Saudi-born actor Aixa Kay in the search for belonging
Credit to Author: Canadian Immigrant| Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2019 06:09:08 +0000
At first glance, she embodies a perfect Vancouverite. Dressed for the gym — her next stop — she confidently enters Lost+Found Café, a creative hub in the Gastown neighbourhood of Vancouver where she spends hours writing. Yet, there is something revealing about her origin when she greets me with a reassuring embrace and welcomes me to share a feta bun, slicing it into four neat pieces. She warms her hands around her chai tea latte and doesn’t wait for any warm-up questions to start sharing her story.
An aspiring actor and writer, Aixa Kay (her stage name) has been living in Vancouver for six years. Her weekly schedule includes auditions, acting and belly-dance classes, five gym visits, writing a script for a TV drama contest, time for her 12-year-old son, and, finally, time for herself. While she enjoys the freedom to pursue the creative career she’s always wanted, she doesn’t take it for granted.
First acquaintance with Canada
Kay was born and grew up in Saudi Arabia, in the family of a nuclear engineering professor and a published children’s writer. Her father, an avid traveller, had a work opportunity in Canada. Eventually, he brought his children here so that they could see how people of different values and beliefs live together in peace. The family, including five kids, stayed in Canada for four years.
Kay experienced excitement, culture shock when she found herself to be the only hijabi at her new Canadian school. As she explains it, most of her classmates didn’t want to talk to “a weird covered girl with a hormonal mustache.” Kay got mocked even from children who came from Muslim countries. The young girl didn’t understand that her peers might look at her as a symbol of the religious injustices they’d experienced before moving to Canada. She wanted to make friends, not excuses.
It was also strange for her to sit in a classroom with boys. According to her upbringing in Saudi Arabia, as soon as she reached puberty, she should not have been allowed to sit together with a male who could potentially become her husband. It made friendship between genders impossible. She admits,“I used to have crushes about every boy. Now I’m learning how to have a genuine, meaningful human relationships with men.”.
In high school, Kay secretly started to take off the hijab. After she confessed this to her mother, the diaries where Kay wrote about boys, were also discovered. Her parents made a quick decision to take the kids back home to Saudi Arabia before they lost their values.
On the intersection of different cultures
After arriving back in her homeland after so much time away, Kay still felt like a foreigner. The girls at school pointed out her walk, words and manners, the way she wore an abaya, and snacks she ate. Feeling like an outsider wasn’t new to her, even before going to Canada. Being brought up by parents from two different regions of Saudi Arabia, she already had a sense of not belonging to either side. There were different accentsor behaviours that each side considered not local. Then, new Canadian habits added up. “I hated it, but as you grow up, you understand it allows you to break the rules,” she says. “You have a freedom to be different.”
In 2005, the Saudi King reopened a scholarship program that sponsored students to go study abroad. Marriage with a man Kay loved, also a writer, gave her an opportunity to take part in the program and study in the U.S. You may ask, where is the connection? The thing is, she, like other Saudi women, couldn’t study abroad without a male guardian.
Despite a gender-segregation policy, women do have job opportunities in Saudi, if they speak English, and are open to work in a non-segregated environment and travel. Kay came home with a master’s degree in creative writing from Portland State University. Without experience and qualifications, she easily found jobs in a bank and a hospital.
In 2010, Kay joined a team of young professionals as a head writer, and produced a sitcom, Um Elhala (Season 2). It wasn’t until seven years later that a ban on cinemas was lifted, women were allowed to drive and restrictions on gender-mixing eased.
“In societies that cannot deal with change, the best way is not to discuss change, but to show and be a change,” she says.
Finding identity through acting
The restlessness of a traveller’s soul encouraged Kay return to Canada. Supported by her ex-husband, she found an agent and started acting at the age of 34. When insecurities and fear shackle her, Kay keeps telling herself, “One foot in front of the other.” Bit by bit, this simple mantra has borne its fruits. Aixa played a belly-dancer in the TV series UnREAL and had leading roles in the award-winning movie Aperture and the four-minute horror I’m sorry.
Why acting? Kay explains it with a quicksand metaphor. If you don’t protect and nurture your creativity by removing the layers of sand, you’ll suffocate covered by the societal expectations and someone else’s masks. Coming from Saudi Arabia, where everything is governed by rules, she loves acting for the freedom to be real.
Kay dreams of playing a girl with an accent who struggles to belong somewhere. It’s what her story is about, being a foreigner in the homeland. She hasn’t visited Saudi Arabia for six years and sees no reason to go back. After her politically vocal father was arrested and released, he left Saudi Arabia.
As Kay talks about her new home, Vancouver, a glimpse of uncertainty appears in her brown eyes. She confesses it wasn’t love at first sight. Though, to her surprise, in Canada, she no longer feels like an outsider. While questions of identity and belonging still bother her, long hikes, improv classes, new friendships and writing sessions in airy coffeeshops bring her closer to the answer.
Now in her sixth year in Vancouver, Kay feels part of a community that “allows you to be you.” It seems she’s found the crucial piece of the puzzle. As Kay puts it, “Whether it’s volunteering or hosting your friends, you need to contribute where you are in order to belong.”