This is a long overdue shoutout to Libro.fm for the ALC...one of the first I ever received from them, years ago. 

A super compelling mix of memoir and social-historical-political commentary written in and with poetry, A History of My Brief Body is one of those books that requires the reader to really slow down and consider each word and phrase, if they are to take away even some of Belcourt’s meaning. Of which, for how short this book is, there is an abundance. There is a deeply intellectual and artistic meditation on colonization, the NDN body, gender (masculinity) and sexuality, racism and bigotry and the violence they engender, the “state,” and the many and varied intersections of these topics and identities. There is also a search for the meaning and manifestations of love, of how to find and share that.

There is no mincing of words (the result of Belcourt's skill and knowledge and experiences, as well as the poetic writing style in which each word must purposefully chosen for the brevity of the overall piece) nor backing down in acknowledgement of hard truths and callings out. And I felt some similarities to Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, both stylistically and the way that the writing is in conversation with many other writers/artists/philosophers works.  

These essays are a bit dizzying: intense, poignant, and with high expectations of the reader to comprehend. The terror and pain and heartbreak and truth and joy and love and hope, at emotional experiences presented here at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class is a lot. It's a lot in a salient and necessary way. But also a lot that the reader should be ready for, upon deciding to read this for themselves. 

“What is it to live, to suffer, and, above all, to love in an emotionally inflexible world fashioned to produce men who eat 'too much of the sunset?'”

“Memory, it seems, isn’t always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us.”

“Utopia, of course, is an impossible love object. But as such, it is also an incitement to write, to run with pen in hand into the negative space of the future. Would I have it another way? What a danger to creativity, after all, to find oneself fitting neatly into the world!”

“To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world. To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world. A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization.”

“Has anyone ever managed not to mold the body into an archive of their own degradation?”

“From nowhere but the graveyard of history could someone marshal the cruelty of denying someone the solidity of everyday life.”

“How to account for the love that bubbles up where it is banned?”

“To tell a story of the possibility that swells up even where it is negated requires a sociological eye, and epistemological standpoint, that is born out of experience, of knowing what it is to be a map to everywhere and nowhere. What's more, to hear this story of compromised living, of joy against the odds, of the repeatability of a history that lives in the bellies of those who reap the spoils of colonialism, as something more than a 'simple' account of a singular life, is to undergo a process of resubjectification, one that requires the abolition of the position of the enemy, the vampire, the one who describes, the settler. You need to read, to listen, and to write from someplace else, from another social locus, a less sovereign one, a less hungry one. All my writing is against the poverty of simplicity. All my writing is against the trauma of description.”

“Trauma, made unspeakable in public, consumes, whittling a life down to the bare bones of emotionality: paranoia and survival instinct. Made to endure too long in paranoia, the survival instinct glitches.”

“Sometimes knowledge is a rope made of poison ivy.”

“Where does grief go when it is barred from institutions of justice?”

“Freedom makes breathing easier; it begets an atmosphere governed by joy, not oppression. Freedom is a measure of breathability.”