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Admid the overlapping crises of a pandemic, ecological disaster, and global capitalism, two leading Black and Indigenous feminist theorists ask one another: what do liberated lands, minds, and bodies look like? These letters are part debate, part dialogue, and part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp thinkers, sending notes to each other during a stormy present. Featuring a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and an afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley.
“This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.”
—Dionne Brand, poet, novelist, and essayist
“Using the age-old practice of letter writing and the land itself as a palimpsest, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson find common ground to challenge the moral legitimacy of the settler nation state, and reinscribe new ways of what it means to be beings who are human in the forensic landscapes of Canada. In Rehearsals for Living, two women, one Indigenous, the other Black and African-descended confront their shared yet different experiences of colonialism, provide new and subversive meanings to the colonial trope of being landed, the mechanism by which the land was (un)settled. Unflinchingly, and in long-overdue and profoundly-needed “reasonings” that reverberate with shared breath, Simpson and Maynard weave their ideas, thoughts and reflections and their deep caring for community and society through the network of issues that impact us today—the pandemic and the differentials in treatment for Black and Indigenous people, the role of BLM, abolition, the necessity of Nibi and homespace for the Nishnaabeg, the joys of living on the land, and parenting in the face of ecological and racial disasters are but a few of the challenges they grapple with. Rehearsals for Living is fundamental to understanding the interlocking, founding crimes of the Americas; necessary for remembering the many erased histories of the on-going struggle for justice, and altogether indispensable to those wanting to create possible solutions.”
—M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!
“Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes different. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.”
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, from the foreword
“We have been, and will continue to be, flooded with big books and little books and reports and documentary films all showing us how capitalism, racism, prisons, patriarchy, walls, and war are killing the planet. But this book is different. How Maynard and Simpson came to understand the world we must abolish and the world we need to build is through communing—with each other, comrades, friends and family, and the movements to which they make themselves accountable. They dance together, sing together, meditate, worship, and study together through letters, by sharing, by making themselves vulnerable to one another and to all of us reading these pages. Rehearsals for Living is a work of profound humility that honors the ancestors, the land, the children, and the struggles that enabled every generation to survive. They braid the histories and collective memories of Black and Indigenous struggles to establish a basis for solidarity, to find answers, and to reveal and share valuable lessons for our movements.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, from the afterword
“Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again.”
—Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem
“As we collectively and unevenly live through sedimented colonialities, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard draw out a political vision that emerges from epistolary connections—letters, animated by stories, that seek out, engage, imagine, and narrate different kinds and types of liberation. Accentuated by entangled black-indigenous histories and geographies, Rehearsals for Living actualizes friendship as correspondence, modeling a mode of togetherness that we can practice, learn from, and revise.”
—Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds and Dear Science and Other Stories
“The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“In their inspired act of ‘writing together, walking together, witnessing these times together,’ Robyn Maynard and Leanne Simpson illuminate in essential ways the entwined lives of Black and Indigenous peoples. Rehearsals for Living honours legacies of courageous revolt against the ongoing histories of dispossession, incarceration, and violence. It is a book of relation, radical generosity, and care – a book, too, of running children, and the colour of the sky, and of ‘holding within [ourselves] that nascent shimmering of possibility.’ Above all, it is a book that poses and answers these most urgent questions: ‘how are we going to live and how are we going to live together?’”
—David Chariandy, author of Brother
“Lyrical, visionary, and transcendent, Rehearsals for Living creates a literary maroon space deeply rooted in unique and overlapping histories and presents in which to dream abolition, home, love, land, liberatory forms of governance, life itself. While chronicling the continuing unfolding calamities of settler colonialism and racial capitalism with care and razor sharp clarity, Simpson and Maynard point readers to portals to different futures through the infinite possibilities of Black-Indigenous resistance. Give yourself the gift of allowing your heart and mind to overflow with the beauty and promise of Rehearsals' visions.”
—Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition
“Rehearsals for Living is a profound and sublime work of memory, witnessing, refusal, dreaming. In the trenchant tradition of Black and Indigenous feminisms, this brilliant book moves us away from the language of crisis or victimhood to the precise and intimate encounters of kinship and liberation. The letters between Maynard and Simpson magnificently shapeshift and engage on multiple levels, and in doing so, rigorously demand an accounting for horrific violences while illuminating lives and worlds anew. A masterclass in literary form, ethical orientations, and collective futures.”
—Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule, Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
“What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book."
—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough
“Not all apocalypses are unwelcome. The profound anticipation for a world otherwise bubbled to the surface the summer of 2020. Collective rage and love shattered the sense of inviolability surrounding white supremacy putting forward an alternative vision, one already existing and always in the making. Rehearsals for Living is an epistolary that captures that urgent project of what it means to be human and imagine freedom in times of terrible danger. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tap into Black and Indigenous ways of knowing and world-making that require a fundamental disordering of the forces of destruction and the re-ordering of life and the beautiful struggle to get free.”
—Nick Estes, author of Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
“Rehearsals for Living is an intellectually fierce dialogue about our colonial present by two of the most renowned scholar-activists working today. In a time of incredible uncertainty, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard show that the shared and divergent histories of Black and Indigenous communities are foundational to the building of a better world for all.”
—Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
“The end of the world, or the end of capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy? This astonishing work of literature and theory enables us to imagine the end of them all, and to call into being, to rehearse, a world anew. If pandemics opened portals, Rehearsals for Living reveals the places of Indigenous and Black freedom to which they might lead. At a time when we need it most, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s letters generously invite us all to a future in which relations of liberation, not exploitation and oppression, constitute living on this planet together.”
—John Munro, author of The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Movement and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960
Solidification is a video collaboration blending an immersive reading by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson from her recently released novel, "Noopiming:The Cure for White Ladies" (House of Anansi Press) over a wintery soundscape of drone and vocal composed by her sister Ansley Simpson, brought to life with visuals from Sammy Chien of Chimerik似不像, an interdisciplinary collective of performance, art & technology. Check out the EP Noopiming Sessions, on Bandcamp.
Available in February 2021 in the United States from the University of Minnesota Press. Short Listed for the Governor’ General’s literary award for fiction.
“Noopiming is a novel that is as philosophically generative as it is stylistically original. It begins with someone who is frozen in a lake, waiting, and from whom we learn that: ‘being frozen in the lake is another kind of life.’ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s expansive work explores the indivisibility of beings — old woman, old man, tree, caribou, stone, ice, spirit, geese, the brain and more, all watching, grieving, thinking, acting, and listening amidst the ongoing and quotidian urgencies of capital. They are sleepless, ceaseless, trying to alter and to recode the world of consumerism, and their survival means that they must daily and collectively reconstruct existence in the city and its coterminous forests. Noopiming is far ahead of us in so many registers of story, language, and worldview; its cumulative effect is a new cosmography.”
“Noopiming is a rare parcel of beauty and power, at once a creator and destroyer of forms. All of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s myriad literary gifts shine here – her scalpel-sharp humor, her eye for the smallest human details, the prodigious scope of her imaginative and poetic generosity. The result is a book at once fierce, uproarious, heartbreaking, and, throughout and above all else, rooted in love.”
“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming once again confirms her position as a brilliant, daring experimentalist and a beautiful, radical portraitist of contemporary NDN life. The prose hums with a lovingness that moved me to tears, and with a humour that felt plucked right out of my rez adolescence. The chorus of thinkers, dreamers, revolutionaries, poets, and misfits that Simpson conjures here feels like a miracle. My heart ached and swelled for all of them. What I adored most about this book is that it has so little to do with the white gaze. Simpson writes for us, for NDNs, those made to make other kinds of beauty, to build other kinds of beautiful lives, where no one is looking. Noopiming is a book from the future! Simpson is our much-needed historian of the future!”
BOOKS
In A Short History of the Blockade, award-winning writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices to explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, the beaver—or in Nishnaabemowin, Amik. Moving through genres, shifting through time, amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance, as both a negation and an affirmation. A Short History of the Blockade reveals how the practice of telling stories is also a culture of listening, “a thinking through together,” and ultimately, like the dam or the blockade, an affirmation of life.
