The Living

By Colleen Wagner

The Living is a powerful and unsettling documentary play by Colleen Wagner, author of the Governor General's Literary Award–winning play The Monument. It is inspired by the actual stories of women and girls who survived trauma in post-conflict zones like Rwanda and Uganda. The Living examines the lives of victims and perpetrators, post-genocide, who live side-by-side in government-issued housing, as well as the role of NGO-funded campaigns. By means of theatrical fiction, documentary work, and re-enactment, The Living provides a creative path toward reconciliation, in hopes that the impossible act of forgiveness can end the cycle of revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781772013078

Colleen Wagner

A multi-award-winning writer, Colleen Wagner studied arts at the OCAD University, as well as literature and drama at the University of Toronto, and she moves between these art forms. Her writing interests include screenplays, stage plays, poetry, and short fiction. Her produced plays include: The Monument (Playwrights Canada Press), translated into a dozen languages and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, several Dora Mavor Moore Awards, and a number of inter-national awards; The Morning Bird (Scirocco Drama), produced in English and French; down from heaven (Playwrights Canada Press), nominated for a MECCA Award for Best New Play; and Home (Scirocco Drama). Wagner is a past recipient of a research-creation grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council that took her to Africa. Her documentary play, The Living, based on stories of survivors in post-conflict zones, premiered to sold-out audiences at the 2015 SummerWorks Performance Festival at the Theatre Centre’s BMO Incubator for Live Arts in Toronto, and won NOW Magazine’s Jon Kaplan Audience Choice Award and Best Director Award. Wagner has written a number of screenplays, including an adaptation of The Monument; filmed a documentary film about women in post-conflict zones and matriarchal societies, Women Building Peace, winner of the Silver Wave Film Festival’s 2016 Best Documentary Award; and an interactive website based on this research, thelivingplay.com. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in various anthologies, including Acta Victoriana, The Fiddlehead, and dANDelion Magazine. She divides her time between a riverside farm in New Brunswick and downtown Toronto.

Book preview

The Making of The Living: A Transmedia Project

Colleen Wagner

The stories we tell shape our thinking. They provide a framework for our sense of identity within our civilization – our sense of history, cultural expectations, and personal goals.

As a professor of screenwriting and playwriting, I was aware of the influence classical Greco-Roman mythologies and the Judeo-Christian Bible in particular had on the kinds of stories and ideas being portrayed in literature, films, television, and digital media. My students tended to recycle these old narratives in a more modern setting. Many female characters in their scripts fell into old stereotypes. Mothers, for example, were usually stay-at-home moms, and fathers were out in the world, earning the family living, whereas in real life both parents worked outside the home. The writing was stuck in old tropes. Central characters tended to be male, even if the writer was female, and the story-lines tended to follow variations of the classic hero myth.

A typical male heroic myth goes something like this:

The hero must travel outside his community in order to conquer a demon or enemy that is blamed for harm done to the community.

The hero slays the enemy and returns home with some boon that delivers his people from the suffering caused by the enemy.

He is aided in his adventure by a female, often from a foreign land, whom he may marry, but because of his heroic deed is offered the daughter of the king as a gift of thanks for purging the kingdom of evil.

He will usually dump the female who helped him and marry the king’s daughter instead, thereby securing wealth, power, and position.

This tale, based on a belief that the enemy is the sole cause of all problems, creates within the literary framework the character of the scapegoat, the other responsible for misfortune. The female in these myths is often a silent voice, a passive aspect in an active male world, a temptress, a stoic wife, or a victim – the other.

We witness this narrative myth being played out in nations around the world, where the perceived foreigner, the other, is marginalized, exiled, or killed by the dominating cultural group. And women remain on the frontlines of violence. Genocide, war, and rape have a long recorded history. The Bible is full of clear directives from God to commit genocide. See, for instance, Numbers 24:17–18 (King James Version):

smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies …

for just one of many such directives. Rape, aggression, and the vilification of women are also detailed in the Old Testament, as well as in Greek and Roman mythology.

In classic English literature also, rape abounds. Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and W.B. Yeats’s Leda and the Swan (1924) are just a few examples. Representations of rape appear with striking frequency in apartheid and post-apartheid South African literature: see Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999); Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993), and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001).

Recently, however, some male writers have been taking a hard look at the ongoing assaults on women at the hands of men, often intimate partners. The War on Women: Elly Armour, Jane Hurshman, and Criminal Violence in Canadian Homes and Life with Billy (Key Porter Books, 2007 and 2008), by the late Brian Vallée, are two examples of this growing field of literary inquiry. Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007), by Robert Jensen, examines the masculine notion of sex and rape in the pornography industry. The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence, edited by Anne-Marie de Brouwer and Sandra Ka Hon Chu, with photographs by Samer Muscati (D & M Publishers, 2012), is a collection of survivors’ stories that graphically speak to the horror of masculine-imbalanced societies, the savagery of genocide, and the use of rape as a weapon of war. And films like Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck, 2005) and Shake Hands with the Devil (Roger Spottiswoode, 2007) tell the shocking story of those one hundred days between April and July 1994 when between five hundred thousand and one million people were butchered.

And yet, by way of contrast, in matrilineal societies like the ones I visited in Lijiang, China, or the Asante/Akan of Ghana, and others that still exist today, rape is almost unheard of. I had to ask how come, though the answer is self-evident: when women are valued, misogyny and its corollary violence are shunned; if a man commits an act of rape, he is condemned and banished.

With the assaults, rapes, femicides, child marriages, sexual slavery, and domestic violence women and girls continue to experience in the world, I asked myself what would a female heroic myth look like. Would it simply be the reverse of a male-centred narrative, with women victimizing men or seeking their pound of flesh? I received a research-creation grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to write a play and create an interactive website on this question, which became thelivingplay.com. I travelled to Africa with a cinematographer and filmed many interviews, the result being a documentary film titled Women Building Peace (available through Moving Images Distribution at www.movingimages.ca/store/products.php?women_building_peace). All information can be found on my website, colleenwagner.ca. I was particularly interested in how women emerging from trauma saw their role in society; how that differed from a male’s role (which has traditionally fallen within a revenge model); how this information could inform a new female-centred heroic myth; and how this new myth might empower women in society.

In my research, I was hoping to find remnants of ancient oral stories speaking to women’s and girls’ power, their value and place in society before the ravages of colonialism and before patriarchal structures supplanted pre-existing goddess-worshipping civilizations. I found none. Colonialism and patriarchal structures eliminated all traces. I realized that a female-centred narrative would need to be based on the actual stories of women and girls who had survived trauma. Why post trauma? Because war and genocide upset the existing order, allowing for