POETIC LANGUAGE IN
WAJDI MOUAWAD’S PLAY
SCORCHED
by
Gemma Bayod Pastor
Master’s Thesis submitted in the department of
Theatre Studies of the University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Bram van Oostveldt
August 2019
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INDEX
I. Introduction...3
II. What is poetic language?...9
II.I. Poetic language in the context of philosophy and literary studies…...…...9
II.II. Poetic language in the context of theatre………..………..18
II.III. Definition of poetic language………..………..21
III. Poetic language in Scorched...22
III.I. How is it found in the text?...22
III.II. What is the role of poetic language in the text?...24
III.II.I. Poetic language in reference to time: the language of the past and the language of the present………25
III.II.II. The notary Alphonse Lebel and the banality of language………...40
III.II.III. The evolution of Simon………..………43
III.II.IV. Janine and the rationality and poetics of mathematics……….45
III.II.V. Nawal: from poetic language to silence……….………..48
IV. Appendix: how is poetic language treated in the performance?...53
V. Conclusion………..……….………..57
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I.
INTRODUCTION
It was 2012 when I first saw the play Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad in a theatre from Barcelona. Specifically, it was the version by the Catalan company La Perla 29 directed by Oriol Broggi. The production not only dazzled me, but also the critics (it received good reviews and several Catalan awards) and the audience (it was shown during two consecutive seasons in the Teatre Romea from Barcelona, it went on tour, and it was performed again in 2015). After this experience, I didn’t take long to find the text and read it. I think now I have a good opportunity to delve into it.
Trying to discover what made this particular text (and production) so memorable, I became intrigued by the use of the language in this play. Scorched deals with the big topics of life (death, war, love, hope, despair, identity), but does it in a very particular way, with a poetic language. The use of this ‘style’ or ‘language’, as I call it in the thesis, is not simply a rhetorical or aesthetic choice, but adds to the layers and density of the play, gives us more information about the characters and the conflicts and oppositions that underlie the story. The poetic style brings the language at the forefront, becoming, in my opinion, another -not so apparent- of the big topics of this work. For this reason, what I investigate in this thesis is the role of the poetic language in the play Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, mainly in the text. I also wanted to exhaustively analyse the treatment of poetic language in the 2012 performance directed by Oriol Broggi in Catalan (Incendis), but finally, due to the restrictions of length, this is introduced as a short, complementary appendix at the end of the thesis.
The point of view of the language –and especially the poetic language- in Scorched has received little attention in the academia. It has been studied specifically in two Master’s thesis, curiously both from the Stendhal University in Grenoble: L’Image oxymore chez
Wajdi Mouawad. Textes théoriques, dramatiques et mises en scène (2012) by Marie
Jacomino and Présence d’un «travail épique» au sein d’Incendies de Wajdi Mouawad (2013) by Manon Pricot. Jacomino’s thesis analyses the recurrence of the oxymoron image in Mouawad’s discourse as a public figure, in his works and in Mouawad’s stagings of them. According to her, the use of these images in the three fields has as purpose and effect to offer us a new and unusual look on the real, to question our relationship to it. Pricot’s thesis uses the concept of “travail épique” (“epic work”) by Florence Goyet, who
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defines it as «le coeur même de l’épopée»1, which she defends as the contrary of a
simplification of life: she considers it an intellectual tool that appears in moments of political and moral crisis that depicts life as a network of dense and contradictory relationships. Pricot analyses the characters and the relationships of parallelism that appear in the play according to Goyet’s parameters. Although the perspectives that these works propose have been an interesting source for me and are close to mine, the first talking about images and oxymorons, tropes also characteristic of the poetic; and the second talking about the contradictions and relationship between the characters, something that the analysis of poetic language also brings to light, the perspective of my research differs from theirs. Here I analyse the text (and, much shortly, the performance) departing from the linguistic level and making use of close reading and its subsequent interpretation.
Much more have been written, though, focusing on other aspects of Scorched. Trauma, memory, exile, identity and history are some of the most addressed topics in relation to this play. Besides, the majority of Mouawad’s main works, among which the tetralogy Le
Sang des Promesses (“Blood of Promises”), of which Scorched is part, but also other
works like the one-man show Seuls (“Alone”) or the novels Anima (“Soul”) and Un obus
dans le coeur (“A Bomb in the Heart”), have been object of many scholar studies in the
English and French languages. Such large amount of attention from the academic world, which can be surprising in the case of a 50-year-old author, is also the reflection of the effusive critical and public reception. Many critics have already talked of him as a “classic”, and not only because of his evident connection with the classic genre of the tragedy, and specifically with Sophocles2, but also due to his ability to so masterfully explain and express the contemporary horror and suffering, and make it into just human, timeless horror and suffering.
Mouawad himself, as a child, experienced the horror first-hand in the Lebanese civil war. His early exile and subsequent mixed nationality are probably the germ of one of the basic
1 Florence Goyet, "Le «Travail Épique», Permanence de l’Épopée Dans la Littérature Moderne," La Réserve I, no. 10 (November 25, 2015),
http://ouvroir-litt-arts.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/revues/reserve/263-le-travail-epique-permanence-de-l-epopee-dans-la-litterature-moderne.
2 He has also been labelled by some critics as “the modern Sophocles” or “the contemporary Sophocles”
because of the cathartic character of his tragedies, the universality of the topics he addresses, his visible inspiration in motifs like the oedipal in Scorched, and his known fondness for the author. In 2016 he staged the seven tragedies by Sophocles in three works: Des Femmes (2011) composed by Les Trachiniennes,
Antigone and Électre; Des Héros (2014) with Ajax-cabaret and Oedipe Roi; and Des mourants (2016) freely
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and recurrent questions that his plays raise: who am I? Who are we? Most of his works contain these autobiographical traces, and Scorched is not an exception for it. Let’s look briefly at his biography. Wajdi Mouawad (1968) was born in Lebanon but moved, escaping from the civil war, to Paris in 1977 and then to Quebec in 1983, where he completed his studies in theatre. Nowadays he works as an actor, stage director, novelist, translator, painter, filmmaker and is one of the most renowned playwrights of the twenty-first century. He is currently the director of the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris since 2016 and of the theatre companies Abé Carré Cé Carré in Quebec and Au Carré de l’Hypothénuse in France. Since 2011, he is associated artist in Grand T, theatre of Loire-Atlantique in Nantes. Previously, from September 2007 to 2012, Mouawad occupied the position of the artistic director of the Théâtre Français du Centre National des Arts du Canada in Ottawa.
