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

By Wajdi MouawadTranslated by Linda GaboriauDirected by Carey PerloffAmerican Conservatory TheaterFebruary 16–March 11, 2012

Scorched

A M E R I C A N CO N S E RVATO RY T H E AT E R

P R E S E N T S

© 2012 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Made possible by

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 . . .

COVER

OPPOSITE Mourabitoun Soldiers During Lebanese Civil War

Table of Contents

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Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of ScorchedIncendies 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 pro-duction of Scorched is the West Coast premiere.

Characters and Castalphonse lebel, doctor ............................. David Strathairnsimon, guide ................................................. Babak Tafti janine ........................................................... Annie Purcell ralph, antoine, militiaman, photographer ........................................ Manoel Felcianonawal at 14–40 ............................................ Marjan Neshatjihane, nawal at 60, abdessamad ............. Jacqueline Antaramianwahab, nihad ............................................... Nick Gabrielnazira, janitor, malak, chamseddine ...... Apollo Dukakiselhame, sawda ............................................ Omozé Idehenre

SettingCanada 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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Synopsisact 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 note-book. 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 epi-taph for those who don’t keep their promises . . . for those who keep the silence.”

Nawal also leaves her children two enve-lopes: 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 instruc-tions 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 cloth-ing 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.

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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 hor-ror: 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 para-military 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 compli-cated connection to this sniper known as Nihad Harmanni.

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Wajdi MouawadAt 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 compa-nies 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 emi-grated 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-

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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 read-ing] wasn’t about somebody else, it was me. The novel was about me. . . . [It] was like an elec-troshock.” 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:

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.

“I don’t write plays because I saw war, I write plays because I saw plays.”

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Imagine, in short, that you have seen one of the most brilliant theater pro-ductions 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 lan-guages 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 Israeli-supported 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 inspira-tion 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-

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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 con-tains 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.

Civil War in Lebanon

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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 obvi-ously the Palestinians in Lebanon, while Mouawad says the apartment building repre-sents 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 indict-ments 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.

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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:

Daily Life in Beirut

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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 begin-ning, 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.

SOURCES The Globe and Mail

The Globe and MailThe Gazette

cafebabel.comPremiere.fr

Evene.frScorched

SummerWorks Theatre Festival Blog

The Globe and MailWilmabill: Scorched

The Green Line Beirut 1993

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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 for-gets 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 lan-guage 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

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and new-play development. In the 1980s she introduced the first workshop and play-development 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 ele-ments. 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.

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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—obvi-ously 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 neces-sary 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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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 dia-logue 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

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is an additional benefit. In recent literary trans-lations, 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 look-ing 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 direc-tor, 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 sud-denly 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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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

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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” (“see-ing 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

Scorched

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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.

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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.

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Layers of DestructionAn 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 tra-verses 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.

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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 layer-ing 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 envi-sion 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 ScorchedScorched

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A Brief History of the Lebanese Civil WarBy Emily Hoffman

Scorched travels to an unnamed land, as much Sophocles’ Greece as it is any contempo-rary 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 dis-agreement 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 indi-rectly. 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 ConflictIn 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 inde-pendence 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 south-east 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

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Mount Lebanon to avoid persecution during the Byzantine era) and the Druze (a secretive and persecuted Muslim sect) had never lived easily together. Fighting erupted in 1953 after Maronite President Camille Chamoun refused 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 beacon of pan-Arab nationalism—a movement 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 man-date of Lebanon, which had left an indelible European stamp on the country. The conflict, then, was as much between Arab nationalism and Westernization as it was between Muslims and Christians.

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 associa-tions 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 increas-ingly divided between the predominantly—though not entirely—Muslim left and the Christian right. In very broad strokes, the leftists stood for socialism, pan-Arab nation-alism, 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.

Syria

Israel

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Phase I: Descent into ViolenceThe militarization of the conflict in the south crept north, contaminating Beirut’s bur-geoning 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 attend-ing 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.

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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 InterventionSyria’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 dis-couraged 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 InterventionOn 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 thou-sand 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 infa-mous Khiam prison, which appears in Scorched under the name Kfar Rayat.

