Billy-Ray Belcourt's loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism

[This Wound Is a World] insists that loneliness is endemic to the affective life of settler colonialism. (Belcourt, 2017: 59)

In suggesting that loneliness is the affective condition or structure of feeling of settler colonialism, Belcourt takes up the work of queer affect theorists who have thought about race as a shared feeling rather than a fixed identity. Especially important is José Muñoz on ‘feeling brown’ as an ‘affective difference’, and on ‘the ways in which different historically coherent groups “feel” differently and navigate the world on a different emotional register’ (2000: 70). ¹ Belcourt takes up a concept that was designed to articulate the heterogeneity of Latinx experience as distinct from Black experience, which tends to dominate discussions of race in the US, and he productively extends it to Indigenous experience, which can also go missing from overly binary frameworks for conceptualising race. In keeping with the queer of colour theory that he invokes, Belcourt is interested in loneliness as an ‘affective commons’ that might bring people together and signal a ‘dysphoria’ or dis-ease with things as they are. Muñoz's notion of a ‘brown commons’ readily lends itself to a form of Indigenous commons, especially since the former references the convergence of Indigenous peoples and lands and peoples of Spanish and Portuguese heritage, as well as peoples of the African and Asian diaspora (although with the important caveat that the ‘commons’ has been the object of Indigenous critique). ² As chilling as the equation of Indigeneity with not just loneliness but death might be, Belcourt also draws centrally on Muñoz's notion of cruising utopia to retain the hopeful potential for collectivity in the shared affective experience of loneliness. Belcourt's Indigenous take on queer of colour work largely forged in relation to Black and Brown identities offers a fresh perspective (and moreover an indispensable one given the foundational status of settler colonialism and theft of Indigenous land) on debates about dialectics of hope and despair, pessimism and optimism (including Afropessimisms) and positive and negative affect that have been central to queer and critical race theory in recent years.

Indeed, it is exciting to see affect theory become one catalyst for a critical mass around race, indigeneity and queerness – and, as I will argue, produce new convergences of literature and theory. The emerging and more visible presence of Indigenous writers in new cultural publics around anti-racism and decolonial practice is also a welcome and long overdue phenomenon. Belcourt is part of a burgeoning cohort of young Indigenous writers that includes Alicia Elliott, Therese Mailhot, Tommy Orange, Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, Arielle Twist and Joshua Whitehead, whose rapidly emerging generations mean that even a relatively young writer such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson can be named as a mentor. ³ This emphatic evidence of Indigenous cultural resurgence represents a literary sovereignty that does not need non-Indigenous people to build Simpson's (2013) ‘islands of decolonial love’. At the same time, Belcourt's work on colonialism and sex, or colonialism as sex, is reminiscent of women of colour feminisms, including that of Chicana feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga whose work on La Malinche, la chingada and queer and butch-fem genders has provided tools for understanding the dynamics of vulnerability and intimacy as integral to histories of colonial violence. Belcourt's references to queer affect theory – like a form of gay flagging – are no surprise given that he has just finished a PhD, and hence is part of a thriving cohort of poet scholars, especially in Black Studies (such as Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey), who are challenging white supremacy in the literary world and using poetry, and other forms of public writing, as a resource for anti-racism and social justice. Belcourt has clearly read widely in critical race theory, affect theory and queer theory, which show up in his citations as he crafts poems as another form of theory. Not only does he add to scholarship on queer indigeneity by Daniel Heath Justice, Qwo Li Driskill, Mark Rifkin and Scott Morgenson, among others, but he also engages with African American writers on the afterlife of slavery, Afropessimisms and Afrofuturisms and the undercommons (Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Christina Sharpe), as well as queer theorists such as Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant, as well as Muñoz, on the anti-social and queer utopia. Belcourt is not merely applying or translating this work from one context to another; he is instead staging an encounter across fields and identities that has the potential to bring Indigenous frames to new contexts. Through an extensive citational network that ignores separatisms and moves across boundaries of race and gender, Belcourt establishes the necessity of an Indigenous frame for affective logics or structures of feeling, given that the theft of Indigenous land and ongoing Indigenous sovereignty are foundational for all accounts of colonial and affective histories in the Americas.

