Kazim AliNorthern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water

Abstract

Swedish, Finnish, Catalan, Norwegian, Afrikaans, and Hungarian by writers who are regarded as leading the genre’s edge in their respective countries (only Spain is represented more than once). From the collection’s first story, Italian author Luigi Musolino’s “Uironda” (a story about a divorced trucker reminiscent of the best culture-critical writing of Stephen King and the most nihilistic impulses of Thomas Ligotti), to the last, late Spanish author José María Latorre’s “Snapshot” (a macabre but humorous story of a man obsessed with snapping shots of himself in a photo booth, revealing the grim truth of what he is), The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories is a grand guignol of horrific oddities from across the world, representing as many subgeneric impulses and terrifying plays with the genre’s possibilities as there are stories. Of particular interest and terrifying conclusion are Attila Veres’s “The Time Remaining” (Hungary), Flore Hazoum é’s “Menopause” (Ivory Coast), Marko Hautala’s “Pale Toes” (Finland), and Yvette Tan’s “All the Birds” (Philippines). Lars Ahn’s “The Collection” (Denmark), about a couple who discover they’ll do anything to prove they are right for each other, is probably my favorite of the bunch. But the range of stories presented suggests no one will be without something to love. Many of these stories are translated by Jenkins and Cagle themselves, a remarkable feat, and particular attention was paid in the anthologizing process to diversity of gender, nation, race, and colonial subjectivity . The stories come from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, some from minority languages like Catalan, and all are interested at some level in power disparities (poor/rich, men/women, colonizer/colonized ). Jenkins and Cagle have promised a second volume of The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and I can only hope that future anthologies in the series Books in Review Kazim Ali Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2021. 200 pages. ON A NIGHT WHEN icy winds blew south off Lake Erie and shook the windows of Kazim Ali’s house in Oberlin, he remembered the Canadian winters of his youth and searched online for images of Jenpeg—the company town he’d lived in as a child. He finds little online about Jenpeg . It’s mostly gone, the modest network of residential homes for employees at the hydroelectric dam under construction on the Nelson River. Other regional headlines piqued his interest instead. In Cross Lake, across the waters from Jenpeg and home to the First Nations Pimicikamak community, Chief Cathy Merrick had made headlines for serving eviction papers to Manitoba electric -utility giant Manitoba Hydro. Chief Merrick had contended that Manitoba Hydro, the province of Manitoba, and the federal government of Canada had not fulfilled their agreements in the Northern Flood Agreement, the 1977 treaty with five northern Bands under which Manitoba Hydro received easement rights to build the generating station. The Jenpeg Generating Station and the former town of Jenpeg where Ali lived were on Pimicikamak sovereign territory. Now, the dam his father had built was negatively impacting the Pimicikamak’s community and changing the biodiversity of their unceded lands and waters. He read more: last winter, in Cross Lake, six young people between the ages of fifteen and eighteen had died by suicide in the space of two months. The Pimicikamak had declared a mental-health emergency, and, Ali writes, “the Elders in the community had gathered and performed a sacred ceremony calling on the spirits of the land and water to assist.” In the weeks that followed, he couldn’t get Cross Lake out of his mind. The contemporary concerns in Cross Lake alarmed him and recalled the years that Ali, who is queer, Muslim, and the child of South Asian migrants, had spent traveling through the Palestinian territory in the West Bank teaching yoga and training yoga teachers. “I’d seen the impacts of occupation and political disenfranchisement up close,” Ali writes, and “the sociopolitical impacts of colonialism.” He wonders about his own family’s complicity in the dam that his father had worked on at the Jenpeg Generating Station. Reflecting on his family’s culpability in the...