A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Their dress was structured unconventionally, defying geometrical norm, and because of this it told a story of an interesting inner world.

So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

In the midst of tragedy, we wake up differently and go to bed differently.

I haven’t even been writing lately; I’ve been binge-watching all sixteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.

The lushness of their prose felt to me like an extension of their sexual identities. With beautiful ideas, they could reclaim their bodies from the history of language as a collective weapon.

The political standard I hold myself to, I said, is that I have to exist in the world so as to refuse it.

The problem: universities are institutions inside which one could feel as if they were doing radical work when in actuality that radical work was being coopted and diminished and transformed into “diversity” and “equity” data.

Sometimes I think I have to steal myself away, I said.

was like a character in a Virginia Woolf novel: There must be another life.

I write because I’ve read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I’ve loved and been loved. I want to find out what “we” or “us” I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

You have to protect your art, nourish yourself.

For a while, this felt like an extension of my work, mostly because my sadness and horniness had become inextricably entangled.

What I wanted from sex I wanted from writing: to be more fully inside my body without encumbrance, to experience embodiment as something other than a catch-22. My body felt so thoroughly overdetermined by forces outside of me, yet it was the source of my livability, it literally coursed with life even as life was something I was being deprived of. Love, art, these were small portals, they allowed for transcendence. Maybe there was a kind of danger in how ravenous I was for that which placed me beside the present. It was too late in the day to fully pursue this epiphany to its logical end, especially after the conversation with Hannah that afternoon, so I opened Grindr.

In my early twenty-something mind, the act was an homage to Barthes’s famous declaration that language is a kind of skin.

was late and I was lonely and I was in rehearsal for another kind of life, so I drew the blinds and unbuttoned his jeans. It was all over in thirty minutes.

asked what he thought I should include, and he said, “Forgetting who you are.”

Even though I knew they’d be asleep, I texted River: sometimes when I have sex it feels like I’m a photograph a man takes off the wall and puts back somewhere else and for the rest of the night I feel a little crooked lmao.

My hypothesis on the morning of August 6 was this: a novel is a gust of life from another world.

“Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down,” wrote poet Richard Siken. I’m a writer. I experiment with language and therefore with the unknown world. I’m a writer; I’m unoriginal in my suffering! Join me in the crowded streets of dull possibility!

How to write sentences that go tick, tick, tick?

Since then, I had always thought that if I were to write a book I would write this down. So, here, have it.

Some days my will to write a novel outweighed my will to live. That I can distinguish between the two is a coping mechanism.

I had sex with a man in the basement of a parking garage. I said it was the most alive I had ever been because I felt so close to death. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you,” the man said before he stripped naked.

It was a cliché that suddenly seemed new, shocking, piercing.

She shivered in the late summer air as she confronted history’s vastness. All they’ve done is try to kill us, she said.

They felt as if they were being stalked and ignored at the same time.

She could go on and on, she said, enumerating every injustice, every racist act that befell them, but there would be no language left inside her if she did. And what good would that do her? It was any old weekday and we were in the middle of a genocide.

No one, however, lived differently because of this, not even us, the captive and killable. Or was it that we’d never stopped running, that we couldn’t distinguish bet...

Sometimes I think there should be no art, no literature, under these conditions, that the street should be our blank page, revolut...

“Demons” was her word. My phrase was “the psychic life of dispossession.”

His mom and dad wanted to experiment with what was possible, as all eighteen-year-olds do, and so they fell in love with other people, built new families, fabricated new lives, and mostly, unfortunately, grew indifferent to and distant from Jack.

Jack, I thought, was evidence of how permanent a wound a misplaced desire or a misfired arrow could leave behind. To be parentless—what an ordinary misfortune.

Sometimes she blamed the irony that those closest to you slip into blind spots inside of which they can realize an entire life.

At the end of the day, wasn’t he just like everyone else? I thought. Wasn’t he just a young man who thought he was on time’s bad side, who couldn’t pause to figure out what being in the world could look and feel like when separated from a sense of endangerment?

She loved him as if that were all one needed to make a good life.

It was something like a haunting, as if past, present, and future suddenly merged inside a long minute, as if he walked straight out of a nightmare of hers.

When she would chastise him, it would sometimes be without conviction, because questions of ethics are complicated here.

Clarity wounds. Clarity intrudes. Some boys are as fleeting as the memory of rainwater during a wet spring.

I thought about something Ocean Vuong has articulated, which is that the hunted convert violence into a mundanity, into background noise. It becomes, against our will, but as a matter of survival, something as evident but suppressible as the presence of light.

As she walked cautiously to the curb, it occurred to me that I’d just been appointed the elegist of the family; it would be my job to lament, to infuse past lives with beauty and meaning, before a congregation of mourners who looked like me. Suddenly I became the family’s writer and, in this, its historian, its coroner.

He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.

But just as we don’t get to choose who we love, as the saying goes, I don’t think we get to choose which kinds of language envelop us like another layer of skin.

believe every person is a repository of a community’s memories, I said. A town speaks when its people

Through people like you, I want to summon an honest emotional voice.

My theoretical framework was that place governs the practice of self-fabrication.

All faces are still-drying paintings, I thought, when glimpsed from both ends of a long decade.

than decisively, crossing one leg over the other. I was, however, of the opinion that a cliché could be an anchor, that it could bind us to the world, to one another.

They were boys who knew only how to fail at boyhood, I thought. It was like an ethnographic spectacle.

He was still someone’s child, and children didn’t get to plunge into their solitude.

The emotional intensity was enough to last a lifetime. Is that bizarre? Michael asked. That such a brief experience of love was too much?