Mouawad’s corpus of work is enormous and diverse (plays, novels, essays and radio texts), but some of his most known and critically acclaimed plays are the four from Le
Sang des Promesses, Littoral (“Tideline”), Incendies (“Scorched”), Forêts (“Forests”)
and Ciels (“Heavens”), which he presented as a tetralogy for the first time in Avignon in 2009, and gave him international recognition. Mouawad himself adapted his work for cinema and directed Littoral in 2005. The adaptation to the cinema of Incendies, made by Denis Villeneuve in 2010, was selected in the category of the best film in foreign language in the 83rd Oscars ceremony. Incendies is, indeed, his greatest success. Other important plays are Rêves (2000), Seuls (2008) and Soeurs (2015). His work as a novelist includes
Visage retrouvé (2002), Un obus dans le cœur (2007) and Anima (2012), which received
several awards. He has also taken many other authors’ plays to the stage, such as Voyage
au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1991), Macbeth by Shakespeare (1992), Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (1998), Six personnages en quête d’auteur by Luigi
Pirandello (2001) or Les trois sœurs by Anton Chekhov (2002).
His works are always impregnated of a poetic style and of philosophical concerns. These elements help him erase the boundaries between the personal and psychological, and the political and social. For this reason, the label of ‘politically engaged author’, which has already been ascribed to him, falls short to describe, understand and situate his figure as an artist and his work. Another of Mouawad’s characteristics is the presence in his plays of a strong narrative, a fact that clearly diverges from the post-dramatic tendency. It is surprising to discover, though, that, in fact, Mouawad creates most of his plays making
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use of improvisation. He works through collective collaboration: he gathers a group of actors that he leads in building the situations and characters of the future play. Based on the resulting ideas, he writes the final text. Scorched contains all of these representative traits.
Let’s quickly explain its plot. Scorched, “Incendies” in the original, was written in 2003. By then, it was not conceived to be part of what it became later, the tetralogy Blood of
Promises, constituted by four independent pieces that form a coherent universe. The first
three plays of the tetralogy (Tideline, Scorched and Forests) address the question and quest for the origins. They all feature a young protagonist who, after losing a parent, embarks on the search for who they are really. This discovery brings to light pasts steeped in blood. The last, Heavens, works as a counterpoint. It tries to contradict everything that the previous plays supported: it is a dystopian spy thriller about an intelligence personnel team that searches for hidden messages from a terrorist organisation. The suicide of one of the members of the team uncovers underlying conflicts and opens new mysteries. The story of Scorched starts in Montréal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It begins with the reading of Nawal’s will, who just passed away, in front of her two twin children, Simon, an amateur boxer, and Janine, a math teacher. Alphonse Lebel, the notary, is in charge of it. In the will, Nawal, who had stopped speaking a number of years ago, reveals to her children the existence of their father (they had been told that he was dead) and of another brother. She asks her twins to find their father and their brother and hand them over a letter she has written for each of them, a condition sine qua non to engrave her name on the tomb.
While Simon, though, refuses at first to fulfil her mother’s last wish, Janine starts investigating, first talking to her mother’s nurse in the hospital, that gives her tape recordings of her mother’s silence (he had recorded it intrigued by whether she spoke when he was not there) and some photos from Nawal’s past in Lebanon, her country of origin. With these clues, Janine travels to Lebanon, where she learns that her mother was a revolutionary during the war and that she was imprisoned in the Kfar Rayat prison. There Janine finds out that their father is no other than the prison guard, who raped his mother, Abou Tarek.
In between this storyline we get to know Nawal’s younger years: how she promised herself to find the child that had at fourteen with her lover Wahab and was forced to give
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to an orphanage; and how she promised her grandmother that she would learn to read, write and think and would engrave her name on her tomb when she died. Nawal first fulfills the promise made to her grandmother (leaves the village, learns, and comes back to write her name on the gravestone) and then leaves in search for her child, accompanied by Sawda, a friend that wants Nawal to teach her how to read and write. They start a journey across the country while the civil war explodes, and they become victims of it. Nawal refuses to engage in violence, but seeing the senseless massacres, she decides to kill one of the generals of the militia of the South, Chad. For this act, she is imprisoned in Kfar Rayat, where she is tortured and raped by the guard, Abou Tarek.
Back to the present storyline, we see how, after Janine had discovered who their father was, Simon agrees to travel to Lebanon to look for their brother. He does it with Hermile Lebel, the notary. There they discover that the name of Janine’s and Simon’s brother is Nihad Harmanni. Their quest leads them to Chamseddine, the man who picked up the babies born from Nawal’s rape and gave them the names of Janaane and Sarwane. Chamseddine also knows that Nihad Harmanni, their brother, is in fact the same person as Abou Tarek, their father.
Knowing already the truth, the twins carry out their last task, handing the two letters to Nihad/Abou Tarek. In these letters, Nawal explains how she discovered that her torturer, the person she most hated, was also the son she had been looking for all her life: because of the clown red nose Abou Tarek talked of as the only possession he had from his biological mother in the trials against Lebanon war criminals, the same object she had put in the wrap of clothes before giving the baby to the orphanage.
Under the instructions of Nawal, Hermile Lebel also gives to each twin a letter from their mother, where she can finally talk to them and explain her pain. At last they can engrave her name on the tombstone.
Before arriving to me, this story and the way it is written had to make a great impression on the stage director Oriol Broggi. In fact, during the time he was directing the Catalan version of Scorched, called Incendis, he said of the play: «We feel that we are doing a very important play, written by one of the best playwrights there exist, like Sophocles or
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Shakespeare.»3 It was actually a turning point in the short history of this Catalan company, La Perla 29, confessed me the girl I contacted to ask for the film version of the performance. Not only were they extremely successful by number of spectators, critical reviews and public repercussion, but they also reached maturity as a company and consolidated themselves as an important name in the Catalan theatre scene. It was probably one of the most ambitious projects they have had since their start and they succeeded by far.
The company La Perla 29 was born in 2002 in Barcelona with the intention of creating and managing theatre shows. Theirs, like the company itself, is a personal and artisan theatre that addresses big classic texts from a small scale: with few actors, few decorations, with simplicity and nakedness of the text; a characteristic that they have preserved in the productions set in bigger theatres, like the Teatre Romea in the case of
Incendis.
The stage director of Incendis, Oriol Broggi, is one of the founders of La Perla 29 and has directed most of its plays. He was also stage director of the opera The Magic Flute by Mozart, in the Festival from Peralada in summer 2018. For his work, he has received several Catalan awards and is known as one of the best dramaturges of the Catalan scene, just like the company has been repeatedly recognised for many of its plays.
After a little bit of background about the author, the play and the specific production I analyse, let’s move to outline the structure of the thesis. This thesis is constituted by an introduction, two central chapters, an appendix and a conclusion.
