The Subtweet

by Vivek Shraya

  “The ones that speak to you.”

  “In time with the music?” The soundscape was almost ambient with a barely audible beat.

  “You’re overthinking this.” Malika got up and turned off the bedroom light. “Ignore the music for now. Ignore me.”

  The computer screen shone bright enough for Rukmini to read off her papers, but after a few minutes, she closed her eyes and let her memory move her mouth.

  * * *

  “Maybe this is a bad idea,” Rukmini whispered to Malika as they shuffled down the stairs of the lecture theatre to the front of the room on the afternoon of their presentation.

  “Just pretend we’re in my room,” Malika replied. She plugged the audio cable hanging on the side of the podium into her laptop and dimmed the classroom lights like she had done this before.

  As Malika fastened the lapel mic to the strap of Rukmini’s sundress, Rukmini looked up at her classmates. They seemed to have multiplied from this perspective and many of them had their heads down, already taking notes. What could they possibly be writing? She often suspected notetaking was more about performing engagement than actually engaging. But once Malika’s beats burst through the mediocre sound system, their classmates were compelled to look up. Rukmini began to wish they hadn’t stopped taking notes.

  She stared down at the typed page in her hands and whispered the title, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as though these cherished words were foreign to her. Seeing Malika nodding in her peripheral vision bolstered Rukmini’s confidence, though she wished Malika was beside her. She said the title again and moved towards the centre of the room as she moved into the piece. Some of their classmates began nodding along with Malika, while also frowning, demonstrating how hard they were working to absorb the presentation.

  Malika had built the track so that Spivak’s words, spoken by Rukmini, were prerecorded. Rukmini recited their analysis of the article live in class over the instrumental breaks, ensuring a distinction between the theory parts of the song and their responses to it. But for the last eight bars of the song, the music dropped out and Rukmini assumed Spivak’s voice live, quoting the line, “White men are saving brown women from brown men,” acapella. The two white men in the front row resumed taking notes.

  When the presentation ended, the classroom fell silent. It seemed as though everyone was waiting for what would come next. Rukmini looked back at Malika, standing behind the podium. Her eyes were wide. Rukmini finally leaned into the mic. “That’s it?”

  With this cue, the class cheered and whistled. When Rukmini and Malika hugged, the class cheered louder.

  “We did it.” Malika softly whispered in Rukmini’s ear.

  * * *

  Rukmini and Malika continued to meet every Wednesday without ever making formal plans to do so. When Rukmini arrived at her house, Malika would play her newest beat or the latest effect she had learned in Ableton. Rukmini would listen attentively and ask technical questions, which Malika loved, like, “What is a hi-hat?” or “How did you distort that snare?” Eventually, she nicknamed Malika “Prof M.”

  “Don’t your roommates mind?” she asked one night, as Malika cranked the volume knob.

  “What? Nah. They’re lucky,” Malika shouted over the music. Rukmini dropped her mouth, pretending to be shocked by Malika’s audacity, but she agreed. It was lucky to live in a house that brimmed with the energy of someone who was still searching, someone who electrified the walls and floors. Without Malika and her “noise,” this would be just another house full of apathetic people. Malika’s vigour made Rukmini rethink the idea of home as a place just for rest.

  In the midst of one of Rukmini’s informal production lessons, Malika announced, “We should form a spoken word pop group. Think about it. Nothing like that exists!”

  “Everything already exists,” Rukmini chided as she hit the yawn sample on Malika’s sequencer.

  “We could call ourselves ‘Subaltern Speaks.’” Malika reached behind the sequencer and turned it off.

  It was a catchy name, the kind that would intrigue Rukmini to check out the band. “But then what?” she asked.

  “Keep doing what we’re already doing.”

  “Why do we need a name for that?

  “It just makes things official.”

  Rukmini didn’t know what Malika meant by things, but she hoped she meant their friendship and she didn’t want to say no to her new friend.

  At first, Subaltern Speaks songs were composed largely of Rukmini’s voice chanting favourite lines by theorists they loved — Sara Ahmed, Stuart Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw.

  “What about this one?” Rukmini got off Malika’s couch and handed her a stapled essay, pointing at the line she had highlighted.

  “How many times has this thing been photocopied?” Malika asked, squinting.

  Rukmini grabbed the essay back and read the line aloud into the mic, “If you are free, you are not predictable . . .”

  “Who said that?”

  “June Jordan. The essay is called ‘A New Politics of Sexuality.’ We’re reading it in my queer theory course.”

  “That’s a solid quote. Lend me the article sometime?” Malika glanced back at her computer and then up at Rukmini, like she had solved an equation. “What if you tried . . . singing it?”

  “Singing? I’m not a singer.” Rukmini backed away from the mic.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I don’t sing? Unless we take that road trip to Detroit this summer. Then I’ll treat you to my car voice.”

  “I just think these words are special. They were meant for more than just to be read or spoken. ‘If you are free’ . . . What’s the rest of the line?” Malika reached for the essay.

  Rukmini held on to it and read with emphasis, “You are not predictable and you are not controllable.”

