The speaker manages to escape the violences and destruction tied to having a racialized, gendered, or queer body in Settler society by surrendering that body in acts of love and desire. Belcourt’s poems position sex as a space where the body is repeatedly sacrificed or lost and through that loss of embodiment the speaking subject achieves a kind of transcendence.
This is an instance of one of the most important moves the book makes. When he writes “we are a people/ who proliferate/ only as potentiality” following the invocation of “a place like a reserve but not” the threat that the speaker carries for the addressee is not an embodied threat but something else, something haunting and powerful and rooted in both loss and love. Belcourt writes in the poem “If I have a Body, Let it be a Book of Sad Poems” that “indigeneity troubles the idea of ‘having’ a body, so if I am somehow miraculously, bodied then my skin is a collage of meditations on lone and shattered selves.” There is, however, a competing notion of presence in these poems that is spectral and haunting. There is a sense that embodiment as conceived in Settler cultures runs counter to indigenous experience. The latter is particularly true of racialized bodies, which Belcourt highlights in lines like “colonialism, definition: turning bodies into cages that no one has keys for.” Embodiment functions as a double bind for the indigenous subject in these poems. Belcourt rejects the body in these poems because of the troubling dual functions it performs in Settler Colonial conceptions subjectivity: it is at once something to be owned or possessed-the legacy of Cartesian dualism and the resulting hierarchical relationship between the mind and body-and the body as determinant. The body as site/cite of presence and absence is at the core of the work that This Wound is a World is undertaking. The poems, though, earn that discomfort through a combination of poetic craft-Belcourt writes lines and images that are clear, simple and evocative-and intimacy, the voice of the poems feels specific and real even when the body where they are located becomes unfixed and abstracted. The act of mourning in This Wound is a World is inherently and intensely political, this makes for uncomfortable reading at times. The text is pervaded by a sense of loss as the closing lines of the poem “Heartbreak is a White Kid” clearly show: “that our eyes stopped/ believing in what was in front of us/ was the closest we got to killing ourselves.” However, no loss is simple in Belcourt’s book lost love or frustrated desire or even death are not self-contained but necessarily intersect with race, gender, sexuality, identity, and, ultimately, the body.
This Wound is a World, the first collection of poetry from Billy-Ray Belcourt, is an act of mourning.
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