Reviews

“…i’m thinking of Her escaping through these spruce, walking across these rocks, walking over this moss. i’m thinking of Her escaping past stolen, walking across lost, walking over shame, holding fire in Her heart, like all her descendants so effortlessly do, under your always light.”

TITLE—This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories

AUTHOR—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

PUBLISHED—2017

PUBLISHER—House of Anansi Press

GENRE—literary short stories, prose & poems

SETTING—Anishinaabe lands

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Ojibwe language, Mississauga traditions, history & culture, ceremony, indigenous realities, occupation anxiety, seasonal harvest, cedar boughs & sweetgrass, moose & other indigenous animals, settler colonialism—suppressed identity & stolen lands, queerness, love—romantic, familial & friendship relationships, maple sugar, blueberries & raspberries, poetry, white liberalism, bodies of water, water as the source of all possibilities

“They want to win. We need to win. They’ll still be white people if they don’t have the kind of beach they want. Our kids won’t be Mississauga if they can’t ever do a single Mississauga thing.”

My thoughts:

It was clear pretty early on that this book would need to be reread multiple times in order to pick up on everything that was being done—and even, as one of the bookclub members observed, to pick up on different elements and understand them differently as you are going through different stages of your life—but for my first reading I just really wanted to lean into the language.

It also took me a minute to realize this was a collection of short stories and poems (I didn’t read anything before diving into it as it was a bookclub pick) and not a novella since all of the stories are woven together so cohesively, not plot-wise, but thematically and emotionally, and there definitely feels like there’s even a semblance of something like a character arc on some level throughout the whole collection as well.

In that same vein I can’t even really pick out individual favorites since I felt that they all worked so cohesively together and built off of and derived deeper meaning from each other.

I would recommend this book to readers who love vulnerable, light-hearted narrative voices with beautiful, poetic writing and themes of indigeneity, nature, and love. This book is best read with the same kind of energy you bring to leisurely, solitary outdoor hikes and swims.

Final note: I found this site useful as a reading companion as I am a non-Ojibwe-speaking reader: https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/about-ojibwe-language

“meet me at the underpass
rebellion is
on her way.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // guns, racism & micro-aggressions, hunting, animal death (moose), flood disaster (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: Maple Sugar Moon

Further Reading—

STONEFISH by Keri Hulme
ASK THE BRINDLED by No’u Revilla
INDIGIQUEERNESS by Joshua Whitehead
THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES by Thomas King Jr.
THE NIGHT BETWEEN THE DAYS by Ailo Gaup
ISLANDS OF DECOLONIAL LOVE by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson—TBR
AS WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson—TBR
PAᏓESᎢ1NE +100 edited by Basma Ghalayini
THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich
WHITE MAGIC by Elissa Washuta
Tove Jansson

Favorite Quotes—

“This is our sugar bush. It looks different because there are three streets and 150 houses and one thousand people living in it, but it is my sugar bush. It is our sugar bush. We are the only ones that are supposed to be here. Please help us.”

“to the oldest tree in the world

i’m worrying about

what you’re drinking

you’re worrying about

what i’m breathing

i like you

because you

never

talk

too loud

i breathe it out

you breathe it in

i like you

because you all hold

this all together

with the parts i can’t see

i breathe it in

you breathe it out

you: eleven times my age

me: draped in clouds of youth

i think i know what you’ve seen

i think we’re the same

but it’s not true

i don’t know

i don’t

i don’t know how to say this

without embarrassing you

but i do know

i believe in saying things

i do know

i believe

in the telling

your wrinkled grey skin is gorgeous &

i hope you don’t know what’s

happening.”

“I am 10 minutes and a bottle of cheap wine away from falling in love with you, which means I already am in love with you and that this fact was discreetly caged in the space of the unspoken and the unwritten and the unsung.”

“…we are the singing remnants

left over after

the bomb went off in slow motion

over a century instead of a fractionated second”

“I cheat on myself with Sad and she never abandons me. In a way that will sound awful to you, but not to me, she is the only one that loves me in the way I need to be loved. My constant lover Sad, as muted, dysmorphic entrapment.”

