Noopiming by Leanne Simpson

Noopiming by Leanne Simpson

The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism

 

In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy.

Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce the seven characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator's will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman, their conscience; Sabe, a gentle giant, their marrow; Adik, the caribou, their nervous system; and Asin and Lucy, the humans who represent their eyes, ears, and brain.

Simpson's book As We Have Always Done argued for the central place of storytelling in imagining radical futures. Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for "in the bush") enacts these ideas. The novel's characters emerge from deep within Abinhinaabeg thought to commune beyond an unnatural urban-settler world littered with SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, and Fjällräven Kånken backpacks. A bold literary act of decolonization and resistance, Noopiming offers a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits--and the daily work of healing.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Noopiming once again confirms her position as a brilliant, daring experimentalist and a beautiful, radical portraitist of contemporary NDN lifeThe prose hums with a lovingness that moved me to tears and with a humor 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, 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 is a rare parcel of beauty and power, at once a creator and destroyer of forms. All of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's myriad literary gifts shine here-her scalpel-sharp humor, 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

The tenderness and sly wit of these snippets coalesce into a beautiful image of Native resilience and a piercing, original novel.-Publishers Weekly

Simpson's skill as creator allows those outside Indigenous traditions to apprehend a complexity of meaning-making whose fluidity challenges Western reliance on notions of fixed boundaries and discrete categories of being and nonbeing.-Star Tribune

Probably unlike anything you've ever read, this remarkable novel is written in prose and fragments and is an alarmingly beautiful tale of decolonial resistance and the uncovering of a world of natural abundance, connection and compassion.-Ms. Magazine

Fascinating, brief, vivid.-Novel Gazing Redux

Noopiming is an important literary work that transcends form and breaks molds of storytelling in contemporary Western consciousness.-Colors of Influence

If you are reading more diversely to learn about different cultures, then dive into the culture. Embrace the language. Open your mind to perspectives that are different from your own.-Carry a Big Book

A novel that is intellectually challenging both as literature and as a commentary on colonialism. Fragments of poetry and prose bring the reader into the Anishinaabe way of storytelling as an essential element of the good life.-Ely Summer Times

Leanne Simpson is a Mississauga native with Scottish descent who works as a researcher, writer, and educator. She is a citizen of the Nishnaabeg nation and a member of the gidigaa bzhiw dodem. Leanne has a doctorate from the University of Manitoba and served as the director of Trent University's Indigenous Environmental Studies program. Indigenist theory and methodology, Indigenous political cultures and traditional governance, Nishnaabeg women, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous ideas on land and environment are some of her study interests. Leanne now teaches at Athabasca University's Centre for Global Indigenous Knowledge, as well as Trent University, the University of Victoria, the University of Manitoba, and Tampere University in Finland.