The Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad during a class at the Collège de France. (Credit: Patrick Imbert/Collège de France)
The invention of Europe by languages and cultures is the chair at the Collège de France entrusted to the director of the Théâtre de la Colline in 2025. This journey began on Feb. 6 with an unforgettable inaugural lecture for all who witnessed it in person or on the Collège de France website. Subsequently, eight lessons were scheduled, revolving around foundational verbs of the writing process: To be, to see, to tremble, to choose, to meet, to console, to love and to die. Each lesson is followed by a multidisciplinary seminar with renowned specialists, such as astrophysicists Étienne Parizot and Michel Casé discussing the birth of the universe, conductor Louis Langrée around Time, a fragment of music, medievalist Patrick Boucheron to evoke oracular memory. On March 11, Mouawad's lesson will focus on the "Puzzle without image of the verb to choose," followed by a seminar about "Writing of conciliation and reconciliation, failure and stubbornness of mediation in conflict zones." The discussion will feature Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli Prime Minister, Nasser Alkidwa, a former Palestinian Foreign Minister, and Anne-Claire Legendre, North Africa and Middle East advisor at the Élysée.
Just before Mouawad's inaugural lecture on Feb. 6, 2025, the administrator of the Collège de France, Thomas Römer, highlighted the stakes surrounding the questioning of European culture, the prestigious theatrical and artistic journey of the writer and the universal mission of the Collège de France.
"The Collège de France, through its history, reminds that knowledge does not belong to an elite but to everyone."
Afterward, Mouawad took over the space, outlining the elusive contours of The Shadow Within Writing.
"Meeting oneself often involves clandestinity," he said. The approach was theatrical, visual and the performance invited the audience on an abundant, erudite, brilliant, and breathless reflective journey.
An initial movement evoked a passage from the fire of creation to blood as the embodiment of the purifying ritual of tragedy. It was about questioning the gesture of writing and its foundational matrix. The artist's art of hypotyposis allowed him to embody some scenes underlying his creation. 10 years after exile, discovering in a ruined building the five letters the child had hidden behind a detached stone, the five letters of his first name. This was followed by the image of a piano in a ruined field with five notes still resounding. Then the sacrifice of the lamb witnessed by the child as the liver was removed from a bloody beast, and which would be eaten raw. Another sacrificial scene, that of the expiatory victims of April 13, 1975, in Beirut. Mouawad spoke of an "ecology of repetition" in creation, within which "stories have condensed into morning dew."
If "everything that is wonderful is owed to horror," the speaker said that contemporary European creation was essentially centered on a first-person enallage; I, me, myself. Yet "unity leads to delirium," and with migrants, "the stories of our time are drowning."
The author of All Birds claimed that "the one who bears the narrative is always the newcomer, the traveler; the one who comes from elsewhere, the one who has something to tell … It is the one who carries the treasure of tragedy, whose brilliance washes and upsets."
In this contemporary disarticulation of the self with others, Mouawad denounced the so-called respect, "toilet paper of bonds." He invited people to "accept oscillating from I to you," "to write the massacres of the unknown on the caves of our time." And to affirm, "after Rwanda, Auschwitz, Gaza, only poetic discourse is possible."
As his speech unfolded, the tension grew to a crescendo and reached its climax with a performative sacrificial gesture by Mouawad, embodying before everyone the foundational act of the writing gesture, in its violence and mystery. The poet covered his face with his own blood, his white shirt stained with the still steaming red liquid. "Make do with what's in your hands, a pencil, paper, the blood of victims, memory made to the dead, and tell them: I will never abandon you."
'Embracing Monstrosity'
Tuesday, Feb. 25, just a few minutes before the start of Mouawad's second lesson, a large crowd hoped to find a seat in the Marguerite Yourcenar amphitheater. It was full, as with previous lessons, and a relay room is already set up. In the crowd, dedicated followers of the Collège de France's teachings, armed with large notebook edges, were ready to capture the fragments of a kaleidoscopic thought never where expected and unfolding in a striking rhythm. Many students were present, their faces still somewhat blurred by the early morning and the dark gray sky; they were eager to hear the speaker, a notepad in hand. Among the audience, a palpable camaraderie with the verbal, reflective, and scenic power of Mouawad is evident.
To explore the verb see in the creative process, Mouawad relied on Shakespeare, Cervantes, Copernicus, Columbus and many others, addressing the question of time, of space, the subject and the event, to see how they interweave to give birth to modern storytelling. He envisioned the verb narrate in its political dimension, which structures the city, incites it and contributes to keeping the notion of madness alive in the memory of society.
Mouawad noted the connection between power and creation.
"Power fears any power that escapes its authority," it is "obsessed with the need to control artists and researchers." The act of seeing is foundational in "an affirmation of oneself," eyes are "a matrix of rebellion." And he mentioned the abuses in Syrian prisons, where victims' eyes were gouged out.
The poet said that for a child, everything is magic, "until the membrane is torn," sometimes by a traumatic incident, rape, incest, a massacre witnessed.
"Magic encounters the inconsolable." From terror comes revelation, inviting action. "Through the power of the gaze, the verb see opens the poet's field." To embody the articulation of vision with revelation and speech, the poet quoted Oedipus, for whom "naming is going towards the vision."
He then set the temple of Delphi with its famous motto "Know thyself." Mouawad's explication of this formula gave rise to a theatrical tour de force that explicates the sibylline injunction.
"Bring to light what is hidden in the depths of your mind … Do not forget your condition as a mortal, do not presume of yourself, know your measure, do not judge that of others … do not confuse origin and identity, know the rhythm of your walk, become your own eye."
The oracle noted the connection between eye, light, truth and knowledge. Mouawad returned to the contemporary world and spoke on the dangerous nature of formulas like "I am incapable of lying … I am straightforward … I tell you the truth." The writer said that the spoken truth can be bitter. "The oracle of Delphi speaks incomprehensibly to protect the receiver of the word. It is a matter of slowly embracing monstrosity." If Oedipus gouged out his eyes, it was because of the "brutality of revelation." And to remember that "to see oneself, one must protect one's soul."
Knowledge is "a place from which seeing is possible without danger." The principle of catharsis implies that "everyone cries but everyone applauds … We die of pain to feel alive."
Greek theater allows us "to wash away our pain." And when "each thinks of their own dead," we speak of "the solidarity of the shaken," which, according to Mouawad, is "the only target of writing. When Sophocles tells the story of Oedipus, we know the story, "he makes the audience an accomplice by having them investigate their own crime." If Oedipus was blind to his condition, "to what am I blind?" the spectator wondered allowed. This perspective reminds us that "we are all murderers, some become."
For Mouawad, the blank page was a battlefield.
"It is there, it waits to be confronted … We are ready to embrace monstrosity … I am waiting for you, bitch!" he exclaimed. After witnessing massacres, "writing promises to love you," he added. And he insisted that his audience: "Rise, write, trust, the stories come to you!"
The magic of the writer's gesture lied in its immediacy.
"What we write is always written in the present … The time of writing is writing itself." According to the writer, following a precise plan established the day before is akin to constructing a "bidet." Writing calls for a particular relationship with time, inviting a "shift into the time of writing, it is a very concrete sensation." To die is when our eyes close, "identity is fixed, we are freed from the struggle of being who we are."
The audience applauded vigorously, the words continued to resonate in their ears and on notebooks filled with quotations, after a total, visual, theatrical and poetic performance. After the intermission, the seminar on Time, a fragment of music, holds more promises of exploration. All lectures and seminars from the Collège de France are available on the institution's website located opposite the Middle Ages Museum in Paris.
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.
