... resonated so strongly with me that I cannot pretend to be objective about how much I loved the book. I was captured by its compelling themes of global desi homelessness and what it means to love places that are not our own — what it means when none of the places we love are our own, but we belong to them anyway ... This is not a book with easy answers ... Ali gives the reader a crash course on Canada’s history of problematic relations with its Indigenous communities. The book is not exhaustive on that subject, and does not intend to be. But for me, a non-Canadian, the brief contextual snippets were eye-opening, to the point where my notes in the margins frequently degenerated into repeated exclamation marks ... forces the reader to keep thinking and engaging, throughout. That demand for engagement helps the book cut through the reader’s own baggage, based on every other story they have heard about an Indigenous community in trouble ... By carrying us along on his journey to understand his love for a place, and by refusing to extract the 'truth' of tragedy from what he encounters, Ali draws readers into his own complicity, his own complex, frustrated love.
There are many powerful lines that hint at an interiority that is never fully breached ... The book ends, beautifully, where it begins. At first, I found myself wishing that some of the answers we get in the final pages had come sooner. Then I was reminded of how deeply I have been trained to read for the Western arc of a story, with its conflict and resolution. What Ali does, often imperceptibly, is to decolonize this structure. His story is cyclical, like the rhythms of the land and the water that are both backdrop to and main characters in his story ... will push you to consider what home means to you. It evokes the transformative power of revisiting a place from your past in order to reencounter yourself.
... eloquent ... Illuminating contrasts are drawn between Ali’s Indian/Pakistani Muslim background and Native culture; Ali analyzes differences between Canadian and Indigenous identity, and their diametrically opposed perspectives about land and resource ownership. Intracommunity tensions are acknowledged in relation to religion, gender roles, alcohol sales, and relationships between Pimicikamak residents on provincial and reservation lands and the government. Though these topics are complex, they are untangled in an elegant manner ... Lyrical motifs of stargazing, and of an origami crane that Ali carries as a talisman during his visit, enrich the book’s descriptive passages. Throughout Northern Light, Ali continues to reassess his understandings of his childhood memories and his reasons for returning to Jenpeg. The book’s open-ended questions, like 'What does it mean to be from?,' are resonant.
Part personal narrative, part chronicle of history, Northern Light reads mostly as an in-real-time account of Ali's return to reacquaint himself with Cross Lake and its long-suffering yet gracious people. The effect is kinetic — the reading can be breezy and then downright slow, weighed down by the formal language of treaties, many of them broken ... Embedded in this overall effect, however, is the higher call to slow down and pay close attention to the injustices wrought upon the people of Cross Lake, including, as a result, its troubled youth. And to truly feel what it's like to be there, to reclaim a land that possesses you in return ... so beautiful, so vivid, so real.
Ali’s ethical imaginary is as finely honed and illuminating as his prose. What a privilege his fine book is, what a joy to spend a week in Cross Lake beside Ali.
Ali moves from writing a memoir to something else, something larger than the story of one person, one family, or even one place ... transcends any one of these categorizations to become something much larger than the sum of its parts, a provocative consideration of what it means to belong to a place--and whether or not a place can ever belong to a person.
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.
