S3 E11: Nastassia Jagatsingh on deconstructing her Mauritian and Canadian identities, unlearning colorism, and living with chronic illness.

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GUEST BIO

Nastassia is a 31 Indo-Mauritian Montrealer currently based in so-called Vancouver. After a little under a decade in the banking and ESL teaching spaces, she’s exploring non-traditional avenues for work and embracing slow living as she learns to live with chronic illness. During the “summer of racial reckoning” she, like many, turned to social media spaces and literature to make sense of the world around her. Since then, she’s been reading and writing at the intersections of indenture, diasporic Brownness and disability while cultivating a keen interest in the millennial/Gen Z zeitgeist. She’s also a photographer, an aspiring bookstagrammer and is working on her first book! .

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DEFINITIONS

Kreol/Creole community: people who are of Mauritian ancestry or those who are both racially mixed and Christian. The Mauritian Constitution identifies four communities namely, Hindu, Muslim, Chinese and the General Population. Creoles, who are mostly of African descent, are included in the General Population category along with white Christians.
Creole: A stable natural language that has been created through the mixing of two other languages.
Kaya: A Mauritian artist who pioneered the Seggae genre, which mixed Mauritian Sega with Reggae influences. He was arrested for smoking marijuana at a concert and died in police custody in 1999. He was our George Floyd.
Substack: A blogging/newsletter platform that allows writers to monetize their content through subscriptions.

MENTIONED

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TAKEAWAYS

It’s important to talk to people in your community and ask rather than assume what their experience has been like.
Believing that Western countries were better is white supremacist thinking and something we’re both trying to deconstruct.
Although Mauritius has very few whites, white people still hold a lot of economic & social power, and are treated as such.
Beyond the US, the 2020 BLM protests had the worldwide effect of giving people the vocabulary and the tools to start the painful process of confronting and healing from racial trauma.
Canada is often touted as an immigrant-friendly country, but it actually is really hard for immigrants to find jobs if they did not study in Canada.
Behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, slut-shaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape, refusing to acknowledge the harm caused by sexual violence, etc. This is a huge problem in Mauritius, but it exists everywhere. If you see this in your community, speak up and let them know that it’s not okay.
Looking good doesn’t matter if you don’t feel good.
Brown kids are given so many signals so early on that lighter skin is the standard of beauty. Comments like “don’t go in the sun” or “oh she’s lighter now, she’s more pretty” are so harmful. Again, if you hear these comments, gently educate your circles on why these are harmful.

CONTACT

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Host: Lazou

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This episode is brought to you by 23rdhr.com.

Featured song:

“Where Do We Go” by 23rd Hour. Written by LAZOU & Edi Jon Yuk

“Le Morne (Cassiya Cover)” by 23rd Hour. Written by R. Sedley Assone & Gérard Louis.

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Nuances Podcast – curated Spotify | Apple Music playlists with past guests, hosts & more Asian diaspora artists.

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Transcript

Lazou: Our guest today is Nastassia Jagatsingh. Nastassia is a 31 year old in Mauritian Montrealer, currently based in Vancouver. After a little under a decade in the banking and E S L teaching spaces, she’s exploring non-traditional venues for work and embracing slow living as she learns to live with chronic illness.

During the “summer of racial reckoning”, she like many turned to social media spaces and literature to make sense of the world around her. Since then, she’s been reading and writing at the intersection of indenture, diasporic, brownness and disability, while cultivating a keen interest in the millennial/gen z zeitgeist.

She’s also a photographer and aspiring bookstagramer and is currently working on her first book. Nastassia, thank you so much for joining us today.

Nastassia: Thank you so much for having me.

Lazou: You were born in Montreal, then moved to Mauritius when you were seven. Your family is of Indo Mauritian descent.

I’m curious to know how much about your family’s migration history you know of, because most Mauritians don’t know very much.

Nastassia: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t think I know that much in terms of the timelines. I don’t think I really asked. I think I may have asked my mom, but I don’t think she knew exactly which generation came to Mauritius. All of my ancestors are from India but from different places in India.

My mom’s family, both her parents are of Telegu background. On my dad’s side my paternal grandmother is Bengali and my paternal grandfather’s, my dad’s dad is Punjabi. So I have three different, Indian identities or Indian Cultures. Not that it really transpires that much in Mauritius. ’cause everybody’s, a bit mixed in that sense. But yeah. So the closest link that I have to India directly other than my husband who’s also Indian, would be my dad’s dad ’cause he was born in India. But all of my other grandparents or ancestors are multiple generations removed.

Lazou: Yeah. I recently started asking my family why did we come here? And how did that happen? I realized how little I know. I know like the one-liner version of the story, but there’s so

much that I don’t know

Nastassia: And do your parents seem to know the why and the whens of when everything happened?

Lazou: They have vague timelines. But for the Chinese mauritians, we’re newer to Mauritius than the Indo Mauritians, so It’s a little closer in terms of the timeline. On my mom’s side, my great-grandparents escaped when there was the war in China. And I know that my great-grandfather disguised himself as a woman

so he could escape the war and not be drafted. And he got on a boat and came to Mauritius and he was like, I’m not fighting this thing.

I’m going,

Nastassia: Oh, wow. That’s a great story

actually. Wow.

Lazou: And then on my dad’s side I learned recently that my grandmother, when she moved to Mauritius, she actually exchanged IDs with somebody who was in Mauritius but wanted to move back to China.

She was in China and wanted to move to Mauritius, so they pretended to be each other.

Nastassia: wow. Wow.

Lazou: So they changed IDs. So like apparently all of her official documents have a name that isn’t hers.

Nastassia: That’s insane. wow. That’s really

interesting.

Lazou: and I just learned about that a few years ago, like this whole time my entire life, I didn’t know any of this.

So what was your relationship with your Indian roots going up? Did that change when you moved from Montreal to Mauritius?

Nastassia: Yeah, so that’s something that I feel like I haven’t thought about much prior to the last couple of years when I’ve started reading, writing more about identity and having those conversations with people going through the same types of thought processes.

I don’t think I had a relationship to being brown and or of Indian descent as a child.

I know that for example, A lot of people when they immigrate to another country, they will find community within, their ethnic for example, in Vancouver, there are a lot of Punjabis and there’s a big Punjabi community.

