What does it imply to jot down a novel in a world outlined by the violence of colonization and white supremacy—a world that may’t be saved with mere phrases? What does it imply to wish to write a novel in any respect, particularly as you doubt your self and acknowledge the contradictions in your needs and intentions? And what does it imply to be a queer Indigenous man residing by these questions and their penalties?
These are the quandaries on the coronary heart of Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt’s extraordinary debut novel. A Minor Chorus is a slim, sparse e-book with a panoramic construction, a genre-defying mix of fiction, crucial idea and oral historical past that holds seemingly infinite layers of tales in its mere 176 pages.
Belcourt’s unnamed narrator is a 20-something queer Cree man fed up with the overt and insidious racism of the tutorial realm. He abandons his dissertation, leaves his Ph.D. program and returns to his hometown in northern Alberta, Canada, to jot down a novel. While there, he speaks with varied folks from his previous: an outdated classmate, a closeted homosexual elder and his great-aunt. Between these conversations, he recounts childhood reminiscences of his cousin, one other Cree man who’s simply been arrested on a drug cost.
It’s arduous to explain simply how shifting and weird this novel is. It is extremely inside, generally dizzyingly so. The narrator is a scholar who consistently analyzes his personal experiences, philosophizing and interrogating, however he’s painfully conscious of the bounds of tutorial thought. This pressure sizzles and spits on the heart of the e-book, and whereas the narrator by no means resolves that pressure, he begins to dissect the inflexible binaries between residing on this planet and fascinated about it, creating expertise and feeling it.
Belcourt crafts sentences like solely a poet can, each exact and shimmering. He writes with ferocious depth and wonder about Grindr hookups, queer Indigenous friendship, police violence, the open wounds of Canada’s residential colleges, loneliness and longing. The narrator often invokes the work of different poets and writers—Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Carl Phillips—and in doing so, firmly locations himself in a lineage of battle and resistance, creative rigor and poetic thought.
A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the value of writing even because it asserts its personal worth. It is a slippery, scholarly work, rooted within the layered complexity of Indigenous life. Belcourt has established himself as one of Canada’s main modern poets. Now, together with his first work of fiction, he cements his place as each author and world builder, his phrases creating portals from the previous and current into the queer Indigenous future.
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