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

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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balfies's review against another edition

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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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moranguinhos's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

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lilypad537's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

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h0llyr00th's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

Dark but beautiful. Ruminations on existing as NDN, as queer, as other in what's known as Canada. Every content warning.

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robotswithpersonality's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful

A galvanizing series of essays that blur the line between memoir and think piece. The author is palpably a poet, in that I struggled to adapt to his gorgeously complex phrasing, but found it all the more affecting and informative for not coddling the reader.
It is heartening to see Belcourt push towards a future of creative joy, while consistently elucidating all the ways in which the Canada of the past and present hampers the possibility of such a life experience for Indigenous people.
Discussions of life as a queer man of colour likewise indicates the striving for love and the social and structural impediments to finding it.
It is enjoyable to see a writer frequently touch on a sentence or two written by others, you get this sense of collaborative inspiration, of sharing ideas, when otherwise I worry that writing is isolating, in the search for a 'pure' inspiration not to be intermingled with words that might be claimed by another.
I think it's because I usually see it in research/journalistic non-fiction, seeing citation/quotes in a memoir provides hope of a full life, reading and discussion between fellow writers.
As with other non-fiction personal works written by Black, Indigenous and people of colour I have encountered as a white reader, I am reminded that reading alone will not suffice. Action must be taken, so that the liveable future so many minorities have long been fighting for and creating art to encourage into existence may become a reality, via the restructure of systems, (as well as hearts and minds), long incapable and seemingly uncaring, of meeting all citizens' needs.

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wetdirtreads's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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