For writer Kazim Ali, writing has always been personal.
As the author of over a dozen books — including seven books of poetry, five novels and five essay collections — he’s often had to mine the deepest depths of his psyche for a profound sentence or a heartfelt stanza. Not to mention his day job is as a literature and writing professor at the University of California San Diego.
But when asked where “Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water” ranks in comparison to his other projects, he doesn’t hesitate to remark that the recently published book was his most ambitious project and one that left him feeling deeply changed.
“This was a story that I never thought I was going to write, and even as I was writing it, I never really felt prepared to do it justice,” Ali says. “I had to learn, I had to train myself on the ground what it meant to be a journalist and tell the story of a community.”
Where that story of “Northern Light” truly begins is, in fact, up to the reader. One could argue it begins as early as the 18th century when French and British colonizers began taking over land that would eventually become part of northern Manitoba, Canada. The story could begin in the late ‘70s when the Canadian government, along with the utilities company Manitoba Hydro, signed a treaty with five Indigenous bands to build a hydroelectric dam at the nearby Nelson River. Or does the story really begin in 2014 when the Pimicikamak Cree Nation began to occupy that dam, citing that their “homeland has been ruined” and that “the promises of fair treatment have been ignored”?
For Ali, however, the story begins around the mid-‘70s when his family moved to Jenpeg, Manitoba. “Northern Light” immediately recounts Ali’s family history, that of Muslim parents driven from their ancestral home in India to Pakistan, then moving to London and eventually emigrating to Winnipeg. There, Ali’s father began working for as an electrical engineer for Manitoba Hydro, specifically helping to design hydroelectric dams to generate electricity to nearby towns. It’s in Jenpeg where Ali spent a good chunk of his formative years and recalls with a poet’s grace in the book.
He later adds, despite his mother telling him later in life that the family only lived there a few years, that it was Jenpeg, with its bristling winters, abundant wildlife and celestial lightshows, where the poet in him was born.
“Really, it was the sky because it’s so far north and out in the middle of the forest,” Ali says. “Every night that was clear, you could see everything. It’s where I first learned the stories of the myths, because I would see the constellations in the sky and my dad would tell me the story.”
Ali often refers to his time in Jenpeg as a “fleeting phantom of my past.” One day, however, he began googling around only to find that the dam, the one his father had a hand in designing, was at the center of a controversy between the local indigenous community of Cross Lake and Manitoba Hydro. He also found details on a more recent history of mental health crises and suicides in Cross Lake.
He reached out to the chief of the Pimicikamak nation via email, explaining that he’d grown up in neighboring Jenpeg, hoping she would send more information. She responded with a simple message: “Come visit.”
“That was for sure a challenge,” Ali recalls. “It was a challenge and an invitation. A challenge with generosity. I was just looking for her to send me some links and she was just like, ‘Get up here.’”
Still, Ali had a job teaching literature at Oberlin College in Ohio (he moved to San Diego in 2019) and was unsure what he could bring to the story of the community.
“I felt some ambiguity with that role,” Ali says. “Should I be of service to them? Will I be able to be objective as a writer? I was still at the outset of this journey caught up in those kinds of questions. As I got there in 2017 and learned and met people, those questions of objectivity became less important, because I realized I am part of this story.”
In fact, one of “Northern Light’s” greatest strengths is Ali’s ability to weave between his personal connection to the land and the history of the people who call it home. In one particularly moving passage, he tells a Cross Lake elder, “I don’t think I can understand my childhood until I know what happened in your community.” He dove headfirst into the proverbial waters of researching the history of the people that make up the land, something he was hardly used to.
“I became a researcher and I did have to dig up a lot of stuff,” Ali says. “I’m not a journalist or a scholar by profession, so it was an adventure and new for me.”
The book was recently included on a list of must-read books about climate change. Ali says he initially found that to be odd, but now understands that these focused stories about Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities, whose lives are disproportionately affected by industry, do go a long way to speak to broader issues of inequality. Ali’s gift as a writer is the way he is able to present his story in a way that brings attention to the myriad issues facing Indigenous communities, from oil pipelines in the Dakotas to border walls running through Kumeyaay land.
“Don’t we all have an acknowledgment to be part of whatever the organizing for social change and political change that the indigenous communities are doing,” Ali asks. “It’s something that non-indigenous people all over the United States and Canada should be asking ourselves.”
The Book Catapult presents Kazim Ali
When: 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 17
Tickets: Free
Online: thebookcatapult.com
“Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water” by Kazim Ali (Milkweed Editions, 2021; 200 pages)
Combs is a freelance writer.
