdu leur enfant, leur pays, leurs rêves, le goût de la vie. J'offre ces mots aux oublié-e-s et à tous ceux et celles qui essaient d'oublier. À ceux qui affrontent chaque jour, chaque instant, le silence de la mort. (9)
The playwright explains that, "Le pays en guerre dont il est question dans la pièce peut être n'importe quel pays" (11). The stage set graphically underscores her global perspective: the back wall is a map of the world with drawers marking countries at war. During the play, the drawers pop open and expose bloody body parts while loud music drowns out the sounds of war.
The main character is Monique/Kaokab, a writer whose two names symbolize her bicultural immigrant identity. She writes to reclaim different kinds of memories. As she sorts through objects, articles of clothing, and photos she keeps in a trunk, she remembers her native country (14-15). As she sleeps, she is haunted by violent dreams about the war and the suicide/death of her niece, Samira, who comes to life on stage (15). Samira is not a ghostly apparition; she appears as a living being to signify her continuing presence in the lives of those who mourn her death. The dialogue between Monique/Kaokab and her cousin Mariam, Samira's grieving mother, who has recently immigrated to Quebec, explores the violence of the civil war and seeks to understand the girl's death. The Mother displays symptoms of trauma and bereavement: seated in a rocking chair, she rocks incessantly while clutching a small carpet, rolled up in her arms like a baby (11). The first words she speaks express survivor's guilt ("... est-ce que ma fille serait morte si nous avions pu nous enfuir avant?" [20]) and war fatigue ("Parfois, je m'ennuie de la musique des bombes" [21]). She conveys her profound sense of loss with simple eloquence: "Samira ne répondra plus jamais à son nom, mon pays n'a plus de nom, je n'ai plus de pays, je n'ai plus d'enfants" (25). From time to time, an indescribable look in her eyes signals that she is reliving the moment of Samira's death (28, 30).
Farhoud's writer is her alter ego. She writes to come to terms with the incomprehensibility of violence:
Pourquoi? Pourquoi? Pourquoi? Je dirai "pourquoi" jusqu'à la fin des temps, jusqu'au jour où ma langue séchera dans ma bouche. Pourquoi elle, pourquoi lui, pourquoi Beyrouth, pourquoi eux, pourquoi ce bébé, pourquoi Bethléem, pourquoi cet enfant, pourquoi Bir-Barra, pourquoi notre village, pourquoi notre quartier, pourquoi notre ville, pourquoi Babylone, pourquoi notre pays? Pourquoi notre planète?
Je dirai "pourquoi, pourquoi, pourquoi" jusqu'à ce que mon gosier éclate, et personne ne me répond... Et personne ne me répondra...
Et je veux écrire! Je veux écrire! Calice d'hostie de tabernacle! (40-41)
And she writes to ease her guilt for having watched this and other terrible conflicts from afar:
Depuis des années, je n'arrive plus à me caler tranquillement dans mon fauteuil sans penser que quelque part dans le monde des corps brûlent, des êtres sont déchiquetés, des êtres ont faim, des êtres sont humiliés, emprisonnés, violés, torturés, au même instant où j'essaie de me caler dans mon fauteuil, des bouches s'ouvrent et crient, et je me bouche les oreilles, parce que je ne peux rien faire d'autre. Je veux comprendre. (51)
In Jeux de patience, Farhoud questions the utility of literature, drama, or films that memorialize historical traumas. Samira tells us that she wanted to make a film recording how she and her best friend Amal lived during the war,3 an upbeat film about surviving war, but she jokes that films may sway public opinion but they cannot stop violence (55-57). Despite this, the Mother beseeches Monique/Kaokab to tell Samira's life story (59) so that her death will have served a purpose: "Je ne veux pas que cette mort se perde. Je veux que sa mort serve la vie" (62). The text that Monique/Kaobab has been writing is a poetic monologue that describes nightmarish images of war and deepseated feelings of guilt for having kept herself at a safe distance from the destruction of her native country (64-66). At the Mother's urging, she reluctantly reads the story of Samira's death, recounting how the young girl chose death in a moment of despair after the rape, torture, and death of her friend Amal (69-73). Farhoud's writer bears witness to her family's loss and to the collective tragedy of civil war in Jeux de patience, and in so doing she expresses the playwright's belief in the life-affirming power of memorial writing:
On ne peut pas tout effacer et recommencer ... Il faut continuer. Rentrer de plain-pied dans la fêlure et la transformer. De croire que je peux transmettre ma mémoire et la mémoire des miens est pure vanité ... Il le faut pourtant ... Ne pas me laisser broyer ... La souffrance est partout, ici, là-bas, partout ... La vie est partout, ici, là-bas, partout ... On la tue par ignorance ... partout, à chaque instant ... Ne pas nous laisser noyer ... Rentrer dedans et en ressortir ... vivants ... Écrire... pendant que je suis encore vivante. (76)
The play demonstrates the therapeutic value of shared mourning and grief work: as Farhoud's writer tells the story of loss, she helps the bereaved mother find hope for the future.
