Rajiv Mohabir : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

For me and definitely for Cutlish music has been very important. The question is largely philosophical for me as well as political. When I consider what gets to be (oftentimes) elevated to Poetry as a rarified literary production (emphasis on the “product” of production), I see the shadow puppet show of capitalism and colonialism. Together, they have shaped my own engagements with the ancestor-poems which came to me first as epic narrative retellings through ropni-geet/ballads.

This is to say that the archive of sound and the poem that I am from—that I have intimate connections to—live in my body in a different way that the written word. I almost typed “world” for “word” which is apt since this difference in literature (the written vs. the denigrated aural) is largely epistemological. Those forms of poems that I have danced to, recorded, and translated are the formation of my earliest metaphorical thinking. 

Sometimes people think of the connections between music and BIPOC poetry as being the one thing that we do. I’ve been told this by some very ungenerous people—but I am hoping that this is exactly what Cutlish is doing: bringing back the music to my community through the literary world. I want to say that our histories, languages, and soundscapes are important and worthy of embracing.