COEXISTENCE by Billy-Ray Belcourt

These stories are mostly (though not exclusively) set in and around Edmonton. Belcourt’s narrators are mostly queer Cree men—artists, poets, professors, and students—struggling with how to live and love and how to use language to describe and make sense of their living. One story details the beginning of a relationship; another a different relationship’s end. They take place at literary festivals and in drab motel rooms, on highways and in living rooms. Every story is pulsing and clattering with aliveness. Every story is a beautiful and specific expression of Indigenous love.

I’ve always admired the way Belcourt writes theory into his fiction. His characters take thinking seriously but they also belly laugh. They use theory and scholarship as a way to remake language and remake the world, but they wrestle just as meaningfully with the systems of oppression that affect their material realities. In these stories sex and poetry are equally important; the life of the mind and the life of the body are not separate. It makes for incredibly intimate reading.

How do you make a poem? How do you fall in love in the wake of ongoing colonial violence? What does it mean to listen well—to your mother, your students, your lover, yourself? Does art matter? How do you rebuild your life after being released from prison? What about the prairies and the ghosts that live there, the Alberta wind, your childhood home? What are they telling you about how to live? These questions are not abstract, as they live in the bodies of Belcourt’s characters and in the language they use to make sense of the world.

This book is steeped in Indigenous futurity—the insistence of remaining, of having been, of continuing to be. It is also about beauty. The characters are always striving toward beauty, toward making beautiful lives—as a way of celebrating and as a form of resistance. Sometimes they’re dealing with outright crises, and even when they’re not, they’re living inside the ongoing crisis of colonization. In the face of such overwhelming violence, it’s the aliveness of Belcourt’s characters that’s loudest.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this book since I read it months ago. I’ll leave you with one of the 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.”