Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother

A winter’s night in a city somewhere in the Western world. Wahab, a nineteen-year-old boy, is struggling through a snowstorm, on his way to the hospital where his mother is on her deathbed. His head is spinning: is it too late to turn around? Why isn’t he crying? How did his relationship with his mother become so complicated? 

Wahab remembers his fourteenth birthday, the day on which he discovered his mother’s face had changed all of a sudden. No one else noticed; Wahab was the only person who no longer recognised her. Other episodes from his childhood run through his mind. It gradually becomes clear to him that this trip to see his dying mother will also be a confrontation with a haunting memory from the distant past, an awful event in the country of his birth that he witnessed as a seven-year-old. 

On his way to his mother, Wahab carries the song Al-Atlal (‘The ruins’) by the Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum deep in his heart. The song encapsulates the grief of losing your home, longing for love and ultimately the hope for reconciliation amidst the debris of a broken relationship. 

Composer Bushra El-Turk, director Kenza Koutchoukali and dramaturg and librettist Wout van Tongeren jointly developed the concept for Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother. During the second week of rehearsals, the makers reflect on their new creation. 

Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother was inspired by the music of Oum Kalthoum. What role did her music play in your lives before you started on this project?

Kenza Koutchoukali: “My father was born and raised in Algeria. In the Middle East and North Africa, people say ‘you’re either for Oum Kalthoum or for Fairouz’. My father was a big fan of Fairouz but he also had a documentary DVD on Oum Kalthoum, which I now have at home.” 

“My father had a complicated relationship with the country of his birth. Algeria was a French colony, so he went through the French school system, including studying in Paris. But despite the educational opportunities that the French occupation offered him, it was still a violent and oppressive regime. That must have been conflicting for him, and I think that is reflected in how Arab culture was a very prominent aspect of my father’s life at times and more a background element at other times.” 

“My first conscious encounter with the music of Oum Kalthoum was when I listened to it at the invitation of Mohamed Aadroun, artistic director of the Amsterdams Andalusisch Orkest. It was remarkable how I immediately felt at home with the music, and especially the rhythms. I must have already heard the music more often than I realised.”

Bushra El-Turk: “For me, the music of Oum Kalthoum represents my parents’ lives before the outbreak of the civil war. My parents were born in Lebanon. For my father, who is somewhat older, the 1950s and 1960s — the period following independence from France — were a real golden age, and Oum Kalthoum was one of the great voices of that era. The civil war started in 1975. A couple of years later, my parents got married and fled to Britain, where I was born. When we visited Lebanon again after the war ended, my parents’ house was damaged but still standing. All the furniture was still there: an interior that must have been old-fashioned even before the war. I could imagine myself transported back to that golden age. There were also loads of records of Oum Kalthoum. When I hear her music now, I can smell that house again.”

Wout van Tongeren: “My connection with Oum Kalthoum is as an outsider. While talking to our partners in the Amsterdams Andalusisch Orkest and Meervaart, I discovered how much of a presence her music is here in the Netherlands too, although most people without roots in North Africa or the Middle East are probably unaware of this. I must have heard her music before in a taxi, or picked up snatches coming from a neighbour’s living room on a summer’s day. Even so, this project still feels like a first encounter because it’s only now that I have started listening to the music seriously. For the purposes of this project, I’ve made an effort to get to know a musical culture that is quite unlike the musical references I’m familiar with. I realise that many people with migrant backgrounds are constantly making this kind of effort, building bridges between the culture they grew up with at home and that of wider society where they are expected to be familiar with very different cultural codes.”  

Kenza, you were the first maker to become involved in the project. How did that happen? 

Kenza Koutchoukali: “At Dutch National Opera, I previously directed How Anansi freed the stories of the world, which was inspired by stories from West African and Caribbean culture. When I was working on that production, it occurred to me that I’d never created anything that drew on my own bicultural roots. I got talking to Mohamed Aadroun about that. Coincidentally, discussions were ongoing at around that time between ‘his’ Amsterdams Andalusisch Orkest, Dutch National Opera and Meervaart about a new collaborative project. They’d already decided the project should be one inspired by Oum Kalthoum. Then they asked me to shape the production artistically.” 

