The Sounds of Silence

written by Moshumee Teena Dewoo

Mauritian Tales Told After Midnight

Teena found a pen one day, a beautiful Cartier that her father so delicately kept in soft cotton in a drawer. It was mesmerising. She tried it. And on that day, blue on white became her ill, perhaps today more of a skill. Unsure, she has never stopped writing about those people she knew, lives lost, wars fought, orphan migrants, all those things she heard, too much for her brain, but never enough for her pen. Sometimes too painful to write about, her stories took form in poetic verses, a language easier to hide truths into. Two things Teena has since then known: She would forever write about Mauritius, her motherland, happy or otherwise.

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…