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A History of My Brief Body
* 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, Finalist.
* A Best Book of 2020 — Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy, Maudlin House
"In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. Out of the 'ruins of the museum of political depression' springs a 'tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.' Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance."
—Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine
Synopsis
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place.
Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
* A Best Book of 2020 — Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy, Maudlin House
"In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. Out of the 'ruins of the museum of political depression' springs a 'tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.' Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance."
—Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine
Synopsis
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place.
Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
142 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2020
418 people are currently reading
20450 people want to read
About the author
Billy-Ray Belcourt
11 books786 followersBilly-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His books are: THIS WOUND IS A WORLD (Frontenac House 2017; UMinn Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, NDN COPING MECHANISMS (House of Anansi 2019), winner of the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Prize and longlisted for Canada Reads, A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY (Hamish Hamilton and Two Dollar Radio 2020), finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, and the forthcoming A MINOR CHORUS: A NOVEL (Hamish Hamilton and Norton 2022).
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 902 reviews
January 6, 2021
I devoured the first few chapters before forcing myself to slow down and savor Belcourt's way with words, the unexpected, compressed perfection of lines like "How silly that we measure the day by how much light fits inside it and not by the number of ordinary wounds the light lands on at any given second." A History of My Brief Body is one of those books which gets its adulation from the impact of sheer grit — an explosive exposition on the profound and often the peculiar terrain that forms the nexus of indigeneity, sexuality and colonial violence, written with diamond-cut precision and lyricism. Not a word is wasted, each sentence self-consciously precise, with its gentle flow that comes through in all chapters as Belcourt threads a criss-crossing path through biography, anthropology, art and history.
Belcourt's tender exploration of pain reminded me of the works of Maggie Nelson, and also Ocean Vuong, nonpareil chroniclers of the way trauma reverberate through minoritized bodies. A History of My Brief Body, in addition to being a cornerstone of queer narratives, is also an unabashed examination of self, of race, intimacy, the casualties of colonialism, and of ultimately looking back (and ahead) for a better understanding. In this complex landscape of violence, it's hard to find the joy of living but this book is a pure treasure. Every sentence meaningful, peppered with breathtaking moments to ponder, to mull and to think about. I think I found a new favourite.
Thank you Libro.fm, Penguin Canada and Two Dollar Radio for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest opinion.
Belcourt's tender exploration of pain reminded me of the works of Maggie Nelson, and also Ocean Vuong, nonpareil chroniclers of the way trauma reverberate through minoritized bodies. A History of My Brief Body, in addition to being a cornerstone of queer narratives, is also an unabashed examination of self, of race, intimacy, the casualties of colonialism, and of ultimately looking back (and ahead) for a better understanding. In this complex landscape of violence, it's hard to find the joy of living but this book is a pure treasure. Every sentence meaningful, peppered with breathtaking moments to ponder, to mull and to think about. I think I found a new favourite.
Thank you Libro.fm, Penguin Canada and Two Dollar Radio for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest opinion.
September 1, 2020
I read this on a Monday morning, and you know how sometimes you find yourself in a book? Here is how I found myself in this book:
"Desirous of a beautiful life I get out of bed, but it's Monday and I'm in the throes of a genocide. I make a cup of coffee and pick up a poetry collection, both of which I attend to at my living room window; for a few minutes, I think of nothing besides coffee, poetry, and windows, which feels like a small rebellion... I'm not in the future. I'm in the present; this means I'm as lonely and as brief as a country."
-Billy-Ray Belcourt, "Please Keep Loving: Reflections on Unlivability"
Billy-Ray is in conversation with so many others in this book - it brought to mind The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson in the way it connects to other thinkers and their words (and in fact he does mention Nelson at least once) and weaves together literary criticism and art criticism level thinking (ie: scholarly) with his own experiences as a gay man, an "NDN," and more. To even talk about more of the book I'd be quoting heavily because it's that kind of read. Gorgeous, I need to go back to his earlier work as well.
"Desirous of a beautiful life I get out of bed, but it's Monday and I'm in the throes of a genocide. I make a cup of coffee and pick up a poetry collection, both of which I attend to at my living room window; for a few minutes, I think of nothing besides coffee, poetry, and windows, which feels like a small rebellion... I'm not in the future. I'm in the present; this means I'm as lonely and as brief as a country."
