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.

instead to invent an exit route, to make something out of nothing, to prop up a landmark for a place that was nowhere and everywhere.

If I admired my own abundances, my own little rebellions against subjugation, I reasoned, I could learn to be as alive as possible.

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.

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 was less interested in having sex with him and more interested in his knowledge, which I suppose is also a kind of eroticism.

it occurred to me that I wanted to examine how we live under conditions of duress, both visible and invisible.

Death itself wasn’t nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time. We endure with quaking certainty; the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.

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?

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.