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Articles

Volume 34, Number 1 (2013)

Staging Memory in Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies: Archaeological Site or Poetic Venue?

Submitted
December 5, 2013
Published
2013-01-01

Abstract

This essay examines the forms of history and memory representation in Incendies, the 2004 play by Wajdi Mouawad, and its 2010 film version, directed by Denis Villeneuve. Incendies tells the story of a twin brother and sister on the quest to uncover the mystery of their mother’s past and the silence of her last years. A contemporary re-telling of the Oedipus myth, the play examines what kind of cultural, collective, and individual memories inform the journeys of its characters, who are exilic children. The play serves Mouawad as a public platform to stage the testimony of his childhood trauma: the trauma of war, the trauma of exilic adaptation, and the challenges of return. As this essay argues, when moved from one medium to another, Mouawad’s work forces the directors to seek its historical and geographical contextualization. If in its original staging, Incendies allows Mouawad to elevate the story of his personal suffering to the universals of abandoned childhood, to reach in its language the realms of poetic expression, and to make memory a separate, almost tangible entity on stage, then the 2010 film version by Villeneuve turns this play into an archaeological site to excavate the recent history of a single war-torn Middle East country (supposedly Lebanon), an objective at odds with Mouawad’s own view of theatre as a venue where poetry meets politics. Naturally the transposition from a play to a film presupposes a significant mutation of the original and raises questions of textual fidelity. This essay, however, does not propose a simple comparative analysis of two works, but aims to discuss: 1) how and to what effect the palimpsest history of Mouawad’s play is transferred onto the screen; and 2) how and to what effect its testimonial chronotope is actualized in Villeneuve’s film. As its theoretical lens, this paper uses Lubomir Doležel’s distinction between fictional worlds created in the work of literature based on a particular historical event and historical worlds evoked in the historical narrative documenting and analyzing this event.