This special three-part episode brings together five diasporic writers with indenture origins from two hemispheres, from Eastern Africa’s Mauritius to the Caribbean’s Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, to talk about identity, language, these artists’ craft of words, and to read some of their work.
Kama La Mackerel (they/them) – @kamalamackerel, Karimah Rahman (she/her) – @karimah__kr, Rajiv Mohabir (he/him) – @rajivmohabir, Siela Ardjosemito-Jethoe (she/her), and Ryan Persadie (he/him) – @tifa.wine graced us with their presence and magic! Give the episode 9 series a listen to hear about how these writers locate themselves and their identities with words and hear their artistry, ranging from poetry and spoken word to short stories and article excerpts.
Working across several time zones and a difference of 6 hours came with some challenges, but we made it happen! However, the universe did not allow everyone to stay the entire recording session. Either way, a HUGE thank you to these 5 writers for joining us!
Episode 09a
Episode 09a starts off the series with introductions and discussions of identity with the five writers of the round table.
Episode 09b
Episode 09b is where the magic happens. Come listen to Kama La Mackerel, Karimah Rahman, Rajiv Mohabir, Siela Ardjosemito-Jethoe, and Ryan Persadie share their writing!
Readings include:
Rajiv Mohabir’s “Coolie Oddity” from his book Cutlish, “Belonging Nowhere but Unapologetically Me: Muslim Indo-Caribbean and More” by Karimah Rahman in Blooming Through Adversity: A Collection of Short Stories, Kama La Mackerel’s “Your Body is the Ocean”fromtheir book ZOM-FAM by Kama La Mackerel, and excerpts of spoken word pieces by Siela Ardjosemito-Jethoe and forthcoming articles by Ryan Persadie.
Episode 09c
Episode 09c is a post-reading conversation, diving deeper into the questions of identity, language, writing and words.
Kama La Mackerel (they/them) – @kamalamackerel
In episode 09b, Kama reads from “Your Body is the Ocean” in their poetry book ZOM-FAM.
Kama La Mackerel is an award-winning Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, ancestral healing and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.
They are the author ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. World Literature Today called ZOM-FAM “a milestone in Mauritian literature.”
Kama has exhibited, performed and lectured internationally and has published in English, French and Mauritian Kreol. In 2021, Kama was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts. In Fall 2021, they premiered their new multimedia exhibition Queering the Is/land Body as part of MOMENTA, Biennale de l’image, and their new performance Le Morne: Sekinn ekrir pann efase was presented at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts as part of Af-flux: Biennale Transnationale Noire.
lamackerel.net // @KamaLaMackerel
Karimah Rahman (she/her) – @karimah__kr
In episode 09b, Karimah reads from “Belonging Nowhere but Unapologetically Me: Muslim Indo-Caribbean and More” in Blooming Through Adversity: A Collection of Short Stories curated by Tiffany Manbodh.
Karimah is the founder of The Muslim Indo-Caribbean Collective (MICC @muslimindocaribbeancollective) and The Muslim Indentureship Studies Center (MISC- @muslimindenturestudiescenter). She is currently pursuing her PhD in Policy Studies focused on the intersectional marginalization, lack of representation and Anti-Muslim Racism towards Muslim Indo-Caribbeans (and marginalization of Indo-Caribbeans) in policy (India’s Diaspora Policy and Ontario’s South Asian Heritage Act, 2001) as well as Indo-Caribbean, Indentured Diasporic, Indian and South Asian spaces.
She has coined a few terms:
- The South Asian/Indian “Authenticity/Purity” Hierarchy Theory
- The Indian(Indentured/Indo-Caribbean)“Authenticity/Purity” Hierarchy Theory
- Mainland South Asian/Indian Supremacy
- Mainland South Asian/Indian Privilege
- Hindu Indian/Indenture/Indo-Caribbean Supremacy
- Hindu Indian/Indenture/Indo-Caribbean Privilege to unpack this
along with popularizing the term Muslim Indo-Caribbean and coining the terms:
- Muslim Indo-Caribbean Heritage Day
- Muslim Indo-Caribbean Studies
- Muslim Indentureship Studies,
- (Radical) Muslim Indo-Caribbean Feminism
- (Radical) Muslim Indentured Diasporic Feminism.
