Book Review: Killer Tune by Dreda Say Mitchell

What is race? Is it the colour of our skins, or the faith of an individual, or is it the rebel within? Dreda Say Mitchell paves a way for us to understand the extent to which one's search for truth can open sealed wounds.

As the day seeps into night and the night into yet another day, August 25 will see frenzy on the streets of West London. Whilst people will be so mesmerized by the lights and the beats of the drums, the town of Notting Hill be ablaze with culture ala the Notting Hill Carnival.

As a Pakistani identifying with the likes of fellow brown-skin men and women, I have come to a moral realization - Melanin is race. In a country that wrought the concept of racism, nothing gives your soul pure satisfaction than to learn that a fellow person is summing up the rationale of equality that isn't skin. Dreda sees the events that led to the existence of the carnival as a seedling of the racist clashes of the mid 70's.

In this story of a black rap artist, a sensation, crushed between the death of his veteran musician father and a careless fifteen-year-old fire-starter's rebellion as he lights a house up with a petrol bomb, skin is notoriously questioned. Amidst the search for truth, he learns how the town of Notting Hill once painted black and white came into colour and how the music of the black helped heal wounds.

Dreda seems to brilliantly portray the individualistic ideology of a black skinned person when he comes to question race, colour, religion and creed. History has been written yet again in this book marking the final chapters of racist England.

But, what made me buy this book off the shelf at a Notting Hill bookstore was not the brilliant story-telling and intricate plots set by the author, rather an inquisition, within me burning, to trace the route of my skin throughout history on this foreign land. Curries and tandooris don't do justice. The question still rattles inside me - is Melanin race?