I Will Not Go (Kaya Press, 2024), edited by poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir, is a bold new anthology of poems that respond to influential Indo-Caribbean music. In the mid-twentieth century, a new genre of music emerged in the Caribbean, melding elements of Bhojpuri folk music, from northwestern India and neighboring Nepal, with those of Calypso and Soca music, from Trinidad and Tobago. Wildly popular, this new genre came to be known as “chutney music”—borrowing its name from a simple and versatile dish, found all over South Asia, that is made by mashing ingredients together.

After slavery was abolished in the 1830s, the British, French, and Dutch colonial powers desired cheap labor to work on their plantations. Over 1.3 million Indians would be shipped to locations around the globe, including the Caribbean, to work under abysmal conditions in sugar fields. In chutney music, Mohabir sees the origins and endurance of the poetics of his people—a historically underrepresented population with a thriving literature known to few.

In I Will Not Go, poets embrace, reinterpret, and interrogate the lyrics of Yusuff Khan’s “Aaj Sawaliya Sasur Ghar Jana” (1980) and Sundar Popo’s “Ham Na Jaibe” (1979).  The central refrains in these songs translate to “today, I must go to my beloved at my in-laws’ house” and “I will not go to my father-in-law’s house,” respectively. In this wide-ranging conversation, we spoke over email in the fall of 2024 about Mohabir’s vision as an editor, and the chutney music that accompanied his childhood.

Urvashi Bahuguna (UB): I am curious, do you recall when you first encountered “Ham Na Jaibe Sasur Ghar Me Baba” and “Aaj Sawaliya”?

Rajiv Mohabir (RM): You know, I don’t really remember the first time I encountered these songs—they have always been part of me and my home. I remember them playing on the vinyl EPs when we would have parties at home or when we would visit family. They were intimate and public at once—those who knew the songs were part of a community that I was estranged from yet intimately tied to.

I do remember playing the records when I was able to, DJing for my family’s dinner parties in high school and college. Also, dancing with my sister and brother in Scarborough, Ontario, when we would make our yearly visits to my Aji’s tenement.

UB: You write, “If we don’t translate these songs for ourselves now, who will? Will they be left to translation by someone who doesn’t intimately know what it means to wine? To someone who has no idea what it feels like to go to a gay club in Toronto and hear Sonny Mann’s ‘Lotela’ play on the speakers?” What does it feel like?

RM: It feels like Kaieteur Falls crashing onto the heart. It feels like your Aji smiling at you as you wine up with the cock in the fowl house. It feels like you’re swimming in an ocean the same temperature as your blood. It feels like roti rolls in the parking lot of Disney. It feels like ordering the most expensive thing at The Nest in Richmond Hill. It feels like a dozen black-eye cakes from Bun King Bakery in Scarborough. It feels like good cookup rice when you’re hungover. It feels like singing along to an album that you know all the words to. It feels like being among other lambs while outside wolves prowl—but for now they are locked out of the building where you are warm and safe. 

Is this what it’s like for everyone else? Like, do white people have to search and search to feel like this, or is this their everyday experience of music, dance, and sexuality as they all intersect?

UB: How did you choose the writer-translators in this anthology?

RM: I wanted to ask people who did interesting things in the world and would know these songs in their complexities of language: whether they knew the language or not. I wanted queers and mixed-race people to be included since there is no such thing as cultural purity—and definitely NOT in the Caribbean! I also wanted to include as many Indo-Caribbean cultures as possible in this anthology.

I asked other folks who either didn’t respond or gave casteist reasons for not wanting to contribute. Luckily our people are many!

For instance: Miranda Rachel Deebrah is an artist, writer, performance artist, and mental health professional doing work to help heal ancestral traumas of descendants of indenture. Divya M. Persaud is a planetary geologist, an award-winning poet, musician, and activist. Aliyah Khan is a literary scholar who contributes to the field and is the director of the Global Islamic Studies Center, International Institute, and associate professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her book Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean showed me how to close-read Sufi poetry using Arabic poetic devices, laying bare a poetics outside of the West.

I could spend the rest of our time bragging about the poets and writers included here! It’s really a blessing of riches that there are so many people out there changing the face of Caribbean art, literatures, and scholarship.

UB: As the editor, did you receive any translations that did not resonate with you or that you disagreed with? How did you navigate that?

RM: As the editor, I was really interested in the myriad and multiplicities of meaning-making that this project opened up. I was looking for poems that I disagreed with, versions and iterations that I could use to interrogate my own deeply grooved translations. I was thirsty to learn of others’ interiority and embodiments of these songs. It’s personal, spiritual actually. The idea of purity in South Asian cultures is casteist, anti-Muslim, misogynist, anti-Black, and trans/homophobic (as far as Indo-Caribbean spaces are concerned).

