Award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson returns with a bold reimagination of the novel, one that
combines narrative and poetic fragments through a careful and fierce
reclamation of Anishinaabe aesthetics.
Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago
time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in
isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters:
Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator's will; Ninaatig, the
maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who
represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their
marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the
human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who
represents their brain. Each attempts to commune with the unnatural
urban-settler world, a world of SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies,
Fjällräven Kånken backpacks, and coffee mugs emblazoned with
institutional logos. And each searches out the natural world, only to
discover those pockets that still exist are owned, contained, counted,
and consumed. Cut off from nature, the characters are cut off from their
natural selves.
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. It
is a lived experience. It is a breaking open of the self to a world
alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits, who are all busy
with the daily labours of healing -- healing not only themselves, but
their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them
all together. Enter and be changed.