Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.

The Accident of Being Lost

Lindsay

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. I proofread the flyer one more time because everyone knows white people hate typos.

For NDNs the tougher we act, the purer our hearts are, because this strangulation is not set up for the sensitive and we have to protect the fuck out of ourselves.

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.

Nearly everything we do is confined to probably no more than 500 characters, so theoretically you should be easy to quit, because theoretically you don’t actually exist.

I think getting old is about doors closing, opportunities lost, and a series of things you do to trick yourself into thinking you are going to have fun, do something meaningful, or have a break in the tediousness of life. I should do something about that, like before it’s too late.

Sabe is standing beside me with his fingers on my back vacuuming the shame out of me. “Settle down, Kwe,” he whispers. I tell Sabe to stop touching me and then I immediately feel bad. I’m too stressed and armoured for touching. I know Sabe is trying to be nice to me but I’m angry and hurt and wounded.

I’m a bobcat that’s been non- fatally shot with a .22 and I’m still being pursued. The last think I want is a fucking massage.

Sabe should just wait at the edge of me. He should wait until I collapse and can’t do this anymore. He should wait until they beat me. He needs to stay close to me even though I’m pushing him away. I hope he gets that. How could he not know this about me by now?

he lives in his own muted, dysmorphic entrapment that is slightly different than mine.

I imagine what it would be like to tell you. You’d listen. Ask official questions. Offer standard support. Check in. I’d make inappropriate jokes. You’d worry and ask more official questions. I’d deflect. You’d back off to give me space, and I’d need you to do the exact opposite. I’d need you to fall into me. You’d worry more, which would lead to more fake bureaucracy. I’d retreat into myself, abandoned. By you. By my body. By life. Then I’d be gone.

I’m mostly sure this is how it would go. I’d become one more thing for you to take care of and manage; you’d become one more thing I’d avoid. I didn’t want this for us.

It matters where pity comes from and hers would come from kindness.

The Accident of Being Lost quotes

Join the club