ZOM-FAM: the queer and decolonial poetics of Kama La Mackerel’s work

Kama La Mackerel is multidisciplinary artist, educator, writer, literary translator, community organizer and a pillar of Montreal queer and trans communities. A firm believer that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience, to heal and to act as forms of resistance to the status quo, Kama has created many artistic spaces for LGBTQ+ and QTBIPOC communities in Montreal, including GENDER B(L)ENDER, The Self-Love Cabaret, Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists, Qouleur, Our Bodies Our Stories and many more.

Kama La Mackerel’s new interdisciplinary project, ZOM-FAM, is a 75-mins solo performance that was supposed to debut at the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) in April 2020 but is now rescheduled to a later date due to COVID-19. ZOM-FAM is also being published as a collection of lyric poetry from Metonymy Press in September 2020.

In ZOM-FAM, 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.

In the words of pioneer queer writer, Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life, Subrosa and Sodom Road Exit: «These long-form poems offer unique modes of storytelling—most especially the arresting anaphora, breathy rhythms, abundance of sensory imagery, and motifs of Mauritian place making. Both enchanting and exacting, these poems are, indeed, blessed with the femme divine.”

The book will be out in all bookstores on Sept 10, 2020, and you may already pre-order your copy here: →metonymypress.com/product/zom-fam/