Rajiv Mohabir: Liberating Myth
One of our previous interviewees, Minal Hajratwala, identified Rajiv Mohabir as someone whose work aligned with Interfaith Muse. I invited him to join us this month during the AWP conference in Portland, and as I kept reading his work, I knew I had to interview him as well. We talked a lot of Ramayana in a long conversation infused with his warmth and generosity. We spoke via Skype from his office just as the semester was about to start. I began by asking him about his religious identity.
RM: This is hard because I feel as though to say one thing is to say that you’re not another thing. I was born to Hindu parents. My mom was a daughter of a Hindu priest, and my dad converted to Christianity when he was 17, so my family is a mix of Christian and Hindu. I was raised as Christian, confirmed in the Lutheran church, but then at the age of 15, I realized — oh, I actually I’m not just Christian. There are things that happen [in my family] that my Christian friends aren’t doing. Maybe politically I can I can identify as a Hindu as a like a way of being a non-Christian, like reclaiming like a part of my heritage that was being silenced by the fact of our migration. I feel like I lie whenever I say that I’m a Hindu and I feel like I lie when like when I say that I’m a Christian. I think I was raised to be somewhere in between. These days I’m more Hindu as far as ritual goes; it’s the Hindu ritual that is the form that my prayer takes. But most of the days I’m agnostic at best.
EHF: Can you say more about those things that you saw happening in your home that most Christian people were not doing? What kind of things were you were you feeling a dissonance about?
RM: For example, my dad had an uncle who bought a house in Kissimmee, FL. There’s a special kind of pooja or ritual work that we do [for a new house,] a havan ceremony, a blessing with sacred fire. We would go and my grandmother would make sure she would have her dupatta to cover her head. That’s just like one example; we had incense in our house and we had copies of the sacred Hindu books as well. And I have ancestors that are also Muslim, so sometimes celebrations would be covering Diwali and Christmas and sometimes Eid and Diwali, depending on who is around. We’re actually more blended and syncretic as a family, but outwardly facing my parents would say, no we’re Christian, as a way to kind of mask the kind of cultural differences that they wanted us to not suffer for in the United States in the ’80s and ‘90s.
EHF: It is fascinating to me how people walk that line with syncretism, and the line moves, because as you said, it depends on who’s around.
RM: There’s a very firm belief of obia in my family, which is a syncretic African religious practice, and it’s funny — what is the distinction between obia and Hindu religious work? My father was ill in London once and my grandmother had this special ring made, and blessed by what they call a Magi in Guyana, a Muslim learned person who theoretically can lead prayer. And it was blessed by a pandit, a Hindu priest. And she took it to an obia man, somebody who practiced obia, and had it blessed by all these traditions. They didn’t go to a Christian church at all! And then sent it to my father who, according to the familial legend, was being haunted by ghost, so when we wore this thing, the ghost went away.
EHF: Your grandma was covering all the bases! How much angst has that internal syncretism given you, would you say?
RM: Oh, total angst! People want a simple answer. I mean my family hasn’t been in India since the end of 1800s. People expect my family to have similar political ideas as the people who are recent immigrants, within the last generation or two. For example, the Hindu-Muslim divide that happens in India doesn’t happen in Guyana until recently, until the conservative Hindu parties from India go and proselytize. People [argue to] me, ‘to say that you’re Hindu is anti-Muslim.’ Well no actually, to say that I’m Hindu is anti-imperialist. But then why can’t I say that I’m Muslim too if I have Muslim ancestors? I think it’s about culture and practice because I don’t want to take away space from people who identify as Muslim as well. Saying, ‘this is what I am’ shows a kind of political solidarity with minority folks, rather than a kind of hegemonic ‘this is what I am and I want to stifle this [other thing.]’ So this is just part of the angst that is present for me right now!
My brother, when he was 16, was starting experiment with marijuana and like, “Eastern thought,” but you know, Eastern thought as coded through the Beatles —
EHF: Western-flavored Eastern thought.
RM: And I remember my father and mother being upset that they found him smoking pot. They took all of the secular music in the house and demolished it.
