Artwork by Nina Gruteser
In the publishing world, already exceptionally hard to break into as it is, Guyanese Indo-Caribbean Queer poet Rajiv Mohabir is making great strides in the industry as a Brown creative. Receiving his MFA in poetry from Queens College, Mohabir has authored many successful books throughout the years such as The Taxidermist’s Cut, The Cowherd’s Son, and Cutlish.
In his most recent book, a memoir titled Antiman, Rajiv takes his readers through various phases of his life, skillfully experimenting with genre and form along the way. The book begins with him as a young adult growing up in Central Florida, where he is heavily inspired by his Aji (grandmother) and develops a deep desire to connect with his culture and heritage. This eventually takes him to Varanasi, India where he masters his Hindi and Bhojpuri and works to trace back his ancestral lineage. From there, we see him when he moves to New York, when he becomes an ESL teacher, when he’s outed to his family, and much much more.
To learn more about his novels and his own personal journey as a writer, I had the honor of meeting with Mohabir and asking him a couple of questions in the following conversation:
To start, I wanted to ask about the story behind your memoir, Antiman. How did approaching this work feel different from the poetry collections you’ve released in the past?
Originally, I forced myself to learn how to write essays and stories, in hopes that they would help people promote my poetry. About two years into doing that, another friend of mine who writes nonfiction was like, “Rajiv, you’ve written enough nonfiction. Have you ever considered [turning it into] a memoir? She made me pull all the things out and look at them together, and I was like, “Actually, you know what? These essays are all about a particular decade of my life… What if I arranged these essays as I would a poetry collection? Instead of a linear chronological story going from A to B to C… what if I allowed moments of poetry to kind of break through the form? And so that’s what I did.
Did you have any particular inspiration coming into the book?
I was inspired by books that I had read, mostly work by Rigoberto Gonzalez. His poetry and nonfiction has been really instrumental, as well as Alison Adele Hedgecock. She’s someone who really showed me that poetry and nonfiction dovetail really well together. So I never actually set out to write a memoir, it just kind of happened.
A central theme of the memoir is reconnecting with your culture, particularly through a diasporic lens. We see you undergo a journey in this book, exploring your South Asian heritage and bridging generational gaps, and you’ve talked about how those experiences coincided with your journey as a writer. How do you think your identities have influenced the art that you create?
So much of this book is about self exploration, like the exploration of cultural inheritance, colonial trauma, facing queerness. I don’t think that I would have had the impetus to write had I not been trying to hold all of these paradoxical things in my mind at the same time. The way that I could externalize things and make sense of it was through the act of writing. You know, how can I illuminate [for someone else] the nuances of my particular diasporic community, being Indo-Guyanese, when I grew up in a place where there were not many Caribbean folks? So, part of this [process] for me was making sense of the connections between people from all of these spaces, tracing back to kind of an original story, an idea of where we’re from. I think that was the most impactful thing for me as I was coming to terms with all of these different aspects of my life.
So, I wanted to touch upon that conversation around queerness, from one brown person to another. We are often made to feel like our queerness has no space within our culture – and that by embracing queerness, we are somehow betraying our roots and giving into a Western way of life. But in this book, you embrace your intersectionality so unabashedly and make sure your queerness is at the forefront of the story. How have you experienced that “paradox” between our culture and our sexuality?
Yeah, I mean, it’s always positioned that way. I remember when I came out to my dad he was like, “We never should have come to the United States,” as though queerness doesn’t exist everywhere, in every kind of way. Dealing with that myth is really important because a lot of times, brown immigrant families have this idea of a home country that existed 20-30 years in the past and hold onto cultural mandates, laws, or norms [from that period]. I mean, just look at the state of queerness today in South Asia – it’s different than it was in 1980, it’s different than it was in the year 2000.
But I think that you’re right about [putting the word “paradox” in quotation marks], and I thank you for pointing out that it’s a presumed paradox, as if there’s not joy in actually being who we are [in terms of both sexuality and culture]. And I also say that people who have non-normative sexual practices can have closer contact outside of the United States [because of] the ideas of masculinity pervading our media. I believe that American ideas of how genders are supposed to act are connected to that influence as well. For example, the people depicted on old Mughal sculptures and paintings tend to be a little bit more androgynous… There’s not a masculinist separation between various gendered people, the way there is in contemporary depictions, so why don’t we embrace that as part of our cultural inheritance?
Those ideas [of strict masculinity] are being shipped off into the Global South though, there’s no question about it. Last time I was in India, I saw this one picture of Hanuman, the monkey guide, and he had this sculpted body with a six pack and Superman pecs… that’s not the picture of Hanuman that I knew from my childhood. You could really tell that it was a result of Western media influence.
I was talking to my dad as we were driving to some nikkah in Toronto, and I was like, “Have you heard about the God called Ardhanarishvara who is literally half woman, half man?” He just couldn’t handle that, and I definitely think it’s worth thinking about why there was that cognitive dissonance happening with him.
Because language plays such a huge role throughout this memoir, I wanted to ask you some questions about the value and weight of language. Do you think knowing one’s mother tongue is important to connecting with one’s culture, particularly when it comes to people of the diaspora? Should we be trying to learn the languages of our ancestors? How did you approach it in your own personal journey?
Thank you so much for this question. I feel like this is definitely a hot-button kind of thing because there’s so much shame around language. You’ll often hear people saying things like, “Your Hindi is really terrible,” or “Your Punjabi doesn’t sound like the right kind of Punjabi,” or “You talk like a Gora.” That’s probably the worst thing that someone could tell you.
