Electric Fence Zine: Mauritius

My first three months in Mauritius have been a crash course in Hindu Male Privilege, 101.

Men in Mauritius, particularly Hindu men, feel enormous amounts of entitlement when it comes to their treatment of women. As a Black woman, my experience has been all the more acute.. scarcely a day goes by when men aren't honking, whistling, staring at me or otherwise carrying on. Doesn't sound too bad? Nothing truly out of the ordinary? Well, try being followed all the way home from the marketplace by married men who are desperate to have a chance with you...

Or, even better, having doctors in fancy cars corner you on the side of the road and essentially proposition you for sex, on grounds that you remind them of a Black women they screwed 20 years ago in the UK, all while offering to give you a free medical exam. And then imagine said lecherous doctor coming back to your neighborhood several days later to scour the block in search of you/your address/the place they last saw you. EEEEK. (Thank God for roommates who lay down the law and scare the creeps away..)

anyhow.. get the picture?

Well, I thought I did... Which is to say, I thought my aforementioned encounters with Mauritian men had shown me the full extent of the sexual harassment that takes place here in Mauritius.

Sadly, however, I stand corrected. As it turns out, sexual harassment in Mauritius has an even more sinister face.

First off, there is the Hindu man who dropped his trousers on me at a club. In previous blog posts and in conversations with friends, I have tried hard to find humor in the situation and turn the whole debacle into a joke. However, the fact remains that the encounter was a huge unnerving mess. If you have never had someone expose themselves to you and say"Je veux vraiment de te baiser" and "Descends" in the dark recesses of a club, I truly hope you never live to see that day. I was so revolted by the experience, I seriously wanted to scrub out my ears and jab out my eyes.

I wish that I had the presence of mind to cuss out the mec in French and English as things were unfolding, but instead all I managed was a meek Bonne Nuit before grabbing my friend Jason and fleeing the club on foot. However, I guess it's better late than never... Vijay, if you're reading this out there in internet land, va te faire foutre.

Fast forward to this week, Monday. It is 4:40pm and I am sitting on a bus, making what is usually a tranquil ten minute trip from my host NGO to the Tae Kwon Do class I began a month ago. One other passenger is on the bus, and she gets off one stop after I get on, leaving me, the driver and the conductor (person who sells tickets to passengers). Seeing that I am alone, the bus conductor crosses the aisle and sits in the seat across from me. From there, he begins addressing me in French and asking me personal questions.. "Am I married?" "Do I have a boyfriend, and am I looking for one?" Do I want to get married in Mauritius?"

Assessing the situation, I take the man's flirtation to be indication that he is another one of Mauritius's typical lecherous curmudgeons. Wrong. As it turns out, a better way to describe this man is an "old, married, snaggletoothed molester"... because before a minute of conversation passes, said gentlemen has begun reaching over the aisle, stroking my thighs and trying to grope my privates.

Dumbfounded, I try to force the guy's hands away using my arms, as well as a water bottle that I'm wielding like a piece of armor. However, the assault continues, with his hands ever-so-persistently divebombing the crotch of my pants. At this point, my head is spinning, and I leap up from my seat and try to move as far away from him as physically possible.. which leaves me pressed against the window of the bus. However, my aggressor responds by tugging my waist and urging me to sit back down. Pretty soon, we’re both standing and he has me cornered against the window.

At this point, despite the fact that the bus is going full throttle, I try and squeeze past my aggressor and make my way for the door. From there, it's utter chaos. My aggressor starts hollering at the bus driver to keep on driving and essentially hold me hostage on the bus-- all the while grabbing my buttocks and telling me vulgar things. In the end, I basically leaped off the bus when it approached its next bus stop, with the conductor following me all the way to the door.

Suffice it to say, I arrived at Tae Kwon Do shell shocked. I didn't really speak to anyone until after the class ended, and when I finally broke my silence I confided in a colleague from work. Upon hearing my story, he insisted that we drive to the nearest police station and file a report.

To my chagrin, the first question I am asked when I sit down before the on-duty officer is, "what were you wearing when this happened?" -- which is unforgivable for reasons that are hopefully obvious (a little blaming the victim, anyone?).

