Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - A History of My Brief Body

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

6 reviews

drraytay's review against another edition

I have never felt so stupid while reading a book in my life. The first half was easy enough to understand but the second half ate me alive. There were large chunks of text so academic I was having flashbacks to learning how to read medical journals. If I was a Scientologist, it would take me YEARS to clear enough words to fully understand this book. I am not exaggerating.

The author casually uses words like aleatory and elegiac. Ontological is used seven times. There’s an essay in this book in which the author rejects simplicity in writing and, let me tell you, he has succeeded. If you can decipher the word soup of these two passages, I give you a standing ovation.

“There is no ontological difference between the dumpster and me. We are mimetically liminal, both purged of ethical matter. To be young and in love in a dumpster, in the constitutive outside of the present, is a manifestation of melancholia.”

“Utopia isn't a feeling but rather the banished shape of an ur-feeling. It is in one valence submerged in an ethics of privacy. Invisibilized, utopia is against a sovereignty of the senses. In a more politically rousing valence, it is incommensurable with publicness, being instead an unownable thing that barks back at the interpellative shout of property.”

My spell check didn’t even understand three words in that last quote. Google barely got that I was searching for the meaning of ur-feeling and instead gave me articles about understanding your feelings.

I am by no means shitting on this book. I think many of the essays are powerful and vital to understanding the queer Native experience. I’m just not smart enough to understand it all.

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readingwithkaitlyn's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

3.0

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nibs's review

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.5

Belcourt's writing is so beautiful & precise & eloquent. I felt & learnt a lot about his experiences as an NDN queer man.
I wrote down so many quotes because the writing is so beautiful. Learning about the specifics of Canadian colonialism (and thinking about how that compares to Australian colonialism), being in a body the state wants consumed. But also so much content on loneliness and queerness in a broader sense of community, collectivity and vulnerability as well, and how that intersects and interacts with his NDNness.

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pawpaw's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.0

To call Belcourt's memoir "inspiring" or "emotional" feels like an insult; the level of his writing is indescribably rich, refreshing, complex, and needed. I would quote some of his most poignant lines, but that'd ruin the experience of coming across them naturally.

Don't get me wrong: sometimes I rolled my eyes because of how much he used the word "ontological," and he can come off as pretentious, but so be it. With everything that he's been forced to deal with, with everything he's achieved? He's allowed to come off as a bit arrogant at times.

If you're triggered by suicide, sexual assault, murder, and the institutionalized destruction of Indigenous peoples, please tread carefully. That being said, this book is vital, and well beyond worth it.

Please remember that there are many other Indigenous and queer voices. If you choose to listen to this one, don't stop there.

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jhatrick's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad fast-paced

4.0

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offbrandclubsoda's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

2.75

I am hesitant to assign a number value to this book or even to leave a review, because I suspect that my experience is more reflective of my reading level than the actual quality of the book. I found the prose challenging and had to reread some passages several times but still couldn’t grasp the meaning. Nonetheless, the book was beautiful and lovely at times and very painful at others, and, as a Queer, disabled person, I am glad I read it. I found that listening to the audiobook helped me follow a bit better. One of my favourite quotes from the book:

“if I try to compose anything but sad poems, I fear it’ll be akin to a widower trying to convince others that he has found happiness again by wearing a T-shirt that says HAPPINESS” (p. 94)

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