Farhoud's witnessing project carries over to her next play, which also dramatizes personal and collective traumas. Apatride (1993)4 stages the reunion of old lovers who were separated by family and ethnic differences and who have returned separately after four decades in exile to a country destroyed by war. The didascalia specify that Sawda and Walid's reunion takes place amidst the ruins of a city "dans n'importe quel lieu où il y a eu guerre et destruction" (2). In the background, we hear the voices of soldiers speaking different languages—perhaps an allusion to foreign intervention in Lebanon or to the universality of civil war. We also hear bulldozers plowing through the rubble and landmines exploding (39). Sawda remarks that the bombed out buildings will all be razed "[p]our que le reste des humains oublie le plus vite possible," but Walid says he cannot forget anymore (5). He asks: "Sawda, ces maisons défoncées, sans vitres, Sawda, ces murs qui s'écroulent, ce paysage de fiction, ces mémoires que l'on piétine. Mon pays a éclaté, je suis en miette. Est-ce que c'est ça un pays?" (30). He has returned to his native country because he wants to understand why it destroyed itself (28). He is also mourning a personal loss: the suicide of his daughter (29).
In addition to being a play about war and the loss of a child, Apatride is a love story—a story about the power of love to overcome ethnic hatred. In a world that Sawda calls "une boucherie" (18), human beings must combat hate and violence with love (19). Because she is black skinned, foreign-born, and stateless, she has always been an outsider. Ironically, she finds this liberating since ethnic identity often leads people to deny basic humanity (24-25). Since emigrating, Sawda has become a botanist whose research involves studying the rebirth of flora in countries devastated by war, a project that clearly symbolizes her belief in the regenerative powers of nature (17). In the end, the passion rekindled between the former lovers overcomes his despair and restores Walid's belief in the possiblity of happiness. Farhoud ends Apatride on an optimistic note, expressing her conviction that while we must not forget the traumas wrought by hatred and despair, we can survive them.
Several plays by Wajdi Mouawad have brought similar reactions to the Lebanese civil war to the Montreal stage.5 In Journée de noces chex les Cromagnons (1994) and Les Mains d'Edwige au moment de la naissance (1999), family dramas are acted out against the backdrop of the war that precipitated the crises. In Littoral (1999), a young man living in Quebec returns to bury his father in his native land, only to find no space left in the cemeteries of a country devastated by years of war. The language, tone, and style of Mouawad's plays differ greatly from what we see in Ombres de ruines, but some of the similarities are striking. Here, too, we see no attempt to analyze the politics of the conflict or to represent the real persons responsible. We see ordinary people trying to live normally under abnormal conditions: a population decimated by death and emigration, carrying on despite rockets, bomb, and sniper attacks. Most of the basic institutions of society (government, education, the economy) have been destroyed or disrupted, yet people try to carry on. In Mouawad's dramatic world, the nightmarish reality of a war-torn country often lends itself to grotesque theatrical absurdity à la Alfred Jarry or Jean Genet. The plays demonstrate the survivors' need to bear witness to the historical trauma of Lebanon and to the desire to reaffirm human needs and life.
