Of Spirit Worlds and Doors | Anonymous

Dec 22

December 22, 2020

Before reading This Wound Is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first poetry collection, I listened to a podcast about home with Belcourt, Dale Alexis and host Noah Richler. What I connected to was the theme of disconnection, of being Indigenous and feeling alone living in the city – and also of the want, or the need, to return home, back to your ancestral territory. I felt very emotional toward the end of the podcast, when Alexis spoke about being Indigenous in the city and of the roots that connect you back home to the land. I’ve been living in Montréal and going to school for a year and a half now, with another two and a half years left, and I have begun to truly miss my home, my land, and the reserve where I grew up. I miss my family, the trees I’m surrounded by wherever I go, I miss the river – and I have come to more fully understand the disconnection of going from a “bush indian” to a “city indian,” as my people tend to call it. It’s tough and sometimes I question the choices I’ve made to be here.

I have a quote pinned on one of my social media profiles that says, “If my spirit were sand, it would cover the world.” It’s been there since February 2019. I no longer remember how I came across it. The song that shows up in the search results sparks no memory.

I want to know what Belcourt means by “world,” so I pull worlds from his poems:

the parkade basement might be a metonym for the world ... how do you know when the world is not that basement anymore? {1}

my kookum begins to cry / and then there is a world before me. {2}

i need to cut a hole in the sky / to world inside. {3}

i ran off the edge of the world / into another world / and there everyone / was at least a little gay. {4}

In the poem “Wihtikowak means ‘Men Who Can’t Survive Love,’” Belcourt associates the windigo, or wihtiko in his Cree language, to queer men. According to the Cree dictionary, wihtiko means, “a greedy person. In legend, a cursed grotesque super-human figure who was also a cannibal.” In my language, Ojibwe, according to the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, windigo means “a winter cannibal monster.” Both versions mean cannibal, and I believe the word “winter” is there because that was a time of starvation for our people. It also refers to the heart of ice the windigo have inside them.

The next thought I wander to is the word windigokan because of its close association to wihtikowak, although I believe that Belcourt used that version of the word to pluralize wihtikow, adding ak to the end. I may be deviating from the poem’s context by delving into the meaning and backstory of the word windigokan in my language, as it has a different meaning beyond the basic: “being like the cannibal.” After looking for a decent source, I landed on a message board and came across this quote describing windigokan: “though they're usually referred to as the Cannibal Cult, it would be more accurate to say that they were the Cult of the Cannibal, or maybe even better, the Society of the Cannibal, which in sacred-clown fashion means that they completely don't eat people at all.”

I’ll give more information on windigokan, as I grew up surrounded by them. They are in my close family. Windigokan are sometimes referred to as “contraries” because everything they do or say can be contradictory. They are also called the “backwards people.” Over time, I’ve noticed they tend to be like a mirror, in that they can reflect the innermost thoughts or nature that a person has, and reveal the thing that they either hide from themselves or are self-conscious about. Basically, a windigokan has a tendency to blurt out the thing about you that you don’t want to hear, but it is not done by accident, or even fully on purpose. These words come from the spirit of the windigokan and are spoken as a reminder to the person, to remind them to revisit that thought or emotion, to reflect on the thing that bothers them, instead of continuing to ignore it. Windigokan are also referred to as clowns because of their tendency to tease others and make jokes, but their teasing has inner meaning to it. They tend to tease the people who are on a high horse, with the intention of bringing them down a notch or two, reminding them to be humble.

Belcourt’s use of wihtiko has thrown me off here because of my close association to the word and growing up around windigokan. I’ve watched some of them do menial tasks and speak full sentences backwards, or even do part of a ceremony backwards. Growing up with windigokan has been beyond interesting. It has been sad and fun. It isn’t all rainbows and laughs, as life can be very tough and full of tests for them.

π

I find more worlds:

she who gave birth to herself three times: 1. the miscarriage. 2. the shrunken world. 3. the aftermath. {5}

she who walks upside down on the ceiling of the world and does not fall. {6}

I liked reading “The Rez Sisters II,” especially the third stanza which begins with “sister of forest fire. sister who dwells in the wreckage.” This brought to mind when my home was threatened by a forest fire in 2018 and the community had to pack up and leave the reservation and relocate. We lived in hotels for two weeks until the threat passed. I was working on the construction site at the Wind Farm when this occurred and had been putting out fires made by the heavy machinery for several days. I was not far from where the actual fire began. I was one or two kilometres away, and I radioed my uncle to let him know about the smoke. He was one of the first at the scene. I remember the day we were evacuated because it was my birthday.

