If any text this year rendered me speechless because of a major “shock
factor”, it would be Wajdi Mouawad’s play Scorched.
If I were to describe the scene in which I was exposed to the climax of the
story, it would have to be one of those “you had to be there moments”.
The link above is to a song called “Elephant Gun” by Beirut. The
correlation I made between the author of this play and the artists’ lyrics was
their strong relations to “home”. In Scorched,
the setting is anonymous but it is implied that the main character, Nawal, is
from somewhere in the Middle East. This epic that integrates family drama
throughout the narrative is concerned with the past and the present,
intertwining their effects on each time frame.
The literal place that is “home” is a missing and searched for emotional
destination that has been displaced through civil war and disintegrating
familial bonds. Home is not always a place, but an emotion that can be felt
through the presence of cultural nostalgia.
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