Belcourt puts queer affect theory's focus on negative affects or ‘feeling bad’ as a foundation for collectivity to use for his own thinking about depression and loneliness: ‘In her inspiring book Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich argues that bad feeling might actually “be the ground for transformation”’; ‘In The Alphabet of Feeling Bad, Cvetkovich and Karin Michalski ask: “Is it possible to share the feeling of being lonely or alone as a way to make new forms of collectivity?” This Wound Is a World insists that it is’ (Belcourt, 2017: 58, 59). Although Belcourt may only have intuited it, Muñoz is present in those last lines of The Alphabet of Feeling Bad that Belcourt quotes about the capacity of loneliness to bring us together, an adaptation of a comment Muñoz made about depression at a shared panel on public feelings. The possibility that bad feelings can be a ground for transformation owes much to work on queer utopia crystallised by Muñoz's (2009) Cruising Utopia, which provides an important foundation for Belcourt's own orientation towards joy, and not just trauma or loss. Central to the collectively produced cluster of work in queer affect theory by Berlant (2011), Muñoz and Cvetkovich that Belcourt cites is an embrace of the tension between positive and negative affects and a refusal to distinguish between them, which is often elided in ongoing debates about political optimisms and pessimisms that try to choose between the two. Belcourt shows the urgency of this productive tension for Indigenous contexts where genocide is a pervasive everyday reality and the struggle for survival not only produces loneliness as a structure of feeling but also, operating in the spirit of Black Studies, refuses to give up on the potential for joy and an orientation towards freedom.

Belcourt's use of loneliness and depression as public feeling for the project of articulating queer Indigeneity also helps advance the ongoing work of thinking in racialised terms about the affective experience of capitalism that was the goal for work on political depression. ⁴ I continue to think about what I have called the ‘emotional color line’ (Cvetkovich, 2012: 116) – the way in which depression, loneliness and feeling bad are experienced differently by race and thus require care that white middle-class experience does not become universalised when describing or documenting racialised capitalism as a structure of feeling. Belcourt confirms my sense that categories such as depression, feeling bad and loneliness – whether understood in clinical terms or not – are an important way to describe the experience of race as an affective one – and that both indigeneity and whiteness (and white supremacy in the form of settler colonialism) can be experienced as loneliness, depression and other ‘bad feelings’. ⁵ Moreover, a racialised understanding of clinical categories such as depression (and anxiety) can help link them to more vernacular terms such as loneliness – and orient towards social analysis and transformation rather than just medical diagnosis. The pervasive experience of loneliness across racial differences seems particularly relevant to accounting for the way that racial capital produces experiences of separation, especially segregation, and isolation. It can explain the increasing epidemic of mental health issues among the privileged, who seem to have everything they could need materially and yet are miserable affectively. They have their own forms of loneliness that stem from isolation within middle-class families, a deep rootlessness that is generations old and is the result of moving around and a lack of close extended family networks and the neoliberal outsourcing of care to medically managed drugs with very little else in the way of social connection to back it up. Depression focused significantly on white experiences of depression, including an awareness of bad feelings as racialised and racialisation as a feeling. The book was shaped by an interest in how depression, feeling bad and/or loneliness are experienced differently along racial lines, including differences between racialised experiences of Blackness, always central in the US, Latinidad/brownness that Muñoz foregrounds and Indigeneity. A better account of racialised affect can also contribute to an analysis of white supremacy as an affective condition – especially if white/settler loneliness is understood as a symptom of that which is misrecognised as personal and private or as having nothing to do with race. Queer work on affect and intimacy has helped ground an insistence on the political dimensions of the so-called personal or private and the refusal of distinctions between the public and the private. ⁶ For loneliness to be central to both white and Indigenous experience, albeit differently, is notable and suggests that race and Indigeneity are central to this special issue's exploration of the category. Another form of the land acknowledgement that calls us to remember that the theft of Indigenous land pervades everyday life would be to ‘acknowledge’ settler colonialism and racial capital as the ‘underlying causes’ of a mental health epidemic that produces psychic symptoms of many kinds across racial identities – feelings that are both shared and in some cases not shared because of racial divisions.

