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MTV Iggy Interview With Big Freedia: The Queen Diva Of Sissy Bounce > MTV Iggy - Global Pop Culture, Latest Trends and New Music

I heart Heems.

How does writing fiction bleed into your rap lyrics?

 A lot of the fiction I write is much more rooted in my South Asian heritage than my music is.  There are parts in my rap where I might allude to South Asian poetry, but I don't really get to delve into that too much.  In some ways, rap is limiting compared to other music.  There are so many words, and you have so much room to develop thoughts, but that's also more difficult because you have so many words to explain something that might not be that complicated. 
Fiction is a much better way for me to tackle my feelings about being a working class South Asian American.  There really isn't much representation of that in Postcolonial literature.  There's people like Jhumpa Lahiri, but she's talking really about upper middle class South Asian American culture.  Which is why rap makes sense for me: it's within that class I am a part of, the class I am speaking about.  I don't think a lot of people would really read a short story I wrote about feeling weird about a guy at a convenience store speaking to me instead of to my mom when I'm a seven year old, because my accent is more American than hers.  That's the type of thing that's much easier to convey in fiction, but the trade off is that it reaches fewer people than a rap would.

Heck, I'd read it.

I know someone like you would, but that's the problem with being a working class South Asian kid who went to a school like Wesleyan. I was surrounded by people who would read it, but until I was 18 I wasn't around people who would read it.  So what's the point of talking about this experience if I am framing it to people who are not working class South Asian?  It's kind of like putting the experience on display, whereas rap is a much more efficient way of targeting the people you are sharing the experience with, rather than letting it be an outsider's perspective looking in.  That's a large problem when you engage in Postcolonial critique: you are jumping out of the community to look at it, then after a while you are no longer a part of it.

http://www.writersonprocess.com/2011/01/himanshu-suri-das-racist.html

This legitimately made me angry.

http://onlyup.org/work-life-balance.html

http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/

http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/