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PRESENTS
Scorched
By Wajdi Mouawad
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Directed by Carey Perloff
American Conservatory Theater
February 16–March 11, 2012
WORDS ON PLAYS
vol. xviii, no. 4
Elizabeth Brodersen
Director of Education
Dan Rubin
Publications Manager
Michael Paller
Resident Dramaturg
Emily Hoffman
Publications and Dramaturgy Associate
Emily Means
Education and Publications Fellow
Kate Goldstein
Artistic Fellow
Made possible by
© 2012 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Table of Contents
1
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Scorched
4
Wajdi Mouawad: At Home with Words
by Dan Rubin
11
Finding Just “le Mot Juste”: Scorched Dramaturg
Beatrice Basso Interviews Translator Linda Gaboriau
Introduction by Emily Hoffman
20
Layers of Destruction: An Interview with Scenic
Designer Scott Bradley
by Emily Means
22
A Brief History of the Lebanese Civil War
by Emily Hoffman
29
The Price of Memory
by Emily Hoffman
35
A Life of Resistance: A Brief Biography of
Soha Bechara
by Kate Goldstein
40
Applications of Graph Theory in Scorched
by Dan Rubin
42
“Al-Atlal”: Poem of Love and Courage
by Dan Rubin
44
Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .
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iv
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis
of Scorched
Incendies premiered in France on March 14, 2003, at l’Hexagone Scène Nationale de
Meylan before receiving its North American premiere in Quebec on May 23, 2003,
at Théâtre de Quat’Sous (Montreal). Scorched, the English-language adaptation of
Incendies, received its world premiere in 2007 in a coproduction by Canada’s National
Arts Centre English Theatre (Ottawa) and Tarragon Theatre (Toronto). A.C.T.’s production of Scorched is the West Coast premiere.
Characters and Cast
alphonse lebel, doctor ............................. David Strathairn
simon, guide................................................. Babak Tafti
janine ........................................................... Annie Purcell
ralph, antoine, militiaman,
photographer........................................ Manoel Felciano
nawal at 14–40 ............................................ Marjan Neshat
jihane, nawal at 60, abdessamad ............. Jacqueline Antaramian
wahab, nihad ............................................... Nick Gabriel
nazira, janitor, malak, chamseddine ...... Apollo Dukakis
elhame, sawda ............................................ Omozé Idehenre
Setting
Canada and the Middle East; 50 years ago to present day.
Spoiler Alert!
Scorched is a mystery about the violent history of a fractured family. The play unfolds as
the pieces of the story are reassembled by its characters; therefore, the following synopsis
necessarily reveals some secrets. We have purposefully left out many details, including
the final resolution. If you would like to experience the thrill of discovery as the truth
is revealed onstage, however, you may prefer to refrain from reading the synopsis at all.
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1
Synopsis
act i. In Canada, notary Alphonse Lebel reads
the last will and testament of Nawal Marwan
to her twin children, Janine and Simon. To her
daughter, she leaves a khaki jacket with the
number 72 on its back; to her son, a red notebook. To both, she leaves the instruction to bury
her corpse naked in a hole, face down, with no
coffin or tombstone: there should be “no epitaph for those who don’t keep their promises . . .
for those who keep the silence.”
Nawal also leaves her children two envelopes: for Janine, a letter to give to her father
(whom the siblings have never known); for
Simon, a letter to give to his brother (whom
the siblings never knew existed). Only after
the letters have been delivered may a stone be
placed on their mother’s grave and engraved
with her name. Simon interprets the instructions as the requests of a madwoman (Nawal
had not spoken for the last five years of her life);
Janine, however, decides to fulfill her mother’s
final wishes. From here the play flashes back
and forth between the story of Nawal’s past life
in the Middle East and the twins’ present-day
search for the truth about their heritage.
Nawal’s story begins when she is 14, in love
with a refugee boy named Wahab and pregnant
with his child. She confesses the pregnancy to
her mother, Jihane, who tells Nawal that she
can either leave without a single piece of clothing on her body, or she can stay hidden in the
house and give up the baby when it is born. She
stays. Nawal gives birth to a son; before he is
taken away she slips a red clown nose in with
his swaddling clothes and swears to him: “No
matter what happens, I will always love you.”
After he is gone, she wanders around in a daze
until her grandmother, Nazira, on her deathbed,
makes her promise to break the family’s legacy
of poverty and anger by leaving the village and
learning to read, write, count, speak, and think.
2
Older and educated, Nawal thinks only of finding her son. As she begins the search
at an orphanage near her old village, she is stopped by another young woman, Sawda, a
refugee from Wahab’s village. She asks Nawal to teach her to read and write in exchange
for singing lessons.
Nawal and Sawda arrive at the orphanage only to find it deserted. They continue to
another orphanage, in Kfar Rayat, and find that it, too, has been emptied—by refugees
taking revenge for a militia attack. Nawal follows the refugees without Sawda. When
Sawda later tracks her down, Nawal reveals that she has witnessed an unspeakable horror: the slaughter of a busload of refugees who were doused in gasoline and set aflame
by the militia, from which she herself only narrowly escaped.
act ii. Janine travels to Nawal’s native village. She asks Abdessamad, a resident, if he
remembers her mother. He tells her the legends of “the woman who sings” and the love
of Nawal and Wahab, whose laughter can still be heard in the forest. He sends Janine to
Kfar Rayat. Janine arrives at the Kfar Rayat prison, which is now a museum. A tour guide
leads her to the cell once occupied by “the woman who sings”—prisoner number 72.
Now 40 years old, Nawal and Sawda are consumed by rage at the injustices they have
witnessed over many years of violence. They were editors of a resistance newspaper, but
their press was recently burned and their colleagues and contributors murdered. Nawal,
who has given up hope that she will ever find her son, hatches a plan to kill the paramilitary leader: she will infiltrate his home by serving as a teacher for his daughters so
she can get close enough to assassinate him.
Janine discovers that the museum janitor is the only person left who worked at the
prison while “the woman who sings” was held captive there. She shows him a photo of
Nawal and Sawda and the jacket with the number 72 on the back. He reveals that her
mother was “the woman who sings” and tells her Nawal’s story: after assassinating the
paramilitary leader, Nawal was imprisoned and repeatedly raped by the prison torturer,
Abou Tarek. Janine telephones her brother in hopes that this new information will
prompt him to take on his half of their mother’s request. Janine then meets Malak, a
peasant the janitor said was involved; he turns out to be the final piece of the puzzle
Janine has been putting together.
Nawal, age 60, stands before a tribunal and confronts Abou Tarek about the crimes
he committed against her and countless other women. Simon reads her speech from the
red notebook, and he decides to begin his quest to find his brother. Simon and Alphonse
travel first to Nawal’s native village, where they are set on a path that eventually leads
them to Chamseddine, who was once a leader in the resistance movement. Meanwhile,
a young sniper shoots passersby and takes photos of his kills. Chamseddine takes Simon
aside to explain Nawal’s cryptic last request, the reason for her silence, and her complicated connection to this sniper known as Nihad Harmanni.
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3
Wajdi Mouawad
At Home with Words
By Dan Rubin
Over the last decade, playwright, director, performer, and uncompromising advocate
for the arts Wajdi Mouawad has gained an international reputation as a major force in
Quebecois theater. He graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1991,
and by 1999 had solidified a reputation as one of Quebec’s rising stars, with numerous
celebrated productions and the artistic directorship of Montreal’s Théâtre de Quat’Sous,
where he served until 2004, to his credit. In 2002, the government of France named him
a Chevalier de l’Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005, he founded two companies specializing in the development of new work: Abé Carré Cé Carré in Montreal and
Au Carré de l’Hypoténuse in Paris, where he spends much of his time despite the fact
that in 2007 he began a five-year term as artistic director at the National Arts Centre
French Theatre (NAC) in Ontario. “In his writing as in his directing,” states the NAC in
the press release announcing his appointment, “Mr. Mouawad investigates the tension
between the importance of individual resistance and the no less essential renunciation
of the self. On this subject he is fond of quoting Kafka: ‘In the struggle between yourself
and the world, back the world.’”
Mouawad has lived with the tension between personal agency and unstoppable
world forces since his childhood, which he has summarized as “one war, two exiles, and
a death.” Born in Beirut, he was six when the Lebanese Civil War erupted in April 1975.
Hundreds of thousands fled the country, including Mouawad and his family. They emigrated to Paris. In 1983, unable to renew their French visas, they moved again, this time
to Quebec. Mouawad’s mother died from cancer a year later.
“What was hard [about growing up] was the silence,” Mouawad told Canada’s Globe
and Mail in 2002. His parents did not talk about the home they had left behind, or why
they had left it. For Mouawad, Lebanon was “a little garden behind the house in the
mountain. It’s the sun and a strangely happy time.” Later, he learned about the horrors
his family escaped—not from his parents but from reading French and U.S. historians.
“My parents weren’t people with the emotional armor to deal with a civil war,” said
Mouawad. “It was this silence that I have tried to name.”
Mouawad’s interest in the arts began as a fascination with the world of adults,
“people for whom art was happening.” Surrounded by adults who read, he began read-
4
ing voraciously. As a ten-year-old boy in Paris,
he discovered Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (in
which the protagonist awakes to find he has
mutated into a cockroach). “For the first time I
had the impression . . . that [what I was reading] wasn’t about somebody else, it was me. The
novel was about me. . . . [It] was like an electroshock.” He began writing Metamorphosis fan
fiction, in which his characters woke up as all
kinds of creatures. Kafka continues to inspire
him, as does the ancient Greek tragedian
Sophocles: “They give me oxygen so I can live.
I would be lost if I hadn’t found them.”
These literary idols set Mouawad apart
from his English-speaking classmates when
he attended the National Theatre School. He
had a penchant for antinaturalistic work, and
he watched with amusement as other students
“hauled in real fridges and couches to stage their
plays,” writes the Globe and Mail ’s Kate Taylor.
