How was born your text The Imperceptible ooze of life that you interpret at the Vidy theater in Lausanne in Switzerland?
Rabih Mroué invited me to a festival on Lebanon, in Frankfurt, and I read a text on the city of Tripoli, my sexual identity, exile and writing. Lina Majdalanie and Rabih encouraged me to develop this writing, which I did by adapting it for a theatrical performance. It is an open monologue, with a part in French, and other passages in dialectal Arabic and in classical Arabic. This linguistic mixing adds to the strata of the text the specificity of my current use of the three languages.
How has exile changed the way you consider your identity?
Freedom helps to loosen the knots of the tongue and those of the body. My body, today, as an exiled body, seeks its place politically and socially. Regarding my gender identity, my experiences of openness in a city like Paris open up other horizons and close other spaces. My identity, which has found a place of expression, has narrowed it to the last places of its intimacy. I am the son of an Arab city, conservative, with patterns of relationships and forms of communication that do not exist here. Exile and my new society impose formalities on me that are not like me. It’s a long debate, but I believe that exile allowed me to get closer to my body, its concepts, its linguistics and its desires; it brought me closer to exploring my identity and its implications, which appears in a profound way in my latest novel.
In which language do you write?
I write and I publish in Arabic, I do not publish my experiences in French. I need time to discover my relationship with my new language. French helps me to say what I fear, to enter a closed forest, with spaces that I find difficult to express in my mother tongue. Both languages are my tools on the difficult path of writing. From the age of fifteen, I worked in journalism in Tripoli, writing is an intimate space, a world in which I can imagine, play and explore. Every day, I discover the brutality and the tenderness of this immense world.
How does it feel playing your own lyrics?
I play a role, as if this life does not belong to me, it is an awesome and dangerous game. I was very scared, because my relationship with this text is strained. The text is loaded with my memories, my scars, which the directors are aware of. Rabih and Lina made me work so that I separate myself from my text, and today I see myself as an interpreter of the text. The process was difficult, maybe the dance I was trained in for this role freed me from my words, their weight, their anger and their pain.
Why did you choose to share your story with your readers and audience?
This is the first time that I have shared my personal stories in a contemporary text. In my novels, all my characters are fictional and the stories I construct are imaginary. This text was a challenge for me, on a personal level and as a writer, I had to write a text that would come into direct contact with the public. I can’t wait to hear the reaction of viewers and see them interact with my words.
How was born your text The Imperceptible ooze of life that you interpret at the Vidy theater in Lausanne in Switzerland? Rabih Mroué invited me to a festival on Lebanon, in Frankfurt, and I read a text on the city of Tripoli, my sexual identity, exile and writing. Lina Majdalanie and Rabih encouraged me to develop this writing, which I did in…