  “Damn. What is she talking about here?”

  “Bisexuality.”

  “Wow. See? These words need to soar. They can’t be delivered in a predictable way. You have to sing them. Just try.”

  “Okay, fine.” Rukmini sighed. “I’m going to do this because you’ve been right about everything else, but don’t you dare laugh at me, Malika Imani. Now turn around.” Malika jumped up from her chair and turned off the bedroom light. Then she opened one of the instrumental files in Ableton, hit Play and said, “Go for it.”

  Behind the mic, instead of closing her eyes, Rukmini stared at Malika’s hair, trying to draw inspiration from the vitality that seemed to energize every curl. She began to chant the quote, as she usually did. But remembering what Malika had said, she tried to imagine what these words wanted to sound like musically. How might June Jordan have sung them? She began to lift her voice when she said the word free. After several repetitions, she had constructed a melody.

  “I can’t believe you just did that. That was incredible!” Malika cried, jumping off her chair again.

  “You made me do it!” Rukmini buried the bottom half of her face under her Leave Britney Alone T-shirt.

  “It was so effortless. You must have sung before.”

  “Not since grade school.” Rukmini stepped away from the mic, feeling guilty about her lack of training and experience, especially when she considered the hours Malika devoted to studying and practicing production. She also thought she sounded generic, like the one singer in a girl group whose name no one remembered. But Malika kept encouraging her to sing, and so she did.

  For their final class project, they submitted a CD of theory-based songs called Hegemony, accompanied by an explanatory essay. They had taken several photos of themselves in Photo Booth and Malika selected the outtake of just their mouths, open in mid-laughter, for the cover. At their classmates’ urging, they also posted a download link on the course message board.

  Ten years later, that link and photo were everywhere.

  * *
*

  It took Rukmini two days to respond to Neela’s text.

  In the past and with other friends, this delay wouldn’t have been noteworthy. Unlike live conversation, text conversation was ephemeral. The connection could dissolve at any moment, without notice, if the lure of the text was not strong enough. Texting was sending a message in a bottle: all Neela could hope was that her message safely reached the other shore. Once perturbed by the medium’s enabling of unreliability, she taught herself to appreciate read receipts, to try to find comfort in the word “Read” itself. Read below her “How are you?” text meant that the recipient knew that she was wondering about them. Read below her “Are you free next week?” text meant that the recipient knew that she was interested in spending time with them. She had learned to be satisfied with the knowledge that the person on the other end knew the intentions encrypted in her words. But Rukmini’s consistent responses had retrained her low expectations. She was confident that every message sent to and Read by Rukmini would receive a reply.

  This uncharacteristic radio silence worried her. Had someone in Rukmini’s family been injured or died? But when she checked Rukmini’s Twitter page, she saw that Rukmini had been retweeting all the news about the unearthing of Hegemony. Neela had composed many tweet responses in her drafts:

  @RUKMINI I spent today digesting the album. Looking forward to discussing.

  @RUKMINI Did you get my text? Are you ok?

  @RUKMINI Time for Twitter but no time to text?

  Rukmini’s eventual response — Can you come over? — prevented Neela from resorting to Twitter.

  When she arrived at Rukmini’s house, empty-handed for the first time, the door opened before Neela could ring the doorbell.

  “I saw you from the window. It’s really nice to see you, Neel.” Rukmini was holding a glass of water.

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  Rukmini handed Neela the glass and together they wordlessly walked through the house’s smell of churros to her bedroom.

  “Can you believe this whole thing?” Rukmini said, throwing herself onto her bed. Neela crossed her legs in her usual spot on the floor. She recalled the first few times she had visited Rukmini’s place, how she had digested her aesthetic choices, stroked the spines of the books by Rupi Kaur, Gloria Anzaldúa and Angela Davis on her bookshelf and asked to see her childhood photo albums. Now Neela’s fingers aimlessly fidgeted with the grey carpet.

  “Not really. You told me you didn’t write your own songs?” She framed the last sentence as a question so that she sounded curious instead of accusatory.

  “I don’t! That was a school project. It wasn’t meant to be heard.”

  Neela had read that Hegemony had been recorded as part of a university assignment, with songs named after women of colour theorists. The original source of the album was a tweet from one of Rukmini’s former classmates. This tweet had been retweeted 36K times. The louder the online noise about Rukmini’s band grew, the louder the silence between Neela and Rukmini had resounded. Maybe this attention was what Rukmini had wanted all along, why she had been obsessed with the idea of forming a band with her, but had now lost interest. With their friendship weakened, Neela finally understood the comparison of internet marketing campaigns to viruses, the aspiration to go viral anxiously embedded in every link.

  “Why put it up on the message board?”

  “Our classmates asked us to! We never thought it would go anywhere. Our names aren’t even mentioned on it.” Rukmini spoke rapidly like she was still in shock.

  “Just your band name.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your other band . . .” Her mouth could not hold the words inside any longer.

  “Oh my god, Neela. Are you mad?” Rukmini sprang off the bed and folded herself next to Neela.

