“But I am sure that all the languages spoken by the immigrants were Arabized by the grandchildren who forgot their language, and discovered that it is part of their souls.” (Elias Khoury)
Wajdi Moawad goes out to the people who have visited La Colline National Theater in Paris, this crazy city with the beauty of its streets, to tell them the unsaid in the language of Racine and Jacques Prever. He wants to make them, even for a moment in their lives, feel some subtleties (subtilité) of the Lebanese spoken language that cannot be translated into French. “Tomb me” is a word that, if translated literally, does not mean anything. But if it is replaced by something that corresponds to it, and there is of course something that corresponds to it, then it automatically loses those emotional charges that stick to words of this kind in our language. Wajdi Moawad wants his audience to engage in the language game that leads us to the brokenness of language, and takes us to what is not said. He says and says. Then he notices a very simple fact: the theatrical performance must begin. And he must turn on the stage into Naji, the boy who is betrayed by the language, so he does not say a word throughout the performance, contenting himself with carrying the luggage and moving the dining table from one place to another.
In “Mother,” Wajdi Moawad restores the face of his mother, Jacqueline Garzozi (Aida Sabra), during her five-year Parisian stay: a woman fleeing the hell of the civil war in Lebanon with her children, Nayla, Naji, and Wajdi, leaving her husband, Wadih, to carry on his business, in the hope that the civil war will end quickly. And the family reunites again. The Parisian exile becomes the place where Jacqueline fragments between her nostalgia for the burning homeland, with all its traditions that add some security to the lives of its children, on the one hand, and her children, whom she feels slipping through her fingers in their new world with its rationalized language, its intertwined history and different values, on the other hand. She is crushed by the Parisian exile, and we find that she does not stop screaming and hurling Lebanese insults (which are dear to our hearts) and persecuting her three children, as if squeezing them in the details of their daily lives becomes her only way to recover something from her lost paradise. But the dream of returning quickly fades. The family is forced to leave France and take refuge in the province of Quebec in Canada, where Jacqueline dies of cancer, taking with her to her grave nothing but her broken memories and story. In the fifteenth Parisian arrondissement, Lebanese food and sweets, and the spoken language that is gradually hidden from the diaries of Nayla and Wajdi, become a symbol of a fugitive world to which Jacqueline clings. However, ironically, the children and their mother do not sit at the table to eat together, although they are preoccupied throughout the play with preparing it, except in the last scene of the show. It is a scene in which Wajdi Moawad raises his hat to his mother, announcing his reconciliation with her, and with his past, in a moment as if it was drawn from One Thousand and One Nights. So the table will be filled with delicacies, and the mother’s face will become like an icon.
However, Wajdi Moawad not only restores his mother, Jacqueline, on stage, but also re-creates her. For him, this is the genius of memory and the genius of theater. This person is able to mix the reality with the imagined, the past with the present, and suggest moments that never happened. Almost in the middle of the theatrical performance, Wajdi turns from Naji the silent to Wajdi the writer and director, and he enters with Jacqueline in a dialogue stressing that it was “authored by him”, in order to tell his mother what she had not heard from him throughout her short life: admonishing her for her cruelty, and cheering her that he did not become a writer theatrically only after her death, or perhaps because of her death; He tells her about those whose bodies were dismembered in the Beirut port explosion, and he reassures her that the Lebanese war, whose end she had long waited for, is not over yet. After this imaginary meeting, Jacqueline’s character in the play takes on more severe features. She becomes more obedient to her new French reality, and more distant from the tragedy of violence and death that made her leave Beirut. Perhaps this distance reveals itself in one of the theatrical performance’s most profound and cruel scenes, when Jacqueline enters into a fit of absurd giggles while recounting the details of the funeral of a militiaman during the civil war.
To say that Wajdi Moawad in “Mother” goes from autobiography to theater is to say nothing. The fact is that he is coming back. He returns from the theatrical text to what happened in the past, and what did not happen, in order to become, and we become with it, more able to bear this past and coexist with it. Jacqueline Garzozi did not return to Beirut to prepare Lebanese mezze for her husband and children. But Wajdi in “Mother” prepared a different kind of return for his mother, Jacqueline… and a different kind of table.
