The Joy of Resistance

“Joy” appears in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body at least 19 times.

This is a word not commonly associated with First Nations/American Indian literature, but I wish it were. Belcourt insists it is part of the Native experience, that it must be.

Belcourt is a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, and he does not deny the pain and grief that comes with living as a queer Indigenous person in a settler colonial state. Nor does he deny the anger and resentment. He discusses these topics in his collection of essays.

But joy is key to overcoming those things, and pleasure in its various expressions (physical, emotional, intellectual) is an important element of Native life. It always has been. It is part of a Native person’s inheritance from their ancestors, and it must continue to guarantee a Native future.

I did not count them, but the words “future,” “futurity,” and “utopia” also appear frequently in the book. They are made possible (or at least desirable) by joy.

Belcourt writes that with joy Native people can “breach the haze of suffering” inflicted on them by the Canadian government and the Canadian dominant culture. He states joy is an “ethics of resistance” (8).

I encountered the word so often as I read his new book that I wanted a new word: jouissistance.

This would be a combination of the jouissance and resistance.

Why combine those words? Because the new word echoes “survivance,” which is a very popular word in American Indian Literary Studies. That word was introduced into American Indian Studies by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and it commonly is understood as a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance.” The settler colonial cultures of the United States and Canada want Native people to disappear, and they expend great efforts to make that happen. So any act of survival is an act of resistance for Native people.

However, I believe Vizenor means more than that with the word. Survivance is originally a French word that is similar to the concept of inheritance, “the right of such succession in case of survival” (19). In a chapter titled “Aesthetics of Survivance,” Vizenor describes examples of Native people claiming their cultural inheritances, evoking the presence of ancestors through their actions (telling old stories, speaking their language, etc.) and claiming their personal and Native sovereignty from colonizers. A Native person’s act of survivance is not merely personal; by surviving they keep more than themselves alive; their survival is a continuance of their ancestors and their community.

For Belcourt, feeling joy can be, it seems, an act of survivance. Joy – and with it love, hope, and optimism -- is an inheritance, a birthright. He states this clearly in his preface, when he thanks his grandmother, his nôhkom, who taught him to be “a practitioner of the utopian.” He writes, “This book, then, is as much an ode to you as it is to the world-to-come” (3). Thanks to her gifts he can write himself “into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race,” which he says stalks her and her family. He hopes she can see in his book his affection for her: “That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere” (6).

As for jouissance – this is a word already in use by theorists in several fields, but I am borrowing it from French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. She used the word to describe, among other things, female sexual and emotional pleasure, and it can be understood as pleasure that is excessive and ungovernable – and therefore transgressive in a male-dominated society that seeks to confine and control women and their sexuality. Cixous writes about this in “Sorties,” which originally appeared in 1975 in French. Its English translation can be found in The Newly Born Woman (1986), and the glossary of that book defines jouissance as “sexual ecstasy.” The glossary states, “At the simplest level of meaning – metaphorical – woman’s capacity for multiple orgasm indicates that she has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra… Real and unrepresentable.” The glossary also states that the word can have “sexual, political, and economic overtones. Total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy are implied” (165).

I find this concept of pleasure useful for discussing Belcourt’s book. Native pleasure subverts the settler colonial state that tries to make Native existence miserable and therefore untenable. The settler states of Canada and the United States attack Native bodies (quickly with violence and slowly with degraded living conditions), so celebrating and enlivening Native bodies with sexual pleasure resists that erasure. Native jouissance resists the power of the state to observe and control Native bodies. Quite literally, some Native orgasms resist that erasure by producing more Native bodies.

The queer Native body is targeted for erasure in multiple ways. The dominant culture targets the queer Native body for being brown and for being queer; so the pleasure of the queer Native body is overcoming a double-negation. This negation can also come from within a Native community that has adopted the dominant culture’s prejudices against queerness (and other expressions of sexuality). We could say some queer Native people must overcome yet another negation, a self-negation, since they may resent their body for its queerness. Therefore, queer Native jouissance can be easily understood as subversive or transgressive. This joy makes life more desirable, makes imagining a bright future more possible. Jouissistance is necessary for the futurity that Belcourt writes to create.

With A History of My Brief Body, Belcourt seeks to “keep brown queer joy in the world… a world-to-come imbued with brown queer possibility” (126-127).

Yes.

+ + +

Understanding Native sexuality as resistance is not new. Back in 2000, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm wrote, “Indigenous erotica is political” (98). She was describing the anthology project she would eventually publish as Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (2003). She wrote about the repression of Native sexuality: “We were supposed to vanish, to die, not procreate, for God's sake!” (99). Although I may be coining a new word, jouissistance, I am not claiming to have a new idea. I simply find it particularly useful for thinking about a book I recently read and enjoyed.

I imagine this response to A History of My Brief Body will continue to evolve, and I may develop it further and expand this short essay.

As for jouissistance, I can find just one reference to it online. It is used once in a French legal reference book from 1879.

 

Works Cited

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri. “Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall 2000), pp. 97-104.

---. Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. Kegedonce Press, 2003.

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. A History of My Brief Body. Two Dollar Radio, 2020.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 24. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Vizenor, Gerald. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. University of Nebraska Press, 2008.