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This World Is a Wound: Analysis
Billy-Ray Belcourt is queer and indigenous. That puts him at the meeting point of two paths of
victimhood: being indigenous/colored and being gay. Caught in this intersectionality, Belcourt
finds himself fighting two wars, one for the freedom of the individual, in this case the freedom of
the body and its desires; and another for the freedom of a people, the indigenous people’s war
against colonialism. The former is a big fight within the latter, but ironically a much harder one.
His remedy is love and sex, the two things that are universal for all human beings. His poetry is,
therefore, a paradox: a cry over individual plight and yet the act of crying is what links one
individual to the next. This is the paradox at the center of his poem Everyone is Lonely.
The paradox of the poem Everyone is Lonely is evident right from the title. Whereas the
word “everyone” suggests plurality, “lonely” suggests a singularity. Indeed, it is possible to be
lonely in a crowd. Belcourt expresses this “loneliness in a crowd” thus: “once a week/i
curate/obituaries/on my facebook wall/without trying” (lines 4-8). The word “Facebook” may be
a metaphor for multitudes, whatever “obituaries” the persona is curating may be his/hers or
everyone else – just as “dead”. In any...
