‘The powerful don’t want individuals who think for themselves’

Is he Muslim or Christian, Druze or Maronite, rich or poor? Those are questions Rabih Mroué prefers not to answer. Instead, he refers to the essay of Roland Barthes, La mort de l’auteur, in which the French philosopher pleads to approach and interpret the literary text exclusively through the written word, and to make an abstraction of the author, his origins, his personality, his ideology, and the circumstances in which he lived. The writer has to step aside, and the reader takes control. The reader re-writes the text for himself.
‘This is necessary to treat the text more seriously’, Rabih Mroué says, and that is what he tries to accomplish with his plays. ‘It is not important who I am, or what I’ve been through’, he says. ‘More important is what the spectator makes of my work’.
Of course, Rabih Mroué often relates about his life. The situation in his country, Lebanon, and the civil war prominently appear in his work. But it is not his intention to evoke emotions. ‘If I make a play about the civil war, it is not my intention to make people feel compassion’, he says. ‘Because theatre isn’t the place for sadness or joy. Those are negative feelings, curbing rational thinking. I want people to ask questions and to think when they see my plays. I want them to link the play with their own social, political and philosophical environment. This is more useful, and healthier.’

In Make me stop smoking, the performer introduces his own archive, consisting of different anonymous and personal documents. Texts, newspaper clippings, missing person notices, unfinished projects, ideas, interviews, material he carefully collected over the past ten years. ‘Showing my own archive is just an excuse to deconstruct and analyse the meaning of the archive’, Mroué says. And this is his way to address the political and intellectual situation of his country, Lebanon.

‘Make me stop smoking raises questions about the archive, about the document’, he says. ‘What makes a piece of paper a document, and who decides over that matter? Who decides a certain document needs to be saved, and another needn’t? Which documents and events deserve to make up history, and which don’t deserve that honour? These questions prove the responsibility of the historian, questions that reveal the influences the historian is subjected to,’ Mroué says.
‘When the historian takes an archive under his wings, and decides what makes up history and what doesn’t, he falls into a trap. And creates gaps. Between document and document, there is a document that went missing, or that has been covered up by a certain power.’ For Rabih Mroué, all documents deserve to be treated with the same amount of care and attention. There is no document more important than another, no event more important than the next one. All events are important, and they all deserve to make up history. ‘Therein lies the responsibility of the historian. It is his job to fill in the gaps, to look for all the documents, and to retrieve every aspect of a past event.’

In the archive Mroué presents in Make me stop smoking, he mixes real documents with fictitious ones in such a way that the boundary between the personal and the impersonal, between the real and the artificial, becomes blurred. Among the newspaper clippings, for example, one can find a missing person notice of a certain Rabih Mroué, a five-year-old child that went missing the 2nd of February 2000.
Another picture shows Rabih Mroué as an adult. ‘I want to confuse the spectator. I want him to ask himself what is reality and what is fiction. But the real question is not what is fiction or reality in my play. The real question is what is reality and what is fiction in history. Is our history based on facts or on fiction? And if the latter is the case, how do we deal with that history?’

These questions are inevitably linked with the situation in Lebanon. The country was torn by a brutal civil war for several years. To this day, tension between the different communities is high. The war left deep scars, and was horrible for everyone. ‘But every war is the precursor of a new one,’ Rabih Mroué says.
‘The least we can do, is think about the past and the mistakes that have been made. The political rulers in Lebanon and the Arab world do not want citizens. They don’t want individuals that think for themselves. They want the masses, followers listening to their leaders. It is our duty as artists to claim the right to be an individual, to be a citizen, and the right to freedom of opinion. It is the law that must govern, not the ruler nor the ruler’s temper.’

Rabih Mroué himself doesn’t take up a particular position. He doesn’t proclaim ideological ideas or political commitment. ‘It is not my intention to change or not change ideas. My first concern as an artist is questioning myself, entering into a discussion with myself, provoking myself and afterwards my audience, asking myself difficult and taboo questions. It is more an attempt at self-criticism. A criticism on the ideas we grew used to. Ideas that were spoonfed to us. A criticism on the so-called self-evident line of thinking that was passed onto us in school, in university, in our religious community. It is an attempt to question clichés and traditions.’

Mroué didn’t come up with this reasoning out of the blue. There was a certain evolution in his thinking and works. After ’96 and the end of the civil war, he started to think about what had occurred. Gradually, he gained certain insights. Insights that also apply outside Lebanon.

‘There are different levels in every artistic work’, Mroué says. ‘There are questions that are important and urgent. One of these questions is if it is necessary to make theatre. If that is the case, then how does theatre work? Are actors or performers necessary? And if that is the case, then how should they act on stage? These questions seem easy and uncomplicated, but are in fact hard to answer and require serious thought. They concern politics. What is the relation between art and politics? Can there be art without political commitment?’

‘There is no need to answer these questions directly: what concerns me, are questions that stimulate the spectator to think for himself, questions that make him inquire into the presented problems. Just thinking about these questions can urge us to reconsider our heritage, and to do ijtihad.’ With ijtihad, Mroué refers to an ancient and fierce debate within the Islamic world about the question whether the believer should interpret the texts and traditions himself, or whether he should follow the teachings of his religious leaders.

The questions Mroué asks himself transcend religion, country or region. They apply everywhere. Because of that, there is a good relationship and exchange of ideas with artists in Europe. ‘There are common concerns’, he says. ‘I have friends everywhere and I am used to discussions with other artists. There are issues that have become globalised. The question about theatre, or about the relation with politics or the visual image, has become common ground. The question about the Other is another example. Who is the Other, and who am I? A question for Arab artists as well as European artists.’

Rabih Mroué uses the same critical approach in dealing with his audience. ‘I have an audience that follows my work’, he says. ‘But attracting a large audience is not my objective. It is my goal to interact with an audience that consists of individuals. And that is very important. The audience is not one body. It does not form one whole, and thus we arrive at a criticism on the religious and sectarian discourse used in Lebanon today. A discourse that treats people as groups belonging to an ideology or a religion, and not as individuals belonging to the institutions of the state. Individuals that have the same rights out of which arise the same duties. Individuals that are governed based on the laws that apply to everyone, under the umbrella of the state.’
Rabih Mroué questions the relation between the state and the individual and draws attention to the problematic nature of the individual within the state.
‘In our region, the individual exists’, he says. ‘But the individual suffers in an environment where religious communities have the final word.’