{"id":27268,"date":"2025-10-06T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/?p=27268"},"modified":"2025-09-26T12:38:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T19:38:06","slug":"the-salty-scent-of-home-offers-hopeful-twist-on-newcomer-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2025\/10\/06\/the-salty-scent-of-home-offers-hopeful-twist-on-newcomer-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"The Salty Scent of Home<\/em> offers hopeful twist on newcomer stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yasmine Kandil learned a lesson while teaching at Brock University in Ontario: newcomers to Canada don\u2019t 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 \u201cwere sad when they saw some of the scenes that the students created,\u201d says Kandil. So she took a different, more celebratory approach.<\/p>\n

That work culminated in Kandil\u2019s The Salty Scent of Home<\/i>, which is launching UVic\u2019s Phoenix Theatre\u2019s 2025-26 season.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want to see themselves or their stories as equal citizens and equal contributors to Canadian society,\u201d she says. \u201cThey also didn\u2019t 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, \u2018Why don\u2019t you remember my country for the markets and for the mosques and all the glory that it used to be?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Salty Scent of Home<\/em> documents stories of those new to Canada (photo by Dean Kalyan).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so what we did was we twisted some of the stories\u2019 endings in order to give that resolution,\u201d she says. \u201cSo 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, \u2018The Nile is telling me to go back to Canada, pushing me to to have a good life.\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

When searching for a concept that would tie the stories together, birds and their migratory patterns came to Kandil\u2019s mind. She was drawn to the resilience of birds and their ability to know where to go, and when.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir migration patterns are fascinating,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hoping that there would be empathy raised, connection, care towards the newcomers, and a sense that there isn\u2019t so much that divides settler from newcomer, that, in fact, the journey is very similar,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just taken place over different periods of time. I\u2019m 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\u2019ve manifested to be able to carry through this work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Salty Scent of Home
\n<\/i>Various times and days,
\nThursday, October 9 to Saturday, October 18
\nVarious prices (student rush tickets $20 30 minutes before show),
\nPhoenix Theatre, UVic
\nfinearts.uvic.ca\/theatre\/mainstage<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yasmine Kandil learned a lesson while teaching at Brock University in Ontario: newcomers to Canada don\u2019t 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 \u201cwere sad when they saw some of the scenes that the students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27269,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,339],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-october-1-2025"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27270,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27268\/revisions\/27270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}