This article explores how Belcourt advances an Indigenous and queer take on the racialised affect of loneliness – and moreover does so through new genres of writing that fuse poetry and theory to articulate these affective epistemologies or ways of thinking. Belcourt's work provides an Indigenous perspective on why new forms of creative non-fiction, such as the lyric essay and autotheory, have been an important way for queer and racialised writers to situate their accounts of personal experience as systemic conditions and as structures of feeling. ⁷ As he puts it in the Preface to the US edition of This Wound Is a World (Minnesota, 2019), drawing from Keguro Macharia (2019) and in the spirit of Robin Kelley's ‘freedom dreams’ (2002), poetry enables ‘freedom-oriented knowledge’. While this article will be heavier on theory than poetry, that emphasis is perhaps excused by the link between the two that Belcourt establishes when he describes: ‘the poem as a unit of study, where study is construed by Fred Moten as a convergence of suffering, dancing, and walking together’ (ix). In the spirit of Audre Lorde (1984) for whom ‘poetry is not a luxury’, as well as Dian Million (2014) on ‘felt theory’, for Belcourt and his fellow travellers in Black Studies, poetry is crucial to affective knowledge or theory because it seeks to ‘marshal experience, felt knowledge, and feeling in the service of a kind of anticolonial and/or queer theorizing’ (ix).

Loneliness as settler colonial sexuality

Through his poems, Belcourt tackles the persistent wounds of indigeneity in the 21st century, where survival, even when it is called resurgence, often takes the form of an ongoing struggle for life. The word ‘body’ is everywhere across these poems, and even when those bodies are having lots of sex, they are also sites of violence and absence. They are cages, an abandoned house, wounds, a ghost, a pile of shattered glass, an open casket (Belcourt, 2017: 27, 40, 41). ‘my body, like the land, was up for grabs’ (Belcourt, 2017: 37). Fucking is a way of bringing the flesh into existence and making it material, but it is also about disappearance and loss, performing again the annihilation that is genocide. Sex is a constant reminder of death – and Belcourt invokes missing and murdered Indigenous women, Colten Boushie, Indigenous youth suicides and the persistent shadow of the residential school system as evidence of the ongoing presence of genocide in the 21st century.

Leo Bersani's (1989) concept of sex as ‘self-shattering’ from ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, his classic essay of the HIV/AIDS era in queer theory, and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman's (2013) concept of sex as ‘the unbearable’ or the ‘non-sovereign’, both of which Belcourt cites, take on new urgency in his Indigenous worlds, where death haunts practices of intimacy. Self-shattering is not just a metaphor, and it is not just about sex, but a fleshly enactment of survival as an ordinary or everyday miracle. ‘if I have a body, let it be a book of sad poems’ (Belcourt, 2017: 22). For a body that is targeted for destruction, that carries grief, that feels invisible or ghostly, what does it feel like to engage in intimacy or get fucked? Belcourt explores the fraught nature of sex with both Indigenous and white men, as well as other racialised men, with visceral honesty about bad feelings. Queer sex is messy but also a way to work the wound at the level of the flesh. ‘i wanted him to fuck me,/ so i could finally begin/ to heal’ (Native Too, in Belcourt, 2017: 26).

