A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

measures the only survivors of which would be the upper classes. Secondary school curriculum was being demodernized, teachers and nurses were being fired, health care was being privatized, amenities and resources were being deregulated, climate change was being accelerated.

From the outside, from a leftist standpoint, it appeared as if it were a marker of political action to endorse the cheapening of one’s quality of life, that it was normal and a generational birthright to vote on the side of structurally induced hardship.

A punishing government was a burden they could choose, one that would keep them from installing too much optimism in what a future could reap. From year to year things changed very little, one’s threats to existence remained the same, and so liveliness coalesced as the negation of change, of difference. A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.

The former was regularly aimed at others, the non-normative, namely queers and immigrants, who were coded as squatters on the private property of the everyday.

I wanted to tell him that his son likely spent every morning inside that silence reinventing the concept of joy, that his hands were likely very callused because of it, but I couldn’t.

How suddenly a boy can transform from a loved one to an unknowable music, I thought.

I had almost forgotten that all my experiences added up to a normal life.

I’ve always said that it’d still be August in my body when I died.

probability, I wanted to be in love as long as humanly possible. What is a human possibility? I wondered. Love? I had few reasons to believe that that was the case, but I believed it all the same.

I couldn’t live my life as if I were on the run all the time. Perhaps I fetishized love because it represented a stability I rarely had. A fetish is a fetish because of its aura of unattainability. What if part of me refused love as much as I ached for it? What if I wanted to destroy myself as much as I wanted to be saved?

I thought about my mother again. I wondered how the barbecue had gone. I hadn’t been inside her house in a long time, I realized. She had refurnished my childhood bedroom when I moved out, converted it into a guest room. I wasn’t sentimental about my childhood, but I did think at the time that this was a strange decision. In a way, I’d been expunged from the space. Maybe it was necessary, a small way of reckoning with our uneasy relationship, putting it to rest or starting over. The memory didn’t summon anger or sadness in me, as I too had tried to move on.

Into the stale apartment air, I said, Mom, I forgive you.

Perhaps making room for my mother’s love, I thought, was a politics in and of itself.

I started to think, oddly enough, about how novels frame human existence and sensation so narrowly that a character can appear to be trapped in a structure without agency.

but in my mind it seemed to underscore the way normal people, writers that is, play the part of a security guard or a correctional officer under the auspices of literature.

It is all of our duty, I thought, to rebel against the beautification of violence. I recognized this straightaway as the raison d’être of the countercultural novel.

Jack was seated behind a translucent barrier, which called to mind James Baldwin: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”

architectural flourishes inside and outside the center. To my mind, it demonstrated how much more prison was about hiding people away rather than it was about justice.