For many refugees, the move to a new country marks a difficult departure from familiar cultural norms and customs, often posing challenges in their initial transition abroad. But despite that swift change and period of adjustment, newcomers still carry a trove of knowledge and lived experiences that enrich not only the people they meet, but also the communities, workplaces, organizations, and institutions they become part of.
That idea is at the heart of the Qissa Festival, a gathering that celebrates newcomer and refugee writers and rejects the idea that newcomer artists are “emerging subjects,” instead recognizing them as “established artists, thinkers, and cultural producers.”
“An artist may have twenty years of professional experience in their home country, but in Toronto they are labelled as ‘emerging,’” say festival co-founders Haroon Khalid and Anam Zakaria. “Through this festival, we want to challenge that notion.”
Eight creatives will share stories on March 29th at Small World Music in Toronto, starting at 11 a.m. Among their roster of talent is screenwriter, playwright, and filmmaker Tala Motazedi, who fled Iran two-and-a-half years ago. Now the PEN Writer-in-Residence at George Brown College, Motazedi credits her move to Canada as the start of a long healing journey addressing the challenges of living under a restrictive regime.
Tala Moetazedi
Motazedi hopes that queer people and immigrants alike will find her movies healing in their own way. “When I came to Canada, a safe place, I started to do my real job of talking and writing. Making movies about my community, queer people, this is my duty. This is my destination,” she says. “From now to the future, I will make, talk, and write about the queer [experience].” (Motazedi’s 2023 film Orca, a tale of an Iranian record-breaking female swimmer, was banned in Iran, forcing her to leave the country.)
It's a sentiment that is felt by many other artists looking to share their work with an audience.
The Qissa festival will feature multidisciplinary performances, including readings, screenings, exhibitions, and oral histories telling the stories of Toronto-based immigrants and refugees. Rainbow Railroad recently spoke with the Qissa co-founders about the festival’s origins, the significance of spotlighting immigrant and refugee artists, and more.
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Anam Zakaria and Haroon Khalid being interviewed for the Driving Canada: A Front Seat View of Immigration through Uber (2024), by Emily Burton of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 (CMIP). This was a collaborative project between Qissa and CMIP. Photo Credit: Darryl LeBlanc
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Rainbow Railroad: Can you talk about Qissa and how the festival came to be?
Both Qissa and the festival emerged from our personal experiences as racialized immigrant artists in Toronto. With Qissa, we wanted to create a space where immigrants tell their stories in their own words, without having to fit into a particular mould or framework, which is usually informed by the Western Gaze. The festival is then a way through which we bring our vision to life, with newcomer and refugee writers leading the conversation about their own experiences, without being told what stories are important to tell, and which ones are not.
Why did you decide to put this event together? What do you hope potential attendees will take away or learn from it?
Perhaps the biggest impetus behind this festival was to challenge the notion that newcomer and refugee writers are ‘emerging.’ We realized that even the most well-meaning support programs frame newcomer and refugee artists as ‘emerging.’ This ends up informing the kind of programming that is developed for these artists. So, an artist may have twenty years of professional experience in their home country, but in Toronto, they are labelled as ‘emerging.’ Through this festival, we want to celebrate these incredible artists for the depth of expertise and experience they bring, while encouraging the attendees to reflect on the current programs and support systems within the arts and beyond, including how they may need to be re-examined and re-imagined. We also hope that this is a space for attendees who have a love for the arts to engage with some brilliant performances and thoughtful conversations, and for other newcomers and refugees to feel seen and validated.
Your event aims to highlight creatives "not as emerging subjects, but as established artists, thinkers, and cultural producers." Can you talk more about this? What do you hope artists will gain from their participation in this event?
So, a lot of support programs that are established for newcomers and refugees are designed to ‘help’ them integrate into the Toronto landscape. Inevitably, a majority of these programs put the burden on recent immigrants to navigate systems — job market, housing, arts sector — without necessarily challenging the unfair and discriminatory systems. This sometimes positions immigrants as recipients of information, rather than a source of information, which is why many programs don’t necessarily reflect what recent immigrants actually need in terms of how to establish themselves here, but rather what people perceive they need. Through this festival, we want to put recent immigrants at the centre, to lead the conversation around the experiences of newcomers and refugees. We worked with all these writers to co-create this festival, from performances, panels, and programming. We wanted to create a space where participating recent immigrants can truly be themselves without being told what they need to do to ‘integrate.’
What is the importance of spotlighting refugees and newcomers?
Despite there being so many support systems already existing for refugees and newcomers, as recent immigrants ourselves, and based on our qualitative research with other immigrants, we believe that there is a wide gulf between what immigrants need and what support systems offer. Given how much money is invested in these newcomer and refugee support systems, we believe it is imperative to have these conversations, and challenge some of the dominant narratives around newcomers and refugees. At the same time, engaging with refugee and newcomer literary talent and art, beyond stereotypes and tropes, also creates a platform for both celebration and reflection on the stories people carry, and the stories they want to tell versus the stories we sometimes impose or want to hear.
Why was it important to include queer artists and creatives?
At the core of what we do is challenging the white gaze through which stories of racialized immigrants are told. And particularly in the contemporary political context, may that be wars being fought elsewhere, or political movements in Toronto, rainbow-washing is a dominant phenomenon, which is deeply entwined with the white gaze — perceptions of global south, and saviour narrative of the global north. Any story about the white gaze is incomplete without the story of queer artists and creatives.
If you’d like to attend the Qissa festival, please RSVP here.