The conventional five-act form and comic subject matter are quickly undercut by the fact that Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons is set against urban warfare. As the family prepares for the wedding of the only daughter, the complications abound: it is no longer easy to find good food, the sounds of bombing continue, a terrible storm is brewing, and there is, in fact, no groom. The bride, Nelly, suffers from blindness and narcolepsy, which her mother says is a godsend in a country at war (25). Sleep is an escape from memories of the violence she witnessed in the village of Berdawné. In Act I, the cries of the sheep being slaughtered for her wedding banquet trigger traumatic memories:
Maman! Il y a des ombres omniprésentes! Les violeurs tournent autour de mon someil [sic]! Mon souvenir de toi décampe! Où es-tu? Pourquoi ne viens-tu pas comme autrefois danser au milieu de mes songes? Où sont-ils nos souvenirs l'une de l'autre? Maman, nous ne savons plus regarder en arrière, nous ne savons plus que baisser la tête! Maman, au delà de mes mains ouvertes, tendues, il y a le sang, le sang maman! Berdawné est détruite! Court maman! Ils vont t'attraper! Ils vont te tuer! Court! Maman!
............................................
Maman! Non! Ne tombe pas! Relève-toi! Vite! Non!!! Ils sont sur toi maman! Ils sont sur toi! Ils vont t'égorger! Non! Non! Laisser [sic] ma mère! Le sang! Le sang! C'est le sang de ma mère! (34-35)
The violence that haunts her dreams is inescapable. Immediately following Nelly's traumatic memory, her neighbor Souhayla and her brother Neel look out the window and describe how soldiers kill children trying to escape from a flaming bus (37).
Wedding preparations continue through the next three acts, amidst the sounds of exploding bombs, sniper fire, a violent rainstorm, and the screams of victims fleeing from burning buildings. The conversation frequently turns to the war, which is roundly condemned as hellish, yet Nelly, like Apollinaire, sees that the infernal beauty of destruction has a fascinating power:
Pourquoi la guerre est-elle si admirable? Pourquoi suis-je incapable d'en détacher les yeux? Ce feux d'artifice! Cela est si beau maman, je suis agenouillée à la fenêtre grande ouverte, éveillée, je contemple l'horreur avec ravissement! Ah! j'ai tant de peine à garder mes yeux fermées! Cela est si beau. Là bas, des immeubles s'écroulent: la ville tombe à genoux, tous ces incendies qui dansent au milieu de l'orage; un arbre explose! Et ces bombes qui tombent! (51)
Nelly can no longer escape the horror of war by closing her eyes and sleeping; in fact, she claims that she can no longer distinguish between wakefulness and sleep (70-71). Her seventeen year old brother Neel, who has never experienced peace, says that Nelly's sleepwalking anesthetizes her senses and narcolepsy preserves her sanity (92).
When Nelly and Neel's brother Walter arrives in the final act, the anti-war rhetoric of the play intensifies. A murderous terrorist who declares "La guerre, c'est moi" (107), Walter now feels betrayed by the lies of his leaders (111). Wounded, showing signs of combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder, Walter deliriously claims to have killed fathers, mothers, children, and sisters —a claim that underscores the internecine aspect of the combat (115). Now the war has followed Walter home: machine gun fire hits the apartment door, a grenade lands on the floor, and Walter surrenders his arms (115-16). The ending of Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons expresses Mouawad's hope for an end to the national nightmare of Lebanon. After Walter recites a beautiful love poem, silence replaces the sounds of war and a handsome stranger arrives—the bridegroom who will whisk the awakened Nelly away to a life of peace and love just as Prince Charming rescued Sleeping Beauty (123). Unfortunately, the cease-fire is only momentary: bombing resumes and the play ends with the death of young Neel (128).
In Les Mains d'Edwige au moment de la naissance, it is a funeral rather than a wedding that sets the stage for the family drama. Although there is no corpse to bury, the family intends to hold a ceremony for their daughter Esther who disappeared ten years previously. Mouawad's play makes no direct reference to Lebanon or to civil war, but the backdrop of the play can surely be interpreted as a country engulfed in a long civil war. A dense fog has settled around the family home and most of the neighbors have fled, giving in to the despair that accompanies hatred, violence, and death in "ce pays de misérables, ce pays qui ne connaît qu'obscurité, froid et brouillard" (26). Some of those who have remained deal with despair by trying to forget, seeking what the mother Eloïse calls "une amnèsie bienfaisante" (65). Esther's siblings condemn this forgetfulness as moral cowardice and fight against the fog which Edwige calls "la longue langue de la mort" (32) and Alex denounces as a form of self-deception (71). While her father Mathias has lost faith in everything and just wants peace, Edwige, whose hands exude tear-like drops when she prays, clings to her belief in the possibility of happiness and refuses to give in to the darkness—which she associates with all of the horrors of the century:
[p]eu importent la colère des gens, leur rancune et leur désespoir, peu importe l'argent et peu importent les portes défoncées, anéanties, déchirées, peu importent les massacres et les horreurs, les épidémies, peu importent les femmes que l'on m'a dit violées et assassinées, étranglées, noyées, et peu m'importent les hommes pendus, peu importent les enfants égorgés, ... toutes les horreurs du siècle mises les unes sur les autres ne pourront pas m'attrister. (57-58)
What sustains Edwige is her passion for life and her love for Vaklav. She is also buoyed by the return of Esther, who is pregnant and about to give birth. Despite the fact that Esther dies after giving birth, Edwige is determined to go forth into the light, bearing witness: "[J]e veux vivre en plein air, là où l'obscurité est encore plus effrayante. Esther a parlé d'un monde de spectateurs. Je veux aller m'y plonger, affronter ce monde de désespoir et lui parler de l'amour, lui parler de la lumière" (89). Using poetic images and metaphorical language, Mouawad's play becomes an allegory of the struggle between darkness and light, blindness and sight, hate and love, despair and hope, death and birth. Whether or not Les Mains d'Edwige refers directly to the Lebanese civil war, it performs traumatic experience and becomes a play about surviving incomprehensible horrors without losing human values.
In Littoral, Mouawad's protagonist Wilfrid performs numerous acts of memory, mourning his native country's national tragedy, his mother's death during childbirth, the loss that comes with emigration, and his father's death. It is this last event that triggers his traumatic memories and his need to work through them by talking, acting out, and returning to Lebanon to bury his father. Wilfrid's very first words make clear the psychoanalytical imperatives that underlie the play's structure. Addressing a man we presume to be a psychiatrist, he says:
C'est en désespoir de cause, monsieur, que j'ai couru jusqu'ici pour venir vous voir. On m'a dit que vous étiez la bonne personne pour ce genre de choses, alors je n'ai pas hésité, et je suis venu [...]. Je suis devant vous. On m'a dit aussi que tout ce que j'aurais à faire, ce serait de vous raconter mon histoire. Vous dire un peu qui je suis. Alors je suis venu le plus vite que j'ai pu pour vous dire qui je suis, mais ça va être un peu difficile. (1, 13)
The bereaved son must begin his mourning by telling his complicated story. Wilfrid's history and identity are shaped by the sociopolitical divisions that led to civil war. Sorting through childhood memories and fantasies that materialize on stage, accompanied by his dead father who is still very present in his life, and aided by letters and photos that help him retrieve the past, Wilfrid pieces together the fragments of his personal history. Despite the opposition of his mother's wealthy family and the chaos of war, his parents were young and in love, so they got married. When his mother died giving birth to him, her family blamed his father who, in his grief, abandoned him to his maternal relatives and emigrated (55-56). His father's death has left him with a profound sense of loss and a need to understand the events that have shaped his life (60). Wilfrid has inherited his father's traumatized memory and his sleep is often disturbed by frightening dreams of his father's death. Now that the dream has become reality, he wants to overcome both nostalgia and forgetfulness in order to reconcile himself with the past and give his father a proper burial in his native land.
