Performing Memory: Contested Identities in the Work of Wajdi Mouawad
Performing Memory: Contested Identities in the Work of Wajdi Mouawad

Summary/Abstract: This paper will examine two major works by the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad, who has achieved international prominence with plays such as Tideline and Scorched. Both plays are exercises in performing memory. The characters in each play embark on quests to recover lost identity, traversing real and imagined landscapes and crossing boundaries from current to historicised identities in doing so. Mouawad himself has made this voyage. Emigrating first to Paris and then to Montréal as a teenager, Mouawad developed his oeuvre as an actor, director and playwright in the multicultural milieu of contemporary French Canada. Writing in French, an adopted or second language, his works, particularly Littoral and Incendies (as they are titled in French), betray an obsession with origins and with recovering memory while simultaneously rejecting nostalgia or the idea that authenticity resides solely in the past.

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