The cover of I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals features “Ties That Bind,” a mixed media piece on archival paper by Renluka Maharaj. In the pixelated color photo of an Indo-Caribbean wedding, the groom is about to fall asleep, the bride looks demure—perhaps trying to hide her laughter, carefree children chat in the corner, two fierce-looking women look daringly into the camera, and an elder female relative holds a moneybag. Following the ingenuity and the personality of the anthology’s cover—with sequins that imbue historical reality with fantasy—the contents of the text, divided into an introduction and five sections, are even more astonishing. I Will Not Go contains two translations, two fractals, and various lyrical essays about the translation/ writing process of seventeen Indo-Caribbean writers: Krystal Ramroop, Aliyah Khan, Divya Persaud, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Nadia Misit, Alex Bacchus, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Andre Bagoo, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Anu Lakhan, Will Depoo, Natasha Ramoutar, Nicholas Peters, Anita Baksh, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Elizabeth Jaikaran, Suzanne Persard, Chandanie Somwaru, and Ryan Persadie. Like Maharaj, each of the featured translators are descendants of indentured South Asian peoples or part of the Coolie diaspora in the Caribbean.
In Mohabir’s foreword, “Like Chutney Masala,” he describes the music that fuels these writings and translations: “Chutney music as cultural production is poetry: oral and performed. There is flexibility in the writing down of these words, the singing of them, the performance of them.” In terms of its sound, it “blends Afro-Caribbean beats with Indo-Caribbean experience and music.” Beginning with the base of two chutney songs, the translators reimagine the music and lyrics, adding their own inflections and personality that is oftentimes “smoothed out” as incorrect in the Western publishing process. As this multivocal and imaginative collection seeks to reveal, chutney music forces its listeners to hear in its lyrics and melodies the gender violence, sexism, and expectations of marriage within the Indo-Caribbean community—“an open secret.”
Tiffany Troy (TT): In your foreword to I Will Not Go, “Like Chutney Masala,” you wrote of how this collection is “. . . a kind of Caribbean, diasporic response to [Eliot Weinberger’s] 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. . .” How does I Will Not Go draw inspiration from and go beyond 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in its conceptualization of chutney music?
Rajiv Mohabir (RM): For me, this book extends into a kind of spiritual realm whereby the translators all are descendants of indenture, and as such, they hold the particularities of our diaspora’s nuances in particular regard. What I mean is that this is not just an academic experiment; this work blends our own familial histories, our embodiments of music and rhythm, and writing skill. While 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei uses the editors’ essays to discuss what each translation does, the translators in I Will Not Go respond to their translational acts.
This brings me into another element that differs from I Will Not Go from Weinberger’s text: the translators add their original poetry that responds to their individual vision of chutney music’s afterlives. That we are haunted by our language loss is no secret—this is how colonization worked for many of us; we take in the colonizer’s messages about ourselves, and they go on to dwell in the deepest parts of our psyches. This anthology plumbs that depth, reaching into ourselves to see where chutney music (if it does at all) lives and loves inside of us. It’s personal and intimate, wrapped up in identity and ancestral trauma and joy.
TT: The essays of the translators shed light on how “the shards of the pain and prayer” in chutney music help conjure memories, creating entry points that inform the translational acts in I Will Not Go. Can you speak of the process in researching “what each word means under the actual word in the original variety of Caribbean Hindustani,” which is described as the “plantation language specific to each Indian community in the Caribbean”? That requires knowledge of Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Hindi and Urdu!
RM: Yes! However, to me, these languages are more or less mutually intelligible. I’ve studied Indian Hindi and Indian Bhojpuri while trying to acquire Caribbean Hindustani and Guyanese Hindustani, and it’s proven to be a very fruitful road. I can tell the difference, for example, between Sarnami Hindustani and Guyanese Hindustani, which are similar but have marked differences. Since there are so few speakers (if they are alive, they are mostly of my Aji’s generation) of these languages, it makes sense to fill in any gaps with words from Sarnami and Trinidadian—at least for me. In this way, Caribbean Hindustani is an umbrella term that allows for this kind of international travel.
