Review: “Noopiming” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
By Rob Jackson
Art by Michelle Campos Castillo
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies is a gift of a book. Its capacious form invites readers into a world of grounded Nishanaabeg brilliance—of self-determination and sovereignty, consent, non-interference, solidarity and care. In this suite of stories woven together from a multiplicity of perspectives and timelines, Simpson not only compels us to imagine worlds full of vibrant, queer, Indigenous life; she challenges us to find ways of nurturing the conditions in which those already existing worlds can thrive.
Noopiming offers a structure for balancing the often-contradictory needs of autonomy and collectivity at the heart of any world-building project. The novel begins with the main narrator, Mashkawaji, suspended in a frozen lake. As Mashkawaji goes further inside themself during their hibernation, they are visited and watched over by seven of their comrades: Akiwenzii, Ninaatig, Mindimooyenh, Sabe, Adik, Asin, and Lucy. These characters carry parts of Mashkawaji as they rest, and Mashkawaji carries their stories with them, too, sharing pieces of them with us.
Mashkawaji’s trust in their relatives provides the heartbeat of the novel. “Trust replaces critique, examination and interrogation.”1 This ethic allows for the expansions and contractions of form, language, and scale. Through trust and vulnerability, the one becomes many as the novel enfolds readers into its “economy of meaning” where the dailiness of living can be conjugated to “an actual good life” (241).2 Life in collectivity. As Noopiming’s brilliant theorist of Indigenous governance, Mandaminaakoog, tells us, this actually good life is predicated on the co-constitutive relationships between ourselves and others, and that the deeper inside ourselves we go, the more porous the membrane of the self becomes. “The formation is made up of individuals and individuals are formations in and of themselves” (231).3
At the beginning of the novel we are told that Mashkawaji went to the lake to “get out of the wind” because “tragedy happened again” (7).4 Which tragedy doesn’t matter, Mashkawaji tells us, because “the details are hopeless, overwhelmed” (12).5 Mashkawaji knows these tragedies in their marrow, at a cellular level: “the molecules / calculate / the accumulated effects of hate” (206).6
But beyond this initial gesture, the novel does not share the circumstances that sent Mashkawaji to the lake. Their reasons are their own, and the reader is asked to respect them. We don’t even know how long they’ve been there, or how long they will stay. “It is unclear how long visiting takes” (21).7
This gap between the reader and the narrator is one of the first gifts Simpson offers us. It offers us a different way of reading than novels usually do. Rather than being guided by an omniscient narrator who knows everything, or a first-person narrator who offers everything they know, Mashkawaji entrusts us with only parts of the story. This gap between Mashkawaji and the audience opens up a site of relation. They ask us to engage in a readerly practice that prioritizes consent, respect for autonomy, and patience. They help us rehearse these values as political ethics.
Martinican writer Édouard Glissant—who provides one of the epigraphs for Noopiming—writes about the commitment to honour this gap between the known and the unknowable as the “right to opacity.” For Glissant, the desire to close this gap animates colonial power. In the mind of the conqueror, the cop, the social worker, the professor, everything must be rendered transparent, visible, ready for the taking:
If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. (190)8
Glissant shows us how a desire to see everything animates the power to know everything and how that knowledge finds its expression in the will to judge, measure, and police difference.
In the service of colonial containment, Indigenous lives and lifeways are too often reduced to what Unangax̂ writer Eve Tuck terms “damage-centred narratives”: representations of Indigeneity that “look to historical exploitation, domination, and colonization to explain contemporary brokenness.” When all narratives (re)turn to brokenness, our fields of relation are enclosed. We become unable to see how people “make flyways through the grief” (112).9
Noopiming is an aesthetic intervention into the trajectory of desire that underwrites so many colonial narratives. It refuses transparency as a technology of colonial violence and it teaches us to read in ways that do the same. In “Opacity,” the third section of the novel, Mindimooyenh reminds us that “the brain is a relational organ, that it is constantly building and rebuilding networked pathways” (105).10 For Mindimooyenh, ceremony is one way to wire and rewire the brain. Reading, I want to suggest, is another: an “exercise that widens the network and tightens the connection. Exercise that produces and reproduces love” (106).11
When I teach Noopiming in my first-year university classrooms, students usually struggle with the form. I listen as they brace against it and the confusion it can produce. I try and ask them what their expectations are for the novel and where those expectations come from, and I invite them to think of reading this novel as a sort of visiting—as more “dance than event” (22).12 I remind them that the whole novel is made up of a series of visits: from Akiwenzii’s loving visits with Ninaatig, to Adik’s visits with the “Nishnaabeg-that-stayed” (280),13 to the twinned celebratory feasts the close the novel out. The meaning, and the world, is made in relation, and those relations need to be nurtured. Reading as visiting. Reading as consent. Reading as refusal.
Noopiming prompts everyone interested in the transit between the word and the world to ask how we might change our narratives so that our social relations can change with them.
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Notes:
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (House of Anansi Press, 2020), 30.
Simpson, Noopiming, 241.
Simpson, Noopiming, 231.
Simpson, Noopiming, 7.
Simpson, Noopiming, 12.
Simpson, Noopiming, 206.
Simpson, Noopiming, 21.
Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190.
Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” (Harvard Education Review, 2009), 413.
Simpson, Noopiming, 105.
Simpson, Noopiming, 106.
Simpson, Noopiming, 22.
Simpson, Noopiming, 280.
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Rob Jackson is a settler educator and writer based in Tkaronto and amiskwaciwâskahikan. His research and teaching focus on Indigenous poetics, the politics of treaty, and radical social movements.