Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Idea of An Entire Life

 

There is a blank space inside all natives that history
lays claim to. Every winter, I take pictures of the snow
because the snow reminds me of my impermanence.
Mostly I want to be undone without being ruined.
A native truth: the present is as beautiful as it is brutal. (“AUTOFICTION”)

The latest from Vancouver-based writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt, a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, is the poetry collection The Idea of An Entire Life (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025). “How we exist in the world / depends on how we describe it.” begins the opening poem in the collection, “AUTOFICTION.” The poems in this collection are quietly gestural, earth-shaking, precise and performative, offering a layering of direct statements, narrative storytelling and subtle truths. “Picture the women waiting at the forest’s centre,” Belcourt writes, as part of the poem “20TH-CENTURY CREE HISTORY,” “their hands / folded into little coffins. // Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.”

I seem to be a few books behind on Belcourt, having missed A Minor Chorus: A Novel (Toronto ON: Hamish Hamilton, 2022) and Coexistence: Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), the two most recent of his growing list of titles that includes the full-length poetry debut, This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), a book that made him the youngest winner-to-date of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], as well as his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020) [see my review of such here]. There is a way that Belcourt has of stitching together the present moment with threads of memory and history, writing declarative details of and around Queer identity, family history and survival, utilizing factual details as building blocks into something larger, deeper. As any poem might require, in that particular moment. “I want to call attention to the dead,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CRUISING UTOPIA SONNETS,” “to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world.” There is a dream-like quality to elements of these poems, blended with concrete realities, each side complementing the other in quite striking ways, hitting all the right notes of lovely, of devastating, of loss and heartbreak and wonder. These are poems of witness, of memory; of documentation; a book of the whole world, the whole body, an approach that seems to be how he approaches the books of his I’ve seen to date, including elements of his entire world in that particular moment into the work. This is, arguably, what the best work is supposed to, each poem and line offering a different facet, a different fragment, of something far larger and more expansive as a unified whole. A book of an entire life, indeed. Or, as the third poem of “CHILDHOOD TRIPTYCH” reads:

I used to think that the first tragedy of my life
was that I wasn’t raised by my parents.
These days, I suspect that all children come
from the same country of dreaming. I didn’t
so much leave as escape. My impulse was
to break open this poem. Like childhood.
To break something in order to repair it.
To touch all of the earth in order to think
about something else. I’ve forgotten everyone.
It’s autumn already. So many leaves have fallen
—I have to go out and kiss each one.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

 

The aesthetic function of the novel, to my mind at least, is to whisper, to hide critique, to grab a reader by the throat with an invisible hand. I want no part in this. My provocations will be bare-faced. I wont trick anyone. Maybe what I want is to be violent in an epistemic sense; the blood will be not on my hands but on my words. This is why I’m a poet before all else. Maybe it’s best if I admit everything that is fucked up about me and my writing practice in the first paragraph of any piece of writing. Am I fucked up because I believe beauty is in short supply? That this lack is all I care to write about as of late? That the world is at once the condition of possibility for and addicted to this beautylessness? Probably. To be without beauty is an integral component of human life in Canada. There, I said it. Now no one needs to feel slowed down by this heretofore unutterable sentence. This act of avowal is no heroic feat; my desperation is creaturely. I spew verbal matter even when my mouth is shut. Truth is I feel savaged by language, by the History of Language, which is always-already a History of the NDN as an Endangered Animal. (“FUTUROMANIA”)

