Speaking through the Night : Diary of a Lockdown, March–April 2020

Isolating in Nogent-sur-Marne, Wajdi Mouawad embarks upon a spectacular inner voyage, travelling from his own microcosm to the eye of the Big Bang, where dead stars shine. We follow him from Peter Handke’s office to his father’s retirement home, from the banks of the Saint Lawrence to Montréal, Greece, Greenland, and the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, by way of French phonetics and the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, he explores the razor’s edge of madness, conjures a dream shared by all humanity, and probes the bestiality of our everyday lives. Mouawad’s plays, novels, and essays speak to us all, confronting our ghosts, addressing the obscure and the impenetrable, which dissipate as they are put into words. During the nights of lockdown in the spring of 2020, gazing into the murky depths and braving the mystery of the universe, Mouawad wrote these chronicles to stir the inky pandemic darkness and shed a consoling light.