Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Anishinaabe author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates the enduring spirit and colonial struggles through which their characters operate
Noopiming is a living artefact, in Anishinaabemowin meaning 'in the bush'. The novel follows six main characters who compose the narrator’s voice, Mashkawaji, weaving in satire while remaining sincere to Indigenous experience and dispelling colonial myths. Colonial rule and environmental anxiety are major issues that the book interrogates, but they do not dominate it. Meditatively, Simpson decolonises Western ideas of the self and the capitalist urge for material possession, owing life to the 'we' that each of us is not possible without. In Noopiming, we do not have, rather we are.
Simpson’s writing unifies us across the occupied pond, illustrating images that are all too real: one of the characters only has Al Jazeera activated, 'notifications turned on for Palestine. They dream of a Jayco trailer houseboat… of driving their Jayco house trailer boat all the way to Palestine with the flotilla to resist the idea that this situation is complicated, that there are two sides, that there is no way to help.' Sentences move between internal monologues, poetry, and the affirmations that ‘White Ladies’ wish to appropriate. The eponymous 'cure' is in the book’s final product, playing with form and lyric to reject eurocentric (dis)order and heal through constant awareness.
Sarcastic yet searingly hopeful, Noopiming teaches that those who appreciate mundanity, value nature, and notice the smaller things, are also capable of going to extreme lengths to liberate.