How did you arrive at the concept for this production? 

Kenza Koutchoukali: “I knew from the start that it shouldn’t be a biographical opera. How could you possibly present such an iconic singer in a music theatre performance? I preferred to do something with what Oum Kalthoum means to different generations in our society today.”

“I think it’s very important to know your cultural background so you can then embed it as you wish in the life you want to lead. But that means the society you live in has to accept that culture’s right to exist, and unfortunately that can’t be taken for granted these days. That gave me the idea of a story about someone struggling with their cultural background and therefore with themselves. Then Wout suggested we should look at the work of the Lebanese author Wajdi Mouawad.”

Wout van Tongeren: “I remember how that went. In one of our discussions, we thought of a basic story in which someone inherits a collection of music cassettes from their parents, intending to throw them away, but then starts listening to them. That brings the person into a dialogue with their parents’ culture. Which made me think of Wajdi Mouawad. His work deals with topics such as migration and the relationship between parents and their children. We were planning to approach him for the libretto, but then Kenza found his novel Visage retrouvé, a wonderful story that addresses precisely those themes we wanted to explore.”

Kenza Koutchoukali:  “I’d also wanted to work with composer Bushra El-Turk for some time. I’d got to know her work through various contacts and when I came across this story, I knew at once she would be the ideal person to compose music for it. Bushra is a composer who seems to incorporate her identity naturally into what she writes, which is something I really admire. Some artists choose to deliberately hide that side of themselves, but not Bushra.”

Bushra El-Turk: “When Kenza approached me, I felt immediately that it would be good working with her. We clicked, partly because of our shared interests but also because of common aspects in our personal histories as children of diasporic parents. When Kenza told me about Wajdi Mouawad’s book, I felt we could turn it into something very powerful.”

“In the past few years, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to embed my Arab roots in my music. When people see you as an Arab composer, they expect you to incorporate that into your work in a recognisable form. At times I have gone along with that, but it’s also something I’ve resisted at other times. I think it is important that people look beyond my roots; I’m more than just that.”

What do you take from Oum Kalthoum’s music? 

Bushra El-Turk: “Oum Kalthoum’s music touches me at a very personal level. It’s not easy to work with material that you have so much respect for. There is a lot I want to leave intact, but during the process I’ve also discovered how much room there is in her music. It is very open and receptive to reinterpretation. That let me create a kind of kaleidoscopic work. Sometimes Oum Kalthoum takes pride of place in a very recognisable way, but there are also moments when I use elements from her music that the audience will barely notice. It’s as if you’re abstracting the pure essence from it.” 

“Her music is also full of improvisation: no two concerts of hers were the same. I try to include that in the composition. Together with the musicians, I’m working on varying degrees of improvisation, from ornamentation around a prescribed melody to almost completely free improvisation.” 

Oum Kalthoum’s song Al-Atlal has a prominent place in the production. Why did you chose that particular number? 

Bushra El-Turk: “Al-Atlal is unbelievably complex. It also has a fragmented structure that makes it well-suited to our project. At the same time, the song is hugely emotional and communicative, which works very well in music theatre. When we delved into the text of Al-Atlal, we realised the number would be a good fit in that regard too: there are so many sentences in the song that give an extra dimension to the events in the opera. The song is really an opera in its own right, with its own narrative that interacts with the music theatre production that it is part of.” 

Kenza Koutchoukali

“A canvas that everyone can project their own story on”

Kenza Koutchoukali: “The conceptual link has to do with the inner world of Wahab, the main character. He wants to be reconciled with his mother, from whom he has become alienated, which is really also a longing for reconciliation with himself. To achieve that, he needs to face up to a major trauma that he would obviously prefer to avoid. That translates into his relationship with the music. Only once Wahab has become reconciled with his mother can he accept the music of Oum Kalthoum in its entirety, and at that point in the performance Al-Atlal breaks out in its ‘pure’ form.”

