Dear Wajdi, if I dare to take up the pen to respond to the one who brought me into the world on an artistic level, it is because it has become necessary for me to oppose the creator. “Those who learned the science of the bow from me finally targeted me,” my father declaimed to me, in Arabic, to taunt me when, when I was younger, I enjoyed having the last word on him. By teaching me archery, you have become at your expense a target for those who, like me, have acquired this knowledge by reading your works and studying them. It is not out of joy that I shoot you an arrow, but rather to fulfill my role as an artist: to disturb and question.
My first encounter with your work marked me with a hot iron. I still remember the distrust that your name inspired in me on the theater ticket that I held in my hand – Wajdi Mouawad – as my father had taught me to distrust everything that sounded “Arab”. I was going to see Fires for the first time at Quat’Sous. It was in the spring of 2003. I came away blown away.
Staring into the abyss of my own strangeness, I recognized myself for the first time as a Quebecer thanks to Jeanne and Simon Marwan, because they suffered just as much as me from being uprooted. If there is one thing that your work has taught me, it is that universality does not lie in the negation of cultural particularities, but rather in the transcendence of these particularities to touch the essence of the human condition .
The seeds of hatred
I, who am of Armenian ancestry, recognized myself in your hatred, that which you recount in “They will not have our hatred”, published in these pages on November 11. Subjects of the Ottoman Empire, my ancestors faced extermination during the massacres and mass deportations of the Armenian genocide. I barely knew how to speak when, at the age of three, I was already learning to hate the Turks.
And I hated them all the more because this hatred, as visceral as I was allowed to feel, received all the affection of my mother. The Turk is an animal, heartless, less than nothing. You have to hear it from the mouths of my people to understand the full extent of this fanatical hatred which oozes Islamophobia.
If, in my novels, my characters embody Muslims, it is to convince me that together we share the same humanity, the same need to be loved. I left for Syria, in the middle of the war, driven by the firm conviction that I had to go back to the roots of violence to tell it in my books.
After having followed a front line facing Daesh for 80 kilometers, at the risk of being decapitated in the middle of the desert, I arrived in Aleppo, the mother city, where the power of the explosions reduced entire neighborhoods to dust, where once (not a hundred years ago), Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together.
I peered into the ashes and dipped my hands solemnly into them, as if I were standing on the remains of a sacrificial altar. I naively believed that after such a long journey, a hidden truth would come to light. It was my smallness that hit me in the face with a brutality that made me almost blind, in the middle of a field of ruins where a merciless sun beat down. Our lives are so insignificant in the face of the rise and fall of empires; these are the new gods who play with us, unite and wage war, give birth to monsters who unleash their furies on the earth, leaving human beings at the mercy of their whims.
Neither good nor bad
Just as was the case for Daesh and the United States, a few isolated Cassandras had already warned us: what if Israel had not unwittingly created this monster that is Hamas? In other words, if you accuse Hamas of setting us the trap of anti-Semitism, how would Israel not set us the trap of barbarism? The courage would perhaps be to address the issue head-on, if we one day want to rebuild lasting peace in the region and avoid making the same mistakes.
I agree with you: anti-Semitism is a cancer that must be fought fiercely. Right here in Montreal, hate incidents and crimes against the Jewish community are on the rise. In my childhood neighborhood, a Jewish school and a synagogue were targeted by gunfire. We are on the brink of catastrophe. I fear for our most vulnerable young people, those who are overly inflamed and who see crime as a way to overcome themselves, a form of sacrifice at a time when our underfunded schools are struggling to inspire them to surpass themselves and self-giving.
Faced with this sad inevitability, the real trap would be to pass the blame on oneself. The real trap would be that the sacrificed and the sacrificer exchange roles like in a game of musical chairs. The real trap would be to think that there is Good and Evil. There is neither one nor the other, in my opinion. These concepts imprison us in shackles.
Literature has taught me this: when the author dives into the suffering of the other, to reveal it with authenticity, he has no other choice but to recognize his deep humanity – his own and that of his characters. There are neither good nor bad people in my books. Only protagonists and antagonists.
In his book Falling upwards (Nota Bene), the philosopher novelist Maya Ombasic borrows from Derrida to invite us to recognize our own strangeness in order to “heal” our relationship to otherness. Perhaps this is how we will finally succeed in overturning the Judeo-Christian narrative that traps us in the vicious circle of violence. As for me, if there is one place where I can continue to act, it is perseverance in my desire to see the world through the eyes of a writer. Even if it means losing your sight.