Posts filed under 'Kaya Press'

“alchemic / exchange / we fade bruises here”: Rajiv Mohabir on Editing I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals

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.

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. READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: In Conversation with Kaya Press

"We push boundaries by putting these books out there."

Kaya Press was founded in 1994, and has established itself as a premier publisher of Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic writers in the United States. Its diverse list of titles includes experimental poetry, noir fiction, film memoir, avant-garde art, performance pieces, “lost” novels, and everything in between. Kaya and its authors have been the recipients of numerous awards, including the Gregory Kolovakas Prize for Outstanding New Literary Press, the American Book Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, the PEN Beyond Margins Open Book Prize, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Award, and their books have become cornerstone texts in American Studies and Asian American Studies curricula at universities throughout the country. I spoke with Publisher Sunyoung Lee via email.

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Alexis Almeida: Can you tell me about Kaya’s origins? I’ve read that it was originally intended to house a journal of Korean literature-in-translation, and that the press has been through many transformations.

Sunyoung Lee: Kaya was founded by Kim Soo Kyung, a writer and a publisher based in Korea, who originally was interested in publishing Korean lit in translation. She met up with writer Walter K. Lew, who convinced her to publish a broader list of Asian diasporic lit—and to move beyond putting out a journal format to putting out actual books. The transformations that Kaya has gone through have been largely due to staffing and funding. The start up funding from Kim Soo Kyung ended in 1997, whereupon all funding for salaries abruptly ended, though I continued to work at Kaya with Juliana Koo, Kaya’s original managing editor. Probably the most difficult time for Kaya was the period where I became the sole volunteer staff person at Kaya after Julie went to graduate school. Luckily, we had enough forward momentum to stay afloat because of the great organizational groundwork that Julie had put into place, but it was a huge challenge to keep up—to continue publishing books, keeping our books in print, etc. We managed to keep our heads above water, but there were a couple of moments when it was a bit touch and go. More recently, however, working with Neelanjana Banerjee, our managing editor, and our new publicist, Cathy Che—not to mention our graduate student assistant, Heidi Hong, and the numerous, talented undergraduate interns whom we work with here  (happy to give a list of all of their names! Anita Chen, Maggie Deagon, Jamaal Armstrong, among others)—has made all of the difference in getting Kaya Press really humming again. Not only are we putting on more events and publishing more titles than ever before, we’re also working on a couple of new series of titles (and planning a few more), including one on Japanese lit in translation, and another on Korean literature in translation, both of which will be launched in 2017. So there’s a way in which we’ve finally circled back around to our original founding impulse!

AA: What has your move from New York to LA been like? Can you tell me about your affiliation with the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, and your relationship with the greater LA community?

SL: From New York—at least back in the 90s, at least for myself—Los Angeles was not just beyond the pool of light being generated by the city itself, it was past the curve of the earth—past the horizon. So it was never a place I ever really ever thought about, much less imagined Kaya moving to.

Because we started in the 1990s, we had a very strong sense of creating culture as we went—desktop publishing had just started to make possible the world of indie publishing that we now see flourishing around us, and there was a lot of excitement and new ideas and people trying to figure out how to making this indie publishing thing work.

The feeling was a lot like the feeling of riding my bike (my primary mode of transportation in those days) through midtown Manhattan—you’re out in the world, completely self-powered, moving between lanes of packed traffic in the shadow of these enormously tall buildings. It’s a weirdly wonderful feeling—you feel acutely your smallness and insignificance, yet all of that looming institutional weight can’t prevent you from making your way to wherever you need to be. That’s what it felt like to be doing indie publishing at that time. It was hard not to feel like a pioneer.

Ditto with regards to working the Asian diasporic focus—unlike out on the West Coast, where there was a more of a cohesive sense of history and critical mass and activism around Asian American-ness, in New York, being Asian American and really trying to make an impact as an Asian diasporic press required a different kind of wiliness—a different set of survival skills, if you will. There was definitely an active, thriving community of Asian American artists, but it wasn’t as entrenched and institutional as it was out west, from what I could tell at least. Which meant that you spent more time trying to break new ground—to get to the table—than you did navigating pre-existing social and cultural hierarchies—or figuring out how to position yourself at the table.

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