After the introduction, chapter II, “What is poetic language?”, provides theoretical tools for the subsequent analysis. Its objective is the revision, contextualisation and definition of the main concept of this thesis, “poetic language”. For this reason, it is formed by three sections: the first two situate this concept in the philosophical (II.I.) and theatrical (II.II.) framework, and the third (II.III.) defines the understanding of it to be used in the thesis. Chapter III, “Poetic language in Scorched” is the analysis of the poetic language in the text, according to the definition established in the preceding section, in comparison and
3 «Tenim la sensació d'estar fent una obra important, d'un dels millors autors de teatre que hi ha, com
Sòfocles o Shakespeare», in the original declarations in Catalan from the Diari Ara, 20/12/2012,
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contrast to other uses of language in the play. It results mostly from the interpretation and
close reading of the text but also relates it and makes use of the theoretical insights
acquired in chapter II. This section is formed by part III.I., in which is analysed how poetic language is found and manifested in the text, and III.II., which examines the role that poetic language plays in it. This last section (III.II.) is divided in different chapters. Each looks at poetic language from a different perspective and illuminates and brings to light more layers of the content, form and the underlying conflicts of the play. They mainly revolve around the language of a character. Finally, there is an appendix that very briefly reviews the treatment of poetic language in the 2012 performance of it by La Perla 29, paying attention to how this relates to the analysis of poetic language in the text previously done.
To close the thesis, the conclusion brings together all the outcomes of the research and evaluates the course of the investigation.
II. WHAT IS POETIC LANGUAGE?
‘Poetic language’, one of the objects of this investigation, is a notion vague enough to require for clarification. For this reason, in the present section I first address the concept of ‘poetic language’ from a theoretical point of view, situating it in the context of philosophy of language, literature, literary studies and of theatre; to later define the understanding of it that I will use in the analysis, and which, therefore, is closer to the poetic language found in the play.
II.I. POETIC LANGUAGE IN THE CONTEXT OF PHILOSOPHY AND
LITERARY STUDIES
The term ‘poetic’ or ‘poetry’ opens many possibilities of signification. On the one hand, ‘poetry’ has commonly been used to refer to the whole body of literature, understanding it as encompassing all genres, which traditionally, after Aristotle’s Poetics, are mainly distinguished as the epic (or narrative), the lyric and the dramatic. However, it has also been employed, and this is the most recurrent usage, as the specific genre of poetry. Here it could be discussed –but I won’t do it– what exactly constitutes poetry, if it is only found in poems or if it can be found in other formats; and if it necessarily involves verse or not. A glance at how the principal common dictionaries in English define the word ‘poetry’
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informs of the apparent essentiality of two elements, not always referred to in the same entry: on the one hand, that poetry possesses a rhythmical or metrical characteristic; and on the other, that it appeals to the imagination and the emotions. These two characteristics make rhetoric and all its figures important in the writing and analysis of poetry, a fact that will be evident in the later analysis of the poetic language of the text of Scorched. Moreover, to add another layer, etymologically, the word ‘poet’ comes from poiesis, which means in Ancient Greek ‘create’ or ‘make’.
Anyway, the word ‘poetry’ contains and appeals to all the meanings that have been attributed to it throughout the history of philosophy and literary studies, it connotes all of them. Certainly, I could situate the starting point of the thought about poetry in Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the polis, a fact later relativized by Aristotle, when he attributed poetry a philosophical and cathartic social function.4 In modernity, aesthetics has continued being one of the concerns of many philosophers and theorists, and poetry has occupied a place in these reflections. In the introduction of Heidegger, Hölderlin, and
the Subject of Poetic Language (2004), Jennifer A. Gosetti-Ferencei looks over the role
of poetry in modern philosophy:
(…) it [poetic language] surfaced in Kant’s notion of “aesthetic ideas” in the Critique of
Judgment, which, Kant claims, are best expressed in poetry; in the “Earliest
System-Program of German Idealism” attributed to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin wherein poetry is to survive philosophy; in Schlegel’s fragments; in Kierkegaard’s journals and in his pseudonymous acknowledgement in Philosophical Fragments to be writing poetry; in Nietzsche’s attempt to search for a writing that “sings”; in Adorno’s arguments for the critical and utopian “truth content” of art; finally in Kristeva’s investigations into poetic language as revolutionary for thought.5
However, it would be a huge, unmanageable (and not pertinent enough) task to detail the ideas about poetry of each of the mentioned authors (which, moreover, are already a selection). Therefore, aware of these limitations that make me leave many interesting authors out, the ones that I expose in this section are those I consider relevant for the present thesis and/or representative and crucial in the thought about poetic language. I haven’t had, though, the opportunity to totally immerse myself in each author’s thought
4 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York:
Fordham Univ Pr, 2004), 3.
5 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York:
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and its complexities. Nevertheless, I attempt to give a concise, clear and as accurate as possible overview of their understanding of poetic language. On the other hand, I examine different acceptations of the term ‘poetic’ or ‘poetry’, not only the obvious one, because they enrich the reflection and provide useful tools for the subsequent analysis.
A use of ‘poetic language’ much extended in literary studies is the one that results from the contraposition of poetic language and ordinary language. It derives, in most of the cases, from the search for the literariness of a text, that is, the search for what it is that creates a distinction between literary texts and non-literary texts. This was one of the main concerns of the Russian Formalism, a school of literary criticism that developed in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s, and of the Prague Linguistic School, which developed in Prague from 1928 to 1939; who thought that what made a text literary is related to the language and how it is used.
For the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, poetic language (or literariness) has to do with the mechanism of ‘defamiliarisation’. In his opinion, poetic language makes use of ordinary language but in an unfamiliar way to us. As a result, it ‘defamiliarises’ and estranges our habitual perceptions of the world so that they are not automatic anymore, and, therefore, it enables new insights. This estrangement also makes the reader turn the focus to the language itself by paying attention to the literary resources that have provoked it. In the Prague Linguistic Circle, Jan Mukarovsky and Roman Jakobson explored further the idea of ‘defamiliarisation’. Mukarovsky clearly distinguished the poetic language from the ordinary language as two different entities. He considered that poetic language results from the deviation and distortion of the ordinary language, creating in this way aesthetic effects. To do so, Mukarovsky introduces the notions of automatization and foregrounding, two resources that specify the idea of ‘defamiliarisation’ and that can take place in any linguistic level (phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, etc.). As he defines it, «foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become.»6
6 Jan Mukarovsky, "Standard Language and Poetic Language," in Chapters from the History of Czech Functional Linguistics (Brno: Masarykova Univerzita, 2014), 44.
