Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  WINNER OF THE 2019 RESTLESS BOOKS PRIZE FOR NEW IMMIGRANT WRITING

  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 genres—linear prose, various poetic forms, transcriptions of traditional myths, and simultaneous translations of family lore—that pays homage to the storytelling traditions of his family’s 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, HÉCTOR TOBAR, AND ILAN STAVANS

  ANTIMAN

  Also by Rajiv Mohabir

  Poetry

  Cutlish

  The Cowherd’s Son

  The Taxidermist’s Cut

  Translation

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

  ANTIMAN

  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

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Restless Books, Inc.

  232 3rd Street, Suite A101

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.restlessbooks.org

  publisher@restlessbooks.org

  For my Aji

  For Antiman kind, everywhere

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Open the Door

  Home: Prolepsis

  Aji Recording: Bibah Kare

  My Eyes Are Clouds

  South Asian Language Summer

  Aji Recording: Dunce

  Evolution of a Song

  Bhabhua Village

  Neech

  Ganga Water

  Prayer

  Pap

  The Last Time I Cut, A Journal

  Antiman

  Aji Recording: How Will I Go

  Eh Bhai

  A Family Outing, Alternative Ending 1

  A Family Outing, Alternative Ending 2

  A Family Outing, Alternative Ending 3

  Amazon River Dolphin

  Aji Recording: Song for the Lonely Season

  Leaving Florida

  Ardhanarishvaram Raga

  Mister Javier’s Lesson Plan

  Islamophic Misreadings: Some Queens Definitions

  American Guyanese Diwali

  Aji Recording: Love Beat Handsome

  Sangam / Confluence

  The Lover and the Chapbook

  The Outside Workshop

  Brown Inclusion: Some Queens Definitions

  E Train to Roosevelt Ave Making All Local Stops in Queens

  Ganga and the Snake: A Fauxtale / Ganga aur Saamp

  Aji Recording: Asirbaad, Blessing

  The King and the Koyal: A Fauxtale / Raja aur Kokila

  My Veil’s Stain

  Barsi: One Year Work

  Reincarnate

  Open the Door Reprise

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN THIS MEMOIR I have changed many names, places, and relationships in order to keep the spirits appeased—protecting 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 present—this crucible of years in which I discovered the poetry that also discovered me. I have chosen the title Antiman, consciously aware that it is upsetting—that the term is a violent one. I use it in order to shift its heaviness and release the trap of its letters—to 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 me—one of migration and survival.

  This is my own accounting of events as I remember them. I was entrusted with my Aji’s 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 Aji’s 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 one’s individual language philosophy.

  When Aji sang I heard grief’s 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 house—like me—in 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 language—our language—is 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 master
ed anything.

  A few words of love,

  if you read them, will make you wise.

  —Kabir

  ANTIMAN

  Open the Door

  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 Chuluota—just outside Orlando—and 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 husband’s name, Sewdass, in India ink underneath a handwritten om. When she was newly wed, a fifteen-year-old leaving her father’s cows, a barber came to mark her with this godna—a tattoo to keep her safe and the bad eye away. She never went to school but raised her four siblings, perfecting her magical spells: her phulauri and barah, her curry and roti, her first-aid massaging, her understanding of song—her poetry that would be my inheritance.

  We sat in the Florida room, December blinking in color like Christmas lights about us. I was visiting home from the University of Florida in Gainesville for winter break. I put a cassette in the tape recorder. I wanted to be able to listen and listen again to our conversation—to savor Aji’s Creole and Bhojpuri when she returned to Toronto and I to Gainesville.

  Aji was the eldest of five children. Betiya was her call name, a name that means “precious daughter”—the “-ya” a suffix that personalizes and endears. She stood at the sangam of three linguistic rivers: English, Bhojpuri, and Creole. Born in 1921, she was the grandchild of indentured laborers and spoke these languages before the following generations drowned in the flow of English-medium schools, eschewing Creole and Bhojpuri. In our family and in our familial community, Aji was the last speaker of Guyanese Bhojpuri. Forged against the anvil of indenture on sugarcane plantations, her stories and songs were precarious—on the verge of being erased forever.

  Gangadai, her other call name, was first named Bhagwati, after the goddess Saraswati—the goddess of language, reading, and music.

  Aji was anakshar. Unlettered. Not anpardh. Not illiterate. In two languages. Each of her songs, a poem—a small devastation. Each of her stories, a fire to scorch my heart’s forest: a door that, when opened, led to enchantment.

  I wanted to know more. From childhood I was told that Aji was broken. She did not speak filmi Hindi—the kind that belonged to the “Indiaman”—but rather some other language that had been broken on the plantation. I was told that Aji’s English was broken, too—an English of the damned, a Creolized version that would never count as literary or worthy of learning in school now that we were in the United States. My father’s philosophy was to leave behind these backward ways and adopt those of the English and Americans.

  Try as I might to ignore the brown of my hands, it betrayed me as Other constantly in the world of White celebration. I was different; I always knew. I was brown, but there was another difference that I did not share with my brother and sister. I sat at a crossroads: I did not understand myself but wanted to. I wanted to sit in the negative capability of my Aji’s songs; to learn them to piece my own broken self together.

  ultan sultan howe dono bhai ho

  ultan sultan tare ho

  pajire se kara kara bhaile dupahariya

  kholo bahini baja rakhe ho

  tohare dolar bahanoi janghiya par sowe ho

  kaise ke kholo bhaiya, baja rakhe ho

  lewo bahini lewo more sir ke pagri ho

  bahini baja rakhe ho

  Dem been get one buddy an sistah,

  Come see who a come, sistah

  Da bright bright mahning a-tun black black night,

  sistah, keep a-doh hopem.

  a-you bahanoi de sleep pon me lap,

  tell me how me go hopem a-doh.

