Bøger af Rajiv Mohabir

Playful and celebratory, yet also mourning the loss of language, this poetry anthology revives the fading tradition of Caribbean Hindustani songsIn a new groundbreaking anthology, award-winning poet, memoirist and translator Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) engages with Indo-Caribbean language and culture, this time by inviting 17 diasporic writers to experiment with their own personal interpretations of two famous Chutney songs. Chutney music is a syncretic, Caribbean music born out of North Indian tunes and African beats. Caribbean Hindustani songs and poems, the basis for Chutney music, are no longer spoken with the frequency that they were two generations ago. To this end, Mohabir asked some of the most exciting Caribbean writers and poets working today to "translate" two popular Chutney songs. A Caribbean diasporic response in the manner of Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, this book expands on the idea of that translation classic with reimaginings, reinterpretations and compelling treatises on Chutney music. I Will Not Go collects poetry inherited by the descendants of indenture and, through its innovative reimagining, celebrates the poetry of survival.Contributors include: Anita Baksh, Divya Persaud, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Will Depoo, Anu Lakhan, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Natasha Ramoutar and more.

"For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue," recounts Rajiv Mohabir's speaker in "Boy with Baleen for Teeth." As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry. In our search for meaning, in our call and response, kinship resonates; "the echo is amniotic." "Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you've called / since childhood." Fluid and inexorable as the ocean, Whale Aria articulates the confluence of ecological fate and human history. In "Why Whales Are Back in New York City," Mohabir notes the coincidence of current events: humpback migration returns to Queens for the first time in a century while the state expedites deportations of undocumented people in the same burrough. The language shared by human and marine creatures in these poems, however, promise that the tides will turn. "Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms," Mohabir underscores the eternity of water. "Behold the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you."

"Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word 'home' and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, 'They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement...'"--

Broadening the scope of his award-winning debut to consider the wider Indo-Caribbean community in migration across the Americas and Europe, Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir’s inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet-narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.Praise for Rajiv Mohabir’s previous book: “In his excellent debut, Mohabir exposes desire and inner turmoil through the measured incantations of a queer, Indian-American voice that refuses the burdens of a homophobic and racist world. He eloquently describes how the brown body survives, clinging vigilantly to longing, lust, and love: ‘I mean to say / I am still — this trembling breath of a comma, this coincidental object of your want.’ . . . Mohabir illuminates his own wounds, and as the reader watches him dresses and stitches those wounds, ‘A queer flutter knocks about your ribs.’” — Publishers Weekly