Whereas there has sometimes been a racialised tension that casts the anti-social as white and utopianism as a queer of colour concept, Belcourt gives us forms of anti-sociality and non-sovereignty (as well as cruel optimism) that are fundamentally Indigenous, and where intimacy is inextricably tied to histories of genocide. ⁸ ‘it's ironic, I think: that love and despair can fill out a body together and we call it indian’ (‘Something Like Love’, in Belcourt, 2017: 41); ‘love and heartbreak are fuck buddies’ (Belcourt, 2017: 10); ‘12:03 am: why is it that love makes you feel lonely?’ (‘A History of the Present’, in Belcourt, 2017: 18). Love is not only indistinguishable from despair, heartbreak and loneliness, but they co-constitute Indigeneity, the NDN (Not Dead Native) or the ‘indian’. Bersani's concept of sex as self-shattering is quite literal: ‘take this body and do not say you see anything but a pile of shattered glass’ (2017: 41). Or in ‘Time Contra Time’ (Belcourt, 2017: 40): ‘i kiss every native man/ who looks at me/ like i am splitting at the seams. /i tell them to call me rendered/ since to rend/ is to tear into pieces/ is to rip and sever and split /such that one can be rendered again’. In embracing Bersani's self-shattering and queer theory's anti-social, Belcourt also echoes Berlant's notion of intimacy as non-sovereign, which is especially meaningful given the emphasis on ‘sovereignty’ within Indigenous ways of thinking. ⁹ As he explains it: ‘I remember reading the Berlant interview on non-sovereignty and something immediately coming into focus for me, which was that Indigenous theories of the political foreclosed queer experience because they couldn’t account for those moments when we lose control, surrender something, are ecstatic, when the body is necessarily a site of convergence and instability’. ¹⁰ Eschewing Indigenous literary separatisms that have refrained from using non-Indigenous sources so as to prioritise Indigenous forms of thinking and cultural sovereignty, Belcourt openly engages with, and freely adapts from, queer theory and critical race theory. ¹¹ I would argue that by placing these sources within an Indigenous context, he also circumvents some of the tensions between the utopian/anti-social and the sovereign/non-sovereign; he is not merely applying the theory but indigenising it in a way that transforms it.

Engaging in a citational practice that constitutes a form of what Omise’eke Tinsley (2018) calls ‘theoretical polyamory’, and unperturbed by whether it is too white or not Indigenous enough, Belcourt makes theory his own in part by transporting it to the language and forms of poetry. ¹² He seizes colonial intellectual property and creates Indigenous sovereignty in the domain of ideas. Although it has been the focus of queer of colour critique, white queer affect theory is useful to Belcourt because he is interested in how intimacy, and especially gay sex and cruising, produce NDN structures of feeling, including loneliness. That the shattered bodies of cruising culture are littered across the poems makes sense in an Indigenous context because sex becomes a way of enacting in the flesh the ontological reality of nothingness that is the structure of feeling for Indigenous people who have been targeted for genocidal destruction. Cruising and other casual sexual encounters are a version of the queer youth suicides that have become an all too everyday occurrence that produces Indigenous forms of ordinary affects and crisis ordinary. ¹³ In ‘Sexual History’ (Belcourt, 2017: 39), the moon says: ‘wow i remember when he thought getting fucked was like disappearing into someone for a few seconds’. And: ‘note to self: shouldn’t the creator be angry by now? even I know what it's like to watch everything disappear into everything else’ (Belcourt, 2017: 39). The appearance of the word ‘lonely’ is particularly pronounced in the poems that are explicitly about tricking and cruising culture but Belcourt also seeks to make ‘every blow job transformative’, in the face of the cultural force of annihilation. In ‘Notes from a Public Washroom’ (Belcourt, 2017: 12), ‘there is a city in colorado/ called loveland/ and it is where alone meets lonely’. Belcourt's focus on cruising reveals the cultural logic whereby loneliness is everywhere embedded in sex and intimacy, especially when understood in the context of colonial histories, where sex has so often been a mechanism for domination and annihilation. In ‘I Am Hoping to Help this City Heal from Its Trauma’ (Belcourt, 2017: 20): ‘i want to know what it's like for my body to end in someone else so i travel twenty minutes to his apartment and stay for three hours’; ‘being with me, he says, was like living inside a cemetery’. The poems’ Indigipessimism doesn’t feel extreme or abstract; it is simply the lived reality of Indigenous people who continue to be targeted for destruction – and it is played out in queer cruising cultures. ¹⁴ Sexual encounters with others are a way to ‘face up to what's killing you’ (to borrow from Toni Cade Bambara by way of Avery Gordon [2004:193]) and to experience in the flesh an intimacy with death and a contact with collective histories that exceed the self. ¹⁵

