Early life and education
La Mackerel was born in Pamplemousses, Mauritius where they grew up in a Hindu and Catholic family. The first of their family to attend university, at the age of eighteen, they moved to India to pursue a Bachelor in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pune, India. While in India they also studied and trained in contemporary dance and Kathak, the latter under the mentorship ofCommunity Organizing
La Mackerel's experience of not finding queer community spaces that were hospitable to trans people of colour, led them to create community events and spaces that center 2SLGBTQ+ people.Gender B(l)ender (2013-2018)
In 2013, responding to the lack of queer-friendly open mic spaces in Montreal, La Mackerel founded ''Gender B(l)ender'', a monthly open mic/cabaret event held on the last Friday of every month. Venues included at Café l’Artère and librairie L’Euguélionne. Over a 5 year period La Mackerel organized and hosted 40 editions of the event which saw over 600 performances. Performers included Asher Lionheart, Iyan Hayadi, Jespa Jacob Smith, Roxane Nadeau, Kim Ninkuru, Tranna Wintour, Valerie Bah,Self-Love Cabaret: L'Amour se conjugue à la première personne (2012-2016)
Running for four years between 2012 and 2016, the Self-Love Cabaret was an anti-valentine, artistic event which sought to challenge the dominant, heteronormative and consumerist holiday of coupledom: Valentine's Day by showcasing creative expressions of self-love.Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists (2018)
Curated and facilitated by La Mackerel, this event brought together six trans women of colour artists:Speak B(l)ack: A Black History Month spoken word show and open mic (2017-2019)
Part of McGill University's Black History Month events, ''Speak B(l)ack'' was hosted by La Mackerel and saw performers such as Stephanie Lawrence, Kim Ninkuru, and Shanice Nicole.Interdisciplinary Arts Practice
While La Mackerel is most known for their debut poetry collection ''ZOM-FAM'', their creative practice moves between dance, theatre, photography, sculpture, textiles, digital arts and video. La Mackerel is a self-taught artist and their practice emerges from a need to survive and find methods for navigating patriarchal colonial violence, and DIY grassroots cultural practices like zine-making, YouTube tutorials, open mic nights. Major projects include ''From Thick Skin to Femme Armour, Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness, 'Race' is a Drag!, My Body is the Ocean, Bois d'Ébène.'' ''
''From Thick Skin to Femme Armour'' (2016)
''From Thick Skin to Femme Armour'' is a extended multidisciplinary research art project which honours trans women and femme of colour resistance and resilience. The project was toured in Europe in 2016 as a spoken word solo show. The project involves watercolours, textiles with text, photographs, video and a series of wearable objects.''Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans subjectivity in the Mauritian postcard''
In this series of fifteen photographs, taken by South-African writer and scholar Nedine Moonsamy, La Mackerel challenges the way postcards contribute to colonial framing of tropical spaces as empty lands to colonize. The artist poses their body against scenic Mauritian vistas, reinscribing their trans body onto their native island.''ZOM-FAM''
In 2020 La Mackerel published their debut poetry collection ''ZOM-FAM'' with Metonymy Press to wide acclaim. The title is a Mauritian Kreol term denoting "man-woman." The work consists of eight poems which were originally composed as spoken word pieces that eventually became the material of a solo stage performance. The decision to move from spoken word to theatrical stage performance was prompted by a desire to create more texture in the work through movement, ritual and embodiment. As the poems migrated from stage to page, La Mackerel carried the stage movement over into the written poetry by using the page as a stage and allowing the words to break with traditional poem stanzas and envisioning the words as the body and the page as the stage. Written in Canada, the poems explore the artist's experience of growing up on the island of Mauritius, in particular their relationship to land, water, family, language, and gender within, and in resistance to, the ideological and material framing of the island's colonial history. While written primarily in English, the poems pay tribute to the ancestral languages of the island, using Kreol and Mauritian colloquialisms which grow from the interrelations of English, Kreol, French, Bhopuri, Tamil, Hindi. The island and the ocean are situated at the heart of the work and lay the foundation for La Mackerel's poetic excavation of ancestral femme lineages connecting them to their femme spirituality. In the summer of 2021 the book was launched in Mauritius and is hailed as the first published work of queer Mauritian literature. The cover art of the book was made by Aun Li and Kai Yun Ching.Translation
La Mackerel has focused their translation on works by Canadian Anglophone trans women writers. Titles they have translated includeAwards
La Mackerel is a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer prize for emerging artists and was shortlisted as a finalist for theReferences
External links
* {{DEFAULTSORT:La Mackerel, Kama 21st-century Canadian artists 21st-century Canadian poets 21st-century Mauritian writers Canadian LGBT poets Canadian writers of Asian descent Mauritian poets Mauritian artists Mauritian emigrants to Canada Canadian non-binary writers Non-binary artists Non-binary activists Artists from Montreal Writers from Montreal Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century Canadian LGBT people Canadian non-binary artists