Well, it’s kind of hard to write about it in words that run along lines like this, but I’ll try. I love this book because it is what I dreamed life could be, what I didn’t know words could be before I met it. I love this book because it dissolves or makes unnecessary the lines between fiction, non-fiction, so-called subjects or topics (theatre, literature, science, magic). In short, I love this book because it doesn’t rely on thin colonial histories for its shape. It doesn’t impose colonial structures of gender, or human/non-human divides. It holds a deep critique and awareness of what it means to be alive right now, in the impossible violence of colonial capitalism… and it doesn’t succumb to the idea that this is everything. Not at all. The book, its inhabitants, they remind us that we are always many. That we are struggling to survive. And that we are.

In school (in England) I was taught that certain books were ‘classics’. These were novels and plays by people like Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Shakespeare. I loved some of these books and hated others. I found ways to love them, because this limited world of ‘literature’ was what I had access to. And yet, in recent years, I have discovered my own understanding of what might be called classics. Those books that open up worlds beyond a singular narrative, that teach me that to be human is to respect and learn from Indigenous ways. Those books that refuse to meet me until I slow down and let them in. They teach me that within all of us are pathways to wider, wiser versions of humanity. Noopiming holds hands with sorrow, joy, ghosts, buildings, addictions, cities, and all kinds of animals. It is irrepressibly plural. What I love most about this book is that whole worlds open up between words on pages. Sometimes it takes me days to read what appears to be one short line of text. Somewhere in there, I find there is space for me, for us.

Rajni Shah (they, them) researcher and THIRD tutor
https://www.atd.ahk.nl/das-research/people/researchers/profile/rajni-shah/
Collective Listening as Survival (article): https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/558606/558686

PS Leanne Betasamosake Simpson will be ATD Artist in Residence in 2024!