In their debut poetry collection, Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self amidst the legacy of colonial silences. Multiply voiced and imbued with complex storytelling, ZOM-FAM showcases a fluid narrative that summons ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages, and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which grapple with the legacy of plantation servitude. Emerging from a creative process in spoken word and live performance, these poems transform the page into a stage where the queer femme body is written and mapped onto the colonial space of the home/island. Interwoven with Kreol, ZOM-FAM showcases a unique lyrical sensibility, a musicality influenced by the both unforgiving and soothing rhythms of the ocean, where the poet enunciates the complexity of their displaced Indo-African roots, “the lineage of silence / that we weave in-between our intimacies.” Striking, vivid, tender, intimate, and political, ZOM-FAM is a beautifully wrought journey that articulates a contemporary decolonial poetics and offers a roadmap for colonized and displaced queer and trans voices to (re)imagine themselves into being.
Author
KAMA LA MACKEREL is a Montreal-based Mauritian- Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, community-arts facilitator, and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art, and literature. They have exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French, and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. They have lived in far-flung places such as Pune, India and Peterborough, Ontario. ZOM-FAM is their first book. Kama’s work has been published in the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (2015) and We Mark Your Memory: writings from descendants of indenture (2018). Their translation of Kai Cheng Thom’s From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea was published in French by Éditions Dents de Lion in spring 2019 and their co-translation of Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men was published in French by éditions du Remue-Ménage in winter 2020.
