“A Tribute to the Potentiality of Sadness”: Sex and Desire in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World

Despite writing scholarly work, two poetry collections and a memoir/autobiography, Driftpile Cree author Billy-Ray Belcourt is yet to feature widely in the academic work of others. Regardless of the success of his writing, no work has yet explored his poetry’s presentation of queer Indigenous identity in relation to trauma; two key aspects of his work.
This article examines selected poems from Belcourt’s debut poetry collection This Wound is a World (2017) and discusses settler colonialism’s impact on Indigiqueer (Indigenous queer) experience, and argues that, though victims of trauma at the hands of settler colonialism, Indigiqueer individuals also aim to visualise futures free from the bounds of settler colonialism, and in turn, free from despair and traumatisation.
This article will deconstruct certain tropes that tend to cloud more productive understandings of the kinds of intergenerational and identity-related traumas that queer and Indigenous people face, focusing on the inciting of decolonisation and collectivity through queer sex and desire to achieve this deconstruction. It will assess how Belcourt’s representation of sex with other Indigiqueer people opposes the myth that the only reality of sex for them is related to that of sexual assault, fetishisation, and the pathologisation of gay sex, to manifest a reality where Indigiqueer people are seen as proponents of joy in the face of their traumas; not defined by them.