And even in Montreal there is Mauritian community, but I don’t feel like my parents were part of that larger community. So I wasn’t really raised with a strong sense I’m Mauritian, or, I’m of Indian descent.

Over the past couple of years I thought to myself then how did I perceive myself? Where did I situate myself and somewhere in my mind I believe that I belonged to the majority, and I’m not sure what that means, but maybe I grew up thinking I was white.

I really did not have any understanding of race I grew up relatively colorblind.

Yeah, that definitely changed a lot when I moved to Mauritius. And not that I felt more Indian or more brown, but if anything, it’s when I moved to Mauritius that I felt really strongly about my being Canadian. And again, now that I look back on it, I have all kinds of other lenses to look at that kind of situation. But I received a lot of messaging about that as a kid. Oh, you’re Canadian, you’re born in Canada, blah, blah, blah. I was made to feel that I was different from other kids my age in Mauritius.

A lot of that has to do with speaking English or one big thing is deferring to authority or deferring to adults. That was really different. When I moved to Mauritius, I remember there was a lot more hierarchy between children, teens, teachers like standing up in class when your teachers come in. That didn’t exist in a lot of schools in. Montreal, in Canada. yeah, I, I felt very strongly that, oh, I’m not from here even though all of my family is from Mauritius, and I’m Mauritian too, but I don’t think that at the time I wanted to associate with that.

And people around me made me associate with other things

Lazou: It’s interesting hearing that, because I also was born in Canada, but I moved when I was two. I obviously didn’t remember anything about Canada.

But I was always told, you were born in Canada and in a way it kind of made me feel special as a kid. And I was like, oh yeah, Canada so much better. So I had a very positive association with it, but I didn’t realize that in thinking that way, I was also dissociating from my Mauritian identity.

It’s only, looking back now and I’m like, why did I feel like I needed to do that?

Nastassia: But I feel like what you’re saying is exactly what I felt and what I went through. And I feel like this is very much something that happens when people around you are telling you those things. Oh, you’re Canadian, or for example I would sometimes be outside in the winter in Mauritius and not be cold.

And my family would be like, oh, but she’s Canadian. That’s why she’s not cold. You know, like, You receive all these messages about yourself and like you said, you, you create this kind of positive correlation with, oh, I am special, I am better because I was born not here.

Lazou: Yeah.

Nastassia: And then a parallel to that, you have all of the people who associate success with leaving the country, right?

Oh, this person went to study in the uk or this person has settled down in France or whatever it is. All those very Western quote unquote global north colonizing countries. And so it’s hard not to associate a positive correlation to oh, I am also from that part of the world, hence, I am better.

It makes sense that we develop those kinds of reflexes. ’cause that’s the kind of messaging that was fed to us.

Lazou: Yeah. So what was it like moving at the age of seven?

Nastassia: It was really hard. I initially moved with my dad and my mom had to stay back for a couple of months to, deal with work and stuff like that. So it was my dad and I, and suddenly I was across the world. I The bigger thing was that I missed my mom so much, as a child, like your mom is like your world, you know? and so that was really rough. Suddenly I was in a different country. We were suddenly living in my grandmother’s house. Culturally, one big thing that I hated at the time that I still don’t like that much is how everybody, when they greet is like kiss kiss on each cheek, thought that was so weird. I remember being like, why are all these strangers trying to kiss me?

Lazou: Wait don’t people do that in Quebec? ’cause that’s very French.

Nastassia: very French, but I don’t think people in Quebec do that. No. Maybe with really close friends, but I don’t think you’re greeting a stranger by doing kiss kiss.

That’s not a thing. And so that’s a memory I have landing Mauritius and having all these aunties be like, you know. So that was a really big culture shock for me. I had a very different idea of what it would be like. ’cause I was told, oh yeah, we’re gonna go to the beach. It’s gonna be like that, or whatever. And it was nothing like that. I lived in Vacoas, like it wasn’t, anywhere near the beach.

Lazou: cold and damp

Nastassia: It was not that picture perfect postcard life that I thought it would be. I went to a private ish school, like not a fancy, a fancy private school, but just like a low key kind of private school that was run by one of my relatives.

And it was really weird. I felt so alien. The first year especially, I felt really at odds with my environment. And as early as then on, I was like, oh, I have to go back to Canada at some point. And again, I would hear this from my family as well.

Oh, when you’re older you’ll go back, which is what happened. But yeah, I don’t think it’s the friends as much that I miss, but it was more like, yeah, I was really weirded out by school and family

stuff.

It was intense.

Lazou: Did you speak Creole at that

time?

Nastassia: No, I did not. I did not.

Lazou: Oh my God, that must have

been

Nastassia: So that’s also interesting. I don’t know how that happened. I spoke English, I understood French. ’cause I went to French school in my last year or so in Montreal. And I would imagine that I understood Kreol to a certain extent, but I did not speak it.

I don’t think

Lazou: Your parents probably spoke Creole at home, right?

Nastassia: That’s the thing that I don’t know for sure because my parents have been separated for most of my life I did not really have a family unit for most of my life where I would have two adults in the same place, speaking in Creole to each other. Maybe I’m misremembering, but as far as I know, it was often me with either of them, in which case we would be communicating mostly in English.

So I would imagine that they spoke to each other in Creole at least some of the time. But they had diverse, friend groups with people from different parts of the world. So common denominator was English and yeah, that’s how I ended up speaking English as well.

Lazou: Yeah, that must have been quite a change to go from. As English speaking country to too Mauritius, where English is the main language, but nobody really

uses it on a daily

Nastassia: Right. that was one of the funniest things. I have a lot of thoughts on this. I don’t know how to make this short. in my elementary school, the teachers liked me because I could speak English, oh. This person will succeed in life because, she speaks English So for me, again, that was one of the pride points that I had, I have this thing that is considered nice and desirable. It was weird for sure, but like I said I understood French, so I was able to get by, at least in school. And most of my family, like my cousins, they would also speak French. I don’t remember having a really weird linguistic experience when I moved back. So , yeah, it was pretty okay.

Lazou: You went back to Montreal for college, and then you spent some more time as an adult in Mauritius after that, and now you’re in Vancouver. Why Vancouver? What made you decide to move there?

Nastassia: After three pandemic years in Mauritius and I had been back in Mauritius for almost three and a half years.

