Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt
These tales are largely (although not solely) set in and round Edmonton. Belcourt’s narrators are largely queer Cree males—artists, poets, professors, and college students—fighting the right way to reside and love and the right way to use language to explain and make sense of their residing. One story particulars the start of a relationship; one other a special relationship’s finish. They happen at literary festivals and in drab motel rooms, on highways and in residing rooms. Each story is pulsing and clattering with aliveness. Each story is a ravishing and particular expression of Indigenous love.
I’ve at all times admired the way in which Belcourt writes principle into his fiction. His characters take pondering severely however additionally they stomach chortle. They use principle and scholarship as a solution to remake language and remake the world, however they wrestle simply as meaningfully with the methods of oppression that have an effect on their materials realities. In these tales intercourse and poetry are equally essential; the lifetime of the thoughts and the lifetime of the physique usually are not separate. It makes for extremely intimate studying.
How do you make a poem? How do you fall in love within the wake of ongoing colonial violence? What does it imply to hear nicely—to your mom, your college students, your lover, your self? Does artwork matter? How do you rebuild your life after being launched from jail? What concerning the prairies and the ghosts that reside there, the Alberta wind, your childhood dwelling? What are they telling you about the right way to reside? These questions usually are not summary, as they reside within the our bodies of Belcourt’s characters and within the language they use to make sense of the world.
This e book is steeped in Indigenous futurity—the insistence of remaining, of getting been, of continuous to be. It is usually about magnificence. The characters are at all times striving towards magnificence, towards making lovely lives—as a method of celebrating and as a type of resistance. Generally they’re coping with outright crises, and even after they’re not, they’re residing inside the continuing disaster of colonization. Within the face of such overwhelming violence, it’s the aliveness of Belcourt’s characters that’s loudest.
I haven’t stopped interested by this e book since I learn it months in the past. I’ll go away you with one of many many, many passages I underlined:
“It occurs to me that one also has to love despite the geographical violence of colonialism. I want to love in a way that has geographical consequences. Can love undermine a settler state? It’s likely that my happiness depends on it.”
