A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

I’d been experiencing life as a problem of form: it is difficult to live in a world that corrodes freedom.

“Write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property.”

words to live by

Our friendship felt metaphysically ordained.

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

We laughed at how tweetable my despair was.

Reconciliation’s dying. The government said sorry and now everyone’s moving on.

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 heteropa...

My writing is so embodied, so full of longing, I tend toward the poetic all the time, there’s a kind of music I’m trying to generate, I think. What if I’ve been working in the wrong mode this entire time?

I don’t think theory and prose, or whatever you want to call it, are that distant. They both ask us to refuse a romance of the present.

I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.

I remember, for example, one session in which Hannah led us into the river valley to write little poems for and with the trees in the style of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. The point was to make use of a writing practice that was in concert with the earth, that wasn’t about the singular “I” we’d been elsewhere instructed to pledge allegiance to the way one does a nation. She was teaching us to be citizens of the air and water and sunlight.

that there are few to no methodologies that can cure loneliness or whatever you want to call what it feels like to be besieged by structural forces that assail our joy.

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.

I felt that errant wanting in my chest. My anxieties weren’t just about writing but living; the two had become enmeshed.

I was going to don a new “I” like shiny armor. Maybe because I was a hopeless romantic, maybe because I was prone to melodrama, this “I” seemed less despairing, more lyrical.

writing into the void, hurling myself at myself.

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

Literally yeah

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.

!!!!!!!!

I didn’t care if my woundedness was unsexy. All of this was ugly work.

Maybe I’m predisposed to being a writer because I radiate emotion so openly.

I decided to reread James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to try to relive the awe I felt when I first read it; I’d written for hours after putting the book down.

bumped up to priority to-read

I was a boy not long ago. I did as boys did, which means I climbed a tree on a weekday evening in search of a new fable. Which means I ran through the boreal forest openmouthed in search of the edge of the world. I was so small I could be drowned out by the most unimposing gusts of wind.

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 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?

I decided that if I were a word it would be “grieve,” and it would be sprawled across my forehead, as both a demand and a self-description.

I ran ahead of my body, into bodilessness, without shoes on.

We endure with quaking certainty; the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.

it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn’t time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one’s life, to assert one’s enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up?

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.

A poetic image, after all, can be a mistake that, through repetition, through luck, acquires the ability to say, So what? not out of laziness or disaffection but in defiance to the sovereignty of the “I,” a reiteration of how art exceeds individual consciousness.

So often the creative impulse is an impulse to build something that, in the end, its maker can’t destroy, something that outgrows intention.

!!!

This fact made me want to write another book about how under capitalism to live and work is to be against the population of which you’re a part.

Coexistence to be available in 2025

rewired the mechanics of time such that some years, months, weeks, days, seconds became elongated, more metaphysically intrusive than others, garnering so much psychic weight that she couldn’t trust chronology or linearity anymore.

To evoke an “I” is an elegiac act; it’s to kick-start a losing game. Perhaps there’s a kind of freedom in this, to be rid of the demands of personality and subjectivity and given over to a grammar of intimacy that’s plural, undeniably worldly, against loneliness.

There’s always the risk of disappearing into someone else, of risking one’s humanity by chasing after a myth for so long you become engulfed by it, turn mythical.

Jack, she said, once more, letting it embalm us like a secret. It was an unanswered beckoning, the opposite of an incantation, a warning, something like, Run!

suddenly there was an oppressive kind of quiet, one so simultaneously thick and porous they shared it, as if there were suddenly no distinction between where she was and where he was, as if their combined terror violated scientific law.

The hairs on my arms rose, as if to say, Enough. To whom or what does the body plead?

It was any old weekday and we were in the middle of a genocide.

Clarity wounds. Clarity intrudes.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We are questions first and foremost, then children. Which means we are half-truths; we are where the boundary of the real intersects with that of the unreal.

What was I if not a disobedient blur?

He pressed his head against the passenger-side window and began to sob. I looked on uneasily, because he hadn’t seen me; I had turned his grief and anger public and it isn’t always easy to forgive someone for doing so.

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.

gutpunched

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.

I believe every person is a repository of a community’s memories, I said.

If the sociological imagination was available to all of us, what kinds of truth would surface?

I was, however, of the opinion that a cliché could be an anchor, that it could bind us to the world, to one another.

I could feel my language flickering, aching.