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For his part, Jakobson developed the idea of the poetic function, the function of language that focusses on the message itself and that predominates in literary texts. Departing from structuralist linguistics, Jakobson understands the meaning as the result from the choice of words (that is, the choice among synonyms and antonyms such as boy, child, fellow or man), an operation he calls “the paradigmatic relation” or “axis of selection”; and these words are juxtaposed creating a sentence, operation he calls “syntagmatic relation” or “axis of combination”. When the poetic function prevails, claimed Jakobson, there is a projection of the axis of selection to the axis of combination, so that the construction of the sentence, the combination, is also susceptible to selection: the form takes on importance.
The linguist Émile Benveniste also considered poetic language strictly different from ordinary language, claiming that poetic language calls for its specific linguistics. He wrote some short sketchy notes on it concerning Baudelaire’s poetry. According to him, in ordinary language signs make reference to “the denoted”, an external “thing”, whereas in poetic language “the denoted” is internal to the signs, it is produced by the combination of the words.7 For Benveniste, poetic language conveys «impressions of life» and «experiences» and is linked to inspiration and emotion.
Some other authors developed their theories about poetic language departing from the understanding of it as the language characteristic of the genre of poetry.
Probably one of the most relevant examples of thought about poetic language is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who showed a particular interest in poetry and poetic language especially in his last writings. Namely, his readings of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin were very fruitful for the development of his philosophy. Heidegger doesn’t restrict the ‘poetic’ to the traditional literary genre of poetry; for him, it can also be found in architecture, for instance, but it is in the genre of poetry where the ‘poetic’ is mainly concentrated. He finds in Hölderlin the best example of his understanding of it, that is, poems that think, that poeticize knowledge and reflect about themselves, that, in short, are concerned for truth and ontology. In fact, according to Gosetti-Ferencei in Heidegger, Hölderlin and the Subject of Poetic Language, poetic language is for Heidegger an alternative to the violence of technological rationality, which
7 Émile Benveniste, "Poetic Language," ed. Andrew Eastman and Chloé Laplantine, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 31, no. 1 (2010): 137, doi:10.5840/gfpj201031110.
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defines, reduces, manipulates and exhausts its object, its “other”.8 To my understanding of it, Heidegger argues that rationality makes our relationship to language instrumental, but poetic language offers the possibility of others ways of thinking by listening to the language. For this reason, Heidegger affirms that poetic language is able to have an ‘apophantic’ dimension: it cannot express present facts but the way of being, and hence he considers it more revealing than conceptual language, the most often used in philosophy.9
Poetry also plays a relevant part in the thought of the French philosopher Alain Badiou, because his understanding of philosophy is based on four “truth conditions”: science, love (namely, desire), art (namely, poetry) and politics. He is not concerned specifically about poetic language but rather about poetic thinking and poetic truth (he understands ‘truth’ as mainly ‘power’). For him, art, but mostly the poem, is a singular event: it is singular because its truth can only be found in art, is specific of it; and it’s an event, a central term in Badiou’s philosophy, because it represents a rupture from the ‘being’, from ontology. Furthermore, for him, the poem has nothing to communicate, it’s simply a saying or declaration that drives its authority only from itself.10 That is, it originates a meaning or truth that cannot be interpreted from outside, but only with internal parameters.
According to Badiou, this truth created by poetry arises out of the multiple, conceived as a presence that has come to the limits of language. In other (of his own) words, poetry has the capacity to make the notion of “there is” present in the effacement of its empirical objectivity.11 The poem, therefore, captures the presence of the rupture or disappearance
of its ontology or empirical objectivity. When it comes to poetic thinking, Badiou affirms that poetry doesn’t convey thoughts but the singularity of thoughts themselves, what could be called “an artistic expression of thoughts”. Above all, Badiou considers that the poem mainly manifests the power of language itself, «the power of eternally fastening the disappearance of what presents itself.»12 However, this power of language remains unnameable for the poem.
8 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York:
Fordham Univ Pr, 2004), 6.
9 Marius Johan Geertsema, Heidegger's Poetic Projection of Being (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 273-74.
10 Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-century Poetry and Prose
(London: Verso, 2014), 23.
11 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press), 22. 12 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press), 24.
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Instead of contrasting it with ordinary language, Badiou opposes poetic truth and thinking to the mathematical (in discussion with Plato’s ideas in the Republic such as the validity of poetry and philosophy to create knowledge). He considers both regimes of thought as exclusive to each other, but necessary for philosophy.
However, while Badiou’s conception of language stays closer to a structural notion, as being governed by grammar and syntax rules, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze gets rids of these traditional ideas to go towards an understanding of language as force, energy or vibration. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written jointly with the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guatarri, he argues that language’s primary function is to emit
mots d’ordre, orders and commands that will be enforced in the world. His conception of
language is, therefore, similar to Austin’s speech-act theory, that is, performative. His concern is what language ‘does’ and not what ‘means’, an idea that connects with his aesthetics, where he claims that art’s main aim is to produce a sensation (and not to signify).
He thinks of language, though, as underpinned by the notion of ‘stuttering’ or ‘stammering’, meaning language is inherently in disequilibrium and bifurcation, is heterogeneous, it fails. However, differently from tradition, he considers this feature positive and necessary as a creative force, and he links it to intensity. This model of stuttering language he proposes is not outside language, but is the reverse or negative part of it. Namely, it is in poetic speech that language sets free from the linguistic yoke13. However, this poetic language is not restricted to the poetic genre but to any genre that makes the language (and not only a character, a person or a voice) stutter (Deleuze calls ‘poetic operation’ a language that stutters). The work of the playwright Samuel Beckett and of the poet Gherasim Luca are the examples Deleuze uses the most to talk about it. Not by chance poetic language has been in many occasions closely connected to the limits and insufficiencies of language. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz claimed that the word always fails in verbalising the world. In his book Corriente alterna (1973), he concludes: «la actividad poética nace de la desesperación ante la impotencia de la palabra y culmina en el reconocimiento de la omnipotencia del silencio»14 [poetic activity is born out of
13 Christel Stalpaert, "The Creative Power in the Failure of Word and Language. On Silence, Stuttering
and Other Performative Intensities," Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies 45, no. 1 (2010): 83, doi:10.1515/arca.2010.005.
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despair before the impotence of the word and culminates in the recognition of the omnipotence of silence.]