Placing the anti-sociality of queer sex in an ‘indian’ context means that the experience of sex as self-shattering or unbearable is connected to colonialism, its afterlife played out daily in intimate encounters. Heartbreak is a consistent image closely connected to loneliness and once again not a metaphor. In ‘Love and Heartbreak Are Fuckbuddies’ (Belcourt, 2017: 10): ‘love is a native boy from northern alberta who decided almost everything he does is an attempt to repair the brokenness-of-being that is indigeneity’. Belcourt here articulates an understanding of love that might have a reparative relation to colonialism's history of breaking people, things and treaties. ‘colonialism broke us, and we’re still figuring out how to love and be broken at the same time’ (Belcourt, 2017: 27). The breaks of ‘heartbreak’ or the ‘broken bodies’ of a sexual encounter enact the history of a people being broken – and still being broken in murders and suicides. ¹⁶

Belcourt's citational reach brings an Indigenous perspective not only to queer affect theory but to critical race theory. In presenting gay male cruising as a site where sex and colonialism converge, Belcourt's work suggests links between Bersani's concept of ‘self-shattering’ and feminist of colour thinking that depicts colonialism through the sexualised image of the rape of the colonised/Indigenous woman by the (male) coloniser. In stating, for example, ‘my body, like the land, was up for grabs’ (‘Boyfriend Poems’, in Belcourt, 2017: 37), Belcourt provides a renewed version of ‘colonialism as a love story’ that is found in the canon of queer of colour feminisms, especially in Latina/x work by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga. ¹⁷ They use the chingada, the fucked one, to think through the mechanisms whereby the Indigenous peoples of Greater Mexico were erased through the sexual encounters that created mestiza identities and eroded and destroyed Indigenous connections to land, language and culture. Belcourt's work builds on and foregrounds the Indigenous roots of their investigation of the relations between femme vulnerability and getting fucked as a form of colonial genocide and highlights the connections between critical race theory and Indigenous thinking that the ‘bridge’ of feminism has enabled. ¹⁸ Belcourt offers his own version of a matrilineal ancestry: ‘maybe if I surrendered myself to grandmother moon she would know what to do with these pickaxe wounds’ (2017: 9).

‘sometimes bodies don’t always feel like bodies but like wounds’ (Belcourt, 2017: 27). The body thus carries a kind of grief and loss that makes it sad, that makes it empty and ghost like. In ‘An Elegy for Flesh’ (Belcourt, 2017: 34) ‘how do you mourn something you can still see in the mirror?’:

This separation from self and body is profound, an existential body politics of colonialism as dispossession that is particularly evident in gay male cruising culture. It draws on feminisms that have often linked the violation of bodily integrity and sexual intimacy with colonialism in articulating notions of erotic sovereignty. ¹⁹ This material life of the body – which also enacts absence and ghostliness – also allows Belcourt to explore the relation between love and the decolonial about which Leanne Betamosake Simpson writes. ²⁰ The continuities between Simpson's contemporary and cutting edge work and that of Lorde, Anzaldúa, Moraga and other women of colour feminists from the 1980s – extending what they have done with the sexual politics of colonialism by putting it in a contemporary Indigenous context – suggests why Indigenous frameworks are foundational for both critical race theory and queer theory, and Belcourt's work offers an important resource for critics and writers in all fields.

