The Burning Tongue


A short story on language, displacement, and the nuances of heartbreak that may come to exist between parents and children.

One day, I wake up and my tongue is burning with the need to speak my mother tongue. The word “burning”, here, is not a metaphor. My whole mouth feels like a volcano awakening after years of dormancy, and my tongue is already beginning to writhe under its first slivers of lava. The twisting, however, is not random: my tongue is struggling to spell out the well-worn patterns of the language I have grown up speaking, but haven’t...

19 May 2020

Between Cambridge and Troumaron:
Teaching Mauritian Literature at Harvard


I have been studying and teaching Mauritian literature at Harvard for the past four years. The experience taught me to simultaneously be proud of my country’s specificities, and to keep asking difficult questions of it.

It is a cold Wednesday afternoon in Cambridge, MA. Sunlight streams through the large ceiling-to-floor glass windows of the Boylston Hall classroom that I occupy with my students. They are all Harvard undergraduates, each uniquely motivated to incorporate a course in Francophone literature into their constellated Harvard experience: Many are literary concentrators eager to work on new texts, while others are keen to...

30 Apr 2020

Stuck in Quarantimbo
Attempting a Dissertation in the time of COVID-19


Specks of doubt tinge my resolve as I sit down with my morning cup of coffee to write this. After all, there exist a lot -- I emphasize, a lot -- of coronavirus-lifestyle-articles out there. I myself spend hours reading them on a daily basis. In the mornings, I often wade through productivity tips and recipe videos that make mouth-watering dishes look much easier and more necessary to make than they really are. In the evenings, I settle down with long-form narrative pieces, compulsively looking for intersections between my own experience of self-isolation and that of others (i.e. trying to...

13 Apr 2020