A review by shelleyanderson4127
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

challenging dark reflective medium-paced

3.25

 

What can you say about a collection of essays that cite Judith Butler or Foucault or Barthes in one sentence, and in the next describe hooking up for anonymous sex on Grindr? 

Billy-Ray Belcourt, of the Driftpile Cree Nation, is an award-winning poet and queer NDN activist. I found these essays deeply insightful, heart breakingly honest, and obtuse in turn. He writes about the brutality of settler-colonialism, about desire, and about the search for joy and liberation in a country that denies queers and NDNs the right to live on their own terms--and, too often, the right to live at all.

The last three essays, especially "To Hang Our Grief Up to Dry", are very, very powerful, as they deal with the subject of suicide. Some First Nation communities in Canada have experienced an epidemic of youth suicides. "What determines ours lives as NDNs and/or queers are pain and trauma, love and hope. Death looms at all scales, individual to planetary. But there is also an ecology of creativity, one indivisible from our futurity. In the face of an antagonistic relation to the past, let us start anew in the haven of a world in the image of our radical art."