A review by korrick
Weweni by Margaret Noodin

4.0

Giniijaanisinaanig wawezhi'aangwaa
ashamangwaa ashki-enendamowinan
mii ganbaj gaawiin waa miigaadisiiwaad.

-Gimiizhaanaanig

Not all languages are created equal.

The majority of those fluent in a European tongue had it beaten into them. Beaten by money, beaten by power, beaten with rods and whips and electric chairs. Twenty-four "working" out of a 6,500 and then some world, a phrase that renders those thousands of others, what. Lazy? A stop gap? Mandarin Chinese rules the roots by sheer numerical force, but it's the translation of white people I'm concerned with, where on US territory ABC means more than Latin roots and US citizens are slaughtered for not speaking English. When the now dictates that to know a language means a measure of love for learning and nothing at all of fear of future deprivation or lust for future conquest, I'll be content in knowing that the people who speak Anishinaabemowin and its 6,476 and then some non-working kin do so in peace. Until then, refusing to read translations is simply following the status quo of a hegemony.

I took longer with this than I usually do with poetry because of its nifty introduction. Some of the pronunciations have multiple possibilities and I wasn't quite sure when it came to various juxtapositions in the multiple tongues both working and non, but I had enough to slowly but surely move more fluidly through the untranslated left side of the double page span as the days progressed. I don't have a head for languages at all, so what I got instead of word to word equations and guesses at grammar was an ease in pronunciation and trickles of memory from previous encounters with German, Japanese, and music which sampled from what I'm guessing were indigenous languages, although I'd have to make excessive use of Google to confirm that last one. Readers don't have to do the same, but I do have to say, in light of the context of language and the brevity of this particular circumstances of pages, it would be for the best.

I believe the term for this particular breeding would be "niche", translation compounded upon woman of color compounded upon poetry compounded on the next time I come across something in Anishinaabemowin may be a long way off. But hey. This edition's quote of Emma Goldman, for those in the know, is an extraterritorial inclusion that hits closer to home than what English is capable of on its own.

Our decorated children
nourished on new ideas
possibly able to avoid old battlefields.

-We Give Them