The Globe and Mail
By RUKHSAR ALI
Saturday June 11, 2022
Playwright Fatuma Adar’s Dixon Road is at the High Park Amphitheatre in Toronto from June 3-19.
ELIJAH NICHOLS
Somali Canadian playwright Fatuma Adar is bringing her fresh
brand of Black joy and celebration to Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park
theatre event this summer.
A rising talent in both theatre and on screen (CBC Gem
series 21 Black Futures; Toronto Fringe’s She’s Not Special), Adar’s Dixon
Road, on at the High Park Amphitheatre in Toronto from June 3-19, is a musical
journey of family, diaspora and searching for a new sense of home.
Her latest production, inspired by Toronto’s vibrant Somali
community of the same name, is based on her father’s real life experiences. The
story follows the journey of a Somali family that immigrates to Canada in 1991,
settling in Dixon Road, a neighborhood near Pearson airport, as civil war brews
in their homeland. A production close to her heart, Adar’s show promises to be
a novel musical experience, combining R&B, contemporary verse and
traditional Somali melodies. /cut for print/
Adar spoke to The Globe and Mail about her experience
growing up in Dixon Road, her show’s unique musical stylings and the diasporic
dilemma of following your own dreams, or that of your parents.
What’s your
connection to Dixon Road?
My dad came to Dixon in ‘88, and he was with the first group
of people to settle there and they started creating their whole communities.
always thought it’s such a beautiful, joyful, vibrant place, which is such a
stark difference from what’s been represented in the media.
Doing research for the show, going through the archives, I
found it was really sad that I couldn’t find any archives outside of one VHS at
the Toronto Reference Library of the Somali community at that time. It was
buried in all of these police reports and awful headlines about the community
and violence and obviously the Rob Ford scandal. Dixon Road on Google was just
an entirely different thing from what I knew it to be.
It was always a joyful, communal ground where I knew I was
going to see a bunch of Somali people sitting outside with freezies while the
aunties talk to each other, while the uncles have coffee and talk politics.
It’s such a different experience that I had compared to what other people know
the neighbourhood to be like.
Adar's Dixon Road is a musical journey of family, diaspora and searching for a new sense of home.
How is the story of
Dixon Road linked to you and your own family?
My dad was a documentarian and still is very much the
smartest, kindest and most hardworking person I know. I hear so many stories
about what his life was like in Somalia and the distinction that he has there
versus in Canada. He was cab driver [in Canada] and now he works as a truck
driver, and he’s still involved in documenting back home but there’s just such
a stark difference between what I always saw him as and what other folks saw.
And when I was younger, I always wanted to write. I always
wanted to create. But it’s so hard to even think that dream could be a reality
because my family lost so much coming here.
[In Dixon Road] the daughter, in Canada, starts discovering
herself and that she wants to be an artist, but it’s really difficult for her
to stand up for that because when a family has sacrificed so much for you to
have an opportunity, it feels almost selfish to say “My dreams, which are kind
of unstable, are what I want to try to achieve.”
Can you describe how
you came up with the sound for Dixon Road?
I have a very unconventional – in the musical theatre world
- way of making music. I never grew up with a piano lessons. I didn’t go to
theatre school. I don’t know how to read sheet music. But when it comes to
R&B and hip hop, and pop music, I think that there’s a lot more leeway for
people to work on GarageBand, which is a software that I used to start working
with beats and I’m like, okay, if I was to write a song how can I build it
without having this “distinction” that a lot of my musical theatre
contemporaries have.
And with that, because I have such a wide range and random
selection of music that I like, some of the songs in the show feel like Disney,
some feel like Destiny’s Child, some feel like Mogadisco, which is the disco
era in Mogadishu, Somalia around the 1970s-80s.
Why did you choose a
musical format to this story?
I just thought it sang. There was a musical story to it, and
there was humour. The idea that I could take this medium that I’ve always
escaped with and tell a story with it that looks from the point of view a
family that looks like mine, a Black Muslim family, specifically a Somali
family, a refugee family and put it in the musical medium, I think it’s just so
easy to put your heart into a musical. It’s a very warm and joyful storytelling
path.
This interview has been edited and condensed.