Hyena’s Trail, Nextfest 2023. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For every hyena in the world there’s a witch.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

It’s a uneasy pairing that powers a new play premiering at Nextfest 2023. At the centre of Hyena’s Trail, by actor-turned-playwright Kijo Gatama, are dark, powerful, mischievous creatures — secret scavengers who thread their way through African mythologies and folklore  “eating things they’re not supposed to eat, sucking spiritual power….”

The more she read the more fascinated she was, says Gatama, a U of A acting grad who tapped the cultural richness of her immigrant Kenyan family in the course of creating this her first play. In fact, her mom is the “cultural consultant” to Lebogang Disele-Pitso’s production. “I can picture my aunties, my own family members, in there as characters,” Gatama says.“And myself too! Which is kind of vulnerable.”

actor/playwright Kijo Gatama, Hyena’s Trail at Nextfest. Photo supplied.

In following the trail of the hyena, Gatama’s first play, as mentored by African theatre researcher Mūkonzi Mūsyoki, explores “the source of our fears, our own sense of being selfish, our own worries about getting around the game, making our own choices in life that don’t involve our parents.” It’s coming-of-age, heightened by being in an immigrant family.

“A disobedient child of immigrants, wanting to be sexually liberated as a Black woman, feeling like you’re failing in Western academia” … these are tensions that speak to the immigrant experience and to Gatama personally, she explains, of a story of a mother and her daughters, one of whom who’s returned home from studying in Canada.

“In the souls of our parents’ dreams our lives begin,” she says, quoting her character in the play. “It’s a big cultural motif in the African immigrant experience.”

“It started as a witch hunt,” Gatama says of the seeds of the play. And her inspirations have included Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom, which explores the 17th witchcraft trials through a contemporary lens, and movies like Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not A Witch. Mūsyoki, says Gatama of her mentor, “is a veritable bible of African literature and writers…. I had a lot of work cut out for me, a lot of digging deep and being curious.”

“In the storytelling a lot of the scene locations are signifiers,” she says of community life and information-sharing. The marketplace is one; the kitchen is another. And as for the bedroom, that private place is prime for intrusion any time. “The hyena pulls it all together.”

Gatama arrived here from Montreal as “a junior high kid, with no friends.” She was lucky, though, as she says, to have African parents “who constantly affirmed my creativity.” Theatre seems to have been an inevitability.” I was the entertaining child my mom would put in a circle and I’d come up with something,” she laughs.

“My mom has seen me do the weirdest stuff,” she says cheerfully of roles that have included a Yiddish grandmother (in the musical Onions and Garlic), a little kid, the last Black vampire on earth looking for love….” And now, a year since she graduated from the U of A, a year of gathering experience in producing and community-building, she’s made her debut as a playwright. “It’s like Yay!. And Eek!” she says laughing.

Hyena’s Trail, Nextfest 2023. Photo supplied.

Hyena’s Trail has the most culturally diverse cast at Nextfest, with accents to match as the playwright describes. She herself adopts the contemporary Kenyan accent, “mixed with U.K. and regional sounds…. It has a resonance to it, on the tip of your tongue, so melodic.” As well we’ll hear accents from Jamaica, Ghana, Zimbabwe: “a cultural mosaic,” from actors playing multiple characters.

Gatama has loved the rehearsal process led by director Disele-Pitso. “She’s so driven by community; you always feel you’ve been pushed gently and held, a lovely balance…. The people of the African and Caribbean diasporas are very blunt people; we don’t mince words,” Gatama says. “But I’ve never felt so brave to be that vulnerable…. Everybody in the room had experiences that led and fostered great changes in the writing.”

Hyena’s Trail runs Wednesday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 5 p.m. Further details and tickets: nextfest.ca.