-Billy-Ray Belcourt, "Please Keep Loving: Reflections on Unlivability"
Billy-Ray is in conversation with so many others in this book - it brought to mind The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson in the way it connects to other thinkers and their words (and in fact he does mention Nelson at least once) and weaves together literary criticism and art criticism level thinking (ie: scholarly) with his own experiences as a gay man, an "NDN," and more. To even talk about more of the book I'd be quoting heavily because it's that kind of read. Gorgeous, I need to go back to his earlier work as well.
December 27, 2020
I struggle to negatively review the lived experiences of others. I find it especially difficult when those experiences belong to an extremely talented artist. But this book just did not connect with me. There were portions that were dizzyingly beautiful, subversively funny, and heartbreakingly poignant, and then there were parts that read like an academic’s muddled stream of consciousness, lacking any sort of congruity or relevance. At 128 pages, this book is rather dense and, oftentimes, completely inaccessible. I can appreciate structural experimentation, genre blending, and the occasional obscure reference (I did actually recognize a few in this book), but I found it quite difficult to penetrate Belcourt’s text amidst his discordant musings. While he is truly a gifted and sophisticated writer, and the philosophical exploration of self-love at the intersection of colonization and suffering is indeed passionate and urgent, the execution was rather mediocre and left me yearning for something more.
***edit***
The final essay (“To Hang Our Grief Up To Dry”), as a stand-alone, is absolutely genius and utterly moving.
***edit***
The final essay (“To Hang Our Grief Up To Dry”), as a stand-alone, is absolutely genius and utterly moving.
July 12, 2021
This was amazing! Belcourt is such a phenomenal poet and combined with his raw storytelling technique, I didn't want to put this book down. His memoir focuses on the intersectionality of race and sexuality. I especially loved how Belcourt included stories of many Indigenous Canadians' experiences, discussing things that have happened in his life and relating them to the experiences of others.
I found Belcourt's thoughts and feelings of loneliness and isolation that accompany being queer, very relatable and heartbreaking. Even as adults, we struggle facing homophobia, hook-up culture, toxic relationships, etc. And he does an amazing job at highlighting queer loneliness and the effects it can have on us.
“I was lonely once and that was all it took. A thick haze, a smothering opacity, this was the loneliness of feeling estranged from one’s body and, by extension, the world. My loneliness asked nothing of me, it festered with inattention. Rarely did it think out loud. I neglected my loneliness and it expanded with animosity. My loneliness grew into a forest atop me.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
I also just loved reading Belcourt's experiences as an Indigenous Canadian, Cree, man, and getting to see the world through his eyes. Especially his thoughts and discussions on being fetishized. Overall, I think this memoir was executed so well, and I highly recommend it to everyone.
I found Belcourt's thoughts and feelings of loneliness and isolation that accompany being queer, very relatable and heartbreaking. Even as adults, we struggle facing homophobia, hook-up culture, toxic relationships, etc. And he does an amazing job at highlighting queer loneliness and the effects it can have on us.
“I was lonely once and that was all it took. A thick haze, a smothering opacity, this was the loneliness of feeling estranged from one’s body and, by extension, the world. My loneliness asked nothing of me, it festered with inattention. Rarely did it think out loud. I neglected my loneliness and it expanded with animosity. My loneliness grew into a forest atop me.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
I also just loved reading Belcourt's experiences as an Indigenous Canadian, Cree, man, and getting to see the world through his eyes. Especially his thoughts and discussions on being fetishized. Overall, I think this memoir was executed so well, and I highly recommend it to everyone.
January 18, 2021
It's hard and weird to give a very personal and vulnerable memoir a bad rating but I didn't like the writing at all. There are some beautiful sentences/sections, but overall I found this a weird mix of writing that was incredibly meandering, elaborate, and densely cited (often he cites himself! which I hate) and writing that was oddly informal (he likes the word butt and butthole a lot?). Not really for me. However the perspective was really interesting.
November 25, 2020
TW: suicide, racism.
“How any of us survive in a world we neither wanted nor built ourselves. I have called this bind precarity. It’s also the ground zero for suicide ideation.”
Driftpile Cree/Indigiqueer writer Billy-Ray Belcourt wrote in a way that had my heart soaring & aching. Immaculately crafted, intelligent, honest, searing. Necessary truths, personal reflections. What it means to be Queer/Trans Indigenous, 2Spirit in colonial Canada. Suicide epidemics in multiple First Nation communities. Colten Boushie & what his killers verdict did to Indigenous hearts that have been mourning ever since. How do we exist in a world where settlers view Indigenous bodies as disposable, especially when land/property is involved?