I think, for me, learning the language was important because it was something I wanted for myself. It never really came from any familial expectations – in fact, my parents kind of expected the opposite from me. They wanted me to be as un-South Asian as I possibly could. Growing up, I was always discouraged from learning any Bhojpuri, but I still really wanted to understand how my grandmother and my ancestors understood the world. The best way to learn about a worldview is to learn the language of that view because you’ll pick up on so many things that you probably wouldn’t have known otherwise. For example, in Bhojpuri, you don’t say, “I have a brother,” or “I have a sister.” You would just say, “My brother is.” You wouldn’t say, “I have a pen.” You would say, “the pen is next to me.” You don’t have things, you don’t have people, they are simply next to you for a little bit of time. It queries this whole Western sense of constructed time… because then the [cultural] focus becomes on how temporary our bodies are, right?
Returning back to the question, learning the language was so important for me because I had been cut off culturally by my parents, who really wanted to assimilate. And that’s not to shift the blame over to them because the stakes were very high – I mean, we moved to Klan country in Florida. I remember there were literal KKK members going to my high school and living in the community around us, so [my parents] had no choice but to blend in. It was a survival mechanism.
Going to India was instrumental, and learning that my Aji’s songs were still sung there… by people that we had been cut off from for over 100 years, was astounding. I was always told that my Aji didn’t actually know the proper songs, that she didn’t know real Hindi, that she spoke broken Hindi. Even with her English, people always said that she didn’t know real English, she just spoke broken English. Well, that “broken English” is called Creole and that “broken Hindi” is called Bhojpuri. So, going to India and learning this stuff showed me that maybe it was the way that we thought about my family and my history that was broken, and not the history and people themselves. That was kind of like emotional fireworks for me.
As a reader, it was very clear to me that the material you were covering in this book was very personal and close to you. Did you ever feel afraid or uncomfortable with the idea of releasing this book, given how intimate it is?
My answer to this question actually kind of ties into the other answers I’ve given so far, especially when it comes to the idea of risk. The title piece of this book is about how I was outed to my extended family and how I was suddenly kicked out all together: nobody talked to me, nobody called me. Now, my brother and my sister are all kind of on the outside for various reasons, but really, I think it happened to me before it happened to my brother and my sister. As a brown person, losing my family meant losing a lot of my culture and my identity, you know? It took me 15 years of living with this grief and shame inside of me, before I was able to let it out into the world. When I give readings, I never read from the title story, because it’s just still too painful for me. It’s a real-life trauma and wound, where I lost so much psychologically, so much personally. But what I did gain was control over my story. I get to say what happened, instead of having all these other people tell me who I am.
What advice would you give other creatives and writers who struggle with being vulnerable in their work?
It’s all a matter of calculated risks. That sounds so mechanical, but I don’t mean it like that. I just mean that first and foremost, you need to make sure you’re safe. Your physical needs need to be met. Your emotional and spiritual needs need to be met. Writing can… put you in harm’s way, so being very practical and safe about how you conduct yourself in the world is of the utmost importance, especially for queer BIPOC folks. In this world, where there is legislation out there aimed to kill us and tell us that we shouldn’t be here, we need to protect ourselves first.
My second piece of advice is that getting a story outside of yourself is wonderful. It doesn’t have to live inside of you… The Antiman story inside of me was a shapeshifter; it turned into a monster and turned into a demon, but I was able to put it onto paper and to make it into what I wanted it to be, instead of letting it control me.
The third thing that I’ll say is that you don’t actually have to show anybody what you write at all… You can write something and then you can burn it; you could let it go; you can write something and keep it in a journal if that’s safe, or you can write something and publish it. It all just kind of depends on where you see the story going. And I think that you should be careful about trying to mine your personal traumas and personal experiences for a writing project, because that’s one way to make sure that healing never occurs. And for what, literary benefit? I don’t know if that’s worth it.
For my final question, I just wanted to look at the next generation of queer brown writers and artists that are coming up. What do you think is the biggest obstacle for them as they are trying to move into a larger literary space? And in general what advice would you give to people who are trying to pursue writing as a career?
So, I’ll tell you this statistic, and it’s not to be discouraging, but it’s just to really show the kind of stamina that it’ll take. The publishing world is still 89% White. That does not reflect the demographics of the United States. And even of the 11% that is not white, how many of those are queer folks of color? How many of those are trans folks?
The numbers are undeniably against us, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t those Lightworkers out there who are trying to kick down the motherf—ing doors. And I’ll tell you, now that I have had books published, and now that I’m in the literary world, I have a responsibility to do my part in kicking down those doors for other writers to come in. I really am trying to constantly connect with people who would otherwise not have access to the literary world.
I honestly think that the age of the cis, straight writer is going to come crumbling down as more and more gatekeeping is being questioned. And more people are already [gaining] access to things, like studying creative writing, which was a really inaccessible kind of thing for BIPOC folks. Like, I didn’t even think that it was possible for me to study creative writing, let alone get an MFA. But now that I’m here, hopefully I can show people that it is, in fact, possible to have a life in writing. I mean, it might not look like mine, but it might look like yours, and that’s a beautiful thing. There’s a lot of toxicity out there, but there’s also a lot of positivity, and my advice will always be to just go towards the light.Rajiv Mohabir’s memoir, Antiman, was published June 2021. You can learn more about his work here.