Cover

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a play by
NICOLAS BILLON

Coach House Books / Toronto

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ALSO BY NICOLAS BILLON:

The Elephant Song

Fault Lines: Greenland – Iceland – Faroe Islands

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To my father, Pierre.

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Foreword

by Louise Arbour

Harm, hurt, hate, guilt, punishment, shame, pardon, redemption and justice are all intertwined in a reality where the line between offender and victim is often blurred. The greatest harm inflicted on a victim is when, infected with hate, she morphs into the mirror image of her abuser. This is how the cycle of violence is perpetuated, often with increased cruelty and madness.

Fifty years after Nuremberg, international criminal justice was resurrected in an effort to break this cycle of violence and, in the words of the chief Nuremberg prosecutor, to ‘stay the hand of vengeance.’ Whether this civilizing project will succeed remains to be seen. In the meantime, we struggle with two larger questions: Where can victims find peace if justice is elusive? Can offenders find closure if punishment is not extended to them?

Real peace and closure, it is often said, can only come from forgiveness. Whether forgiveness arises from an inner generosity or merely from an impetus to overcome residual pain and despair, it is a difficult and necessary process for both the offender and the victim. Yet how can the victim forgive her torturer without betraying who she was before the humiliating pain inflicted upon her? In addition, the victim’s pain and shame is often aggravated by a sense of guilt for having put herself in that situation. As she prepares to forgive the offender, she may also have to forgive herself, an even more painful process.

In turn, for the perpetrator of heinous crimes – the torturer, the rapist, the cold-blooded killer – justice allows for closure, for a claim that harm has been remedied, that reparation has been made, that the past is now buried. But without a judicial process, the offender is left to deal with his deed by himself, to take ownership of his crimes and, if he is ever to expect forgiveness from his victim, to eventually forgive himself. It is, I believe, a near-impossible task.

This is why the offender becomes a victim of his own crimes, locked forever in the windowless room of his shameful past, destined to remain his ugly self, and delusional about who he is and what he’s done.

And this is how justice brings closure and peace. It tells the painful truth and, even in the face of irreparable harm, it helps both victim and offender to forgive each other and maybe, one day, to forgive themselves.

LOUISE ARBOUR is a former Supreme Court of Canada justice and former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

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Production History

Butcher had its world premiere on October 17, 2014, at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, as part of the Enbridge playRites Series of New Canadian Plays. The cast and crew were as follows.