Sunday Aug 27, 2023

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

For the full show notes, go to https://nuancespod.com/2023/08/27/nastassia-jagatsingh


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! .

Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Web

DEFINITIONS

  • Creole Mauritians: mostly descendants of African slaves, or racially mixed Mauritians who are also 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



TAKEAWAYS

  1. It's important to talk to people in your community and ask rather than assume what their experience has been like.
  2. Believing that Western countries were better is white supremacist thinking and something we're both trying to deconstruct.
  3. Although Mauritius has very few whites, white people still hold a lot of economic & social power, and are treated as such.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Looking good doesn't matter if you don't feel good.
  8. 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.

SONG

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


CONTACT

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Host: Lazou

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