Contemporary Canadian Culture

The symbols of pure mathematics, twins, Nawal’s twos letters and the incest in the film from Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, relate in a lot of ways to the theme of identity.

First, mathematics here allows Jeanne to grasp a difficult situation to think. Indeed, ‘’The abject, as one of the four mathematicians in the story (Nawal, her daughter Jeanne and their respective higher math teachers at university) states--is an "insoluble problem” whose investigation leads to “more insoluble problems,”’’(Kennedy, Kohan 10), which means that the mathematics she practices, the pure mathematics, do not provide a strict and definitive answer starting from strict and definitive problems. On the contrary, they are insoluble problems which lead to other equally insoluble problems. They make it possible to think what seems in theory unthinkable, in this they prove indispensable to Jeanne and Simon to apprehend the truth about their brother / father. The place given to mathematics at the beginning of Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, as well as at the crucial moment of the revelation of the identity of the brother / father, make it a quite legitimate logic, indispensable to grasp the reality.

To continue, ‘’the twins are not children and they are not adults, simply because they cannot live in childhood nor in adulthood--they cannot inhabit a human life, they are not humans. They are told that only through searching out the “truth” (the record, as kept by the notaries, the record-keepers, the adults, the society, the law) of their origins will they become adults.’’(Kennedy, Kohan 12), this means that they can only become someone when they find their real identity.

More over, Jeanne and Simon found out the existence of a father/brother with the help of Nawal’s twos letters. They found out a lot about the identity of their mother when they found the truth about their origins.

Also, they found about the symbol of the incest, which shows us a darker side of the father’s/brother’s identity, also that Nawal was hiding all these years, behind a heartbreaking secret. Overall, ‘’the twins uncover the horrible truth of their birth: their mother was a resistance fighter and their father is their brother, the rapist-torturer chosen by Fate to be their parent.’’(Meerzon 7). Thus, ‘’The story of Nawal’s “scorched” life and the resolution of the puzzle by the twins also testifies to the enigma of the human condition: that to discover, as adults, our “true” history reveals our debt to the infans of infantia. Jeanne and Simon discover that there is no human order, no social life, no regulative state, no law, no living together in the condition of infantia; but at the same time no aesthetic or political life without the attempt to testify to it.’’ (Kennedy, Kohan 6).

To conclude, the film’s symbolism can relate to the theme of identity because it’s through them that we were able to discover the hidden identities of the characters.

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