欧宝娱乐

In Belcourt's story, "Summer Research", a gay, Indigenous PhD student goes back to his hometown to conduct interviews with locals for his dissertation. He is interested in the indelible legacies of colonial violence and dispossession on reservation communities and, in an ironic coincidence, he is staying in a refurbished residential school, a place where nuns had abused native children in the name of public charity and Christian salvation. In his bag, he is carrying an academic book鈥擜very Gordon's Ghostly Matters鈥攁 treatise on the idea of "haunting", a literary and sociological exploration of the ways in which the past is always immanent in the present, the present always insolubly tied up with the historical trauma of the past. During the night, he has a vivid dream of a nun crying in his bathroom; during the day, a racist vacationer threatens him away from his property. It is a story that captures both the spectral and the sociological meaning of "haunting", historical memory haunting him at day, ghostly visitations haunting him at night.

It's a story that speaks for the collection, vignettes illustrating the coexistence of the past and the present, the ways in which the colonial past is reenacted on Indigenous communities鈥攖hrough racism, through educational curricula, through the carceral system. His stories follow the modern lives of Cree individuals and show the lingering depredations of colonialism. It is an overtly theoretical work of fiction, applying the language of critical theory to the contours of daily life on reservation land. In "Poetry Class", the teacher muses on the "political uses of illegibility" and he is annoyed at his partner who derides his over-use of theory. In "Literary Festival", an aloof poet speaks at a largely empty panel, trying to explain the role of poetry as a means of resistance and courting skepticism ("I felt a couple audience members tune out at the mention of "colonial-capitalist enclosure." Some people thought those kinds of words were meaningless, too large to shape real life"). Belcourt's stories are gritty and academic at the same time, an attempt to show and to explain the contemporary tragedies of colonization.

The novel is very similar to his earlier A Minor Chorus. I thought on the whole these were clipped and incisive, but in some cases, a little forced and implausible. In "Summer Research", the doctoral student has a conversation with a priest about the sins of colonialism, but it just felt hollow (the priest obstinately redirects the conversation to confession and conversion, refusing to discuss the sordid history of the old boarding school鈥攂ut, whatever one might think about the Catholic Church, a lot of priests are sensitive to this topic and have more pastoral good sense). Sometimes it felt like theory dogmatically overrode authentic story-telling and character complexity.