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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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Vivek Shraya
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More quotes by Vivek Shraya

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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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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 would love to see more dialogue around the responsibilities of art consumers - how can audiences better financially support artists we love, artists who are doing the work, so that artists have a more solid foundation upon which to make art?
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I worry about what Trump will inspire in Canada, especially given incidents that have already occurred here since the election.
Vivek Shraya
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When I do book readings, I always incorporate music or singing.
Vivek Shraya
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Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.
Vivek Shraya
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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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Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.
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My intention was never to write a trans novel - which is perhaps an effective strategy for writing a trans novel.
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If anything, I have witnessed the ways my art travels, or is rendered more accessible, when sanctioned by or connected to white artists.
Vivek Shraya
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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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As a brown artist, I have mixed feelings about my relationship to art and my responsibilities post-Trump.
Vivek Shraya
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I continue to explore poetry.
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In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.
Vivek Shraya
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I recently did a reading at an elementary school in Ottawa, and one of the children asked me if I was a girl. I said yes. Another child commented that I had a deep voice. I responded: Can girls have deep voices? There was a pause and then the group responded, Yes!
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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.
Vivek Shraya
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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.
Vivek Shraya
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Despite the fact that I'm not highly skilled in any visual art, aesthetics have always played a strong role in my art, including my first albums.
Vivek Shraya
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I am always hesitant to call myself an activist, mostly out of respect for the activists who are using their bodies and voices to protest or activists online who are constantly engaging and educating others.
Vivek Shraya
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Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.
Vivek Shraya