Eugène Ionesco made a similar reflection in his Fragments of a Journal (1967), as cited by George Steiner in Language and Silence (1958):
It is as if, through becoming involved in literature, I had used up all possible symbols without really penetrating their meaning (…). Words have killed images or are concealing them. A civilisation of words is a civilisation distraught. Words create confusion. (…) There are no words for the deepest experience. The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself. Of course not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.15
In this fragment Ionesco addresses two of the flaws of language: its excessive use and subsequent wear and tear; and its insufficiency to name and capture the “deepest experience”, “the living truth”, as Paz also stated. To overcome these flaws it is required to use language in a different way, to break the inertias by forcing it, twisting it or silence it. In this context comes into play the language of poetry, which, due to its attention to the form and its usual abundance of literary resources, tends to contort language more than any other genre. Actually, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, following Freud’s and Lacan’s idea that «man is a subject captured and tortured by language»16 and, therefore,
humans have to «cope with the traumatic impact of speech itself»17 considers that poetry is the best way to tell the truth because it tortures language:
It [language] should be twisted, denaturalized, extended, condensed, cut and reunited, made to work against itself. Language as the “big brother” is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves, but a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. The most elementary form of torturing one’s language is called poetry.18
As for Ionesco, for Žižek language is unreliable, «a place of cruel indifference and stupidity», even harmful. For this reason, because language by itself is insufficient and misleading, Žižek points out the need to manipulate it, to get over it, so that it can reach and tell the truth.
15 Cited by Steiner, Language and Silence, 72.
16 Slavoj Žižek, "The Poetic Torture-House of Language," Poetry, March 2014, no page.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70096/the-poetic-torture-house-of-language.
17 Žižek, "The Poetic Torture-House of Language", no page. 18 Žižek, "The Poetic Torture-House of Language", no page.
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Historically, poetic language has also been a place to investigate our perception of the world. For instance, it offered a way out to the «crisis of poetic means» that arose when the common modes of writing couldn’t meet the complexity of the sense of reality that the development of thought had brought about. Until the seventeenth century, explains Steiner in Language and Silence, language encompassed and could explain almost completely reality and experience. Since then, though, many disciplines have fallen outside the domain of language. It is the case of science and mathematics, no longer accessible through the word: now, the empirical world begins outside verbal language.19 In the nineteenth century, while Nietzsche and Freud were exploring new dimensions of reality and its perception, literature offered different possibilities to rethink how to explain and capture it through language. George Steiner explains the case of poetry:
Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Mallarmé strove to restore to language a fluid, provisional character; they hoped to give back to the word the power of incantation –of conjuring up the unprecedented‒ which it possess when it is still a form of magic. They realised that traditional syntax organises our perceptions into linear and monistic patterns. Such patterns distort or stifle the play of subconscious energies, the multitudinous life of the interior of the mind.20
Namely, he explains that Rimbaud tried in his prose poems to «liberate language from the intrinsic bond of causality (…), events unfold in inconsequent simultaneity»21;
Mallarmé, for his part, «made of words acts not primarily of communication but of
initiation into a private mystery.»22 These movements tried to pass the perception from the real to the more real, to fill the gap that the higher awareness of how reality was experienced had created.
But be it a more real reality, the empirical world, an extreme experience, or a divine entity, as I stated before, poetic language has a certain access to what is outside language. According to Steiner, language borders on three other modes of statement: light, music and silence.23 Tending to them and approaching them is, therefore, pushing the limits of
19 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York:
Faber and Faber, 1967), 36.
20 Steiner, Language and Silence, 46. 21 Steiner, Language and Silence, 46. 22 Steiner, Language and Silence, 47. 23 Steiner, Language and Silence, 58.
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language, transcending language, reaching somehow the unsayable. And poetry, more than any other literary genre, is constantly flirting with music, as well as with silence. Firstly, poetry is clearly intertwined with music, (still today, states Steiner, «the vocabulary of prosody and poetic form, of linguistic tonality and cadence, overlaps deliberately with that of music»24). Moreover, it tends towards it, an idea underpinned by the implication that music has a superior status than language. When this happens, poetry, without completely leaving the field of language and all its connotations related to the understanding of the world, steps in its beyond, is able to reach and convey what language cannot do.
As already said, poetic language also adjoins another mode of statement, silence. However, as Steiner explains, «the poet’s choice of silence» is quite a recent phenomenon. His examples are Rimbaud –again‒ and Hölderlin, who both «carried the written word to the far places of syntactic and perceptual possibility.»25 But the choice of silence can also come from a socio-political situation of inhumanity that has devaluated language as a means to express external and internal reality. When words are overused, controlled by gossip and trivialised through their naturalised employment to name atrocious realities, language becomes damaged and rotted; it loses its effect and value. In this case, says Steiner, there exist two different possibilities for the poet: one the one hand, to convey with his language the precariousness of the communication; and, on the other, silence. This dilemma was specially present in the German language after the experience of Nazism: «Because their language had served at Belsen, because words could be found for all those things and men were not struck dumb for using them, a number of German writers who had gone into exile or survived Nazism, despaired of their instrument.»26
Atrocities happen to be an interesting challenge for language, because, on the one hand, create, unfortunately, extreme experiences and realities that language fails to express, they belong to the realm of the unsayable; and, on the other, since they almost inevitably involve language, they make it complicit of them, and leave it unusable for any decent purpose.
In conclusion, poetic language or, in a broader sense, poetry, is involved in a variety of philosophical discussions. It is argued to be the element that makes a text literary, be a
24 Steiner, Language and Silence, 61. 25 Steiner, Language and Silence, 66. 26 Steiner, Language and Silence,71.
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valid source of knowledge, convey a language that ‘stutters’, and be able to express a more real reality and the unsayable. It has to be seen, though, how all these potentialities are specified in the practical level. The first step is to situate poetic language in a context, namely, the one that is of interest in this investigation, the theatre.
II.II. POETIC LANGUAGE IN THE CONTEXT OF THEATRE
The search for the place of poetic language in theatre is not simpler than the previously conducted, especially regarding the vagueness and complexity in the definition of my object. In theatre, the poetic has been commonly found in the form of verse. According, again, to George Steiner in the book The Death of Tragedy (1961), verse not only had the function of keeping the “poetic truth”, which he defines as follows,
the criterion of poetic truth is one of internal consistency and psychological conviction. Where the pressure of imagination is sufficiently sustained, we allow poetry the most ample liberties. In that sense, we may say that verse is the pure mathematics of language. It is more exact than prose, more self-contained, and more capable of constructing theoretic forms independent of material basis.27
but it was «the prime divider between the world of high tragedy and that of ordinary existence.»28 Historically, in the world of tragedy there was a division between the noble
characters (heroes, kings and prophets) and common men, and the style of utterance reflected these positions, so that the first group, to show their superiority with respect to the ordinary people, spoke in verse. However, since this “verse” was indicative of an aristocratic status, not only concerned the form, the contortion of it (which, moreover, inevitably created a barrier and, therefore, estrangement, as the formalists said), but also a certain register and content. «Where men speak verse», says Steiner, «they are not prone to catching colds or suffering from indigestion. They do not concern themselves with the next meal or train time-tables.»29 In other words, their concerns were not from the ordinary, prosaic world, but also somewhat elevated. For this reason, says Steiner, verse at the same time simplified the account of reality (it eliminated the prosaic part of it) and complicated «the range and values of the behaviour of the mind.»30
27 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 240. 28 Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 241.
