Rajiv Mohabir - Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir

JUDGES CITATION

In Antiman, Rajiv Mohabir sets forth on a journey with few parallels in the history of immigrant literature. While tracing his ancestors peripatetic migrations from rural India to Guyana to Canada and the US, Mohabir examines both the bonds and disconnects between his American identity as a gay poet and the expectations and limitations of his diverse cultural inheritance.

Mohabir chronicles his global upbringing through a cross-pollination of literary genreslinear prose, various poetic forms, transcriptions of traditional myths, and simultaneous translations of family lorethat pays homage to the storytelling traditions of his familys homelands while breaking new ground all its own.

More than a memoir, this brave and beautiful book is a tale of the resilience of the human heart and of multiple family journeys across generations and four continents. With great intelligence and insight, Mohabir tackles questions of caste, ethnicity, and sexuality, spinning tales of tenderness, ignorance, love, and longing for that mysterious place called home.

PRIZE JUDGES TERRY HONG, HCTOR TOBAR, AND ILAN STAVANS

Also by Rajiv Mohabir

Poetry

Cutlish

The Cowherds Son

The Taxidermists Cut

Translation

I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara by Lalbihari Sharma

A Hybrid Memoir

RAJIV MOHABIR

RESTLESS BOOKS
Brooklyn, New York

Copyright 2021 Rajiv Mohabir

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First Restless Books hardcover edition June 2021

Hardcover ISBN: 9781632062802

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933540

Portions of this book have been previously published in different form in Arkansas International, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Cherry Tree Journal, Drunken Boat/Anomaly Press, Go Home!, Kweli Journal, Literary Hub, na mash me bone, North American Review, Thunder in the Courtyard (Finishing Line Press).

This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cover design by Na Kim

Text design by Sarah Schneider

Printed in the United States of America

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Restless Books, Inc.

232 3rd Street, Suite A101

Brooklyn, NY 11215

www.restlessbooks.org

publisher@restlessbooks.org

For my Aji

For Antiman kind, everywhere

IN THIS MEMOIR I have changed many names, places, and relationships in order to keep the spirits appeasedprotecting kin is the work of the ancestors, but so is speaking truth.

I have represented the emotional truths that have led me up to the presentthis crucible of years in which I discovered the poetry that also discovered me. I have chosen the title Antiman, consciously aware that it is upsettingthat the term is a violent one. I use it in order to shift its heaviness and release the trap of its lettersto embody it with a flourish despite those who would use it to condemn and damn. Those who are not familiar with the Caribbean slur may hear it as anti-man: against man, which could be its own title. Another mishearing of the word, ante-man: before man, is also apt. To my niblings I am very much an auntie-man, be I Chacha, Uncle, or Mamu. The word antiman represents and holds a history for meone of migration and survival.

This is my own accounting of events as I remember them. I was entrusted with my Ajis only possessions: her melodies and words in her dying language of Guyanese Bhojpuri. They were seedlings from India, grown in the plantations of Berbice in Guyana, and pressed for their sweetness in Orlando, Toronto, and New York.

After her death in 2010, I was moved to collect what I could of her recordings and translate the songs she wanted me to learn. All her life in diaspora, far from Berbice, my Ajis songs were ignored. Her language and customs have died out with her, replaced in diasporic Guyanese spaces with Bollywood and other mass media. But in them I found the queerest magic.

She was born in 1921, was the grandchild of indentured laborers, and spoke as her first language a form of Bhojpuri blended with Awadhi called Guyanese Bhojpuri. This language, which falls under the larger category of what is called Caribbean Hindustani, is unique to her speech community and descends from North Indian languages with words borrowed from her colonizers. I was lucky enough to learn as much as I could before she passed. As I began to transcribe and translate her words, I puzzled over how to convey oral languages that change from generation to generation. Since so few people read and write in Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Bhojpuri, I developed my own orthography for them. Inevitably, such an orthography and the migration of these languages into Romanization depend on ones individual language philosophy.

When Aji sang I heard griefs bitterness. Bitter melon. Tears. The stem of a mango leaf given to the bride to bite before meeting her groom to remind her that separation from family spells despair. Did Aji know that she, too, would be exiled from her own houselike mein diaspora in her own home?

She left me no guitar, no sitar, no flute. Just these two hands and my tongue. If we forget our ancestors, they disappear. We disappear.

I was born in an echo of forgotten songs. Anguish of the lost, the kidnapped, the absconded. I was born to be cast out, turned away into night.

I want to believe that her languageour languageis not dead. I began to write in it only after my dreams delivered themselves in this musical grammar. I do this clumsily and as a student, with reverence and overwhelming thanks for my Aji.

My Aja had a boat he named Jivan Jhoti: The Light of Life. The real light, though, is a kind of ship. It is a life vessel my Aji passed to me, singing.

Reading countless books, the world died

no one mastered anything.

A few words of love,

if you read them, will make you wise.

Kabir

BEFORE SHE CUT her silver hair, it sat in an oiled bun, a Guyana full moon, atop her head, a Sunday hat for what the British called her: a Coolie Hindoo. Aji sat in the Florida room in my parents house in Chuluotajust outside Orlandoand sang a story that came beating into this world as an uncaged bird from Indian soil, which was nurtured on whole grain in the paddy fields of Guyana and now was lilting here against the tiled floor in a second, new diaspora.

December. Even in Florida, the day bit the skin with a hint of ice. Her hands, well veined, wore two gold bangles and bore a tattoo of her husbands name, Sewdass, in India ink underneath a handwritten