A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a queer writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation, an Indigenous Cree community located in Northern Alberta, Canada. Belcourt’s latest work, A Minor Chorus (2022), explores the boundaries of his Cree identity from a community perspective. This work reimagines not only what a novel looks like, but also the very foundations of one’s mooring within an individualistic, heteronormative and colonial society.
As the novel opens, Belcourt is struggling with his chosen path in academia, feeling like his dissertation in critical theory has stalled, and is desperately seeking a form of creative expression that serves a wider purpose in his world. The result of this journey, as you might have guessed, is A Minor Chorus itself.
In its form, A Minor Chorus is closer to experimental, vignette-style autofiction than to a novel. Through his self-reflexive investigation of the collective "we" behind community storytelling, Belcourt explores life as a Cree person through a ‘minor chorus’ – vignettes from a collective voice so to speak – with different figures telling their own stories in their own voices. There is his Aunt Mary, who is heartbroken over her grandson Jack being incarcerated, Belcourt’s cousins, old school mates and relatives, the men he meets on Grindr, and even a closeted gay man he’d known since childhood, named Michael. Their stories, told to and interpreted by Belcourt, all add to a larger picture: one of survival, socioeconomic disadvantage, belonging to a Cree reservation, and most importantly, a communal identity in modern day Canada.
At one point, Belcourt’s Aunt Mary is recounting the story of her grandson’s arrest (Belcourt’s cousin’s), which she witnessed through the phone as it was happening. Jack suffers brutality at the hands of the police, a story which evokes especially strong feelings in Belcourt.
“I was familiar with this genre of story, in the way that all Indigenous people were familiar with it, but my body reacted as if I were hearing it for the first time. The hairs on my arms rose, as if to say ‘enough.’ To whom or what does the body plead?”
Belcourt asks many questions like this, and he remains rightfully enraged by the circumstances that minorities must face in the society he is a part of. He points out that “queers and immigrants [...] were coded as squatters on the private property of the everyday”, an outcry that echoes throughout the pages. Through A Minor Chorus, Belcourt attempts to break free of this privatisation of minorities’ lives, and to reclaim a different mode of existence.
Throughout the book, Belcourt also struggles with depression, alienation and a sense of purposelessness. He hopes that the writing of a novel – this novel – is a way for him to define life outside of the box he’s been put in by looking to more Indigenous modes of communal storytelling.
“[...] writing is fundamentally a social act. I write because I've read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I've loved and been loved. I want to find out what ‘we’ or ‘us’ I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.”
But writing isn’t only a way of finding like-minded souls. For Belcourt, it’s the radical act of reconstructing a fate he’s been prescribed by decree of being both Indigenous and queer. Writing, and this book, then become so much more than lines on pages: they become a literary call to arms, an act of rebellion.
“But what if the act of writing a novel, I wondered, enabled one to practise a way of life that negated the brutalities of race, gender, hetero- and homonormativity, of capital and property? Rather than change the world, a novel could index a longing for something else, for a different arrangement of bodies, feelings, and environments in which human flourishing wasn't inhibited for the marginalised, which seemed as urgent an act of rebellion as any.”
While Belcourt’s writing is lyrical and poetic, it also veers towards academic in tone, as if the author is still examining his own life and the lives of his loved ones from a theoretical lens. This lends A Minor Chorus both a sense of authority and a sort of detached distance; something that is luckily reclaimed by Belcourt’s writing style. It is both sad and profound, in a way that makes you devastated by the human condition, yet all the while hopeful for the future generation of writers, thinkers, teachers and humans like Belcourt. In his musings, he stumbles upon weighty, thought-provoking conclusions.
“Death itself wasn't nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time. We endure with quaking certainty; the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.”
Despite his awareness of this juxtaposition, Belcourt himself remains unfoundedly hopeful for a future that allows for reinvention, acceptance, and radical change. And while the ending doesn’t appear to be any closer to happiness than the beginning, it is the collective journey that begins to stake out a different path for those like Belcourt.
In the end, there is no breakthrough, no justice, and certainly no tangible reclamation. However, through A Minor Chorus, Belcourt poses the questions others might not dare to ask, and as a result opens up the door to conversations, to change, and to others fighting and challenging the limiting beliefs that harm us as a whole.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer and book reviewer from Hungary, currently residing in Naarm/Melbourne. She has been a reader all her life, and she finds unexplainable joy in forcing literary revelations into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. When she's not reading or writing, she likes to even out her nerdy side by doing martial arts or going for hikes. You can find her online at fruzsinagal.com.