While Belcourt portrays sex as an encounter with the nightmare of colonialism, it is also capable of healing and even joy – but through an encounter with the wound or trauma that produces forms of what Berlant would call the non-sovereign or the unbearable. Sometimes love brings nothing but pain and ‘you want a man/ whose body doesn’t whisper/ horror stories’ (Okcupid, in Belcourt, 2017: 32). Sometimes sex is a draw because: ‘i wanted to taste/ a history of violence/ caught in the roof of his mouth’ (Belcourt, 2017: 26). It is impossible to separate love and loneliness. ‘i think sex is the only thing that can stop the hurt for a little while. perhaps this is what being medicine feels like’ (Belcourt, 2017: 20). Without being uncritically utopian or optimistic, Belcourt offers a vision of a queer and feminist body politics in which pain can be explored through intimacy. ²¹ In doing so, he refuses to give up on joy in the encounter with death, or the pleasure that comes from being able to engage with the wounds of colonialism and genocide.

In his epilogue, Belcourt works through in a more overtly theoretical frame the tensions that inhabit the poems of This Wound Is a World in a way that is of particular interest to me because he puts my own work, which grapples with tensions between positive and negative affects, in dialogue with Berlant and Muñoz, as well as with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Belcourt takes up Berlant's observation that ‘Love always means non-sovereignty’, which he reframes to describe ‘love as what opens us up to that which feels like it can rupture the ground beneath our feet’, requiring that ‘we accept turbulence is the condition of relationality as such’ and ‘a process of becoming unbodied’ (Belcourt, 2017: 58). Naming This Wound Is a World as a ‘book obsessed with the unbodied’, Belcourt proceeds to move in a direction slightly askew from Berlant's by challenging the idea that death and Indigeneity are co-constitutive categories. Refusing Indigipessimisms that would equate the two, he lands on my formulation of ‘bad feeling’ as the ground for transformation. Belcourt is picking up on concepts in queer affect theory from Berlant, Muñoz and me, among others, that have been forged in close proximity, but he gives their internal tensions a new spin via an Indigenous frame. He does so by moving to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's vision of ‘islands of decolonial love’ in which intimacy is like making love but ‘sadder than that’ and nonetheless ‘salvation’ (58-9). The body is non-sovereign not just because of ‘colonialism's dirty work’ but also because it is ‘an assemblage, a mass of everyone who's ever moved us’(59). This structure of feeling that is like love but ‘sadder than that’ and nonetheless ‘salvation’ is Belcourt's description of loneliness not only as the affective condition of settler colonialism but as a way to make new worlds. In finding this potential in shared loneliness, Belcourt also transforms nagging tensions around the utopian and the reparative within queer affect theory; while it may not be his primary goal, his exploration of a specifically Indigenous affective experience offers a compelling and urgent account of why loneliness and love are not mutually exclusive.

New genres of poetry as theory

I turn now to the question of genre in Belcourt's work – and how his capacity to forge new forms of writing that combine essays and poems – including poems that are in the form of what has of late been called the lyric essay – contributes to his exploration of the affective condition, including loneliness, of (queer) Indigenous life. In addition to a broad citational reach across queer and critical race theory, Belcourt creates bridges between poetry and theory, framing his collections of poems, for example, with brief essays that include bibliographic citations and point the reader towards those with whom he is in dialogue.

The broad citational reach that puts Black and Latinx Studies, and queer and affect studies, in dialogue with Indigenous Studies takes a different path from the Native literary and cultural separatisms that have been necessary to create space for Indigenous thinking, especially in the US where it has been less visible even in discussions of race. ²² I would argue that this range also draws from Belcourt's dual status as scholar and poet who has completed a PhD, and he joins other writers who combine the two in order to forge new forms of documentary poetics that capture affective and everyday life as public feeling. In moving across cultures, Belcourt draws on experiments in form, both from scholars, such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Christina Sharpe, who have used poetry and memoir in their critical writing, and from poets, such as Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson (Belcourt, 2019: 38), who have brought the lyric essay and the fusion of poetry and the essay to public attention. Their efforts to address the affective life of racism, including racism as ordinary and transgenerational grief and mourning, are clearly relevant to Belcourt's project – and creating these connections also puts Indigenous lives (and deaths) at the centre of those conversations. This work has forged new documentary media that explore structures of feeling, especially the ‘afterlife of slavery’ and anti-Black racisms, and Belcourt puts it to use to focus more directly on settler colonialism and Indigenous life and death. ²³ The microaggressions or ordinary racisms that Rankine documents in Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, for example, are a model for Belcourt's ‘Oxford Journal’, which documents the experience of being the lone and lonely ‘Indian’ at the esteemed educational institution. ²⁴ This move in the direction of lyric essay anticipates Belcourt's recent book, A History of My Brief Body (2020), which draws from his PhD dissertation and extends the ideas and practices in the earlier books of poetry to produce a fusion of memoir and critical theory that combines Belcourt's personal history with a broader social analysis through experiments in the essay form that serve as a register of affective life. Belcourt joins a new generation of writers who are experimenting with forms of creative nonfiction such as the lyric essay, autotheory and critical memoir, and he places Indigenous concerns – and queer perspectives – at the centre of this transformation of the literary public sphere. ²⁵

