Listening to the Good People: A Review of Margaret Noodin's Weweni: Poems in Anishinaabemowin and English

The preface of Weweni opens with a quote from Maurice Blanchot describing "poetry as a powerful universe of words where relations, configurations, forces are affirmed through sound, figure, rhythmic mobility, in a unified and sovereignly autonomous space" (ix). This is a fitting frame for Margaret Noodin's collection. Published as part of the "Made in Michigan Writers Series" and containing poems in Anishinaabemowin and English, Weweni attests to the complex relations that define the Anishinaabe world amongst worlds. Noodin offers multiple means of engagement for non-speakers of Anishinaabemowin by providing a basic pronunciation guide in the preface of the text and offering audio of her reading "Bizindamaang/ Listening" and "Waagaatigoog/Crooked Trees" on the publisher's website. By writing poems in Anishinaabemowin and offering English translations that are supplemental, "lyrical explanations" (ix), she reminds readers that Michigan is the settler-colonial mispronunciation of the Indigenous word for the great lake. Noodin's poems define Michigan on Anishinaabe terms evoked by the gentle insistence of Anishinaabemowin.

Weweni is a sovereign speech act in published form that works against the genocide of Indigenous languages and affirms the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. To read Noodin's collection of poems is to tread carefully within a firmly positioned Anishinaabe world that includes all relations, cosmic and earthly, human and nonhuman. This intricately connected world is epitomized in "Nayendamowin Mitigwaaking/Woodland Liberty" by the "I" narrating the poem as they journey into the woods for the gift of sustenance brought by reconnecting to one's relations. When they are weary the narrator visits the pines, listens to the water fowl, and shares the lake with fish and cattails before cosmic relations guide them back toward the light. The health of the narrator depends on the health of all in the Anishinaabe world. While among their relations, the narrator comments on the interconnections that hold the world together: "I marvel at the complexity of wild paths and webs woven" (19). The imagery of a world constructed of interconnected paths and webs parallels the structure of the text. Images and actions reappear in multiple poems mapping the intricacies of the Anishinaabe world through Noodin's "powerful universe of words."

The metaphorical body is one image that weaves together multiple poems throughout the text. The role of the metaphorical body is as a keeper of knowledge, which appears in "Ode'ng/Into a Heart." As the first-person narrator of the poem moves through several major organs -- the body of knowledge -- they are transformed by the process. The interdependence of each body part to create a functional whole is analogous to the Gordon Henry quote that frames the poem and characterizes Anishinaabe knowledge as the collective worldview of the community. When the narrator proclaims: "We are bone relatives," the interdependence of each individual in the community is reinforced, as well as the interdependence of each poem to structurally recreate the Anishinaabe world within text (71). To mention bones as part of the metaphorical body of knowledge alludes to the first poem of the collection "Bizindamaang/Listening" in which the narrator states, "We sense the truth in our bones/ if we listen," reasserting the body as the site of knowing, but also the responsibility of individuals to be active recipients of knowledge (3). However, like "Ode'ng/Into a Heart" where embracing the body of knowledge as a whole is transformative, the poem "Okanan/Bones" imagines bones as both a structural necessity and the source of profound creative potential. In the third stanza, Noodin writes: "I have twenty-seven of them/ I use to make one handprint/ or curl together to write/ stories that can be seen" (11). If the preface promises a universe created by poetry, Weweni fulfills this promise through the imagery of the body and explicates the creative capabilities of writing according to an Anishinaabe epistemology.

While the world created in Weweni is Anishinaabe-centric, it is not exclusively Anishinaabe. In "Waagaatigoog/Crooked Trees," Anishinaabe presence is imprinted on the land in the subtle shaping of trees to mark paths and...