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. 

Rajiv Mohabir : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I have been thinking about this question since Cutlish came out. This year also saw the release of my hybrid memoir Antiman—which is prose, poetry, translation, transcription, and imaginative speculation. For me poetry calls the reader to explore their own associative mind, to follow how each line connect to the next—and it doesn’t have to be linear. In fact, we can abandon the need for linearity altogether and rely on our affective reservoirs to lead us into realization, and if we are lucky, transformation. For prose the elasticity of time and “story” are different. There is more space for the kinds of realizations that move the characters and so the relationship between representing the abstract through precision feels less heightened.

Rajiv Mohabir : part three

How did you first engage with poetry?

For me poetry happened through song, dance, and then through the act of translation. I was a religious studies major as an undergraduate and was drawn to Bhojpuri folk music from the Caribbean. I recorded as much as I could, listened to as many songs as I could, and started to translate them in my journals and in my spare time. I then started to wonder what would these folksongs sound like if they were written today. That was my first effort: the up/re-cycling of folksongs with themes and poetics that are largely ignored by Caribbeanists, South Asianists, and ethnomusicologists who fetishize my community. 

I am not deluded into thinking myself an American poet that is an inheritor of classical culture. My Aji had gold teeth. I am proud of this fact and of my ancestors teaching my parents the act of survival. 

Then I started reading poetry by people from aural/oral cultures and was incredibly moved by Joy Harjo’s work. Her poems touched the deepest part of me, that of the ancestral knowing that I was absorbed in, and showed me how to take the original idea and blend it into the poetics that felt like home. 

Rajiv Mohabir : part two

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is important because it is the go between for humans and the divine. It also lets the writer and the reader have immediate expression for their situations or the slow burn of realization tempered by time and consideration. The dreamers of a different world are poets. I think of the Guyanese poet Martin Carter and his poetry that helped to bring about the independence of Guyana through the poem’s protestation of colonial rule. There are political stakes for the poem that can change the world. In the United States it feels like we have forgotten this, or at least the academy has. There are many people who are currently working at dreaming up a more just world and poetry is the space for that.  

Rajiv Mohabir : part one

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three poetry collections, the latest of which is Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021, Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021, Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir), received the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

What are you working on?

Currently I am working on editing my book tentatively titled Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) that will be out in almost a year and a half. This looks at the bioacoustics of humpback whale song to use what humans understand as its aesthetics to make a form (or constraints). The themes that I have held loosely in my mind while putting this collection together was the world of 1838-1917: the height of the whaling industry as well as the exact period of South Asian Indenture. Happening during this time also is the active colonization of the Pacific, of the Philippines, and of Puerto Rico by the United States. 

As in all of my obsessions queerness, Brownness, and a postcolonial critique take on ecocritical dimensions and frameworks for understanding the sangam, the intersectionality, of these issues.  

I am also at work on a collection of poems that I am calling “deviant translations” for their multiple crossings in and out of Guyanese Bhojpuri, Creole, English, and Hindi. I have taken five chutney songs and performed at least twenty translations in and out of these various languages looking to extend my (very elastic, deviant) interpretations as broadly as possible that they are no longer translations.