From Driftpile Cree Nation writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, comes his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020). The author of the poetry collections This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms:Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], A History of My Brief Body is a collection of short essays that blend lyric memoir, critical theory, life writing and confessional on his cultural and contemporary self, blended together into a commentary on grief, sexuality, gender, colonialism and the body across fourteen sharply brilliant and beautifully written essays. As he writes early on in “AN NDN BOYHOOD”: “Perhaps this pressurized orientation to memory—a body in the present—is always the case with life-writing. The writ  is called on by others to do the politically significant and ethically charged work of construction and then documentation. This is my job to report from the scene of an undead past colliding with a still-to-be-determined future.” Belcourt’s view is unflinching, writing on the cultural and sexual self and the contexts around which he emerged and exists, writing the dark underpinnings of racism and homophobia, the falterings of any coming-of-age and sexual awakenings, and the ongoing personal and family legacies of the residential school system, as well as multiple other concerns, experiences and explorations. As he writes to open the title essay: “Let’s start with the body, for so much is worn and lost, and lost and lost there.” The essays centre around the body, as the body is where everything is felt, everything ends, and everything begins. And from the foundation of the body, so too does he write on the requirements and statements around desire, and the possibilities, joys and complications of desire. And from there, his essays open into a meditative suite of incredible depth, range and complexity. As he asks early on, how does one exists in such a space of constant erasure and denial, citing experiences around his culture, his family and his sexuality? Later in the collection, as part of the essay FRAGMENTS FROM A HALF-EXISTENCE,” Belcourt offers:

            I believed the quirk that made novelists novelists was an ability to say no to the world. But as a poet, I couldn’t break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object. I said yes to the world again and again, sometimes to my detriment, if only to increase the volume of my selfhood, a performance of creativity I felt closer to than invention. One night in an empty bed (empty beds are for me a call to art-making in response to an imposed quietude) it occurred to me that what I wanted wasn’t to write a novel but to fall in love. Both were overwhelmingly possible, which perhaps explains why I accomplished neither.

Even as he writes on grief, there is an optimism in these essays, one that works through some dark passages, working to open up necessarily conversation on what has so often been brushed aside, including having to somehow exist, and attempt to thrive, from within an ongoing colonial violence. Remarkably complex and passionate, A History of My Brief Body is easily comparable to work by Maggie Nelson for its blend of theory and memoir, and its openness and engagement with a range of social and political inquiries, queer and cultural theory, and personal explorations around love, sex, joy, disappointment and belonging. Belcourt writes through how theory can speak to lived experience, and how lived experience can be articulated against trauma, negotiating and navigating how one arrives at the present moment, so as to be better prepared to move forward. So much of the book is heart-ripping, stunningly articulated, and utterly devastating, and the deceptive ease and straightforward matter through which he writes is startling for just how thoughtful and deeply felt this collection is, as he writes as part of “AN NDN BOYHOOD”:

I can’t blame my kin for forgetting that the form for my life’s emotional content isn’t, as one might expect, a family but an entire world, a wilderness ruled by unknowing inside which I’m a future relic. What binds us is the knowledge that it can be devastating to discover that a loved one has forfeited everything to that which you’ll never fully see yourself. To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) might be Milan Kundera’s best-known novel, but I was always partial to Immortality (1990). This is a book, of course, I can’t locate in my library. I know I still have it around, although it might still live in our storage unit, two-plus kilometres east; a storage remnant of our two years’ past basement flood and extensive downstairs reconstruction. I remember first reading Immortality when I was twenty-four years old, and I told myself for some time that the novel ‘changed my life,’ although I can’t remember exactly how. That was nearly thirty years ago, after all. Since those days, I’ve admired Kundera’s ability to equally blend elements of the political, philosophical and the intimate, a goalpost I’ve worked to reach in my own fiction. It’s hard to do well, and easier to see when it misses the mark, and Kundera managed to articulate novels from within a period of turbulence, writing of political and social upheaval. I read a debut novel some twenty years ago that went back and forth between a political thread and a romantic thread, but only one of those threads was compelling, which meant the other lay fallow. At the end of my paperback copy of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he closes an interview conducted by Philip Roth with this:

I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

While he remains one of the great writers of the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring, and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, certain elements of Kundera’s work don’t exactly age well. His depictions of women, for example. And yet, his an example of living, breathing and writing through the midst of great crisis. Writing as a way of thinking, of documenting. Of processing. How does one write in a crisis?

And crisis is relative, of course. There were those on both sides of Quebec’s language debate in the Bill-101 years that Mordecai Richler wrote about in his non-fiction blend of politics and satire, OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC! (1992), that saw themselves as the victims of unrelenting crisis. One could also begin to finally ask, also, why there have been water advisories in certain communities, predominantly aboriginal communities, in Canada at all, let alone some lasting four decades or more? How do we allow such conditions to continue, especially those we’ve the ability to change? I dread to think of how hard some of these communities could be hit, through this crisis, in part due to their lack of basic necessities, even before any potential access to masks, gloves and ventilators. How does one write in a crisis?

In the introduction to Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (2019), editor Nyla Matuk writes: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” She continues:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

I think of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019), where he writes: “Let us undertake an ethnomusicology of tears. I am after the frequency of NDN grievability. My hunch is that the pitch interrogates itself, like a hymn.” I think of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), writing: “But the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated / boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us / anywhere but to rot. If the language of race is ever truly attached to emptiness whatever it is / I feel now has me in the hull, head knees feet curled, I dare say, to fetal position—but better / stated as a form I resort to inside the jaws of a reference; [.]”

I might ask how one writes in a crisis, but to many, the very question broadcasts my lack of awareness of the larger world in which we live. To some, crisis has been here for hundreds of years. None of this is new.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Resistance: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Nyla Matuk

ONE WAY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHO IS TALKING

If I change one word, I change history. What did I

say today? Do I even remember one word? Writing is

oral tradition. You have to practive the word on

someone before writing it down.

I do not intend to become the world’s greatest Indian

orator. Maybe I might by accident. I might speak my

mind even when running off my mouth like I’m doing.

language finds a tongue. Maybe it will be an Indian

accent.

Counting hostile Indians is made easier because they

don’t talk much or very little. They look the part

—the part in the middle with braids. You never do

know if you are talking to an Indian.

Frozen Indians and frozen conversations predominate.

We mourn the ones at Wounded Knee. Our traditions

buried in one grave. Our frozen circles of silence

do no honour to them. We talk to keep our

conversations from getting too dead. (Marie Annharte Baker)

I was curious to see this new anthology edited by Montreal poet Nyla Matuk, Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2019), a volume of work including contributions by Jordan Abel, Marie Annharte Baker, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Beth Cuthand, Rosanna Deerchild, Marilyn Dumont, Marvin Frances, Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, Lee Maracle, Janet Rogers, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Gregory A. Scofield, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, James Arthur, Wayde Compton, Jim Johnstone, El Jones, Christine Leclerc, Canisia Lubrin, Sachiko Murakami, Arleen Paré, Michael Prior, Shane Rhodes, Ingrid Ruthig, Karen Solie, Moez Surani, Derek Webster and Rita Wong. For the purposes of this book, “resistance” seems concurrently an overly general and remarkably precise descriptor, one that acknowledges a building cultural shift over the past decade or so, and the responses to those shifts, as well as to some of those authors who have been already been doing this kind of work for some time. There has been a growing frustration around cultural issues, with subjects such as Idle No More and #MeToo cohering into flourishing movements, something that has been increasingly reflected in Canadian writing and publishing. Young writers such as Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jordan Abel might only have emerged over the past decade or so, but poets such as Armand Garnet Ruffo, Rita Wong and Marie Annharte Baker have been at the forefront of this kind of work for a very long time, so while some of the larger attentions to such issues and ideas might be more recent, the responses to such have existed for decades.

As Matuk writes as part of her introduction: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” As she writes:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

Writing as a response to politics, I would argue, is a thoroughly postmodern idea: writing that exists as part of the world (and a response to that world) as opposed to the modernist suggestion that writing exists separate from the world. We exist in tandem, and one can’t exist without affecting the other. Why should writing be any different? And some of the strongest writing I’ve seen over the past decade or more has been work that exists within the world, from the geopolitical to the social to the flourishing of eco-poetry.

Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry opens with a land acknowledgment (something I’ve been hearing, increasingly, at literary events the past few years, but hadn’t seen in print), and ends with a variety of statements by a handful of the poets, providing context for them and their works. As Vancouver poet Rita Wong’s statement (clearly composed before her jail time) writes:

In August 2018, while BC was in a state of emergency because of wildfires, breaking records for the second year in a row, I sang and sat in ceremony in front of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge marine terminal for half an hour. For this, I was arrested, and face the threat of 28 days in jail for opposing the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. My punishment—while Kinder Morgan gets away with clearcutting trees, poisoning the land, air, and water—shows how Canadian laws are dangerously disconnected from the laws of physics, chemistry, and the land itself.

