Praise for Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Noopiming
“How is it that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s fiction can feel both familiar and warm like old teachings and absolutely fresh and brand new? Is it even fiction? Noopiming seems to exist somewhere in the in-between, with all the best parts of poetry and story. As always, I am in awe of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, prolific in every way.” — Katherena Vermette, bestselling author of The Break
“This imaginative book is what would happen if we gave pen and paper to the deepest, most secretive parts of ourselves. Down to the fibres, down to each breath, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson dares to explore not only the humanity of a character, but the humanity of the parts that make us whole, in a world running on empty.” — Catherine Hernandez, bestselling author of Scarborough
“Noopiming is a rare parcel of beauty and power, at once a creator and destroyer of forms. All of Simpson’s myriad literary gifts shine here — her scalpel-sharp humour, her eye for the smallest human details, the prodigious scope of her imaginative and poetic generosity. The result is a book at once fierce, uproarious, heartbreaking, and, throughout and above all else, rooted in love.” — Omar El Akkad, bestselling author of American War
“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming once again confirms her position as a brilliant, daring experimentalist and a beautiful, radical portraitist of contemporary NDN life. The prose hums with a lovingness that moved me to tears and with a humour that felt plucked right out of my rez adolescence. The chorus of thinkers, dreamers, revolutionaries, poets, and misfits that Simpson conjures here feels like a miracle. My heart ached and swelled for all of them. What I adored most about this book is that it has so little to do with the white gaze. Simpson writes for us, for NDNs, those made to make other kinds of beauty, to build other kinds of beautiful lives, where no one is looking. Noopiming is a book from the future! Simpson is our much-needed historian of the future!” — Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of This Wound is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms
“I’m pretty sure we don’t deserve Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. But miracles happen, and this is one. This book is poem, novel, prophecy, handbook, and side-eyed critique all at once. This book doesn’t only present characters you will love and never want to leave (but yes, it does), it doesn’t only transform the function of character and plot into a visibly collective dynamic energy field (and hallelujah), but it also cultivates character in the reader, that we might remember what we first knew. Which is that what seems separate was never separate. What feels impossible is already happening. And it depends on our most loving words. It requires our most loving actions towards each other. The ceremony has been found.” — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony
Noopiming
Also by the Author
Fiction
This Accident of Being Lost
Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs
The Gift Is in the Making: Anishinaabeg Stories
Non-Fiction
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom
through Radical Resistance
Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg
Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence
Albums
f(l)ight
Islands of Decolonial Love
Anthologies
The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement (Kino-nda-niimi Collective)
This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades
(edited with Kiera Ladner)
Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations
Noopiming
The Cure for White Ladies
Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson
Copyright © 2020 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Published in Canada in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Noopiming : the cure for white ladies / Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.
Names: Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 1971– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200208365 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200208373 | ISBN 9781487007645 (softcover) |
ISBN 9781487007652 (EPUB) |
ISBN 9781487007669 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8637.I4865 N66 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
To my heart, the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg,
and to all of our anticolonial relations with whom
we share the big lake, and the world.
Counting her own theory, the theory of nothing, she had opened up the world.
— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance.
— Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.
— Fred Moten
Noopiming
ONE
SOLIDIFICATION
Once you move through cold, there is pacific.
Once you move through pacific, there is placid.
Once you move through placid, there is a condition of expanse.
And it was that condition of expanse that held me.
I heard them singing above me:
Mashkawaji fell through the ice
to find quiet
to get out of the wind
to visit with namegos
They all sang:
Mashkawaji stitches up the hole
they are so cold they can’t move
they are frozen stiff
the lake is their blanket
They all sang:
Mashkawaji is frozen stiff
still
calm
no one knows if they’re coming back
They all sang:
Akiwenzii is fishing through the ice with a spear
they brought a line of beads
they will wait patiently
they will wait until Mashkawaji is done their visit
The singing and drumming came every night, from a distance. Different choirs every evening at dusk, marking the passage of time, reminding me there is still love.
You see, tragedy happened again. The details don’t matter because the details are hopeless, overwhelmed, shut down.
Know this: After two years, the best parts of me are still frozen in the lake — my limbic system; its best friend, the prefrontal cortex; and the hollow, pumping organ in which I keep benevolence. The only one that regularly comes to visit is Akiwenzii. In the winter they park their truck on the ice, drill a hole with the auger and fish until the cold makes their bones crack. As soon as the ice is off the lake, Akiwenzii is back in their boat, with a torch and a sort of pitchfork for spearing pickerel. In the dead of summer, Akiwenzii sneaks back before first light in their canoe, before the cottagers and their jet skis are
out. In the fall, they sprinkle tobacco around me and sing.
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.
There are ashes in my eyes.
I am so far inside myself. Like miskwaadesi on a full fast inside time, pulled inside their organs, inside their turtle shell, inside the sediments of the lake, while the iceworld forms on top, oblivious to the outside with body as lake.
And there is solace in being cut off.
And there is freedom enmeshed within that state.
Know this: Being frozen in the lake is another kind of life.
Know this: It is unclear how long before I will be done with my visit. It is unclear how long visiting takes.
Know this: Visiting is more of a dance than an event.
Akiwenzii is my will.
Ninaatig is my lungs.
Mindimooyenh is my conscience.
Sabe is my marrow.
Adik is my nervous system.
Asin is my eyes and ears.
Lucy is my brain.
I believe everything these seven say because ice distorts perception, and trust replaces critique, examination and interrogation.
I believe everything these seven say
even though,
even though.
I believe everything these seven say
even though
their truths are their own,
not mine.
I believe: In the absence of my own heart,
I will accept the hearts of these seven.
