Manikanetish

Manikanetish / Naomi Fontaine
trans. from the French by 
TO: Arachnide, c2021.
153 p.

This is a small story about Yammie, an Innu woman who left her community on Quebec's North Shore, and has now returned as a teacher. She has a classroom full of rather disaffected students; they see no future for themselves and are not engaged in learning the French language that she is responsible for teaching. 

This small story moves between Yammie's own experiences both in her childhood and with her current French boyfriend still living in Quebec City and getting impatient with her decision to teach Up North, away from him. That's rolled into the lives of these students that she is beginning to care for, in regard to both their schooling and the issues in their lives. 

Yammie decides that her class will put on a French play, to liven things up and give them a different way to approach French and learning in general. This seems to spark something and the class, even some of the most antagonistic boys, get into it and want to be involved. It brings out new characteristics in some of the students, even while it's not enough to change to fates of others. 

In some ways, this brief and bittersweet book reminds me of Gabrielle Roy and her novels and stories about young teachers in one-room schoolrooms across the prairies. It has the same sense of a young teacher feeling their way with students not too much younger than they are, and becoming a part of the students lives in unexpected ways. The language is also laden with that odd sense of nostalgia that can be found in Roy's writing; in this novel Yammie is telling her story in the present tense, but it feels like she's looking back at it and drawing out the poignancy of her time at the school. 

It's an unusual book, sharing the daily life of a community that isn't represented a lot, and it is told by an author who is a member of the Innu nation. It's one that is worth reading, to get a perspective on a life and a community that can be overlooked in Canadian literature.