Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is an Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist. The Accident of Being Lost is her second book of mixed poetry and fiction. This book is much like the material it explores, it resists categorization by being at the intersection of prose and poetry. Other reviews talk about it as a collection of songs, short stories, poems. You could say that or if you are a reader of contemporary poetry you just say it is all poetry. She deals with intersections of groups and how the speakers in the book personally relate to the tensions coming from these intersections.
Simpson is exploring the personal and the social. We don’t know which if any of the stories are factually true but they seem like poetically true experiences of a First Nations woman thinking about her place in the world and looking at the other be that different races, sexes, gendered and non-gendered relationships. Exploring the suburbs, the reservation, the wilderness and all the differing attitudes of those that inhabit those locales as well as the attitude of the speaker of the work.
The Accident Of Being Lost is a fascinating work, a piece of literature that delivers in a consistent voice that feels sardonic, observant, self deprecatory, angry, bewildered and thoughtful. Thoughtful about herself and trying to understand the other, whoever that other maybe from her primary relationship or a relationship that exists just on the internet through social media. And the uncertainty of the speaker about herself and the world draws us in along with an urgent sense of humour. This writer is not only unafraid of being inconsistent or unsure but highlights how we all live as surely as we can in uncertainty. Within this uncertainty humour is used but often to dilute something heart breaking underneath the humour.
The book is written in the first person so it has the feel of biography. But that adds to the poetic effect, that this subjective view point is not necessarily literally the author of the book but the reader experiences it as such. As we move through the book the I, which seems to have a consistent voice, traversing place, time and relationships with no clue as to whether the events in the book are linked.
I’ve been doing an MFA at a private university in the Bay Area. There is a lot of exploration of race here around the literature of the US and the context of literature. That was not something I thought much about for the decades I was ensconced in the old white male bastion called Imperial Oil, the Canadian subsidiary of Exxon. I grew up in the old Canada, the one that was mostly white and in the case of Toronto, mostly white anglo saxon protestant. This is in high contrast to today’s Canada with our multi cultural mosaic but that is also continues to be home to racism, hidden and overt.
I lived in a city near Toronto where we had a total of two black kids in our whole high school, brothers. That family might have been the only blacks in the city of 20,000. Canada has changed a lot since them, but despite that cultural background I have though of myself as a supporter of liberal causes, I felt from my position of relative privilege I owe it to marginalized groups to support their efforts, if only mostly in spirit.
I learned a few years ago from a Metis writer friend that I have no idea how people of other groups think. She was telling me about growing up and attending Banff Indian Days, the event that started off as a way to entertain bored hotel patrons by bringing in local First Nations people and have them perform for the rich hotel patrons. I thought to myself “Oh my God, how could we think of exploiting our native population that way”. Then she said “When I was young I loved it”.
I found myself once again exploring my white liberal guilt as I read Simpson’s book. As a matter of fact she calls people like me out on it. In the second piece in the book, Plight, the speaker and two friends are going to go into a neighbourhood to mark maple trees so they can tap them the next spring to make maple syrup. She describes the neighbourhood as “They have perennials instead of grass. They get organic, local vegetables delivered twice weekly, in addition, to going to the farmers’ market on Saturday.” Simpson lightly makes fun of a progressive neighbourhood in ways that seem very true, very much like where I live in urban Hamilton.
She then goes on take it another step describing how they neighbourhood wants to be designated heritage so you can’t modify in ways so that “it isn’t from the 1800’s or rent your extra floors to the lower class”. This observation works on two levels in terms of extending the effect of the writing. The first is this idea of nostalgia by the property owners for the 1880’s, a time of colonization for much of Canada’s First Nations, the second is the an apparent hypocrisy related to the progressive nature of the neighbourhood that wants to block poor people from living there. The darker side of this progressive neighbourhood is subtly exposed.
After this setup Simpson really goes for the jugular when talking about getting permission to tap the trees from the neighbourhood. “We know how to do this so they’ll be into it. Hand out the flyers first. Have a community meeting. Ask permission. Listen to their paternalistic bullshit and feedback. Let them have influence. Let them bask in the plight of the Native people so they can feel self-righteous. Make them feel better, and when reconciliation comes up at the next dinner party, they can hold us up as the solution and brag to their real friends about our plight.”
Simpson is talking about more than tapping trees here, talking about ways power has managed to exploit First Nations through supposed consultation. She is turning these techniques around and using them on the oppressor, she brings in the word “reconciliation” which evokes the Truth and Reconciliation commission process around the tragedy of residential schools where First Nations children were yanked from their homes and sent to residential schools where many suffered sexual, physical and verbal abuse. She also increases the power of her indictment of the progressive community and at the same time shows how this can be exploited. She maybe is portraying a stilted view of that community but it is believable that a member of the outsider marginalized community would have that view and the colonialist community would be unaware.
She then finishes the paragraph with the line “I proofread the flyer one more time because everyone knows white people hate typos”. This line is an example of how Simpson’s book works so well. The humour is this line is bi-directional. It simultaneously makes fun of white people but also of the First Nations speaker’s truisms about white people. And for me that is the trick Simpson pulls off throughout this book. Highlighting hypocrisy of others while at the same time apply self-deprecating humour to lighten the material. This what I mean about the text existing in the intersections. This intersection between two groups on white attitudes produces truth but also humour.
After this early piece I am constantly on guard for my own liberal white bias in approaching the work. Even writing this review I am thinking about my reaction in those terms. I am aware up until this point I much of what I have written about this work relates to myself and other white people, a fact I don't think would surprise Simpson. While that is a component of this book it isn’t what the book is only about. Mostly it is about a complex woman try to understand her role and feelings in an alienating and confusing world, a world she has inherited that is full of unfairness. And yet here I have focused my race in terms of my relating to the work. I think making me think about this is an important outcome from this piece of literature. Through the author’s own exploration of the world we all participate with our own lenses.
In a later piece of short segmented prose set around her time at a writer’s colony in Banff during a major flood she talks about about her listening to the CBC and NPR and knowing the personality on the radio but also says “she has a fair amount of contempt for all the middle-class white people huddled around the radio listening to that shit” This is a pretty good reflection of other occurrences in the book, the speaker’s part of the white culture but also not, with the author’s PhD and literary success she’s part of the country’s intelligentsia but not. The speaker sometimes seems middle class but often has roots that aren’t.
The book is excellent on many levels. The prose and poetry pieces are all well written with a shifting subject but with a consistent voice. The exploration of race, sexuality, consumerism and the difficulty we all have with understanding others is both obvert and nuanced. The author shares her bewilderment with the world and we engage with her in that bewilderment while examining our own attitudes.
