Yasmine Kandil learned a lesson while teaching at Brock University in Ontario: newcomers to Canada don’t necessarily want to see their stories as narratives of struggle. While her students worked with a community group for a class assignment, some of the recent immigrants “were sad when they saw some of the scenes that the students created,” says Kandil. So she took a different, more celebratory approach.
That work culminated in Kandil’s The Salty Scent of Home, which is launching UVic’s Phoenix Theatre’s 2025-26 season.
“They want to see themselves or their stories as equal citizens and equal contributors to Canadian society,” she says. “They also didn’t want stories from their home countries to be sensationalized. So the woman from Syria did not want to see her country in rubble. She was like, ‘Why don’t you remember my country for the markets and for the mosques and all the glory that it used to be?’”
While telling the stories of newcomers to Canada, Kandil learned that participants wanted to make peace with whatever it was that they left behind and to have a hopeful future.
“And so what we did was we twisted some of the stories’ endings in order to give that resolution,” she says. “So the fellow from Sudan who really missed the Nile and missed the presence of the Nile in his life, we send him back in the story to talk to the Nile, and he tells the audience, ‘The Nile is telling me to go back to Canada, pushing me to to have a good life.’ And so we do that with all of the narratives, whether we make peace with the past or imagine a hopeful future and existence in Canada.”
When searching for a concept that would tie the stories together, birds and their migratory patterns came to Kandil’s mind. She was drawn to the resilience of birds and their ability to know where to go, and when.
“Their migration patterns are fascinating,” she says. “And so I started looking at poems by Mary Oliver and by Rumi and by others, and picked a few of those, brought them to the team, and I began to stage some of those bookends. So there are four chapters in the show. Every chapter is bookended with a poem. And in that poem, I directed the students in a physical theatre piece that that would express the words in that poem. But also the poem is narrated over top of that.”
Kandil says that she and her team hope that audiences will develop an understanding of the immigrant journey and find connections between their own ancestral journeys and those of newcomers in the performance.
“I’m hoping that there would be empathy raised, connection, care towards the newcomers, and a sense that there isn’t so much that divides settler from newcomer, that, in fact, the journey is very similar,” she says. “It’s just taken place over different periods of time. I’m also hoping that any newcomer or immigrant that sees this work can see themselves in it, can see their cultures represented in it, and can have a sense of pride in their journeys and pride in the courage and resilience that they’ve manifested to be able to carry through this work.”
The Salty Scent of Home
Various times and days,
Thursday, October 9 to Saturday, October 18
Various prices (student rush tickets $20 30 minutes before show),
Phoenix Theatre, UVic
finearts.uvic.ca/theatre/mainstage