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A review by katie_greenwinginmymouth
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This is one of those revelatory books that defies genre to convey ideas so potent, so crucial, it has your brain doing flips. It combines theory and poetry and memoir into its own unique form that uses transformative language to describe and think a way out for the colonised who are “savaged by language, by the history of language.”
I really want to acknowledge the openness with which Billy-Ray Belcourt writes and his generosity in sharing the details of his life in raw detail. He does this with care and an understanding that, as we all know, the personal is deeply political. He talks about the world at large as a “museum of political depression” and of how he learned to walk upside down on the ceiling of the museum, changing his point of view to ‘see breaks in the clouds.’ He posits joy and beauty as political acts of resistance against the brutality of settler colonialism.
He describes how colonialism creates patterns of behaviour borne out of trauma that cut along gendered lines. How violence is a symptom of racialized masculinity and how colonialism created a modality of gender that produced men who self-destruct. He talks about the particularities of his life as a queer NDN person and how his body is perceived and exoticised via the medium of hookup apps.
He describes care as disruptive - “With care one grows a collective skin” in contrast to the rampant individualism of high capitalist society. Surrendering yourself to care and to be cared for is also an ambivalent act - it plunges us into a zone where everything shape-shifts, where everything is a potential site of severance and constitution. “...always, with care, we perform high-stakes processes of world-making - in the hope that, in our dying days, we might feel freer.”
This book is transformative, moving and beautifully written. I want to read and reread it over and over again. most importantly I want to recommend it to everyone.
I really want to acknowledge the openness with which Billy-Ray Belcourt writes and his generosity in sharing the details of his life in raw detail. He does this with care and an understanding that, as we all know, the personal is deeply political. He talks about the world at large as a “museum of political depression” and of how he learned to walk upside down on the ceiling of the museum, changing his point of view to ‘see breaks in the clouds.’ He posits joy and beauty as political acts of resistance against the brutality of settler colonialism.
He describes how colonialism creates patterns of behaviour borne out of trauma that cut along gendered lines. How violence is a symptom of racialized masculinity and how colonialism created a modality of gender that produced men who self-destruct. He talks about the particularities of his life as a queer NDN person and how his body is perceived and exoticised via the medium of hookup apps.
He describes care as disruptive - “With care one grows a collective skin” in contrast to the rampant individualism of high capitalist society. Surrendering yourself to care and to be cared for is also an ambivalent act - it plunges us into a zone where everything shape-shifts, where everything is a potential site of severance and constitution. “...always, with care, we perform high-stakes processes of world-making - in the hope that, in our dying days, we might feel freer.”
This book is transformative, moving and beautifully written. I want to read and reread it over and over again. most importantly I want to recommend it to everyone.