“…the kind of love that exists before you really know someone. The kind that seems so pure but never lasts… Just I love you as you are right now in this breaking moment. …and I could let this fleeting love in and carry it and steal it away from reality and play it and replay it in my head until it was the most perfect, infallible love in the world. It never matters if it actually exists outside of my head. It’s always better in my head.”

“i’ll sing to you, until you sing back.”

“If I had your undivided attention, even for five minutes, I would tell you to stop panicking. I would tell you that you have no idea how amazing freedom feels and that you should stop giving a fuck about all those things you are supposed to give a fuck about, even if it is just for five minutes. For one thing, you’d realize that ice storms always melt, eventually.”

“She loved you. Not you the circumstance, but you. All of you. The fucked-up parts. The not-fucked-up parts and everything in between. She knew the lists you kept in your head just for yourself. She didn’t care about any of those things. It was a flawless love. She loved you and she didn’t want to own you or cage you. She had your heart. She had your back. She just loved you in an endless way.”

“We are from people that have been forced to give up everything and we have this one opportunity to give something to ourselves and we’re going to take it. We are fucking taking it. Even though occupation anxiety has worn our self-worth down to frayed wires. Even though there is risk. After all, everything we are afraid of has already happened.”

“For a while we all got lost in the beauty of things, and the intelligence of hopeless romantics won the day.”

“The real problem is there’s like eight steps and I’m only good at three-step things.”

“Blueberries and maple syrup are both stolen Nishnaabeg things and sometimes stolen Nishnaabeg things are better than no Nishnaabeg things at all!!”

“There is a part inside, between anatomy and physiology, that you drop breath into when you sing.”

“I knew it was a test. I knew I would pass in a way that would make you consider taking things too far. I find that interesting. I find riding the edge of taking it too far pregnant grace. People who are just learning how to walk are not afraid of taking things too far.”

“The water is high, and the rocks are slippery. I pretend fearless.”

“mii go aaniwi: your empty isn’t as

empty as you think

we are thieves that feel better in the

same room

because of everything, we are doing

well

we are thieves stealing back ourselves

even when i am gone, you carry me we are thieves, cradling our ruined

we are carrying the hard parts, & they

lift us up

there are two thieves in this tent

frame

your empty is never as empty as you

think”

“Fuck, I can complain about anything. Really, I can’t stand myself.”

“Honestly, I enjoy white people’s mega-tar-sands-industry homes getting sucked into the river. I do. It just seems fair.”

“Floods… are naturally occurring events. They remind us of the power of the land and the power of water. But the reminder never sticks.”

“Situation Update #5

One person has texted me to see if I am ok. One.

Situation Update #6

Maybe I should text people I know that are in Calgary and see if they are ok.

Is that too forward? Too boundary-pressing? Breaking the texting boundary? What if they cringe when they get my text and are all like, FUCK it’s a white-collar disaster.

Kindness is a goddamn art.”

“I can’t imagine myself selling toilet paper to some desperate rich white person for twenty-five dollars. I’d probably just give away all my stockpiled stuff, revelling in how “just in case” finally fucking paid off.”

“You’re supposed to stay away from the river. It isn’t even a river anymore. In some places it’s a full-fledged lake and other places it’s a waterfall, only the water doesn’t drop so the fall doesn’t stop, it just continues. It’s that angry.”

“I’m not actually a person that is good at making the best of a bad situation. What I am good at is satire and sarcasm, which I tend to use to make good situations bad. How hard could it be to make things go the opposite way?”

“Sometimes it isn’t annoying to be around happy people. Sometimes it is possible to get swept up in whatever denial they have going on.”

samantha_shain's review

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4.0

The prose writing in this book was spectacular, though the poetry and song didn’t quite do it for me. Nevertheless, stories like Brown Against Blue and Akiden Boreal were so fantastic that I read them each 3 or 4 times. I really wanted to read books by indigenous “Canadian” authors and I am so glad that I encountered this memorable collection!