Book Review: The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya

 

I can count on the fingers on one hand the number of books featuring musician characters I´ve read. The latest I can surely remember is The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. The Subtweet, the latest book by the Canadian multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya is a story with a more complex context.

The main topic of the book is the exploration of the relationship between a couple of brown Indie musicians in the digital age. Neela´s songs are discovered by the Internet artist RUK-MINI with whom a friendship is born. Until a subtweet created an online storm that disrupted not only the relationship between the two, but also raised important questions about the position of brown musicians in the white world. How exactly they are supposed to create music? And for whom? Is the white praise important for the success? Should it be requested, after all?

Altough the story in itself is relatively simple the dynamics between the characters and particularly their different identities they are becoming aware of during the enfolding story are very complex. The approach of race and identity and the creative act is not necessarily new but outlines aspects that are less outlined by both writers and musicians themselves. By introducing the social media pressure that is so genuine nowadays to all the creative streams of life - what happens when someone stops tagging you, what is your ´Likes´ count situation from a day to another, how to create and attract an audience through social media targets - Shraya is exposing the everyday struggle of an artist. For female brown artists though, it´s just one part of the general complicated story.

I had access to the book in the audio version, read by the multidisciplinar human Nisha Ahuja. The Subtweet was a finalist of several international literary competitions, such as 2021 Dublin Literary Award, Toronto Book Award or Lambda Literary Awards For Transgender Fiction.

A short praise is deserved for the cover, which convenes the Indie spirit of the book in a very inspired way.

Although music-related topics are not necessarily my area of interest right now, The Subtweet helped me to understand the complex relationships that do cross in the music creative acts. Hopefully in the next weeks and months I would be able to read more in this area and expand a bit my relatively limited knowledge in this respect.

Rating: 3 stars

Growing up an Anti-Racist Baby

Children are not born racist. I am convinced about this, as I often watch my son playing together with children from all over the world and representing all possible religions. No skin colour or Gd is strong enough to convince a kid to give up of his/her friends. That´s only what adults do. Or rather they can try prevent. 

Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, with illustrations by Ashley Lukashevsky, is a book worth including in a simple bibliography parents should start reading to their children as early as possible. No matter where you are living, there is always racism to fight against, which affects primarily children. Therefore, this book may help even when parents are trying to push their children into the dark kingdom of adult minds. 

Besides parents, educators should read this book too, as it is a very useful tool to educate children in the spirit of universality and open citizenship. Indeed, as the book says, ´antiracist baby is bred, not born´.

Talking to children abour racism must take place in a very clear environment and by using simple yet outstanding ways of talking. Racism should be pointed out and denounced where it occurs. There is not other way to recognize it. 

There are nine steps that one shall follow in order to ´make equality a reality´, but this is rather wishful thinking. For a start, it may work though. There are some of those steps that make a lot of sense like the fact that world and its humans come in different colours, that we are all humans and therefore we should celebrate differences, that children must remain curious and not-all knowing, and also that one should learn how to openly deal with racist language - by denouncing it. There are also a couple of things that in full honesty, you cannot make a child understand, no matter how progressist and intelligent he/she is: for instance, that it is the fault of policies for not having equal access. Keep this one maybe for a 4-5th grade maybe. 

I am not a fan of the illustrations though, as too grotesque for my artistic taste.

Anti-Racist Baby is a a good book for starting or further developing the open mind of children and help them refuse any kind of racist education, no matter from where it comes. 

Rating: 3 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review