Rabih Mroué

Rabih Mroué:  Covid-19 Diary

Commentaries by Susan Plath and Mark Auslander

Susan Plath: Rabih Mroué has worked for many years from archival documents, journals, diaries, and newspaper articles to create dynamic performances that cut to the heart of whatever issue he addresses.

Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, Mroué now lives in Berlin. His background in theater means his performances are highly disciplined and scripted, while seeming to be informal and accidental. I have written about his work “Searching for a Missing Employee” in my book Art and Politics Now (Midmarch 2011). It is a complex narrative partially based on newspaper clippings pasted into notebooks. The convolutions of his search for the “missing employee” sounds very much like someone ( in the US) trying to either get tested for COVID 19 or trying to find out the results.

    

Today though we see his COVID-19 diary. Its immediacy speaks to all of us in the creative fields accustomed to constantly moving from one event to another.  He moves rapidly from rehearsals to cancellations. His final gig before everything stopped was to Spain as we see here,  and then in red ink he starts to feel sick.   Anxiety, fear for his family in Beirut, and his own health begin to dominate his life.

But we also read that he is planning a collaborative event "Die Balcone" with friends in Berlin in which they explored the new spatial relationships created by the virus. In Europe the many balconies create a meta space from which to perform.I will discuss it further in another post.

Mark Auslander: Rabih Mroué's 2020 Covid-19 diary diary may be read, whether intended or not, as a contribution to the long history of plague diaries that stretches back at least to Samuel Pepys' famous 1665 journal of the great plague in London, and Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (a difficult to classify, quasi-fictional reconstruction of that terrible year, written from the vantage point of many decades later.)

I find myself thinking of Francis Barker's brilliant reading of Pepys in The Tremulous Private  Body: the new forms of deeply interior self-fashioning and self-surveillance through writing, which for Barker are foundational to the emergence of modern subjectivity, seems somehow linked to experiences of life during an epidemic, when even the most banal and quotidian of actions (whom do we greet, whose hand do we shake, where do we draw a breath) may be a matter, ultimately, of life or death.  So in this sense Mroué's text is heir to a long entangled history of plagues and written self-narration: when the self is most imperiled, something within glows especially brightly.

It is probably only a coincidence that the cover of Mroué's pocket diary is red, but through our current anxious eyes, that seems entirely appropriate, red being the sign of danger, that now infuses every day of our lives. Red is also the color with which Mroué chooses to scrawl the word "cancelled" over his calendar. The word "cancelled" may have a double meaning here: not only are the actual events sudently off the calendar, but the very lives around us risk being "cancelled" as well: we read of friend's deaths, or at least the rumors of death.

It is enormously moving to see that "on a sunny Sunday," Mroué quotes the start of  Octavio Paz's famous poem, in French, a poem which could ibe thought of as the ballad of our strange era:

"A day is lost
In a sky of hurrying
The light leaves no footprints in the snow
A day is lost
Doors open and close
The seed of the sun soundlessly opens
A day begins"


Mroué' doesn't transcribe the rest of the poem, a love poem which concludes:

"A day begins with your mouth
The day that is lost in our eyes
The day that opens in our night"

Above the poem fragment Mroué has drawn what looks like a king bearing a sword, then a  picture frame on a wall, then that same king, with a sun beside him, inside the picture frame. That seems an apt encapsulation of the poem and of life under Lockdown: everything now transpires within the framed-off confines of our immediate dwelling place. We live, in effect, within the frame--the very same shape, as it happens, as the page of the diary, on which each day is written. 

On the right leaf, the artist quotes Plato, "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when men are afraid of the light."

The eight drawings above the quote are, appropriately, explorations of light and dark, geometric patterns that evoke an aperture opening and closing

It seems oddly appropriate that on the next page, March 28, the artist contemplates a new way of bringing  light into the world, the Berlin Balcony ("Die Balcone") project, encouraging artists to communicate with the world through art, on the miniature theatrical stages that are balconies in the heart of the city.  The artist writes, "When some of us are cut off from our plans and our loved ones., we reach out to the balconies of the world..not leaving everything in the hands of the virus and the fear it generates."

Here, it seems to me, we see the trajectory of a mode of urgent self-fashioning that Samuel Pepys helped launch nearly four centuries ago: paradoxically, solitary acts of writing let us light a candle against the dark, and even in our times of utmost isolation, lets us spread out and amplify our voice, creating a choir where once only silence seemed to reign.

On the next to final page that Mroué' shares, we see a list of cancelled events,  and then a little spark of hope at the bottom: "Preparing for Die Balcone (Lina and I)," Then on the facing, final leaf, we see a largely empty page, marked only with the filled-in shadow of a standing person, and a phrase in Arabic (discussed  below by Drs. Riedlmayer and Buturovic). The meaning of the image seems clear enough: even in these strange, disorienting times, when everything is topsy-turvy, we somehow endure, and remain standing,  looking out at the world  upon a balcony--even if we are, at the moment, all upside-down!

Note from András Riedlmayer (Harvard):  Two notebook pages have Arabic text:  the sixth page in the sequence (from the top down) has a line of poetry running vertically on the right-hand page, while the last page has the Arabic phrase that you noticed, next to the drawing of the upside-down man.

The vertical line of poetry reads:

بَحْر المدينة سِحِر و بيروت عم تسبح الشعر
"Spell of the city's sea: Beirut immersed in poetry"
-- verse transl. courtesy of Youssef Rakha

The text next to the upside-down man literally reads:

حرقوا دين العالم
"They burned the world's religion"

This is a common expression in the region, the artist explains, meaning they really screwed us over.

Amila Buturovic (York) writes of this phrase: "The expression, from what I remember, goes back to the Mongols: one of the poets used it to describe the situation in Baghdad and it became idiomatic."