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language: English
country: Mauritius
year: 2020
form: poetry
dates read: 18.2.25
this isn’t to say that it’s bad, by any means; it is, rather, to say that I don’t think it’s especially compelling as verse. mostly it reads as prose with line breaks. and it’s pretty good prose, worth reading, but I wanted more from it. its most striking aspect as poetry is La Mackerel’s use of white space, and I will hand it to them, this allows them to produce some interesting visual effects, like this in “your body is the ocean”:
no matter the borders, fences, walls
masses of lands, bodies of water you putbetween
you & your home
you & your island
you & your bodythe pain
is something
you just can’t
leave behind
you will drag
its festering weight
halfway across the globe
in a heavy
invisible
suitcase
grief
the size
of your ribcage
heartache
the length
of your spine
a burden
you just can’t
leave behind
they clearly put a lot of thought into the arrangement of text on the page, and that part pays off, maybe most notably during the climax of “zom-fam”, which I’m not going to attempt to reproduce here but which is really striking, both triumphant and disorienting, as I suspect it’s meant to be. I would say that in general “zom-fam” is the highlight of the collection for me, not least for its striking imagination of an unknown/unspoken trans/queer relation-friend-ancestor, nameless and known only from a passing comment by La Mackerel’s mother
that she vaguely remembers an old relative
who lived close-by... when she was a child...
who was... who was... “of my kind...”
recalling perhaps the opening poem, “the invocation”, La Mackerel muses really movingly on the life/lives this person might have had.
overall, however, I came out of the collection feeling like it might have been more effective as prose or prose poetry — more like Craig Santos Perez’s work, or even Tommy Pico’s. when arranged in verse it felt — and it pains me to say it — at times a bit fake deep. apparently the poems were originally composed as spoken word, which in retrospect makes a lot of sense: it’s a medium where so much depends on intonation and verbal rhythm in a way that I think is difficult to adequately convey on the page, and I suspect some of the things that fell a little flat in writing would be much more effective when delivered orally.
one other highlight of the collection was the use of Mauritian Creole, although I was struck by two things in relation to this: first, the choice to italicize it, marking it as Other/external to the English text, which seemed like an odd kind of bounadary policing; second, and relatedly, there’s an odd tension between the language of the bulk of the collection (English) and the affirmation of Mauritian Creole in the title poem:
there is a voice that does not have the words or the vocabulary
but reverberates goodness & music in my body—
my heart beating the drums of my ancestorsthere is a voice that did not go to school
does not speak english
does not speak frenchyet echoes wisdom & truth
in my bloodstream
like the waves of the oceans
that witnessed
the loss of our languages
that voice tells me
that i do not need an imperial language to define myself
that i do not need to be trans in english or in french
and I hate to be that guy, especially since La Mackerel apparently does also write in Mauritian Creole, but: if this is the case, why write such a deeply personal collection in — precisely — an imperial language?
so I am thinking again about audience: to whom is this poetry addressed? and it seems to me that the answer is not Mauritian readers but rather the queer and trans artistic community of Montreal, where La Mackerel now lives. which is obviously fine, but there’s a certain gap, it seems to me — of language, history, and about 9,200 miles — between these spaces and hypothetical audiences, and I’m not sure the collection always succeeds in bridging it.
with all of that said: I did enjoy the collection overall, and especially keeping in mind that it’s a debut I would definitely be down to read more of La Mackerel’s work in the future. if you’re interested in diasporic queer/trans narratives, complex negotiations of family, and — less foregrounded but still very much on La Mackerel’s mind — the legacies of plantations and unfree labor outside of the familiar space of the Americas, it’s definitely worth a look.
moods: emotional, reflective