EHF: Wow.
RM: Records, original records from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and all the contemporary CDs, except for all the Hindi music we had in the house. That’s interesting because my parents, they have a limited passive understanding of Hindustani, Bhojpuri from the Caribbean, not standard Hindi. When they heard the records they wouldn’t always understand what it was. Okay so, without listening to the lyrics of any of this Western music, we’ll say that it’s all evil, but you will keep this thing that will represents a different part of you.
EHF: I asked about the angst part because I think when people are able to be very articulate about it sometimes folks assume that there’s no angst and it’s all settled. So I think it’s important to highlight that just because we can talk about all the different threads that make up who we are does not mean that we feel like everything is sort of woven into a very beautiful scarf. So thank you for that.
When I was reading about your Coolitude Project, I was thinking about the idea there of India as kind of a fiction — that the nexus point was not so much India but the crossing itself, being in diaspora. It made me think about my experiences of my Jewish friends and their relationship with Israel: you’re supposed to want to go home to this homeland because you’re in diaspora but the relationship with the homeland is so fraught. How does the feeling of of home or homeland play out in terms of your spiritual homeland?
RM: The idea of the displacement is like a trauma — I don’t think that in my generation I will get over it. It’s a seed that has been watered for generations. In the original contracts of my ancestors, they were promised return fare home, to go back to India, but that promise was never delivered upon and instead people settled in Guyana. Part of our origin story is an unfulfilled promise, and I think that is a very strong inheritance. So when it comes to spirituality, Gaiutra Bahadur wrote this wonderful book called Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture and [she and] Martina Carter in Coolitude make this metaphor that people in diaspora actually use, of Sita being abducted. Sita can never go back to Ayodhya as Sita. And Ram through the journey is going to be changed as well. We were kidnapped by this demon of Empire, the British Empire, for sugar in the metropole. It’s very much enlivened in my own writing in that being a forever migrant is kind of like the lasting legacy of this transoceanic crossing. I think in my poetry that definitely comes out because it’s so fragmented as to the place of origin.
EHF: Do you find that the Ramayana creates a home for you in the midst of that dislocation or that it exacerbates the dislocation?
RM: That’s a great question because the Ramayan is so fraught, and linguistically as well. Like the fact that my parents can’t read and write in Awadhi and so the Ramcaritmanas is the text that we come from… but I would say that I’m more at home when I listen to my grandmother’s songs. When I was in my early twenties I had like this really good idea to record her and I’m so glad that I did. It’s sad because its static now that it’s recorded; it doesn’t have the lyrical and lexical fluidity that it did when she would sing. So I think about a place that would have been home, that could have been home, that is no longer here. I feel a lot about it. Sometimes I feel like we’re dying, my family is dying, and other times I think no, we’re more resourceful now than we‘ve ever been.
EHF: What is it that makes you feel like your family is more resourceful now?
RM The fact that we’re still surviving. The fact that my family came here and that there’s still a motion, we’re still moving and I think that’s the testament.
EHF: In what you write, do you feel like you’re building a home in that text for yourself or that you’re trying to write through and out of something? Or both?
RM: It’s kind of like a trace of my passing, if that makes sense. I’m here now and there are other folks like me around and I’m going to leave these little markers so that we can find each other. And though the Coolitude Project I feel like I have found a lot of folks here. There’s a huge community in South Queens, [New York] that I feel very much a part of even though I live in Alabama now. A lot of my writing is for that. It’s not exactly bearing witness because I’m not watching anything passively. I think it might be trying to create a platform: we are here, you can’t ignore us..
EHF: That to me has echoes to me of the Queer movement as well, right? Can you talk about how that figures into your spiritual life?
RM: We can say things about the Caribbean being homophobic but I think that all derives from colonial rule. I think there’s real movement now from the grassroots organizing… There’s a lot I don’t want to throw away from my community but there’s a lot that I think that, because of culture, we can change.