This work took me a long time to do. I started learning Hindi and Guyanese Hindustani when I was a young teenager, and then acquiring Bhojpuri, Urdu, and Awadhi in my twenties. This process of relearning my native language has been rewarding and deeply painful. The fact that this anthology is out in the world shows how I have wound the threads of my learning together—something that is more accessible, I suppose, to the relatively recent immigrants from South Asia.
We must remember that Spanish, French, and English are languages that marked our backs, shackled us, but most people only consider the colonial languages of the Caribbean when it comes to translating a specific geopolitical area. Creoles, Kréyols, Hindustanis, Indigenous languages—these are Caribbean languages that are beautiful and nuanced in their histories of ongoing displacement (as is the case for Indigenous folks), enslavement, indenture, and other kinds of colonization. I want to expand the area of focus by shifting the gaze to a speech community in peril.
TT: In your glosses of the two chutney songs, you provide “a breakdown of what each word means under the actual word in the original variety of Caribbean Hindustani.” Is there a specific reason why you wrote these glosses in the Latin script as opposed to the Devanagari, Kaithi, or Perso-Arabic scripts?
RM: I used the Latin script by taking a note from written Sarnami Hindustani, which uses Roman letters. Most of the people in Caribbean communities would not be too familiar with Devanagari or Kaithi scripts—to the extent that they’d access the sounds easily. It’s because the Caribbean Hindustani languages were only rarely written down.
These songs descend from oral cultures, so it’s a little bit in homage to the history of surviving the plantation while bearing the marks of the Caribbean Seas, which we have turned into gem-like adornments. For Nastaliq script, I suspect more people would be familiar with it, as ritual recitations from the Qur’an are pretty common in some circles.
When I translated I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, many people suggested that I include the Romanized writing so that they could use the book as it was designed to be used: as a songbook for Phagwa. I also think that the deep grief of our languages becoming ghosts in our throats made me want to make these words more immediately recognizable to the writers who I imagine have sung and danced to them. I offer these translations as a door that opens to a field of ancestral knowledge, with a threshold that is familiar while moving into a new space.
TT: How did you select Sundar Popo’s “My In-Law’s Door” (1979) and Yusuff Khan’s “Fasten Your Veil” (1980) as the songs to be featured, and in what ways are they themselves part of a “very clear poetic tradition that marks its lineage from verses preserved and reinvented orally with each iteration”?
RM: Funny, the alternate translations of both of these titles can also be “I Will Not Go to My In-Laws’, Baba” (Ham Na Jaibe Sasur Ghar Mein, Baba) and “You Must Go to Your In-Laws’” (Sasur Ghar Jaana). This wasn’t on purpose! I was trying to pick a song that everyone would have danced to and a song that was a little more contemplative, that bordered on the edge of Baitak Gaana—a local semi-classical genre of song in the Caribbean. Also, these are songs that many people of the Coolie Labor Diaspora would most likely know as they were made extremely popular by the India-based duo Babla and Kanchan in the 1980s. These two took songs from the Caribbean and refashioned them in India.
In believing the translation to be an iteration or performance, it allows for flexibility. The realization is not static; it holds multiplicity and simultaneity, rejecting any notion of stasis or staidness—which in my thinking is very Caribbean. Each instrumentation, each drum, each harmonium, each dantaal sings out with a different voice. Is this dholak drum made of mango? What about this other one? How about this jhaal, what is its substance? So the voices of the assembled writers also carry with them their own particular beauties and wisdoms. As presented here, they also beckon the reader to also try their own hands at iterating their own idioms.
TT: That is so lovely, and actually explains the title of the anthology too, as in the speaker will not go to the cunning in-law’s house, where horrible things happen!
You describe the writers of I Will Not Go as being from various “[gender] identities, ethnicities, sexualities, and religious identities,” and that your selection was made “to respond to the diversity of our communities.”
