Lost (and Found) in the Space of the Unspoken

“I am 10 minutes and a bottle of cheap wine away from falling in love with you, which means I am already in love with you and that this fact was discreetly caged in the space of the unspoken and the unwritten and the unsung. Being in love with someone you’ve never met and only text still falls in the realm of unhealthy even though everyone is doing it and whenever the odd person suggests critical thought we just all go back to loving strangers on the other side of our screens.

Eventually this will just be normal. Remember when you could get addicted to the internet? And now it’s just normal.”

---

How can you be lost and found at the same time?

Although I finished reading this collection quite a while ago now, it hasn’t strayed far from my mind. This Accident of Being Lost (2017) is a book of songs and short stories by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that I’ve been marinating in for the past month -- I'm talking Frank Ocean style lost in the heat of it all.

Punchy, unfamiliar, and wonderfully decentering would be my words of choice to describe this collection. Starring a Nishnaabekwewag narrater, the short stories feature a recurring cast of characters that are, by and large, unrecognizable to me. It isn’t hard to discern that I am not the primary (even secondary) audience for this book, and the feeling of surrendering to a text that was completely unfamiliar in its rhythms, intonations, plot, and methods of story telling was fun and exciting, and made the entire experience feel new in a way that things do when you’re a kid.

The stories follow the narrator through a variety of different events and settings. Over the course of the book, the narrator completes a firearms class in Eastern Ontario, takes her daughter to ballet lessons, falls in love, visits the last corner of boreal forest, collects maple syrup, shoots to kill, and lives in a world that is not of her own making. The love in this book is multitudinous, as is the steady yet amorphous cast of characters who accompany her throughout the stories.

The stories were wry, dry, and darkly humorous. They occurred in places that I am already familiar with, which added another layer of understanding and intrigue to the text. At times, Simpson's descriptions almost remind me of Vonnegut’s matter of fact flare. The stories are not negatively oriented, overall though - just eyeopening. The dark humour and matter of fact, tell-it-like-it-is tone of the whole collection emphasizes certain moments in the text for their authenticity and apparent truth.

Yet, there is also gentility. The stories were really more like mirages, or sharp vignettes. A point-in-time snapshot of something that tells a much larger story; a reflective fragment with jagged edges from a big ol' shattered mirror.

What I’m trying to say is that when Simpson writes things like the quote at the start of this post, I felt that. When she writes “your wrinkled grey skin is gorgeous/&/ I hope you don’t know what’s happening”, I felt that too. Do you?

The songs wove a thread of keening notes high above the rest of the plot, and the refrains stuck with me (as Simpson's music is prone to do).

There's something going on in Simpson's text that I would need an essay to uncover properly, but that I sense gestures to the question I opened with. I am intrigued by how space is created, defined, and occupied within the text. The space of the unspoken, of the unrecognized and unrecognizable, is liminal, marginal, and unmapped topography. The space is blank. The space is land. But, perhaps in writing, and thereby acknowledging or creating, the previously unspoken reality occurring in, on, and of the space, the space is transformed - no longer is the space defined by a sense of not knowing where you are or how to get home, but by a sense of being seen, recognized, and found in a sudden and previously invisible reality. How then does community begin to form in and around, from and of, this space? How does space become the starting point for the creation of a shared reality or futurism? #thingsIwonder

Needless to say, I enjoyed this book very much. It was fast, easy to read, and asks nothing of you as a reader except your willingness to go with the flow. And, in that sense, it gives a lot more than it asks from you. I have read Simpson before and was glad to read her work again. She never disappoints. 8.5/10. Would recommend.

Read if:

• You want a fast read that doesn’t sacrifice efficacy for brevity

• Science fiction, realism, adventure, and/or poetry appeal to you

• You’re a fan of dark humour

• You like punk rock (I don't know why but reading Simpson also makes me feel like listening to Le Tigre and Bikini Kill)

• You live in Ontario (or Canada, for that matter)

• You can relate to the anxiety of managing/establishing relationships electronically

Don’t read if:

• A single, linear plot is your MO

• Disparate threads frustrate you

• Simple writing strikes you as pedestrian

• You prefer third-person or omniscient narration

• Anecdotal/experiential storytelling puts you off

• You associate good writing with elevated language

If reading isn't your thing, I might recommend giving her album, f(l)ight (2016), a listen.

Her short films, “How to Steal a Canoe” and “Under your Always Light” are also some interesting Youtube content. Simpson is an UBER talented writer, songwriter, film maker and creator imho. Curious what you think, too.