A collection that empowers NDN bodies while likely stirring the fragile non-Indigenous. Which is likely the way it will always be.
Belcourt writes for Indigiqueer/Trans/2S NDNS, Indigenous youth, holds important & necessary space for Indigenous folks on these pages, “Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
While telling settlers the honest truth, “you aren’t invited into our commune. We aren’t yet at that point of hospitality. I won’t tell you when the time has come.”
While reading I found myself acknowledging that colonial pain but also rejoicing in the beauty of resistance & art & identity & community. I found myself dreaming of the beacon that is Indigenous Youth, the future generations & all that they will do & fight for.
“NDNs are moved—positioned and oriented—not in the direction of the dead future that state violence anticipates but instead toward a time and place gushing with all that this violence can’t extinguish, which is our metaphysics of joy.”
A History of My Brief Body. I came away with a full tank of decolonized gas for my sometimes exhausted soul. I came away recharged & understood. Radical Indigenous Art. How that art can heal & obliterate the worst of settler societies attempts to define us. How that art is a safe harbour.
This will be one of the strongest recommendations I will ever give: read it. as soon as you can.
“How any of us survive in a world we neither wanted nor built ourselves. I have called this bind precarity. It’s also the ground zero for suicide ideation.”
Driftpile Cree/Indigiqueer writer Billy-Ray Belcourt wrote in a way that had my heart soaring & aching. Immaculately crafted, intelligent, honest, searing. Necessary truths, personal reflections. What it means to be Queer/Trans Indigenous, 2Spirit in colonial Canada. Suicide epidemics in multiple First Nation communities. Colten Boushie & what his killers verdict did to Indigenous hearts that have been mourning ever since. How do we exist in a world where settlers view Indigenous bodies as disposable, especially when land/property is involved?
A collection that empowers NDN bodies while likely stirring the fragile non-Indigenous. Which is likely the way it will always be.
Belcourt writes for Indigiqueer/Trans/2S NDNS, Indigenous youth, holds important & necessary space for Indigenous folks on these pages, “Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
While telling settlers the honest truth, “you aren’t invited into our commune. We aren’t yet at that point of hospitality. I won’t tell you when the time has come.”
While reading I found myself acknowledging that colonial pain but also rejoicing in the beauty of resistance & art & identity & community. I found myself dreaming of the beacon that is Indigenous Youth, the future generations & all that they will do & fight for.
“NDNs are moved—positioned and oriented—not in the direction of the dead future that state violence anticipates but instead toward a time and place gushing with all that this violence can’t extinguish, which is our metaphysics of joy.”
A History of My Brief Body. I came away with a full tank of decolonized gas for my sometimes exhausted soul. I came away recharged & understood. Radical Indigenous Art. How that art can heal & obliterate the worst of settler societies attempts to define us. How that art is a safe harbour.
This will be one of the strongest recommendations I will ever give: read it. as soon as you can.
August 9, 2020
A beautiful and poetic exploration of queer and indigenous identity, but a bit too bogged down with academic stuff and theory for me to fully understand and appreciate. I would probably enjoy this more after I have a degree or two lol
November 11, 2021
Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/_PLiI_vt8d8
September 2, 2022
It feels wrong to rate this two stars, considering how many lines I highlighted and how personal it is, but I found the text overall meandering and prone to grandiose statements that I wish was backed with more substance. The last few essays were excellent for this reason; highlighting the structures by which Canadian colonialism silences and diminishes Indigenous thought and literature. Belcourt references heavily to other great Indigenous and Canadian writers - much to his determent - I would have liked to see this work stand a little more on its own. I will check out his poetry, and his fiction where I think his style will work better for me.
March 7, 2024
"If I’m a writer, it’s because to be queer is to worship loss—and what is a book but a losing game?" "To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you." FUCK !!!! MY GOD !!!
January 15, 2022
“To love someone is firstly to confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body is a beautiful and vulnerable and visceral work of poetry. Unflinchingly honest and emotional and brave. A baring of a soul and a call to arms to NDN people everywhere to love and live fully in their own truth, as radical as that simple act may be.
“Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the route of despair it causes, and an always loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
Please read this book.
Trigger/Content Warnings: racism, homophobia, genocide, suicide, death, medical trauma
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Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body is a beautiful and vulnerable and visceral work of poetry. Unflinchingly honest and emotional and brave. A baring of a soul and a call to arms to NDN people everywhere to love and live fully in their own truth, as radical as that simple act may be.
“Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the route of despair it causes, and an always loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
Please read this book.
Trigger/Content Warnings: racism, homophobia, genocide, suicide, death, medical trauma
You can find me on...
Youtube | Instagram | Twitter| TikTok
You can join our book club over on Patreon...
PBB Book Club
January 16, 2021
Reading this memoir was a mixed experience. There are many passages that are both beautifully written and convey an observation with a depth and bite. (Please see my numerous "highlights." I had more than 40, many are shared here.)
The read is quick and has a frenetic energy. In one of the earlier sections, the author prepares us for a read that will be raw, jumbled, and cutting. I imagine some of the chapters or paragraphs were drawn from a personal journal, one packed with ah-ha thoughts, random urges, and writing exercises to play with a word or its sounds. I think the first half is stronger, more clear.
The poetry of the language and its astuteness contrast with moments of what I call "high-falutin" ponderings, intellectual but very academic linkages that sometimes felt too esoteric. I recognize this is the author's voice and I'm glad to witness it. And those references mirror or create a sense of alienation and confusion that he describes in his life.
I certainly recommend this book.
The read is quick and has a frenetic energy. In one of the earlier sections, the author prepares us for a read that will be raw, jumbled, and cutting. I imagine some of the chapters or paragraphs were drawn from a personal journal, one packed with ah-ha thoughts, random urges, and writing exercises to play with a word or its sounds. I think the first half is stronger, more clear.
The poetry of the language and its astuteness contrast with moments of what I call "high-falutin" ponderings, intellectual but very academic linkages that sometimes felt too esoteric. I recognize this is the author's voice and I'm glad to witness it. And those references mirror or create a sense of alienation and confusion that he describes in his life.
I certainly recommend this book.
January 20, 2022
"Beside you, bound together in the same puny blaze, there is little to believe in besides the promise of our infinite luminosity. Dozing off, it occurs to me that if there is a corrective to the problem of my existential loneliness, it is this study of light."
This book left me absolutely speechless. Billy-Ray Belcourt's prose is something to cherish and behold for its stunning insight and illuminating wisdom. He writes so eloquently of continuing to find joy in life in the face of endless oppression and of resistance to the structures that seek to destroy and silence bipoc and/or queer bodies and voices. I know I will keep this volume on my shelf to read and reread for years to come.
This book left me absolutely speechless. Billy-Ray Belcourt's prose is something to cherish and behold for its stunning insight and illuminating wisdom. He writes so eloquently of continuing to find joy in life in the face of endless oppression and of resistance to the structures that seek to destroy and silence bipoc and/or queer bodies and voices. I know I will keep this volume on my shelf to read and reread for years to come.
August 7, 2021
This book says so many important, powerful, heartfelt things. This book is so important. I could barely get through it.
I don’t think I was smart enough for this book. I know i didn’t understand a lot of it and that upon a reread i would probably rate this book higher, but i think the layout of the book itself just didn’t match up to my brain and it wasn’t a good time for anyone.
I really appreciate this book and the author for all the things said in this book, it just really wasn’t for me this time.
I don’t think I was smart enough for this book. I know i didn’t understand a lot of it and that upon a reread i would probably rate this book higher, but i think the layout of the book itself just didn’t match up to my brain and it wasn’t a good time for anyone.
I really appreciate this book and the author for all the things said in this book, it just really wasn’t for me this time.
November 19, 2021
This book was phenomenal!
Belcourts writing gripped me. It's powerful, raw and extremely impactful.
Thank you so much ZGstories and Penguin Random House Canada for this gifted copy!
Belcourts writing gripped me. It's powerful, raw and extremely impactful.
Thank you so much ZGstories and Penguin Random House Canada for this gifted copy!
November 30, 2024
a little bit slippery at times, but the parts that hit really did. definitely bring your brain for this one
September 8, 2021
"At a reading another poet says my love of beauty is abundantly clear. To be compelled to write beautifully about unbeautiful matters is a minor miracle, but it's also declare that the world has been poured onto me and that anyone within earshot has the power to wield a word like a match."
•
🌿
" How silly that we measure the day but how much light fits inside it and not by the number of ordinary wounds the light lands on at have any given second."
•
🌿
" Something happened in those death-schools that made happiness into a rotted thing. I smile now and it is still a rotten smile. My teeth are historical solidities. My breath reeks of the loneliness of living under a bed. I confuse a man for a Prairie Sky. Up there, in him how I hope to have my sour breath drained out of me! At sunset NDN boys look red, drenched in biopower. Our fury is animalistic. Can a poem resemble animality? Can a poem be resonated with it? Fury is a revolutionary habit. I have faith in the emancipatory power of rage and little else."
