Brown erasure in white spaces

In early February, I attended an artsy fartsy bobo event, Anba Pie (which translates to “under the tree”) at l’Aventure du Sucre in Mauritius. This was my first time going out out in a while. I felt a twinge of nervousness on my way there, not uncharacteristic of me to feel ahead of events like these. In fact, I tend to steer clear from the Mauritian yuppie scene altogether. Instead of dismissing those feelings though, I let myself linger a bit longer than usual, you know, to try to situate the discomfort. Déconstruire pour mieux reconstruire.

We get to the event location and find our way to the entrance after walking a few minutes through the parking lot. We go in and we hear rhythmic percussion beats, typical of this kind of shindig. People are gathered in pods around tables, trees, and makeshift seating areas talking, laughing, drinking.

The venue is beautiful, simply adorned with fairy lights interspersed between the trees. I scan the area for familiar faces, hoping to catch the eye of a friend. I look around and what I already knew before coming here is now made abundantly clear. This is a Mauritian bobo hideout. This is where all the twentysomething yuppie Mauritians come to play. Also, this is where a lot of Franco-Mauritian yuppie twentysomethings come to play.

This might seem like an innocuous observation to some, so let me expand. White or Franco-Mauritians are a very small % (around 2) of the population. Many of us non-Franco-Mauritians also have this kind of unspoken understanding that they live and exist in their own spheres, largely segregated from the rest of the population. As I explained in an older post on anti-Blackness in Mauritius, growing up Brown or Black here often means you rarely get to interact with white people. At least not socially. They don’t go to your school. They’re not at the same restaurants. They most certainly aren’t serving your food. You know of white Mauritians as wealthy business owners. You associate them to life in Rivière Noire and the upscale parts of Curepipe. You associate them to private beaches (the ones they could freely roam as you followed strict quarantine rules at home). You associate them to the means of production. You’re never sitting at the same table.

To add to the unofficial segregation, that some places are made for them and often by them is usually crystal clear. A lot of Mauritian brands advertise their products using only white or white-passing models. Some will even indicate prices in euros or dollars. A lot of these places will generally be really expensive too, like a month’s rent for a bikini, a month’s pay for a dress. Additionally, there are the more subtle cultural hints you absorb over the years. It’s not uncommon for me to walk into stores and barely be acknowledged as a client but for a white client to enter the exact same store, and be fervently greeted. It’s also not uncommon for me to have waited in line to pay or order, and have a white person, further in line, be attended to before me and any other Brown or Black paying customers.

I remember a particularly scarring occasion circa 2010: I was visiting Mauritius from college and went to a night club in Flic en Flac with a bunch of friends. We were all dressed to the nines, as was expected of us in order to be let in. We were amassed by the entrance, and the bouncers, savoring the fleeting modicum of power they held in that moment, took an obvious pleasure in making us wait, huddled impatient and sweaty against one another. A short while later, a group of white men approach the entrance. I distinctly remember them all dressed very casually, in t-shirts, beach shorts and flip-flops. The bouncers gesture at us to get out of the way. To literally make way for them to enter. In that moment, we see the bouncers’ facial expressions (Brown and Black bouncers, to be exact) shift from “I call the shots” to “at your service”. We continue to wait in line for quite some time.

I don’t think I reflected on this incident very deeply back then. I was irked and could see the injustice, but I hadn’t yet tied this to all the other racially-motivated events that I’d been witness to. Putting the pieces together is nothing short of heartbreaking. It takes so much to hold your head up high when you’ve been told so many years to keep it lowered.

So, walking into a place that’s very white inevitably feels like you’re entering a space that’s theirs. That’s created and crafted for their leisure and their purported superior tastes and preferences (superior by virtue of having the means to access the best of what this island has to offer). And because you operate from that internal vantage point, you’re suddenly thrust into thinking you have something to prove. That you must prove you belong there as much as they do. That you must latch onto any form of acknowledgement you might receive. That acceptance within this group enhances your social credentials.

The lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

I sit with those feelings for a moment. I’m reassured because this time, I’m not alone. I’m with friends, one of whom feels similar discomfort. It’s nice to have a sounding board in this kind of setting. It’s grounding and life-affirming. Because you’re uneasy and you’re not sure why. And this is why: you feel invisible. Places like these invisibilise you. Like the decades of implicitly knowing white people exist above you just suddenly rise to your frontal lobe. The knowledge becomes palpable.

My friends and I discuss this. The singularity of being placed in a white space in Mauritius. Knowing that white Mauritians don’t dominate in number but do in potency. It’s a painful reminder of our otherness on what feels like our land. It’s a painful relegation au second plan. The ideas that have festered in our brains for as long as they have are rapidly regurgitated and inform our social awareness.

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I want to start paying heed to these feelings whenever they show up, to look them in the eye and reason with them. To ground myself and affirm myself. I am not lesser than them. I do not need to prove myself to them. They are in privileged positions because their ancestors pillaged and enslaved. That is nothing to look up to or envy. I am not lesser than because of the color of my skin. I am not born with this knowledge that my complexion makes me small. Just as I’ve learned to diminish myself for it, I can learn to elevate myself for it. This space is mine for the taking too. I am here because I belong within myself and within the spaces I carve out for myself.

In this realization, I let loose. I do not need their approval. As much as my brain seems to want to convince me that I do, I do not. I let loose. Bodies, swaying, sweaty on the ground that we dance upon. Magic System’s 1er Gaou is playing, as we all cheer and channel a vague sense of pan-Africanism, and I am reminded of simpler times. My feet pound and my hips sway. I live for none of them.

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