I found some of the work here challenged my thinking of Caribbean Hindustani language and culture, poetry, and the translational act, and I am here for all of this. This kind of disagreement brings vitality and vibrancy to the original—it’s like hearing the song again for the first time with each translation and transformation.

UB: In your introduction, you speak of a “Creole gist-giving.” Where does that relationship to meaning and translation come from?

RM: I think writing and literacy (and writing cultures) are obsessed with one-to-one meaning making. This kind of reliance on the word is flawed, especially given the social distance between languages. Kwame Anthony Appiah in “Thick Translation” speaks of the inability of worldview to be migrated in this binary configuration. Creolese (as it’s called in some Guyanese spaces) acts like this too. The humor, the seriousness, the cursing culture in Creolese makes it unlike any other language. Similarly, in the Caribbean Hindustani languages, there are some nuances and shades of meaning that need more than just one-word correlatives in English. Creolese adds this inter-space as the first language of most Caribbean people in this anthology.

I like to think of it as gist-giving, but perhaps it’s deeper than this: it’s its own language with a practice of poetics available to us in the aural. A transcript of Creolese will need a performance paired with it for folks unfamiliar with its hurricane voice (to quote Kamau Brathwaite), the intonations, the dance of the tongue, and the magic it casts. 

There is also the very basic question of what part of the original is being translated—is it important to have meaning, form, musicality, etc., carried over? Isn’t betrayal the most telling thing about this practice? Betrayal of meaning, of form, of musicality? For me it evinces the dynamism of the original and its new iterations. The questions of meaning also extend in this anthology to encompass personal experience of the song and the Caribbean cultures the authors and translators come from, which is a unique aspect of this particular book—that the translators are part of the culture that produced the songs that they translate. So often translations are performed by people from outside. My thinking is that this project reveals something spiritual and lived. White translators probably don’t want to hear this. Fight me.

UB: In the first translation of both poems, you have chosen to follow Arthur Sze’s method of writing each word in the original language with the English translation of the word right below it. I was curious about your choice to not include punctuation, which may have gone some way in clarifying the meaning of these lines.

RM: I didn’t want to use punctuation because I wanted to have the meanings of the words be as fluid or songlike as possible when presenting the “raw” material to the writers. I was thinking also that the punctuation would steer them toward particular meanings, and I wanted them to look upon the English possibilities with a sense of meaning-creation, thus empowering them in their own poetics.

A lot of these songs I once understood through patchworking the meanings together before attaining enough Caribbean Hindustani to actually be conversant.

UB: In addition to the translations of the two songs, you also invited contributors to compose “fractals”: original poems inspired by the songs. Could you tell us a little about this?

RM: I asked the writers and translators here to use the poetics that they saw in play and write their own original poems that may or may not respond to the songs themselves. I was interested in seeing what of the chutney poetics would remain in their individual practices. This was to counter the idea that “chutney’s lyrics are meaningless because no one speaks Bhojpuri/Caribbean Hindustani” that some white ethnomusicologists have written.

I knew that this was not the truth—I knew that the poetics, while not necessarily spoken in Caribbean Hindustani languages anymore, did enter the consciousnesses in Caribbean spaces. The Caribbean was ready for the ideas of labor, loss, longing, and contesting racial dynamics, colonization, and patriarchy. The poetry of the geopolitical region interacting with these songs continues to produce works of poetry and writing that are moving, indelibly marked, and linked to each other, such that there is no real separation or “purity” of an Indian poetics in the Caribbean.

The fractal, I believe, bears witness to this truth.

UB: In a section title, you refer to the fractals as “afterlives.” Would you talk to us about a text (besides the two in the anthology) whose afterlife lives within you, shaping your understanding of the world?

RM: I think of mythology as a framework for understanding our contemporary realities—that we code ourselves in metaphor. My poetry and writing are shaped by the nuances and shades of the Guyanese Bhojpuri my Aji called Hindustani. It’s poetry: the cane fields, the scorpions, the marriages, the deaths, the lashes, the subjugation, the patriarchy, the survival, the settler colonization that we inherited—all of this lives inside of me as I continue to move and dance across this North American continent.

The songs’ rhythms and electricity thrum within me. I’m speaking of the old-school chutney music by Sundar Popo, Radew Chaitoe, and Rikki Jai, to name a few. Dropati is also a family favorite. I remember my Mamus coming to Florida, where I grew up, and our playing her music after eating and (the adults’) drinking. The entire album Let’s Sing and Dance with Dropati was and remains to this day a major vibe for me. “Manikdar Jabbiya” in particular is so stunning, and its meanings were revealed to me by a singer and songwriter from Suriname named Raj Mohan.

