The poet and the civil-rights advocate
I first caught wind of Alexis Kienlen in 2007 through Linda Goyette, a well-known Alberta writer, editor and mentor who at the time was still living in our city. Kienlen, Goyette told me admiringly, showed real promise as a writer, was really going places, so I scribbled down her name and I Googled the young poet (then based in Grande Prairie) as soon as I got home.
I found out we had a lot in common: a love of books and writing and Saskatchewan, our home province. Later, we realized we had a mutual friend, Sunni, my schoolmate from rural Saskatchew an whom Kienlen got to know while they studied at the U of S. Later still, we learned our moms were both social workers who’d actually worked together in Saskatoon in the ’70s.
Destiny, perhaps, that after Kienlen moved to Edmonton in 2008, she and I would become friends and I’d watch her “go places,” as Goyette had predicted. The 37-yearold is quickly establishing herself as a capable literary jane-of-all-trades. She’s got two poetry collections under her belt: She Dreams in Red and 13, both published by Frontenac House. She’s a full-time agriculture reporter with Alberta Farmer, adding charm and adventure to the ag-journalism trade with day-in-the-life work tweets starring cows, wheats heaves, plaid-clad farmers and alpaca herds, and also does freelance book reviews.
Now, Kienlen can add biographer to that list. She just completed Truth, Love, Non-Violence: The Story of Gurcharan Singh Bhatia, a book chronicling the life of the celebrated Edmonton civil rights advocate and retired citizenship judge, now 82.
Goyette, I learned, was the literary matchmaker in this instance, too. It was she who suggested Kienlen as someone Bhatia could approach about a book commission. “As I heard parts of his story, I felt like it was a story that should be captured and preserved,” Kienlen said. “It’s an important story for Edmontonians and Canadian immigrants. It’s about someone who had a lot of challenges and made a better world.”
Over the course of many interviews, Kienlen became intimately familiar with her subject’s life, beginning with the violent, heartbreaking, early chapters. Bhatia survived the partition of British India, but the massacres killed 67 members of his Sikh family, including his father. In 1964, Bhatia immigrated to Winnipeg with his family, where he was one of only two Sikh men in town (the other was his brother-in-law). Needless to say, their turbans stood out. Those early experiences in cross-cultural understanding (or lack thereof) fuelled Bhatia’s desire to further multiculturalism and tolerance in Canada. “Mister Bhatia did a lot for Sikh immigrants, for everyone who came after him. He wanted to teach people what it meant to be different.”
In the half century he’s called Canada home, Bhatia has worked tirelessly to promote justice, peace and equality, founding and editing the Edmonton-based multicultural newspaper Canadian Link and starting up organizations like the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights. The real estate developer and father of two (including Gurvinder Bhatia, Edmonton’s beloved wine aficionado and owner of Vinomania) has also been a member of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
In 1997, Bhatia received the Order of Canada for his work.
“It’s the story of how one man can really make a difference, how one person’s life can have an impact,” Kienlen said. “There are amazing people in Edmonton who have done things to make Canada a better place. Maybe they’re not super famous but they’re people we should know about and respect, because they’ve made our lives better.”
Bhatia’s most recent brainchild is Daughters Day, a volunteer-led Edmonton celebration started in 2012 to combat inequalities and abuses facing women. A launch for Kienlen’s book was held Wednesday in conjunction with a Daughters Day event at Norquest College. “Daughters Day is his big thing now,” said Kienlen, noting the annual event has picked up momentum since the #YesAllWomen global Twitter campaign.
Kienlen was keen to write Bhatia’s story in part because she has a background in international studies, with a focus on race and ethnic relations. “The human rights aspect really appealed to me,” she noted. But she’s by no means an authority on India and has never even visited that country, which mean she had heaps of homework to do fleshing out Bhatia’s personal narrative with historical context. She and Bhatia spent a lot of time watching Indian documentaries together.
Three years in the making, Truth, Love, Non-Violence is out now through Createspace, Amazon’s selfpublishing arm. Kienlen and Bhatia considered trying to get a traditional publisher to pick up the biography but “it can take up to 10 years to get a book published, and when your subject is nearly 83, you just don’t have that kind of time,” Kienlen said.
She is still coming to grips with the fact this project is complete. “We worked on it so long it doesn’t seem real.” Now, she can devote her personal writing time to a new endeavour: a novel. Because why not add fiction to her list of writing accomplishments.
Hard copies of Truth, Love, Non-Violence are available at Tix on the Square for $20, online through Amazon and at Edmonton Public Library.