Mouawad was more attracted to work like
that of Quebecois multidisciplinary innovator
Robert Lepage: “With The Dragons Trilogy,
I understood that one could do anything in
the theater, that there was a freedom. Lepage
knows how to make theater with everything,
with nothing,” he said in 2010. Mouawad
solidified his reputation as a Lepage for a
new generation with the 1998 production of
his boisterous adaptation of Don Quixote. Ray
Conlogue reviewed the undertaking in the
Globe and Mail:
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“I don’t write plays
because I saw war, I
write plays because I
saw plays.”
Imagine a retelling of Don Quixote where the old dreamer’s horse is a mandolin
held between his legs, where a chorus of village folk dressed in costumes from
a variety of centuries magically accompany him on his adventures, where the
“windmills” are huge rotating lamps atop metal gantries, their stabbing beams
of light approximating the arms of windmills. Imagine further that the sun of
La Mancha is an orb of illuminated cotton cloth, its rays a collection of glass
bottles and old lamps stippled about its circumference. And that the Don’s
mortal enemy, the Knight of the Mirror, is an arrogant young man from our
own century who spouts Nietzsche as often as he does the words of Cervantes.
5
Imagine, in short, that you have seen one of the most brilliant theater productions of recent years, and one of the most incongruous mixtures of talent
possible in Montreal today.
Since then, the scope of Mouawad’s work has often been compared to that of Lepage,
but Mouawad is quick to point out the difference: “The plays of Robert are about
Quebecois trying to discover the world, in Japan, Russia, France, London. In all my
plays, there is the story of someone who discovers his origins are different from what he
thinks, and he tries to get back to those origins.”
Like his characters, Mouawad is trying to unearth his own origins—to name the
silence of his parents. When he wrote Journée de noces chez les Cro-Magnons (Wedding
Day at the Cro-Magnons) in the mid 1990s, memories of Lebanon were unlocked for him.
In this absurdist play, a family attempts to conduct a groomless wedding as a relentless
bombing campaign rocks their apartment. “I understood then that I had experienced
war,” Mouawad remembered in 2010. “For me, until that moment, war was only for
those who stayed in Lebanon. The memories came back. It was a shock.”
After Cro-Magnons came Littoral (Tideline, 1997), a metaphysical play centered
around a young Montreal man’s attempts to bury his father in their unnamed homeland.
It was the first play of what would become The Blood of Promises cycle, a tetralogy that
also includes Incendies (Scorched, 2003), Forêts (Forests, 2006), and Ciels (Skies, 2009). “It
was with Littoral that war entered my plays,” Mouawad explained in 2010. “War is where
the collective and the intimate collide. My question is how to be happy personally when
the collective isn’t working. The history of our inner lives is as complex as our collective
history. In the stories that I tell, I ask the questions: How far can we go? How do we
console? How do we find safety?”
With these questions in mind, he set about writing Incendies, perhaps his most
famous work to date, which has received more than 100 productions in multiple languages and was adapted into the Academy Award–nominated film by the same name. In
2000, Mouawad learned the story of Soha Bechara. Bechara, a Lebanese Christian with
pro-Muslim sympathies, had attempted to assassinate the commander of the Israelisupported South Lebanon Army during the Lebanese Civil War and was subsequently
incarcerated in the notorious Khiam prison for a decade. She was sentenced to solitary
confinement in a cell adjacent to the room where inmates were tortured. “For ten years,”
Mouawad told CBC News, “she heard the crying and pain of the tortured. To try not
to become mad, she began to sing. She sang the songs she knew—popular songs. The
people in the jail, who heard this woman but never saw her, called her The Woman Who
Sings. She gave them hope and courage to survive.” Bechara became Mouawad’s inspiration for Nawal, the mother whose history is uncovered by her children in Incendies.
Mouawad created Incendies over an eight-month rehearsal period, shaping it around
the actors with whom he was working. It was a process that had proved successful for
Littoral: “I discovered that with your words, friends, and thoughts you can create a story
that tells your pain, bares your soul,” he said in 2005. “I had the feeling that the story
gave me life in the same way my mother gave me life. With [Littoral], I learnt to under-
6
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stand, to think, to make theater: to discover who I am and what I want to say.” In the
short essay “A Ruthless Consolation,” which introduces the script of Scorched, he credits
his original cast with revealing his characters to him:
Before a single line was written, we talked about consolation. The stage as the
scene of ruthless consolation. A ruthless consolation. For me, that was a first
step into the tunnel. The guiding spirit. An intuition. Words began to surface.
I set out. I set out into the darkness. The actors’ voices guided me. One day,
I asked them: “What do you want to do onstage? What do you want to say?
What fantasy would you like to act out?” . . . It was amusing and touching to
see everyone admit their childhood or teenage fantasies, but every desire contains an undeniable truth, and every desire, expressed so simply sitting around
a table one day in May, became a lead I never would have imagined alone. Not
everything was taken into consideration, but those wishes often led to solutions
as I developed the plot.
The most surprising example is the idea of the clown nose. Isabelle Roy, who
would play the youngest Nawal, admitted she’d love to play an unfunny clown.
There was a huge gap between young Nawal and an unfunny clown, but the
idea of a clown took an unexpected turn and became one of the pivotal points
of the story.
7
In early drafts of Incendies, Mouawad attempted to be more overtly political than in
earlier plays by including the nationalities of his characters. But it did not work well. “I
tried to say the real names: Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians, Lebanese,” he told the Globe
and Mail, “but every time . . . the poetry and the theater stray far away from me. I stop
and they come back. . . . Every time I speak about a Middle East tragedy, I can’t name it.”
This political reticence has been prevalent since his first play, Willy Protagoras enfermé
dans les toilettes (Willy Protagoras Locked in the Bathroom), which he wrote in his early 20s.
In the play, Willy refuses to come out of the bathroom until guests who have overstayed
their welcome leave his family’s apartment. “The visitors,” Taylor interprets, “are obviously the Palestinians in Lebanon, while Mouawad says the apartment building represents the Middle East and the neighbors who eventually break down the wall between
their apartment and Willy’s represent Syria. But he points out that the play’s effect—its
ability to shock without preaching—depends on never naming those places.” Incendies
journeys to Lebanon, but in refusing to specify its setting, Mouawad is able to create a
mythical representation of his homeland, while not distracting his audience with indictments of any particular party.
What does one do once suffering arrives? This is the question Mouawad explores
most in his plays. “More often than not,” he has said, “you have to integrate suffering
into your life. Become it. And let it move you into another country, so that it can become
something else.” For him, suffering has become theater. But while he transforms it into
drama, grief is not the basis of his art:
I prefer to think that poetry comes from itself. We try to write poetry because
we read poetry. I started by reading stories, novels; Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud.
But also a lot of German poets, Hölderin, Novalis, Rilke; Russians like
Turgenev, Pushkin. . . . All of them were extremely powerful, important poets
for me. It’s art for art’s sake, not anything else; I don’t write plays because I saw
war, I write plays because I saw plays. War is one of the elements that I work
with because I have it at hand, but it’s not what formed me. What formed me
was school, art, other people, talking with my friends about changing the world
when I was 20 years old.
Mouawad often wonders what kind of man he would have become if he had stayed
in Lebanon. Far from considering himself above the fray, he is convinced that he would
have been consumed just as the rest of the country was. In 2006 he wrote:
I belong, as a whole, to all this violence. I look at the land of my father and
mother and I see myself, me: I could kill and I could agree with both sides, six
sides, twenty sides. I could invade and I could terrorize. I could defend myself
and I could resist and to top it all off, if I were one or if I were the other, I
would know how to justify each one of my actions, and justify the injustice that
fills me, I would find the words with which to express how they slaughter me
so, how they remove all possibility for me to live.
8
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Even in his painful fantasies of a life that could have been, Mouawad eventually chooses
words as his weapon of choice, but he questions, “If my parents didn’t leave Lebanon,
would I be making theater?”
His parents did leave, however, and Mouawad found in the theater an outlet for their
silence—and a home for his words—and he is ready to defend it. In 2008 he famously
wrote a seething open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, scolding him
for the federal government’s cuts to arts funding: “I wanted to tell you,” it reads, “no
government, in showing contempt for artists, has ever been able to survive. Not one.
One can, of course, ignore them, corrupt them, seduce them, buy them, censor them, kill
them, send them to camps, spy on them, but hold them in contempt, no. That is akin to
rupturing the strange pact, made millennia ago, between art and politics.” In justifying
his rhetoric to CBC News, he explained, “We’ve begun to think that art is not important,
that politics is the business of reality and the artists are dreamers. It’s important to take
these opportunities to make our voices heard.”
Through his work, Mouawad has been making his voice heard since the 1990s,
dramatizing the experience of first-generation exiles in a series of epic dramas. Forever
haunted by what his parents left unsaid, he has tried to create a forum in which ideas,
pain, and joy can be shared, because theater has the power to connect people:
9
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The theater is a live place, where everyone—actors, audience members—are
alive. It’s not like the movies, where some are dead, maybe, and where those
that you watch no longer look like what you are seeing. In the theater, everyone
is there. There are people who are going to die, in front of other people who
are going to die, but who are alive at the same time. Moreover, these people are
gathered around this very particular thing, which is the word. From the beginning, this word is not trying to sell me something, to convince me to vote for
someone or believe an idea. This word exists apart from all desire for profit. It
uses the fundamental notion of being together: I listen to someone who speaks
to me. Theater brings together people who have come to listen to a cry that will
upset them. This freedom seems fundamental to me today.
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10
Finding Just “le Mot Juste”
Scorched Dramaturg Beatrice Basso Interviews Translator Linda Gaboriau
Introduction by Emily Hoffman
The mark of a successful translation is that it leaves no mark; best if the audience forgets entirely that they are watching a work originally written in another language. To
achieve that effect, conscientious translators spend vast amounts of time looking for the
most effective and evocative equivalents for every word, sentence, joke, and idiom in
the original text. Linda Gaboriau, the Montreal-based translator of Wajdi Mouawad’s
Scorched, has devoted her life to the search for le mot juste (the right word), distinguishing
herself over the years with beautiful English translations of the most prominent living
Quebecois playwrights.
