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A Minor Chorus, by Billy-Ray Belcourt (2022 🇨🇦)

Premise: An Indigenous graduate student, jaded by the institutional game and the broader lack of effective action on Indigenous Reconciliation in Canada, returns to his home community to find the voice for the novel he knows he has within him.

Review: This is incredibly well-done and is thought-provoking in all the best, most challenging ways. Cont.

Superb. The eminently frustrating part of reading an author with such a way with words is not being able to convey your admiration in as worthy terms! The characters are searingly alive, yet subtle portraits of struggle, their stories, strains making up the minor chorus, are a mix of heartbreaking and hopeful, joyful, clear testaments, analogues of the realities of Indigenous experience in what is called Canada. 1/?

“...to insist on a form of gender that wasn't a natural disaster but rather a sprawling field where nothing was a coffin someone could fall into.“
DAMN. Again, the way Belcourt uses words leaves me stunned wordless in appreciation.

Belcourt, man. 👏🏻 He says such relatable things in such an eloquent and original fashion. You recognize it as a thought pulled from your brain, but know you'd never have the words to say it the way he does. 🤌🏻

This is an experimental novel / not really a novel by western conventional standards, as it is just as much academic theorizing as a narrative. On the sentence level I found a lot to love here, BRB is such an amazing wordsmith/poet. As a piece of fiction this is a meandering collection of conversations and throughts that ask questions and broach topics w/ no answers or resolutions. If you like that kind of thing + smart poetic writing, read this.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is an award-winning queer poet, memoirist & essayist from Driftpile Cree Nation in northern Alberta. His deeply philosophical experimental debut novel is about how individual lives are inevitably shaped by community and by larger social, political and historical forces. #LGBTQ #Indigenous #CanadianAuthor

After he left, when I was alone in a throbbing silence, I thought: Maybe I‘m predisposed to being a writer because I radiate emotion so openly.

I‘ve been trained to see the novel as this capacious and possibly dissident form for the articulation of social life. I‘ve been thinking: What if I wrote one myself? I‘d reach a larger audience. I could represent the lives of queer and Cree people without the constraints of scholarly norms.

Lyrical, poetic, & often philosophical, Belcourt‘s novel debut (he‘s a published poet) tells the story of a queer Indigenous graduate student who steps away from his PhD program to write a novel. This is a story about identity, belonging, whether or not any accommodation can be reached between a system/institution/tool of oppression & the people it oppresses & much more. Complex, compelling & definitely thought-provoking. Recommended.