I think I was just tired of being in Mauritius. At the end of the day, Mauritius has so much to offer, it’s such a great place. And I got to live by the beach for the first time in my life, which was actually living by the beach this time. Not in Vacoas, like a seven minute walk from the beach like that, you know, I got to have that life and it was really great.

I got to rediscover it with new eyes and have a different relationship to Mauritius that I didn’t have before. Because this happened at the same time that all those conversations about race and about identity were happening, I was able to kind of deconstruct a lot of my biases while in Mauritius, which allowed me to appreciate a lot of it even more, which is really great.

But I don’t know, the energy around me felt stale. I felt like I was not changing anymore. Like I wasn’t evolving as a person. A lot of my friends and cousins who were in Mauritius or had been in Mauritius for a while, they left. So suddenly I was like, okay, I have no more community.

I’m finding myself in the same routine and I’m not enjoying my life that much. Like even though I live by the beach, I’m not enjoying that anymore. Canada’s always an easy answer, obviously for me. Like you as well. We have the option to do that, which is great.

Vancouver, because I wanted to live in a different city. I did not want to go through minus 20 and minus 30 degree winters in Montreal. And also my closest friend from high school in Mauritius lives in Vancouver, so she was also, telling me, come on, move to Vancouver. It’ll be nice. So yeah, all of those things put together.

Lazou: Yeah. One of the things that I notice most when I visit Mauritius is the sexism.

Nastassia: Yes.

Lazou: It’s so ingrained in our culture, and I don’t know if it’s Mauritian culture, if it’s our Asian culture something.

But it is so ingrained in the culture that it even shows up in the way that people care for each other. Men not letting you walk

alone or,

things like that. And it’s just so weird to me.

Nastassia: It really is. It really is.

You were asking why Canada and why not Mauritius? One of the big things was daily street harassment. Especially since the beginning of the pandemic, I don’t know what happened, but men have become so much more bold in their harassment tactics. I felt like a lot of guys, because they were wearing a mask, it was almost like being behind a computer screen, you’re a little bit incognito. So you’re being way more brazen in your approach. That’s really the one of the biggest reasons I left.

The way that the patriarchy just thrives and Mauritius. It’s just understood that women cannot all go out alone at night. It’s not even a conversation like, oh, it sucks. It’s just, it’s the way that it is. And every year there’s so many cases of femicide in Mauritius, every year, always some jealous partner, some crazy thing. And it’s always scary things happening to women in this country.

I don’t know if you saw this, but this as recent as this week Ariel Saramandi shared an article that was in the news about how a bunch of high school girls were harassed at a bus station and they went to report it to their headmistress. And apparently she told them and trigger warning for the audience that, oh, this happens, you need to be mentally prepared to get raped. What the actual fuck, and this is a female rector saying this.

This is so scary. I know they’ve been protesting and asking for her to resign. But this is barbaric, like you need to expect that it could happen ’cause it’s just a thing. I know sexism is a real thing everywhere. Like here, I the way I feel it the most is probably like, glass ceilings and things like that. But I don’t have to think if I wear this top, then I’ll get catcalled. That experience doesn’t exist here.

Interestingly, you were saying you know what if we inherited this from our Asian heritage and for sure, that’s definitely there. But I went to India for the first time last year and people told me, oh, whatever you experience in Mauritius, it’s gonna be way worse there.

And it wasn’t, it really wasn’t. I was there for two months and I was catcalled once, which again is not great. Ideally you wanna be cat called never. But I was able to walk alone at night in Bombay. I went out alone and that was the first time in four years I had done that.

So in Mauritius it’s really bad. It’s nothing like India. Maybe it used to be that way in India, but it’s changed, which, good on them, but Wow.

Lazou: Yeah, every now and then I think about could, I live in Mauritius as an adult.

And I always come to the conclusion that if I had to, I could, but that I couldn’t be fully myself. Because I’m a very independent woman I just cannot comply to that norm and then, if anything happened, be like, oh, you shouldn’t have gone it alone at night, or you shouldn’t have worn this, or you shouldn’t have worn it. Like, No.

Nastassia: right.

Lazou: and I remember when I was growing up in Mauritius and you get catcalled on street it was annoying, but it never bothered me as much.

But then after living here you know, Canada, the US when I go back now and the cat call me, it really pisses me off in a way that it never did.

Nastassia: For sure.

Because I feel like then you have the experience of like, oh, I can exist as a person without having to be constantly reminded that I am you know, a woman it was exactly the same for me when I first moved back.

I was like talking back to all of them. I was like, what do you want? Can I help you? But then it got too exhausting ’cause it was every day, like nonstop. But when you have the experience of, oh, I can live freely, I can just exist and not have to think 10 times about what time I’m gonna come back home or whatever it is it’s really rough for sure.

Lazou: Yeah. I remember the last trip I took to Mauritius. one time I went to a beach I was the only Sino Mauritian there and somebody ching chong me,

Nastassia: Oh my God.

Lazou: It was another Mauritian, an Indo Mauritian and I don’t really remember that ever happening when I was a kid.

Nastassia: Huh,

Lazou: And I remember being really shocked by it. It feels really weird because I’ve never been subject of racism in Mauritius. Like I’ve always felt like I belong there. so bizarre.

Nastassia: As a teen I have heard Indo Mauritian guy friends make those comments towards Sino Mauritian. So I think It definitely exists no, I’m sorry. That sucks.

Lazou: Having lived in Canada and the US, you become more aware of where that stems from and what it implies. ’cause before in Mauritius you just like, they’ve got nothing better to do, they’re idiots, You just

Nastassia: Right.

Lazou: But now that you know the context, you’re like, will not stand.

Nastassia: I really feel like guys in Mauritius, because the majority is brown and black, fetishize white women or East Asian women, I really feel like that’s a thing. ’cause it’s a smaller group of people and hence a smaller group of women.

East Asian women also have proximity to whiteness. I had a lot of guy friends growing up and I can tell you that I’ve heard those comments about East Asian or Sino mauritians and similar to what people would say about white women in Mauritius.

So for sure, that’s a really real thing that exists.

Lazou: That I didn’t know about that, that we were I don’t know. maybe I wasn’t looking for it.

Nastassia: Right? I feel like in general women are way better people than men. So I don’t think it happened in my circles where like women would say the same things about guys. But I’ve definitely heard this from guy friends for sure.

