‘Please Tell Me Who I Am’: Resisting Media Representation of Arab Masculinity and Violence in Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies

Abstract

In Wajdi Mouawad's play Incendies (2003), a photojournalist stands offstage, photographing a sniper who, it can later be deduced, is half-Lebanese and half-Palestinian by birth. The sniper sings along to Supertramp's ‘The logical song’, using his rifle as a guitar. But he refuses to allow the photojournalist to capture his silent image. The sniper shoots him, drags him onstage and verbally tortures him before he kills him. The sniper then uses the photojournalist's arm as a microphone and interviews himself in a rock star fantasy to reveal his biography. This scene is examined in detail to tease out the themes of listening and tracing origins and identities in war, exile and diaspora, and leads to questions about the role the media plays in the construction of Arab masculinity as both menacing and marginal. The article argues in conclusions that, as one of the leading voices in Francophone theatre today, Mouawad offers a new variation on engaged theatre, one that frames origins as a process rather than a matter of fact.