“In the final analysis, the meaning of the song is quite bitter. The title refers to ruins and the number is about loss. That ties in with what Oum Kalthoum represents for a lot of people, namely the connection with the country of your forebears, the place where you will never feel completely at home again.”

Wasn’t dealing with this material nerve-racking or overwhelming at times? 

Bushra El-Turk: “Of course it’s daunting to compose a work that enters into a dialogue with the music of such a great artist. But that applies to other projects as well. If you compose a string quartet, you always have to deal with the legacy of Mozart, Schubert and so on. It can be intimidating, but you need to do it. This project has also helped me better understand my parents’ world. I listened endlessly to old, crackling recordings of music from when they were young. This project is like a jigsaw puzzle for me where we try to fit all the pieces together.” 

Kenza Koutchoukali: “It’s true this project feels like a puzzle, both artistically and personally. I was very keen to tackle these themes but I also wondered what right I had to work with this material. I only know Algeria as my father’s country. But even though I was born and raised here in the Netherlands, something about that place has always attracted me. How do you deal with that as a person? That’s basically what this opera is about. As a cultural phenomenon, Oum Kalthoum has become a canvas on which everyone can project their own story. Her work lends itself to this — Oum Kalthoum is incredibly generous in that respect.”

Dutch text: Maxim Paulissen 

Wajdi Mouawad’s oeuvre seems to be a constant reckoning with his personal history. And yet his work transcends the particular; Mouawad transforms his own experiences into a powerful and compelling literary form. 

Wajdi Mouawad is one of the most prominent playwrights of his generation. His plays have been performed in many countries. In the Netherlands he is best known for Tous des oiseaux (Birds of a Kind), performed as Vogels in 2023 by ITA, and Incendies (Scorched), performed as Branden by RO Theater in 2010 and Toneelgroep Oostpool and Toneelschuur Producties in 2024/2025. 

Mouawad spent the first ten years of his life in Lebanon. In 1978, during the Lebanese civil war, Mouawad and the rest of his family fled to France while his father stayed behind to work. Five years later, the family moved to Quebec in Canada. Mouawad found it difficult to settle there — he played truant a lot, preferring to spend his time in cinemas — until he auditioned for a theatre course and was accepted. He subsequently developed into an actor, director and writer. Mouawad has led various theatre companies and became director of La Colline – théâtre national in Paris in 2016.

Mouawad’s writing has a distinctive personal style: full of imagery, rich in emotion and with an emphasis on monologues. His characters appear to use language in an attempt to get a grip on their own existence and the world around them. That makes the key role he assigns to silence — the refusal to speak — all the more striking in his stories replete with such eloquent characters. However, a character’s silence does not prevent them from communicating with the audience. In Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother, the main character Wahab is constantly talking, but his monologues show that in fact he tells his family very little. 

Certain elements turn up frequently in Mouawad’s plays and novels, such as twins, ghostly appearances and animal figures. There are also recurring themes that draw on his personal history: migration, broken families and coping with loss and violence. Many of Mouawad’s texts refer implicitly or explicitly to the civil war, which he experienced as a child. That is also the case for the texts on which the music theatre production Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother is based. 

Wahab’s story

The production’s libretto is based on Mouawad’s play Un obus dan le coeur (A bomb in the heart) which in turn is an adaptation of his debut novel Visage retrouvé (Face rediscovered). The novel is from the perspective of Abdelwahab, whom everyone calls Wahab. 

In the first chapter, ‘Le temps’ (Time), Wahab describes a carefree childhood that ends abruptly when he witnesses an appalling massacre. His family decides to flee the war that has now broken out. “Tomorrow we will be taking the plane. A distant, rainy country awaits me. I wish I never had to say ‘I’ again, that I never had to get involved in anything again. I wish someone would say ‘he’ for me. Relieve me of myself.”

