Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water by Kazim Ali (review)

Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water documents the Indian-American poet Kazim Ali's return to Jenpeg in the Cree lands around Manitoba, the town where he spent his childhood years. Ali's family moved from the United Kingdom to Manitoba because Ali's father was hired to work at a hydroelectric dam in the area. The dam ultimately displaced a lot of the Cree Indigenous inhabitants. As an adult in Oberlin, Ali reads in the newspapers that suicides around Jenpeg are skyrocketing. He wonders about the extent his family and its decisions may have played in the fate of the Pimicikamak people. Feeling a responsibility to this land that he is from, Ali sojourns from his current home in Ohio to the snowy steppes of Manitoba.

However, Ali is not Pimicikamak, and after having spent time in India, the United Kingdom, Canada, and various cities in the United States, he cannot truly call Jenpeg home. This contradiction—to be from a place partly but not really—orients Ali's memoir. Questions of national identity and belonging permeate the text, yet Ali's conflicts are not strictly geographical but spiritual as well. The dam that Ali's father had once worked on has almost completely swallowed the town. If there is any life beyond the pumping and pulsing of the dam complex, it is found only in the guzzling of the river, or the chirps of idling birds. And while Ali expects to recognize the Old Main Road where he formed many of his childhood memories, he finds that "the whole area has been bulldozed flat at some point in the past and is just a large open area in the middle of the forest, with a group of four or five trailers arranged in a half circle at the edge of where the trees start."

Jackson Osborne, a local elder and historian who has acted as Ali's guide, is more excited than he is. Ever since Jackson has come to know that Ali has grown up in Jenpeg and aspires to shine an international light onto the plights of their community, Jackson has gone out of his way to educate Ali of what has happened to Jenpeg and show him around. It is therefore no surprise given the effusive energy that he is portrayed with that he shouts, "You're here! You're home! After forty years you've come back! What does it feel like?" But Ali is not able to articulate a response, particularly because what he is thinking is not the response that Jackson would be looking for. He writes, "We left this place. We went back to our cities and onward on the journey of our lives. And we never once looked back. This place isn't my home. It never was."

Ali's insecurities about belonging spill over his interpretations of Jenpeg as well as his interactions with the other Pimicikamak people. As Ali asks permission to come stay with the Pimicikamak sector of the Cree community, he talks to Lee Roy, one of the members of the executive council who monitored the relationship between those building the dam and the Pimicikamaks. Lee Roy invites Ali to partake in a sweat lodge ceremony to ascertain how true or not Ali's intentions are. Ali agrees but with reticence. He writes: "And now I had agreed to be a part of some kind of ceremony in a community I barely knew. Would I be going there as a poet or as a journalist? An ethnographer or scholar or memoirist?"

What was meant to be merely a homecoming tale takes an unpredicted narrative turn. Ali feels distanced from the Pimicikamaks and uncomfortable engaging in local traditions with them. Despite that, the Pimicikamak people remain warm. The elders and locals he meet know that Ali spent his childhood in their lands, so they invite him with open arms, remind him at every turn that he too belongs to their country...