Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut novel A Minor Chorus explores sex, love and violence in northern Alberta
'One of the central intimacies the protagonist is interested in is intimacy with the self'
Known widely for his award-winning poetry, Billy-Ray Belcourt says he had to "write his way out" of his usual writing habits in order to create his debut novel, A Minor Chorus.
Longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, A Minor Chorus follows an unnamed narrator who abandons his thesis and goes back to his hometown, where he has a series of intimate encounters bringing the modern queer and Indigenous experience into focus.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a Rhodes Scholar and PhD student from Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta. His debut collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. The collection also won the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award for most significant work of poetry in English and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
Belcourt's second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms, was on the Canada Reads 2020 longlist and was shortlisted for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards.
Belcourt spoke to The Next Chapter's columnist and CBC Books producer Ryan B. Patrick about writing his debut novel, A Minor Chorus.
Changing forms
"I had to write my way out of my habitual writing practices in order to write a novel because with a poem, it's such a compressed space. You're writing toward brevity, whereas with a novel, it's an endurance act. You don't want to imbue each sentence with as much importance as you do in a poem. So I had to figure out how to slow down and let things unravel and not rush to any kind of conclusions.
People everywhere — in the novel's case, northern Alberta — are living historical lives, though most of us aren't afforded the lens or the language to understand ourselves as such.
"I began with my own voice, which I imbued in the protagonist. I then considered: what kind of people live right now in northern Alberta? What are their experiences? What history shaped those experiences, and what might I have to say about them?
"People everywhere — in the novel's case, northern Alberta — are living historical lives, though most of us aren't afforded the lens or the language to understand ourselves as such. That lack of understanding is something we urgently need to address."
Writing to find intimacy
"One of the central intimacies the protagonist is interested in is intimacy with the self. He is lonely, both existentially and situationally.
My protagonist reflects in the novel something that I also think, which is that language and writing allow for rare moments where we can fully inhabit our bodies in a way that's not dangerous.
"[Writing a] novel allows him to reach out to others to have specific kinds of conversations that he felt he wasn't able to have without the excuse of research for a novel.
"He has this critical language that he's developed over time in the university, and he's able to diagnose the ways that politics and history shape his life, but despite being able to diagnose those things, he isn't able to figure out entirely how to live a good life.
"He thinks, for sometimes inexplicable reasons, that maybe a novel, something as vast and as culturally significant as a novel, will lead him to a new conclusion.
"My protagonist reflects in the novel something that I also think: language and writing allow for rare moments where we can fully inhabit our bodies in a way that's not dangerous or doesn't put us in danger.
"That's probably why I've written so much and I'm still in my twenties."
The limits of academia
"Beginning sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, post-secondary education was seen as one of the ways for Indigenous peoples to exceed conditions of poverty and subjugation. Of course, that did not mean that the university, broadly speaking, was going to accommodate us in our complexities.
"From my own experience, and anecdotally from the experiences of a number of Indigenous peoples in academia, we have to confront a number of structural barriers — and oftentimes, compromise on some of our political values in order to do work there.
Post-secondary education was seen as one of the ways for Indigenous peoples to exceed conditions of poverty and subjugation. Of course, that did not mean that the university, broadly speaking, was going to accommodate us in our complexities.
"The protagonist of the novel realizes that he can only be so free in the university and that he might have to pursue his freedom elsewhere."
Becoming the writer he is today
"I always think of this time after my first book came out where an Indigenous person in northern Alberta reached out to me on social media. They told me that a family member had got the book for him because she knew about me and he was questioning his sexual identity and that it brought a lot of relief and solace.
"That's moving and rewarding, because I know how much I would have benefited from a book like This Wound is a World when I was a teenager; I was feeling a lot of huge emotions that I didn't have the ability to to untangle.
"It seems almost overly simplistic or cliché to say that [my kokum] truly believed that I could accomplish anything. I think that most parents want that for their children but she never imposed any kind of vision of how I should live and held a lot of space for what we couldn't know and for possibilities beyond the confines of northern Alberta.
"Without that total belief in my future self, I would not have become a writer.
"With the first book, the validation from my peers allowed me to fully step into the role of the writer. At first, I felt pretty removed from that role because of self consciousness and insecurities and also my youthfulness, but I feel like at this point, I see myself as a writer and as someone who will continue to write for as long as I can make that workable."
Belcourt's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
