By Meredith Grace Thompson
Content warning: coarse language, violence, racism, homophobia
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first book of prose, defined in tiny print on a beautifully collaged cover as memoir, is magnanimous. A continuation of the strong voice established in his previous poetic works, A History of My Brief Body is a series of lingering essays, each bookmarking an event, time, idea, or moment of becoming in the weaving together of poetry, theory, social commentary, and phenomenological embodiment. Belcourt offers up an ontology of queerness, Indigeneity, and what it is to be a self inside of a body or a body inside of a self, pressing up against a world which intentionally pushes you away. The actualities of the ecosystem of racism in which all Canadians swim come starkly to light in scenes where Belcourt’s speaker comes face to face with public health systems—“Hospitals have always been enemy territory. My body, too brown to be innocent, enflames the nurses’ racialized curiosity”—as well as sexual fetishization of queer Indigenous men. Looking at the echoing and yet constantly present nature of colonialism and the deeply ingrained culture of white, cis, heteronormative supremacy, Belcourt questions and illuminates systems of dominance and oppression from both the macro and hyper-individualistic levels.
Belcourt’s narrator is a fictionalized or perhaps intellectualized or perhaps hyper-realistic version of himself. He is expansive in his discourse. Looking at the colonial constructions of gender and enforced normative performance of a European masculinity, Belcourt examines the ways in which white patriarchal ideas of domination have colonized Indigenous lives, ricocheting throughout Indigenous communities and oppressing those within further, as men taught violent masculinity “bombard the lives of women and girls, two-spirit peoples, and queers.” Using fragmentation and philosophy rather than fiction, Belcourt recounts the lived rather than invented nature of a life in poetry, balanced precariously within a theoretical framework: “as a poet I couldn’t break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object.” But “no one runs to theory unless there is a dirt road in [them]” and theory can often be our greatest and most poetic escape.
Belcourt writes the philosophy I have always wanted to read. Connected to the intimacies of his own life and yet expansive as great ideas necessitate, Belcourt is one of the strongest voices in contemporary Canadian literature. A History of My Brief Body is a perfect example of a hybrid in-between-ness. This book, free from constraints of plot or of narrative construct, luxuriates in a sort of scholarly sharing. It is writing that could not possibly be other without damaging itself—if only slightly—answering the question of what exactly the purpose of writing is in the time of filmmaking. I feel lifted up by this book. Of course, it is easy to fall in love with a philosopher who expands your mind and makes you feel individually seen and spoken to. Billy-Ray Belcourt is such a philosopher.