Originally from Boston, Gaboriau moved to Montreal in 1963 to study French language and literature at McGill University. Drawn to the “great cultural and political
significance” of Quebec, she made Montreal her permanent home and began to work
as a theater critic for the Montreal Gazette, the city’s English-language daily newspaper,
and as a radio host and producer for the CBC and Radio-Canada. She happened upon
her first translating project in 1968 while working as a cultural journalist for the CBC
program Quebec Now, when she translated an excerpt of Michel Tremblay’s monumental
breakthrough drama Les belles-soeurs. Her first full-length translation came in 1975 when
she was working as theater officer for the Canada Council for the Arts, responsible for
Quebecois theater and theater for young audiences.
Since 1975, Gaboriau has translated more than 100 plays, including the work of
Daniel Danis, Michel Marc Bouchard, Tremblay, and, most recently, Mouawad. She
has received many awards in Canada and internationally and has twice been honored
with the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation: first in 1996 for
Danis’s Stone and Ashes and again in 2010 for Mouawad’s Forests. Gaboriau has won the
trust of many Quebecois dramatists, earning a reputation as a translator whose loyalties
lie very much with the playwright. “[My] reason for loving translation,” she has said, “is
the encounter with the most intimate and, often, most creative and original inner voices:
it is the privilege of working with writers who have made significant contributions to
theater.”
In addition to her widely produced translations, Gaboriau has made significant
contributions to theater with the programs she has founded and chaired for translation
11
and new-play development. In the 1980s she introduced the first workshop and playdevelopment program for Quebecois playwrights at Montreal’s Le Centre d’Essai des
Auteurs Dramatiques (CEAD); in 1999 she established an annual residency program
for translators and playwrights at Tadoussac, Quebec; and from 2002 to 2007 she served
as the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. With
these programs, Gaboriau has been a major force in ensuring that the work of Quebecois
playwrights is known to the English-speaking world and in promoting the art of literary
translation. In her own translations, she is adamant about maintaining the particularity
of Quebecois voices, even as she makes the work accessible to audiences elsewhere: “I
don’t think underscoring the otherness in a self-conscious way, or even allowing it to
be too apparent, is necessarily a good choice. But I also do not think that we have to
pander to audience identification, for example, by always transplanting it to Ontario, or
the eastern seaboard of the United States.”
Gaboriau is no stranger to A.C.T., which mounted a production of her translation
of Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, starring associate artists Olympia
Dukakis and Marco Barricelli, in 2002. She returned in 2010 for a workshop of Scorched,
and, before rehearsal began this winter, she spoke in a Skype interview with A.C.T.
artistic associate and Scorched dramaturg Beatrice Basso (an accomplished translator
herself ) about her experience translating Quebecois playwrights, Mouawad’s work in
general, and Scorched in particular.
Tell us about your relationship with Wajdi Mouawad’s work.
Scorched is the second play in a tetralogy; the first was translated by another Montreal
translator. When the second play came up I think she wasn’t available because of some
film work, so they were looking for someone else. Wajdi approached me because he
was aware of how much work I had done in the theater, so it was on the basis of my
reputation.
And then he asked you to translate the third play, Forests?
Yes, and I will be working on the fourth play, Skies (Ciels), this year. Wajdi has these
larger-than-life themes that run through his works, and he uses the backdrop of the elements. So the first play was called Tideline (Littoral), the second was Scorched (Incendies),
and then Forests (Forêts). Wajdi’s main influence is Greek tragedy. He is always very
much aware of the fact that the work should be universal and in some way timeless. That
is why he doesn’t name the country where Scorched takes place. Everyone assumes and
various allusions in the play conjure up Lebanon, where he was born, but he wanted it
to be about the ravages of war in general, and about the Middle East in a broader sense.
He tries to find drama that goes beyond a specific setting. He does not want this play
to just be the product of a Lebanese expatriate playwright. He is looking for universality.
12
How does Scorched fit in the tetralogy?
The first three plays are very much about a
quest for identity, an identity that in some way
has been tainted or blurred by events—obviously in the case of Scorched the events are
related to war. In the first play, only indirectly
is the search for identity related to war: it is the
search of a young man whose father died and
who wants to go back to the father’s homeland
to bury him. He tries to retrace who the man
was. The first three plays are very much about
the quest for personal identity in a world where
identity has been either damaged or totally
uprooted, or perhaps blurred by the many
forces at work in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries: migration, exile, war.
In the introduction to the fourth play, Wajdi
says that the quest for individual identity
involves looking back, but that in his fourth
play he has chosen to no longer look back but
to look at what lies ahead for future generations.
It’s interesting that he wrote this play about two
years ago and now his daughter is two years old,
so he made that decision as he was becoming a
father. The question of identity is very necessary in the life of someone whose roots have
been uprooted, but it is not enough to prepare
the world for future generations.
Is there something about Quebecois
playwrights that links them together? And
within that, what is compelling to you about
Wajdi’s writing?
First of all, I should say that Wajdi became the
extraordinary theater artist he is in Quebec.
His family left Lebanon when he was quite
young. They emigrated to France, and then
from France to Quebec when Wajdi was in his
early teens. He did his theater training at the
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13
National Theatre School in Montreal, which has a French and an English section; he
was in the French section.
Having said that, it is really the fact that he has lived on three continents that
makes Wajdi different from other Quebec playwrights, because his life, his experience,
his background span three worlds: we are dealing with North America, Europe, and
the Middle East. That makes him quite different from many Quebec playwrights I’ve
translated.
What they do have in common that I always find very exciting is a great love of
language onstage. They do not shy away from exploiting the many levels of language:
rhetorical moments, the kind you have in Greek tragedy or sometimes Shakespeare; they
don’t shy away from poetic language; and they also have a very non-American sense of
contemporary drama. So it is an interesting mix.
It is slightly tricky for North American theaters because sometimes American
actors find this much talk unusual if they have been trained in naturalism, psychology,
the backstory. If that is their approach to the script, it is not sufficient to render many
Quebec playwrights effectively. If you’re delivering their work with naturalistic tone and
body language, it can come off sounding very verbose. But in fact it is Poetic, with a
capital “p.” So it is quite a challenge for a translator. I don’t believe in diluting the dialogue of the playwright. I would not go towards what feels like familiar “kitchen-sink
naturalism,” because many of these plays, and especially Wajdi’s work, are not that. But
I am aware of the fact that if I succumb to the temptation to be perhaps as flowery as
the original French, I might alienate the actors and the audience. Without wanting to
dilute, I have to be aware that there might be a tiny toning down in order for it to ring
a bit more familiar to audiences.
Is there something fundamental in the French that needs an implicit adjustment
when translating? I know that the romance languages tend to be wordier and more
repetitive than English.
That is true of French. And it is a real challenge for the translator. I often refer to the
work of a drama translator as that of a servant of two masters, because we have to be
loyal to the audience and to the cast and the director who will produce the piece, and yet
my first loyalty is to the writer. For two reasons. For one, I believe that “the medium is
the message,” as the wonderful Canadian media pundit Marshall McLuhan said. There
is some message in the medium the playwright chooses, and I feel that in the case of
Wajdi the medium is not naturalistic; it is sometimes rhetorical, often lyrical; it is very
much in keeping with his admiration of Greek tragedy and of drama that goes beyond
specific styles and countries. So I feel some of the playwright’s message resides in the
choice of style.
The other reason is that I feel that audiences in North America in this day and age
deserve to be introduced, to some extent, to the Other, to the Foreigner. That’s become
a dirty word, but if there is something slightly unfamiliar, something that comes from a
different place, a different way of seeing the world, a different way of speaking, I feel that
14
is an additional benefit. In recent literary translations, say of Chekhov into French and also
into American English, there is a tendency—
rather than disguising the original in order to
make it more familiar—to go with some of the
rhythms and weltanschauung (the way of looking at the world) of the original writers. We
shouldn’t be afraid in the theater to join in this
trend—maybe not quite a trend—but this way
of looking at the process of sharing literature
from other cultures.
In his introduction to Scorched, Wajdi talks
about the eight-month process he shared
with actors to create the play. You weren’t a
part of that process, but did you see Scorched
in French before you started translating? Did
you know any of the actors who were in the
English premiere in Canada?
Yes to both questions. I saw the play twice: once
in a 200-seat theater and once in a 700-seat
theater, both productions directed by Wajdi.
Some of his plays do reveal input from the
actors coming from improvisational moments
in the rehearsal hall. But I should say that most
of the final writing is Wajdi’s, inspired by actor
improvisations. The real input of the actors is
present in the elaboration and development of
the production style. Wajdi is an amazing director, very innovative, often iconoclastic, and he
needs to get his actors on board over a period
of months to make sure they are ready for suddenly being showered onstage, for instance.
I did get to hear my translation in a rehearsal
hall. I worked for a day with director Richard
Rose in Toronto several months before the cast
went into rehearsal. Some of the actors had
already been chosen for the production, and
others just came in for the day. So I didn’t have
the benefit of working deeply with the cast
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15
who was going to create the English premiere, but we did have that day’s workshop
(much as we did later at A.C.T. with different actors), so I could hear my English text
and fine-tune it and respond to questions and comments. That is always very useful. In
translating theater I never feel that I have produced the production draft until I’ve heard
it read by the actors.
If you have doubts or questions for the writer about the text, do you ask him or her?
Oh, yes. I am very fortunate because for the most part I translate living playwrights and
novelists and many of them live in Montreal, so I have an opportunity to talk to them.
Of course, now Wajdi is living in Europe and commuting only occasionally to Ottawa
as artistic director [of the French Theatre] of the National Arts Centre.
Did you ask a lot of questions of Wajdi?
Since Scorched was my first [translation with him], I asked a lot of questions that were
more general: about his approach to language, his approach to performance and theater,
what he wanted his characters to exude and embody onstage. There were not too many
lexical questions. My French and my Quebecois are very good. Occasionally when I
translate from Spanish I feel I have one hand tied behind my back as I try to wrestle
the work into English, and that is because I don’t know spontaneously the other words
the writer could have chosen. But in French for the most part I know the other words
they could have used. So I can ask questions like, “Why did you choose this more exotic
word?” Sometimes I ask for the tone implicit in a word.
There is a wonderful Canadian novelist, Ann-Marie MacDonald, who came to
the Banff International Literary Translation Centre when I was the director there and
worked for a week with her Israeli translator. She found the experience illuminating and,
quoting Darwin, she said, “God is in the details,” and added, “A good translation is in
the details.”
What is a good translation? There are many answers to that question beyond the
obvious general notion of fidelity to the meaning. To do justice to the original writer’s
style and intention, it is essential to understand his choices in detail. That is why it is
important to meet with the writer, even if it is only for a couple of hours. To have that
personal contact. Then if you send the draft to the writer, you can have a much more
involved email exchange about questions he or she might have about the translation, and
you can also fine-tune with them when even in the final stages of your process you are
still not sure about whether you’ve found the most dynamic, the most effective choices.
You mentioned tone, and in Scorched I am struck by the way the intensity of the
situation is tempered—without any apology—by humor. Did that surprise you, and
how hard is it to recreate that in English?
It doesn’t surprise me because I think it goes back to what makes Quebec playwrights
perhaps unusual. That mixing of genres is quite present in the work of many Quebec
16
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playwrights. In the middle of a tragedy there can be moments of humor—often black
humor, but humor. We see it in English with Shakespeare, of course. I find it tricky
to do that segue effectively in English. I just have to go with it and try to ensure that
the sudden switch of tone is not too jarring. For example, the notary in Scorched is
Shakespeare’s fool.
The notary is the perfect example of the difficulty of translating humor, malapropisms,
and word games. One example I found interesting is that, in talking about the
difficulty of finding a character named Chamseddine, the notary says of him: “He’s
like Shakespeare’s Skylock [sic].” And in the original it reads, he’s like “Caracas in La
Passion.” Do you remember how you got from the original to the translation here?
The image notary Lebel has in mind, but garbled, is Barnabas and the Passion—
Barnabas being the saint (along with Paul) often associated with Christ’s Passion. Lebel
scrambles some syllables, confusing B’s with C’s and comes up with Caracas (the final
syllable being the same but the key consonants are changed). So I went to Shakespeare
and butchered the name of one of his best-known characters.
Did you often have to reinvent the notary’s mistakes to make them work in English?
I had to reinvent virtually all of them. For example, Lebel says, “la mer à voir” (“seeing the sea”), when the proper expression in French is “la mer à boire” (“drinking the
sea”—something impressive). He remembers an expression, halfway, and confuses a few
syllables. So I thought of something impressive, a major achievement/undertaking, like
17
the Taj Mahal, and butchered a couple of syllables, while leaving the image more or less
in the same part of the world, so it reads: “It wasn’t the Taj Nepal.”
The other challenge you probably encountered is that one of the characters, Nihad, is
supposed to speak bad English, and he does so in the original French. You opted to
keep that in the English text. Could you explain how that convention works?
That’s very tricky because basically what I decided to do is assume that subliminally
the audience would understand that all of these characters are speaking to each other
in French. They are from Montreal, they go to a country in the Middle East where
French is spoken, as is the case in Lebanon, and so we hear them in English the way
we hear Chekhov in English, knowing the characters are speaking Russian to each
other. So when Nihad speaks broken English, we have to assume that these people have
been speaking the lingua franca, which is French: we go from fluent English to broken
English because in the case of fluent English it is understood that they are speaking
French.
Were you tempted to set the play somewhere other than Quebec? I ask because the
original play already features two worlds: the West and the Middle East. For an
American audience, wouldn’t the Quebecois context add an extra layer of distance?
Could you have set it in the United States?
For the reasons we discussed earlier, I think it is very important that it is Quebec,
especially with Wajdi Mouawad, a playwright whose work spans continents. There is a
French context, just north of the border, that many inhabitants south of the border are
not even aware of. It’s a country within a country. The French-speaking population of
Quebec is larger than Denmark, or Austria: it’s a country with a political, social, and
cultural identity that is distinct. Moreover Wajdi includes a specific North American
experience that is autobiographical and his identity is at the heart of the play. Also . . .
let’s open our stage to others, to other cultures. It doesn’t have to be all from our own
backyard for us to be interested in a person’s tragedy.
The play centers so much on the power of words and the power of silence. There’s
nothing like the act of translating to remind us of both the fragility of words and of
their potential. As the translator, how does that feel?
Awful! [Laughing] It just reminds you, there’s nothing more to say—Wajdi has said it
all in the script and the translator’s responsibility is to find le mot juste, the right word,
and that task is so great. The weighing of every word is really sometimes a huge weight.
I feel a great sense of responsibility.
18
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There is almost always something lost in translation, but I am curious if you feel you
ever gain something by translating material into a language that has its own unique
richness. Can things sometimes work better in English?
It happens every so often, but the translator is rarely the judge of that. It is true that
sometimes writers who have an opportunity to consult with their translators often say
that a translator’s questions really take a magnifying glass to their style and process,
which can be extremely enlightening. That is why occasionally a writer will say, “This
is better in translation!”
As a translator you have to go through a kind of alchemy, in which you really distill
the essence of what the writer intends to say, and only then can you put the veneer on it.
But first it’s the essence you need to get at, before you can make that successful choice.
Sometimes the essence of a moment or a phrase can be a tiny bit blurred in the original.
Translation can be a sort of illumination, if you can glean that. It can cast a clear light
on a moment, and that can be very rewarding.
19
Layers of Destruction
An Interview with Scenic Designer Scott Bradley
By Emily Means
Scenic designer Scott Bradley says that he prefers “huge, iconic, metaphoric places” to
sets that mimic real life. Since studying at Yale School of Drama, he has become a
master at inventing stage spaces that echo the emotions at the heart of the plays he has
designed. He is therefore the ideal collaborator for Scorched, a poetic journey that traverses continents—from North America to the Middle East and back again—and the
latter decades of the 20th century. A week before rehearsals began at A.C.T., Bradley
was kind enough to talk to us about how he met the aesthetic and practical demands of
this evocative play.
Scorched has an enormous scope. When you first sat down with the text, how did you
begin to design the numerous locations the script calls for?
The set is more all-serving now than it was previously. At one point, there were huge
piles of destruction, and that really got polished down. Now it’s more minimalistic: just
what we need. A suggestion of things. As I started to refine, the set became less literally
about place and time and more sculptural, so that [a single set] can serve everything.
Even if you’re not designing specific locations, it’s important for audiences to be able
to orient Scorched ’s action in time. How are you differentiating between the different
threads of the story, especially the ones that play out in the past?
We have for our use and delight a black scrim and a white scrim. Images can be easily
seen in silhouette against the black scrim, or disappear suddenly—they can blend into
the black. Janine will be talking about her mother in the present, when suddenly Sawda
appears looking for Nawal in the past. We’re able to reveal moments and make them
disappear instantly.
We also play a lot with contrasting darks and lights (the costumes will do that, as
well). Sometimes the set will be quite bright, sometimes quite silhouetted; we’ll have all
these different layers.
20
So much of Scorched has to do with layers of memory, with shifting focus from
something in the forefront of the story to something in the background.
The set tells that story through its ability to reveal moments, make them go away, and
show them again in a different, more literal light.
Would you call the set wholly abstract?
Well, it’s definitely not a literal arrangement. Scorched visits places that have been
destroyed over many years, so there’s sort of an archeological feel to everything: a layering of destruction. There are also leftover vertical elements from the idea of establishing
this beautiful forest of white trees [where the love story between Nawal and Wahab
begins]. They fly in and out so we can get rid of them quickly, and they float in space,
which was really important to me. They’re not literal trees; they’re pretty much just
square vertical masts.
The trees became an important element for you?
Yes. Since they’re white, with the use of the white scrim they can slowly appear and
then disappear, which will allow for beautiful transitions without having to move a
lot of stuff. The lighting is really important for that effect. [Scorched lighting designer]
Russell [Champa] and I have worked lots together, so he’s used to picking out areas of
my scenery to exploit or hide.
When the trees aren’t there, the set has this feeling of architectural leftovers. I envision it as a lot of big matches that have been burnt and blown out—from black down to
sooty nothing, remnants of a building. That’s in juxtaposition to the beautiful, pristine
white of the trees that come and go.
Costume Designer Sandra Woodall on Scorched
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21
A Brief History of the Lebanese
Civil War
By Emily Hoffman
Scorched travels to an unnamed land, as much Sophocles’ Greece as it is any contemporary place ravaged by the relentless logic of violence and revenge. Yet Wajdi Mouawad’s
fictive terrain has a real-world correlate in his home country, Lebanon, which, between
1975 and 1990, suffered a civil war that left more than 100,000 dead and a million (a
quarter of the population) displaced.
The Lebanese Civil War was so sustained and complex a conflict that there is disagreement among scholars as to whether it can even rightly be called a war, or whether
it might not in fact be a series of wars, or a warring period. In Lebanon, it is popularly
referred to as “the war of the others,” drawing attention to the foreign powers—Israel,
Syria, and the Palestinians—who participated in the fighting both directly and indirectly. Whatever its label, the Lebanese Civil War began as an ideological conflict but
it devolved into a self-perpetuating miasma of violence that saw countrymen, formerly
allied groups, and families turn on each other.
The Roots of Conflict
In the space of just six days in 1967, Israel succeeded in displacing 300,000 Palestinians
in the third major war between Israel and its Arab neighbors since Israel declared independence in 1948. From the West Bank and Gaza, tens of thousands of the displaced
streamed over Israel’s northern border into Lebanon, where they joined Palestinian exiles
from the first Arab-Israeli war—referred to in Israel as the War of Independence—in
20-year-old refugee camps that had begun to take on an air of permanence. They would
be joined by still more of the dispossessed in the Black September of 1970, when the
king of Jordan violently expelled his nation’s Palestinians (who had also fled Israel in
1948 and 1967), as well. By 1970 the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), headed
by Yasser Arafat, had effectively established a Palestinian state-within-a-state in southeast Lebanon, making up almost 15 percent of the Lebanese population.
The Palestinian presence in Lebanon polarized an already deeply divided nation.
On the surface, the division appeared to be between Christians and Muslims. Certainly,
the Maronite Christians (the dominant Christian sect in Lebanon, who took refuge on
22
!