🌿
•
Thoughts~
A magnificent memoir of queer sexuality and intimacy, of the impact of intergenerational trauma towards Indigenous peoples, of grief and survival.
This slim book is a powerhouse of intelligent, beautiful brutally honesty writing. I literally would have highlighted every page! Belcourt's honesty and ability to open up to the reader and completely encompass them is something not every writer can do. A beautiful mix of poetry and philosophy. Of Canada's racist history and colonialism, an exploration of queer sexuality, of trauma, grief, love, sex, and so much more. All through the eyes of a true poet. I feel like nothing I say here can do this book justice just go read it you wont regret it!
•
Thank You to the publisher for kindly sending me his book opinions are my own.
•
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
•
🌿
" How silly that we measure the day but how much light fits inside it and not by the number of ordinary wounds the light lands on at have any given second."
•
🌿
" Something happened in those death-schools that made happiness into a rotted thing. I smile now and it is still a rotten smile. My teeth are historical solidities. My breath reeks of the loneliness of living under a bed. I confuse a man for a Prairie Sky. Up there, in him how I hope to have my sour breath drained out of me! At sunset NDN boys look red, drenched in biopower. Our fury is animalistic. Can a poem resemble animality? Can a poem be resonated with it? Fury is a revolutionary habit. I have faith in the emancipatory power of rage and little else."
🌿
•
Thoughts~
A magnificent memoir of queer sexuality and intimacy, of the impact of intergenerational trauma towards Indigenous peoples, of grief and survival.
This slim book is a powerhouse of intelligent, beautiful brutally honesty writing. I literally would have highlighted every page! Belcourt's honesty and ability to open up to the reader and completely encompass them is something not every writer can do. A beautiful mix of poetry and philosophy. Of Canada's racist history and colonialism, an exploration of queer sexuality, of trauma, grief, love, sex, and so much more. All through the eyes of a true poet. I feel like nothing I say here can do this book justice just go read it you wont regret it!
•
Thank You to the publisher for kindly sending me his book opinions are my own.
•
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
June 4, 2022
"If I'm more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things? What I mean is that I don't subscribe to the fantasy of self-sovereignty, knowing fully that the past starts into my brief body like a knife. My hands are made up of a set of hands that puppeteer me. The hands aren't God's. They are History's. Its sores are mine."
For Belcourt, "Joy is an ethics of resistance", an ecology of feeling in a utopian, anti-institutional world wherein "we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature". The act of writing is an act of care gendered in opposition to the existential threat and political subterfuge of the neocolonial settler state. He's really well-read and it's clearly visible in this poetic, moving text. He marshalls other writers and thinkers in quite an organic fashion to scaffold his thought process where, as he states right at the start, a chief aesthetic concern is beauteous open, plural ambiguity.
It is a call against historical amnesia, where past practices mutate in the present to reenact precarity in the edged lives of marginalized peoples. It celebrates the multitudinous nature of NDNs and how they bear their "racialized burden". It's an indictment of those "impoverished readings" that aim to flatten, to simplify, the profundity of their quotidian lives. These tender, erudite essays ably explore the intersections of queerness and indigeneity in breathtaking ways. "Fatal Naming Rituals", against the "poverty of simplicity", and the titular essay, "an ode to gay fugitivity", were my favourites.
June 30, 2024
Want to know the true honest feelings of being a queer, young, Canadian NDN? It's all here. The societal ramifications are all out in the open in this cerebral collection of essays.
The problems that NDN people face daily, and for all of history, weigh heavy throughout this book. People need to hear this! Simple proclamations and government organizations look/sound good, but the underlying injustices still remain too prevalent.
There is despair in much of what is written here, but with obvious reasons. Yet young Billy-Ray has hope:
NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn't to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn't only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.
Being very openly queer allows us to hear detailed stories of how the NDN personality gets abused within this community. There is less safety as being NDN is still the one that gets 'conquered' too often.
Much of being a gay man in rural Canada is still the experience of being a stampede of horses in an enclosed cul-de-sac. The horses are invisible and translucent, but the pain of galloping through walls and furniture and fences is acute.
There are footnotes that lead to bibliographic references that I will further explore. This is a trademark of Billy-Ray's writing.
