How does one decide where one’s story begins? The sister and brother in Incendies are compelled to choose the point of origin for their story. Incendies is an odyssey, an attempt to return to oneself. Wajdi Mouawad’s characters are always driven either to abandon their home or to confront an abandonment long forgotten, overlooked. Lost within the labyrinth of their own past and often entangled with the history of the world, his characters cross, in a manner at once epic and tragic, the wall of time that ultimately reveals who they truly are.
Hidden, repressed, or even forgotten secrets prevent them from reassembling the fragmented aspects of their identity.