Choose to write on one of the six poems by Cree poem Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation). In your reading response, analyse how your chosen poem takes up the connection between grief and the body. What is the specific poem doing in terms of this connection? Write a response around 300 words.
Some prompts / questions that are common between the poems (optional prompts for analysis). If these ideas resonate with your reading, feel free to go off from them in your response, or to synthesise your own. You do not need to use the ideas below:
- We think of the body as private; as something that we are in control of, most of the times. Yet, different bodies who do not conform in normative ideas (regarding gender binaries for example) navigate a tension between private and public. How is that true for a racialized , trans, queer, or non-binary body?
- Belcourt’s poetry has recurring language about haunting elements : e.g. the line “haunting is a gender. gender is another word for horror story” (“Grief after Grief”). What is the connection between haunting and gender?
- What is a potential parallel between a self-deterministic experience with gender (where one subject challenges cis-gender normativity and biological essentialism and performs gender according to their own authentic self-actualization) and Indigenous self-determination?
- What is “the wound” in Belcourt’s poetry?
- What is the interconnection between stories and grief?
- How is grief negotiated through intimacy and sex in the poetry?
- What does colonialism do to Indigeneity?
- For Belcourt, his Indigeneity and experiences of Indigeneity cannot be separated by the ways gender and sexuality reflect personal and collective traumas and losses. Why is this?