Literary fiction. Draws, I think, on Nishnaabeg storytelling traditions, which I know little about. The building blocks of the book are units of text ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages, each focused on one of the book’s characters. These characters are human and not, and introduced in a way to unsettle the distinction. And they are going about their lives in colonized territory currently known as “southern Ontario.” The different characters and their quirks, the different textures of their everyday lives, the different practices they take up that are on the one hand just them living but that are also how they survive and evade and refuse and persist in the face of the violent colonial present, the way they weave back and forth through each other’s stories, all paint an engaging picture of healing and quiet decolonial resistance. There is a stretch of poetry in the middle of the book that I found harder going – I rarely read poetry, so I don’t have the reading practices to engage it how it deserves – but other than that, the form of the book was very effective. And the writing is, I think, both spare and rich, if that makes any sense, in that its richness is accomplished with relatively few words. I’ve spent more time with Simpson’s nonfiction in the past – *As We Have Always Done* is a masterpiece – but I will definitely keep my eyes open for whatever kind of writing she publishes next.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.