This is for you, and you, and you, and you, you, you!

Dear friends, lovers, strangers, fellow-bloggers, readers, fans, followers, passers-by (and whomever else I might have missed out on): This is for you.

Looking back on the year gone by, I want to thank you for reading sometimes, for reading often, for reading always... I want to thank all of you who comment too, and those of you who send me e-mails, as well as all of you who nominated the blog for the Canadian Blog Awards, and the Canadian Weblogs too. Thank you for your support, for voting for the blog, and just generally, for sharing a slice of my life and my (weak) attempts at creative writing, at queer writing and serious writing too! In the midst of all these, special thoughts to fellow bloggers who've made my reading list very stimulating on a daily basis over the year that just went by.

Now, looking forward to what's ahead of us, I wish you joy, success, a lot of positive energy, a fulfilling libido, plenty of aesthetic experiences and much creativity. For the fellow-bloggers, I look forward to reading you, so may it be a year full of fun posting and challenging blogging!

A note on the future of The Queer Behind the Mirror? Unpredictable as the future may be, for now, I will just say that the blog should be up and running for the year to follow! But one never knows... In the meantime, I hope you keep coming back, and commenting, and writing back! 

- XOXO -

My best wishes for the new year!

Because It's in the Taste(s)

They say that the experience of the diaspora, those unrooted, uprooted and rerooted people, lies in making-do with what is immediately available to them to recreate a sense of the homeland they left behind. 

What was immediately available to me was: garlic, green chillies, onions, split peas (dal as we call it back home), spring onions, cumin and an electric-grinder to crush the dal. The result: gateaux piments, and it actually did bring smells, tastes and memories of Mauritius back to mind. While you can have it in a hot baguette with melting butter, you can also eat it as a snack or cook it further in a curry.

While some recreate the homeland through language, others through what they wear, others through sacred books and spiritual beliefs, I decided to go with the food and taste (for now at least.) My gateaux piments tasted good. I can't wait to tell my mum: she'll be proud of me!

Untitled [poem]

That taste

That smell 

My tongue

Your pungent sweat

And the depth of my nose.

This whiff

This liquid

Your rough skin

My sweaty pubic hair

And the curve of your armpit.

Serious Post and Serious Question: what would you do to fill up the time if you were stuck in an elevator for more than 15 minutes?

As you may know, I am playing the role of Kalil in the play Arabian Night (link here.)

Kalil's climax in the play (other than the sexual climaxes of being seduced by three different women who start howling like wolves during their orgasms) is when he gets stuck in an elevator while on his way to meet Fatima, his girlfriend. This is the point where everything turns upside down in his life.

This means that I am left with roughly 15 minutes on stage, stuck in an elevator. While I have worked on some pantomime, some humorous jumps and growls, expressions of anger and frustration and moments of despair, 15 minutes in a non-physical elevator on stage is an awful lot of time to fill (even if there are other things happening on stage during those 15 minutes.)

So the question is, and I encourage you to be creative and/or be realistic: what would you do if you were stuck in an elevator for 15 minutes? How would you react and how would you fill the time? 

[Note: you have no cell-phone and/or pocket-game on you!]

On Schimmelpfennig's "Arabian Night" [the play]

[This is my take on/review of Schimmelpfennig's Arabian Night, the play that I will be performing in with the troupe I am working with. Coming up in February 2011.]

Schimmelpfennig's Arabian Night (Die arabische Nacht) brings together five characters who experience an erotic urban fantasy that occurs in an anonymous (probably imaginary) housing settlement somewhere in Germany. Between dreams and nightmares, the play is part fairy tale, part noir thriller and it tells the story of Franziska, a beautiful narcoleptic who combines imagery from Sleeping Beauty and The Arabian Nights to drag people into her nightmares; two migrant lovers, Fatima and Kalil, whose relationship change after Kalil gets stuck in an elevator, repeatedly cheats on Fatima with women living in the same building and ends up getting stabbed by her; Karpati, a voyeur who gets stuck in a bottle of brandy after kissing Franziska while she is sleeping; and Lomeier, the building's caretaker who yearns for the wife he lost years earlier. Their lives become intertwined on a hot summer evening when their building's water suddenly disappears and they are all drawn to desert fantasies in the apartment 7-32.

Somewhere, the narrative (if this play has such as thing as a narrative) keeps reminding us that we are each authors of our own fairy tales and tragedies. Just like the characters in the play, our lives twist and turn in and out of the narratives of our neighbours, lovers, friends... The dialogues remind us of Brechtian aesthetics with self-narrators looking at each other with disconnect while the quality of their fears, regrets and hopes merge into corresponding alienations.

With the blasé and the surreal interacting and merging in numerous instances, this play presents the claustrophobia and repetitiveness of everyday life. Absurdist and post-modern are the two words that sum it up, indeed!