“What about these poems?” Shayna asked, looking at Ryan and then at me.
“I was hoping you would forget,” Ryan laughed into his drink. He took a sip and put his glass on the coffee table, ringed with marks of cup sweat. He reached his hand into his back pocket and pulled out a stack of poems that he unfolded. Ryan stood up in front of the fireplace that had been painted over.
“I wanted to make this a kind of book that fits into your back pocket,” he said, his voice trembling ever so slightly. I wondered if Jonathan could hear the slight falter—how well he knew him.
Ryan began. “This one is called ‘Birth’ and it’s about my birth parents.” I noticed his stance, its posture, and his voice’s tremble. He delivered the poem in a musical cadence. His poem asked his parents if they knew about him, if they thought about him after leaving him. His poem asked the birth parents questions about living, puzzling through what he could have inherited from them.
I looked at Jonathan and he was wiping his eyes. Shayna was staring at Ryan, her eyes two full moons. My throat was a collapsed mine shaft. Ryan was dealing with many nuanced layers of abandonment as he called out to his parents.
Ryan read another poem to his audience. The room was silent. We were enthralled with his metaphor. His delivery was half spoken-word and half poet-voice. He continued reading his poems to his silent audience about his breakup and how Steven fucked another guy in the bed where they built their own nest.
Ryan shot his drink and put his glass down. Who needs another one? He trembled after he finished and zipped to the kitchen for more alcohol. I had lost count of how many drinks he’d had. He was exposed. He stood naked in front of us and we looked at his parts, inspecting them and thinking of our own burns and scars.
“That was so brave,” Jonathan said, standing up and rushing into the kitchen to hug Ryan. I sat on the couch and reflected. I stared at my own journal that was on the coffee table from earlier. I had not heard many other queer South Asian poets. Something about Ryan allowing himself to write his stories felt freeing. Something broke inside of me. It was fear of being seen. If Ryan could be brave, so could I—at least in front of my friends. He didn’t care what the end game of his poems was. Maybe I could be free to just write them and not care. My parents’ words haunted me, You need to know the difference between what’s a career and what’s a hobby. I was the one policing this message. It was injected into my thinking and I was the one who polished the idea until it gleamed, outshining any ideas that I had for myself.
I got up and held out my hand to Shayna, who with a flourish stood up. We trotted off to the kitchen. Ryan and Jonathan were still hugging.
“Well it’s time for me to go,” Shayna spoke up, eyeing me. “That was really exceptional, Ryan. You have a gift.” I’d never thought of writing as a gift, but a skill and a bravery that you have after refusing to burn up in flame. It was an act against death.
“Let’s walk together,” Jonathan said to Shayna, loosening his grip on Ryan’s waist.
“You guys don’t want to go out? We are going to go dance,” Ryan’s words started to slur together.
“Nah—you guys go and slay ’em,” Shayna said. They put on their jackets and left the apartment.
As soon as they left, I looked at Ryan and said, “Jonathan is in love with you.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“I’m done with white boys for now.”
“Come on. …” I began, smiling into my glass as I drained its last brown flame.
“Steven used to like to fuck me when I wore a bindi,” Ryan said blankly.
There was no arguing with this. This was pretty unforgivable.
In the Baltimore gutter scene Ryan and I danced and danced. By the time we left the apartment I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. None of it mattered. Baltimore was a sticky city with an electronic “gutter music” that kept us sweating and dancing for our lives. I was celebrating the breakage in me—the permission to write the ugly and to share it with my friends.
Amidst the din and fog of the club I remembered what an astrologer had told me in India. He said that I have an artistic palm, but my problem was that I had to commit to one form of art and that if I did that then I would go far. I thought the art that I would commit to would be astrology, originally, but now something else was happening. I was moved by Ryan’s openness and was now moving my way through this process by dancing. Something else broke for me, too: I wanted Ryan.