What Wilfrid finds when he arrives is a country devastated by years of war, a population reduced by violent death and emigration, cemeteries filled to capacity, fields filled with landmines, and vanquished survivors divided by the war. Many of the villagers he encounters have lost hope and can only vent their anger (65-82). Fortunately, he also meets several young people who have enough faith in humanity to envision the future now that the country is at peace. Mouawad uses these survivors to bear witness to the horrors of war. Young Simone declares, "On veut aller sur les grandes places, nous arrêter et raconter aux gens nos histoires" (93, see also 84, 91, 92, 99, 117). They need to do this "pour laisser au monde notre pauvre témoignage, pour que le monde sache ce qui s'est passé" (96). They all have terrifying stories to tell: born during a bombardment, the orphaned Simone is the sole surviving child in her village (71-72); Amé is guilt-ridden because he killed many people during the war, including his own father (95); Sabbé can't stop laughing hysterically since he was forced to witness the murder and dismemberment of his father (101-02); Joséphine's parents were both killed and their home burned (123). Not only do the traumatized survivors need to testify, they also need to mourn and memorialize the victims by naming them, as does Joséphine (103-09, 114-17). The enormity of the tragedy makes restful sleep impossible for Joséphine, who has taken it upon herself to be the collective memory of her nation. Mouawad compares Joséphine to another young survivor of internecine conflict, Antigone, who could not rest until her brother received a decent burial (115).
The ethical burden placed on those who survive historical trauma is to mourn the dead and bear witness, and this is exactly what Littoral does. Until the dead have been buried with ritual mourning ceremonies, and until their names have been inscribed in collective memory, those who survived the violence or observed it from afar will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders. They will have insomnia and wake up with nightmares, suffer from fits of hysterical laughter, feel suicidal because of guilt—all symptoms experienced by Mouawad's characters. Once the dead have been honored and buried, the survivors can move on into the future, which Mouawad again compares to the brightness of a clear day (132).
Littoral is a complex, postmodern play that uses self-reflexive and nonrealistic strategies to stage traumatic memories. The dead share the stage with the living because the survivors maintain their attachment to them and because the past continues to haunt the present. The past returns, for example, as Wilfrid reads the letters his father wrote but never sent to him years ago. Reading these letters leads to the re-enactment of what they recount: his father's love for his mother Jeanne, the opposition of her family to their marriage, and the bombardments they had to live through (51-63). Mouawad relieves the tragic seriousness of his play with some humour and by using amusing postmodern distancing techniques. Wilfrid's actions and words are often recorded by a film crew that exists only in his head but symbolizes his sense that he is an actor in a drama (15-17, 24-25, 76-77, etc.). The noble quest aspect of his journey is gently mocked by the fact that Wilfrid is accompanied by the imaginary Chevalier Guiromelan, an Arthurian knight who starred in his childhood fantasies (22-23, 28-33, 86-87, 99-100, etc.). With mock seriousness, Mouawad underscores the universal aspect of Wilfrid's quest by citing the passage of the Iliad in which Priam beseeches the victorious Achilles to return the corpse of Hector so that he may give him a proper burial (65). Humour and irony notwithstanding, Littoral belongs to the theatre of witness because it allows Mouawad and his protagonists the opportunity to memorialize the civil war and to "rendre à des vaincus leur dignité" (112). The final scene depicts the Father's burial on the shore of his native land: as he disappears beneath the waves of the sea, weighted down by sacks filled with the names of war victims, he promises to guard their memory and he urges Wilfrid and the survivors to go on living (133-35).
