Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt
CBC Books | Posted: March 27, 2024 8:11 PM | Last Updated: September 27
A short story collection that paints a portrait of modern indigeneity
A grieving mother calls out to her faraway son. A student forgoes the lurid appeal of dating apps in exchange for a painter's love. The anonymous voices of queer native men converge amid violent eroticism. A man just out of prison balances the uneasy weight of family and freedom, while a professor returns home to conduct research only to be haunted by a dark specter.
The stories and voices in Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut story collection are buoyed by philosophical undergirding, poetic demand and the complex relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Belcourt pirouettes through the short story form in his signature staccato voice, imagining a range of characters from all walks of native life. He is an expert in celebrating the ways Indigenous peoples make total conquest impossible. (From Penguin Random House Canada)
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Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta. His debut collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, is unapologetically Indigenous and queer at the same time. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain without giving up on the future.
Belcourt won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for This Wound is a World. 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.
From the book
Will invites me to Thanksgiving at his reserve. We're on the highway in his pickup truck and we're listening to country music and we're in love.
At first, the landscape is mostly fields of canola. A landscape conceals as much as it makes visible. It seems straightforward, something we should all agree on, but a farmer's field is a story of dispossession; there are those who take and those who are taken from. I'm waiting for everyone else to admit this.
Soon the topography changes, and we're surrounded by trees.
"Did you know the boreal forest is the largest forest in the world?" Will asks.
"I had no idea, somehow."
"It wraps right around the northern hemisphere. We need it to breathe."
I let his comment hang in the air. What else wraps around the northern hemisphere? History, its many wounded.
Will's mom's house is at the end of a winding dirt road. It looks like every house on every reserve: two storeys, blue siding, a roof in slight disrepair, a large living room window, a blanket with several howling wolves woven into it draped over the window. She hugs us both as soon as we step inside. Her hair is shaped in a firm bob and she's wearing denim on denim, a sartorial tradition that's more Cree than it is Canadian, in my opinion. Her face is symmetrical and pretty and, like Will, she exudes compassion. She has a kind of gravity, something I feel pulled into, but not unwillingly.
"You're so skinny," she says. "I can't wait to feed you."
The smell of meat and gravy and frybread radiates from the kitchen in powerful plumes. I think about my family, my mom. One day I'll bring Will to my reserve too, I decide. I owe them a visit. In showing him my little corner of the boreal forest, I'll show him my past, which is one of the most intimate acts available to anyone. I understand that Will is extending a precious vulnerability toward me.
We sit at the kitchen table with his mom, two aunts, two uncles and a kokum. About a dozen kids, all under 18, are scattered throughout the house. Laughter wells up from every room. I want to watch Will interact with his relatives more than I feel the need to contribute to the conversation. His mom notices my quietness.
"So," she asks, "has Will told you how I found out he was gay?"
Will's face reddens. "Don't do this," he says timidly. Everyone laughs.
"No, he hasn't," I say, happy to be a co-conspirator in his minor embarrassment.
She sits up straighter. "Well, he was in high school," she begins. "I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and found him watching gay porn on the computer. I couldn't decipher what it was at first, until the quiet noises became clearer. I'll never forget how petrified he looked when he turned around and saw me. I laughed until I cried."
"That's not normal, by the way," Will says. "Normal parents don't do that." There's a tenderness underneath his performed awkwardness, her ribbing.
"We still had dial-up!" she adds. "I don't know why he was trying to watch porn on that old-ass computer. It would've been easier to just close his eyes and imagine it!" At this, his aunts and uncles become hysterical.
We aren't lonely people, at least not today.
Will's mom goes on as the laughter subsides. "We love him very much and we will love whoever he brings home." She reaches for my hand, and I open it for her the way the October day seemed to open up specifically for us, a handful of Crees on a small rez in northern Alberta. What do you a call a handful of Crees? A laughter.
After something else fixes the group's attention, Will leans over and kisses me on the lips, longer than I expect given the relatives around us. I'm anxious at first, then I surrender to the gesture, relaxing, for the first time, into the publicness of our queer Cree joy.
On the drive back to the city, I think about how in the years since coming out I mistook lust for something grander. Before Will, men treated me like a museum artifact to pick up, then put back down and walk away from. I'd been as engrossing as humidity and hadn't noticed. Now, I didn't want to long and ache for nothing. Something inside me, it seems, is opening like a door, and maybe Will is already wherever that door leads to. That's what love is — someone else's spirit moving through you. When someone moves through you they leave behind a small trace of human life. It's how we know we're still alive.
"Tell me about your mom," I say as we round a bend and the city comes into view like a sudden moon.
"She believes in kindness and the afterlife. In redemption," Will says.
"Is she spiritual?"
That's what love is — someone else's spirit moving through you.
"I think it has more to do with her upbringing, how much loss she went through. She lost her dad at a young age, and then my dad died when I was young."
I rest my hand on his thigh. Somehow it hadn't come up before.
"He was attacked in the city one summer, while running an errand. My mom pleaded to the cops that it was racially motivated but they didn't listen to her. They said it was because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Fuck."
"We're still being hunted," he says. It's a remark we both have trouble doing anything with. It's too honest. Being Indigenous in the 21st century means that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness. If sadness could fill up a truck we'd be drowning right now, but that's only part of the story. We still believe in the future, so we keep surviving to live in it.
"What was he like — your dad?"
"Sweet. Super loving. Not a toxic bone in him. He taught me so much simply by being gentle to others," Will says. "My mom talks to him every night. I do sometimes too. I've drawn him dozens of times. I suppose that's my particular spiritual practice. I really do believe that to draw someone is to reach out to them."
Excerpted from COEXISTENCE. Copyright © 2023 by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Excerpted with permission of Hamish Hamilton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.