Back to School

Early on in Manikanetish, Naomi Fontaine’s spare, bone-clean sophomore novel, the narrator, a young Innu woman named Yammie, recounts the story of her grandmother’s death. It is a slow, painful exit from the world: the old woman’s body is lined with sores, the final decline months long, the terminus a hospital bed. There she spends her final days surrounded by family. But her husband, Yammie’s grandfather, refuses to visit; he says he’s watched his wife suffer enough and can’t muster the strength to now watch her die.

“How great their love must have been for a man as strong as he was, who’d faced all sorts of adversity head‑on, to feel incapable of seeing the woman of his life meet her end,” Yammie says. “Such intense love was hard for me to grasp. But I knew it was part of my heritage.”