  “Mad? Why would I be mad? I’m happy for you. This is a big deal.” She said these lines as smoothly as she had rehearsed them in her mind. And she meant them.

  “What are you then?” Rukmini pulled Neela’s hand off the carpet and held it in her own.

  “I’m just a bit surprised. You have a band, and you have an album. I am not sure why you felt you had to hide any of that from me.” Neela turned her head towards Rukmini’s vinyl collection, noting how peculiar and even uncomfortable it felt to be in Rukmini’s room without a soundtrack playing behind their voices. Without music, the room felt like thick emotion, like a clinic waiting room. She tugged at the cowl of her stone-grey shirt.

  “I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. We were never an official band, and I honestly try not to think about that whole time. I don’t even recognize the name of the person who leaked it!”

  Neela pulled her hand back. “Then why did it take you two days to respond to my text?”

  Rukmini curled her empty hand and sighed. Then she shimmied herself an inch closer to Neela, their knees now touching. “I was embarrassed. I look up to you so much, and I was worried you would listen to these old songs and think they were terrible.”

  Neela leaned back against the wall. “Well, I did listen to it.”

  “And?” Rukmini tugged the carpet now.

  Neela had been unable to swallow all the buzzwords posturing as lyrics:

  patriarchy

  feminism

  performativity

  misogyny

  white supremacy

  gender binary

  intersectionality

  accountability

  Critics had referred to the album as radical, another buzzword, and discussed the power of naming, but where was the artistry in merely reciting words? Hadn’t Rukmini learned how to “show versus tell” in university?

  “I loved the last song. It’s different from the others,” she offered, and faintly sang the hook,

  Wanting is dangerous

  “Oh, the bonus track. ‘Wanting.’” Rukmini paused. “You sing it better than me.”

  “You sing it perfectly.”

  Rukmini reached over and hugged her, but Neela’s body was still stiff. There was another question she needed to ask. “So what does Malika think about all of this?”

  Neela had tried Googling Malika to hear what other music she had recorded and see what she looked like. But without a last name, it had been impossible to locate her.

  Rukmini scrunched her face as though she was about to sneeze, but instead she began to cry. Before she’d arrived, Neela had anticipated how Rukmini would rave about how wonderful these past two days had been, how astonished and giddy she was about the online attention. Rukmini’s unexpected tears were somehow comforting. She too had been distraught, at least in part because she was concerned about Neela’s impression. Neela wiped Rukmini’s cheek with her fingers, letting the salty liquid soak into her palm.

  “I haven’t heard from her,” Rukmini stammered between sobs. “We haven’t spoken in ten years.”

  * * *

  “You know that girl who never said hi to me in the halls?” Malika asked.

  “Vidya?” Rukmini responded. Vidya’s disregard seemed to expand beyond the brown girl code of silence given that they’d been in many of the same classes.

  “She actually talked to me today . . .” Malika paused on the sidewalk as the streetcar clanged by. They had said their goodbyes to their classmates after the commencement ceremony and were now heading to Malika’s place for a private celebration of Jell-O shots and planning their Detroit trip.

  “Really? When?” Rukmini gasped, clutching her new canvas purse embroidered with a pink elephant — Malika’s graduation gift to her.

  “This morning. In the washroom. Apparently, she downloaded Hegemony.”

  Rukmini cringed, anticipating a plunging critique. “Uh oh.”

  “No. She loved it. She said it helped her understand some of her course work better.” Malika walked on, her stride almost a
strut. “She even talked about connections she had made between the album and her Feminism and Film class.”

  “No way!” Rukmini playfully whacked Malika’s arm.

  “It’s everywhere. Vidya said that she knew other POCs who had downloaded the album and felt the same way.”

  “Ooh, maybe we should introduce Vidya and her friends to Stacilyn,” Rukmini joked. Stacilyn was a white girl in their class who had put up her hand to ask their professor if her presentation could be on Subaltern Speaks’ presentation because she had been “so transformed by the capacity for music to disrupt and elucidate upon the formal page.”

  “No, but seriously, hearing all of this is more validating than any grade I have received.”

  “You’re right. It’s pretty special,” Rukmini agreed. “I can’t believe how many people are listening to this. I didn’t think it would ever leave our class.”

  Malika stopped again. “Vidya gave me her number and asked me to let her know when our next show is.”

  “Our next show? Did you tell her that we’re just a one-hit wonder?” Rukmini veered towards the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, one of their favourite pit stops, trying to steer away from the disagreement that she and Malika had been having for weeks.

  “But this is what I keep telling you!” Malika didn’t move save for her hands that she motioned up and down like a lecturing parent. “We don’t have to be. I sent the album to my cousin in the States and she said that people down there would lose their shit for us.”

  Rukmini was forced to turn around and walk back to her. “Okay but Mali, what I keep telling you is that I have 20K in student loans. I can’t spend the next ten years living on instant soup and adding to my debt while we try to make a career out of some school project.”

  “How can you say that? How can you keep making jokes?”