Belcourt adapts these new forms for the documentation of affective histories of violence – or what I would call ‘an archive of feelings’ – in his second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms, which turns more explicitly to histories of colonisation, residential schools and contemporary forms of genocide such as missing and murdered Indigenous women. His ‘poems’ are a means of writing history and theory together – where the ‘afterlife of slavery’ now becomes the ‘afterlife of settler colonialism’ so as to offer a fuller account of the Indigenous presence in the ‘intimacy of four continents’ that is the history of the Americas. ²⁶ ‘Canadian Horror Story’, for example, addresses the deaths of Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie but in a way that does affective justice to the ‘centuries of settler rage pooling inside me’ (Belcourt, 2019: 32) that isn’t generally captured in a news story. As further evidence of Belcourt's citational reach, in one of the poem's ten numbered stanzas or micro-essays, he invokes David Wojnarowicz's vision of a political funeral, which has been a foundational case of public mourning in queer studies. ²⁷ ‘If I die prematurely, forget burial/ just drop my body/ on the steps/ of the Supreme Court/ of Canada’: the words are splayed across the page, using poetry's line breaks to accentuate each phrase. Adapting Wojnarowicz's White House to the Canadian context and putting the mourning politics of HIV/AIDS activism to work in dealing with missing and murdered Indigenous women and the death of Indigenous youth is a powerful example of the generous reach of this work in forging connections and an affective politics. ²⁸

In ‘At the Mercy of the Sky’, Belcourt addresses the history of the residential school in his home territory of the Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta, using the genre of poetry – and its juxtaposition with the photographic image – to resist more conventional forms of memorial and documentary. The poem engages with a photograph of the ruins of the residential school in Joussard, Alberta that precedes it – ‘In front of me:/ 1947, a fractured door,/ rotted wooden beams’ (Belcourt, 2019: 21). Belcourt imagines the place as still haunted by ghosts, which may not be explicitly visible in the photograph but can be spoken of in the poem. ‘We are mired in the afterlife of captivity’ (Belcourt, 2019: 21), a sentence that calls to mind Saidiya Hartman's ‘afterlife of slavery’, which has been a crucial phrase for thinking about ongoing grief and death in the context of slavery and is taken up here to describe Indigenous history. ²⁹ Belcourt disparages the bad politics of memorials: ‘One day, the Government of Alberta/ might make this place into a historic site./ I can see it now:/ a spectacle during which white politicians crawl/ out of the bloody maw of the past,/ smiling with the carcasses of words/ like “history” and “empathy” hanging from their lips’ (Belcourt, 2019: 22). Refusing the politics of the spectacle – ‘To be NDN is to know a spectacle isn’t always an event.’ – Belcourt instead looks elsewhere in this moment of ‘unsayable’ return to a place that is saturated with violence (22). In ‘this primal/ scene, this open wound’ (21), there is ‘an aroma of violence only the hunted can detect’ (22), while the rich white people camped on the nearby shores of Lesser Slave Lake are oblivious because ‘Not thinking is a way to think the world’ (22). To apprehend this scene requires a different kind of sensory apparatus, the capacity to be ‘fixed by the darkness that emanates from the doorway’ (22). The poem's speaker stares into a darkness that conjures the nothingness that is NDN bodies and lives. ‘It is a thick nothingness at which I feel compelled to stare./ Nothingness is a world unto itself./ A lot of NDNs live there’ (22).

