A Meditation on the Fractured Self: Wajdi Mouawad’s Autobiographical ‘Mother’ Revives Memories of Relationships Fragmented by War

From his award-winning play “Littoral” and its continuation, “Incendies,” Wajdi Mouawad frequently delivers compelling narratives surrounding family — whether it be a bereaved son navigating the complications of burying his father in his native, war-torn Lebanon like in “Littoral,” or in “Incendies,” where two siblings based in Montreal return at the request of their dead mother to their birthplace in the Middle East in search of a father and brother they’ve never met. Like a connective tissue between many of his creative works, it comes as little surprise that family also takes a focal point in his autobiographical theater series, in which war-consumed Lebanon is as much the setting as the Parisian apartment 10-year-old Mouawad’s family lived in for five years while waiting for the war’s end. “Mother,” which the director presented in 2021, echoes a diaspora that Antoine Gouki of Independent Arabia considers “Promethean torture,” and critic Alma Abu Samra in Al Akhbar writes very likely felt no different from the basement shelters with which Lebanese families living through the civil war were all-too-familiar.

 

Wajdi Mouawad’s “Mother” (Mère, 2021), preceded by “Alone” (Seuls, 2016) and “Sisters” (Soeurs, 2020), makes the third part of the Lebanese-born playwright, actor, and director’s series, which he plans to continue with “Father” and “Brothers.” With a two-hour and ten-minute runtime, the play reopens old wounds in a blend of fiction and reality. Mouawad’s late mother, Jacqueline, takes front and center of this play as Mouawad (52 at the time) recreates the memories of his 10-year-old self on stage. “Mother” toes the line between meditation, remediation, and a second chance at processing grief, identity, and perhaps regret as Mouawad reflects on the five years he spent in France after his family immigrated at the start of the Lebanese Civil War, leaving his father Abdo behind to support the family. Recreating the walls of their Paris apartment, he relives memories of his mother’s cooking, her frenetic bouts of screaming and anguish, and the anxious wait for phone calls from home punctuated by the steady voice of French television broadcaster Christine Ockrent’s Channel 2 news bulletin. The play is arguably the most Lebanese of Mouawad’s works, according to Najwa Barakat in Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed. Mouawad constructs the image of his Lebanese mother as he remembers her, and in doing so, opens a window into a complicated relationship that resonates with many Lebanese growing up amid war, whether in exile or at home. 

 

 

 

 

 

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