Burned into being: forms of trauma and exile in Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn an examination of Wajdi Mouawad's play, Incendies (2003) and the 2010 film version of the play directed and scripted by Denis Villeneuve, this article explores the quest narrative as it underpins these texts, with particular reference to exile, trauma and reparation. The suggestive trope of “home” as this intersects with identity, and the threat to identity posed by war and suffering, as well as the palimpsestic construction and reconstruction of memory, and its ability (and inability) to palliate the traumatised “housing” of the body (in particular the maternal body of Nawal Marwan, the character who originates the theatrical and filmic chronotopes) is also investigated in relation to the reworking of the Oedipus myth that informs both play and film. Through the theoretical lens of Derridean and Lacanian poststructuralism and the imbrication of gender and trauma studies, the article interrogates the complex staging of traumatic re- enactment as manifested in the interstitial spaces between the theatrical and filmic texts.