A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

I wanted to leave academia. This thought, which wasn’t so much intrusive as it was a response to an ongoing crisis of creativity, permeated my days.

rules. I was meant to be writing a dissertation, but what the sentences I’d been compiling in a document really added up to was a depression diary or a lover’s discourse.

By virtue of what we as marginalized peoples have survived, against the odds, we speak with at minimum a kind of political possibility. Our ancestors very literally survived genocide.

What a brutal worldview, I said to River, that everything has a kind of exploitable value, regardless of its personal toll.

They have a theory that reserves are fundamentally rebellious spaces by virtue of band members making joy in the face of carceral power.

No job seemed more perfect for me than a professor, I continued. But then I took a required seminar on professionalization and realized I may not even get hired. Who knows how long universities will be interested in recruiting Indigenous scholars? Reconciliation’s dying. The government said sorry and now everyone’s moving on. They’ll stop hiring us in the name of austerity. I paused. The political standard I hold myself to, I said, is that I have to exist in the world so as to refuse it. Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.

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.

Despite our idealism, despite our elegantly articulated methodologies of resistance, our research output would likely be called forth as evidence of a structural reckoning that wasn’t happening, not in any substantial sense. Universitie...

Hannah looked compassionately at me, as she had done many times before, a compassion that seemed to acknowledge that we were situated inside a structure that depleted more than it enlivened.

I often marveled at her ability to weather the difficulties of the neoliberalizing machine we had put our bodies inside of. She was an expert in seeming complacent while building a cooperative of rebellion in her seminar rooms. There, we could be more than data; we could, without shame, think up the contours of another university, another world.

Maybe what repels me about the dissertation is that it’s so individualistic. 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.

I convinced myself that the tattoo would amount to a small refusal of the ways colonial systems demanded my invisibility. I hadn’t yet understood that visibility begot its own kind of endangerment.

“Rusty” was the only word I had for the effect of having a body with wounds that aren’t recognized as wounds. Whether or not I could write my way back into an embodied space where repair was possible was a question I tasked myself with answering.

Why write a novel? There were the requisite answers: to think through questions that agitated thinkability—what is truth, what makes a livable life, who suffers and who injures, what is it to be in a world one didn’t choose, et cetera. On the contrary, the news coming out of North America as of late was, in a sense, an ongoing refutation of the novel, of anything that wasn’t direct action, that didn’t have to do with an immediate insurgency against those whose disregard for the livability of the oppressed amounted to a politics of socially engineered mass death. A novel, then, could be an indictment of the novelist, evidence of his inaction, his carelessness.

Nothing was inextricable from the trauma of the twentieth century, everything was bound up in colonial policy, in the processes of racialization and settlement, yet the topography was gorgeous, yet my people were still so full of life. I was a product of this paradox, and I had returned to study it.

under capitalism to live and work is to be against the population of which you’re a part.

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 between being alive and living furtively anymore? Sometimes I think there should be no art, no literature, under these conditions, that the street should be our blank page, revolution our magnum opus, love our oeuvre.

I was interested in how a singular voice, when heard from a sociological distance, implicated a larger population, in how the autobiographical was rarely an individualistic mode; all of its wonder and devastation was social. I knew I couldn’t articulate that interest in those terms. It would sound like nonsense to Michael, as so much of my academic writing and thinking would. I often questioned what use that language was when it alienated so many. 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.

Don’t we all tell ourselves that what’s inside us, our wanting, is annihilative to this degree? Don’t we all suspect our most volatile yearnings, when freed from the pits of our stomachs, could upend a world? What if desire were one of the few forces that troubles the idea of continuums, meaning we’re either entirely absorbed or wrecked by it? We all have it in us to destroy ourselves.

we got off on each other’s unavailabilities, more aroused by what we didn’t know than by the bits of data fed to us on the app as unerotic statistics.

For all he knew, I was a small town he could get lost inside of; for all I knew, he was a cliff I could hurl myself from.

Could a place have a soul? If so, what kind of damage would all those decades of child abductions have done to the soul of these communities, to those who benefited from these acts of genocide?

what’s fieldwork called when it’s for a novel? Me: group therapy? River: LOL River: so, the trip’s been . . . a lot?? Me: i’m not entirely certain i know what i’m doing anymore, but i believe there’s a story here, about how people are made to participate in the production of their own misery. Me: i guess that’s the definition of hegemony, isn’t it? Lmao River: yes, i do believe it is haha River: but just because an experience has definitional clarity doesn’t mean it’s thoroughly understood or represented. what it feels like to exist under that kind of pressure is so circumstantial. it is our job to translate our individual language of suffering.

Everywhere that didn’t hold inmates was adorned with reflective glass. The obvious function of this was to destroy the subject-object distinction, to make everyone into subject-objects of the carceral gaze.

The Remand Centre was Canada’s largest prison, and, like other infrastructures of legally sanctioned cruelty, it relied on the visual to authorize the inhumanity practiced within its walls.

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

I locked eyes with a guard stationed behind a desk at which a monitor displayed the hallway through which I was moving. What I sensed first was his contempt for me, an interloper, someone who cared for someone he punished. I troubled his fantasy of absolute punishment, humanized those he was paid to dehumanize. I was a sign of his guiltiness, something that made him alert to the blood on his hands.