Toronto (CBC)- When Fatuma Adar thinks of home, her memories are filled with the sights and sounds of Toronto’s Dixon Road community, its beloved convenience stories, aunties who would run daycares from their apartments and a neighbourhood whose character she’s never quite been able to find anywhere else.

Adar, a 30-year-old first-time playwright, grew up at the intersection of Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue, known as Little Mogadishu.

Now she’s bringing those personal stories to the stage in Dixon Road, a musical inspired by the Dixon Road community, Adar’s personal experience and her relationship with her father who came to Canada with hopes and dreams of his own.

The musical follows the journey of a Somali family that immigrated to Canada in 1991 as a civil war begins to tear through their homeland, forcing many to flee and eventually settle in Dixon Road, near Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

“The big joke is that Dixon was just like the closest thing to the airport. It was just an intuitive, ‘We will go to those towers right there,’ which you know, also tracks [for us] as a nomadic people,” Adar said.

The musical explores the dynamic between a father learning to navigate a new world in Canada and his daughter who’s seeking opportunities of her own — one that mirrors Adar’s own relationship with her father, Mohamed Adar.

“It’s a dynamic of what it means to take care of each other, to listen to each other, to find each other,” Adar said.

“It’s been incredible to sort of figure out what’s at the heart of making your parents proud and making your parents proud of you.”

Making Dixon Road home

Mohamed Adar fled Somalia in the late 80s after the civil war broke out, seeking asylum in the U.S. before coming to Canada. 

When he arrived, the Dixon Road community was still very small at the time, Adar said, before it became a magnet for many Somali families arriving in Toronto.

After getting a job as a cab driver, he became the neighbourhood’s “go-to” person and would help other Somali newcomers get settled and navigate the city, his daughter recalled.

For families fleeing the civil war in Somalia at the time, it was important to be able to create a community in Canada that they could call home, she said, which is why the tight-knit community adopted the neighbourhood as their own.

While her family would end up moving in and around the city, the Dixon community remained just as important no matter where they went, Adar said

In the musical, the father — a documentarian back home — arrives in Canada before realizing he can’t achieve the same level of status he held in Somalia.

“In addition to him trying to navigate this new world, he has his daughter who is seeing new opportunities for herself, and what does it mean for her to go after her dreams when her father has lost so much of his?” Adar explains.

“I hope [others] find themselves in the story of what a lot of diasporic kids go through, which is the sacrifices our parents made to come to this country,” she said.

Dixon Road, co-produced by the Musical Stage Company and Obsidian Theatre Company, has been several years in the making.

Read more: Young playwright captures heart of Toronto’s Somali-Canadian community in new musical

Source: CBC