For our final installment of Ruff Reads for the season, we’re discussing a piece that has been called “a decolonization of the novel” and a “fierce reclamation of Anishnaabe aesthetics”. We can’t wait to get into it.
Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Thursday July 28th at 8pm on Zoom
DM us or contact ruffreads@shakespeareintheruff.com for the Zoom link. (Don’t have time to read the book but still interested in the conversation? Join us anyway!)
Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies is available at Queen Books (10% off with the code RUFFREADS), the Toronto Public Library, as an audiobook, and an eBook.
From the Publisher:
“Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters: Akiwenzii, the old man; Ninaatig, the maple tree; Mindimooyenh, the old woman; Sabe, the giant; Adik, the caribou; Asin, the human; and Lucy, the human. Each attempts to commune with the unnatural urban-settler world. And each searches out the natural world, only to discover those pockets that still exist are owned, contained, counted, and consumed.
Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush,” and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing it in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, gentrification, and willful resistance. It is a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits, who are all busy with the daily labours of healing – healing not only themselves, but their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them all together. Enger and be changed.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician, and is a member of Alderville First Nation. She is the author of five previous books, including This Accident of Being Lost, which won the MacEwan University Book of the Year; was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award; was longlisted for CBC Canada REads; and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Quill & Quire. She has released two albums, including f(l)ight, which is a companion piece to This Accident of Being Lost.