After that grave misstep, however, the police officer asked me to give a full account of what happened, so I spent the better part of an hour recounting the events as he paraphrased them. However, his transcription took liberties with my testimony and featured several undesired flourishes, for instance, statements like "He touched my privates and I felt very embarrassed," and "I have no witnesses." In the end, I got the former changed to "He touched my privates and I felt violated," but the officer kept the latter as is.. despite my arguments that the bus driver witnessed the whole thing and was also somewhat complicit.

Anyhow, while I can say nothing for the Mauritian Police Force's feminist sensitivity training, I left the station believing that they at least had some semblance of professionalism. According to the officer I spoke with, my case would be investigated as a criminal case and I would eventually be called to testify against my assailant in court.

Sadly, however, I was proved wrong yet again. It all started yesterday night, when I received a flirtatious SMS from a telephone number that I did not recognize. The message read: Salut ma belle. Je veux etre amis (Hello my beautiful, I want to be *friends/lovers-- meaning sort of unclear given the context). To which i responded Qui est ce? Je n'identifie pas ce numero (Who is this? I don't recongize this number...)

In response, I receive another message saying "This is Ryan. I'm 25 years old, blah blah blah (insert some French dribble here)" At this point my mind is spinning because I don't know anyone named Ryan, and I can’t understand for the life of me how someone randomly got my cell number. However, it’s late and I'm tired so I simply ignored the message and go to bed.

However, this strategy is less than successful, because come morning I have several new messages from the mystery caller in my inbox, essentially saying "hello beautiful, why didn't you write back, and why are you being so méchante (mean, cruel)..presumably for not writing.

Owning to the fact that I'm as confused as I am disturbed, I write my mystery caller a follow up message asking: Où avons-nous rencontré? Et comment as-tu trouvé mon numero? (Where did we meet? And how did you find my number?) … To which the guy responds in Creole: "No we haven't met, I just saw you in town. I will tell you how I found your number later . Are you married?"

At this point I'm infuriated, so I write the French equivalent of "No, tell me how the hell you got my number, or stop effing contacting me!", to which I receive the following response:

Ok alors, suis policier ok si je ta v enuirais ok tu mexkuz si tu v pas ke nu soyons amis bn 2soler mai jaimeria bien etre amis ok alor a toi maintenant

Between the text message slang and the Creole and the who knows what, I won't even attempt a 1-1 translation of that message. However, in short, my text message stalker revealed himself to be one of the policemen who handled my sexual harassment case, and who apparently, helped himself to the number I left on file.

Honestly, I'm floored. Absolutely floored. In essence, it’s why I decided to rant in my blog tonight. Most of the time when I write about Mauritius, I try and dwell on all the positives because I ultimately feel fortunate to be here.

However, the fact remains that I have never lived in a society like this before.. a society where the harassment of women is so brazen and unabashed, where you get harassed while seeking redress for harassment, or where being black (and to a lesser extent, foreign) makes you a sexual fetish object in such vulgar and explicit ways. And mind you, none of this harassment comes from Creole/African Mauritians, it comes from Indian Mauritians, who constitute the Majority in a Brown-Black society that resembles the U.S. both in terms of the forms of racism that exist and its race based economic disparities.

Up until now, I've tried to keep my feminist politics of the non-separatist variety. However, with every day that passes here, the women-led society that Charlotte Gilman depicts in her novel Herland seems more and more like Utopia. I, for one, think Mauritius could do with a lot less disrespectful, predatory, misogynistic assholes.

Alas, here's to hoping that I can pass my last 7.5 months here without being groped, solicited for sex, picked up by old married men, or hit on by public servants. In the event that this modest wish does not come true, however, I have resolved that I will begin slapping, cursing and hollering at (in all languages that come to mind) anyone who violates or disrespects me in the future... presumably a much better strategy than diving off moving buses and running out of clubs with my hands covering my eyes. Hmph hmph.

Labels: street harassment, women's issues

Posted by east of madagascar on Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 10:42 PM | Permalink