  Tek dis me sistah, tek dis, me head ke pagri,

  hopem a-doh na sistah.

  Upturned, a brother and sister’s bond.

  Go and see who is at the door, sister.

  Early morning, midday, the sky blackens.

  Open the door, sister.

  Your spoiled brother-in-law sleeps on my lap,

  how can I come open the door?

  Take this, sister, take this turban from my head.

  Open the door, sister. …

  Home: Prolepsis

  Home is the scrape of the trashcan against

  raked pine needle copper.

  Shadows of Chuluota pine trees

  and palmetto and in the green tennis court paint on my jeans,

  the chalk white against beige stucco,

  the sprouting watermelon seeds in the pool from eating

  and swimming into being darker than all of my cousins.

  Playing The Little Mermaid, my sister’s hair in a chlorine braid.

  The scent of pennies as the rain falls from the ground up,

  swallowing me in a pocket of mist

  and missed chances to run from that heavy hand

  of the father who pulled open my penis

  how glitter shakes the foreskin from the head

  and the blood,

  the apartment in New York where we came back from the doctor

  and Emile was crying and crying and bleeding.

  You are nothing.

  No one will ever love you.

  You are fat and hairy.

  You are good for nothing.

  Home is the name Paul on paper how it sounds like the neighbor’s kid

  when I wrote to Pap on a plastic Father’s Day cup

  Dear Dad, Happy Father’s Day, Love Paul.

  He laughs, his belly shaking in Niagara Falls,

  I have never been his son. A shut door.

  He says, Don’t call me Pap.

  Aunties who hate the fact of you—

  this disavowal of the son is a home

  is the reason for the Diaspora

  every little boy grows into poetry and feathers and how.

  Aji Recording: Bibah Kare

  BEFORE MY BROTHER Emile’s wedding, Aji sat at the dinner table wrapped in my childhood comforter—a blue-and-white floral print over her pink dress. My tape recorder hummed and beat out a cassette-tape pulse. Emile was not the first of Aji’s forty-two grandchildren to marry, but he was special to her. He was her second son’s eldest son. If they had been back home, it would have been time for community. I was twenty and could feel the ghosts that haunted our new rituals—some ghosted magic haunted our family. I was eager to write down and learn what I could of poetry from this woman with coarse white hair, a tattooed forearm, and a developing aneurysm swelling with love.

  “Tiday is de hardi,” she said. “Tiday de dulha ke mummah go rub he wid haldi.”

  “Rub him with haldi? Why?” I asked, taking notes.

  “Fe mek he skin shine so he go deh handsome an’ de dulhin, de woman na go tek one nex’ man.” She laughed a deep croak. Aji loved her jokes, especially when it came to teasing me, my sister, and my brother. She grew up in New Amsterdam, Guyana, the daughter of Jangbahadur and Anupiya Singh. Jangbahadur was known all over for his mithai and pera; he owned several cows and made his sweets from their milk. Aji spoke often of her love for him. Her mother, Anupiya, however, was not the same gentle soul. She insisted that Aji be raised in a proper fashion, learning to chownke daal and bele round-round roti—not to climb mango trees and run and skip in the black water trenches that lined the streets before the stilted houses.

  Aji sat at the table recalling the Amazon jungle, how her husband married her at fifteen—and how her mother protested.

  “He been big fe me six years.” She fingered her engagement ring. “He been put dis ring on me fingah and tell me papa he go married me.” It was a rose-colored Guyanese insignia ring with the initials SM printed on it. SM
—Sewdass Mohabir, her husband was named as a servant of Shiva. The ring was one of her most cherished possessions, though it was not the actual ring that Aja had put on her finger, but something remade perhaps in Toronto by a Guyanese jeweler. The ring itself was filled with Aja and Aji’s love story—with all the wedding-time songs and rituals that made her life a life. Every recounting of their connection imbued the ring with more history.

  “What did your father do?” I was incredulous at my Aja’s bold and rash behavior. I had never known my Aja. He died when my father was seventeen—many years before I was born.

  “He seh na mattah, Betiya, you wan’ married he? An’ so come so done.”

  Emile was marrying his pregnant girlfriend, whom he met working at Pizza Hut in Gainesville. He had moved up to live with me briefly, while I attended the University of Florida. Though he was older and more attractive, Emile was slimmer and shorter than I, and my long curly hair and round features made me look older.

  Emile proposed to his girlfriend and put a different ring of gold bought in the United States on her finger, and now our preparations involved making curry and roti—but not lawa to offer to the fire god, Agni. Instead of Hindu rites, a wedding ceremony would be performed by a Lutheran pastor in a flower garden. My family had converted sixteen years before when we were new immigrants to the United States, and Aji had to adapt to the whims of her children. But now she sat at the table recalling the “proper” ways that things should be done in order for her son’s eldest son to marry.

  “What kinds of songs should we sing today, Aji?” I asked, writing furiously. I wanted to keep her voice forever.

  “Abi mus’ sing de lawa song. Me go sing one—hear.” Aji began to sing. From her throat the aging voice of a once good singer poured forth. It was said that when the Ganga River acquiesced to the prayers of Raja Bhagirath and descended from the mountain to the earth to rescue his ancestors from being forgotten in Patal, she made a deal with Lord Shiva. Instead of crushing the earth with the force of her descent, she would fall upon his head and flow from his dreadlocks, gently, removing generations of sins. Gangadai, my Aji, had such force behind her song. It was mediated by her aging body: a dam—a dreadlock that betrayed its profundity just below the surface. Aji sang with power and might in the voice of a trickling stream.