Who gets to be in the city and who gets to tell its stories? In Edgelands, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali sets out to answer these questions and many more in order to offer a better understanding of the modern world from his perch on its margins.

Mohamed Ali is Somali, Muslim, gay, and three times an  immigrant. He has been forced across several borders, both geographical and personal, including narrowly escaping an arranged marriage at 19 to a woman he had never met. He subsequently became a substance abuser and a street person, and finally a university graduate. Edgelands takes us from his kidnapping by his father in Somalia at age five in 1990 to his reunion with his mother in Minneapolis thirty years later, with sojourns in the Netherlands and Canada in between, and a job teaching English in Thailand.  All this has made him intrigued by the way we choose to live amongst each other. His incisive, brilliant depiction of his journey opens our eyes to a unique perspective on how we live now.

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MONA, OR THE SPAN OF MY UNCERTAIN YEARS: A NOVEL

 Mona is the name of a crossdresser who was born a boy named Mahdi. She hails from the Somali community and is found dead in her apartment surrounded by upturned furniture. The police declare it a suicide but her friend, Bilal, knows Mona wouldn’t kill herself. As he clears out her apartment, he comes across a stack of notebooks. In them he finds descriptions of a person he doesn’t recognize. The notebooks reveal Mona’s descent into a world of sadomasochism and her evolution as a crossdresser. They reveal the names of people Bilal goes in search of in order to better understand what happened to his friend. The novel asks us to think about how revenge and desire can often blind us to what is right. How can we come out on the right side of events when our honour or dignity has been impugned?

“Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali has been through a lot since he was born almost 35 years ago in Mogadishu, Somalia. A ruinous civil war; migrating to the Netherlands and then to Canada, a Muslim in a strange land; a fractured family; discovering he was gay; homelessness, alcoholism and addiction. You might say that anyone who's lived through all that should write a memoir. That's what he did. It's called Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir, and it was widely acclaimed as one of the best Canadian books of 2019.”— CBC BOOKS