Edgelands: A Life on Society’s Margins

Somali-Canadian writer Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali deconstructs the original meaning of the word ＂edgelands＂ across ten powerful tales, each exploring a facet of what it means to live life on the margins, in the city and beyond, and offering us a unique perspective on the way we live now.

＂Edgelands＂ is a term originally coined by the British author Marion Shoard to refer to the space between town and country. Here, in his new work of non-fiction, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali applies the word to mean the many formless spaces he has found himself occupying over the years, sometimes intentionally, and oftentimes against his will.

On July 26, 2005, at the age of nineteen, Ali escaped an arranged marriage to a woman in northeastern Somalia whom he’d never met. Thus began his first of several periods of transience, in which the city of Toronto became both his refuge and his prison. Fleeing one set of unsavoury circumstances landed him in another. With no permanent address and only the shakiest understanding of self, Ali sought to find places both internal and external to him 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.

Throughout these years of exploration, Ali’s desire to be a writer thrummed within him, a lifeline glowing with potential that allowed him to make sense of what his mind and body were experiencing. In Edgelands, Ali brings the edges to the centre, vividly and powerfully drawing the reader’s attention to those spaces and topics they’d rather not look at too closely.

MOHAMED ABDULKARIM ALI was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and lived in the United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands before immigrating to Canada as a teenager. He currently lives in Toronto. His first book, Angry Queer Somali Boy, was published by University of Regina Press in 2019 and critically acclaimed.