The living archive of war in Rabih Mroué's Make Me Stop Smoking

This paper turns to Rabih Mroué's Make Me Stop Smoking, a one-man multimedia performance, for its capacity to enable us to think about the dilemmas of narrativizing the Lebanese civil war. Critical of Lebanon's official position to move on and forget the war, Mroué presents his audience with his unofficial and personal archive of war, collected over the years without any purpose in mind. His archive consists of random objects, fragments of memory, which speak more to his affective relationship than to the certainty of his experience. Contradiction, hesitation, and pain are what organize his narrative. Indeed, what Mroué delivers to his audience is the vulnerable and fallible human in history. The audience is invited to witness the singularity of a man torn by a nagging memory of his own complicity in the war. Mroué's Make Me Stop Smoking is an invitation to visit the archive and be suspicious of its desires. Archival objects, left unexamined, have the power to construct and stabilize narratives. Hence, a living archive, argues the author, requires an interest in death and in mourning the objects to which one becomes inflexibly attached.