What does it imply to write 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 wishes 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 Refrain is a slim, sparse ebook with a wide ranging construction, a genre-defying mix of fiction, important concept 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 educational realm. He abandons his dissertation, leaves his Ph.D. program and returns to his hometown in northern Alberta, Canada, to write down a novel. Whereas there, he speaks with numerous individuals from his previous: an previous classmate, a closeted homosexual elder and his great-aunt. Between these conversations, he recounts childhood recollections of his cousin, one other Cree man who’s simply been arrested on a drug cost.
It’s laborious to explain simply how shifting and strange this novel is. It’s intensely inside, generally dizzyingly so. The narrator is a scholar who always analyzes his personal experiences, philosophizing and interrogating, however he’s painfully conscious of the boundaries of educational thought. This stress sizzles and spits on the heart of the ebook, and whereas the narrator by no means resolves that stress, 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, every one exact and shimmering. He writes with ferocious depth and sweetness about Grindr hookups, queer Indigenous friendship, police violence, the open wounds of Canada’s residential faculties, loneliness and longing. The narrator incessantly 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, inventive rigor and poetic thought.
A Minor Refrain is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the price of writing even because it asserts its personal worth. It’s a slippery, scholarly work, rooted within the layered complexity of Indigenous life. Belcourt has established himself as one in all Canada’s main modern poets. Now, along 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.
