December 7, 2020
Poet Ali (The Voice of Sheila Chandra) chronicles his return to the small Canadian town he lived in during early childhood in this layered memoir. On an especially cold winter night, Ali writes, he began reflecting on memories of his early childhood in Manitoba, Canada, and wondered what became of Jenpeg, the town where his family lived. Upon his return to Jenpeg—built to house people constructing a dam on the Nelson River—he found that the town no longer exists and the native community, the Pimicikamak, were suffering the economic and environmental impacts of the dam (“The water rises and falls because of the dam, the shore is chewed away”). Ali began to study the ways the dam changed the landscape, such as shore erosion and changing silt levels, as a way to empathize with the challenges faced by the Pimicikamak and to understand the legacy of the dam his family helped build. Along the way, he bonded with the community’s chief, Merrick, and locals Lee Roy and Mervin, who taught him about Pimicikamak Cree culture, including the nation’s sweat lodges and ceremonies. Ali’s prose shines when recalling his interactions with members of the Pimicikamak community and friends. Those concerned with environmental justice or the plight of Indigenous peoples will want to give this a look.
January 15, 2021
A world traveler, not always by choice, ponders the meaning and location of home. Poet, novelist, and essayist Ali was born in London, the child of displaced Indian Muslims who immigrated there from Pakistan. Owing to the visas required to go to either India or Pakistan, he writes, "any average American or Canadian tourist has a far easier time visiting the cities of my parents' and grandparents' births and ancestries than I do." Ali's father took the family to the remote woods of Manitoba, where he found work as an electrical engineer working on a massive hydropower project and where, for a few years, the family lived in a company town of double-wide trailers carved out of the vast forest. They moved again when he was about to enter third grade, this time landing in Staten Island, "the furthest I could have imagined from that town in the woods." Yet that place, receding in memory, seemed more like home than what he had known before. In contemplating a return, he discovered how damaging the project had been to the First Nations people of the area, with displacement, depression, and suicide rates suggestive of other dispossessed and colonized peoples Ali had studied. Writing to a chief in nearby Cross Lake, he was immediately welcomed as a visitor, confessing to another Native writer before traveling there, "I didn't know anything about Cross Lake except that's where the other kind of Indians lived." What he learned was both powerful and dispiriting--e.g., a formal Canadian government program called the "Sixties Scoop" that rounded up newborn Native children for adoption by non-Native people. "Would my dad, a new immigrant, have even thought about the politics of the provincial and federal treaties with the First Nations bands?" he wonders. Ali alerts readers to the First Nations' struggles to fend off an open-pit titanium mine, a gas pipeline, and other water projects, taking care to include many Indigenous voices in his account. A graceful, elegant account even when reporting on the hard truths of a little-known corner of the world.
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