“In The Book of Life there’s an opportunity to re-invent things, to dream, to try to undo, and to propose, for a moment, another point of view, another way of revisiting the past… it’s like a ceremonial way to just rehabilitate life.”

– Gakire Katese Odile “Kiki”

Merriam Webster defines serendipity as: “The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.”

When I first travelled to Rwanda in 2008, I was keenly aware of Canada’s complicity in a global and wilful blindness to an unfolding genocide that had happened just over a decade earlier. Like many Canadians, I had learned of my own country’s failure to act through U.N. peacekeeping General Romeo Dallaire’s insistence on speaking out. He was our witness to the perils of ignorance and inaction.

Western complicity, and a colonial eugenics program that ran for most of the twentieth century in Rwanda before independence, had generated the most horrific imaginable consequences. Groups that had been more socio-political than racial, had been pitted by Europeans against one another over decades of toxic misinformation, forced labour, the introduction of identity cards, and racial favouritism based entirely on fiction. All of this was foremost in my mind.

It was in Kigali, at a coffee shop in the centre of the city, that serendipity, like an agent of fate, put another theatre artist, Kiki Katese, in front of me. Kiki and I have had a long and productive artistic relationship ever since. We have invited each other to our respective countries to teach, to perform and to create. We have been doing this now for well over a decade. The Book of Life spans this entire time. It is a project that has taken many forms for her: short films, a book, a national letter-writing campaign, and now a play. The wisdom of it, of Kiki, of the women drummers who have been so integral to the construction of this project – this wisdom is a light, a beacon for the rest of the world, as we all peer ahead into an uncertain future. Kiki’s artmaking is, in fact, a valuable and agreeable thing.