Karimah looks at the legacy of Muslim Indo-Caribbean resistance to colonization, journey of learning/unlearning, intergenerational trauma (rooted in Indentureship, colonization, white supremacy, Hindu supremacy, Hindutva ideology, Brahmin supremacy etc.) and decolonizing (including Decolonizing Mental Health). Karimah is a published author with work ranging from academic to spoken words, she gave talks, interviews and workshops on the topics mentioned earlier. She is currently working on a documentary movie and upcoming book on Being Muslim Indo-Caribbean made by Muslim Indo-Caribbeans for Muslim Indo-Caribbeans.
Rajiv Mohabir (he/him) – @rajivmohabir
In episode 09b, Rajiv reads from “Coolie Oddity” in his recent publication Cutlish.
Selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his book entitled The Taxidermistʻs Cut(Spring 2016), Rajiv Mohabir’s first collection is a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School (where he was the Kundiman Fellow), and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His second manuscript The Cowherd’s Son won the 2015 Kundiman Prize (Tupelo Press in May 2017). 2021 saw the release of Mohabir’s poetry collection Cutlish (Four Way Books, 2021). He was also awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press 2019), published originally in 1916.
In 2019 Rajiv Mohabir also received the New Immigrant Writing Award from Restless Books for his memoir Antiman, selected by Terry Hong, Héctor Tobar, and Ilan Stavans ( Restless Books, 2021).
With Kazim Ali, Mohabir edited the Global Anglophone Indian foilio for POETRY Magazine in 2019. His poem “Ancestor” was chosen by Philip Metres for the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award. His poems also received the 2015 Editor’s Choice Award from Bamboo Ridge Journal and the 2014 Academy of American Poet’s Prize for the University of Hawai‘i. His poem “Dove” appears in Best American Poetry 2015. Other poems and translations appear in journals such as Quarterly West, Guernica, The Collagist, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, small axe, The Asian American Literary Review, Great River Review, andPANK. He has received several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.
Winner of the inaugural chapbook prize by Ghostbird Press for Acoustic Trauma, he is the author of three other multilingual chapbooks: Thunder in the Courtyard: Kajari Poems, A Veil You’ll Cast Aside, na mash me bone, and na bad-eye me. In 2021 he collaborated with Aotearoa based poet Rushi Vyas to write Between Us, Not Half a Saint.
Siela Ardjosemito-Jethoe (she/her)
Siela Ardjosemito-Jethoe is an anthropologist and sociologist. She has spent the past 20 years working in the field of diversity inclusion, with equity as its foundation. She started within welfare and social work and later on switched to higher education and the public sector at the level of national and local government. On June 1st, 2021, she started as the Diversity and Inclusion officer at the University of The Arts- The Hague. She also runs her own company Connecting the Dot’s unlimited where she provides training, coaching and advice and she works as a wordartist. She contributed to several publications such as Superdivers! (2013), Onbeschreven Erfgoed (2017) and Diversiteit in de Samenleving (2017 and 2020), she is editor-in-chief of the latter. Furthermore, she writes a monthly column about diversity and inclusion at the Sarnamihuis and is a columnist for Cultuurpers. With her husband and children she created the podcast Diversity in Check and she is jointly responsible for the podcast ‘Zeg maar gewoon wit.’ She is a supervisory board member for Mauritshuis, chairperson for Lloyds Company and board member of Het Haags Theaterhuis.
Ryan Persadie (he/him) – @tifa.wine
In episode 09b, Ryan reads an excerpt of a forthcoming article.
Ryan Persadie/Tifa Wine is an artist, educator, performer, and researcher based in Toronto, Canada. His aesthetic and scholarly work interrogates the relationships and the entanglements between queer Indo-Caribbean diasporas, Caribbean feminisms, Afro-Asian intimacies, legacies of indenture, performance, embodiment, and popular culture. His writing can be found in the Stabroek News, A Colour Deep, Gay City News, and MUSICultures. He also works with and organizes with multiple community groups including the Caribbean Equality Project, and Queeribbean Toronto.
Outside of academia, he also works as a drag artist where he goes by the stage name of Tifa Wine. In this capacity, he uses embodied archives of song, dance, comedy, gesture, make-up, story-telling and fashion to pursue calls of decolonial and feminist pedagogy. He has performed across the GTA and internationally and works across mediums of live performance, video, and photography.