Directly or indirectly, the plays I have been looking at represent a specific historical event, but they are not history plays. There are no dates given, no naming of military or political leaders, no battles described, no explanation of the ideological or religious underpinnings of the conflict. Antoun, Farhoud, and Mouawad do not care about the historical record; they care about mourning the victims and empathizing with the trauma of the survivors. While Quebec theatre critics have taken note of the representation of the Lebanese war in plays by Lebanese immigrants,6 they have yet to see them as traumatic performances. Overcoming the silence and desire to forget that frequently accompany horror, death, pain, and the shame of survival, the protagonists of Antoun, Farhoud, and Mouawad testify to what they have experienced as they act out and work through their trauma. Their testimonials implicitly denounce violence and the absurd destructiveness of war at the same time they memorialize the victims. As they re-enact the trauma of war, they perform acts of memory and rituals of mourning which the audience, as a compassionate community of secondary witnesses, reacts to with empathetic unsettlement. While the playwrights and their protagonists are haunted by the past and by the spectres of the dead, their grief leads not to despair but to a reaffirmation of love. It seems clear that these plays belong to the theater of witness described by Karen Malpede, a new kind of politically engaged theatre that has evolved in response to the political horrors and mass migrations of our times.7
NOTES
1. Some of the titles of poetic texts published by Bernard Antoun since his arrival
in Quebec—Fêlures d'un temps I et II (1987-88), Fragments arbitraires (1989),
and À une absence (1992)—reflect the nature of his traumatized memory.
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2. Jeux de patience was given a public reading at the Centre des auteurs dramatiques
in April 1992. It was staged by the théâtre de La Manufacture in March
1994 and reprised in April 1995. An English translation of the play by Jill
MacDougall was performed in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in 1994
and 1995.
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3. The film, West Beirut, is about two adolescent boys living through the first years
of the war. It is a male version of the film imagined by Farhoud's Samira.
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4. The text of Apatride was depositied at the Centre des auteurs dramatiques in
November 1992.
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5. Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons was produced at the théâtre
d'Aujourd'hui in January 1994 and then Wedding Day of the Cromagnons, the
English translation by Shelley Tepperman, was staged by the Theatre Passe-
Muraille in Toronto in May 1996; Littoral was first performed at the théâtre
d'Aujourd'hui as part of the Festival de théâtre des Amèriques in June 1997
and then in France in the fall of 1998; Les Mains d'Edwige au moment de la
naissance was staged at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui in January 1999.
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6. Michel Denance's review of Journee de noces chez les Cromagnons called it a
"psychodrame familial" and stressed the theme of "l'absurditè de l'existence."
Diane Godin's article on Mouawad (Jeu 92) emphasized the religious
symbolism of Les Mains d'Edwige and Littoral, insisting on Mouawad's spiritual
aspect. Stèphane Lèpine explicitly warns against autobiographical interpretations
of Mouawad's plays, preferring to emphasize the possible influence of
Claude Gauvreau and Renè Ducharme on Mouawad. It seems to me that these
interpretations all ignore the obvious, deep felt anguish of the Lebanese born
authors. Michel Vaïs's review (Jeu 75) does recognize Farhoud's need to testify
to the horror of the civil war. His response to her witnessing, "Nous sommes
tous des Libanais" (152), proves the strong effect the play had on the audience.
Since Antoun's dramatic poem was not performed, there were no reviews.
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7. We should note that there have been dramatic works inspired by the war in El
Salvador (Suzanne Lebeau's Salvador) and in the former Yugoslavia (Requiem
pour Srebrenica, La Femme comme champs de bataille). See the special dossier
"Engagement nouvelle vague" in Jeu 94 (2000).
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