Noopiming : The Cure for White Ladies
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy. Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce the seven characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman, their conscience; Sabe, a gentle giant, their marrow; Adik, the caribou, their nervous system; and Asin and Lucy, the humans who represent their eyes, ears, and brain. Simpson’s book As We Have Always Done argued for the central place of storytelling in imagining radical futures. Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush”) enacts these ideas. The novel’s characters emerge from deep within Abinhinaabeg thought to commune beyond an unnatural urban-settler world littered with SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, and Fjällräven Kånken backpacks. A bold literary act of decolonization and resistance, Noopiming offers a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits—and the daily work of healing.
Reviews with the most likes.
Read this in an afternoon. It is incisive ("shining your crown / of neoliberal / likes," p. 219) and luminous ("we love / when we are able," p. 213) and many other things, including too beautiful to summarize adequately.
Poetic prose or verse novel? Some passages more poem like than others, as such, my reading comprehension ebbed and flowed.
The formatting is unique, but it does make the narrative feel disjointed.
If it was meant to expand my understanding, it partially succeeded.
I think the text vacillates between not being for me (white person), and being directed at white people specifically.
Commentary around the many negative impacts/trauma Indigenous (here specifically, Nishnaabeg) people in Canada face as a result of colonialism, racism, capitalism, pollution, is clearly evident.
The fight to preserve fading traditions, to help and protect one another, the model of resilience was seen most clearly for me in the passages personifying the flock of geese migrating, and the raccoons remaining.
Special shout outs to:
-the surprisingly hilarious battle between earnest attempts at home gardening/decor and raccoons who only see spa/party accomodations
-the tree who gives backrubs ☺️
