Revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It can’t be done elegantly and gently. —Mao Tse-Tung
In fifth grade, I had to interview
my grandparents, but I could not say
the questions my teacher gave us
in a language they understood.
So my mother asked the questions,
braiding Hakka and Creole,
hovering over certain words
as she translated them in her head.
I sat and watched their faces.
Where were you born?Moiyen.
What is your nationality? Mauritian.
What was your occupation? A shopkeeper.
When my mother asked, who is your hero,
Koung Koung said, Mao Tse-Tung!
and Popo nodded, Mao Tse-Tung.
I was watching but I didn’t know
what it meant then, indoctrination,
how they targeted the descendants of gypsies,
so a daughter raised by her grandmother
after her parents had fled to Burma,
and the firstborn son of a school teacher,
could revere him.
That a man who taught his daughter
how to nestle minced prawn, pork,
and bamboo shoots in thin veined lace
of lakrepin and wrap them into rolls
dredged in batter, fried twice,
a delicacy served at weddings—
And a woman who held and soaped me
in the dark stone washhouse
of memory—that these folks, elegant
and gentle, could revere him.
I did not think of words being passed
like the beat of a drum over oceans
and crackling telephone lines,
or of words congregating in the columns
of the island’s Chinese newspaper,
rolled into a korne. Weighed
and sold in a laboutik, crammed
into a clan house in Port Louis—all
burying the murderous venom
of a man with a mole on his chin
and the face of an overgrown baby.
I did not understand it. Even now
I struggle to understand.