A History of My Brief Body

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

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.