Interview with Kama La Mackerel

Waves Breaking

This month I got to speak with Kama La Mackerel about their just-released book, ZOM-FAM, published by Metonymy Press. We go in-depth in discussion about their decolonial artistic practices and inspiration for the book.

Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator 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 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 practice through cultural production. Kama has 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, their debut poetry collection is published by Metonymy Press. GO BUY ZOM-FAM! Kama's website

Media, artists, books, etc mentioned in this episode:

• Kama will get to perform ZOM-FAM in Montreal this October :)
• "The Self-Love Cabaret: L’Amour se conjugue à la première personne"
• "From Thick Skin to Femme Armour," performance
• Artists who made the ZOM-FAM cover: Kai Yun Ching and Aun Li
• Kalapani
• "My Body is the Ocean" project and performance
• "Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard" project
• Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
• Disclosure documentary
• Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), by Hazel Jane Plante
• My Art is Killing Me and Other Poems, by Amber Dawn
• "Explained: How Severe was the Mauritius Oil Spill," article in The Indian Express
• "Mauritius calls for urgent help to prevent oil spill disaster," article in The Guardian
• ** Fundraiser to help Mauritian oil spill clean-up **
• "Before and after: Satellite images show how lightning complex fires scarred Bay Area landscape" article in The Mercury News
• "A California fire sparked by a gender reveal party has grown to more than 10,000 acres," an article for CNN. Because we definitely needed another reason to hate gender reveal parties, am I right?
• ** Donate to Latino Community Foundation's Northern California Wildfires Relief Fund **

The Sound of Waves Breaking: "Ay Ay Lolo" by Menwar Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz