“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it” floats above our family like an open secret. I watch nimôsom struggle against emotion, against gender, but never waver in his drive to break from the spell of that haunted door, that omnipresent and cursed doorway, in order to provide for our family. Everywhere NDN men are in a struggle against gender.
There are cavernous gaps in my memory in which people I love with fortitude today, those without whom being in the world would be a taxing affair, don’t exist, as though my brain has been surgically hampered. Rather than let those gaps swallow me up, I plant flowers of all sorts there. Daisies and prairie crocuses. Northern Alberta flowers that grow in the wild, ones that hold a firm place in my childhood psyche where bodies should be. There is no use marinating on the thorny question of how and for what reasons there is nothingness where there should be a haze of good feeling. A thick opacity is missing. Again, it isn’t mine to estimate who or what was the thief in the prairie, subarctic night. Perhaps I write now, in the mode of autobiography, to stimulate the conditions that might call up that opacity, the fragile and engrossing density of memory. In this way, I’m an archaeologist of the disappeared.
Nôhkom worked full-time as a receptionist at the health center on the reserve, so when nimôsom, a mechanic, had an uncompromising string of repairs to attend to at his garage, Jesse and I would stay at my dad’s house, also on the reserve. In and out of his house flowed a host of relatives and family friends, all irrevocably thrown into the orbit of softness and openness that was my dad. To this day, his house is something of a brown commons, an ideational and affective infrastructure that, to use José Esteban Muñoz’s language, “holds and shelters brown life within its walls,”7 one that dissipates the governing power of the male property-bearer and proliferates space for other forms of life, other ways of togetherness. For the untutored eye, for the normatively socialized onlooker, my dad’s house, his houses, might be best aestheticized as a disorderedness, one without law or social norm. It is, however, this anti-authoritarian rhythm that irradiates a more politically radical geography of care. In retrospect, this is likely why Jesse and I rarely wanted to leave when nôhkom came to retrieve us after work. This is what I want my home to make possible, the shelter for brown life I want to prop up, wherever I end up. This, then, is part of a feminist project that Maggie Nelson describes as a socialization or democratization of the maternal function, which is to ask: How are we to architect places through which NDN life flows, through which it isn’t slowed down or disappeared but embraced and therefore multiplied?
I never felt the pressure to actualize my parents’ dreams. Not one. Or, if any, it was the dream of making a life unhampered by the strictures of indecision and ignorance, which is probably something we all want for ourselves anyway. One time my dad said I was living the life that he could’ve had, had he refused to let anyone be the bearer of his optimism. I wonder what it is about my life now that he wishes for his past self, the self-that-could-have-been. Like most parents, he inspects me through the rosy filter of unconditional love, but he doesn’t have enough material to develop a complex idea of the intricacies of Billy-Ray Belcourt the adult, who is different from Billy-Ray Belcourt the child. I don’t mourn this lack of expectation, this absence of narcissism, which is the narcissism of wanting to see oneself in one’s child, to have them bloom into another you. On the contrary, without a mirror held in front of me at all times, I felt without skepticism the platitude that anything was possible.
Maybe I spoke too soon. I remember the worrisome responses from a number of relatives upon the declaration of my queerness. Despite establishing in clear yet sparse wording that their happiness was contingent on my happiness, there was also a fog of grief. This was the grief of childlessness. In my vocalization of a non-normative sexual identity, they heard too a disavowal of futurity, that I had relocated permanently to a land emptied of fathers, one inhospitable to the customs of fatherhood. Perhaps in those seconds and minutes I became less like them, less theirs, less bound up in the ticking time bomb of social reproduction, so less beholden to the continuation of a name, a history. In the quiet variations of tone and tempo I heard the world rearrange in their minds. I watched their language ache and falter as I myself ached and faltered.
Regardless, I forgive them just as I forgive naive versions of myself. I choose instead to appreciate the vastness with which they think of my future self, however tied it is to a fiction over which I don’t hold sovereignty. 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 for yourself. To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.
The noise of everyday life rings inside my head. This essay sits at the center of the multi-sensory labyrinth that is memory recall. When not distracted by other business, I, like a janitor, scan the darkened building of me for detritus and misplaced things, something to put me to work again. When nothing jolts me out of a stupor, I stare up at the ceiling, hoping something will drop onto my face, something with which to make a mess worth looking at, worth showing to others.
I didn’t ever think I would write about this, but here we are. The conundrum is that the data that is the past isn’t a block of clay we can, like an artist, press our hands into. Some of us might seek to be one step ahead of memory, to whittle the loose ends of our personal histories down to a single knowable object (a block of clay or a diary or a memoir), to expose a kind of hidden or suppressed truth, to give it a form, to contain it, to master it. It is difficult to discern when I’m doing this and when I’m not.
In my case, the memory is one I’ve let slip from my mouth only two times. Even now I won’t divulge all the details. The first person with whom I had sex was a dear friend. He and I spoke few words and no complete sentences. In the absence of language, we activated the textuality of gesture and emotion, of sense and sensation. This repeated in the thick of one hot summer. It matters what I call this now, so I hesitate to call it anything. Perhaps if it were a performance art piece I could call it My Subjectivity or Becoming a Subject in the Shadow of Language rather than having to make do with the tropes of the coming-of-age story. That this encounter has seldom lived in the world of speech, hasn’t grown a skin of its own, perplexes me still. Memory, it seems, isn’t always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.
It’s August 2012. I give the valedictory address in a church behind the high school. In it, I spend a great deal of time thanking family and friends for their contributions to my upbringing, to my becoming-human. During the softly named “rose ceremony,” I cry as I hug a number of my relatives. As the graduates empty out of the room, I hug my dad, who is sitting with his partner and their kids near the altar. I realize everyone is taking in the spectacle of two NDN men in a familial embrace, both of us overcome with emotion. In those piercing seconds, we were possibility more than anything else, a mode in which NDN men rarely exist. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to hold. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to be held.
At night, I turn down the lights with this image. It gives me a nocturnal language—something with which to go about the unglamorous work of survival.
A