29 Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 243. 30 Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 244.
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Tragedy has been, historically, the principal space for verse and the poetic in the theatre. The difference between verse and prose was equivalent to the tragic and the comic31. This distinction was perpetuated to a certain extent by the Elizabethan theatre and later on, by the French classicist tragedies. In the nineteenth century, though, realism and naturalism were introduced in theatre and brought a more conversationalist, prosaic style; that is, tragedies and its conventions declined, and so did verse. However, there was a diffuse attempt to fight naturalism: several dramatists at different times and different places writing plays in verse.32 William B. Yeats could be labelled the pioneer of this movement: «he was the first to rethink structure, content and verse form in a way that set his work apart from the occasional vaguely historical verse plays of the nineteenth century.»33 Yeats’ works were concerned for the construction of Irish national identity and culture. The incursions in theatre of the poet and critic T. S. Eliot were also in verse, and most of them, such as Murder in the Cathedral (1935), religious dramas (the non-realistic nature of this genre seemed to fit perfectly with the form of verse). Ronald Peacock in The Poet
in the Theatre explains Eliot’s choice of verse:
It was a breakaway from poetry conceived too exclusively as the expression of the sentient anarchic individual, and a return to the wider conception of it as a presentation of human actions with their reverberations in human society. And it was a restoration to drama of poetic conventions that intensify its “degree of form”, to use Eliot’s own terms.34
Another completely different trend of verse drama was developing alongside. It was the one cultivated by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, which, influenced by 1930s Berlin cabaret, dramatized in a mixture of prose and verse issues such as militarism and fascism.35 Although all the mentioned verse works were at first very much outside the mainstream scene, Eliot managed to bring some of his later plays in verse to the West End, «inaugurating a phase in which poetic drama became fashionable and bankable in the commercial theatre.»36 Another author who became famous thanks to his verse plays
is Christopher Fry, whose most known play is The Lady’s Not for Burning (1948). While
31 Steiner states that next to the affirmation that most of the Ancient comedies that we preserve are in
verse, but that probably there existed a huge corpus of comic work in prose that we don’t have because it might have not been written down, but, since prose had a lower dignity than verse, improvised and transmitted orally, The Death of Tragedy, 247.
32 Glenda Leeming, Poetic Drama (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 2. 33 Leeming, Poetic Drama, 2.
34 Ronald Peacock, The Poet in the Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 5. 35 Leeming, Poetic Drama, 6.
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all these writers managed to become an important force in British drama, because, to a certain extent all defended verse as a reaction to the growing realist tradition in theatre, each of them developed his own understanding of the convention of verse and applied it in a different way.
However, the poetic language in the theatre can also be defined outside from verse. It could be understood as the language that is not instrumental and transparent but that makes use of an elaborate language in literary terms, that is: images, metaphors, and other rhetorical figures that distance it from the language we use on a daily basis, instrumentally. This was developed in different periods and departing from a variety of trends. For instance, Elizabethan theatre, and more specifically, Shakespeare’s plays could also be considered ‘poetic’ theatre in these terms. Later on, the symbolist movement brought the poetic to the theatre with authors such as the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, with a dreamy introspective atmosphere and an intense, minimal language that emphasised the unspoken. In France, Edmond Rostand, a neoromantic, and author of the famous play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897); and Philip Claudel, very much influenced by Symbolism, and whose most known play is Le Partage de Midi (1906), wrote most of his plays in verse and in a poetic style. A generation later, France also produced important playwrights that made use of the ‘poetic’, such as Jean Giradoux, with his characteristic poetic elegance and fantasy; and Jean Cocteau, also known as a filmmaker, who insisted that Surrealist plays, which mixed some verse with strong visual and auditory effects, were also ‘poetry of the theatre.’37 He defended that the material part of theatre, the
mise-en scène, and not only the characters’ speech, could create ‘poetry’, what he tried to do
in his plays (being this a ‘poetic’ that is not restricted to language). Also normally labelled as Surrealist is the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who, in his plays mixed prose and verse and used an intense language, plenty of images, that could be without a doubt regarded as ‘poetic’. Like Surrealists, the so-called German expressionists, made use of many non-realistic conventions: «they were social visionaries rather than documentary writers, and they often made their effects by association and symbol.»38 The use of language has also been considered ‘poetic’ in different ways by some critics in the plays by Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Bernard-Marie Koltès and David Mamet, among others.
37 Leeming, Poetic Drama, 13. 38 Leeming, Poetic Drama, 14.
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The approaches to the ‘poetic’ in theatre are multiple and disparate; and, as far as I know, there has not been a systematic study of them in the academic world. Although nowadays all types of plays are staged and styles coexist; the nineteenth-century wave of realism and the subsequent preference for an –apparently– less conventional theatre seem to be still prevalent. Since the attempt, as explained, of some British authors to bring verse back to theatre, this convention doesn’t seem to attract contemporary authors. It is not the case, though, of the play I analyse in this thesis. The occasional use of verse in Scorched is something that stands out, and, to a certain extent, sets this play (better said, Wajdi Mouawad’s work) apart. The ‘poetic’ in Scorched, though, is not limited to the use of verse, a matter that I address in the next section.
II.III. DEFINITION OF POETIC LANGUAGE
Theory is usually the support to approach practice in a richer way; but theory and practice always match in an odd, uncomfortable manner, because, even when theories are complex and nuanced, they cannot explain the impure, entangled nature of a singular practical example. In this particular case, though, theory is already a diverse, intricate corpus. The theoretical developments and points of view about poetic language and its theatrical context have offered an interesting, useful and deeper insight in the multiple potentialities and connotations of poetic language. However, the understanding of it that I use in the thesis doesn’t depart from them (although, obviously, there is common ground), but it is a much more basic, working concept that gives shape and solidity to the first intuition and impression about the language in Scorched. What makes the language poetic in Scorched is a set of characteristics. Principally, the recurrent use of metaphors and other literary resources, the occasional use of verse, and the tendency to essentiality in the syntactic form and in the content. I label these features ‘poetic’ for the mere reason of their similarity to the features of the genre of poetry.
In simple terms, poetry has traditionally been the space where both syntax and semantics are further from the rational, efficient and instrumental use of language that characterizes our everyday usage of it. The manipulation of language with aesthetic purposes has as a result the possibility to talk about everything that escapes from logics, rationality and even from language (it transcends it). That’s why the topics related to poetry are not normally rational but connected to emotions, imagination, experience (also because of the importance that the Romanticism gave to them), beauty; or are, at least, not ordinary.
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My understanding of poetic language derives from this ‘traditional’, ‘common’ knowledge. I understand it as the language that diverts from its ordinary use both in the syntactic and the semantic sense, and this includes, mainly, the use of rhetoric figures that, again, affect both the content and the form.