Eschewing the kind of public memorial that would mark the space and remove or replace the ruins, the poem's speaker looks to the sky: in the photograph, the blue sky with clouds might seem pastoral above the green grass but he sees in that green ‘an ancient forest of gone peoples’ (21). When he looks at the sky, he asks: ‘Does the sky look like it could shatter/ at any given moment or is it just me?’ (23), recalling once again Bersani's self-shattering of the body in sex or non-sovereignty, or the body that earlier in the poem ‘is a sick/ fucking joke I was never in on’ (21). Belcourt declares, contrary to the white boyfriend who wants him to be ‘less beholden to the clouds’, that ‘we are all at the mercy of the sky’ (23). The poem concludes with: ‘I look up, and down comes a parade of half-smiling children’ (23). In its affective attunement to death, to nothingness and to ghosts, this poetic read of the photograph's simultaneously haunted and pastoral landscape offers a different kind of memorial to the dead and to the ongoing grief of the living (dead). In ‘this primal scene, this open wound’ (21), Belcourt writes against the making of a visible or fixed memorial – and instead insists on the open wound. The poem adds to the documentary power of the image through ‘this mode of attention, this art of description’ (23) that is able to see invisible things and feel atmospheres of darkness and nothingness, which are the sensory experience of the unresolvable and ongoing grief and loneliness that pervade Indigenous life. The more overtly historical poems of NDN Coping Mechanisms provide a frame for the feelings of loneliness that are logged across both volumes of poetry – a loneliness that is not just personal or individual but the result of histories made manifest in and through bodies and feelings.

I close by returning to ‘Red Utopia’, the lyric essay that includes the meditations on loneliness with which I began this article. It, too, is prefaced by a photo: a stop sign on the Driftpile Cree Nation has the word ‘GO’ graffitied across it and is surrounded by the corona of a tree's leafless branches. Across the poem's seven sections, Belcourt fleetingly wrests the concept of utopia from his insistence on death as the condition of life for Indigenous people. He mentions ‘the felt knowledge that the otherworldly is a core facet of NDN life’ (Belcourt, 2019: 76) – invoking Munoz's notion of hearing otherwise for something that does not yet exist, being attuned to that which is beyond but also within the present, such as the ghostly children in ‘At the Mercy of the Sky’. Whereas elsewhere Belcourt draws on Berlant's non-sovereignty, here he seems to resist her cruel optimism: ‘In the somewhere/time, in the land of the un-, optimism is neither cruel nor does it get swallowed up in an emotional economy of scarcity’ (76). Instead, ‘loneliness, the affective state of being in a world one doesn’t want, makes utopia a thinkable concept’ (76). His fellow traveller Claudia Rankine invites him to ‘join me down here in the nowhere’, a nowhere that seems to be an undercommons of the underworld peopled with the nothingness that is visible in the dark and ruined entrance to the residential school. It is quite a feat to pull off this vision – like superimposing GO on STOP – and to transport queer and racialised understandings of utopia to the contemporary reserve, which has been the ongoing site of genocides both spectacular and ordinary. This red utopia is made possible by a fusion of poetry and theory that also fuses together resources from (queer) Black, Brown and white writers in order to produce a queer Indigenous way of seeing and knowing that links the African diaspora, slavery and anti-Black racisms with settler colonialism, Indigenous genocide and the carceral practices of the reserve and the residential school. Belcourt's version of an ‘intimacy of four continents’, to borrow from Lisa Lowe, is enabled by his citational practice and his use of experimental forms that mix genre. By developing an ‘art of description’ in and from fragments of poetry and prose in order to describe loneliness as a way of life for Indigenous peoples, Belcourt also points towards new forms of writing as affect theory and an affect theory in which Indigenous ways of knowing are central.