Best Canadian Poetry 2020 by Marilyn Dumont

Author:Marilyn Dumont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Contributors’ Commentary and Biographies

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Indian parents. His family migrated to Canada in the early 1970s and he was raised on Treaty 1 (Winnipeg) and Treaty 5 (Jenpeg) land. He currently lives on traditional Kumeyaay land in San Diego, California, where he teaches at the University of California. The author of many books of poetry, fiction, and essays, his forthcoming books include the collection of poetry The Voice of Sheila Chandra, and a nonfiction book about the Jenpeg Generating Station and the Pimicikamak First Nation of Northern Manitoba entitled Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, both available from Goose Lane Editions.

Of “Origin Story,” Ali writes, “I am often asked the question ‘where are you from?’ and like many transnational people, especially people from postcolonial backgrounds, it is a complicated question to answer. I was born in one place, have cultural ties to another, and was raised in a third, a fourth, a fifth. My parents, like many migrants, moved for a host of reasons—economic, political, social. No question has an easy answer. I tried to answer this question many different ways and in many different genres. This poem is one approach to it, my new nonfiction book Northern Light is yet another. The idea of a country as a national project—a cultural and social experiment called ‘Canada’ or called ‘the United States of America’ or even ‘India’ depends on a lot of fictions, fictions that must be commonly accepted by the people inside those cartographically delineated national borders. But a person is not what can be documented, a community is not one that can be legislated into borders.”

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