Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson review startlingly original

"Noopiming, the first of Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's books to be published in the UK, means in the bush in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly original fiction is an ironic reference to Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada, an 1852 memoir about the civilisation of barbarous countries by Susanna Moodie a Briton who settled in the 1830s on the north shore of Lake Ontario."

"The cure, then the antidote to Moodie's blinkered vision is this book. To read Noopiming is to be immersed in a storytelling aesthetic that is both challenging and innately familiar For a non-Ojibwe, to read it is to be immersed not only in an alternative worldview, but in a storytelling aesthetic that is both challenging and innately familiar, in which humans, other animals and plants coexist and communicate on an equal plane."

Noopiming weaves prose and poetry to centre an Ojibwe cosmology of reciprocity, where humans, animals and plants communicate as equals. The narrator, Mashkawaji, lies frozen in lake ice and is visited by seven figures who represent parts of herself, guiding memory, grief and resilience. The narrative moves between city, reserve and wild lands, confronting settler extractivism and racial caricature by constructing an autonomous Indigenous worldview. Themes of coexistence, land-based knowledge, resistance and cultural resurgence emerge through lyrical, interstitial storytelling that privileges relational responsibilities over colonial objectification.

Read at www.theguardian.com