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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 – Simpson’s eponymous “white lady” – a Briton who settled in the 1830s on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where Simpson’s ancestors resided and she now lives.
That 19th-century settlers’ guidebook went on to be hailed as the origin of Canadian women’s writing; Margaret Atwood adopted the Suffolk-born frontierswoman’s voice in her 1970 poetry collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Though she mentions Moodie’s book only in an afterword, Simpson’s perspective is different. For Moodie, extolling “our copper, silver and plumbago mines” in the extractivist British colony, the “red-skin” was a noble savage, and the “half-caste” a “lying, vicious rogue”. Yet, rather than a riposte to the toxic original, Noopiming – first published in Canada in 2020 and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary award in 2022 – sets about building a world on its own terms. The “cure”, then – the antidote to Moodie’s blinkered vision – is this book.
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. Divided into 10 parts, and shifting from prose to poetry and back, the book is set in the city (Toronto), the reserve and the tenacious wild spaces in between. The narrator, Mashkawaji, who is frozen stiff in lake ice after an unspecified tragedy, is visited by seven characters, whom she identifies as parts of herself.
Among them are Akiwenzii (the narrator’s will), an Elder man who fishes through a hole in the ice and lives in a cabin near the reserve dump; and Mindimooyenh (the narrator’s conscience), an Elder woman fired from her university job, who scours discounted food bins in grocery chains for “bargoons”. Alienated and deprived of wilderness, the young lovers Asin (“my eyes and ears”) and Lucy (“my brain”) suffer insomnia which can be relieved only by sleeping out in the bush. Asin, who works for a community radio station, takes ornithology courses and watches campfires on YouTube, while Lucy learns to hunt, lamenting that “no one on the reserve remembers how to tan hides with brains”.
Sabe (“my marrow”), a recovering drinker “sober for over a year”, attends sweat-lodge purification ceremonies run by Akiwenzii. For Mindimooyenh, loquacious as an adult after being forbidden to talk in residential schools, ceremony is exercise rather than religion. Its repetitive, meditative nature brings distracted minds back to the present, since the brain is “constantly … rebuilding networked pathways”.
Simpson quit her tenure track in academia more than 20 years ago to relearn her ancestral language and ways of thought from Elders. As part of her recentring of the world – and her refusal, like Toni Morrison, to pander to the “white gaze” – some words in the novel appear unitalicised and untranslated (an afterword steers readers towards the online Ojibwe People’s Dictionary). Some characters have both human and non-human traits, the novel evoking a profound interdependence between people and the natural world. Ninaatig (“my lungs”) is both a maple tree that has their sap drawn in sugar-making ceremonies, and pushes a shopping cart. “Nervous system” Adik, whose caribou hooves are sore from asphalt, buys a voice recorder to capture the melody of hooves on ice. All are neutrally they/them, since, as Simpson has noted elsewhere, Nishnaabeg culture has more than two genders and sexual orientations: “I’ve normalised queerness because that’s how my ancestors did it.”
Along with engaging dark humour, we get satirical swipes at “white people in canoes … going nowhere fast”, or “tree cops” who manage dwindling parkland by “charging a ransom to hike the trail”. The transmission of wisdom, or its interruption, is a key thread. Akiwenzii defies guards to carve new knowledge on the “Teaching Rocks” of Kinomagewapkong, noting that a sacred site must be renewed, not roped off as a tourist attraction. Akiwenzii fears that “maybe each generation is just a watered-down version of the last”. Yet for Adik, the sound of the gorge “carving out rock” is the “language of the past talking to the present … the sound of hope”.
After funeral rites take place on the lake, a section of lyric poetry, Mashkawaji’s Theory of Ice, gives way to fabular philosophy drawn from nature. Asin’s human observation of migrating geese switches to the perspective of the birds. Geese in formation revel in the “synergy of moving though waves of air like a body much larger than the sum of its parts”, their flight also representing the human potential for community. But it is the stubbornly adaptive racoon that best symbolises the Ojibwe people’s defiant survival: “Sure, they had been dispossessed, displaced and their habitat gentrified … but they were not taking it. No way. They moved the fuck back in. Committed, built lodges, spoke their language, did their ceremonies and took care of each other.”
Ultimately, it is this healing care and connection between the characters, human and non-human, in the teeth of ecological disaster, that offers a profound corrective to Moodie’s territorial worldview. Valiantly fighting an undertow of despair, they forge what, in the consciousness of the geese, are “flyways through the grief”.
