The war is over. The war is never over. They keep the fires burning somewhere else where we can’t see.

Black Fish is my new favourite show of the festival, 29 shows in.

This show is so poetic. Retelling One Thousand and One Nights in the context of an immigration interrogation is genius. The unravelling of this surreal interview is so gripping to watch, and the stories merging with reality merging with history is done so deftly that I barely noticed the shifts. The repetition, the frustration, the tension pulls us in. Even the temporal jumps, which can be so tricky to do well in a play while still maintaining audience comprehension, feel completely smooth. This is memory play/ghost story/political commentary all in one and not one of these elements are weaker than the others.

There are so many gorgeous and biting lines in this play. They strike a balance between incisive political commentary and artful reflection on identity and homeland—of course, for immigrants and refugees, these two things are one and the same. No line is wasted. I need the script to get published immediately and then I need everyone to ignore me for a few days so I can chew on it.

Having the immigration officer himself be an immigrant, parroting the colonial doctrine to forget one’s history, one’s people, one’s language (so really, one’s humanity), surely the same advice he has tried and failed to take, is painfully realistic and thoughtfully-presented.

The absence of the White gaze in this was so vital. There are no White characters. Lines are left untranslated. The tension lies in the relationship between immigrant citizen and newcomer migrant, both racialized, which makes room for deep complexities that would be flattened had either character been White. At no point did this feel like it was pandering to a White audience by dumbing things down or trying to comfort them. In doing so, it deeply comforted me.

We are so, so lucky to be able to see subversive, original immigrant art in this city. This is the kind of work that is moving the dial forward for racialized immigrant art.