With this simple tool, the next step is to move to analyze poetic language in the text itself.
III. POETIC LANGUAGE IN SCORCHED
III.I. HOW IS IT FOUND IN THE TEXT?
The common understanding of the ‘poetic’ as the essential quality of the genre of poetry, make easy to see that in Scorched language is not used in an ordinary, apparently instrumental way, but rather closer to the ‘poetic’. It is quick and easy to state, therefore, that Scorched is written in a poetic language. However, this statement derives from a spontaneous perception; I need to analyse and argue what makes language poetic in this play, and this is a much more complex task.
The poetic language in Scorched comes in many different shapes, but its analysis is very much connected to rhetoric. Formally, it is simple to notice, at least by reading it, the occasional use of verse. It is employed twice and is always part of a text, that is to say, characters don’t speak in verse directly, but verse is always written and read. They are the testament, at the beginning of the play (which is half in prose, half in verse), and the final letters, both written by Nawal. They are blank verses, very short, that, without violating any grammar rule, escape the logic of efficient communication. Sentences are cut in pieces («You will each throw | A pail of cold water | On my body»39) and some
parts are unnecessarily repeated («Gently | Console every shred | Gently | Cure ever y moment | Gently | Rock every image»40). This formal resource achieves giving a rhythm and tone to the sentences that prevent from reading them superficially; it gives weight and solemnity to each word.
This effect that verse, through short sentences, that is, many pauses, produces, is also found in parts of the play written in prose. The form of the discourse, how it is conveyed,
39 Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016), 7. 40 Mouawad, Scorched,133-134.
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is used to give or downplay importance to what is said. Repetitions are perhaps the best example of this. For instance, there are some sentences the characters say exactly in the same way in different occasions: «Now that we are together, everything feels better»; «No matter what happens, I will always love you». They are promises or reminders that, in every repetition fill their meaning with everything occurred and acquire more importance, a deeper content. Instead, there are expressions whose repetition (and content) indicate superfluity, they are generally pet words («for sure, for sure, for sure»), and don’t make the discourse poetic. More subtle repetitions in a discourse in prose, helped by other resources, add some ‘poeticity’ to it: «Elhame is never wrong. I asked her. “Elhame, are you sure?” She laughed. She stroked my cheek. She told me she’s the one who has delivered all the babies in the village for the last forty years. She took me out of my mother’s belly and she took my mother out of her mother’s belly. Elhame is never wrong.»41 The repetition of the first and last sentence of this fragment, and of the pronoun ‘she’, always in sentences with a similar structure, creates a certain rhythm, indicates an aesthetic elaboration of the language, which approaches it to the poetic. Besides, as seen in this fragment, generally in this play, the style is simple, laconic, devoid of ornaments, and this characteristic gives the impression of essentiality and intensity, at the same time as brings an air of serenity to the speech. This makes the language more poetic, as well as, as said, adds a certain rigidity to the discourse.
But the language of Scorched is not mostly poetic exclusively due to the form. The content, the words that are used, play an important part in it as well. Scorched is full of metaphors, images, metonymies and all types of rhetoric figures. There abound simple metaphors and comparisons like the following: «Time is like a chicken with its head cut off, racing around madly, every which way»42; «my childhood is full of you, Nawal.
Tonight, childhood is a knife they’ve stuck in the throat.»43 Moreover, there is, in a bigger
unit of meaning, a recurrent comparison between mathematics, a language itself with a certain ‘poeticity’, and the family, or more concretely, geometry (or the theory of graphs), and the place we occupy in the family, a comparison that also connects with other different matters treated in the play. Therefore, mathematics (and other topics in a lesser
41 Mouawad, Scorched, 24. 42 Mouawad, Scorched, 67. 43 Mouawad, Scorched, 29.
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degree), apart from contributing to build the plot and the characters, work in a poetic way as a metaphor or comparison to other topics of the play.
On the other hand, just as sentences tended to simplicity and essentialism in their form, the words used tend to abstraction. There are few references to concrete places, time and people. These are sometimes designated by expressions or forms that give them a somewhat legendary character:
«I’ve just come back from the rock where the white trees stand»44;
«‒Which war are you talking about?
‒You know very well which war. The war pitting brother against brother, sister against sister. The war of angry civilians.»45
This tendency to essentialism also in the content is related to the solemnity discussed above, which is also reinforced by the frequent use of “absolute” terms (such as “never”, “always”). In fact, in the same way as the nakedness in syntactic and conceptual terms contributes to make the language poetic, the topics treated, far from being supplementary and contingent, are also essential, somewhat elevated. In this sense, Scorched fits quite well in the traditional distinction that George Steiner pointed out: it has the essentialism, elevation, solemnity, and sometimes the form (the verse) of the tragic.
III.II. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF POETIC LANGUAGE IN THE TEXT?
Poetic language in the text of Scorched is not a separate, identifiable element, but is intertwined with all of the other elements of the play. The task of isolating it and focusing exclusively on it is, therefore, a forced one. In this analysis I try to navigate between the necessary movement of separating and organizing the elements in order to analyze them, and the accuracy and respect regarding the interwoven nature of the text. For this reason, the distribution in subsections will always have a degree of ineffaceable arbitrariness. In this case, the first subsection lays out a topic that underlies the language in the whole play; and the rest focus on the language of the characters, which often not only reveals us information about them, but also about other general topics in play in Scorched. These subsections propose a view on each character’s language that doesn’t pretend to be
44 Mouawad, Scorched, 29.
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complete or exhaustive, but to be a short, partial immersion in the character’s peculiar language, its evolution and implications.
The following is an analysis mainly based on close reading, hence, a personal analysis that tries to make an intelligent use of all the tools acquired so far, but that mostly focusses and tries to listen to the text. The edition of Scorched I mainly use for the analysis is the English version translated by Linda Garobiau in 2009 and published by Playwrights Canada Press. I also have on hand the original in French from the 2009 edition published by Leméac/Actes Sud-Papiers.
III.II.I. POETIC LANGUAGE IN REFERENCE TO TIME: THE LANGUAGE OF THE PAST AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE PRESENT
Scorched is full of flashbacks and simultaneous temporal lines intertwined. The story
starts with the death of Nawal, one of the protagonists of the play, in whose testament asks her children to dig for the truth of their origins and, therefore, of their identity. For this reason, the past has a great importance in this play, because even the present storyline is based on it: it consists, in fact, in its discovery. In broad terms, there is mainly a storyline situated in the present of the play (concretely, in 2002) and constant flashbacks to different moments of Nawal Marwan’s life, which mostly are ordered in a chronological sense: we first get to know Nawal as a young girl and from there, her life journey.
