A Reconstruction and Deconstruction of Loss
Mohamed El Khatib’s A Beautiful Ending
By Preeti Zachariah
About mid-way through Mohamed El Khatib’s hour-long solo show, A Beautiful Ending, small bowls — what the playwright/performer calls “those little hemispheric recipients designed to hold soup that would allow us to send people home” — becomes a catalyst for grief. Standing on a sparse stage, with a small table on one side and a TV monitor on the other, El Khatib recounts how eight days after his mother’s death, he and his family cannot serve the guests who have gathered at his home to offer condolence because they are unable to locate these serving dishes. “My father suddenly bursts into tears, hit with the full impact of the little bowls disappearing and realizing how soup deprived of a bowl is useless,” says El Khatib. The entire family follows suit, as the finality of their changed situation hits them and they realize, “the only person who knew where those fucking bowls were,” was truly gone.
The commonplace often attains poignancy and magnitude when looked at through the lens of loss, of course. El Khatib’s performance both reconstructs and deconstructs such loss. Relating anecdotes, reading from his diary, showing administrative documents (at one point, he distributes a page with his mother’s death certificate photocopied onto one side, his own birth certificate onto the other), displaying the texts of his email and SMS exchanges on the screen, and describing fragments of conversations, he narrates his mother’s death, drawing a portrait of grief that is both deeply personal and recognizably universal. At the same time, he reveals the inevitable incompleteness of the enterprise, made up of all these fragmentary representational forms, which cannot possibly add up to who his mother was (he makes a point of noting the misspelling of his mother’s name on her death certificate) or capture his careening feelings about her demise.
But the production is not just a personal meditation on grief. It also explores themes of identity, belonging, and language to broaden our understanding of the life and death of his Moroccan-born mother, a first-generation immigrant, whose links to her native country have attenuated even as those to her adopted one (France) remain tenuous.
The piece begins with El Khatib offering a fictional account of what he wishes his mother’s death had been. He imagines reading aloud to her all night from Albert Cohen (“I think that was her favorite reading”), trying to delay the inevitable. “I read to keep her alive.” But when the book finishes, “My mother is gone,” he says. Then he adds that the scenario came from a play he once wrote. Reality is far more prosaic. In fact, he is not there when she finally succumbs to the disease she ignored for far too long and he is left grappling with grief, wondering, “Were we good children?”
This soul-searching finds its way into his small, dated journal that he reads from — possibly along the same lines as French theorist Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diaries, also an homage to a mother, which El Khatib quotes during the performance. One entry he reads, for instance, from September 11, 2011, recalls a family conversation about a liver donation for his mother. When his older sister declines to donate hers, El Khatib dutifully volunteers, thinking that one of his younger sisters will insist that she donate, instead. He’s terrified, he admits, that his father accepts his offer — and relieved when it turns out he is not the proper blood match for his mother. Her only option is palliative care.
Not everything documented is so grim, however. There are also amusing conversations with his mother that involve the slitting the of a sheep’s throat in a bathtub, the vitamin content of prickly pears, and his questionable career decisions. He recalls how his father was caught by a nurse sneaking meatballs to his mother in the hospital, despite her being on a strict diet. He demonstrates how the imam at his mother’s funeral was texting on his phone while performing the rites and he reads out thoughtless condolence messages he received.
El Khatib speaks in even, disarmingly chatty tones, his delivery as laid-back as the casual black slacks and denim shirt he wears. He draws us into an intimacy, as if conversing with us over a drink or on a park bench. His skillful maneuvering of truth and fiction, written and oral record, and multiple voices makes this as much as about the people watching him perform as about himself. It helps that he has charisma, but the strength of the performance rests on the ubiquity and paradoxical elusiveness of the human experience it captures. When the performance ends — he bounds off the stage, leaving behind a photograph of his mother projected onto the upstage wall, a digital recorder playing funeral music, and a stilled audience — I wanted to reach out to him and whisper, “I know exactly how this feels.”
