Last year, from Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran I learned that “if you say yes with enough force, your chi will say yes too." This was the year I found out it works. Or maybe it’s that in this third pandemic year we conned ourselves into believing the virus no longer kills and moved on. This is what I imagine the roaring twenties must have been like. After two years of fearing death, languishing, boredom, grief and separation, some of us went all out. On social media, I saw girl gangs flock to Lisbon over the summer. On a trip to Porto, a friend said he could hear Americans on every street corner. Yikes. Masks no longer dominated the scenery. Instagram reels of crowded concert venues proliferated. I dreamt of raving in Berlin. In Mauritius, the cost of living skyrocketed. Strawberries I used to pay 90 rupees for now average 200 rupees a box. Bus fares went up drastically. Social media activism went down as we went back into the world. We traded infographics for travel logs. I even heard the phrase “during BLM” to refer to the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder two years ago. As if the movement started then, as if it’s over.
On travel, ethnolinguistics and food
I too traveled for the first time in years, spending two intensely hot months in India. I microdosed living in Bombay as autos, Swiggy and mango everything became part of daily life. In between oat lattes at Subko and rumali rotis from Miya, I got to explore Bandra’s lively streets. We got away to cool Bangalore for a week. I met friends and family I had only ever seen through a phone. I met parts of myself I didn’t know. Those of us who live and read in Mauritius know the struggle of getting the books we want when we want them so in that regard, this year felt luxe. From Bandra’s quaint Trilogy to Bangalore’s exquisite Champaca and Blossom, I grew my stacks and postcard collection. I wrote erratically about the emotional tundra that carried me through those places as a couple of Hindi words entered my everyday lingo.
Prior to this trip, I read Patrick Eisenlohr’s Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius and couldn’t stop taking notes. One of the most salient arguments from this book was how there seems to be two competing ideologies, largely in conflict with one another, of what the Mauritian identity is. There is the Kreol identity, marked by the language most of the population speaks and the Indo-Mauritian identity marked by an imagined and sustained diasporic link to India. The first incorporates elements of creolite and quasi-indegeneity as the language it’s founded upon was locally made but is often implicitly rejected by Indo-Mauritians since “Creole nationalism implies a temporal disjuncture between Mauritian Hindus and their Indian ancestors” (Eisenlohr, 2006). This book has profoundly changed my outlook on Mauritian society and was one of this year’s most impactful reads.
“Defining Mauritian nationhood as above all constituted by diasporic traditions, in a situation in which nearly 70 percent of the population is of Indian background, reflects a particular organization of ethnic and linguistic diversity that is shaped by imbalances of power and informed by a logic of exclusion.”
Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius - Patrick Eisenlohr
This year I got to spend time with friends in different parts of the world and took many of them to Bloom: a bobo café owned by white South African immigrants, a place where many of the patrons are white and all of the staff are POC. It’s no small act of defiance that I show up here time and again, in spaces I know are not meant for me, in spaces that want me to shrink myself, in spaces where my ability and willingness to be leisurely is not a given. I spent many an afternoon there, writing, reading, observing and noshing on smokey aubergine toasties and sweet potato fries.
On disability, neurodivergence and TikTok
This is also a year I started not being able to walk. This pushed me to various breaking points as I navigated chronic pain with a baseline of depression. To make sense of who I was becoming, I leaned on Disability Justice writing. Leah Lakshmi’s Care Work gave my life new meaning (I talk more about it here) and Jason Purcell’s poetry collection Swollening tapped into the febrility of slowed crip time. This slowness saw me finally join TikTok and I quickly became part of a strange temporality. Trends are cycled through hastily, as Lizzo, Doja Cat and Harry Styles samples feel aged mere months later. The abundance of queer and neurodiverse content on the app helped me reach new levels of bodymind awareness. I derived from it so much fashion, cooking, skincare (hi La Roche Posay girlies) and travel inspo and as far as I can tell, it’s the first time social media has pushed me towards positive, pleasurable change. I wore the shit out of the parachute pants I got after months of pining and made the parmesan crusted potatoes that dominated my FYP in November. I visited Amsterdam’s Saint Jean and went to the same photo booth Emma Chamberlain posted about. Interesting times we live in. Many of the songs that dominated my soundscape were also thanks to TikTok: Beyonce’s Break My Soul, Steve Lacy’s Bad Habit and Pierce The Veil’s King For A Day. Thanks to a slew of metal covers, I entered my metalcore era by the end of the year. Norma Jean’s Spearmint Revolt would have topped my Wrapped had it been available in Mauritius (fuck you for that Spotify).
In October, a surge of neurodivergent content across platforms helped me put many things together. Flaky ginger scallion salmon cemented itself as what I now know is a same food. I learned that ADHD and Autism often go undiagnosed in girls because diagnosis criteria are based on how they manifest in boys leading to a gender bias. I learned about things like rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), sensory processing disorder (SPD), executive dysfunction and masking and realized how many people who’ve been labeled ‘weird’, ‘gifted’ or ‘different’ probably fall somewhere on the AuDHD spectrum. Parts of me wish I was coming of age now, how different things would have been.
On millennial cringe
Around the same time, I started Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different. This book had been hyped up within South Asian literary circles to the point of skepticism. It turned out to be an incredibly immersive experience. Mathews’ main character Sneha goes through the motions of young adulthood as a Brown, queer immigrant and toys with notions of romance, belonging and friendship in cold, cold North America. The prose was alive and her vivid descriptions of place pulled me so deep into her world that it was at times undistinguishable from my own.
I’ve since read a number of reviews pointing to the novel’s blind spots, especially in its use of harmful tropes towards its Black characters (some of which I initially attributed to a flawed protagonist). I suppose that highlights my own biases as a South Asian reader. I suspect this is what Normal People and Conversations With Friends are to my white contemporaries, a mirror held up to our insides.
At a time when Gen Z vs. Millennial discourse seemed to be at an all-time high (or maybe that’s just me being on TikTok too much) I read Ayesha Siddiqi’s razor-sharp Memento Millennial in which she examines our cultural habits through a Sally Rooney lens. She posits that much of our identity construction has been predicated on uniqueness and knowing something before it’s cool (aka the hipster) but that there is much to gain from letting go of the need to be special and quirky (aka a pick me). I learned that the Sally Rooney girl is a very real trope, one I cringe at myself for having wanted to identify with but one I thoroughly enjoyed in my favorite film this year, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World. Vox also published Rebecca Jennings’ interesting take on millennial cringe this week, charting the evolution of internet culture as we know it, explaining why we don’t have to look back on Dogespeak and wince.
"But realizing that you’re not special can actually be a cool thing. Not because it confirms that life is meaningless, but because it means you have stuff in common with someone else. With many other people, in fact."
Ayesha Siddiqi - Memento Millennial
So here’s to meeting more people with whom I have stuff in common in the new year. To more same fits, same foods and same songs. To more special interests, fascinating reads, friend hangs and beautiful bookstores!
I just finished Care Work as well, and I cannot recommend it enough! So sorry to hear about your chronic pain and the struggles it brings. If you'd like to talk about your illness and how it informed your current view on disability justice, amongst other things, I'd love to have you on "Nuances: beyond first impressions with the Asian diaspora". (nuancespod.com) Let me know if you're interested in more details - I can send via email.