Pas de forêt sans champignons. Hubert Voiry Preface by Marc-André Selosse

15 × 20.5 cm 80 pages color illustrations leporello coedition leméac/actes sud september 2022 retail price: 37 €

An actor, stage director and director of the Théâtre national de la Colline since 2016, Wajdi Mouawad is also the author of the epic quartets Le Sang des promesses (Littoral, Incendies, Forêt, Ciels) and of the novel Anima. Translated into several languages, his work has won a number of international awards.

MOTHER

Wajdi Mouawad

In Seuls, the son of a Lebanese family has to face his demons when he learns his father is in a coma and he grasps the symbolic meaning of the Rembrandt’s work, The Return of the Prodigal Son. In Sœurs, the second volume of the Domestic cycle, a woman expresses the suffering caused by her family’s exile and her difficulties of living a dual culture. In Mother, the third volume of the cycle, a mother leaves her country with her three children to escape the civil war and settles in Paris. Caught in his professional duties, her husband does not realize that he can join her abroad. The family embarks on an absurd period of their lives, devoured the fear of the war’s inevitable destruction and saddened by the absence of a father which makes their normal life impossible. Using a leporello form with Wajdi Mouawad’s illustrations - sketches, recipes, and illustrated family photos, etc. - the reader is plunged into the family’s private world and five years of painful waiting for a father before ultimately returning to the homeland. The format also features two modes of reading. The first follows the early years of exile and the family’s problems adapting to French culture, and is read left to right. After this period, the book should be closed and turned 180° anti-clockwise to pursue the rest of the story, reading from right to left, a reminder of the author’s Arabic mother tongue and culture which struggles to co-exist with life in France.