This book is on a completely different plane compared to other books. If you took a paragraph - no, just take a sentence - from this book and put it before me and I could tell you this author. His voice is distinct. His messages are impactful. And with his poetic thinking and vast vocabulary, I know I'll get even more from this book with any re-reading I can do.
Easy 5*
I look forward to reading anything/everything by Billy-Ray Belcourt.
The problems that NDN people face daily, and for all of history, weigh heavy throughout this book. People need to hear this! Simple proclamations and government organizations look/sound good, but the underlying injustices still remain too prevalent.
There is despair in much of what is written here, but with obvious reasons. Yet young Billy-Ray has hope:
NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn't to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn't only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.
Being very openly queer allows us to hear detailed stories of how the NDN personality gets abused within this community. There is less safety as being NDN is still the one that gets 'conquered' too often.
Much of being a gay man in rural Canada is still the experience of being a stampede of horses in an enclosed cul-de-sac. The horses are invisible and translucent, but the pain of galloping through walls and furniture and fences is acute.
There are footnotes that lead to bibliographic references that I will further explore. This is a trademark of Billy-Ray's writing.
This book is on a completely different plane compared to other books. If you took a paragraph - no, just take a sentence - from this book and put it before me and I could tell you this author. His voice is distinct. His messages are impactful. And with his poetic thinking and vast vocabulary, I know I'll get even more from this book with any re-reading I can do.
Easy 5*
I look forward to reading anything/everything by Billy-Ray Belcourt.
December 24, 2023
I wish I had the words to describe what Belcourt’s writing means to me, or the parts of myself that they help unlock as I read them. I feel so incredibly lucky to have picked up A Minor Chorus at the beginning of this year. His writing continues to change me — softening me in ways while sharpening me in others — and I can’t wait to see who I am when his next book comes out, and who I’ll become once I finish it.
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“Desire is a present-tense verb whirling into the future tense. Desire unfinishes us. Desire unfurnishes us: we are houses out of which it empties the furniture such that we can be peopled again.”
“When two bodies embrace they become a window. Gender is what's heard when wind touches glass. Remember: by the time sound reaches the flesh, innumerable bursts of light have already shot through us.”
“I'm ravenous for the future, but my longings are incompatible with the available versions of it. Bummer.”
“I begin to distrust everyday life, which is a conduit for grief's traversals; at the very least, I'm inclined to waste away weeks and months inside the literature of radicals for whom the present is a mis-take, a ruse, something to turn our backs on. If all we need is one overdetermined reason to suffer the mode of aliveness, perhaps art is mine. Perhaps if Billy-Ray Belcourt is a concept that shouts and dances and philosophizes I'll in the end have been scattered in thousands of pieces across the nation. Everywhere will be my graveyard. I'll have lived and died as that which is more than the sum of my body parts. What will matter isn't how many days I endured in the battleground of linear time, but what every fiber of me aspired to something more than the gift of mortality, more than the rusty category of the individual who had meaning spewing from his ears, something only fully and fleetingly realized in the hands and mouths and chests of those whom I encountered as a ghostly mark on the page.”
“NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn't to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn't only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
“I felt as though I was a part of an endangered species. I still do. This is how I've learned kinship with my kind: danger finds us, on our knees, sweaty with want. What makes a livable sexual life? Where does grief go when it is barred from institutions of justice? What do we do with our surplus rage and fear?”
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“Desire is a present-tense verb whirling into the future tense. Desire unfinishes us. Desire unfurnishes us: we are houses out of which it empties the furniture such that we can be peopled again.”
“When two bodies embrace they become a window. Gender is what's heard when wind touches glass. Remember: by the time sound reaches the flesh, innumerable bursts of light have already shot through us.”
“I'm ravenous for the future, but my longings are incompatible with the available versions of it. Bummer.”
“I begin to distrust everyday life, which is a conduit for grief's traversals; at the very least, I'm inclined to waste away weeks and months inside the literature of radicals for whom the present is a mis-take, a ruse, something to turn our backs on. If all we need is one overdetermined reason to suffer the mode of aliveness, perhaps art is mine. Perhaps if Billy-Ray Belcourt is a concept that shouts and dances and philosophizes I'll in the end have been scattered in thousands of pieces across the nation. Everywhere will be my graveyard. I'll have lived and died as that which is more than the sum of my body parts. What will matter isn't how many days I endured in the battleground of linear time, but what every fiber of me aspired to something more than the gift of mortality, more than the rusty category of the individual who had meaning spewing from his ears, something only fully and fleetingly realized in the hands and mouths and chests of those whom I encountered as a ghostly mark on the page.”
“NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn't to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn't only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
“I felt as though I was a part of an endangered species. I still do. This is how I've learned kinship with my kind: danger finds us, on our knees, sweaty with want. What makes a livable sexual life? Where does grief go when it is barred from institutions of justice? What do we do with our surplus rage and fear?”
August 11, 2020
It is right that BRB quotes Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine, and Roland Barthes throughout this essay collection because when I read this, it is their chorus that rings in my ears. It is the sound of songs that we are writing at all times, individually conceived, that scream harmoniously against colonialism and inequity. I felt like I had read this before, and I also felt like I would read it again, with someone else's name. If I have to face this persistent inevitability, I'm glad I get to do it this time with BRB.
On Moonlight:
"The film hadn't been widely distributed in the UK outside of London, so the theatre was full of queer and black students, all of whom were there not passively to consume a film but to be bodiless for ninety minutes, to have the unbearability of their longing momentarily suspended or supplanted with another's. (This is also the closest I've come to a definition of love.)" (27)
On loneliness:
"It sounds to me, she says, like you're plagued by a kind of dysphoria with the world" (35).
On unlivability:
"Suicide is routinely coated in negative affect, for it marks the loss of a life that could still be here. I, however, want to be able to talk about suicide as both devastating and as a kind of politically charged reaction to a world that makes living at the intersections of social loci untenable. Suicide prevention, then, can't simply be about keeping NDNs in the world if it remains saturated by that which dulls the sensation of aliveness for those who are queer and/or trans and/or two-spirit. History and its ongoingness drove us to a point in which abandoning the world elbowed its way to the front of the line of individual agency. Suicide prevention thus needs to entail a radical remaking of the world" (110-1).
On the response to Pulse:
"If statist and popular discourse can't mitigate our differential vulnerability to premature death, then it won't propagate our grievability" (125).
On Moonlight:
"The film hadn't been widely distributed in the UK outside of London, so the theatre was full of queer and black students, all of whom were there not passively to consume a film but to be bodiless for ninety minutes, to have the unbearability of their longing momentarily suspended or supplanted with another's. (This is also the closest I've come to a definition of love.)" (27)
On loneliness:
"It sounds to me, she says, like you're plagued by a kind of dysphoria with the world" (35).
On unlivability:
"Suicide is routinely coated in negative affect, for it marks the loss of a life that could still be here. I, however, want to be able to talk about suicide as both devastating and as a kind of politically charged reaction to a world that makes living at the intersections of social loci untenable. Suicide prevention, then, can't simply be about keeping NDNs in the world if it remains saturated by that which dulls the sensation of aliveness for those who are queer and/or trans and/or two-spirit. History and its ongoingness drove us to a point in which abandoning the world elbowed its way to the front of the line of individual agency. Suicide prevention thus needs to entail a radical remaking of the world" (110-1).
On the response to Pulse:
"If statist and popular discourse can't mitigate our differential vulnerability to premature death, then it won't propagate our grievability" (125).
September 30, 2020
“Hope: The settler state ≠ the world.” This collection is an evocative look at what it means to grow up and be a queer NDN living in the modern settler-colonial state of so-called Canada. Whether he is describing Grindr hook-ups or writing a letter to his nôkhom, this book is stunning and heartbreaking in its intimacy. While Belcourt’s theoretical and abstract prose style sometimes went over my head (this man does have a PhD, after all), I was struck by the beauty of his writing and thinking. My favourite essays were “An NDN Boyhood,” “Loneliness in the Age of Grindr,” and the haunting “Please Keep Loving: Reflections on Unlivability,” which reflected on the crisis of death by suicide among Indigenous and/or queer people. Even though this is a short read at only 160 pages, this collection is one best read slowly and carefully, and one that demands multiple readings to gain even more layers of meaning.
Read
August 13, 2020I listened to the audio of this book (thanks Libro.fm!) and although it is very well narrated, I do wish I’d picked up the physical book for this one. The author’s writing is beautiful and penetrating, and it was the sort of book that I would’ve benefited from being able to highlight and annotate. There was so much here and I know I only scratched the surface with my listen, which is why I have opted not to rate the book, although I do recommend it. The way Belcourt exposed the reality of Canada, a country which by and large has benefited from some pretty good ‘progressive PR’, was an especially important reminder for me as someone who lives in Australia. The author was unflinching in discussions of race, colonialism, queerness, violence, class, and more. And despite my own limitations in my engagement with the audio material, I still feel like I had a rich experience with this book.
