Edgelands

A Life on Society's Margins

By: Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali

In Edgelands, Somali-Canadian writer Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali, author of Angry Queer Somali Boy, explores what it means to live life on the margins, in the city and beyond, and offers a unique perspective on the way we live now.

Somali, Muslim, gay, and three times an immigrant, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali has always existed in a fraught state of transience. He has been forced across several borders, both geographical and personal, from being kidnapped by his father at the age of five to narrowly escaping an arranged marriage at nineteen. He subsequently became a substance abuser with no permanent address, and finally a university graduate and writer.

In Edgelands, Ali excavates these acute points of transience in his life to seek places, both internal and external, where he could belong. The library became a space through which his family’s history unfurled itself to him, forcing reckonings with his racialized body and the role it is coerced to play in North American society. Walks through the city’s fringe neighbourhoods prompted radical reimaginings of what the plaques and monuments dotting these streets truly memorialize. And Ali’s drug dependency, in all its glittering, insidious entrapments, served also to open doors into a world of freedom, beauty, and terror, of true queer expression as well as its unseen costs.

From his perch at the margins of society and with clear-eyed and rhythmic writing, Ali combines a trenchant personal history with penetrating social criticism, and asks profound questions about identity, displacement, and the geography of belonging in our increasingly complex, globalized world.

Critic reviews

“Edgelands will break you apart and simultaneously hold you together. Histories major and minor will haunt your reading of this book as the everyday lives shaped by those histories are revealed to us. This personal story is one of the transience of diaspora and a tale of queer self-discovery and self-determination, family dissolution and reunification, geographic restlessness and Ali’s profound will to live life on his own terms. Ali will take you on a journey to bear witness to his suffering, decline and pain and his very ordinary survival of it and we get to meet his extraordinary preservation of a self.” —Rinaldo Walcott, author of On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition

“In Edgelands, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali searches for his village while navigating houselessness, addiction and toxic family dynamics, told from the perspective of an author who refuses to play the model minority. An audacious dispatch from the fringes of society, Edgelands will remain in the forefront of my mind.” —Catherine Hernandez, author and screenwriter of Scarborough the book and film