A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Our ancestors very literally survived genocide. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to process the magnitude of that. One of the most enduring problems of my twenties, I continued, is that few, especially those in power, allow that knowledge to alter how they act.

Something I began thinking about in your class is that writing is fundamentally a social act. 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.

My own anxieties about the novel had to do with my hunch that English is much too compromised a language to engender a portrait of Indigenous life that isn’t subsumed by colonial fantasies of our disrepair. Little in my arsenal seemed spacious enough to combat a centuries-old reading practice that made Indigenous peoples out to be bombs. How instead to make a novel into a bomb? How to plant a novel in the moral infrastructure of a corrupt nation? How to write sentences that go tick, tick, tick?

He chuckled. I chuckled too, not because I was amused, but because I was still experimenting with how to be human.

I would return to my hometown and go about the practice of not dying, I thought. My liveliness would be artful.

I 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. My view of the city was still that of a visitor’s, of someone who’d soon leave.

What I think I want is to see her in her totality. I want to know her side of the story without feeling personally implicated. I don’t want to be too vulnerable to what she has to say.

Mothers

These men demanded a certain formlessness from women, demanded that they exist as containers for their anguish.

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.

It is all of our duty, I thought, to rebel against the beautification of violence.