The geese fly overhead in the sheer grace of a carefully angled formation designed to take them elsewhere.
There are still stars.
There are still stars.
TWO
AFFINITIES
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh counts their steps in their head. Every day. All day long. They also make lists on scrap paper, cut coupons, shop all the grocery store chains by taking the bus, studying the flyers and buying only what is on special that week. All of their produce comes from the dead-vegetable bin, which is the place in the grocery store where rotten fruit and vegetables are packaged up and sold for a discount. Mindimooyenh calls the specials “bargoons.” Nothing makes Mindimooyenh happier than a bargoon.
Mindimooyenh does their work alone, except when it is a “two per customer” situation. Then we all get dragged to wait in separate lines with baggies full of loonies.
One day Mindimooyenh finds a pair of ugly brown high-tech hiking boots on sale for $29.99 in the Mark’s Brothers Work Wearhouse flyer.
I say, “It’s just Mark’s.”
They say, “I know.” So they take the bus to the store, but when they get there, the Mark’s Brothers does not have their size in the $29.99 model, only the $32.99 model. Now, Mindimooyenh can afford the extra $3 easy. Instead, they get the $29.99 ones in a too-small size, because the sheer joy of the bargoon outweighs the pain of too-small shoes, and who do I think I am waltzing around the reserve with shoes that cost $32.99 anyway.
“I just shut my feet off when they hurt,” they say.
Sometimes Sabe goes with Mindimooyenh, but Mindimooyenh is hard to keep up with and the nervous energy is jolting and exhausting.
Sabe
Sabe has a tendency to show up at dramatic times and then disappear through the normal. Sabe thinks no one notices, because they don’t seem to notice, but that’s not true. It is just something Sabe tells themselves. Everyone notices when they are not there, which is most of the time.
Sabe makes a point of showing up at the sweats, and for Lucy’s fasts. Sabe keeps an eye on Ninaatig. They usually run into Adik on the trail. They see Akiwenzii mostly in ceremony. Mindimooyenh is harder. Mindimooyenh is always moving around, busy, and to be honest, Sabe doesn’t like the run-ins with them anyway. They tend to be a harsh mirror of things Sabe doesn’t particularly like about themselves.
Sabe has been sober for over a year now. Completely sober, as in no drinks and no funny business, not just an absence of inebriation. It was not necessarily a struggle to stop. They are calmer now and they can sleep through the whole night. They can eat cake because their beer gut vanished. Their serotonin levels are up so they are not depressed and anxious all the time. They have a lot more time on their hands. They are relearning things like fun and happy and how to talk basic-human with basic humans about nothing.
The only real downside is that Sabe spends more time alone and more time in their head than before. They have less patience for people. They have to find benevolence in different places and then really focus and sort of lie, collecting it up and storing it in their hiding spot.
Sabe
Sabe remembers how the first sip of beer used to bring relief. An escape from the tightness of muscles wound around their frame. They remember how words would flow out of their mouth like exhalations, one after another, and everything was easier than it should’ve been. Laughing was easy. They remember how it felt subversive, NDN, rebellious without the rebellion. They remember how sitting in a bar with Lucy was like a revolution without the revolution.
They remember the wave of effortless happy. The false comradery. The illusion of easy intimacy without the intimate. The shame spiral of the morning after.
They remember the precise moment the night would turn, and things would get said that were usually not said. Things would get done that were usually not done. The boundaries that would be crossed and how the ideas that floated around in the back of their head and normally carried no importance became life and death. They remember that as fear.
Sabe
Sabe doesn’t remember the precise moment casual indifference, or mild like even, turned to intense hatred. It was like something snapped in them. They remember where: Dawson City. They remember when: June 21. They remember being with Lucy and Asin, who were already sober. They remember the details of circumstance. But none of the whys add up.
It doesn’t take an enormous amount of self-awareness to see the irrationality of the decision, but it also doesn’t take an enormous amount of self-awareness to see it as a reasonable one. What concerns Sabe is that they thought about it before, lots of times, and they always decided they wanted to take a more measured response. Some Ancestors drink. Some Spirits drink. It gives them empathy and understanding for the humans that do. Everything is fucked up. Everyone is fucked up. Even the Ancestors and the Spirits. No one likes a goddamn judge.
And then one day, Sabe woke up sure, and they’ve never been sure about anything before, not even about decisions that require certainty, but this time, they are certain. Even when they are in bars. Even when they are sad and in bars and surrounded.
It is Sabe’s way of saying no. This is not right.
It just isn’t.
And the truth is, in private, Sabe is judgy, because the damage is laid out and networked and it is inescapable. Once you can see the map of hurt, and how hurt gives birth to more hurt, the shallow justifications fall short. The politics smother. Akiwenzii saw it four decades sooner than Sabe, but at least Sabe saw it, right?
Sabe
Sabe is sitting on their porch watching the birds at the feeder. There is a baby grackle yelling at its parent because it wants birdseed. The parent grackle is hurrying up to the feeder, they get the seeds, chew the seeds and put them in baby’s mouth. Over and over. Baby grackle just yells at parent grackle. The tenderness is gone, only relentless irritation remains, and staying becomes another word for love.<
br />
Sabe is thinking about this in the context of their own life and then projecting their ideas onto the grackles. The parenting of humans is relentless. The continuous infusion of unconditional love. The patience in the face of the same mistakes over and over. The patience with the constant need for attention. With the narcissism. It’s why Sabe retreats here. To the bush. To the cabin with the bird feeders and endless supply of seed. The humans think Sabe is off doing something important, and they are, just not in the way that would satisfy human expectation.
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.
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