"Open the Door": An Excerpt from Rajiv Mohabir's "Antiman"

We are delighted to share an excerpt from Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman, an impassioned, genre-blending memoir of refusing assimilation, coming out, and finding himself as a poet. Mohabir’s debut memoir and winner of the 2019 Restless Books Prize in New Immigrant Writing, Antiman is on sale now.

Open the Door

Before she cut her silver hair, it sat in an oiled bun, a Guyana full moon, atop her head, a Sunday hat for what the British called her: a Coolie Hindoo. Aji sat in the Florida room in my parents’ house in Orlando and sang a story that came beating into this world as an uncaged bird from Indian soil, which was nurtured on whole grain in the paddy fields of Guyana and now was lilting here against the tiled floor in a second, new diaspora.

December. The day bit the skin with a hint of ice. Her hands, well veined, wore two gold bangles and bore a tattoo of her husband’s name, Sewdass, in India ink underneath a handwritten Om. When she was newlywed, a fifteen-year-old leaving her father’s cows, a barber came to mark her with this godna—a tattoo to keep her safe and the bad eye away. She never went to school but raised her four siblings, perfecting her magical spells: her phulowri and barah, her curry and roti, her first-aid massaging, her understanding of song—her poetry that would be my inheritance.

We sat in the Florida room, December blinking in color like Christmas lights about us. I was visiting home from the University of Florida in Gainesville for winter break. I put a cassette in the tape recorder. I wanted to be able to listen and listen again—to savor Aji’s Creole and Bhojpuri when she returned to Toronto and I to Gainesville.

Aji was the eldest of five children. Betiya was her call name, a name that means “precious daughter”—the “-ya” a suffix that personalizes and endears. She stood at the sangam of three linguistic rivers: English, Bhojpuri, and Creole. Born in 1921, she was the grandchild of indentured laborers and spoke these languages before the following generations got lost and drowned in the flow of English medium schools, eschewing Creole and Bhojpuri. In our family and in our familial community, Aji was the last speaker of Guyanese Bhojpuri. Forged against the anvil of indenture on sugar cane plantations, her stories and songs were precarious—on the verge of being erased forever.

Gangadai, her other call name, was really Bhagwati, after the goddess Saraswati—the goddess of language, reading, and music.

Aji was anakshar. Unlettered. Anpardh. Not illiterate. In two languages. Each of her songs, a poem—a small devastation. Each of her stories, a fire to scorch my heart’s forest; a door that when opened led to magic.

I wanted to know more. From childhood I was told that Aji was broken. She did not speak filmi Hindi—the kind that belonged to the Indiaman, but rather some other language that had been broken on the plantation. I was told that Aji’s English was broken too—an English of the damned, a Creolized version that would never count as literary or worthy of learning in school now that we were in the United States. My father’s philosophy was to leave behind these backward ways and adopt those of the English and Americans.

Try as I might to ignore the brown of my hands, it betrayed me as Other constantly in the world of White celebration. I was different; I always knew. I was brown, but there was another difference that I did not share with my brother and sister. I sat at a crossroads: I did not understand myself but wanted to. I wanted to sit in the un-understanding of my Aji’s songs; to learn them to piece my own broken self together.

ultan sultan howe dono bhai ho

 ultan sultan tare ho

pajire se kara kara bhaile dupahariya

 kholo bahini baja rakhe ho

tohare dolar bahanoi janghiya par sowe ho

kaise ke kholo bhaiya, baja rakhe ho

lewo bahini lewo more sir ke pagri ho

 bahini baja rakhe ho

Dem been get one buddy an sistah,

 Come see who a come, sistah

Da bright bright mahning a-tun black black night,

 sistah, keep a-doh hopem.

a-you bahanoi de sleep pon me lap,

 tell me how me go hopem a-doh.

Tek dis me sistah, tek dis, me head ke pagri,

hopem a-doh na sistah.

About the Book

About the Author

© Jordan Miles

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021), The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His essays can be found in places like Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College. His debut memoir, Antiman, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.