Mount Lebanon to avoid persecution during
the Byzantine era) and the Druze (a secretive
1.'!5
and persecuted Muslim sect) had never lived
easily together. Fighting erupted in 1953 after
Maronite President Camille Chamoun refused
Syria
to denounce the Western powers that had
!*+*
attacked Egypt earlier that year during the Suez
Crisis. Lebanon’s Muslims looked to Egypt’s
.charismatic leader, Gamal Abdel Nassar, as a ! ċƫ!
beacon of pan-Arab nationalism—a movement
Israel
that hoped to unite the entire Middle East into
one Arab nation in a return to the region’s pre
+. *
Ottoman glory. The Maronites, by contrast,
found their identity in the West—a result of
the 25-year post–World War i French mandate of Lebanon, which had left an indelible
European stamp on the country. The conflict,
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then, was as much between Arab nationalism
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and Westernization as it was between Muslims
and Christians.
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The early 1970s in Lebanon, and in Beirut in
particular, were electric. Rapid modernization,
the building of roads, the radicalizing presence
of the PLO, and the lifting of the ban on political parties with extraterritorial associations all led to an explosion of political groups: the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP),
the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), and
the Ba’ath Party on the left; the Phalange Party, the Franjieh Party, and the National
Liberal Party (NLP) on the right, to name a few. Thousands of students joined the
various associations, participating in the city’s escalating political life, which was increasingly divided between the predominantly—though not entirely—Muslim left and the
Christian right. In very broad strokes, the leftists stood for socialism, pan-Arab nationalism, a government that represented the country’s Muslim majority, and the rights of
the Palestinian people, while the rightists were populist, Lebanese nationalist, and in
favor of the expulsion of the Palestinians, whom they saw as destabilizing intruders.
As the left and right in Beirut clashed ideologically over the Palestinian presence, the
PLO clashed militarily with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in the south: the PLO used
its strategic position at the border to launch attacks on Israel, and the Israelis responded
with reprisals that penetrated further and further into Lebanon. The reprisals caused the
Lebanese Army to strike out against the Palestinian fighters, though the strikes were
met with protest and resistance from the pro-Palestinian left.
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23
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Phase I: Descent into Violence
The militarization of the conflict in the south crept north, contaminating Beirut’s burgeoning political ecosystem. To keep in step with the PLO, the political parties began
to arm themselves. After that, it was only a matter of time. On April 13, 1975, a clash
between the Palestinians and the ultra-right-wing Christian Phalangists plunged the
country into civil war. Pierre Gemayal, the founder of the Phalange Party, was attending the consecration of a Maronite church in a Christian suburb of East Beirut when
a car pulled up and gunmen shot and killed four people. Assuming the gunmen were
Palestinian, the Phalange Party militia retaliated later that day by attacking a bus of
Palestinians and their Muslim allies who were singing nationalist songs, killing 27 and
wounding 19. The Ain El Remmaneh massacre, as it was called, set off a series of bloody
reprisals that comprised the first phase of the war.
24
The Lebanese political system, at base a power-sharing compromise among sects, fell
apart as soon as the militias took up arms against each other. Rule of law disintegrated
as the nation cracked into its constituent pieces. The national army was not sent in to
intervene for fear it would split along sectarian lines; before long, it did anyway. The
leftist groups united as the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) and were joined by
the PLO after devastating attacks by the Maronite Lebanese Forces in the Muslim
slums of Quarantia and Maslakh. By March 1976, the LNM-PLO had gained the upper
hand. The conflict looked as if it would draw to a close with a defeat of the Maronites
until Syria stepped in to support them on May 31, 1976.
Phase II: Syrian Intervention
Syria’s motives are not easy to understand, particularly in hindsight, knowing that its
intervention would allow the conflict to drag on for another 12 years. For a heavily
Muslim, Arab-nationalist country like Syria, an LNM-PLO–led Lebanon would seem
to make a natural ally—in fact, Syria had been supplying the LNM-PLO with weapons
since the war began. However, Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, worried that a strong
PLO in Lebanon would destabilize the region and possibly draw Syria into a conflict
with Israel. More importantly, al-Assad foresaw that it would benefit Syria to end the
conflict through intervention. Playing an active role in finding a resolution could gain
Syria control of Lebanon once the dust settled.
The Syrian military intervention in support of the Maronites reenergized the discouraged right-wing fighters, who went on to slaughter 3,000 Palestinians at the Tal
Zaatar camp in a 52-day siege in the summer of 1976. The Syrians were eventually
able to negotiate a truce, which left the country carved up among the warring factions:
Syria in the northeast (along its own border), the Maronites north of Beirut, Beirut
functionally split into two cities (the Christian East and the Muslim West), and the
LNM-PLO alliance setting up a proto-state in the south. In this period, an estimated
600,000 Lebanese fled from the south to escape vicious fighting between Maronites
and Palestinians at the border. Syria’s intervention was hardly ideological—by the end
of 1977, al-Assad had turned his back on the Maronites and came to the aid of the
Palestinians once again.
Phase III: Israeli Intervention
On March 11, 1977, in what became known as the Coastal Road Massacre, Palestinian
operatives attacked a bus on a Haifa-Tel Aviv road, killing 35 Israelis. Operation Litani
began three days later; the IDF had soon taken half of South Lebanon, killing a thousand and displacing a hundred times that many. The Israelis stayed for only a year, but
before they left they established a proxy regime in the south: the South Lebanon Army
(SLA), comprised primarily of Phalangists. The SLA, in later years, operated the infamous Khiam prison, which appears in Scorched under the name Kfar Rayat.
25
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By this point in the war, infighting had begun. The Christian-Muslim, rightistleftist conflict, muddied by foreign involvement and the self-perpetuating logic of violence, splintered into intercommunal battles. In Beirut, the Christian Phalangist militia
fought against the Christian Franjieh clan, leading to the murder of the Franjieh family.
Amal (the powerful party of the newly urbanized Shia Muslims who had resettled after
fleeing fighting in the south) battled Palestinian guerillas and other leftist groups. Civil
society in Lebanon was destroyed, and in its place rose a society of the militia, a society
of street violence. The economy was fueled by war, with foreign aid flowing to rival
militias and militia leaders who amassed wealth in the manner of mob bosses.
The success of the SLA in securing the south triggered a further-reaching invasion
by Israel in 1982. The invasion began with Operation Big Pines, which cleared the border areas of remaining Palestinian operatives. Then, the IDF embarked on Operation
Peace for Galilee, an enormously ambitious campaign designed to rid Lebanon of the
PLO once and for all and to install Phalangist Bashir Gemayal as president. Israel’s
actions in Lebanon in 1982 have received more international scrutiny and condemnation than any other military engagement in Israeli history. The summer of 1982 brought
26
a 63-day siege of West Beirut—with all-day firebombing and the disruption of water
and food supplies—which left 17,000–19,000 Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians dead,
almost all of them civilians.
By September 1, 1982, around 14,000 Palestinian combatants had left Lebanon.
Gemayal was seated as president on August 23, but he was assassinated just three weeks
later with a bomb planted by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Spreading rumors
that the PLO was behind the assassination and publicly claiming that a large number
of PLO operatives still remained in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the IDF
allowed the Phalangist milita to enter the camps to wreak their misdirected revenge.
The IDF blocked the entrances to the camps as the Phalangists slaughtered thousands
of Palestinian civilians. News of the Sabra and Shatila massacre—including photos of
rows of dead children—spread quickly and was met with international outrage.
Phase IV: The War Drags On to Its End
By 1984, Israel had retreated to the border region, as the conflict continued to propel
itself forwards. Factional fighting worsened in a series of “little wars” that had little to
no ideological grounding: Amal, the Shia party, fought against Hezbollah, a new Shia
group gaining ascendancy, the Palestinians (in the devastating War of the Camps), and
other leftist Muslim groups. The Christian Lebanese Forces fought each other as Samir
Ja’Ja staged a coup against the Phalangist Elie Hobeika.
In May 1989, the Arab League appointed a Tripartite Committee headed by Algeria,
Morocco, and Saudi Arabia to meet with members of the Lebanese parliament and
broker an end to the war. The meeting was held in Taif, Saudi Arabia. The first peace
deal in the Lebanese Civil War orchestrated by a neutral non-Western party, the Taif
Accord managed to gain the support of all but one of the major militias. It called for
the disarmament of the militias, as well as more proportionate representation in the
Lebanese government (which was tantamount to a power transfer from Maronite
Christians to Muslims). The pact also created a two-year timeline for Syria to withdraw
its troops to the Beqaa Valley near the Syrian border, though it failed to specify a plan
for complete Syrian withdrawal. A presidential assassination followed (Rene Moawad,
a Maronite Christian, was killed after just 17 days in office), and the hold-out militia of
prime minister Michel Aoun had to be defeated, but by 1990 the war was over.
The Postwar Period
The 1990s saw a period of extreme amnesia. Progress was the word of the day, as the
new prime minister, Rafik Hariri, placed a premium on economic development and
the rebuilding of downtown Beirut. A sweeping amnesty law passed in 1991 pardoned
perpetrators of almost all war-related crimes. A combination of government and
popular repression kept the war out of polite conversation until the 2005 assassination
of Hariri caused the country to erupt once again. This time, though, Lebanon’s many
27
sectarian groups united peacefully against a
common enemy: Syria, which many accused
of orchestrating the assassination. The enormous marches—in one, more than a million
Lebanese converged on downtown Beirut—
of the Independence Intifada (or the Cedar
Revolution, as it was also called) successfully
drove the Syrian occupation out of Lebanon,
almost 30 years after the first Syrian troops had
set foot on Lebanese soil.
Lebanon remains a country of conflict.
Since the end of the war, the radical Shia group
Hezbollah has amassed power and arms and
become a major source of contention within
Lebanon and internationally. Hezbollah’s military campaign against Israel—which consists
primarily of firing rockets over the southern
border—prompted another Israeli invasion in
2006. In 2008, Hezbollah squared off with the
Lebanese Army after the Lebanese government
attempted to shut down its communications
network. The 18-month conflict nearly drove
the country to a new civil war and ended only
when the government made serious concessions of power to Hezbollah.