At seven in the morning we stumbled back over the cracked sidewalks to Ryan’s apartment. We had stopped drinking and were exhausted. We crumbled into heaps on his couch.
“I really loved your poems tonight,” I said. I leaned in. “You are amazing and I love you so much.” And I meant it.
“You keep writing, too. I see you—always writing things down in your journal.” He was an artist and restless, like me. It was bright and we were both ready for bed. I kissed Ryan. As he came the church bells tolled 8 a.m. outside.
I boarded the Chinatown bus back to New York. I was glad to return with my new resolve. I could allow myself to be a writer. I could be a poet. Ryan had held me tight and told me that he loved me, too, and that he was lucky that I was in his life. We didn’t have to tell each other this. We were so close that my tasting him didn’t complicate anything.
As Baltimore began its blur I reached up and pulled off my hat and fixed my hair. The bald spot was big. Outside a hawk flew high above the bus and followed us. It felt like a message from the divine: that I must allow poetry to be a reality of my life. I felt my head again.
I pulled out my journal. What would I write? I flipped through my notebook and saw my translations and trans-creation of Aji’s folk songs.
I had been writing this entire time. My head swam. Through translation, journaling, or writing poems and fragments—I had been writing all this time. Since Emily gave me my journal before I went to India. Since I sat with a tape recorder with Aji and penned down her lyrics for translation. I hadn’t been able to see myself without my reflection through a beloved until Ryan held up a mirror to my face. It felt as though my consciousness was looking at my life from a hawk’s perspective. I could see that this whole time I had been alive on this Earth that I had been writing. I was tied to poetry from my umbilicus, I just hadn’t recognized it.
Aji’s songs and stories were poetry that I was working with and it was working through me. This was the poetry that I descended from and I could hear its music inside me as I read my own words. Had I always been surrounded by poetry in many languages? I was so used to overlooking what I was doing, thinking that I wasn’t able to write—that I was not good enough. That I was not enough. I rubbed my head and was frustrated by the hair loss.
I made a promise to myself right there on the road from Baltimore to Jackson Heights, this hawk as my witness. I would shave my head when I returned to Jackson Heights as a reminder that I would dedicate myself to poetry.
The Outside Workshop
IN MY AQUA kurta, jeans, and yellow-orange cowboy boots I touched the ground of the hardwood stage and then my heart. This was my first performance since I started to call myself a poet. Hollis Kam from CARIB NY arranged this performance for Caribbean poets to come together and read from their latest work. The lineup included other poets and performers who were recent immigrants from the Caribbean or the children of immigrants.
The stage was black except for one spotlight that shone on the woman who was emceeing the evening. Her dark hair curled like waves about her shoulders.
“Next up this evening is Rajiv Mohabir, who calls himself a Coolie poet. We in Trinidad pronounce the word like coo-ly. Y’all Guyanese say cuh-ly. I don’t know—if someone called me Coolie I’d pop ’em in de face,” the emcee said. “I hope you will read in English and not in Hindi!” she joked.
I thought of the sound of Hindi and Bhojpuri—the flick of the tongue’s tip on the alveolar ridge, the gentle retroflex, the aspirated
consonants. I thought of the way my Aji pronounced words like pizza as “pihxa,” and how there was only ever Caribbean Hindustani for her when she was younger. I thought of my own tongue, my alveolar ridge, made up of the same stuff as Aji’s and her ancestors and how English language was new to our family—erupting in my father and mother’s generation as a first language.
The audience laughed as I walked on stage. I could see very little except for the slope of chairs beyond the stage as darkness hid its secrets. I stepped up, gave her a hug, and took a deep breath. The poems that I clutched were good enough to get me into VONA—Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation’s yearly weeklong workshop—and the Queens College MFA program. I was unsure of so many things.
