A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

seemed unavoidable that I now wanted my writing not to advance an institutional body of knowledge, as is the case with a dissertation, but 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.

The lushness of their prose felt to me like an extension of their sexual identities. With beautiful ideas, they could reclaim their bodies from the history of language as a collective weapon.

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.

There had been days when anything looked like a counter to being a graduate student: news of a flower blooming once every twelve years, a man’s pulsating body beside mine. Today, even: the sunlight pirouetting around me. The difference was that right now my hope was neither hypothetical nor temporary. I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.

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.

On my couch, surrounded by wobbly towers of books about loneliness and state-sanctioned oppression, we talked for an hour about how I thought the body was a human invention, a ruse, a story that’s easy to digest. I told him about how it had been easy to pretend the sounds of the brutal earth weren’t mounting to a crescendo around me. I didn’t care if my woundedness was unsexy. All of this was ugly work.

a writer because I radiate emotion so openly. What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of? Even though I knew they’d be asleep, I texted River: sometimes when I have sex it feels like I’m a photograph a man takes off the wall and puts back somewhere else and for the rest of the night I feel a little crooked lmao.

“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.

To write a novel about what one might lose, I supposed, was to live inside the sphere of nostalgia, to become a living monument, which, in the end, is a kind of poetic misfortune.

Some days my will to write a novel outweighed my will to live. That I can distinguish between the two is a coping mechanism.

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.

which is to say unsentimental, with my suffering. So often the creative impulse is an impulse to build something that, in the end, its maker can’t destroy, something that outgrows intention. Isn’t a town also indestructible in this sense? Don’t we submit to it, doesn’t it already sculpt us, before we even begin to think it was we who built it, we who dug our hands into the clay of the ordinary and made something permanent and irrepressible?

Sometimes she blamed the irony that those closest to you slip into blind spots inside of which they can realize an entire life.

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.

My theoretical framework was that place governs the practice of self-fabrication. Even when we aren’t alert to the force of history bearing down upon us, it’s there all the same. Everyone from northern Alberta was a historian of it.

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.

Who wouldn’t burn themselves in the drama of self-documentation? How could anyone hold such a jagged memory up to the light and not wince?

Rachel Cusk wrote: “That’s writing for you: when you make room for passion, it doesn’t turn up.” What I’m saying is, that’s writing for you: when you make room for your mother, she doesn’t turn up. What does: a brief scene, a little pathos, the ringing earth.

If there were a transcript of the entirety of my human experience to date, how much of it, I wondered, would be underlined by readers? It was possible none of it would be, a gentler outcome than the reverse. How cruel, to live a life unhinged from meaninglessness, I thought, as I watched through the windshield as my mother pressed her face into her husband’s chest.

Today, language was the sky falling onto me. Language was also something that hadn’t been invented yet.

ameliorate

Did the interiority of their sexuality make their senses of selfhood feel more legible, rigid?

Humans are pitiable because we are unfree from the scripts inside another’s head; but we rebel. Was I endeavoring to hear the sounds made when someone broke through a story they hadn’t written for themselves? At that moment I couldn’t think of anything else worth doing.

A mother’s love—I needed to fight for and defend it as much as I would any of my political values. Perhaps making room for my mother’s love, I thought, was a politics in and of itself.

want to be better for her. I want her to see that her love made a difference.

Works cited: Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject, Carl Phillips’s Reconnaissance, Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival,” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, Kogonada’s film Columbus, Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom.