Jenny Ferguson Reviews Billy-Ray Belcourt's A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir

Billy-Ray Belcourt. A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir. Hamish Hamilton Canada. $25.00, 192 pp., ISBN: 9780735237780

A History of My Brief Body is undoubtedly a memoir. It’s named as such, and therefore claims that genre as the space into which the reader should enter the text. Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first book of prose is also more than a memoir. It’s at once deeply theoretical and personal, fractured and yet formally cohesive. Engaging with time in a fluid manner, A History of My Brief Body moves through bodily experiences without narrating the body from one experience to the next in a chronological story —instead it moves conceptually, like a poem. Yet, Belcourt is engaged in storytelling and in theorizing on what it means to live in an Indigenous and queer body. That is, stories of the body, in Belcourt’s hands cannot be told without theory, without “poetic truth,” and cannot be told without use of the many lenses Belcourt employs to understand his body and bodily experiences. All these things must become part of this memoir. 

The opening essay, “A Letter to Nôhkom,” immediately contextualizes the world that Indigenous — and queer Indigenous bodies — must live in: “Nôhkom, I’m not safe. Canada is still in the business of gunning down NDNs. […] I can’t promise I won’t be ensnared in someone’s legal mythology of race. What I can do is love as though it will rupture the singularity of Canadian cruelty (irrespective of whether this is a sociological possibility). This is my poetic truth.” Here, Belcourt both shares an invitation to readers, and a recognition that the act of reading will be harrowing, painful — but also that inside these pages an ethos of joy exists, one that must be lived, too.

NDN boyhood and considerations of gender are central to this experience: “It is likely impossible to trace when, where, and under what conditions those who arrived with enmity on the shores of what is now improperly called Canada inaugurated a modality of gender that produced men who self-destruct.” But held against this statement — one that seems to suggest it’s not possible for NDN boys to become NDN men un-fated to self-destruct — is this moment: a father and son hugging. Belcourt writes, “In those piercing seconds, we were possibility more than anything else, a mode in which NDN men rarely exist. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to hold. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to be held.” This is the work of A History of My Brief Body, these poetic truths where self-destruction and possibility exist both, at the same time, for Indigenous bodies, and specifically, for Belcourt’s queer NDN self.

There is also poetry here. Moments that cannot be understood in the ways we understand the sentence-as-prose and must jump into the space of metaphor, imagery, or both. I expected nothing less, and close the pages on Belcourt’s latest book, knowing words and moments like this will remain unforgettable: “On the other hand, were I to write a Modern History of Gay Sex, I’d need to write of the kingless in a sprawling kingdom of shame and ecstasy. I’d need to write of the ecstasy of shame and the shame of ecstasy. Much of being a gay man in rural Canada is still the experience of being a stampede of horses in an enclosed cul-de-sac. The horses are invisible and translucent, but the pain of galloping through walls and furniture and fences is acute.” This is a moment I understand in my heart, where poetry roots; but by understanding it in my heart, I can share this, regardless of my subject-position, my own body’s experiences. This is the magnificence of A History of My Brief Body, and of memoir.

Belcourt says, “All my writing is against the poverty of simplicity. All my writing is against the trauma of description.” As a reviewer, I can only hold these words close and know that my job is to share with you not a description, but an understanding, not a simplifying, but an opening to approach this text. This memoir-in-essays, this theoretical memoir, aligns well with Alicia Elliott’s debut collection of essays, A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, fellow Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel’s forthcoming memoir NISHGA, as well as the enchanting and challenging work other contemporary genre-bending, genre-enlarging Indigenous writers are publishing. Billy-Ray Belcourt is as thrilling in prose as he is in poetry. 

Jenny Ferguson is Métis, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice with a PhD. She believes writing and teaching are political acts. BORDER MARKERS, her collection of linked flash fiction narratives, is available from NeWest Press. She teaches at Loyola Marymount University and in the Opt-Res MFA Program at the University of British Columbia.