For Scaachi Koul, a writer who boasts near daily run-ins with Twitter trolls and one full-blown social media scandal that last year caught international attention, the mantra that one day we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter seems like a fair one to carry on your wing.
The motto is also the title of her debut collection of essays, which was launched this week by Doubleday Canada. In Mute, the fifth of the book’s 10 essays, Koul recounts the intense internet backlash she experienced in early 2016 after tweeting that BuzzFeed was looking for story pitches, encouraging “not white and not male” writers to send ideas forward.
A few enraged users accused her of violating human rights laws by discriminating against white men others threatened outright violent retribution. Following a barrage of online harassment that lasted for days, Koul did the unthinkable: she deactivated her Twitter account – albeit temporarily.
Mute takes fresh philosophical aim at the internet and its distillation of personhood, reflecting on, in Koul’s own words, the “men calling me a cunt or a whore or threatening to detach my limbs and toss me into a dumpster.”
Koul writes that she refuses to be afraid of such Twitter trolls “for the same reason that you’re not sup-posed to be afraid of non-poisonous spiders. They’re more afraid of you… Why waste my finite fear and rage on what is, ultimately, something my cat can trap and eat out of her little pink paw?”
The essay dives into Koul’s experience growing up with Nexopia, an online platform once popular in western Canada with “just a few thousand thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds leaving each other messages about how fat and/or fuckable you were,” she writes. Describing the Web 1.0 space as her “first foray into what we would later call online harassment,” Koul also notes that it’s where she made a valuable discovery about her voice: “the internet rewarded all the parts of my personality that the tangible world didn’t: sarcasm, cynicism, and a refusal to enjoy almost anything.”
“I really like the sound of people yelling,” Koul tells me over drinks on King West last week. For instance, she writes with what she calls garbage television blaring in the background (and cites Lockup: Women Behind Bars as one of her favourites). Perhaps it’s an affinity for noise that makes Twitter’s violence-touting trolls manageable, and sometimes even entertaining, for Koul. But the writer says it’s also just an unfortunate by-product of spaces that are open-access.
“People have been cruel in humanity forever,” she tells me. “Anywhere you can express an opinion or have media follow you or create media yourself, people have been cruel. [Twitter] has given me access to an audience I wouldn’t otherwise have, but –” she laughs, “it’s also given me access to an audience I wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Ironically, Koul’s nihilistic catchphrase, “One day we’ll all be dead,” appears not in her chapter about Twitter, but in one detailing the wedding of a loved one.
Aus-piss-ee-ous describes her cousin Sweetu’s seven-day nuptials in India, an exhaustive affair which Koul points out is longer than some actual prison sentences.
The wedding is just one of the book’s entry points to the subject of growing up Indian in Canada. In Inheritance Tax, Koul begins with travel and moves on to identity crises, the post-9-11 world and reflections on the mortality of her bloodline. In Anyway, she uses a teenage relationship to characterize the complexities of cross-culture dating, feminist selfhood and a parent’s understanding of dutiful daughtership.
These thoughtful reflections are accented by an eccentric cast of Koul’s family and friends: her five-year-old half-Indian niece, Raisin – who passes as white and, in one hilariously cringe-worthy moment, declares to her family that Indians are poor people who smell bad herself, “a woman who would one day get both of her hands stuck in two different salsa jars at the same time” and her father, who responded to Koul’s taking a trip to Ecuador with the words “Is it some sort of getting back at me? No other kid has done this. Why? Why?”
Despite her tough topics, Koul’s voice snaps with the same wit as her advice column on Hazlitt and her culture commentary on BuzzFeed Reader. Returning to the subject of Indian weddings, Koul tells me, “The CIA should learn torture techniques from these things. They feed you vats of oil for days. They don’t let you eat meat. They don’t let you drink, they don’t let you sleep, and then they pump you full of sugar and caffeine. And then they show you two women weeping and they go, ‘Now what’?”
That last bit refers to the emotional peak of Aus-piss-ee-ous, the moment when Koul watches the bride say goodbye to her mother after a marriage ceremony that has lasted overnight and into the morning:
“Sweetu took a step towards the car, then swivelled back to her mother, standing behind her. They held each other for what felt like a world-stopping lifetime. It made me want to rip my heart out and hand it to them because mine will never be used as much as these two were using theirs.”
If this doesn’t sound like the @Scaachi you follow on Twitter – the one who recently tweeted, “Just muttered, ‘Oh shut the fuck up’ to a tea commercial” – you might be surprised to find they’re one and the same. Of her distilled 140-character Twitter voice, Koul says, “There’s nothing wrong with curating what your public version should be. There’s lot of stuff about me that I don’t tweet about. I don’t need to give you everything. If I did, this book would be obsolete.”
