A History of My Brief Body

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Here, and in my poetry, you’re always looking up at the sky, longing for the future. In order to remember you as a practitioner of the utopian, I need to honor the intimacies of the unwritten. This book, then, is as much an ode to you as it is to the world-to-come. In the world-to-come, your voice reminds those in your orbit that we can stop running, that we’ve already stopped running.

Love has a tendency to shatter; it is prone to weakening and to running amok without notice. Perhaps, ironically, this is how it anchors us to a world, how it makes us want to give everything to the project of living well with others. Without love or the object into which we hoard parts of ourselves, we might go “crazy,” lose our bearings. Although distance and time have pried open a barely translatable gap between you and me, we still find something worth tending to in the history of us that is unavailable elsewhere.

What I can do is love as though it will rupture the singularity of Canadian cruelty (irrespective of whether this is a sociological possibility). Herein lies my poetic truth.

Having inherited your philosophy of love, which is also a theory of freedom, nôhkom, I can write myself into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race that stalks me as it does you and our kin. It’s likely that you might feel confused at times by my style of writing, its dexterity, its refusal of easiness, but I know that you’ll sense the affection bubbling up inside each word. That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere.

With rebellion in mind, I aim them at a tomorrow free from the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere. The alphabet, grammar, and syntax—these are my mass-produced emotional cargo. My body is the vehicle for transport, which means my heart is an engine. This aspect of my embodiment shadows me like an open secret. With which concepts, then, might we instruct one another how to be more here than we already are? To Allow others to comprehend that we are deserving of and that we already practice this expansive here-ness?

To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.

These pages don’t eschew sadness and sorrow; in fact, many of them traffic in those hard feelings. 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. I’m up against decades and perhaps centuries of a literary history that extracted from our declarations of pain evidence of our inability to locate joy at the center of our desire to exist. With you, I can rally against this parasitic way of reading, this time-worn liberal sensibility. Together we can detonate the glass walls of Canadian habit that entrap us all in compressed forms of subjectivity.

There is a host of violent acts done as a symptom of these performances of racialized masculinity. This is a well-documented facet of NDN life: the trauma of colonialism erupts in the minds and bodies of men, who then bombard the lives of women and girls, two-spirit peoples, and queers. Today, we are beholden to the work of feminist mothering and fathering to repair what has been done and to bring about boys and men who answer the call of democratizing the labor of care.

In retrospect, this is likely why Jesse and I rarely wanted to leave when nôhkom came to retrieve us after work. This is what I want my home to make possible, the shelter for brown life I want to prop up, wherever I end up.

Like most parents, he inspects me through the rosy filter of unconditional love, but he doesn’t have enough material to develop a complex idea of the intricacies of Billy-Ray Belcourt the adult, who is different from Billy-Ray Belcourt the child. I don’t mourn this lack of expectation, this absence of narcissism, which is the narcissism of wanting to see oneself in one’s child, to have them bloom into another you. On the contrary, without a mirror held in front of me at all times, I felt without skepticism the platitude that anything was possible.

Regardless, I forgive them just as I forgive naive versions of myself. I choose instead to appreciate the vastness with which they think of my future self, however tied it is to a fiction over which I don’t hold sovereignty. I can’t blame my kin for forgetting that the form for my life’s emotional content isn’t, as one might expect, a family but an entire world, a wilderness ruled by unknowing inside which I’m a future relic. What binds us is the knowledge that it can be devastating to discover that a loved one has forfeited everything to that which you’ll never fully see for yourself. To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.

Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.

In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to hold. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to be held.

As a teen, I devoured dystopian and queer novels to put to use the existential deferral that narrative elicits. Teens don’t read for beauty, but to practice the art of disappearance. Today, I read and write for beauty, and live so as to disappear.

If I’m a writer, it’s because to be an NDN is to be a concept that speaks. I live in the world of ideas because it’s the world of my people. If I’m a writer, it’s because to be queer is to worship loss—and what is a book but a losing game?

We are children of war for whom the earth is a collaborative work of art. We fold the sky into little flowers and keep none to ourselves.

Maybe what I want is to be violent in an epistemic sense; the blood will be not on my hands but on my words. This is why I’m a poet before all else.