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By this point in the war, infighting had begun. The Christian-Muslim, rightist- leftist conflict, muddied by foreign involvement and the self-perpetuating logic of vio-lence, 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 bor-der 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 condemna-tion than any other military engagement in Israeli history. The summer of 1982 brought

Displaced Persons in Lebanon

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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 EndBy 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 PeriodThe 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

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sectarian groups united peacefully against a common enemy: Syria, which many accused of orchestrating the assassination. The enor-mous 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 mili-tary 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 conces-sions of power to Hezbollah.

SOURCES War and Memory in Lebanon

Lebanon: Fire and Embers—A History of the Lebanese Civil War

The New York Times

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The Price of MemoryBy 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 com-pany 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—with-out 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 conscious-ness, 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 domi-nated, 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 his-tory 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 mas-sacres 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 uncom-mon in countries where complicated long-lasting conflicts leave most of the population

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(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 seek-ing 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 forgot-ten. 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 embarrass-ingly 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 con-ditions, 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, 1993

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writes, “When there is no echo of (often trau-matic) personal war memories to be found in collective memory, the reality of those memo-ries are liable to be put in doubt. . . . In the frenzy of getting on with their lives, many peo-ple 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 none-theless 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 fam-ily 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 uncom-mon 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 wel-comed by a large portion of the populace—went like this: the war was too long and too destruc-tive, the sectarian allegiances too convoluted and shifting, the number of the responsible too

Living in the Ruins of War, Beirut, Lebanon, 1993

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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 philoso-pher 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 cel-ebrated 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 forgetful-ness 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

Re-Birth, Beirut, Lebanon, 1993

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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 ques-tions 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 gro-tesque in a searing indictment of the Lebanese people’s participation in “the war of the oth-ers.” Haugbolle describes: “Here are militia-men 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

The Howitzer Shell Garden, Chouf Mountains, Lebanon, 1993,

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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 discuss-ing 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 col-lective 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 constitu-ent 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 Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982War and Memory in Lebanon

Washington Post Foreign Service Scorched, His

War-Damaged Apartment, West Beirut, 1993

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A Life of ResistanceA 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

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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 occu-pied 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 govern-ment 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

Teenage Girls Manning Street with Guns

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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 seri-ously, 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 resis-tance 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 prac-tice 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 con-nected 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

People Look at the Bus Which Has Become a Symbol of Lebanon’s 1975–1990 Civil War in Beirut

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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 slight-est 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 leav-ing 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 com-municated 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.

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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 Resistance: My Life for Lebanon

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Applications of Graph Theory in ScorchedBy 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).

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 com-puter—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

A

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River Pregel

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LEFT RIGHT

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theory has been applied in everything from car-tography 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 visi-bility 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.

SOURCES An Introduction to Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

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D

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DE

AED

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B E

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“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 Ibr h m 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 con-cert 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.

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“Al-Atlal” Translated by Dr. Mona Arab (First appeared in the Tarragon Theatre Study Guide for Scorched)

My lovedon’t ask me where is loveit was a big castleof fantasywhichcollapsedlet me drinkon its remainswhile my tears are fallingand please tell mewhy all this lovebecame a storyI do not forget youyou tempted mewith a beautiful mouthso tenderand a handstretchedin wavesto adrowning persona love birdwas singinga poemand now I visit his placeyou walked so slowlylike a spoiled childlike a tyrantohlove is burning my ribsand secondsarehot coalin my bloodgive me my freedomset me free

I gave you everythingyour chainsare hurting my handsso why do I keep themwhen you did not keep mewhy do I stay in prisonand the whole world isaround mehe was shyfull of pridewalking like a kingand he was beautifully tenderdeliciously proudcharminglike a dreamI am a weak butterflywho came near youand lovewas a messengerbetween usanda friendgive me a cupdid love seeany drunken peoplelike usmy heartdon’t ask me where is loveit was a big castleof fantasythat collapsed

SOURCES The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the 20th Century

Scorched Study Guide,

Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Volume 1

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Questions to Consider1. 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 unrav-eling that mystery? Do you know the circumstances under which your ancestors immi-grated 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.