With her musical Dixon Road, Fatuma Adar is rewriting what it means to be from Toronto

Black Light is a column by Governor General Award-winning writer Amanda Parris that spotlights, champions and challenges art and popular culture that is created by Black people and/or centres Black people.

When Fatuma Adar first began to conceive of the musical that would come to be known as Dixon Road, she dreamed big: this would be her very own version of Les Miserables. Trading Jean Valjean's 19th century prison for a 21st century immigration detention centre, Adar imagined an epic tale of injustice, weaving together the stories of immigration, police raids and civil war that defined the Somali community in mainstream Canadian news outlets. 

But as she began to develop the idea, this ambitious narrative was synthesized into an intimate and more personal story about a father and daughter who struggle to understand themselves and their relationship in a new land. I spoke to Adar a few weeks ago, just as rehearsals for Dixon Road began. It is on stage now at the High Park Amphitheatre. 

"It became about two people who are big dreamers," Adar told me on a video call. "And how can you actually let yourself dream when somebody who raised you had so many sacrifices of their own in order to give you space? And that was a personal story that I could tell because as much as I wanted to research all the things that were happening, it wasn't the thing I was closest to."

Dixon Road begins with a July 1st celebration of Somalia's Independence Day and ends a year later. It is a story about what gets lost in migration and the struggle to adapt without losing culture, community and self. I went to see it earlier this week during a matinee performance surrounded by restless school children who were shooting paper planes at each other before the show began. But as the music rose and the dynamic set began to move and change, the students and I were transported back to 1991. Dixon Road is a musical that tells the story of a Somali family who arrive in Toronto just as the Civil War erupts in their homeland. They settle in the community of Dixon Road, a haven for a large segment of the Somali Diaspora in Toronto, and begin the difficult challenge of rebuilding their lives. 

Dixon Road joins a growing number of musicals being created by Toronto artists that unapologetically lay claim to the city while simultaneously rewriting the narrative on what it means to belong in this place. There is the audio musical Parkdale that, similarly to Rent, explores a community of residents coming together in an attempt to halt the gentrification of their community. There is the Scarborough-based musical digital series Topline, which follows a young girl trying to make it in the music industry. 

With book, lyrics and music by Adar, Dixon Road is undoubtedly a dedication to her community and to the country of Somalia (the anthem is even remixed into the score), but it is also an earnest love letter to Adar's father.

Adar and I spoke about the opportunities and challenges of writing a story based on her family, her need to create music that was inspired by both Disney and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and her desire to resist the romanticization of the immigrant narrative.

I'm so curious about what it has been like to write from the personal. What has it triggered in you as an individual and in terms of your relationship with your father and your family? How much have you shared with them about the process? 

They obviously know about it. I think when you grow up there's such a big border between you and your parents and how you can understand each other. I think that's so similar to diasporic kids in that there's an ocean of communication that sometimes is really difficult to wade through. But as I got older, the more I gave my parents grace.

Sometimes it's not about understanding why it's a musical or why I decided to tell it in this very strange way. I think what my parents appreciate is me writing the show made me call them all the time and ask them about what their lives were like. They got to see an interest in the stories that they had. My dad told me the story about [how] my mom and him knew each other when they were in Somalia but then the Civil War kind of had everybody lost. And then they found out that they were living two floors away from each other in Dixon Road.

You could have written a romance out of that!

Right?! You never know. Musical spinoffs? But yeah, it's one of those things where I think that they're grateful for what this process has meant to me and our relationship. It's created an open channel of communication. They feel seen and they're surprised that I'm asking.

You used the word grace. Did that grace come through this process or do you think you were already on this journey?

I think it came through this process. When you write, you have to have the most empathetic and sympathetic view from every character you write. It was very easy for me to write from a young girl who felt misunderstood. But then I also had to get into that headspace of my mom and what our communication styles have been like growing up. Your parents don't have the same love languages as you all the time, and that can cause pain that wasn't meant to be there. My dad, I always saw and still do see as my hero. But the ways in which he navigates the world, they don't see him that way. And that's complicated because you see that self-esteem play a part in how he moves around in spaces.

It's allowed me to sit in that. I'm so grateful. Everybody has dreams for where their musicals go. But I never anticipated something so healing and also just joyous to write. The music is fun and it bops. The joy and healing which I get through creating this, I'm hoping other people get [from] experiencing it.

Can you talk about being a Toronto-based person, making a Toronto-inspired musical and how has that shaped the kind of music that is in here, if at all?

Yeah, well, the show is so random at points musically that I feel like it only could be Toronto. I don't know what your playlist looks like, but my playlist is wild. Like you have R&B and then you have rap and then you'll have like, a musical song and then you'll have this more of a poem over a beat kind of music. I think [Dixon Road] gives you a little bit of everything. When I was first starting to work with the music supervisor Adam Sakiyama I essentially was like, "It's kind of like Disney but also Bone Thugs-N-Harmony."

That's a great caption.

One of the songs named "Miskeen" is like Mogadisco. There was a very disco period in 70s, 80s, East Africa, and I was just like, "Ok, this character must've run a disco club back in the day. What would his song be?" So for every moment, rather than thinking this is the general sound of the show, I find music that inspires the moment and figure out what my version of those are.

You started off by saying that the original iteration of Dixon Road was trying to capture a lot of the strife, the trauma, but going through the process now, some of the most exciting part is capturing the joy and the lightness. Can you talk about creating space for that lightness and that joy and the importance of making sure that that was a part of the story?

I think for me, the creation of the music and working on the story… it's a wild experience. I don't even know how to really put it in words. People are asking me what the right Somali colour flag is for them to put up. For folks to gather an email thread of 40 people to [help] tell a story about a Somali family that immigrates to Toronto in the 90s? For people to show me sketches of our people… I feel like in a small part, I'm able to help reclaim the narrative of what folks associate this country to be and our people to be. Even in my own research, trying to find archives of what folks were like when they moved to Dixon Road early in the 90s, all I could get is raids and police violence. The neighborhood's name itself was just buried in all of this pain and negativity. But ever since doing the musical, now when you search [Dixon Road] you get to hear a story about the community; you can come see a show.

Canada often romanticizes the immigrant story. Were you consciously trying to carve out a different kind of narrative?

This story is not by any means what anybody would consider a successful immigrant story by the ways in which Canada handles immigrants. If their resilience shows through by the end of the show, it's stuff that they've had to generate themselves as a community. And I think that was also the thing that made it important to have an entirely Black cast because the story is about how in the face of everything that they have to deal with, they can only mostly rely on each other.

The "How to Be Canadian" song, it's something that is funny, and in development people were like, "That's the opening number." But I was very adamant about the first moments being between the father and the daughter and seeing them as people. This isn't a story about how to survive immigration. This is the story about how, through all those extenuating circumstances, how do you stand up to people you love to follow your dreams? I'm not interested in teaching people about what it's like for Black immigrants or Somali immigrants when they come to Canada. If you get empathy from seeing the show? Great. Not my job.

This is a period piece. Do you feel a sense of urgency to capture this story before the changes that are happening in the rest of the city come to Dixon Road?

Dixon Road, specifically since '88 when my dad came, was a self-operated community, one that managed to help refugees when they first came. And so I'm glad to honour the legacies of the parents who pound the pavement to make it so that anything could grow here. And it's true, the legacy of areas continues to change. Canada is so obsessed with certain historical moments and they don't really witness our historical moments as communities. I don't have any power in legislature so if I can cement their stories, I think that that's something.

Dixon Road plays at Toronto's High Park Amphitheatre from June 3–19.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.