January 7, 2022
absolutely beautiful. a poetic memoir, a beautiful tether perhaps to ocean vuong’s on earth we’re briefly gorgeous. whereas vuong writes of queerness as an immigrant displaced by colonialism between two homes, belcourt writes of queerness and decolonial love as an indigenous NDN, whose ancestral homes were and are violently and continually desecrated. what does it mean to live and love as queer NDN, to be othered by both one’s indigeneity and by whom one loves and fucks? belcourt beautifully strings together prose and poems to create a story of desire, of coloniality and decoloniality, of post structuralist thought, and of course of love: of love as grief and of love as joy and of love as “to love someone is firstly to confess: i am prepared to be devastated by you”
April 4, 2022
beautiful and heartbreaking and everything inbetween.
two lines i found in my notes:
if you hadn’t been my boyfriend my family wouldn’t have been able to see me in love.
in a late capitalist world in which individuality is a fetish, a mass object of desire, a political anthem. what remains queer about queerness is that it entices us to gamble with the i in the name of love, sex, friendship, art, and so forth.
two lines i found in my notes:
if you hadn’t been my boyfriend my family wouldn’t have been able to see me in love.
in a late capitalist world in which individuality is a fetish, a mass object of desire, a political anthem. what remains queer about queerness is that it entices us to gamble with the i in the name of love, sex, friendship, art, and so forth.
April 12, 2022
CWs: Genocide, violence against Native people. Violence against queer and trans people, racism, white-supremacy, homophobia, transphobia. State Violence broadly and in very specific instances. Mass shootings, murder. Dating and sexual violence.
Buckle up for a long love letter.
Belcourt does something that many writers have attempted. I expect gorgeous language from him always, but in this essay collection he shows by example hooks’ idea of theory as love as liberatory practice. In deep conversation with everything from dense academic sociology to YouTube poetry, BRC cites his sources and shepherds us through his analysis. Poetry and “Queer NDN” memoir as well as theoretical scaffolding, Grindr hook-ups, “Rez fag”gotry and mediocre boyfriends make this work surprising and complex; devastating, funny, and scathing evidence for the abolition of states and borders and rematriation of the land for indigenous communities. A long low cry of grief and simultaneous song for hope. The portion on the Pulse shootings was the best contribution to that discourse I have read yet, and I say that coming off the heels of reading Stanley’s effective addition in “atmospheres of violence.”
I have said before in other reviews when texts jump around in levels of literacy it can feel like multiple audiences are failed by the author refusing to choose one or two. Belcourt instead deftly speaks to many audiences, and clearly writes for his communities and himself, too. At times both honoring his colleagues and telling the university to fuck off. A bit of slutty fun too! Short but deeply complicated, a major accomplishment with something for everyone invested in liberation.
I’ll leave this with his own words:
“I’m reminded that freedom is itself a poetics, in that it seeks to reschematize time, space, and feeling in the direction of a future driven by an ethics of care, a relational practice of joy-making that is all of ours to enact” (128).”
Buckle up for a long love letter.
Belcourt does something that many writers have attempted. I expect gorgeous language from him always, but in this essay collection he shows by example hooks’ idea of theory as love as liberatory practice. In deep conversation with everything from dense academic sociology to YouTube poetry, BRC cites his sources and shepherds us through his analysis. Poetry and “Queer NDN” memoir as well as theoretical scaffolding, Grindr hook-ups, “Rez fag”gotry and mediocre boyfriends make this work surprising and complex; devastating, funny, and scathing evidence for the abolition of states and borders and rematriation of the land for indigenous communities. A long low cry of grief and simultaneous song for hope. The portion on the Pulse shootings was the best contribution to that discourse I have read yet, and I say that coming off the heels of reading Stanley’s effective addition in “atmospheres of violence.”
I have said before in other reviews when texts jump around in levels of literacy it can feel like multiple audiences are failed by the author refusing to choose one or two. Belcourt instead deftly speaks to many audiences, and clearly writes for his communities and himself, too. At times both honoring his colleagues and telling the university to fuck off. A bit of slutty fun too! Short but deeply complicated, a major accomplishment with something for everyone invested in liberation.
I’ll leave this with his own words:
“I’m reminded that freedom is itself a poetics, in that it seeks to reschematize time, space, and feeling in the direction of a future driven by an ethics of care, a relational practice of joy-making that is all of ours to enact” (128).”
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