Lazou: A lot of things to deconstruct For sure.

Nastassia: for sure. There’s so much.

When is the last time that you lived in Mauritius?

Lazou: I left right after high school in 2007. a while

Nastassia: but I feel like a lot of us go through that kind of phase of Oh my God, I wanna leave Mauritius as teens or as young adults. And then I’m finding that a lot of us then have the opposite thought of oh, now that I’ve been away, it’s cold.

It’s like this, that like, all my family is back home. Or the weather is so nice. One of my cousins, she was like, no matter where we are, Mauritius or the US or Canada, we’re always gonna be thinking about, oh, that other place has all of those things. But I feel like it’s a nice rite of passage to live in Mauritius as an adult, because you get to enjoy things that maybe as a teen or as a young adult with no disposable income, you can’t enjoy.

So I recommended maybe for a year or something like that. It’s a good life experience to have,

Lazou: for sure. Something I’ve struggled to articulate is how racism and microaggressions differ in Mauritius versus Canada. I’m curious what your experiences have been in with racism in either country.

Nastassia: Racism in Mauritius is a very interesting thing because I feel like it can go unnoticed.

As a brown woman who was part of the ethnic majority I could have gone my whole life probably without ever having to experience racism the way that we do in North America.

In North America, you have the very cliche well, back to your country, or, you smell like curry or those cliches. Nobody wants to hear that, but at this point it’s almost comical.

But in Mauritius, it’s a whole other thing. The kind of neo-colonial structure that exists there is so real and it’s so subtle. Like you can go your whole life without ever realizing that it’s there.

For example, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but you’re in line at a cafe or something and suddenly a white person walks in and they’re magically served before you.

So nothing is said really, nothing is directed at you explicitly, but it’s somehow understood that a white person is always going to be above you. And I feel like a big difference is that because in North America white people are the ethnic majority, you can have a white person who’s your cab driver, your waiter. So class difference isn’t automatic. Whereas in Mauritius, the concept of a working class white person doesn’t exist. It’s sad really.

The colonial structure still exists very much so in Mauritius. And I feel as an adult now, I lived in the north over the past five years, and you see a lot of quote unquote expats or immigrants or, tourists, white tourists, and you feel it, you feel the difference between a space that’s created for and by white people versus other spaces.

I feel like that difference is obvious there, but here I don’t feel like it’s the same.

How about you? How have you experienced racism in both places?

Lazou: It’s interesting. When I left Mauritius, I thought I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

I thought Mauritius was super racist. I had this Hollywood idea of the West and everybody’s so progressive and you can be whoever you wanna be and clearly that’s not how the West is, but that’s what I thought when I was moving. But to me, growing up in Mauritius, I saw racism a lot not directed to me, actually, I saw racism towards all other groups. I don’t know if it’s because the Chinese community is very small and they felt like the need to protect their ethnic identity or something, but I always felt like they were very exclusionary.

They get along with everybody, but if you marry somebody who’s not Chinese then it’s a big deal. that just always annoyed me and like, why does it matter? So to me, I left Mauritius thinking people here are super racist. I can’t wait to go to a place where people are more progressive. Now thinking about it, well, progressive is a relative term. There’s some things that are more explicitly racist and Mauritius, but at the same time I feel like the kind of racism that I experienced, In North America. I would never experience it mauritius. right.

Like even though Chinese Mauritians are a minority, nobody would come up to me and say, go back to your country. It is known that we belong there as much as anybody. We have no political power whatsoever. But we are still considered Mauritian. Whereas here, there is that perpetual foreigner stereotype where no matter how good your English is, people will ask you where you’re from.

Nastassia: true. That’s a good point. No I see that. I feel like it’s that was very woke of you at the time. Wow. Like already thinking, oh my God, Mauritius is racist. I can’t wait to be somewhere more progressive. I don’t think I was having those thoughts at that age.

Lazou: What really set me off was I remember going to Mass and seeing a lot of people who go to mass and claim to be these super pious people. But then they would get really upset when their daughter, who’s my friend, dates somebody who is not Chinese.

And I’m like, wait, isn’t the church supposed to teach you to like, love the same? And like, how can you have this double standard of, I’m a good person, I go to mass and I give money to church and I do all these good Christian things and then you discriminate against people who are not Chinese mauritian. Like, That makes no sense to me. Are you guys listening to what the priest is saying? ’cause I don’t think that’s what he’s saying.

Nastassia: No, that makes a lot of sense. You’re right. And the whole where are you from thing, even that for me now feels like a meme at this point. I’ve heard it and I’ve had those conversations. Oh, your French is so good. How come? Or, all those like weird things.

I’ve seen it so much. It’s overplayed have you been living under a rock for the last three years?

Haven’t you been part of any of these conversations about race and about what we do and don’t say but you’re right. The kind of explicit in your face racism, I feel like, yeah, Mauritius, you don’t experience that.

Lazou: Yeah. So you’ve said you’re a proud Canadian and proud Quebecois. Can you recall particular incidents that made you feel proud to be Canadian or proud to be Quebecois?

Nastassia: Now that I’ve reflected more on this, like I, I do feel a sense of pride still, but again, all of this goes back to the kinds of messaging I received as a child. You’re Canadian. That’s so cool. Canada’s such a great place.

I derived a lot of pride from that, from my proximity to that country, that identity.

I still feel it because I’ve always felt it as much as I can intellectualize, it’s really hard to completely revamp my sense of self and my sense of I shouldn’t maybe feel as strongly about it. But yeah, now I don’t have as much unexamined pride. It’s much more like nuanced.

One space for which I feel a lot of pride and a lot of belonging let’s say, hopefully is literary space. Over the past few years, I’ve been you know, reading a lot of Can(adian) Lit getting to explore narratives from Canadians of, all kinds, anywhere on the L G B T Q, neurodivergent BIPOC spectrums. That’s something I have a lot of pride for. I feel like I don’t identify as strongly with the literary scene in Mauritius. And maybe I’m just not looking in the right places, although there are a couple of people I identify with very strongly. But yeah, those are the kind of pride points that I still have today.

definitely not as blindly proud as I used to be.

Lazou: Yeah. So have you redefined for yourself what the Canadian dream is?

Nastassia: Oh, that’s something that I have a lot of updated thoughts on. Especially over the past couple of months, ’cause we moved here in January and it’s a lot to take in on a personal level to have to contend with the reality of what being here in 2023 means and looks like.

