Book Review: Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

Book Review: Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 

Goodreads Description: 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 who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who represents their brain. Each attempts to commune with the unnatural urban-settler world, a world of SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, Fjällräven Kånken backpacks, and coffee mugs emblazoned with institutional logos. And each searches out the natural world, only to discover those pockets that still exist are owned, contained, counted, and consumed. Cut off from nature, the characters are cut off from their natural selves.

My Review: If you're searching for something out of the box, then Simpson's novel may be just what you're looking for. Noopiming mashes together prose, poetry, and traditional Indigenous storytelling to create a text that defies colonial genre boundaries and narrative conventions. 

Noopiming doesn't follow a traditional plot structure, so giving a description of events is challenging. The text follows seven characters as they navigate their lives in a hyperconsumerist society cut off from nature. Each character is an aspect of Mashkawaji, a being frozen in ice and isolated from the rest of the world, though the text is vague about who or what Mashkawji actually is. The seven eventually unite to resurrect Mashkawaji from their place under the ice, a moment of metaphorical connection that bonds each character into something bigger than themselves. This is largely what the book is about -- isolation and relationships, alienation and connection -- and we see this through the way the characters struggle on their own before ultimately coming together into a community. The book relies heavily on symbolism and metaphor, using a poetic abstractionism to communicate the story through feeling rather than action. Poetry readers will almost certainly have an easier time connecting to the text because of its willingness to eschew narrative for expressionism. 

There’s a beautiful equality all across the text. Human, animal, and spirit characters are on a level playing field – there’s no hierarchy of gods and monsters here. Every character resists the effects of colonialism, from animals dealing with loss of land, to nature reeling from climate change, to Indigenous people themselves displaced and disconnected from nature. This equalization crosses into gender as well – while there is the old man, the old woman, and gendered figures, almost all characters use ‘they/them’ pronouns. Simpson downplays pronouns and gendered indicators for most characters to allow the space to focus on other aspects of their personhood. The text is by no means genderless - it simply places their gender secondary to who they are as people. 

Noopiming is a bit of a strange beast and it's certainly not for everyone. It's not really a novel, or a prose poem, not fantasy or contemporary. It asks some hard questions about capitalism, consumerism, commodification and climate change, but wraps it in poetic symbolism that asks you to feel more than analyze. Lovers of poetry, nature, and spirituality may really resonate with this text, but if you're a fan of traditional western storytelling, this one might be worth skipping. 

TL;DR: 4/5 stars. An intense intermeshing of prose, poetry, and Indigenous storytelling that takes a hard look at colonialism and consumerism.