My world is muted. I look out. If something upsets me, I just wait, and the upset passes. I sit beside. Sometimes, I remember the other me, before I was frozen in the lake. I remember caring and engaging and the sharpness of unmuted feeling. I remember hopeless connection.
I don’t feel stuck, in part because I don’t feel anything. Their song isn’t wrong, the ice is like a warm, weighted blanket. My form dissolved when tragedy came and if I am fluid, the ice is container.
Noopiming; The Cure for White Ladies is a challenging, lyrical, and rewarding read from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. According to the publisher’s blurb, “Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for ‘in the bush’, and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making.” The most challenging aspect of this book is its use of aesthetics from Simpson’s ancestral storytelling tradition; aesthetics that unapologetically refuse to conform to the expectations or comfort of someone (myself) raised solely on the Western canon. Words from the Anishinaabemowin language are untranslated, Anishinaabemowin grammar (including the nongendering of all nouns) sits uncomfortably on the English-speaking tongue, and confusion reigns as one attempts to discern if the character speaking is a human, a goose, or a sentient maple tree that conveys their prized possessions (beneath the white man’s notice) along the roads between Peterborough and Toronto in a shopping cart. And Noopiming is rewarding for these exact same reasons: The language is poetic, the characters are meaningful, and if I had trouble perfectly understanding everything, I acknowledge that I was probably not Simpson’s primary target audience; but I am here to listen and to learn. Well worth the mental exercise.
Mindimooyenh is sitting on a lawn chair on the ice visiting me, talking and talking. It doesn’t matter if you listen or pay attention or respond or talk to them back. And sometimes I like when they come around because it doesn’t matter if I talk, not even one little bit. It doesn’t even matter if I pay attention, because my response is irrelevant. Mindimooyenh is like that. Maybe because all those years in residential school they weren’t allowed to talk, and now their words have just built up and come bursting out.
Noopiming opens from the perspective of Mashkawaji (a word which can be translated as “frozen stiff”); a person who has spent the past two years trapped in a frozen lake. “They” introduce us to seven other human and nonhuman characters (I found it very helpful that the rear cover of my book had these names listed along with their identities [the old man, the caribou, the giant], but continually referring to it did feel like cheating), and Mashkawaji introduces each as their lungs, or their marrow, or their brain, etc. In very short passages (many pages have only a line or two), perspective switches between these characters (and others), and while the whole does not add up to a plot in the way that I might define it, Simpson does tell a story that confronts and adds to the dominant Canadian narrative.
Simpson seems unafraid to ruffle feathers, to get political or confrontational:
• Things seem pretty fucked for the humans, to be honest. The white ones who think they are the only ones have really structured the fucked-up-ed-ness in a seemingly impenetrable way this time. A few good ones get their footing, and then without continual cheerleading, succumb to the shit talk. It is difficult to know where to intervene or how to start. There are embers, but the wood is always wet and the flames go out so damn easy.
• They dream of driving their Jayco house trailer boat all the way to Palestine with the flotilla to resist the idea that this situation is complicated, that there are two sides, that there is no way to help.
• KOSIMAANAN STORY FIVE : A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INDIANS OF CANADA
Mashkodiisiminag begins by saying that they learned this story from Thomas King and that it is not their story by any means.
But Simpson also has important things to say about family, tradition, and ceremony:
They don’t need to try and explain that one can’t just look at or preserve a sacred site. That if the sacredness is to be maintained, Nishnaabeg have to continue the relationship. Fast. Pray. Sing. Carve. You cannot just ignore something and expect it to still be there for you when you need it.
And that last quote feels like the heart of Noopiming: Where once Susanna Moodie found her way in the “uninhabited” Canadian bush, Simpson’s characters explore a different kind of desolation; sleeping rough under the Gardiner overpasses, ignoring the toxic tang of the Don River, prevented from lighting a traditional fire in their own back yards because of Toronto’s bylaws against open air burning. The ultimate response to a collective consciousness finding itself frozen in the ice is to employ art as a political act; Noopiming is such an act of art that strengthens the Nishnaabeg people’s relationship to the sacred. I am grateful to have witnessed the act.