The very obvious things is the cost of living is insane. In Vancouver especially. It’s it’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before.

And in Vancouver especially, what you feel here is the housing crisis, right?

There’s a huge homeless population here. Of course that comes with a lot of social problems that I wanna make sure to not I’m not saying that they are the problem, but that this is a problem that so many people are forced out of their houses or of affordable living conditions. It’s just crazy, right? I saw I don’t know if it was a post or a TikTok about somebody saying there’s so many people in Vancouver who are like a paycheck from being on the street, And so that’s very scary to live in a place where keeping yourself alive feels like a full-time job. And it’s scary to see how People who live on the street and the conditions in which they live, and obviously the drug crisis is wow. It’s I have never seen anything like it, and it’s sad and I feel like this on a personal level is a lot to have to deal with.

And obviously I feel for anybody, anyone who’s in this kind of living situation, but The Canadian dream as a concept where I struggle with this now, is that it’s under no scrutiny. Nobody is examining what that really means, especially outside of Canada. Right?

I visited India for the first time last year, and I was there for two months. And when I came back to Mauritius, I kept hearing oh, what did you think of the poverty in India? Were you shocked by the poverty in India? And I was like, this is such a weird thing to be asking me. I have so many other things to talk about, but I kept getting that question from people, even from people who are Indian, and it’s in the collective understanding of what India is, but nobody’s ever gonna ask me if I’m shocked or what I thought about the poverty in Canada, right? Nobody’s gonna have that thought, but that is way more shocking. And so that’s where I kind of struggle with this idea.

My partner’s family is in India and a lot of my family we’re all around the world now, but my mom and her siblings are Mauritius and, everybody was like, yeah, go to Canada now. It’ll be better for you. You’ll be able to get better healthcare. That’s a joke. You’ll be able to get better career opportunities. That’s also a joke. Like for example, my partner, when you come to Canada as a new immigrant, you are expected to work a low wage entry level job regardless of your background, regardless of your experience. ’cause that’s just the way it is. And even that as a concept that’s insane. They literally want immigrants to come into the country to take up these low paying jobs and do all this service work so that, the

economy can,

Lazou: disguised as Canadian experience, isn’t it?

Nastassia: right. Canadian education, Canadian experience.

but why? Really? I’m getting to reexamine my own privilege through my partner because I’ve never had to think about my passport, my education, whatever ’cause I have those things, but I’m getting to see this firsthand and be like, that makes no sense.

I would imagine that my parents had a very different immigration experience back in the eighties or nineties. But yeah, I don’t think the Canadian dream is doing well at all. It’s a hoax,

Lazou: yeah, I think that’s something that many people who send their kids abroad don’t realize. But if you didn’t study in Canada and you immigrate there, you basically are starting from scratch. Like, I know, fully qualified doctors and dentists who were in residence with me at U F T because they had to redo their training there and get licensed in Canada.

And that was the only way they had to start from scratch. They were practicing in India or other places and they had to start all over again, go through med school, go through dentistry school, do it all over again so they could practice in Canada. And that’s something that people don’t know, and even as students, a lot of my peers, they wanted to take up jobs, to help supplement their tuition fees. And it’s not easy for non Canadians

Nastassia: right.

Lazou: at

Nastassia: for sure. Even when people know that this is the reality of, oh, you need the Canadian experience, you need the Canadian education, it’s just accepted as that’s the way that it is. We don’t question that enough. I don’t think that’s standard practice across the world. I feel like here it’s really worse. That aspect of things makes me really mad.

Lazou: Yeah. It is literally a systemic way to keep immigrants at the lower level of income

Nastassia: That’s right. And to get money into all their educational institutions for sure.

Lazou: Yeah. So in your bio, you mentioned the summer of reckoning, which, myself included, like my brain exploded that summer.

Nastassia: Right.

Lazou: So tell me about that, like where you were and how did you experience that in Mauritius?

I feel like it was probably a very different experience. here in the US versus

being in

Nastassia: That’s right. It was a crazy thing. I really don’t think that at the time, most of us knew or understood how profound of an impact it would have, but I really feel like the pandemic.

The fact that we were just out of lockdown or getting out of like semi lockdown.

Yeah, June, 2020. I was at home and I remember seeing this video and people posting it over and over again and it was something so visceral to just have it filmed and knowing that this is a reality in the US especially, and so many other places, I’m sure.

But to have something so in your face you can’t look away. There’s no, but what if maybe there was nothing, there was no way to brush it off. We were so far across the world. But I really feel like it propelled a lot of us to start reading about this more. There were so many like articles coming out. This is what you should know about the incarceration in the US. This is a documentary to watch. Suddenly, even Netflix was pushing, all those things to its front page. Watch this show, that show. I started doing my homework as well and started really catching up is what it felt like. It was like, wow, how have I not known about all of those things.

And I feel like a lot of people in Mauritius, or maybe not a lot, but a certain amount of people were having reflections about what anti-blackness was like in Mauritius. And then suddenly there was a lot of conversation about how we’re so outraged about what’s going on in the US, what about what’s going on here?

What about anti-blackness in Mauritius? And what about the kind of status quo that we live in where a lot of the Creole population in Mauritius is still very much working class and is not privileged in any way. So it really created spaces for conversations to happen.

And people started creating those online spaces of discussion on Instagram, different activist groups, all of those were in motion.

Lazou: Do you feel like that triggered more activism in Mauritius while that was happening?

Nastassia: So that’s the one thing that I’m not entirely sure about, but it definitely put me in touch with a lot of people who are already either doing the work or having those kinds of conversation. There are a lot of people that I started following or talking to and I don’t know if they had been in those spaces prior or how long prior.

I don’t really know if it was as significant a shift for them as it was for me. But I definitely feel like it put me in those spaces. I sought out those spaces and those conversations and I feel like a lot was going on online, in the diaspora as well. It definitely created a lot of conversations about anti-blackness, Mauritius, for sure.

Lazou: Yeah. I didn’t watch the video, but I knew it was circulating. At first of course it was shock and as you said, feeling like I have to catch up with, wait, this was happening this whole time. How come I didn’t know about this? But then I remembered kaya In Mauritius. And I was like, wait a second. We’ve been there already.

