Migration, alienation and a war that's as much about lip-gloss as it is about oil -- if there's one song on Lal's new disc, Deportation, that captures the reality of life in the post-9/11 world, it is the provocatively titled, Your Body Could Start A War.

Recited by local poet/activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, it contains the lines, "My lip gloss is a bomb and so is my hijab.

We are terrorists for crossing these lines on a map no one but them can see.

They want to take our ability to fly away.

They know your body and mine could start a war.

They already have."

Along with several other pieces on Deportation, which arrives in stores Tuesday, Your Body Could Start A War addresses the alienation and anger that certain communities of colour in Western nations feel since the events of September 11, 2001. The song titles alone hint at those twin themes -- Erase Me, Self Defense and Wasteland -- and they are perfectly complemented by the group's dark, stark, cinematic music.

Lal's Rosina Kazi says she discussed the album's concept with her poet friend and loved the poem she contributed.

"Leah travels a lot and she'd written this piece about her experiences crossing the border, so she came with that piece and we were like, 'Perfect,' " Kazi says. "I don't necessarily write like her so I invited a couple of spoken-word artists who write in a much more confrontational way."

Hence, the appearance of Leah, Kamau and Lucas Costello, three gifted wordsmiths who articulate their positions more forcefully but with as much conviction as Kazi.

In an era when good-time, mindless commercial fodder rules the airwaves, it's rare and refreshing to come across a record that addresses heavy themes such as migration and alienation.

Kazi says the attacks of 9/11 inspired the subject matter on Deportation.

"As someone who is Muslim-Canadian, it affected me personally. Something shifted at that point for me," she says. "I immediately recognized that the world had changed. My parents were never religious and we weren't raised to be very religious, but something for me changed. I realized at that moment that being brown and someone who's tied to Islam ... it made you kind of re-evaluate a lot of different things."

Kazi adds that two events that occurred in Toronto in the past five years "shook me out of my Canadian privilege."

One was the deportation of activist/broadcaster Wendy (Queen Nzinga) Maxwell and the other was Project Thread -- the arrest of 23 men of South Asian descent over suspected links to terrorism.

Those, coupled with her work with organizations such as No One Is Illegal, further politicized her.

"Being born here, you're already dealing with issues of identity but I never had to deal with not having access to health care or education," Kazi says. "So, when you begin looking at those issues, you see a different picture. You see this kind of second-class citizenship situation happening in Western nations.

"And then you see the backlash against people of colour in France and England," she says. "Which I think is really ironic because these are colonial powers that took over different countries and now you have people from those countries coming to live in France and England and they're saying, 'Don't come here!' "

Kazi says that a three-month stint living in London, England, with partner and bandmate Nicholas Murray provided more fodder for songwriting, in particular, one of the album's most powerful tracks, Erase Me.

"That song came out of the combination of being really affected by the closed-circuit cameras that are everywhere and people talking about identity cards," she says. "It feels like eventually someone can erase you if everything is on a computer file. That's what it felt like."

Kazi is asked how she'd respond if someone accused her of being paranoid.

"I'm definitely paranoid," she says, laughing. "It's like (George Orwell's) 1984. When you give government control of things like policing at that level ... ," she trails off.