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.!//ČƫĂĀāĀĩĎƫ%(%,ƫ%.+Č Lebanon: Fire and Embers—A
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28
The Price of Memory
By Emily Hoffman
As soon as the dust had settled on the final skirmishes of the 15-year Lebanese Civil
War, which left more than 100,000 dead and a million displaced, rebuilding began in
Beirut. Once known as the Paris of the Middle East, crowded with ornate French and
Ottoman architecture and busy cafés, the capital lay in ruins, a reminder of the years
of carnage that had overtaken the country and erased the line between combatant and
civilian. Called the “ancient city of the future” by the massive government-backed company in charge of reconstruction, the new Beirut became a mix of the sleek-faced luxury
apartment buildings and office towers found in cities like Dubai and Hong Kong and
nostalgic structures that harken back to the French mandate era, the Phoenicians, and
even the Roman empire. The only period notably absent is the immediate past—without monuments, museums, plaques, or memorials, the war slipped further and further
out of view each time another bullet-riddled building was demolished.
If Beirut’s landscape is a metaphor for the immediate postwar Lebanese consciousness, then it is not extreme enough. Despite the push for development, the wreckage of
the war was still visible in Beirut in the ’90s; outside the capital city, destruction dominated, with crumbling buildings and graveyards strewn across the countryside. But the
war could not be brought up in polite conversation—if mentioned at all, it was referred
to as “the events,” or sometimes “the war of the others” (namely: Syria, Israel, and the
Palestinians, who used Lebanon as a stage for their own proxy wars). In the decade
following the conflict, it was not taught in school; it was glossed over in university history courses. According to Lebanese film director Randa Chahal Sabbag, whose films
have been banned in her home country, “There has been a huge national effort to erase
and forget all traces of the war.” In 1999 Lee Hockstader, foreign correspondent for the
Washington Post, called this phenomenon “an officially sanctioned amnesia.” Historian
Sune Haugbolle’s book War and Memory in Lebanon begins, “When the war ended in
Lebanon, it was like it never happened.”
The era of amnesia was ushered in with a law passed by parliament in 1991 that
granted a general amnesty for nearly all war-related crimes committed between 1975 and
1991, making it impossible to try or condemn those responsible for the scores of massacres committed during the war, even those responsible for the infamous slaughter of
3,000 Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Amnesty laws are not uncommon in countries where complicated long-lasting conflicts leave most of the population
29
(and those capable of governing) implicated.
In South Africa after the fall of the apartheid
government, a special Amnesty Committee
was established in 1996 to grant pardons for
crimes committed during the apartheid era—so
long as the crimes were politically motivated
and proportionate, and so long as those seeking amnesty fully disclosed the details of the
crime to the committee. Disclosure was key: the
“amnesty for truth” bargain was struck to avoid
punishing the entire outgoing regime and its
affiliates, while still ensuring that the regime’s
crimes were not simply covered up and forgotten. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the leader and
spiritual guide of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, explained the guiding principle:
“None of us has the power to say, ‘Let bygones
be bygone’ and, hey presto, they then become
bygones. Our common experience in fact is the
opposite—that the past, far from disappearing
or lying down and being quiet, is embarrassingly persistent, and will return and haunt us
unless it has been dealt with adequately. Unless
we look the beast in the eye we will find that
it returns to hold us hostage.” Many victims
concluded at the end of the painful and grueling
244 days of testimony that the trials were a sham
to protect the war criminals of apartheid; even
so, the model of truth-seeking as a necessary
precursor to peace has taken hold globally and
has been used in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala,
and Germany, to name only a few postconflict
arenas.
By issuing a universal amnesty without conditions, the Lebanese government evaded the
question of truth-seeking from the get-go.
Without official encouragement to process the
devastation of the war—and often in the face
of active discouragement—traumatic memories
of the war turned in on themselves. Haugbolle
Three Children, Sabra Chatila Palestinian Refugee
Camp, Beirut, Lebanon, 1993Čƫ5ƫ2% ƫċƫ.%#$0
30
writes, “When there is no echo of (often traumatic) personal war memories to be found in
collective memory, the reality of those memories are liable to be put in doubt. . . . In the
frenzy of getting on with their lives, many people left the rupture from their past selves of the
war years unaddressed, and to establish a sense
of connection with that reality was held to be so
outlandish that the past simply appeared unreal.”
Silence pervaded the Lebanese diaspora
as well. “The younger generation as well as
those who spent the war years outside the
country may not have felt the same sense of
trauma as those who lived through the war,”
Haugbolle writes, “but they suffered nonetheless from a sense of alienation from an
amnesic society, which did not let them know
about the events that they were obliged to
accept as formative of contemporary Lebanon.”
Scorched author Wajdi Mouawad, whose family fled Lebanon soon after the war broke out,
explained in a 2008 interview with CBC News
that he was forced to learn about the war from
history books. “It was a very shameful war,
where fathers killed sons, where sons killed
their brothers, where sons raped their mothers.
. . . They didn’t want to explain to my generation
what had happened. . . . Strangers had to tell me
my own story.” This disconnect is not uncommon in refugee and immigrant families, where
the first generation often withholds not only
traumatic stories but sometimes even a native
language so that their children can begin with a
clean slate in their new country.
The argument for suppression and silence—
pushed by the Lebanese government and welcomed by a large portion of the populace—went
like this: the war was too long and too destructive, the sectarian allegiances too convoluted
and shifting, the number of the responsible too
Living in the Ruins of War, Beirut, Lebanon, 1993Čƫ5ƫ
2% ƫċƫ.%#$0
31
large, the tear in the social fabric too gaping,
for any commemoration to happen that would
not incite division and anger and destroy the
tenuous peace. Best move forward with the
things we can agree on—development, houses,
shopping malls.
This logic may be hard to stomach for those
steeped in the common wisdom of philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat
it,” or the powerful post-Holocaust warning,
“Never again.” And yet, what is the perennial
problem of the Middle East but an excess of
memory? Beginning with the Zionist claim
over an ancient homeland, the citing of past
grievances has spurred the region’s conflicts,
seemingly without end. Every single massacre
committed during the Lebanese Civil War was
an act of reprisal. Might not the country, then,
and its neighbors, benefit from a good dose of
forgetfulness?
And yet, memory is often the only tool of
the disenfranchised. The ruling class dictates
which memories the nation may hold on to and
which memories must be dispelled for a group
to be accepted into the body politic. The celebrated Palestinian Lebanese author Mahmoud
Darwish has chided the entire Middle East for
the unreasonable demand for forgetfulness it
has placed on Palestinian refugees: “Why then
should those whom the waves of forgetfulness have cast upon the shores of Beirut be
expected to go against nature? Why should so
much amnesia be expected of them? And who
can construct for them a new memory with
no content other than the broken shadow of a
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32
distant life in a shack made of sheet metal? Is
there enough forgetfulness for them to forget?”
The question, then: does there exist a
healthy middle ground of memory? A type of
memory that shames us with its horrors, gives
voice to the disenfranchised, but does not spur
us to revenge? Artists in postwar Lebanon and
the Lebanese diaspora, Haugbolle argues, have
tried to answer this question with their work.
He points to Hassan Saouli’s installation piece
13th of April, which consists of a bus of exactly
the same make as the famous Dodge passenger
bus that set off the war when it was attacked
in 1975, filled with video, text, and images
concerned with memories of the war and questions of guilt and forgiveness. When asked
why he did not use the actual bus—which still
exists—Saouli responded, “The bus is a symbol
of the civil war, but I am trying to show it in
an artistic manner. I avoided using graphical
images and items that are disturbing—photos
of those killed, blood, violence. The actual bus
in its poor condition could be considered a
disturbing image. Therefore, I used a bus of the
same model so I could put an artistic twist to it
and lessen its bitterness.”
Not all artists have tried to soften their
representations of the war. Haugbolle also cites
Sabbag’s film Civilisées, or Civilized People,
which juxtaposes the humorous and the grotesque in a searing indictment of the Lebanese
people’s participation in “the war of the others.” Haugbolle describes: “Here are militiamen killing themselves while attempting to
tie dynamite to a cat, Muslim militias fighting
it out over a refrigerator, small kids imploring
their parents to kidnap foreigners and so on. . . .
The intent is clear: to show that the Lebanese,
in Sabbag’s own words, ‘participated in every
thing. . . . We’ve been criminals and now we’ve
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Lebanon, 1993, 5ƫ2% ƫċƫ.%#$0
33
War-Damaged Apartment, West Beirut, 1993ƫ5ƫ2% ƫċƫ.%#$0
forgotten, which is the worst moment since it’s so false. Then our children will come
and ask us why we did what we did.’”
Though Mouawad has rejected the characterization of Scorched as a Lebanese play
and of himself as a writer of the Lebanese diaspora, his play, deeply concerned as it is
with questions of memory and trauma, cannot but be a part of the postwar Lebanese
dialogue about how to remember. And his very refusal to name the country in his play
as Lebanon, or to name any of the groups in the conflict, might be seen as the partial
articulation of an answer.
As time passed, and the war receded a decade into history, attitudes about discussing it began to relax. The events of 2005 brought a major resurgence of war memory to
Lebanon: the prime minister was assassinated, and the Lebanese blamed their Syrian
occupiers, who had gained enormous control over Lebanese politics. Suddenly, as
hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets in what became known as the
Cedar Revolution, war memories—in the form of political posters, slogans, and news
media—were mobilized and reoriented into a narrative of us versus them: us, the collective nation of Lebanon; them, the Syrians. The Cedar Revolution was successful, and
the Syrians ended their 30-year occupation.
But unified nationalism did not last. Memory is fickle, after all, especially when it
is distorted to political ends. The simplified narrative fractured again into its constituent parts—and has, in the years since 2005, been exploited by the radical Shia group
Hezbollah to gain ascendancy. Sectarianism with its selective memory is on the rise,
even as cosmopolitan Beirut looks blindly towards the future, and artists try to find a
more universal meaning in the past.