            Where Canadian law is failing to protect us from increasing the likelihood of climate disasters, thankfully we can and are learning from natural law and Indigenous law that we have a reciprocal relationship with the land. We all have a responsibility to care for the land’s health, which is ultimately our health too.

            15,000 scientists have issued a warning letter that we need to make a fast transition to renewable energy. Governments aren’t responding fast enough to the peril that we face due to climate destabilization. On a geological scale, we are in imminent peril now.

            I am just one of over 200 people who have been arrested because we take climate crisis seriously. We cannot afford to let this black snake pipeline acidify the ocean. We stand in solidarity with the land, the water, the earth, and all the relatives protecting our collective future.

This does feel like an important book, furthering a conversation that has been building for quite some time. And what should I, as a straight, male and white writer be doing in my own work? Listening, certainly. Paying better attention to some of these conversations that might make certain people uncomfortable (and rightly so). Sometimes it is better not to speak, but, instead, to help re-broadcast the thoughts and works of another, from conversations around Omar Khadr, poverty, systematic racism, the Kinder Morgan pipeline, unceded territories and a history of genocide against Indigenous people and communities, colonialism, Canada’s history of slavery and the historic erasure of Black neighbourhoods from Vancouver to Halifax, Japanese internment camps, the list of murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls, and the trauma surrounding the Residential Schools system. We can only move forward (whatever that forward might look like) once these conversations and reconciliations are properly addressed, otherwise we are trapped where we stand.

BOUNDARIES

This is dream city, built on shores

still not ceded. This is a city of tourists

with mouths agape, these are my boundaries:

the islands in the Gulf, the sea they might call Salish,

the land taken there, taken again

from another family, that line nearly faltered.

and now a nephew with my father’s grin, the last one.

Between the people and the land, what have I to teach?

to tolerate suburbs? To let the land be covered

with another’s vision, then stretch our line out farther than the

commuter trains,

stop where the valley’s silt turns hills, the residents nearly Albertans.

The time is now, and now, and now; built so fast with minds

less changed, from Expo to Olympics,

a lifetime. More than his. Most of mine. (Sachiko Murakami)

I’ve heard recently (given the combination of federal election and thanksgiving weekend) that politics is something our parents should have taught us not to avoid, but to discuss and inquire about in a respectful, thoughtful manner, far different than a generation or two prior, where politics at the dinner table might have been considered taboo. One hopes that a collection such as this would be taught in schools, both for the writing and the content, to showcase just how much culture is shifting and has already shifted to acknowledge some of these conversations, frustrations and attempts toward reconciliation. Given the volume includes numerous works reprinted from full-length collections, I would suspect that is one of the purposes here. The world is changing. Writing is changing in response. One hopes that enough might be listening.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field

CANADIAN SONNET

History is a song, a cruel anthem

my nameless lovers mouth all the words of.

Confession: I rarely survive the night

in the biome of a man’s longing. What

has been lost doesn’t ask to be unlost.

Love’s work is always slow, painstaking. We’re

allowed forgetfulness. Men I fuck don’t

believe people can rust. I’m not unique.

Memory? Pardon the melodrama –

it’s raining again in the apartment.

Funny how suddenly the body turns

into a Canadian monument!
I’d rather be a bird. Do birds grow sick

of the exploding sky would NDNs?

On the heels of his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning debut, This Wound is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), Driftpile Cree Nation poet Billy-Ray Belcourt’s latest is NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019), a collection of uncompromising poems, erasures, photographs and prose poems that blend camp, theory and lyric to examine unexamined, and some extremely difficult, histories, and those histories not discussed enough through mainstream media. “I wrote a poem to resemble a forest floor teeming with decaying vegetation.” he writes, to open “ARS POETICA,” “A struggling thing isn’t a struggling thing / if everything else is in a state of rot.”

