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.

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

And beside River was an almost invisible sentence that sounded to us like the rallying cry of our generation: “Write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property.” They took a picture of the quote to post to Instagram later.

So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

We laughed at how tweetable my despair was.

I’ve given up so much to be a student; I’ve been in school for all my adult life. I’ve forgone dating and hobbies and artistic growth to read post-structural theory.

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.

For a while, this felt like an extension of my work, mostly because my sadness and horniness had become inextricably entangled. Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither what I wrote nor whom I met at all hours of the night made me feel much else other than dim and indistinct.

In my early twenty-something mind, the act was an homage to Barthes’s famous declaration that language is a kind of skin. I interpreted the aphorism literally, wanted to turn my body into a book of sad poems.

“Rusty” was the only word I had for the effect of having a body with wounds that aren’t recognized as wounds.

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.

What I knew about being queer and Indigenous and in my twenties was desperation.

Maybe this was why I wanted to write a novel: to be reminded that not even my puny life with its puny preoccupations and miseries was mine alone to shoulder.

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.

“Demons” was her word. My phrase was “the psychic life of dispossession.”

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.

I felt obligated not to the recent past, the one I had just abandoned, but instead to a fantasy from another life. The fantasy that this novel or whatever it turned out to be would make me into a different person. Somewhere in the future I would think back on this muggy walk in the town I grew up in and avoided as much as possible since then, and I would feel gratitude. Already I felt myself resisting the possibility of any other outcome.

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.

Maybe early on I determined I didn’t have to live, Michael said, in a plangent tone, I just had to be alive.

They were boys who knew only how to fail at boyhood, I thought.

Michael’s story reminded me of Judith Butler’s observation that we sometimes choose to stay attached to what injures us rather than gamble with what it might feel like to be in the world without the attachment. The psychological investment is so large it seems counterintuitive to relinquish it, regardless of its consequences. We don’t want to lose too much, to be left with so little.

I had to learn, however, that a man at work could be mistaken for so much when in actuality he meant very little. It meant he was counting down the hours and minutes and seconds until he was unobligated. A bed wasn’t always an extension of the future. Two nameless men rattling around in the dark sometimes just made each other dimmer and dimmer.

What I made was derivative, but it shimmered nonetheless. I faced each new man with the same unwavering belief that he would wrench me from my past and save me from a life of rotten solitude.

Mostly I wasn’t taught to say no, mostly my body was a question for which any man could be an answer, a solution, dead air to float inside of.

The world was easier to say yes to, he went on.

Love, he realized, can be oppressive simply because it illuminates everything one has turned their back on.

To end up in love and safe and in a happy marriage—I would have to get to the other side of a great deal of suffering first. That felt as inevitable to me as literature.

I adored him with a desperation that has become not just foreign to me but dangerous.

I needed to learn how to live and love without placing an embargo on creativity.

All morning I thought about Toni Morrison—an ongoing activity since her death.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

What was also clear was that this kind of defense of property, even that which didn’t legally belong to anyone, was bound up with the larger culture of amnesia that made it so a white woman could come upon a Cree man standing in front of what’s left of a residential school and think she was in danger.

It made me pause, because what was nostalgia if not a kind of hunger?

With this remark, I felt seen in a way I hadn’t all week. Her structural analysis, however terse, reminded me that my academic training enabled me to see in a way that my rural upbringing hadn’t.

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.

My theory of aesthetics is that if you’re queer you’re predisposed to the condition of overwriting because when you come into your identity after a time of closetedness excess becomes a way of plotting yourself in a different story than the one you inherited. It’s literally gay to be a bad writer!

There’s so much language inside me. I feel like I’m going to explode with it, like light.

What seems to be resonant with everyone I interviewed is the belief that we have to tell our stories, that storytelling will redeem us somehow, make us less lonely.

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

Humans are pitiable because we are unfree from the scripts inside another’s head; but we rebel.

I felt that I couldn’t waste the last days of August. Maybe I could still fall in love, I thought.

When I was growing up, everyone around me was in a relationship. Some of the couples in my family had been together for decades. No one was single, and if they were, they were treated with circumspection. Loneliness was a curse, something to be avoided at all costs. I’ve always felt desperate to be in love, even as a closeted teenager, especially as a closeted teenager.

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?

There were many kinds of legalized violence, practiced by people every day. There were many kinds of arenas for punishment and surveillance, and we lived inside them our whole lives. The prison was where all of these tactics and arenas existed in their most monstrous forms.

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

I want a family, is what I’m saying. But I can’t do that until I know I won’t leave them.

Was I happy? That evening I sat down at my desk to finally begin writing the novel I hoped would answer the question.