HOW TO BREAK THE CIRCLE OF SILENCE AND RECOVER YOUR MEMORY AFTER THE GENOCIDAL WAR (“THE FIRES” OF VAJDI MUAVAD)

Abstract

Vajdi Muavad’s play “The fires” is very relevant for the modern Ukrainian reader, as it immerses him in the contexts of genocidal wars outside of Ukraine and Europe. It is important that the playwright himself is a refugee from Lebanon, so through the metaphorical world of the Eastern space he actualizes many values of the Western world – such as individual human freedom, a woman’s right to be strong and self-sufficient, the importance of family memory as an experience, not as a superstition, generational transformations, the responsibility of countries for their heroes and their criminals. Using the example of several generations of the family of a Lebanese woman named Naval, the author manages to show how important for a person is their inner personal freedom, which is ensured not only by subjective motivation, but also by education, experience, the ability to take responsibility for others and accept decisions, including quite difficult ones. Throughout the play, the playwright is looking for ways to turn the difficult traumatic experience of the family/genus into an instructive story that will not traumatize the next generations, but will give them a chance to get out of the trauma. Purpose: to examine Vajdi Muavad’s play “The fires” in the context of transgenerational traumatic experience, interpreted from the standpoint of mass literature and modern dramatic writing. Methods: transgenerational and transpersonal psychology, trauma studies, memory studies. Results. For Ukrainians’ artistic understanding of the current stage of the Russian-Ukrainian genocidal war, the artistic experience of other cultural practices is seen as productive in two aspects: first, fiction captures and elaborates already available answers to many urgent questions that the war poses to Ukrainians; secondly, understanding the discourse of war through the conditional Other creates a sufficient emotional and mental distance necessary for full-fledged reflections and generalizations. In this regard, Vajdi Muavad’s play “The fires” appears to be an extremely interesting dramaturgical version of the understanding of war as the psychological maturation of a person who seeks to break the endless transgenerational relay of family traumas and give his children a chance not to reproduce these traumas anymore, but to turn them into a story that does not have to repeat itself endlessly, but answers many questions. For this, hatred and rejection, which determined the attitude of children towards their parents in the family, through tragic life trials can be turned into love and acceptance, and this is exactly what the playwright tries to achieve by creating the family saga of the Lebanese woman Nawal Marwan – from the generation of her grandmother to the generation of her adults children. Therefore, the playwright, who must keep the constant attention of his recipient in tension, is forced to adapt his own writing to the framework of modern mass literature, setting before the children of Naval a task that can be realized only in the form of an exciting quest, during which the reader/spectator supposedly knows several stories more, than the participants of this quest themselves. Conclusions. Vajdi Muavad’s play “The fires” in the Ukrainian translation expands the contextual field of modern dramaturgical interpretations of genocidal war in terms of trauma/post-trauma, offering through the story of one family, a kind of family saga, a conversation about how to get rid of negative hereditary patterns and melt deep personal the trauma in the family history, which will testify to overcoming the trauma and stopping its further transgenerational replication. The dramatist's filigree strategy of post-traumatic external silence reveals the mechanisms of the deep inner workings of individual human memory within the psyche of an individual who has experienced a trauma/complex of traumas. The playwright makes the most of the potential of modern mass literature, which concentrates on fast, almost cinematic events, multifacetedness, detective plots, quests, creating the illusion in the recipient that at a specific moment of action, he knows much more than the characters of the work.