Good thing I can’t see the audience, I thought. But they could see me. What if they saw me and knew that I was a fraud? What if these poems aren’t good enough? Can I really do this? I am a nobody—the grandson of illiterate rice farmers. I have no business pretending that I am literary. You are nothing. No one will ever love you. You are fat and hairy. You are good-for-nothing.
I looked out into the spotlight as if I could see my friends sitting there. All I could see was a burning light—purifying, and I was naked for the first time in front of strangers.
I went to San Francisco holding joy in my chest like a wild flame. I was going to a workshop for writers of color that my cousin, Leila, turned me on to while I stayed with her in Toronto for Aji’s eighty-eighth birthday celebration.
Leila, on her purple couch, said, “It’s the place for freaks like us.” Her large eyes were framed by black curls of hair. She raised her eyebrows in seriousness and continued, “I will be there, too, but as an administrator.”
Leila was the writer in the family. She grew up in Ontario and lived part of her life in Quebec, where she learned French and lived with a woman. The aunts all raised their eyebrows.
“I can’t wait to go!” I had been warned that most MFA programs in the United States were hothouse factories of white supremacy—that I would never find a whole community or belonging.
“I can tell you that VONA feeds my soul,” Leila said. Outside tires screeched to a halt and a car ran into a telephone pole. The sound of crushed metal mixed with Leila’s words.
“It’s a safe space,” she said as we both got up to look out of the window at the wreckage below.
I boarded a plane from LaGuardia to San Francisco. I clutched two books of poems tight through the gates: Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human and Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian, Born Black, and submitted to the profiling of the TSA. I thought of Suheir’s poem “Mic Check” and how the process of being screened, by always being “random” at the TSA checks, was the story of my life.
I landed at SFO in the afternoon and Leila picked me up from the airport with Thomas Glave in the car. He’d recently published the book Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, which Leila had gifted me. As I sat in the backseat with this celebrity asking me about my life, Leila handed me an autographed copy.
“Where are you coming from?” Thomas asked.
“Queens, baby.” I said and laughed nervously.
He turned around and smiled at me, got out of the car and said through the window, “It was nice meeting you.”
As Leila wound up the window, she looked at me and said, “He was flying out as you came in. I’m so glad you got to meet him!” I climbed out of the back seat and sat next to Leila. “I’m so beyond glad you’re here, cousin-brother.”
I lit a cigarette and we drove off to Mills College, where the workshop was to be held. Leila came up to my single room with me.
“It’s Pride today, Rajiv. Let’s go check it out.” She smiled and arched her brow.
“I’m totally in,” I said as we both ran down to the parking lot and drove to the closest BART station.
San Francisco was a rainbow flag of shirtless muscle men, leather daddies, brown bodies, dykes, beer and alcohol, body odor mixing with blunt smoke, and techno music. I had drinks on a slope and we walked hills and took trains and buses and streetcars and ended up at the ocean. We sat in the sand.
“If I am ever sad, remind me of this time when we were both in San Fran for VONA and how we sat at Ocean Beach and watched people surf in the mad cold waves,” Leila said as she stretched out her hand for my cigarette. She didn’t smoke but she took a long drag. It curled like a prayer into the sunset.
In the workshop I was surrounded by voices of color. I was the only Indo-Caribbean. I’ve always felt like a nilgai: a rare antelope. I’d sent ten pages of poems with my experimentations with writing in and out of my three languages, intent on cadence and lyric to carry my message. I wrote about New York City, about Liberty Avenue, about Jackson Heights—the scent of Diwali, the way that people strung up Christmas lights for Eid, Diwali, and Christmas. How Patel Brothers always had extra sweets during these times. The loud bang of bhangra music on the avenue, the Hanuman Chalisa being prayed in the Shri Laxmi Narayan Mandir, and the pulse of chutney music where bake and barah fried.
Other students submitted their poems that held phrases in Spanish and other languages. Suheir Hammad’s book breaking poems had just been released by Cypher Books, and she wove words transliterated from Arabic into her verse. I was finally beginning my writing life and was excited to be in a workshop with like-minded students.
