Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

35 reviews

jessie_h's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

This is one of those essay collections that I will stick be thinking about for a while. There is a lot in this collection to unpack and it was so beautifully written. Belcourt leans on his poetic background to tell parts of his story via essays and poems which results in an emotional sucker punch of a memoir. He touches on topics like queerness, indigeneity, sexuality, queer/NDN joy and hope, and colonialism and does so with a vulnerability and honesty. I want to read more from this author in the future.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Homophobia, Suicide, Racism, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Grief, Sexual content, and Cultural appropriation

Minor: Violence, Hate crime, Gun violence, Murder, and Genocide

readingwithkaitlyn's review against another edition

emotional reflective slow-paced

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Sexual content, Racism, and Sexual assault

Moderate: Homophobia, Mental illness, Medical content, Grief, Death, Hate crime, Genocide, Colonisation, Gun violence, Murder, Blood, Toxic relationship, Medical trauma, Violence, Suicide attempt, and Police brutality

Minor: Infidelity, Rape, and Transphobia

strrygo's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

4.75

eviscerated 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Racism, Homophobia, and Hate crime

honeyvoiced's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Racism, and Sexual content

Minor: Mass/school shootings and Murder

ecn's review against another edition

Beautifully written and extremely flowery with such emotion and depth. I would have loved to listen to an audiobook version bc of this. The writing made it hard to follow at time because it was so flowery/intense but overall really wonderful 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia, Toxic relationship, Colonisation, Grief, Genocide, and Violence

maeverose's review against another edition

The writing is beautiful but yet again, I don’t understand it. I tried to keep reading because it’s short but I’m really not getting much from it and I feel dumb so… dnfing unfortunately.

Here are some quotes that I liked though:

“In the museum of political depression, in its tidied halls, books of the sort I want to write are banned, for they are against the world that birthed the writer. Books that emerge from a banned way of thinking, that pry open space to live otherwise in an uninhabitable world, lie open in hospitals and university dorms and community libraries but rarely in an institution governed by a pessimism of the future and a romance of the present.”

“Loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world.”

“I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life.”

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content

Moderate: Colonisation, Murder, Racism, and Police brutality

Minor: Homophobia and Infidelity

biab00's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

The governing thesis of my book would be that we aren’t noble people and therefore the fact of our living is something to be ashamed of. The question I’d ask: What might it look like for NDNs to refuse life in the wake of all that’s happened to us in a country in which we’re social experiments before all else?

I choose this quote to put in the review, but to be fair there are so many beautiful ones that it was hard to choose one. 
This book is so poetic and aaaaa I don't even have words to describe it. 
If you are a fan of Siken and Ocean Vuong I definitely recommend this one.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Homophobia, Colonisation, Murder, and Suicide

balfies's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

This lyrical, intricate memoir of queer Cree resistance made me weep. It also made me want to write poetry again.

Belcourt uses language to charter unnavigable oceans of queer and NDN experience within a capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. 

Feel like I'm a bug on a forest floor with my mouth open in nutrient rich dirt, there's so much going on in this. If you're a fan of Ocean Vuong or Ellen van Neerven this is a must.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Colonisation, Violence, Sexual content, Suicide, Racism, Murder, Grief, and Homophobia

moranguinhos's review against another edition

challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Transphobia, Colonisation, Gun violence, Murder, Police brutality, Homophobia, Grief, Hate crime, Racism, and Suicide

lilypad537's review against another edition

emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content

Moderate: Suicide, Colonisation, Racism, and Mass/school shootings