SOURCES $)+1 ƫ .3%/$Čƫ Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982ƫ Ĩ!.'!(!5Čƫ čƫ
*%2!./%05ƫ+"ƫ(%"+.*%ƫ.!//ČƫāĊĊĆĩĎƫ1*!ƫ1#+((!ČƫWar and Memory in LebanonƫĨ).% #!Čƫčƫ
).% #!ƫ *%2!./%05ƫ .!//Čƫ ĂĀāĀĩĎƫ !!ƫ +'/0 !.Čƫ ė!*+*Ě/ƫ +.#+00!*ƫ .ČĘƫ Washington Post
Foreign Serviceƫ Ĩ!!)!.ƫ ĂĀČƫ āĊĊĊĩĎƫ .0%*ƫ +..+3Čƫ ė& %ƫ +13 ƫ %/1//!/ƫ Scorched, His
!.%*#ƫ(5ƫ+10ƫ0$!ƫ!*!/!ƫ.ČĘƫƫ!3/ƫĨ!,0!)!.ƫĂĂČƫĂĀĀĉĩ
34
A Life of Resistance
A Brief Biography of Soha Bechara
By Kate Goldstein
Though Wajdi Mouawad deliberately left the war-torn landscape of Scorched unnamed,
he called upon events and figures from the brutal past of Lebanon, his country of birth,
to populate his play. Mouawad has revealed in interviews that the character Nawal was
inspired by the best-known prisoner of the Lebanese Civil War: Soha Bechara, who
was born in South Lebanon in 1967. That year, the Six-Day War—the third between
Israel and its Arab neighbors (excepting, notably, Lebanon)—displaced hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians. Many fled north into South Lebanon, where tensions began
to grow between the native population and the refugees. In the tenuous peace that
characterized the early years of Bechara’s life, however, her family was able to move
freely between a suburb of Beirut, where her father worked, and the small village of Deir
Mimas in South Lebanon, where her extended family lived.
The Becharas’ complicated loyalties were a microcosm of the tangled hostilities
that plagued Lebanon. The roots of the Lebanese Civil War have been simplified as
a conflict between the Muslim left and the established Christian right, but Bechara’s
family was Christian with a decidedly leftist political leaning—which meant they allied
themselves with Palestinian and Muslim activists rather than the Christian majority. Of
her secular upbringing Bechara writes, “I was not a Lebanese Christian—I was first of
all Lebanese, and then from a Greek Orthodox family.” Bechara describes her father as a
“notorious Communist militant” who worked for the Communist newspaper Nidaa (The
Call) throughout the war, though he refused to speak with her about politics. Bechara
loved going to the house of her uncle, who encouraged the young girl to take part in the
family’s political activism.
Bechara was just eight years old when the Lebanese Civil War began, rendering her
homeland a war zone. Less than a year into the conflict, her family’s home in Beirut
was destroyed. They moved to South Lebanon, but the war kept them traveling between
northern shelters and the home of family members in the south, attending school and
work when they could to keep their lives as normal as possible. In 1978 Israel invaded
and occupied South Lebanon in response to the Coastal Road Massacre (also known
as the Coastal Road Operation), an attack led by a 21-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian
woman, Dalal Mughrabi. Mughrabi, with a group of ten men, violently hijacked two
35
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$.%/0%*ƫ#%.(/Čƫ((ƫ)!)!./ƫ+"ƫ0$!ƫ.%#$0ġ3%*#ƫ$(*#%/0ƫ.05Čƫ)*ƫƫ/* ##! ƫ..% !ƫ* ƫ
,+%*0ƫ0$!%.ƫ#1*/ƫ +3*ƫƫ/0.!!0ƫ%*ƫ +3*0+3*ƫ!%.10ƫ/ƫ!*+*Ě/ƫ%2%(ƫ3.ƫ+*0%*1! ċĘ
buses on Israel’s Coastal Highway. After a nine-hour shootout with police, Mughrabi
threw a grenade that killed 32 civilians, making her a hero of the Palestinian cause: a rare
position for a woman in Lebanon.
When Israel invaded, Bechara’s immediate family abandoned the dangerous occupied territory, but her uncle remained in South Lebanon. Four years into the occupation,
a dissident group called the United Lebanese Resistance was formed. Upon hearing
about the resistance, Bechara made up her mind. “I was going to join them. But to do
what? With whom? Under what conditions? I hardly had a clue.” Bechara was just 15,
and even though her family was involved in Communist meetings and publications they
did not take seriously her desire to become more active. So Bechara committed herself
to her schoolwork while exploring the few political channels open to her: school government and a Communist organization outpost for youth. Four years later, the actions of
17-year-old Sana’a Mehaidli convinced her to do more. Labeled the first female suicide
bomber, Mehaidli executed a Syrian Social Nationalist Party mission by driving an
explosive-laden vehicle into an Israeli patrol. “Struck by her example,” Bechara writes,
“I was ready to join the struggle.”
Bechara’s parents were thrilled when she enrolled in a college engineering program,
believing this would keep her away from dangerous political involvement. But Bechara
36
People Look at the Bus Which Has Become a Symbol of Lebanon’s 1975–1990 Civil War in Beirut
Ĩ,.%(ƫāĂČƫĂĀĀĈĩČƫįƫ+$)! ƫ6'%.ĥĀĀĀāăĥ!10!./ĥ+.%/ċƫė$!ƫ%2%(ƫ/0.%"!ƫ+""%%((5ƫ!#*ƫ+*ƫ
,.%(ƫāăČƫāĊĈĆČƫ3$!*ƫ$.%/0%*ƫ#1*)!*ƫ/,.5! ƫ0$!ƫ1/ƫ3%0$ƫ1((!0/ƫ/ƫ%0ƫ .+2!ƫ0$.+1#$ƫƫ$.%/0%*ƫ
*!%#$+1.$++ ƫ+"ƫ0$!ƫ,%0(Čƫ'%((%*#ƫ)+.!ƫ0$*ƫĂĀƫ(!/0%*%*ƫ"%#$0!./ƫ%*ƫ0$!ƫ1/ċĘ
used her time in school to search covertly for a way into the United Lebanese Resistance.
She had trouble getting anyone in the male-dominated organization to take her seriously, until she met a Communist Union leader for local high school students. Bechara
announced that she was going to move to the occupied area whether or not the resistance sanctioned it, and the leader gave her a contact. This mysterious fighter, whom she
calls “M.A.,” started sending Bechara into occupied South Lebanese territory on practice runs through checkpoints run by Israel’s proxy military force, the South Lebanese
Army (SLA). Bechara began living a double life: telling her friends and family that she
had a boyfriend in South Lebanon, she devoted her time there to learning everything
she could about the occupation to report back to M.A. in Beirut, where she continued
to attend classes.
Eventually, M.A. put Bechara in contact with Rabih, a man more intimately connected to the resistance movement. Though initially skeptical of her abilities, in 1988
Rabih supported her decision to move in with her uncle in South Lebanon and find
a cover job that would allow close contact with the SLA. Because of her Christian
heritage, Bechara was able to secure a job as a personal aerobics instructor for Minerva
Lahad, wife of Antoine Lahad, the head general of the SLA. Then 21, Bechara insisted
37
that she was going to assassinate Lahad and refused to let resistance leaders replace her
with a more experienced fighter. Relenting, they gave her a revolver. Bechara settled
into her new role, memorizing Jane Fonda workout routines and sneaking her gun past
military checkpoints and even into the Lahads’ guarded home.
In her memoir, Bechara insists that she was never comfortable with violence; she
describes a scene in which she was left alone with Lahad while he was eating dinner
and found she could not draw her gun. Yet she had a graphic plan for the eventual
assassination: “I would not shoot him in the head, as Rabih had advised me, nor would
I empty the chamber of bullets into my enemy’s body . . . two bullets in the direction of
his heart would be enough.” Bechara remained in the employ of the Lahad family for
months, until one night, as Minerva and Antoine sat in conversation with guests while
watching television, Bechara drew her handgun from her purse and shot Antoine twice
in the chest.
Bechara did not resist arrest. She later described the sense of calm she felt after
finally dropping her facade. She writes, “At last, faced with my enemies, I no longer had
to play a role.” Lahad’s guards dragged Bechara into a car and took her to a holding cell,
where she was beaten and interrogated. She was then transferred to the brutal Khiam
prison in South Lebanon, where she was put through countless sessions of questioning
and torture. Sixty of Bechara’s friends and relatives—none of whom had the slightest clue about her resistance activities—received similar treatment over the following
months, as the soldiers tried to make sense of her motives and uncover her links to the
resistance. These acquaintances were released, but Bechara remained in Khiam for the
next ten years.
Condemned by the United Nations for its inhumane conditions, Khiam prison was
hell. Bechara suffered hours of grueling interrogation each day. The jailors relented
slightly after learning that Lahad would make a full recovery, but they taunted Bechara
with her failure. The prison’s 150 detainees were separated by gender; the male section
was larger and contained children as young as 12. The cells were filthy, lacking such basic
necessities as toilets, and prisoners were issued just one small meal each day. Bechara’s
jailers took pleasure in such cruel practices as handcuffing her hand to her foot and leaving her in solitary confinement—a cell two and a half feet wide, six and a half feet long,
and eight feet high—for as long as ten months at a time. Bechara spent roughly six of
her ten years in solitary. She was sexually threatened, but never mentions rape.
Even under these conditions, Bechara managed to connect with fellow prisoners.
She befriended another woman held in the same cell for a short time, and the two communicated by tucking small messages into the shower sponge. After a few years, the
United Nations forced the unsanitary jail’s administrators to install sinks in each cell.
Once Bechara and her friend discovered they could hear each other through the pipes,
they started singing through them. They first tested the guards’ tolerance by humming
religious songs and then began teaching political songs to each other. Bechara describes
singing while in solitary—next to the room where prisoners were being tortured—and
hoping her voice would give others hope. These small victories sustained the prisoners.
38
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*%*!ƫ5ƫ+/01)!ƫ !/%#*!.ƫ* .ƫ++ ((
In 1998, Soha Bechara was released from prison. Like Nawal in Scorched, Bechara
was irreversibly changed by war. Nawal encounters different obstacles, but she retains
Bechara’s fighting spirit. Nawal dreams of reuniting her family, while Bechara dreamed
of reuniting her nation, of “a country at peace.”