I’m a body of knowledge, not one of chemical compounds. Which is to say it is the fate of NDNs to live as ideas do. It is on the rez that one can hear words speak as though in a chorus. To tear the page is to tear our world apart. What shame to be a sentence on its knees! The day I obtained my driver’s license, I followed a cumulus cloud through a maze of dirt roads until it evaporated. Forty minutes. That was all it took. I bore witness. No one asked this of me, but I wanted to keep watch of the dying everywhere, so I could figure out how to care for a bleeding sentence.

White empathy razes everything in its path. Since I can remember, the world hasn’t lasted longer than a single day before it was flushed down the toilet. I take in the news south of the border. I take in the news of the border, the ongoingness of its terror. Knives flower from the soles of my feet. Even my tiptoeing is a kind of violence. I don’t shed a tear about this. I cry about other matters: that so much of being alive in the Americas is about playing dead. To go about the drudgery of the day, I have to at least marginally play dead to white anger and white sovereignty and white hunger and white forgiveness and white innocence. If one is alive to all these rabid emotions all the time, one experiences the world as though it were nothing but TV static. It’s a sedative, so indifference is no armor. That my heart beats loudly doesn’t immunize me from the static or lessen its grip on my well-being. I understand this to be my Canadian inheritance.

What is chronic loneliness if not the desire to exist less and less, to deplete little by little?

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.

If love is world-building, then heartbreak is an implosion.

Slowly, I’m pouring myself into the floorboards of you. Soon, I will be an abandoned house, there will be nothing left of me but scaffolding.

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.

What do we owe the machine of living, which gushes its venom at the innocent? By innocent, I don’t mean those unscathed by politics, which is an impossible position to occupy. Purity is a misleading thing. With this troubled word—“innocence”—I want to nod to those in a brawl with the world as a consequence of what they signify in the arena of national sentiment. How any of us survive a world always against us, against what we signify and make imaginable, is a sociologically significant act. What I know is that it’s unfair that NDNs are called on to make do in a world we neither wanted nor built ourselves. I have called this bind precarity. It’s also the ground zero for suicidal ideation.

This governmental speak, this action-less language, does little to ameliorate the conditions that elevate suicide to a state of emergency. “Emergency” is a key word here, for it indexes a set of circumstances that call for an immediate end to the “rolling nightmare.” “Emergency” is a noun that yanks us from the normality of daily life, but its invocation also promises to grab us by the hand and lead us to safety. The addition of “state of” here is also important insofar as it butts up against “emergency”; it stretches the word out, which denotes its protracted nature, its velocity and scale. The emergency isn’t one emergency but a pileup of emergencies. On the other hand, the state of emergency can be understood as a singular emergency; it is the emergency of Canadian history.

Ocean Vuong: “I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.”2 How to be alive outside the affective register of the state, inside something less structurally sound, where to be lonely isn’t to ruinate?

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.

There are ways of thickening words with meaning so as to injure, of making words into evidence of our injurability. 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.”

All my writing is against the poverty of simplicity. All my writing is against the trauma of description.

We haven’t had time to hang our grief up to dry, for the mourning is never-ending and the erosion and interrogation of NDN livability is built into Canadian political life.

What do we do with our surplus rage and fear?

There are words I can’t speak, however. They line the walls of my chest, pulling me downward, compounding the earth’s cruel appetite.

NDNs everywhere in this country, particularly those in my generation, have been indelibly altered by this ruling. I wonder: How will we ever look white people in the eyes and not periodically see our mangled bodies? This isn’t hyperbole. We have Canadian citizenship, of course, and as citizens we will remember how to participate in the world, but we are still the hunted. The hunted speak of joy, and joy beckons the hunted.

Wherever there is a disavowal of something like brown queer joy, though, there is also its undefeatable excess.

Vuong and Soto write not away from but into traumas mundane and spectacular. By installing the poem with an elegiac force that refutes pacification, that pairs grief and rage, they actualize a style of writing that is against doom—“Ocean. Ocean, / get up”—and one that is bent on illuminating the art of living on in the midst of an illogical and all-too-logical terror—”He sounded like he loved me.” To write is to live on. The page rescues us from a longing for finality. Grief doesn’t wholly assail our imaginations. The creative drive, the artistic impulse, is above all a thunderous yes to life.