Mohamed El Khatib: "We don't see dead anymore: it's a taboo"

There is a theory that tries to explain why Basque does not have its own word for green - and it has to resort to neologisms such as "orlegi" or "berdea" - in a place where wherever you look you end up encountering that color. The green would be unnameable, as sacred. Other theories are more mundane and talk about not needing to mention what exists everywhere, but that inability to name certain things is interesting. According to the Bible, the first thing Adam does is to name the animals and their surroundings. And so it has been since then. But that eagerness to name humans has encountered numerous obstacles .

In Spanish, as in French and in many other languages, there is no word to define the parents who have suffered the death of a child . A couple of years ago there was a proposal for the SAR to accept "orphan" to define this case, although the Academy rejected it. The case is that they continue, with a pain for which there are no words .

Mohamed El Khatib (Beaugency, 1980) considers that the mission of the theater is precisely that: use the word to define the indefinable. When his mother died in 2012 he wrote 'Finir en beauté', a sober spectacle among the rubble of loss.

One night, after a performance of the assembly, two people approached him: Daniel Kenigsberg and Fanny Catel. The first had committed a 25-year-old son. The second had lost another of just five. They told his story to El Khatib and sympathized with him for the loss of his mother, although they wanted to make one thing clear about the comparison between the two losses: "It is a joke compared to what we have experienced . " From there, 'C'est la vie' was born, a show that Kenigsberg and Catel interpret themselves, and which presents paired with 'Finir en beauté' in the Theaters of the Canal de Madrid between next Friday and Sunday.

Double program on death at a time when it is reduced to necrological vain on Twitter and Instagram. "In France and throughout Western Europe we don't know what death is or what to do with it. It's a taboo," says El Khatib. " We no longer see the dead: they hide them in hospitals, they quickly get into cemeteries . " And that, according to him, is as painful as the loss itself. "The rituals disappeared. There is a setback of religion, but nothing came to replace it." That is why he proposes that "theater be the place of ritual."

"When my mother died, I thought: 'How strange. We are all going through this situation. But nobody talks about it,'" he recalls about his duel. "I wanted to do it in a factual way, without pathetic load, in the simplest way possible."

Although her mother died in France, she was buried in Morocco, her country of origin. "And to take his body we found several administrative difficulties with different countries. Sometimes it was even fun. And that I also wanted to share with people: that even in the worst moments there is also life and laughter ."

Another interesting issue for El Khatib is "the difficulty of talking about the end of life." In your specific case, how to say to someone who is very sick: "You are going to die." Without a hint of resentment, he tells how the physicians who attended to his mother became entangled in technicalities and scientific language to make detours around the inevitable. "The doctors never told him that he had terminal cancer. They talked about 'liver disease'. And when I asked them why they didn't tell him, they answered that it was because I didn't ask him directly." There he found another question: "that doctors do not have the necessary training to talk to people and accompany them on the road to death ."

The Khatib does not judge the doctors, because he himself experienced something similar. Kenigsberg and Catel talked to him. "It's the worst thing that can happen. It's unnatural," recalls the playwright. "And at that time, that I had no children, I could understand him intellectually, but it didn't provoke me anything, while my mother's death hurts in my belly . It's something physical."

So he put the two on stage with an almost unthinkable maxim: "Make it as light as possible."

In the documentary 'One more time with feeling' (2016), Australian musician Nick Cave talks about the death of Arthur, one of his two twin sons, after falling down a cliff in Brighton. At one point, Cave says that nothing can be taken out of such an experience, what happens and you have to live with it. "I totally agree with Nick Cave," says El Khatib. "It's too dark. But what theater can do is invent words and rituals. The first objective of this project is that: to create a word for parents who lost a child. It's the first hole we want to cross."

Hence, 'C'est la vie' is "a way of speaking without morals: Time is gone; we have lost our children and we know that we have to take advantage of the time left. That is so old to live as if every day were the last one. And take care of the people you love . "

However, putting life on a stage poses some risks and issues that connect with the very nature of the theater: "How the void can be represented. How to represent an emotion while you live it, what theater resources can we use to share and make it an interesting moment. What does it mean to cry on a stage. How to tell your own story being the person and the character , going back and forth between these two situations. "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• theater

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