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    even this page is white
    even this page is white
    even this page is white
    Ebook87 pages35 minutes

    even this page is white

    By Vivek Shraya

    4.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

  • Vivek Shraya is a talented writer, musician, performer and filmmaker who has previously published an acclaimed novel (She of the Mountains) and a YA book (God Loves Hair) as well as a new children’s picture book this season (The Boy & the Bindi). This is her first poetry book.
  • even this page is inspired by events of the past few years in which race (as well as class, gender, and sexuality) have become explosive and divisive issues. The motivation for the book is to use poetry to reduce and transcend barriers that divide people according to race, and to paint the face of racism so that it is visible, tangible and undeniable.
  • The book includes a “conversation with friends” featuring Sarah Quin (of the popular music duo Tegan and Sara), poet and memoirist Amber Dawn, musician Rae Spoon, and author Dannielle Owens-Reid.
  • Vivek is an engaging and highly popular performer; in addition to writing, she is a performance and recording artist (as well as filmmaker) and often incorporates music and multimedia into her readings.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArsenal Pulp Press
    Release dateOct 17, 2016
    ISBN9781551526423
    even this page is white
    Author

    Vivek Shraya

    Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. Her best-selling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel.” She is the founder of the award-winning publishing imprint VS. Books that supports emerging BIPOC writers. A seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Shraya lives in Treaty 7 territory, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.

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    Reviews for even this page is white

    4.5/5

    71 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book of poetry has a lot to say, in few words. It touches on a lot of race issues, and lgbt issues, but it's largely to make you consider, and learn more on your own. as with most poetry books, I feel like there should be more substance, but I think that might be my personal issue with poetry, not a failing of the book.
    • 4/5
      I just want to say a nig Thank You for using your platform like this.
    • 4/5
      An interesting collection of poems about racism, whiteness, what it’s like to live as a tran woman of color. I am sad I’ve read and not listened to this book. I think I would’ve gain more if I heard the author narrate her poems.
    • 5/5
      Excellent collection. Powerful work examining themes of race, gender, sexuality, queerness, and identity of all types.
    • 4/5
      Happy Pride Month!

      Even This Page is White by Vivek Shraya has to be one of my most long-awaited reads of 2017. And from the first poem, white dreams, I loved her work.

      She discusses racism, colour, what it means to be brown, desire, sexuality and how in coveting whiteness, you can lose yourself. I loved that she was able to take complex, difficult issues like privilege, heteronormativity and her own anti-black racism and condense them into short, emotional, cathartic poems.

      Her work is not academic in nature. It is raw, it is vulnerable, it is beautiful and radical.

      Her writing is lyrical and bare, but most of all honest and I think this is something I value the most. I'm reminded of this quotation by Gwendolyn Brooks:

      "In writing your poem, tell the truth as you know it. Tell your truth. Don’t try to sugar it up. Don’t force your poem to be nice or proper or normal or happy if it does not want to be. Remember that poetry is life distilled and that life is not always nice or proper or normal or happy or smooth or even-edged." -- Gwendolyn Brooks

      This quotation fits her work to a tee. She writes honestly, but not in a way that is not compassionate. She writes as if she were speaking to her former self perhaps, a younger self, and when I think of all the young trans or agender people reading her work around the world, my heart is warmed. Her voice is an echo, a soft place to fall, a mirror through which young trans and LBTQIA people can see their own beauty.

      I think the aspect of her work that I cherished the most was when she discussed her sexuality freely and easily in her work. Trans people are constantly seen as other, they are forever sexualised and objectified. They are portrayed in films as the butt of a sexual joke, the endless fascination with body parts, genitals and sexual preference overrides even the most PG of daytime talkshows.

      Enter Vivek Shraya, talking freely of her own desire, her own parts, her own sexuality. It was a relief to see a counter-narrative to this deafening commentary, for a brown trans body to be honoured in such a way. It is wonderfully queer, and it astonishes me in this day in age that queer sex is still considered so radical, but it is.

      Shraya's work is kind. Shraya's work is gentle. Shraya's work is revolutionary.

    Book preview

    even this page is white - Vivek Shraya

    white dreams

    to be anything in this world, you need to get a white person to like you.

    —scaachi koul

    white dreams

    i have white dreams

    billboards magazines

    mighty praise accolades

    top 10 lists and top 10 hits

    so i climb dodge boulders

    earn blisters but even

    the top of the mountain

    is white

    i have a white boy i top

    i dream on his long body

    as his past bodies have long

    built upon mine but when i cum

    on the dip in his spine

    even the colour of my pleasure

    is white. body you betray me

    the only brown i make

    for sewer but for him

    for him my brown body

    makes white makes nice

    if my cum was brown

    would he still eat it? from my core

    i seek courage

    but even my bones

    are white

    is it my skin that

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