Nastassia: Yeah, that’s true.

Lazou: At the beginning of the pandemic, Mauritius was doing really great compared to the US, not even comparable. It was a disaster over here. And so I was in this space where I felt like oh, Mauritius is doing so much better than we are in every aspect.

And then when this happened, the immediate impulse was the US is just dumpster fire right now. I can’t believe this is happening. But then I’m like, wait a second. The Kaya thing happened. That was also a big, massive wake up moment in Mauritius. I’m not sure anything actually changed. Not so clear cut after all.

Nastassia: For sure. For sure. I don’t know where you were at the time this was 99, right?

Lazou: was in Mauritius.

Nastassia: We moved in 98, I had been in Mauritius for maybe a year or less, and I don’t remember anything from when that was happening. Maybe I saw it on TV but I don’t think there were any conversations going on in my circles. I was a child, but I mean

around me. I don’t know how it was for you.

Lazou: I do remember my dad talking about it with relatives and he kind of explained to me what was happening. But I don’t remember that it created any meaningful change in Mauritius. I’m not sure what happened after. ‘ yeah, I do remember that being a big thing, but then I forgot about it.

Nastassia: I don’t know if this is related directly, but I know at some point there was a Truth I Justice Commission. That was way later. That was in 2009. I don’t know as much about it, but I know it explored the impact of slavery and of indenture and Mauritius. It was supposed to give guidelines as to what measures could and should be taken for I guess, some sort of reparations, but I don’t think much of it was enacted.

Lazou: Yeah. And even, outside of incarceration systems, in general, resources are still distributed unevenly between the communities, right? In Mauritius, for example, a lot of the fishermen in Mauritius are Creole.

But you don’t see a lot of investment in the fishing industry. You see a lot of investment in oil and commercial centers

and and who owns those? usually white people or usually Indo-Mauritians and then there’s a lot of new Chinese money coming in.

But you’re not seeing a lot of investments in the predominantly black communities,

right. So it’s still there for sure.

Part of the work ahead of us, Asian diaspora in general is to check ourselves and decenter whiteness. And I really liked the list that you shared in your metric article about some examples of intrapersonal racism and what that looks like. Maybe maybe we should start with defining what intrapersonal racism is.

Nastassia: Racism is something that we experience towards people of different groups . And then there’s the kind of racism that you would experience about your own self or people of your own ethnic group and standards that you would apply to yourself from a whiteness standpoint.

In brown communities that’s a very real thing. I’ve seen it play out through most of my life, but didn’t really have words for it. That’s a big thing that quote unquote summer of racial reckoning did, is that it, brought a lot of those things to the fore and it helped me and a lot of people put names onto things and those names were out there. It’s just, I feel like they were not part of mainstream conversations, right? Those sociological concepts were there, but we were not talking about it in everyday conversation. Now I can have conversations with my friends and be like, yeah, the colorism and we know what we’re talking about.

Yeah, the biggest thing that experienced and that has impacted the way that I see myself and live my life and see other brown people is really colorism. That’s the biggest one. It’s so real and I’ve experienced it all of my life without even knowing that it was a thing, that it was a kind of offshoot of racism.

It’s really sad and it’s, again, a byproduct of this desire to be close to whiteness, and it affects women way more than men. We bear the brunt of it.

Every time I would come back to Mauritius. I lived in Montreal and I would visit every other year. And then I would hear, oh my God, you’ve got so fair. Oh, look how nice you look now. Or boys in Mauritius would be like, oh my God. I can’t believe I’m dating someone who’s so fair. Taking all those messages and really absorbing them, oh, okay, fair light skin is good. Or I need to be light skinned to be desirable or to be beautiful.

Since 2020, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people in my life. We’ve tried to unpack and have those hard conversations about, that thing we used to do back then that was not okay. Things we used to tell each other in high school that was not okay.

Or comparing each other’s skin tones. That’s something we would do, you know, oh, I’m so tan, or you’re so untanned, or whatever it is. that was a really big part of my childhood, my teenage years and even some of my early twenties. And having those conversations is part of that work, right?

That list that you mentioned in the metric article, I feel like that was really me excavating my brain for the things that I do. And There’s a lot of shame in that for me. I realize that I’m not alone in this, so it’s helpful.

But yeah, having those conversations about how, hey, remember how when I was a kid I wouldn’t go to the beach? Yeah. ’cause I didn’t wanna tan or remember how, we would wear long sleeve shirts, even if it was thirty degrees it’s ’cause we didn’t wanna get darker. So it’s important to have these conversations. I’ve had them with my mom as well, which has been very interesting because we were coming at it from very different generational standpoints.

But yeah, I hope that we can do more of that work and have honest conversations with each other about what that looks like.

Lazou: It’s interesting you mentioned wearing the long sleeves. I’ve always noticed that the Indo Mauritians, a lot of them go to the beach and they’re wearing long sleeves. And I thought that was just a cultural thing. I had no idea that it was linked to not tanning. Like that never even crossed my mind.

Nastassia: It is a cultural thing in that sense, right? Because so many of us do it for the same reason, which is we don’t wanna get darker. For sure, that’s a very real thing.

Lazou: And I’m surprised, that I don’t know, maybe that was very naive of me, but I didn’t even know that that was a thing.

Nastassia: It’s largely unspoken. I don’t think that I would ever have admitted that to anyone at that age. I would never have told anyone. I would’ve been like, oh, I’m cold. You know, And in my case, and I’m sure that’s true for a lot of girls as well, it was a double whammy of I don’t wanna get dark.

And also I’m ashamed of my body and I don’t wanna show it. So those were the two things. But I don’t think we were having honest conversations with each other about it. It was more like, oh, that’s just a quirky thing I do, it was never like, oh, all of us do this thing. And we would hear maybe from mothers and aunts oh, you’ve gotten so dark.

Things like that. So we would take steps to avoid that basically is what it was.

Lazou: Yeah. A lot to unpack and it makes me hopeful to hear that these conversations are actually happening in Mauritius. I wish they were more mainstream, but

it’s a start. In a way Mauritius and Canada are very similar in that they market themselves as countries that embrace diversity and everyone coexists peacefully But there is still a lot of racism.