The temporal difference can also be perceived, to a certain extent, in the language. Although there is a sort of ‘neutral’ language, that is, a communicative, unmarked language that, mainly in the dialogues, all characters use; examining it closer, a distance between the language of the past and the language of the present can be noticed. This happens when the language is not used exclusively with communicative purposes, but employed in a more particular manner, which distances it from its neutrality, and as a consequence the language becomes more revealing: in this case, I argue, concerning the time, but not only it. Let’s delve into it.
In the most remote past, Nawal, age fourteen, speaks like this to her lover Wahab:
NAWAL: (…) I wanted to shout it so the whole village would hear, so the trees would hear, so the night and the moon and the stars would hear. But I couldn’t. I have to whisper
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it in your ear, Wahab, and afterwards I won’t dare hold you in my arms, even if that’s what I want most in the world, even if I’m sure I’ll never feel complete if you remain outside me.46
Later, in another conversation between the two lovers, Wahab says the following:
WAHAB: (…) Listen, Nawal, I’m telling you, listen, the day I see the ocean, the word ocean will explode in your head, it will explode and you will burst into tears because you will know that I’m thinking of you. No matter where I am, we will be together. There is nothing more beautiful than being together.47
The conversations between Nawal and Wahab always revolve around love, an essential topic in life and literature, and very charged poetically, but which, nevertheless, doesn’t require to be treated in a poetic way. However, their dialogues fit very well in the cliché of the two young lovers who just live for their love, which appears depicted idealistically as a pure, absolute, true, enduring love. But not only their conception of love is somewhat romantic, and, therefore, closer to the literary than to the ordinary; they also speak in a rather poetic way. In the citations exposed, there are tropes such as metaphors and images (in the first, «the trees», «the moon», «the stars», words with a huge poetic connotation; in the second «the word ocean will explode in your head»); as well as repetitions of structures or particles of the sentences that could be elided (in the first, «so», «and», «even»; in the second «will explode», for instance), but pursue aesthetic purposes and as a result give a poetic air to their dialogues.
Another of the important characters that appears in Nawal’s childhood is Nazira, her grandmother. She speaks as follows:
NAZIRA: (…) Days go by and months are gone. The sun rises and sets. The seasons go by. Nawal no longer speaks, she wanders about in silence. Her belly is gone and I feel the ancient call of the earth. Too much pain has been with me for too long. Take me to my bed. As winter ends, I hear death’s footsteps in the rushing water of the streams.48
The passage of time and death are the themes of this short fragment, themes, again, not banal at all, but absolutely essential in life and literature, and once more they are treated in a poetic way. Apart from the clear last image («death’s footsteps in the rushing water of the streams»), other elements contribute to give her speech a poetic character: the
46 Mouawad, Scorched, 23.
47 Mouawad, Scorched, 30. 48 Mouawad, Scorched, 31.
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images of «months are gone» or «the ancient call of the earth»; and the short, condensed sentences of the beginning. It also happened in the previous examples: it can be intuited a certain ‘absolutism’ in the point of view, and this results in a solemn and rigid tone. The short sentences, and hence, the abundance of pauses not only move this language closer to the form of the verse, but also highlight the importance of silences. And as Steiner explained in Language and Silence, when language flirts with silence, it is actually flirting with what remains outside itself, it is trying to push its own limits to reach something that is beyond. In this case, probably, a deeper, more essential sense of life and experience than what language usually expresses.
Even when characters of the past talk in a more ‘neutral’ way, they keep a certain gravity in their words. It is the case of Jihane, Nawal’s mother:
JIHANE: Forget your belly! This child has nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with your family. Nothing to do with your mother, nothing to do with your life.49
JIHANE: (…) Keep this child and this instant, this very instant, you will take off those clothes that don’t belong to you and leave this house, leave your family, your village, your mountains, your sky and your stars, and leave me…50
In the first fragment, the mere repetition of a sentence, with exactly the same structure, and a sentence that moreover conveys such a decisive, absolute message («nothing to do…»), not only adds severity to it, but also approaches a type of language that is more poetic. In the second, the last enumeration and its components move also away from the colloquial language in favor of the poetic.
At nineteen Nawal meets who will be her most important friend, Sawda. Her way of speaking also has, like the characters commented so far, traces of poetic language. Here there are some examples:
SAWDA: (…) I saw you hit the man with your book, I watched the book tremble in your hand, and I thought of all the words, all the letters, burning with the heat of the anger on your face. You left, and I followed you.51
SAWDA: (…) I get up in the morning and people say, “Sawda, there’s the sky,” but no one has anything to say about the sky. They say, “There’s the wind,” but no one has
49 Mouawad, Scorched, 26.
50 Mouawad, Scorched, 27. 51 Mouawad, Scorched, 44.
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anything to say about the wind. People show me the world but the world is mute. And life goes by and everything is murky.52
In the first citation there is the obvious image of «[all the words, all the letters] burning with the heat of the anger on your face», but also the sentences «I watched the book tremble in your hand», a quite intense image, and the last, bare and sententious «You left, and I followed you», which add to the ‘poeticity’ of the passage. In the second one, almost all parts contribute to give a poetic character to the fragment. The sentence «I get up in the morning and people say» is clearly not a construction of ordinary language. The sky and the wind are very poetically charged elements, and probably not only due to their beauty, but also to their connection to a certain essentiality that comes from being natural elements. The repetition of «no one has anything to say about (…)» obeys aesthetic reasons, as do the two last sentences, because of their forcefulness, absolute terms («the world is mute», «life goes by», «everything is murky»), and metaphors («the world is mute», «everything is murky»).
So far, the sample of citations have illustrated a generalized but very specific use of the language, which I consider poetic. It consists of semantic (metaphors, images) and syntactic (anaphors, parallelisms) rhetorical figures, together with a style characterized by the bareness, intensity and absolutism. These features are found indiscriminately in the speech of all the characters from the most remote past, and this, as I see it, not only speaks about this time, but gives also indications of a particular world view and system of values. The bareness, intensity and absolutism suggest a conception of the world in which everything is significative and decisive, in which things are forever or nevermore, there are no exceptions or perhaps: that is, values are clearly defined and immutable, without shades or nuances. Essentiality seems so rooted that it becomes rigid, and together with the intensity that generates this seriousness, creates the perfect atmosphere for the tragic: when rigidity breaks, when there is no space for mistakes and alternatives, everything becomes grave, definitive, extreme; and this surely asks for a non-ordinary way of expression, that is, for a language that is closer to the poetic. Moreover, this simple, bare and essential language (and therefore, the set of values and mentality it conveys, as I have argued previously) suggests indeed an ancestral origin, so old and ingrained that could seem ‘natural’, in the same way that traditions seem to be. However,
52 Mouawad, Scorched, 45.
