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When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to look normal.
Vivek Shraya
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More quotes by Vivek Shraya
My intention was never to write a trans novel - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.
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I tend to focus less on genre as a starting point and more on idea or intention and let the idea dictate genre.
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I do use art as a site of protest, particularly in relation to dominant narratives.
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I didn't want to give the white reader an opportunity to think of racism as imaginary - a sentiment that is already a central barrier in addressing the problem.
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I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.
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I used singing as a safety measure. I would pay attention to what songs the popular girls liked, learn those songs from the radio or library cassettes, and then accidentally sing or hum these songs in class. This would impress the girls, who would then defend me from the boys.
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I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.
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As a brown artist, I have mixed feelings about my relationship to art and my responsibilities post-Trump.
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In my thirties, I have felt a greater urgency to make art that highlights what it feels like to be racialized, likely due to living in a country that obscures our racism with the idea of multiculturalism.
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It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.
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Should I be collaborating with artists of color solely because of their race and my politics? This question is weighted with my own worry that I have been invited to speak or collaborate solely because of my race, and not because of my abilities.
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I am more likely to get paid for my art if it's presented alongside a white artist, so the questions around value and agency arise: What choices should I make, or do I have to make, if I want to be compensated for my work? Why isn't my art valued on its own?
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I couldn't write about love without writing about hate - specifically, how the experience of hatred embeds itself in the body and prevents love from entering or leaving.
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I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.
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My interest in language is steadfast, but I think each project and its accompanying intentions dictate how language must be used.
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I continue to explore poetry.
Vivek Shraya
Children's books have great potential to reveal new possibilities to readers, because the intended audience is at an age of genuine learning.
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Making music has been connected to one of my greatest heartaches, because my own music has never quite connected with audiences. But it was this heartache that pushed me to explore other artistic avenues, like writing and filmmaking, and I ultimately feel most at home in a multidisciplinary environment.
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Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.
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My art career often feels less like an art career and more like a career in educating, usually by using my body.
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