Could you tell us about your selection process of the seventeen translators of chutney songs in this anthology?
RM: I put out a call to writers, academics, performers, and others that I knew would be interested in this project. In total, I reached out to about twenty-five people, and many of them responded enthusiastically. I wanted to make sure that the anthology did not only include Hindus and Christians from Guyana—that there would be Muslims and atheists, drag queens, queers, and trans folk included. The more conservative anthologies of post-indenture writings already exist, and they are tired; the crossing of the kala pani is important to discuss, but it’s not the only thing that makes us who we are presently. I am interested in how we live right now.
With the interested individuals, I sent them my glosses and asked them to first translate them (using any lens that they wanted to), then to think about the poetics of the original, and finally to send a new piece inspired by what they saw. The resulting pieces are what I consider to be avtar poems—specifically that these poems are about incarnation and interpretation, allowed to play loose and wild.
TT: What is your hope for readers to take away from reading this anthology, whether as avid chutney music fans, translation aficionados, or budding poets?
RM: My hope is that people will be able to see the poetry in our oral traditions. I have a theory that Indo-Caribbean literature had essentially two trajectories (though there may well be more). One was through the writing and publishing of works in the 1930s, which saw educated folks writing in Standard English, and the other was through the maintenance of ever-evolving musical practice and the singing of folksongs—which would twist and wind themselves into what would become chutney music in the 1960s. Most of my own academic work centers the idea of chutney music as a postcolonial cultural production, with a big, big accent on it being a species of poetry, so my investment is really to show people our own culture’s beauty. My Aji was the last speaker of Guyanese Bhojpuri in my family; I was lucky enough to learn what she called Hindustani or what my father called “Broken Hindi.”
For as long as I can recall, anything “Coolie” was deemed lesser than by the people around, whether subcons (subcontinental South Asians), white folks, and most devastatingly, my own family. I imagine a world where we are beautiful too—that our karaila and shrimp, our machari and roti, our callouses, our impossibilities, can gleam like jewels in the sun. Of course, this is the world that we are dreaming of together—us in the anthology, and more! We are singing it down. We have been singing it down since the beginning of our contracts.
TT: What a vision! I deeply respect how you pay homage to your ancestors while defying expectation of what a “Western” audience expects of artistic production of Indo-Caribbeans. It’s moving because each translator makes a real investment into the real social issues that appear behind the catchy tune or music.
Has the deep dive into chutney music inspired any new work for you?
RM: Thank you—yes, I’d say it’s inspired new work. I made the chutney poem a form with rules and deviations in my book Cutlish. I have an essay called “On Chutney Poems: Poetic Form as Resistance“ published in American Poet. I also am working on what I’m calling “deviant translations” while thinking about the queerness of chutney music—the queerness of the qoolie as a figure—to practice translation-as-iteration myself. I’ve taken five chutney songs and translated them in and out of Guyanese Creole, Hindustani, and English about twenty times each, trying to evince new and different aspects of the songs with each iteration.
More than this, spiritually, chutney music (at least the older, multilingual songs) have added to my sense of rhythm and the song-in-the-poem kind of musicality. I am attuned to sound, language, politics, and everything else through thinking about the artforms of my own home and ethnic community. How I fit. How I don’t. What space I want to make in the soundscape of the various places I live.
TT: I feel like you can definitely run a series with the twenty iterations and show your process! (This isn’t an original idea, but one from Small Orange’s publication of “Deathfugue” by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris.)
In closing, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with Asymptote readers?
RM: Some of the contributors have books, articles, poems, and essays already in print and I encourage you to read them all! They are varied in subject and discourse—and I think that makes the anthology powerful, as it is poetry rescued from the US literary institution, which demands fealty and not so much resistance. What happens when you are at impossible intersections or assemblages of identity? There are no lanes to stay in here. Only constant expansion and creolizing. This is the Caribbean way, na?
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023), Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
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