What is fascinating is in how Belcourt utilizes poetry (over, say, critical theory, creative non-fiction or fiction) as the form with which to engage his field of study. In an interview conducted by Sanchari Sur earlier this year for the Invisible Publishing blog, he responds: “The first reason I came to poetry, I think, was because I was frustrated with the limits of conventional academic writing. As an undergraduate student, I was going through this process of politicization that I think a lot of students of colour go through… [it] brings about a kind of fury [laughs], and pain and sadness that many of us want to put to use. And poetry was where I did that because it allowed me to write and to theorize from experience.” He continues:

So, the next book – NDN COPING MECHANISMS – is amongst other things, a critique of Canada and the structures of complicity that many are mired by. It speaks to the ways in which the suffering of Native people is very much entangled in the daily lives of Canadian citizens, and there needs to be a remapping of terrains of social violence to get at the ways in which many contribute to the normalization of settler colonialism. And, I think that that kind of intellectual undertaking is in itself running counter to CanLit… I think what we are facing – ‘we’ as in marginalized writers like queer, Indigenous, people of colour – is an older version of CanLit, that had to do with a national myth of Canadian life. It reminds me of this [Antonio] Gramsci quote that Dionne Brand cited in a talk once: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” I think we can see these symptoms everywhere in the literary world. And perhaps, this generation of writers – that includes myself – have the unfortunate task of weathering these symptoms as well as championing and bringing forth the new. We don’t entirely have the option of opting out of the old – that’s where a lot of resources and capital flow through –, but that does not mean that we should give up on the construction of alternative literary communities that are first and foremost about freedom, and flourishing for those who continue to be oppressed.

One of the most powerful pieces in the collection is “CANADIAN HORROR STORY,” a poem that writes of Tina Fontaine and Coulton Boushie, and a system that routinely allows and even encourages brutal violence against Indigenous people, writing: “I would unwrite everything to make forever out of August 7, 2014.” The poem opens:

Tina Fontaine’s body was retrieved from the Red River on August 17, 2014, nine days after she was last seen at a hotel in downtown Winnipeg. The Red River is an eight-hundred-and-eighty-five kilometer body of water that meanders through major North American cities such as Fargo, Grand Forks, and Winnipeg. A toxicologist reported that the river, an unknowing accomplice, had washed away the DNA from the duvet in which Tina had been wrapped sometime on August 8. The molecular entities that bore the key to a guilty verdict likely tumbled about the Red river during the criminal investigation. In colder water, the decomposition of DNA is, however, slowed down, so it is also possible that remnants of that violence are still there, in a spectral form, blended into the ecosystem of a river already teeming with NDN history. What happened isn’t nowhere; it wasn’t disappeared. Who listened to the river? Who didn’t?

There is something quite compelling to how Belcourt utilizes theory-as-poetry and vice versa, feeling out both forms and how and where they might meet, blending the two in ways that could end up comparable to works by Erín Moure or Lisa Robertson, but engaged in a writing immersed in contemporary culture, queerness, Indigenous and Canadian histories (and where they both meet and conflict), theory, language and his roots as a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation. Given his gaze on concerns too often dismissed or left behind, the blend is captivating, and even revelatory. As he writes in “MELANCHOLY’S FORMS”:

In her seminal text Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler makes the case that gender identification is a melancholic process in a culture of compulsory heterosexuality. By way of skilled psychoanalytic judgements, Butler posits that one is made to disavow the “same-sexed object” as a site of desire and instead to incorporate it as a part of an affectively endowed becoming-subject. Banished to the netherworld of the unreal, “homosexual love,” to use Butler’s language, is fixed to the status of “never was.” This, Butler says in her essay, “Melancholy Gender – Refused Identification,” published twenty years after Gender Trouble, is what partly conditioned the ungrievability of those lost to the AIDS epidemic, losses accelerated by governmental neglect, the trapdoors of signification, and the neoliberal spoils of forward thinking. In the land of the lost, queerness is ephemera and ephemera is “trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor” (José Esteban Muñoz). Queerness: at once what never was and what is still to come.