Indeed, the next two chapters are written in the third person. They cover a period of several days in Wahab’s new homeland, a few years after fleeing the country of his birth. In ‘La peur’ (Fear), he is given a front-door key on his fourteenth birthday as confirmation of his growing independence. However, the day takes a horrific turn when Wahab returns home from school to discover his mother has acquired a completely new face. Distraught, he runs away from home. 

In the chapter ‘La beauté’ (Beauty), he describes his journey through a winter landscape. Wahab experiences the raw, overwhelming power of nature and has a mysterious encounter with a silent girl. When the police bring him back home, he clings onto this experience of a beauty he has rediscovered after it was swept away by the violence of war during his childhood.

In the final chapter, ‘La colère’ (Anger), Wahab is nineteen and starting out as a painter. The return to the first person form suggests he has regained some control over his life. And yet the transformation of his mother remains a mystery and he still carries the burden of his childhood trauma. The play and the music theatre production largely follow the story in this fourth chapter. Wahab is on his way to the hospital where his mother is on her deathbed. He reflects on his life in a constant flow of words, saturated in anger. Finally, at his dying mother’s bedside, Wahab undergoes a cathartic experience and solves the mystery of the transformation of her appearance. This lets him reconcile himself with his past. 

The legacy of anger

Anger, the title of the final chapter, is a recurring theme in Mouawad’s oeuvre. Talking about this in an interview in 2019, he said, 

“That anger has nothing to do with being reasonable. It seizes me, it holds me in its grasp. That anger is not mine: I inherited it from an entire culture, from an entire generation that experienced the civil war and never had an opportunity to give voice to their anger. I am the heir inheriting that anger and I have chosen to dedicate part of my life to expressing it. (…) I feel like I am the storehouse of a primeval anger that precedes and transcends that of my generation. Writing is a place to remember that anger.” (Études, March 2019)

Mouawad’s writing seems in many respects to be a response to the violence he saw as a child and the hatred that drove that violence. In a recent interview in Le Monde, he said that his exile has given him something important, namely:

“The desire and curiosity to seek out those I had learned to hate – namely the stranger, the Other. Like many Lebanese, I had been taught to believe that those who were not like me were a threat, that we were the victims and they the villains. I felt a longing for rapprochement with the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Jews — all those people I had learned to hate. Not only did I have a wish to meet them, I also turned them into the protagonists of my works. That urge for reconciliation, for harmony has really come through being in exile.” (Le Monde, 3 November 2024) 

An assault on the spectator 

Mouawad’s acknowledgement of the feelings of anger and hatred that he harbours, and his efforts to get to know the Other despite those feelings, make his texts hugely relevant. This is precisely what gives his work an impact that transcends the particular, despite being rooted in highly personal experiences. It expresses feelings that, if ignored, can easily lead to aggression. This is literature that supplants violence, not by tempering the emotions that drive that violence but by giving them a voice and enabling them to be expressed through art. His texts transform the real violence lurking in society into an aesthetic ‘assault’ on the spectator: 

“I wanted to commit symbolic assaults: I wanted bombs to fall in people’s minds. The bomb was the story and the emotion it conveyed. I wanted spectators to leave at the end of the performance feeling shocked, shattered.” (Études, March 2019)

This ‘assault poetry’ is neither cynical nor nihilist. Mouawad often gives his plays a hopeful ending. Troubled characters find a sense of peace; traumas that children inherited from their parents appear to be healed. “Ultimately, it depends on how you decide to end your story. I don’t want to make the end pitiless, because I’m not a pessimist.” (Sens-Dessous, January 2007). Mouawad’s work, which seeks out ‘strangers’ and acknowledges humanity’s dark side, is more urgent than ever today, in a world that is increasingly polarised and in which even the hitherto safe haven of Western Europe is in danger of becoming embroiled in violent conflicts. 

Dutch text: Wout van Tongeren