ARCHIVES 2012 / 33 tours et quelques secondes

How can we penetrate the mystery of a suicide? When the person who commits it is a public figure, a militant for human rights, assuring in a posthumous letter that he has no affective, family or social problems, the act of course triggers many questions. Diyaa Yamout's irrevocable decision therefore electrified Lebanese society. Political or religious personalities, friends, acquaintances and anonymous individuals, the young and the not so young, on the left as well as the right, reacted to this personal act that became a genuine societal debate, magnified by social networks. It is based on objects that took part in this young man's daily life – telephone, answering machine, TV set and computer – that continue to live, to function and to communicate, that not only this terrible gesture, but especially what happened in Lebanon, after it was made, that will be told. Many attempts at hijacking various expressions of despair, of the desire to optimize this tragedy with the keen consciousness of an impossible future, every sort of opinions were expressed in the days after this suicide. They must therefore be heard to question the impasses in which a fragmented, divided, almost paralyzed society finds itself: this Lebanese society that remains at the core of Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué's theatre proposals. JFP