A single mother, not a single father, is one of the protagonists. What Brother reminds me of in tone, at least at the outset, is Boyz n the Hood, though, unlike the film, it isn’t really about gang culture. I will say this much, though: reading this book effortlessly and squarely put me into the shoes of young black men living in the novel’s suburbs of Toronto. I am, after all, white and I want to check my white privilege at the door. Now I want to stop here and say that I’m not sure if I’m qualified enough to review this book. The book is written by an African Canadian man (born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario) and is profoundly about the experience of blacks in Canada. I suppose it turns out I didn’t get a book squarely on music as I was expecting, but, boy, am I glad I read this one. I’m a vinyl lover, after all, so I thought this was going to be a light-hearted romp through hip-hop or dance music culture. I came across Brother on NetGalley, entranced by the illustration of a turntable on the cover. Stories told by a particular culture need to be told by that culture because, well, they have to be. Plus, the word “appropriation” has negative undertones akin to theft.) Those who are against cultural appropriation, however, have an extremely valid point: other voices need to be heard and their stories told because they need to be, if not just to foster community within the community, then for the sake of awareness of their culture. (I agree with the idea of “borrowing” in principle - after all, it’s how we got rock ’n’ roll, though I’ll add that I’m uncomfortable that the genre tends to discriminate against people of colour - but something about the term unsettles me, probably because white culture is not quite at a place where it can just write about a minority culture’s perspective at will without a lot of research. I don’t want to comment much beyond that because my feelings are rather mixed on the issue. The idea is that everyone is now happy-clappy enough to get along and it’s okay for dominant cultures to borrow from minority cultures in Canada as a result. If you’ve been in Canada these last few months, you’ve endured the media blow-out from those two words, written by an acquaintance of mine in a rather ill-informed editorial about indigenous peoples.
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