Bodied by History: Ghosting in Favour of a World-to-Come
- Megan Misztal
- Apr 11, 2021
- 3 min read
“Can a poem resemble animality? Can a poem be resonant with it? Fury is a revolutionary habit. I have faith in the emancipatory power of rage and little else. In my fury, I’m differently gendered. I want to be a bad girl. I want to be a bad girl so there’s a musicality to my rebellion. To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world. To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world. A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization. No one will look at me adoringly and because of this I will be freed from the sovereign’s clenched fist. The antithesis of the bad girl is the man who self destructs. She savages the codes of gender; he is made rancid by them. To be a bad girl is to be alive against the odds, a screeching question. Let me be a bad girl”.
- Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (2020)
I have met Billy-Ray Belcourt on a total of two different occasions. Both times were at the Ottawa Writers Festival. He signed my copy of This Wound is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field. Some day, I hope to meet him again, perhaps with a copy of A History of My Brief Body in tow.
Belcourt is a queer writer from the Driftpile Cree nation. He won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018 for his debut poetry collection. He is currently a professor at UBC. For more: pick up this book.
If you haven’t read Belcourt before, you should know that the text asks of you. It gives you so much more than you can understand, and the meaning is always there, but asks that you surrender yourself to it.
If his earlier collections gesture to a utopia mapped upon the geographies of queer Indigenous bodies, and grapple with expunging the conditions of the “not dead Native”; this book elucidates the heart and theory behind those poems and more. This memoir is an ode.
The story begins with relational identity. Who am I if not of you?
It’s not your typical memoir, though, for it does not (merely) chronicle the events of Belcourt’s life. Most of the memoirs I’ve read previously ask: Who are you and why are you the way you are?
Belcourt’s memoir asks: “With which concepts…might we instruct one another in how to be more here than we already are?” And “How do a people who have been subject to some of the country’s most programmatic and legal forms of oppression continue to gather on the side of life? Under what furtive conditions do they enact care against the embargo on care that is Canada?” (9)
There's a lot there. Even more in what follows. Too much to unpack in a single post lol.
I won’t give much more away. You should know that the book is beautiful. It is one of the most inspiring fusions of poetry and theory that I’ve ever read. It was humbling and unsettling. Undeniably hard to read.
The book writes toward an invisible future. Something yet to be articulated. A utopia, a world towards which indigenous people may aim themselves. A future created in the image of radical art.
Read if:
You’re a fan of Belcourt’s poetry (or other essays!)
You’re interested in history, philosophy, poetry, theory, colonial Canada, race, and/or sexuality
Genre-bending (and gender-bending, for that matter) intrigue you
You have any interest at all in the relationship between art and politics
You’re a die hard word nerd
In-text citations give you a heart on
You’re a fiend for references and allusions
Just read it, I would recommend this to almost anyone
Don’t read if:
You’re looking for a ‘beach’ read
Salacious, telescopic memoirs are your bread and butter
Reading stuff you might not otherwise know about just frustrates you
You are super staunchly shored up in either conservatism or good ol’ Canadian liberal sensibility (though both would probably be good audiences for this book)
I would almost recommend reading his first two collections before picking this up, but a part of me also thinks that it would have been helpful to read this in advance of his poetry. If anyone has tried this, please let me know because I’d love to hear your experience.
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