Cutlish

by Rajiv Mohabir

Overview

In Cutlish, a title referencing the rural recasting of the cutlass or machete, Rajiv Mohabir creates a form migrated from Caribbean chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker in the newest context of the United States. By joining the disparate threads of his fading, often derided, multilingual Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Bhojpuri linguistic inheritances, Mohabir mingles the ghosts that haunt from the cane fields his ancestors worked with the canonical colonial education of his elders, creating a new syncretic American poetry — pushing through the “post” of postcolonial, the “poet” in the poetic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945588983
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	09/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	116
File size:	858 KB

About the Author

Rajiv Mohabir, an immigrant to the United States, 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), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His memoir Antiman received Reckless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize and is forthcoming 2021. He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa and his MFA in Poetry from Queens College, CUNY. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College. He lives in the Boston area.

Read an Excerpt

Dove (or Tell Me the Number of Your Plane)

ordhniya ke torde, hamar jiyara tarapela,
tohar najariya tir jaisan daravni aur jaherila

A scorpion stings me, its toxins swim my veins,
one ill prick from you and I writhe in your fever.

I dream I cough up a songbird I release to the sky,
you board a plane to take you across the desert.

I will tie messages to the feet of doves,
set them to sail at dusk with a map to your country.

Dizzy with thirst they fall, raining, from high,
dried meat hardening under tawny feathers.

I throw stones at planes’ shadows, cursing iron
to crash, to burn in serrated-leafed cane fields.

So my skin never blisters with your desire,
in birdbaths I empty vials of avicide.

            My veil torn, I shake and quiver,
your eyes: poisonous arrows that terrify.

Table of Contents

Cutlish 3

The Po-Co Kid 5

Indo-Queer I 6

Dove (or Tell Me the Number of Your Plane) 7

Sapera, the Snake Charmer 8

Falling from a Plane 9

Lordha and Sil 10

Curry Powder 11

Hassa 12

Angreji Ke Sarap 17

Coolie 32

Hiranyagarbha 33

Kalapani 35

Snowfall in the Tropics 36

Offering 37

South Asian Art Exhibit, Metropolitan Museum of Art 38

Guyana 39

Inaugural Poem with Silence 44

Terrorism in Manhattan 46

Massacre Ballad 47

Indo-Queer II 48

Fire Rass 49

Shame in Mathura 50

Siren 51

Outcry 52

Neemakharam 58

Indo-Queer III 60

Sudama 61

Lyre 62

OK, Cupid 63

Indo-Queer IV 64

Coolie Oddity 67

Dantaal, an Instrument 80

Chutney Mashup 81

Bollywood Confabulation 82

Guide 83

Folksong 85

Kabira 86

Directions to the Holy Place 87

Indo-Queer V 88

May 5, 1838 89

We Come in Planes 93

Notes

Editorial Reviews

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...’ But what I love most is to read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: ‘Let’s get one thing queer—I’m no Sabu-like sidekick, / I’m the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam // on the street. I don’t speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian, / can’t control minds, have no psychic powers.’”

—Jericho Brown

“Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir’s stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer’s English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: ‘May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces.’ The book’s title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today.”

—Nicole Cooley

“Rajiv Mohabir’s polyglottal collection will reward you with its formal boldness and gorgeous intimacy. I didn’t know that I came to contemporary poetry to find the end of English, until I read Cutlish. Here, Mohabir leads us enthusiastically to the edges of language—torn, improvised, as well as deftly carved—where music and meaning are visually and sonically sumptuous. This is a stunning book.”
—Patrick Rosal

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2021

As multifaceted as the many languages in its pages, Mohabir's latest collection (after The Cowherd's Son) lyrically confronts history, homophobia, desire, tradition, colonialism, and place, grappling with identity on varied levels. The poem "May 5, 1838" commemorates the arrival of indentured servants from India to Guyana and deftly navigates the space between recognizing history and injustice ("On those first ships did they know their ash / applied evenly fertilizes the land-grant fields?") and honoring diaspora ("We sow bits of ourselves in all corners: / flags on bamboo posts, milk poured into the sea."). A refusal of erasure—whether of history, national identity, or sexuality—links many poems, and Mohabir repeatedly elevates the complexity of such themes. What does it mean to be "from" somewhere? What encompasses one's culture or family, especially if elements of one's identity are rejected within those structures? "Does wind stay trapped in a room when its windows / yawn? Without country it flows as river-water, / a traceless origin. How can this structure / of earth and bone be home?" Mohabir's language is sharp and energetic, aware of the carving power of language, and often witty in its observations or address of weighty subjects ("O Ancestors, I've inherited passing"). VERDICT Rich with history, layered, and likely to enthrall seasoned and newer readers of poetry. Highly recommended.—Amy Dickinson, Montrose Regional Lib. District, CO

Library Journal