One thing I’ve learned through doing this podcast is the best we can do is try to advocate in the spaces where we are trusted, in the spaces where people already listen to us. So you know, the people in your own community, that’s where your influence is gonna be the greatest. And so I’ve been thinking about that and like how do you navigate that as a Mauritian who lives abroad and I see a lot of things from the Sino Mauritian community that I don’t agree with.

And I know you’ve seen a lot of stuff from the, in the Mauritian community that you don’t agree with. So let’s talk about that. ’cause I feel like there’s not enough conversation about this.

Nastassia: I really like what you shared about doing the work within the communities that you’re already part of, that you’re already trusted in. And that was a big thing for a lot of us when we started grappling with anti-racism, anti-blackness, or all these issues that were already there, but that we started to face kind of head on over the past few years.

And we were struggling with this idea, what do I do? What can I do? Where can I have an impact? Like I wanna change the world, I wanna eradicate all of this. That’s why a lot of us started writing or podcasts in your case or these spaces online.

’cause we were so moved to do something, right. And it’s so true that one of the arenas of greatest impact that we can have is really in our circles, in our families, in our friend groups and like we’re doing right now, having these conversations with each other.

’cause I’m learning from you as well that what internalized or intrapersonal racism looks like in Sino Mauritian communities is drastically different from what it looks like in Indo Mauritian communities. So that’s a great thing to be doing.

And sorry, the second part of your question was about

Lazou: I’d wanna talk about what you’ve seen from your community that you would like to change.

Nastassia: right.

Lazou: I know for me, for example, I really am against the Chinese- only anything.

That’s completely wrong. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach that and do something about it when I am not living there. Sometimes it’s hard to know my place too, ’cause I feel like I should say something, but then also it can seem a little pretentious of me to be like, oh she’s this American mauritian now telling us how to live our life.

Nastassia: No, that’s a very real thing as well. Because like at the end of the day, people like you and I are very privileged in our own positionalities, Right? I feel like even

having this kind of ability to deconstruct and think about those things that comes with privilege as well, right?

That we have access to the language, that we’re able to have these conversations. So for sure, I definitely feel like that’s a bit of a tricky positionality as well. I see a lot of Anti-blackness that doesn’t realize it’s anti-black in Indo Mauritian communities. There’s this idea that Indo Mauritians and Creole Mauritians both come from struggle, which is true.

And then there’s this kind of self aggrandizing thing where it’s but us brown people, we rose through the ranks and we struggled and we made it right.

Lazou: minority myth.

Nastassia: Right.

We did it.

Lazou: except you’re the majority,

Nastassia: yeah model majority, why can’t Creole communities do it? And so there’s absolutely no critical look at things, we’re not looking back to history. We’re not looking back at anything that happened, and we’re just making those blanket statements.

And that’s another problem in Mauritius where we’re not taught at high school levels about indenture and about slavery. They’re mentioned in passing, but overall, it’s oh how lucky are we that we were chosen to be colonized by so many European countries. And hence now we’re in such a great place and we’re so modern and we have English and French, and we’re so diverse. So it’s that crazy forced amnesia that we have. And we don’t examine any of those things. And then we grow up and we develop this kind of tunnel vision about what happened and why a lot of Indo Mauritians were able to become middle upper middle class and now control basically the political arena. And so the thing that I really push back against the most in my own conversations with my family and my friends is they’re really overt anti-blackness.

Creole Mauritians are lazy. If only they work more. If only they did not do drugs, or if only they didn’t have so many kids. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard these things, and it’s just said so casually in conversation about, like it’s a very okay thing to say. And that is something that we need to push back against more.

I’ve had to relearn those things myself and then push back against it in conversations with people, which have gone pretty well, I think all things considered.

And something that I learned relatively recently that is a bit scary in Mauritius obviously, means of production and resources being controlled by white people. Obviously that needs to change. But the political arenas being completely controlled by Indo Mauritians and especially apparently Indo Mauritians of a certain caste. I did not know that was a thing. I learned this last year and I was like, how is this a thing? So many of our forefathers, foremothers came to Mauritius as indentured laborers and there was a lot of caste mixing. There was a lot of new ways of being that came into existence. How does caste still determine who can be elected?

Lazou: So growing up in the Indo Mauritian community, was there ever talk about caste? Were you aware that there was a thing called caste and how that worked?

Nastassia: no, I did not. Okay. I knew about caste vaguely as a concept in India. I did not know that it had transmuted to Mauritius. I was not aware of that at all.. If anything, I learned about caste when I met my partner who is from India. Not that it’s a big thing for him and his family, but when I was starting to read about colorism and all the problems that exist in India and how a lot of them have been transposed onto Mauritian society.

Invariably, I had to come into contact with conversations about caste. So no. Prior to the last, four or five years, I had no real understanding of caste whatsoever.

Lazou: I do remember learning about it in passing in school, but it was I don’t know, maybe a paragraph.

My dad is very in the know about politics and whatnot. So we, we talk about politics and he did tell me before that all the politicians are of a certain cast. And that it’s a very specific cast that gets to be the ruling class.

Nastassia: It’s really messed up that that exists in Mauritius. I was so shocked. I learned about this last year in a conversation about the things that Mauritius has inherited from India.

And I was really shocked to learn that. It was even more shocking to me. ’cause my grandfather, my dad’s dad, was in the government. I never met him. I was born after he had already passed away, so I never saw any of that public life. But it was really intriguing to learn about the fact that this is a thing and my family is so close to it and I didn’t even know.

Lazou: Wow.

Yeah I think there’s a law where there has to be at least one Chinese Mauritian person in the assembly, or something, and it’s always like, minister of sports.

Nastassia: Oh wow. That’s true. I wonder what that is.

Lazou: Yeah my internalized racism was I grew up knowing that my people never have any political power

Nastassia: What was that like growing up with that knowledge or having that knowledge?

Lazou: It made me really wanna leave.

Yeah it definitely reinforced that idea that, yeah, you know what I’m Canadian, I’m outta here as soon as I can I’ll have a better life there.

I thought, you know that in the West I will be treated just as a human with no distinction. Oh not quite true, but close enough. It also made me very disengaged politically.

because I just felt like Mauritius as a political system was hopeless. I gave into that idea that my voice can never make a difference in this country. I’m trying to deconstruct that, but it’s a really hard thing to deconstruct.

Nastassia: right. No, for sure. The two things that in my dreams would be upended in Mauritius would be the way that the political system is, the fact that you can keep on getting elected and over again, that is just nuts. We’ve had the same like handful of people take turns basically at ruling the country.

