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Also by Billy-Ray Belcourt This Wound Is a World NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field
Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard
I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. —Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Built into the mechanics of love is the possibility of mismanagement, for we can never adequately anticipate how our relation to a love object might shift or morph over time. Love has a tendency to shatter; it is prone to weakening and to running amok without notice.
Warsan Shire, that I’m “terrifying and strange and beautiful, someone not everyone knows how to love.”1
kisahkihitin,
Translation from Cree: I love you
I have to tell my story properly, and to do this I need to guide you through a cacophony of things that could break a heart without negating the sociological import of our enactments of care.
In our very corporeality we are thus a container for the terror of the past and the beauty that it can’t in the end negate.
This is my job: to report from the scene of an undead past colliding with a still-to-be-determined future.
we too were key architects of the world of care that brought and is still bringing us into being, against the odds, in opposition to the insufficiencies of gender that colonialism yields.
Perhaps I write now, in the mode of autobiography, to stimulate the conditions that might call up that opacity, the fragile and engrossing density of memory. In this way, I’m an archaeologist of the disappeared.
nôhkom
Cree for grandmother
I’m a future relic.
To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.
Sometimes I’m a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.
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.
Lee Edelman: “The queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves.”3
Fucking won’t rescue me from my longing.
A beast of burden is a beast nonetheless.
Soon, there will be a sofa everywhere my shame grows: everywhere.
I expand with sexual possibility. Which is another way of saying I’m incredibly horny.
D is the first man I fall in love with. I write about him all the time, even when I’m not writing about him.
On my knees, before him, he taught me how to long as though longing alone could propel me into the future. Until then, intimacy had been a lost country. I was becoming vivid to the world. Oh, how I wanted to remember everything before it happened. Oh, how tightly I shut my eyes.
Has anyone ever managed not to mold the body into an archive of their own degradation?
making my body feel too much like a body, a feeling I’ve wanted to evade my entire life.
Han Kang: “I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.”
Stauffer gets at something like this with her concept of “ethical loneliness,” which for her is “the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities.”
I thus see it as my job to lay bare the catastrophic conditions that meet those who are wrenched into a world of loneliness where there are no bodies, just burning houses built from scratch.4
If nothing else, a sustained loneliness thrusts one into a moral position: to be emptiness animated or personified is to be a two-legged warning sign.
To be a poet one can’t use language so recklessly, I argued to no one. If you love me, you will shoot me now. Before the poem begins. This is what I heard as a kind of refrain, repeated by the audience too. I nonetheless knew that those three words were a whirlwind of white speech, wrecked and reckless. People in and of themselves aren’t poems. Remember this.
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.
Men left their dirty worlds in my bed. They are always there, especially when the men aren’t.
GENDER 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.
Jesus christ
The anecdotal is a hiding place. Join me.
I’m ravenous for the future, but my longings are incompatible with the available versions of it. Bummer.
I’m someone who worships at the altar of the post-structuralist notion that to be with others is to be undone by them, which is a state of being regularly intuited as love,
in order to architect a livable world with someone, a loved one, with you, I have to undergo a process of self-abolition, to be in a position of existential risk.
With care, one grows a collective skin: “the fact of being touched by what we touch.”6 Care detonates that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance. We, however, are readied to blend into the unknowable.
All my most volatile and consuming yearnings could be summarized as a desire for an unstructured life, one without an organizational system other than something like untidiness. I don’t wish to be subject to the wrath of any clock, including the biological kind. (The clock of utopia is one I adhere to but adhering to the clock of utopia is akin to sleeping on a couch constructed from love poems, a fate I will always choose.)
That we haven’t sufficed in the project of making being in the world an arousing and joyous thing for all is a cause for alarm.
There’s a way to talk about and represent suicide that’s not pathologizing. The webseries Feral follows the frayed lives of a host of twenty-something queer artists in Memphis, Tennessee, and does just this.
in january 2017, two girls, 12, carried out a suicide pact on the wapekeka first nation. what is suicide but the act of opening up to the sky? what is suicide but wanting to live more than once? yesterday a cloud fell onto me and i never felt more at home. sometimes i cry in indian and it sounds like i am speaking in english. don’t open your eyes. pretend that everything is a bird and no one is hungry for what they can’t have
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.
Hurled with the right amount of intensity, words floor us. There are words that lay me flat on the floor of the world. One of these words is “simple.”
How will we ever look white people in the eyes and not periodically see our mangled bodies? This isn’t hyperbole.
I didn’t yearn for anything but privacy, because it is an embarrassment to be a wound in public.
Christopher Soto, a self-described “queer latinx punk poet,” penned a beautiful poem called “All the Dead Boys Look Like Me” that articulates a method of thinking about Pulse that ruptures the optic of terror that deracialized and desexualized the deaths in Orlando.
They hate our freedom, so only freedom matters. What determines our lives as NDNs and/or queers are pain and trauma, love and hope. Death looms at all scales, individual to planetary. But there is also an ecology of creativity, one indivisible from our futurity. In the face of an antagonistic relation to the past, let us start anew in the haven of a world in the image of our radical art.
SAVAGE GODS MEMOIR BY PAUL KINGSNORTH
