Repairing the Irreparable

PHOTO: MARTIN ROY, LE DROIT

Playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad sparked an outcry by seeking to cast Bertrand Cantat in the cycle Les Femmes, based on Sophocles and staged at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde.

La Presse, Apr. 22nd 2011

Wajdi, I write to you wearing several hats at once: those of a jurist, a woman, a law professor, a feminist and a mother. I have been thinking about you these past weeks. Your silence has inhabited me, run through me, as though it were audible, as though it spoke through its refusal to speak. You spoke to me. You spoke. Reading your words to Aimée, your little darling, I thought of my son, who is also three and thinks only of playing. I thought too of my youngest, who is barely one and smiles at life. I wondered how I would tell them about the irreparable, when they are grown. Killing a woman. Any woman. Killing the one you love more than anything in the world. Killing with fists, with distress. Without meaning to. Without wanting this death that will disfigure you forever. Killing because love can never reach the absolute it symbolizes, because it remains forever imperfect beside that thirst for the immeasurable. Killing the half-measure that taunts the artist.

I wondered what words I would use to teach them that one must not strike, that one must learn to forgive, even the one who strikes. Can we look at the irreparable when it burns the eyes, they will ask me one day? Can we see the complexity of the man behind the bloody second that betrays him? Can we also, at the very same moment, see the woman who did not choose death and who will nonetheless take no part in the rehearsal? She would surely have something to say. She will speak no more. How do we gather beneath one roof the man who lost everything to his own tragedy and the woman who tragically is no longer? No doubt you wished, through art, to speak to us of this dilemma, of this difficult and painful encounter. Of this reconciliation, you would clarify. The reflection matters; it deserves to be heard. But the chorus can only speak if its words are perceptible to the Other. Can we hear you now? Can we listen to the chorus? Can we listen to it through Bertrand, through Cantat? You place yourself alongside justice, you say, outside the law that has judged. The man you speak of, whom you love for the manifold being he embodies, is free, you suggest, from the moment he has served his sentence. The law would then be that altar which punishes and forgives, which detains and restores freedom.

Wajdi, I write to you because I have my own doubts about the pacifying and transformative role of law. I know it from the inside. It has no such magic power. It too is imperfect. It sometimes brutalizes the innocent. It hands down sentences that are often unjust or timid. Legal freedom is temporal, and that is why it is easy to define. It is philosophical freedom, far nobler, that weighs and weighs again the long march of men and women. You say you consider Bertrand your equal because he faced justice. It falls to him now to enter the arena of philosophical freedom, which can only be attained by asking forgiveness. That may well be the heaviest sentence of all to bear, because it demands the humility of self-questioning and the sacrifice of genuine compassion.

To raise the question of morality and justice is also, and above all, to accept the limits of law. Beyond the sentence that has been served, behind the bars that stifle and subjugate, there is a life where everything remains to be built: recovering trust, speaking differently, extending a hand that still trembles a little. Without that first gesture of forgiveness, South Africa could never have moved past the barbarity of apartheid. Wajdi, I would like to tell you, simply like this, what I will answer my sons if they ask me one day how to repair the irreparable, when it is too late and life goes on flowing anyway through the cracks of early morning. One must read and reread the life of Albie Sachs, the South African activist and former judge who, standing before the man who had tried to kill him, "a man who confessed his wrong and hoped for forgiveness," chose to grant it. Perhaps that is the symbol we should be calling for, the only elegance still possible.

If Bertrand Cantat wishes to be philosophically free, he will have to extend that hand toward the Other. This difficult and painful encounter is not the one that belongs to theatre or to song. It must first take place elsewhere, somewhere where discomfort restores to humanity its sublime character.