And more worlds:

6. she watched a western and thought the world looked better in black and white. {7}

1. follow me out the backdoor of the world. {8}

heartbreak lives in the underbelly of a system / meant to world around his body. {9}

3. his moaning is an honour song i want to world to. {10}

I like this line from the poem “Grief After Grief After Grief After Grief”: “8. i am trying to figure out how to be in the world without wanting it. this, perhaps, is what it means to be native.” The line resonates with me because I am also trying to figure out how to be in this world, and there have been times I felt I didn’t want to be a part of it. Especially after reconnecting with my culture and ceremonies, I think it is dangerous to be introduced too early to the spirit world, to different worlds – when some doors are open, they cannot be closed, you will forever have one foot in and one foot out. I saw beauty and peace, and I felt that pure unconditional love that is on the other side of that door. Ceremonies opened that door for me, and that pull to go back Home was tough to resist – my heart was split, but we have all chosen to be here for a reason, and I will not leave early.

After following that line of thought, of spirit worlds and doors, this has me wonder if Belcourt may be doing the same, if he is associating “different worlds” to the “spirit world,” connecting them by the use of the word “door.” For example, in the poem “Gay Incantations,” he writes: “heaven is a wormhole.” During my people’s most powerful ceremonies, the medicine person leading the ceremony calls upon their spirit helpers to assist in opening the “door,” and our ancestors and more powerful spirits are welcomed into the room through this door. During these special ceremonies, the room is always kept in pure darkness. Anything that gives off light is taken away from everyone’s person. My mother is a medicine woman, and I have often heard her refer to these “doors” as “wormholes” that lead to the spirit world, to that other dimension, or reality. Earlier in the same poem, Belcourt writes: “i am the boundary between reality and fiction.” If the speaker is Belcourt, he is referring to himself as “make-believe” and as a “story,” and I can’t help but see a connection to my thought of having one foot in this world and the other foot outside it, placed in another reality – is Belcourt also caught between worlds? Is he referring to his life in this world as fiction?

π

gay as in let’s hold up a world together. {11}

Heartbreak is a theme and begins with the poem “Love and Heartbreak are Fuck Buddies.” Belcourt asks: “is the earth round, / or is it in the shape of a broken heart?” in “Notes From a Public Washroom.” He addresses heartbreak again in “Heartbreak is a White Kid,” where “heartbreak” is an alias for his lover, and again in “The Creator is Trans,” with another use of the word “world”: “but it was all of the women she had ever met / praying in a circle / that she would give birth to a world / without men / only women / made / from other women’s heartbreak.” Does Belcourt use “heartbreak” as an escape to this other world? Is heartbreak a doorway?

The speaker seems to always want to leave this world for another, to transition from one existence to the next – or even to stand between. One kind of world for Belcourt is where acts of queer love or sex are done in an enclosed space, safe from any eyes or judgement. A world becomes a place to escape not from but to. Such a world represents an accumulation of emotions, thoughts, and feelings. Returning to the image of his grandmother’s tears producing, he writes, “a world before me” – there is a lot for her to cry about, especially as an Indigenous woman, since her tears hold a history touched by colonization, oppression, as well as joy, and love. Her world of tears holds potential.

One more quote to consider is: “3. his moaning is an honour song i want to world to.” The speaker is using “world” here like the grandmother’s tears, as well as an enclosed circle of space. It could be read as “his moaning is an honour song I want to feel, to know and to explore, and to be enclosed by.” The way Belcourt uses this word has become something I admire.

π

The poem “Colonialism: A Love Story” contains the following bullet point: “4. sometimes bodies don’t always feel like bodies but like wounds.” It’s as if the title of the book could be This Body is a World, not This Wound. What is a body, according to Belcourt?

the cree word for a body like mine is weesageechak. {12}

5. i kiss him knowing that when i wake up i will be in a body differently. {13}

heartbreak is a body that is not bodied. {14}

if i have a body, let it be a book of sad poems. i mean it. indigeneity troubles the idea of ‘having’ a body, so if i am somehow, miraculously, bodied then my skin is a collage of meditations on love and shattered selves. {15}

one day i will open up my body / to free all of the people i’ve caged inside me. {16}

“The Cree Word For a Body Like Mine is Weesageechak” is the poem which opens the original edition of the book, published by Frontenac House in 2017. It comes second in the edition published by University of Minnesota Press in 2019. It is an introduction, in which Belcourt lets the reader know how he relates to the ancient Cree figure of legend. After doing some research on Weesageechak, I find that he is the Cree peoples’ version of my Anishinaabe peoples’ Nanabush. Nanabush is also a shape-shifting trickster. I grew up hearing his stories. Once I realized that the two are one and the same, right down to having a wolf as a younger brother, I understood the poem. Belcourt establishes a connection between himself and Weesageechak’s shape-shifting abilities, which he connects to gender-fluidity. Belcourt intertwines the trickster’s shape-shifting with that of his own.