There’s this drag performer named Sundari, the Indian goddess, who performs as such. Sundari is the name of one of the incarnations of [the Hindu god] Shiva which is female, or woman, and the person who is Sundari lives in the world as Zaman Mohamad Amin, who is Muslim. And I had this interview with him once when I was writing a paper about queering Ramayana, because he was slated to play Rama in one of the the Ram Lilas that was going to happen in Queens. He sees Hinduism as allowing him to have this slippage of categories because of time constructions and gender. That’s really neat to think about. I know that academic people like to warn against Hinduism as being innately queer-positive, because it’s not how it’s always been enacted but… what if gender and sexuality weren’t as… well, there’s no way to say or to tell what what the world would look like without the fact of colonization. And what decolonization means in terms of migration.
EHF: You were talking about this of slippage of categories that’s part of the Hindu tradition and I think that’s always been very appealing to me as a student of Hinduism and then as a teacher. And yet at the same time, if you’re looking at what is Hinduism currently and you stumble on the political aspect of Hinduism in the BJP, that’s not about slippage of categories at all!
RM: It’s the opposite!
EHF: Yes, it’s all about who counts and who is officially Hindu. I wonder how much we who are outsiders to Hinduism really glom onto that idea of slippage. So I’m interested in the tension about that in our current space, but also for you living as a queer person and having, if I may, a complicated relationship with Hinduism.
RM: I think there’s something to be said about caste as well. Caste identity in my family is complicated, because we are so incredibly mixed in terms of religious identity and the same is true about caste identity. My dad’s caste is lower than my mom which puts us in an inter-caste kind of space, but then also we’re descended from Dalits as well. My mom’s family were Christian Tamalian Dalits, with Muslim and Hindu ancestors too, so . . . <laughter> You know, activist friends of mine will say that caste is so incredibly interlinked with Hinduism, that there’s no way to pull these things apart.
EHF: I’ve heard that argument, for sure.
RM: You look at Kabir, though, and you look Ravidas, these poets who were writing in medieval India who are belonging to these low-casted communities, writing about how caste is bullshit. I see relief in myth, definitely in my work I take the mythology to that level. It’s a template for how we’re living our lives right now. How do you want to interact with the world? Are you going to interact with it as an oppressor or as a liberator or as somebody that’s in between? Because isn’t that always how it is?
EHF: How does myth help you answer that question in your work?
RM: The second book was definitely about like descent and community. The idea of the cowherd’s son — Krishna being the cowherd. Then also like I said, my father being of the Ahir caste, the lower-casted agriculturalists. His dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad, because that’s how caste is kept, was a cowherd in India and according to caste story, that family is a warrior-casted clan that had been stripped of their title and went into the woods to wait for the incarnation of Vishnu that was Krishna. So, Krishna is actually part of our family. So I’m related to Krishna, but I’m also Dalit. And Muslim. And that collection [of poems] is trying to make sense of that, in diaspora.
In my writing I try to queer this all, by saying, you know, Krishna, you’re actually a dick! But then, I was also really slutty in New York, so maybe there’s a connection there…what if Krishna actually played the flute, if you know what I mean. <laughter> That’s the kind of thing I hope I accomplish. But also in that land of mythology is India, India as myth, as well as family story. I have this one poem about all of these unnamed women I descend from — what are their names? Nobody keeps the records of the women. So I wrote a letter poem where I imagined my ancestor as named Sita who is abducted by the British East India Company. I think of myth as a template to see what happens around us.
I think part of rewriting myth, writing into the myth, is to open up a liberatory aspect of it for queer folks. That intersection of justice and mythology. And that’s part of the writing of Ramyan, the translations of it and the writing I have done in that project. There’s a word in Awadhi, kinnar. It’s translated as centaur and it’s one of the the polite ways of saying transgender. And I was like, what if instead of translating it as centaur we translate it as transgender person. Does that reify a divide? I’m not sure. But that’s an example to me of a question that is very spiritual. Because when Tulsidas was writing this thing, what was in his mind? What was his world like? What was the Divine revealing to him?
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017). His book of translations I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) is forthcoming from Kaya Press in March, 2019. His poems appear in Best American Poetry, Guernica, POETRY, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry at Auburn University and translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
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