Other songs that are particularly close to my heart are “Kaise Bani,” “Scorpion Gyul,” “Mor-Tor,” “Chadar Bichao Balma,” and others that seep into my own practice of poetry enough that I developed an “American” poetic form called the “chutney poem.” If you want a fuller fleshing out of what I mean by “afterlife,” I wrote an essay called “On Chutney Poems: Poetic Form as Resistance.” It was published by American Poets Magazine from the Academy of American Poets, and you can read it here.

UB: You’ve chosen contributors who haven’t necessarily translated in the past. Would you say this allowed for a greater elasticity within the translated poems?

RM: I am interested in the ways that we are living lives in translation. The “translator” as a separate entity is real when you’re not living in the languages and cultures that you are interacting with. If you are immersed in a community, an ethnic and/or speech community that is polyethnic and polylingual, then the de facto subject position is one that is translational a priori to the translation act. What I mean specifically is that the Caribbean languages (here I include patois, creoles, Caribbean Englishes, and Caribbean Hindustanis) interact with British and American Englishes. To be legible is to narrate oneself in a country and context that requires a simple narrative, especially around migration to the Global North. What happens to folks who have only partial South Asian ancestry in these spaces? Do they not also have ancestors who were of the subcontinent? How can we hold space for the biracial and multiethnic as well, and resist an easy narrative or a silencing of all of the people we and they descend from? Who is just one thing?

So often it’s easy to be subsumed under American patterns of racialization that ignore our serf story of indenture and survival. So often people want to talk about racial privileges without understanding how there can exist multiple conceptualizations of enslavements to global capital. I am not the child of medical doctors. I did not grow up with parents who had much, nor was my family particularly literate. Being a writer was not something that was available to my imaginary, let alone being a translator.

When I began to relearn Hindi and Hindustani, my entire family was against it and saw it as regressive—their wounds and colonial punishments for speaking our languages run deep and haunt us still. I wanted to ask people who had similar stories, people who were not academic translators, who live in multiple worldviews, to lend their spirits and their own hauntednesses to these translations. To me, it does allow for more elasticity, but also deeper affective reservoirs to be tapped, the ghosts of the ancestors to gather and sing for us as we clap and keep this sacred time with the drums of our own heartbeats.

UB: You said earlier that it’s important for translators to be a part of the culture they translate. I would love to hear your thoughts on the difference it makes when people translate from a place of belonging versus a position of interest.

RM: I think the difference is that when we translate [from and] for the inside, we are not wielding the rhetorical power of Empire to further careers; we are making sense of ourselves in whatever linguistic contexts we are in. There is a spiritual dimension in my own practice that connects me to the voices of my family. That I am calling my excised language back onto my tongue feels holy. It’s not so for a white Becky learning Hindi in India for a year as a fully funded emissary from the United States government, who puts on saris and bindis and attends the university’s Diwali Mela and can have conversations in Hindi because of her privilege.

My own mother was attacked for being brown in the UK. To wear a sari is to awaken a deep trauma for her, though she does wear saris from time to time, always with the awareness that she will be read a certain way—that the potential for harm to her body is real.

Do people vacationing in our cultures have this fear, or do they feel entitled to it? There are so many TikTokers who love to try to out-Indian other brown folks, especially from my own particular diaspora. This translation is not without its cultural baggage. The politics to me are clear: who gets to learn a language? Who gets to speak a language and claim expertise? Certainly not the children of cow keepers and rice planters, of cane cutters or unlettered hassa fishers from Guyana.

To me, this is the difference. Translation by anyone is a worthwhile task. Just do not participate in the economy of ownership. Translator does not equal owner. Not a few people forget this.

Read an excerpt from I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations, and Chutney Fractals

I will not go

Divya Persaud

I won’t go to my father-in-law’s house,
baba, I won’t be frozen there;

father:
I will not go to that man’s place.

every day, he drinks,
and she prods me, every day.

every day, my things are hers:
his everyday greed.

(he bejewels the hammock
of her lap)

and in this small house he beats her:
he beats her with its wood

Rajiv Mohabir was born in London, England, to Guyanese parents. He grew up in New York City and the greater Orlando area in Florida. Mohabir’s first collection, The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books), was a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In 2021 Mohabir’s poetry collection Cutlish (Four Way Books) was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award and the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mohabir was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets and a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press, 2019), originally published in 1916. His memoir, Antiman, received the New Immigrant Writing Award from Restless Books in 2019, and was a finalist for the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature. Mohabir received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i and is an assistant professor of poetry in the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.