A History of My Brief Body

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

The political climate in which art is made will determine whether poetry is a unit of accusation or revelation. I’m writing a literature of blame, for the record.

one of the most vital modalities of decolonial life is that of remaining unaddressable to a settler public that feasts on our misery.

writing a book seems incompatibl...

a white woman begged me not to kill myself. What this meant is that I hadn’t yet died in a bewildering way. Then and now, I was and am a statistical and sociological feat. What she saw where my body should have been was an outline of a body crowded with indicators of my expiration date.

The NDN condition: being in but not held by the present; belonging to a past that endures and a future that moves backward. The problem is that the present is in the air, is now, which is always an empty hand opening and closing inside us, like a heartbeat. 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.

Don’t touch my skin, it is a text in the making.

Love can make even the smallest of spaces feel too large. How?

One way my doomedness manifests is in the sense that I need to hoard a lifetime of living in just a few decades.

To be a poet one can’t use language so recklessly, I argued to no one.

When I write, it feels as though I’m clawing at a ceiling lined with dandelions. The spores and dirt shower onto me, their velocity diametrically opposed to my writer’s block.

The work of art festers inside me.

Their unnumbered days and weeks and months had become mine (see BLAME).

I couldn’t fuck my way out of white supremacy.

ground. If I’m in love with neither another person (an Other) nor the world, what then is the object of my affection which wrenches me into the kind of rhetorical frenzy Barthes sketches out? The answer is obvious: I’m a lover of the prefigurative, the makeshift, the missing.

my lovelessness is a symptom of the settler’s bastardized possibility.

If I refrain from writing, no one can misunderstand me (Kierkegaard inverted).

None of your crying will unsick or unkill anyone.

“This is a body made from all of the missing and gone faces. It is at once lovely and horrible and there are so many.”

Some of us are barred from the terrain of attraction, our faces too ringed with caution tape.

The thing that makes men manly is that they force everyone to be witness to their vengeance. I want no part in this.

I’m someone who worships at the altar of the post-structuralist notion that to be with others is to be undone by them,

To me, this means that 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.

I block you on Facebook. Delete you on Snapchat. I begin the labor of sitting inside the silence that pulsates in your wake.

My world had become so tiny you filled it entirely. Is that so wrong?

I’m re-reading a book of poems in which your name appears a number of times. Put off by how utterly mine I make this, I shelve the book.

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.

NDN literature: to treat language brutally while still writing beautifully.

I have lived. (The most dishonest sentence I have written.)

Judith Butler asks a colossal question that tailgates me everywhere I go: “What does it mean to require what breaks you?”6 She is curious about the indeterminacies of being in the world, how that which constitutes selfhood—being in concert with others—also has the power to loosen our grip on a shared reality.

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. There is a twinned horizontality and verticality to queerness that pulls at the self in various directions.

Desirous of a beautiful life I get out of bed, but it’s Monday and I’m in the throes of a genocide.

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.

Feral asks us to refuse to be entranced by easy fixes for the sicknesses of capitalist modernity, the corrective to which is an overthrowing of normal life.

In one sense, suicide emerges as a political response to structurally manufactured sorrow where joy has been shut out of everyday life for a long time. The manufactured sorrows include inadequate and improperly constructed housing, overcrowding, state mismanagement of funds, ecological harms, intergenerational trauma, and so on.

What do we owe the machine of living, which gushes its venom at the innocent?

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.

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.

“don’t open your eyes,” then, is an ethical call, a note of care and instruction, that has to do with the possibility of another way of looking, one that might illuminate a future in which the clouds aren’t more hospitable to NDNs than Canada is.

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?

words such as “emergency,” “crisis,” and “epidemic” sensationalize rather than humanize those who exit the world.

Simplicity is an affect that motors the cultural imaginary of whiteness, an interpretive strategy. Simplicity hides a flurry of forms of social and political violence that rip the lives of the marginalized from the freedom of a good life, from a life emptied of historically contingent

Simplicity belongs only to those who live and write unfettered by all that ravages the world.

The title alone steals breath from the bodies of those who are roped into the unlivable and racialized terrain of simplicity—it was later modified by axing “simple” after writers like Gwen Benaway wrote incisive threads on Twitter critiquing the profile.

There is nothing fundamentally poisonous about “simplicity,” but it can be bathed in a tradition of wordliness or perhaps “languageness,” to use a term

Macdonald was, of course, an architect of genocide. An ethno-nationalist, his stint as Canada’s first prime minister unleashed famine in the prairies (to make way for westward expansion), inaugurated the time-altering residential school system, and saw ruthless retaliation to NDN resistance

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.

We, NDNs, are given over to that brutal intimacy, against our will, as abstraction and ideality, not as ourselves, never fully material, never allowed to inhabit our messy materiality.

the slow violence of being made to live as ideas do. One need not look too far to glimpse the carelessness with which others treat concepts

We can’t look away. The blood is there, before us. Each day, it spills anew.

Death, no matter how much it decorates our lives and this planet, regardless of the vast territory it stakes out in all of us, is always a badlands, a devastated and devastating environment in which no one wants to linger.