Suheir was the workshop leader for the week and I had long admired her writing and activism. “I am going to decide who goes first,” she said from behind her beautiful and wild hair. “It will be Rajiv and Seema.” We were the only South Asians in the room. “Let’s pay attention to how both of them write about mangoes,” she said.
The class pulled out my stack of poems that they scribbled comments onto.
“Rajiv, why don’t you read a poem that you like the best.” Suheir looked at me. I was nervous. I looked through my own stack and settled on “Bismillah.” As I read slowly my classmates made marks on their papers.
Suheir continued, “And what do you like about it?”
“I like it because it felt like it came to me like a prayer,” I said, ready to write down every single word she said.
“Well, who are your favorite poets?” She looked at the other students in the room.
“I really love Joy Harjo.” There was a brief silence.
“Well, that is a different aesthetic,” she said.
Wait, I thought—wouldn’t Joy Harjo, a Native poet, be held high in a place like this?
“Who would like to begin the critique?” she asked.
One poet in the workshop who wrote mostly prose spoke up. “I get what you’re trying to do here with putting in Hindu words, but it’s just not working.”
“Can you explain that more?” Suheir asked.
My mouth was dry and my palms so sweaty I had trouble holding onto my pen.
“When people write in Spanish it’s allowable, but unfortunately Hindu is not on the level that Spanish is in public consciousness.” The room nodded in agreement. “It would work if you took out the phrases in Hindu and made it more accessible to the rest of us.”
Was she really saying that I was too ethnic? Didn’t VONA say that it’s a place for the people who are constantly told that they are too ethnic? I hadn’t even written in the language she called “Hindu”; I had written in Bhojpuri and Awadhi, quoting my grandmother’s songs, the names of foods, lyrics of prayers, and place names. I was writing Queens, impossible to do without referring to my people and how I lived there.
The room was silent with agreement. Even Suheir was silent. Sweat dripped from my forehead and tickled the back of my neck. I wanted to hide. I wanted to run into a wall and have my ghost leave my body—I wanted to float above and watch. My internal monologue continued to punish me as people discussed my work, how my lines needed help, and what my poems should look like.
Everything that I’ve written is shit. I shouldn’t be writing. I’m terrible and only pretending.
Coolies like me belong on a plantation, in a field cutting cane and drinking rum and cussing up. I don’t belong in this workshop. My father’s generation was the first of his family to be able to read fluently. I am a total no one. Everything about me is obscure—I come from Crabwood Creek and most people mishear Ghana or Guinea when I say I am from Guyana.
You are nothing.
No one will ever love you.
You are fat and hairy.
You are good-for-nothing.
Seema spoke up and said, “You know—the parts that I had the most trouble with were the parts where you wrote English words for the Hindi phrases.” Seema was Punjabi and pronounced Hindi with a dental D, correcting the other participant’s Hindu and modeling the right way to say it. “If you look on page seven, the phrase ‘immovable bow’ didn’t make sense to me until I thought of Ram in the Ramayana and the task of moving Shiva’s bow and then it made sense.”
My poetry was bad. There was nothing redeeming about it, or at least that was the consensus. I had to allow myself to be a beginner and listen to the workshop’s critique.
I sat in the garden, smoking and watching the scrub jays fly back and forth, baring their sky-blue and rust to the dawn. I was on east coast time. The cement picnic table where I sat was underneath two tall trees. The bird looked at me and I felt like it knew me. It cawed and clucked, and I mimicked it. He flew closer and tilted his head to the side.
Relief. This bird brought me a feeling of connection. I belong on this Earth. This bird was saying so. He sang his song and didn’t care if I understood his craft, he wanted to communicate his music to me. He flew up to a low branch just as I heard footsteps coming my way. Diem Jones walked up with his camera. Diem was a tree of a man, tall and gentle. He looked at me and smiled.
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