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Google PlayConsidering how entrenched Somalis have been in enclaves throughout the city of Toronto since our arrival en masse, I’m regularly met with experiencing ‘firsts’ within my community. This time, it was the debut musical created by Fatuma Adar that featured a familiar tale of displacement and a search for self-fulfillment that I’ve come to know so well.
Dixon Road, Adar’s childhood home and the play’s namesake, is an Etobicoke neighbourhood known for its cluster of low-income apartment complexes—densely populated with both new and former Somali refugees, as well as their children. Although the performance itself doesn’t spend too much time focusing on the neighbourhood and its characters or reputation, there’s a knowing implication, a wink, to Dixon Road’s Somali audience regarding the neighbourhood and everything it represents. To those of us whose parents settled in Toronto’s most western suburbs during and following Somalia’s civil war in the early ’90s, Dixon Road is just one of many nooks scattered throughout the GTA that symbolize culture, loss, rebuild, community, scrutiny, isolation, and stories yet to be told. Usually simultaneously.
I’m not a musical theatre buff, but I had no doubt in Adar’s assertion that this work was five years in the making. The themes, humor, design, songwriting, and vocal stylings made for a piece with palpable thoughtfulness. It was deeply amusing and foreign to see nostalgic references through a lens like the stage.
Just a day after a previewing Dixon Road at Toronto’s High Park’s Amphitheatre, I caught up with Adar to discuss the inspiration and process behind her musical.
I’d wonder how I’d write a musical with no experience, but then I thought to myself that people were always doing DIY mixtapes and EPs themselves. You don’t have to know how to read sheet music. I used whatever resources I had, like Garageband. Some songs were just voice notes on my phone.
“I think watching this play, it’s immediately obvious a diasporic Somali kid wrote it.”
What is the play’s relationship to you? Is it a plot based on your own experiences, or even the experiences of Somali Torontonians around you?
It’s semi-autobiographical, which means that there are elements pulled from real life—they’re real-life experiences. So when my dad first came to Canada he was posted up in Dixon Road and was in those buildings and he was one of the first community members who were there. Then eventually he wasn’t able to continue the career he had back home. When he first came he was a cab driver and worked for rent-a-car companies, then eventually became a truck driver. But, the way that my father saw himself—especially around Somalia Day, you’d see him whip out the suit and head to a conference. It seems like every Somali father is involved in politics somehow. He had all these pictures from when he’d cover campaigns and stuff like that. So his life there was so different from what it became here. And I noticed the difference early. I always saw him as a diplomatic person, but when he’d pick me up from school, kids would say, “Oh, you go home in a cab everyday. Is your dad a cab driver?” So there was a difference in how I’d see him, and how the community would see him.
The story is set in the ’90s, and I was born in ’91. The generation before—I mean this idea that you have a country based on a history of violence, though my dad speaks about the country so hopefully. He witnessed almost the birth of the country, whereas my birth coincided with all the fighting. So there’s a difference and a tumultuous relationship with the character’s perception of Somalia and her father’s, and what hope meant.
She’s 16 in the play, which is the generation before me. More like my aunts who were teenagers when they came. They also had such an interesting relationship with everything, and came to the realization that they’d be spending more time in a new country than in Somalia.
But I think it’s an important discussion to have: If we ourselves can’t artistically interpret our own culture, then who can?
Dixon Road plays at Toronto’s High Park Amphitheatre from now until June 19.