And the fact that whatever systems were in place or set up around colonization still exist. They just operate slightly differently. To sit with that reality and to contend with that’s really shocking.

I don’t know how that change is gonna happen. I don’t know who’s gonna make that change. But yeah, the fact that the handful of white families that are in Mauritius still profit from colonization and are still making bank off the backs of brown and black labor, that doesn’t make sense.

Lazou: So you’ve written recently about becoming chronically ill. I wonder if you wanna share a little bit what that journey has been like and how it has changed the way you think about disability accessibility and maybe how it has changed your life?

Nastassia: It’s completely reshaped my life. Now I would say that I’ve entered a space where everything isn’t constantly in flux. The first year, the first six months , there’s really this everyday stress of I don’t know what’s going on with me.

And you have to slowly take it from, oh, this is something I’m dealing with right now to, oh, this is my life now and how do I make it work? Transition is really hard because there’s so much grief you have to process. This is the life that I had until now, and now things are changing.

I don’t know if it’s forever, I don’t know for how long, but it’s changing. And it’s not this isolated moment of grief, it’s really recurring grief . You know, You have to go through these cycles of, oh, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do that anymore. And so I’m thankful and grateful that I’m not in that transition space anymore.

Not to say that it’s easy, but that I’ve reached a kind of consensus with my own body about what I can or cannot do, and finding alternative ways to go about living really. One of the more difficult aspects, and one of the things I dread has been interacting with other people, especially family or friends that are not that close, or people who I don’t know or not if they’re quote unquote safe people. One of the biggest realizations I’ve had over the past few years is how most of us are really ableist. Most of us, even the most, well-meaning left-leaning folks are ableist, myself included. That’s been really hard to sit with because you no longer know who is or isn’t a safe person to be around.

And suddenly the way that people look at you is different. There’s a lot of pity, there’s a lot of invasive questions about your health and you tell somebody you don’t wanna talk about your health ’cause you’re dealing with it every day. You don’t want it to be the conversation you have with people all the time.

I think it was in Roxane Gay’s hunger, where she talks about her relationship to her fat body and fat phobia and navigating life as a fat person in the world. She said it’s almost like you don’t have sovereignty over your body anymore. It’s like people feel too comfortable making comments and suggestions about how you should live your life.

And I experienced that when all of my health issues started, suddenly it’s like, so many suggestions. Have you done this? Have you tried this? Why don’t you do that? And then it became oh, how come you’re not better yet? Oh, well, what are you doing wrong basically that you haven’t healed yet?

And so that’s really been the most taxing because I’ve had to reevaluate a lot of my relationships. In “care work” the author talks about spoon theory which is you have a certain number of spoons in a day, which are like energy units.

And as a disabled or chronically ill person, you have fewer spoons or energy units in any given day than a non-disabled person. And so you have to be selective with how you spend that energy. That was a learning curve as well, being like, oh, today I don’t have enough spoons to deal with this family member, deal with that thing, or deal with all those things.

So you learn to be selective and to be cutthroat with things that you’re okay and not okay with. It’s a rough process and like I said, the transition period was probably the hardest because you’re rewiring your own expectations of your body and it’s a lot of negotiating with yourself.

But dealing with others and figuring out who’s safe and who isn’t safe has also been a whole thing.

But yeah, it’s really reshaped my life and changed how I see the world and my place in it.

The one thing I wanna share that’s maybe more positive is that I really feel like it’s stripped down a lot of the nonsense and forced me to sit with what matters.

one example of that would be my relationship to my physical body, and especially body dysmorphia. Because I lost control over my body. Suddenly I couldn’t do a lot of things and exercising was one of them.

Or because of the anxiety I would overeat and a lot of things just spiraled and I lost control over my body and what it looked like. And that it was really hard. But now that I’m somewhat on the other side of it, I had to replace these questions I had about my body.

Oh, why do you look like this? Or why? Why is there fat here? Why is there hair here? I’ve had to throw that out the window. ’cause it’s like, what does it matter what my body looks like if I don’t feel good? And so that has been one of the more positive takeaways from this. I’ve been able to get to a place where I have much better self-image and I’m much more love for myself, which is interesting because I was on the opposite end of that when this started, where I was like, why is my body doing this? Why is this happening? Where now I’m more like it is what it is. Try to work with what you have. A lot of this shit doesn’t matter really.

Lazou: Yeah. I love it. I’ve also embraced the body neutrality movement. Yeah. And it’s the most freeing thing ever.

I do think that, when you go through a serious health problem, ’cause I’ve had a bunch of those too.

Mm-hmm. It really, as you said, makes you cut the crap out and you’re just like, you know what? I don’t need this in my life.

Nastassia: right.

Lazou: So yeah, definitely resonate with what you said because I had the same experience Right. definitely like a unexpected silver lining, right? Like it’s nice to have something good to excavate from all of the negativity that comes with having a health problem or having to be unwell all the time. Yeah. That’s been a great takeaway.

Yeah, for sure. Alright. So we like to end the interview with a rapid fire section. These are one word or one phrase answers. You don’t have to explain, but you can if you want to.

What languages do you speak?

Nastassia: English, French, and Creole.

Lazou: What is an Asian food that you should like, but don’t.

Nastassia: Mauritian Biryani.

Lazou: What? That’s a good one though.

Nastassia: Yes. Biryani. Oof. Can’t do it.

Lazou: What is an Asian food that you’ll never get tired of?

Nastassia: Fried rice.

Lazou: A favorite book by a Canadian author

Nastassia: “People Change” by Vivek Shraya.

Lazou: A favorite book by a Mauritian author.

Nastassia: Ananda Devi, “Le Sari Vert”.,

Lazou: And finally, do you wanna let people know how they can get in touch with you?

Nastassia: yeah, I write

semi frequently, on Substack so it’s Deconstructd without the e between the T and the D at the end. And otherwise I just started

posting again, semi-frequently about books I’m reading and reflections on books at Nastassia Reads on Instagram.

Lazou: Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I always enjoy your newsletters.

Nastassia: Well, thank you.

Lazou: They made me reflect on my own experiences in Canada.

Nastassia: That’s really nice. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed getting to talk about a lot of the things that are on my mind thank you so much for this.

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