In the poem “God’s River,” the bodies are the community’s, the God’s River First Nation, put in jeopardy by Health Canada sending body bags as assistance supplies during the H1N1 pandemic. This poem reminds me of how my First Nation reserve was also sent body bags during H1N1, and, more recently, other northern reserves have again been sent body bags during COVID-19, after asking for help and supplies. I find that it’s hard not to be upset or angry over the way all Indigenous people are treated, overlooked, and brushed aside. “We’re still here” has come to mean something different to me.

Toward the end of “Ode to Northern Alberta,” Belcourt writes of his “not-yet mooshum” running away from residential school, ending with the lines: “he kept coming back / despite knowing / heaven is nowhere near here.” I was lucky to be brought up in a family that was culturally oriented and attended many different kinds of ceremonies every year⁠ – and it is all because of my own mooshum, or mishomis in my language, my grandfather on my mother’s side. He managed to evade residential school. His mother would take him and all of his brothers out deep into the bush whenever government workers came to our reserve to look for more children to take. They would stay out there from days to weeks, just in case, and survive off the land through their fishing, hunting, and trapping skills. My grandpa grew up in tune with our land and was able to keep hold of our native language, and he later left the reserve in search of the knowledge his generation, and his parent’s generation, had lost. He traveled to different First Nation communities all over Canada and the States. He met my grandmother in the process, at a Montreal train station and asked her to marry him three days later, and they were together for twenty-six years until he passed. He was looking to learn more about the ceremonies we had lost, so he could bring all our old teachings and reestablish that sacred way of life that we were forced to forget. If it wasn’t for my grandpa’s journey and struggle to bring back our ceremonies, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I don’t think I would even be here today. In regards to Belcourt’s quote about the reservation being a place where “heaven is nowhere near here,” I was lucky to have a mishomis who did his best to bring our own version of heaven back to our reserve.

Near the book’s end, I found myself focusing on “The Oxford Journal” series, where Belcourt writes of being called “wonderfully exotic,” and of the reaction a man has after being told that he is native. I can relate to these situations. I have also been told I look exotic, as if I am from “somewhere else.” I have also encountered that silence after telling someone I am Anishinaabeg, or Ojibwe. They will pause and then ask, “What does that mean?” and I feel forced to say, “It means I’m Native American” – words I was brought up not to say due to a radical, Anishinaabeg mother who is proud of our people – and most often the response is “I never heard of that before.” I’ll never forget the moment I told my brother how I thought a passing white guy looked attractive. I said there was something “exotic” about him, and my brother gave me a weird look and said, “Well, it’s because they are exotic. They’re not from here.” It was like my brother had turned on a light for me in the dark room I was standing in and revealed all the white faces surrounding us.

what does one do with the sense of loss that tailgates their body? {17}

how do we live at the edge of the world? {18}

In “The Rubble of Heartbreak,” Belcourt looks at the broken pieces of his lover and sees his grandmother reflected there. His grandmother represents the “old worlds,” our old way of life. She represents how Indigenous peoples lived before, and Belcourt is admitting that way of life is still possible. He ends the poem: “those / who died / already / never forget / what it is / to become / and unbecome / a body,” meaning our ancestors will always remember the process of being their own body, then losing it. I didn’t fully understand that statement, those final lines, until I reread Belcourt’s epilogue several times over. He writes that “love is a process of being unbodied” and “to be unbodied is the ‘sadder than that’ of love, but it is also love’s first condition of possibility.” I think what he is saying is that our grandparents and great-grandparents, our ancestors, were and are the “sadder than that,” they lived their own lives, they knew their language, their culture and ceremonies, they knew love.

Anonymous is an Ojibwe kwe from Anishinaabeg Territory in Ontario. They are a full-time student at Concordia University pursuing a BA degree for Creative Writing, as well as a minor in First People Studies. After graduation, they plan to attend Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig to learn their Native language, Anishinaabemowin.

Koko Summer Rainbow Kester is an Ojibwe Anishnaabe aspiring film director and actor from Lake Temagami, Ontario. She is currently studying Theatre Arts at the University of Guelph.

Footnotes

Quotations are from the US Edition of This Wound Is a World, published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

1. “Love and Heartbreak are Fuck Buddies,” 3

2. “Gay Incantations,” 5

3. “Notes from a Public Washroom,” 6

4. ibid

5. “The Rez Sisters II,” 9

6. Ibid

7. “Six Theses on Why Native People Die,” 10

8. “We Were Never Meant to Break Like This,” 13

9. “Heartbreak Is a White Kid,” 17

10. “Grief after Grief after Grief after Grief,” 19

11. “The Creator Is Trans,” 20

12. “The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine is Weesageechak,” 4

13. “We Were Never Meant to Break Like This,” 13

14. “Heartbreak Is a White Kid,” 17

15. “If I Have a Body, Let It Be a Book of Sad Poems,” 18

16. “The Creator Is Trans,” 20

17. “Oxford Journal,” VI, 42

18. “If Our Bodies Could Rust, We Would Be Falling Apart,” 45

Effy Morris