Breach

written by Moshumee Teena Dewoo

Breach draws from the wisdom of Africa and the African human experience to urge reconsideration of conventional notions of a home as sheltered assurance of belonging. Instead, it embraces the notion of not having a home and therefore not belonging, where this would mean revelling in liquidness, incompleteness, boundlessness – liberating potential.

“During the waning days of Britain’s rule in India, its last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, turned to Mahatma Gandhi and said in exasperation, ‘If we just leave, there will be chaos’ and Gandhi calmly replied, ‘Yes, but it will be our chaos.’ Dewoo’s collection of poems resonates with the Gandhian necessity for each society to continuously breach identity formation and performance in its own self-engendered chaotized order/other; to undauntingly breach zero-sum regimes of home(lessness), power(lessness), and (im)mobility.” Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom, Interdisciplinary Literature Scholar

Moshumee Teena Dewoo

Moshumee Teena Dewoo was born a child of Surinam in Mauritius, on a 23rd December. She grew up in between a mountain and the beach, running the fields and climbing trees, and her head in books, and learning of things that her parents and grandparents thought best she knew. Her life would forever be influenced by a combatant grandfather, a baptised grandmother, a teaching mother and a Hindu father, all descendants of migrants constantly seeking to define themselves and the world around them through words…