A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

I faced each new man with the same unwavering belief that he would wrench me from my past and save me from a life of rotten solitude.

Unlike a sentence, my body didn’t end; I was an elastic form inside which men actualized their inner consciousnesses. When you think of me, picture a glistening wreck, something of a piece with the subliminal. The thing about the sublime is that at some point you have to look away.

They dated straightaway, as they were two middle-class white kids for whom dating was what granted them access to a semi-stable identity and, with it, social legibility.

They knew themselves by way of what others desired about them.

Everyone accommodated their simple joy, its indistinct racket, he said. They continued to step in rhythm; there were no missteps, no bumps.

For a long time, it seemed preordained; they were proof that fate didn’t always leave people stranded.

I can’t remember what I said word-for-word, he said finally, straightening his back, but what I can recall is that I said we’d inhaled each other’s breath for five years, that it was a thrill I didn’t want to ever get used to.

I was stunned. Graham evidenced a poetic instinct I hadn’t expected he was capable of.

Graham said it was like the wedding unearthed an unfixable misalignment; their “I dos” came from different places. Hers was something of a relinquishment of possibility, which he never could have guessed at. Love, he realized, can be oppressive simply because it illuminates everything one has turned their back on.

He was sure she would plunge into her sadness and solitude and build the most pathetic life at their depths before she’d divorce him, before she’d betray everything the social contract of marriage stands for.

Indeed, much of my adolescence was spent estimating how much or little of myself I would have to render invisible in order not to gravely expose my otherness.

To end up in love and safe and in a happy marriage—I would have to get to the other side of a great deal of suffering first. That felt as inevitable to me as literature.

At the very least, it could do what sex did for me, give access to what Lispector called “whatever is not word,” what I believed to be another way of saying “the opposite of the present.”

Let’s say the novel makes only one provocation it can’t actualize: Prove to me with certainty the present is all there is.

This was in my early days of queer dating when any man could become synonymous with the future.

I needed to learn how to live and love without placing an embargo on creativity.

was struggling to unlearn the habits of my rural upbringing: to be at peace with not knowing what was where, with only talking to a few people any given week.

It was proof I could externalize some aspect of my internal world, a task I brought a deep seriousness to.

He’d just been fired for smoking weed on the job and he’d just been broken up with for not being emotionally available.

with the figure of the mother in my dissertation: “A mother is a library seconds before the tornado strikes,” I wrote.

It’d be years before I severed myself from the trope of gay catastrophe; I still found myself falling back into that way of thinking now and then.

Some nights my pseudo-motherlessness seemed to me a more animal form of freedom; other nights I felt corroded by it, like a sculpture long severed from the fingers of its maker.

What this severance from a traditional notion of motherhood opened up to me was a closeness with a queerer notion of motherhood.

I was mothered by biological kin as well as by friends and lovers and strangers and myself. This was what I suppose the writer Maggie Nelson means by the “democratization of the maternal function,” a more egalitarian distribution of the labor of caretaking, less a gendered burden and more

Mothering is about being with others in a context in which mutual flouris...

What my mother hadn’t said made up a non-autobiography that haunted

Rachel Cusk wrote: “That’s writing for you: when you make room for passion, it doesn’t turn up.” What I’m saying is, that’s writing for you: when you make room for your mother, she doesn’t turn up. What does: a brief scene, a little pathos, the ringing earth.

that my feeling of motherlessness had also to do with history. My mother was at the whim of forces she couldn’t always see or name.

Do you think you should tell her that you forgive her?

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t want it to open up old wounds, though perhaps they’ve never closed. I feel like I’ve done enough self-care and inner work that I’m no longer burdened by what goes undisclosed.

remembered reading Auden, who said that poetry makes nothing happen.

“Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid.”

decided that I didn’t want to conceal my fluttering body anymore. My future sentences would ache. I picked up my notebook and wrote: Can one write like a community? Where the narrative voice isn’t individual but plural? Is this the first-person plural?

In other words, they wanted to reign over meaning, to force the genre of women to engender the same thing without end: the end of women.

often ignored him, she continued, which didn’t bother him. He didn’t want me to engage anyway, he only wanted to be heard.

A matter of receptivity, I thought. The fact of being vulnerable to another’s language, regardless of if we respond or not.

Her structural analysis, however terse, reminded me that my academic training enabled me to see in a way that my rural upbringing hadn’t. We saw what we saw in the same light. In this was a kind of intimacy.

As I said, he brought a lot of turbulence into my life, and it was so persistent and normalized I became numb to it.

He never contributed to conversation.

When he was out of work, he spiraled into a depression. It challenged his sense of his own manhood.

I watched him from a distance after that, she continued. I would notice the small terrors he brought into my life, but I was unable to confront him about them.

pulled me out of whatever fantasy I had about the man he could become, the man my love could transform him into.

He knew that I wasn’t just voting against his preferred candidate, but against the person he had become.

As for me, she went on, I feel free.

I was reminded of my own experience of freeing myself from the looming threat of toxic masculinity. Emotional unavailability and domination were the two primary modes available to me; the men around me rarely deviated from those scripts. A boy stepped into one or both of them the way one stepped into a house, with a kind of quiet triumph. But I was predisposed to another way of being, one rooted in joy and care, one that didn’t bulldoze those around me. Robin was right, I thought, one had to pursue what was otherwise. The result was indeed a kind of freedom.

than to write things down, which is to say I had time to write three versions of this novel and I would still have plenty of room for human pleasure and displeasure.

It was loosely about grief as a critical position, as a way of making claim to the world.

I’m worried it means I won’t be able to bring the novel to life, that maybe it can’t be a novel, that there’s too much at stake.

This drive to identify my non-normativity always confused me. Because I was consumed by hobbies and school, I wasn’t thinking about whom or what I desired. For a while, I was squished inside an identity others imagined for me based on fear and stereotypes. As an adult, I had to dig myself out of myself, had to make myself into a ruin from which something new could grow.

After all, Lena was the kind of mother who, like Donna, like Mary, would architect a world with whatever materials were available in which their children’s joy could be infinite.