SOURCE +$ƫ!$.ČƫResistance: My Life for LebanonƫĨ.++'(5*Čƫčƫ+"0ƫ'1((ƫ.!//ČƫĂĀĀăĩ
39
Applications of Graph Theory
in Scorched
By Dan Rubin
The origins of graph theory—the subject Ph.D. candidate Janine Marwan teaches when
she is not investigating her mother’s past—can be traced back to Königsberg, Prussia
(now Kaliningrad, Russia). In 1736 Königsberg boasted seven bridges that connected the
city’s four regions. Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler set out to discover a route that
would cross every bridge exactly once; if it returned him back to his starting point, even
better. Euler proved such a path, in fact, did not exist, and he did so by reducing the
city map to a graph consisting of four points, or “vertices” (the four regions), connected
by seven “edges” (the seven bridges) and developing theorems based on the “degrees” of
each vertex, defined as the number of edges stemming from each vertex (e.g., in the case
of Königsberg, the number of bridges connecting each region).
A
A
D
B
D
B
River Pregel
C
C
LEFTƫƫ),ƫ+"ƫ®*%#/!.#Ě/ƫ"+1.ƫ.!#%+*/ƫ* ƫ/!2!*ƫ.% #!/ċƫRIGHTƫ$!ƫ+..!/,+* %*#ƫ#.,$ċ
Graph theory was long considered a recreational branch of mathematics without
many practical uses, but during the 20th century—especially since the rise of the computer—many diversified applications for it have been found. Recently it has become
important in the technology sector. “On the smallest end of the scale,” states the website
of the Computer Research and Applications Group of Los Alamos National Laboratory,
“a graph can be used to model the way that tiny pulses of electricity flow through the
silicon chips that are built into electronic devices. In the big picture, a graph can model
the ways that computing systems can be interconnected, even when the computers
are located all over the world and connected by telephone wires and satellites.” Graph
40
theory has been applied in everything from cartography to chemistry, and it can help explain
social networks and how personal interactions
determine the spread of anything from potentially
catastrophic diseases to gossip.
A simple example of graph theory can be
found to the right. Graph 1 is a “friendship graph”
of six people: Andy, Bob, Chuck, Dina, Ed, and
Flo. In this scenario, Andy, Bob, and Ed each
have three friends in the group. The most popular
of the bunch is Chuck, who is Dina’s only friend.
Poor Flo has no friends at all within this group.
In Scorched, Janine describes the floor plan
of a house (a “simple polygon,” or a space in
which only the exterior of the polygon acts as an
obstacle, presented to the right as Polygon 1) and
its five occupants with a “visibility graph” (Graph
2) consisting of five vertices connected by edges
that represent “who, from his or her position, sees
whom.” In Polygon 1, Person A can see Persons
B, C, and E, so in Graph 2 point A connects to
points B, C, and E.
Janine explains to her class that it is impossible
to reconstruct the original polygon from the visibility graph. For example, the polygon represented
by Graph 2 could just as easily be Polygon 2. This
is one of many insoluble problems in graph theory.
In Scorched, Janine, who applies graph theory
to her personal life, laments that the information
revealed in her mother’s will suggests that the
polygon to which she thought she belonged is
inaccurate—the visibility graph she subscribed
to, wrong. She believed that she was one of three
vertices (the other two being her mother and her
brother, Simon), when, in fact, the introduction
of a father and another brother suggests she could
be one of five.
E
B
A
F
C
D
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+(5#+*ƫā
D
B
A
C
E
D
.,$ƫĂ
B
C
E
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D
+(5#+*ƫĂ
SOURCES !**!0$ƫ ()*/+*Čƫ An Introduction to Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications
Ĩ! %*#Čƫčƫ %/+*ġ!/(!5ƫ1(%/$%*#ƫ+),*5ČƫāĊĉćĩĎƫ+/ƫ()+/ƫ0%+*(ƫ+.0+.5Čƫė$!ƫ
0$!)0%/ƫ +"ƫ .,$/ƫ * ƫ $!%.ƫ )!/ČĘƫ $00,čĥĥ333ăċ(*(ċ#+2ĥ)!#ġ)0$ĥ3+.''ĥ#.,$ĥ
#.'# ċ$0)(ņ.!(3+.( Ďƫ1**ƫ
ċƫ00/ČƫSix Degrees: The Science of a Connected AgeƫĨ!3ƫ+.'čƫ
ċƫċƫ+.0+*ƫĒƫ+),*5ČƫĂĀĀĂĩ
41
“Al-Atlal”
Poem of Love and Courage
By Dan Rubin
“Remember the poem we learned a long time ago, when we were still young.
. . . Recite it every time you miss me.”
—Nawal to Sawda in Scorched
“Al-Atāl” (“The Ruins,” “The Remains,” or “Traces” in English) was written by IbrƗhƯm
Nājī (1898–1953), an Egyptian physician and popular poet who was a member of the
Apollo Society, a literary group that was the focal point of the Romantic movement in
modern Arabic poetry. “Atāl” was set to music by Riyad al-Sunbati (often described as
a musical genius, “peerless in working with difficult Arabic poetry”) in 1966 for Umm
Kulthūm (1904–75).
Kulthūm, “indisputably the Arab world’s greatest singer,” according to The Rough
Guide to World Music, enjoyed a career that lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s. Her music
was—and still is—a powerful symbol of Arab nationalism that can often be heard on
Egyptian radio today. Virginia Danielson describes the singer’s artistry in her book The
Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthūm: “She had an ability to link musical improvisation to the
meaning of the words that she was singing in such a way that the meaning was really felt
by listeners. Many scholars say poetry is the art of the Arabs, and so to sing poetry well is
something that will tend to garner great appreciation among Arabic-speaking listeners.”
“Atāl” was one of Kulthūm’s best-loved songs, performed during almost every concert series she undertook in the Arab world. Lines such as “Give me my freedom” were
literally showstoppers, prompting audiences to erupt into prolonged applause. The text
is actually derived from two poems by Nājī: “Atāl” and “al-Widā” (“The Farewell”).
Danielson explains: “Most of the lines of the song came from the first . . . drawing on
the images of wandering in the desert, coming upon old ruins, searching for something
lost—a lover, a family, a home—common to the genre. The poem expressed the intensely
personal feelings of torment and bereavement for which Nājī was known.” Kulthūm took
liberty in selecting stanzas from “Atāl,” rearranged the order in which they appeared, and
replaced a few words, inserting lines from “Widā” in the middle.
42
I gave you everything
your chains
are hurting my hands
so why do I keep them
when you did not keep me
why do I stay in prison
and the whole world is
around me
he was shy
full of pride
walking like a king
and he was beautifully tender
deliciously proud
charming
like a dream
I am a weak butterfly
who came near you
and love
was a messenger
between us
and
a friend
give me a cup
did love see
any drunken people
like us
my heart
don’t ask me where is love
it was a big castle
of fantasy
that collapsed
“Al-Atlal”
Translated by Dr. Mona Arab
(First appeared in the Tarragon
Theatre Study Guide for Scorched)
My love
don’t ask me where is love
it was a big castle
of fantasy
which
collapsed
let me drink
on its remains
while my tears are falling
and please tell me
why all this love
became a story
I do not forget you
you tempted me
with a beautiful mouth
so tender
and a hand
stretched
in waves
to a
drowning person
a love bird
was singing
a poem
and now I visit his place
you walked so slowly
like a spoiled child
like a tyrant
oh
love is burning my ribs
and seconds
are
hot coal
in my blood
give me my freedom
set me free
SOURCES %.#%*%ƫ *%!(/+*Čƫ The Voice of
Egypt: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and
Egyptian Society in the 20th Century Ĩ$%#+Čƫ
čƫ $!ƫ *%2!./%05ƫ +"ƫ $%#+ƫ .!//Čƫ āĊĊĈĩĎƫ
#5,0ƫ00!ƫ*"+.)0%+*ƫ!.2%!Čƫė.$%)ƫ#%ČĘƫ
$00,čĥĥ333ċ/%/ċ#+2ċ!#ĥ*ĥ0+.5ċ/,4ĕ/% œāăăāĎƫ
* .!3ƫ )Čƫ ! ċČƫ Scorched Study Guide,
..#+*ƫ $!0.!ƫ ĨĂĀĀĉĩĎƫ 1(%!ƫ +00ƫ !%/)%ƫ
* ƫ 1(ƫ 0.'!5Čƫ Encyclopedia of Arabic
Literature, Volume 1 Ĩ+* +*čƫ+10(! #!ČƫāĊĊĊĩĎƫ
! ƫ $.0+*Čƫ ,.+ 1!.Čƫ ė))ƫ 1(0$Þ)čƫ $!ƫ
+%!ƫ +"ƫ #5,0ČĘƫ Čƫ $00,čĥĥ333ċ*,.ċ+.#ĥ
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43
Questions to Consider
1. What significance does silence play in Scorched ?
2. What effect does the layering of different time periods have on your reception of
Scorched? How does that layering affect the play’s meaning? How does it control the pace
at which the play’s mystery is unraveled?
3. How is violence depicted in A.C.T.’s production of Scorched ? Does the play suggest
any possible escape from this violence?
4. How does Scorched resemble ancient Greek tragedy?
5. What role does the notary Alphonse Lebel play in Scorched ? Simon is an aspiring
boxer; Janine is a mathematician focusing on graph theory: What is the significance of
the career paths the twins have chosen for themselves?
6. What family mystery have you left unsolved? Where would you look to begin unraveling that mystery? Do you know the circumstances under which your ancestors immigrated to the United States?
For Further Information . . .
Bechara, Soha. Resistance: My Life for Lebanon. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2003.
Haugbolle, Sune. War and Memory in Lebanon. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
Hiro, Dilip. Lebanon: Fire and Embers—A History of the Lebanese Civil War. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Morrow, Martin. “Hot Topic: Wajdi Mouawad Discusses Scorched, His Searing Play
about the Lebanese War.” CBC News. September 22, 2008.
Mouawad, Wajdi. Forests. Translated by Linda Gaboriau. Toronto: Playwrights Canada
Press, 2010. Originally published as Forêts.
_____. Scorched. Translated by Linda Gaboriau. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010.
Originally published as Incendies.
_____. Tideline. Translated by Shelley Tepperman. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press,
2002. Originally published as Littoral.
_____. Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons. Translated by Shelley Tepperman. London:
Oberon Books, 2008. Originally published as Journée de noces chez les Cro-Magnons.
Villeneuve, Denis, dir. Incendies. DVD. Les Films Séville, 2010.
44