Keynote address delivered at ‘Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience Within Pandemics,’ Caribbean Equality Project (CEP), June 24, 2021
By Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent is Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021). He is also translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. His hybrid memoir, Antiman (Restless Books 2021), received the 2019 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal. Find him at www.rajivmohabir.com @rajivmohabir
Good evening everyone. I’d like to begin with a word of gratitude for CEP and to Mohamad Amin and all of the organizers, for their tireless commitment to furthering the health and longevity of the queer Caribbean community in New York. From their 2021 COVID-19 Mutual Aid program to their rallying to protect queer and trans asylum seekers, this organization has been doing the work to dignify and uplift those of us who find ourselves in constant struggle to be seen and heard in New York and indeed across the United States.
The theme of this year’s benefit is Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics. Tonight I will share with you some of the questions that I find myself puzzling over as we begin to wake from the haze of languishing in lockdowns and as the vaccination roll out is now making it possible for us to slowly come together again and share physical and psychic space again. I don’t have any answers about what this all means, and my realizations are those that I’ve learned to feel through my own body, made up of ancestral memory and muscle memory of times I’ve had my dignity challenged in the past and what I’ve done to emerge from disaster with my eyes turned towards joy.
As I think about survival in this time of worldwide tragedy and loss, it is not lost on me how it was Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities that faced a higher state of suffering and death due to the governments failing us again. What strength I draw from my situation where my entire world shifted into a state of alienated remoteness, was what I could imagine through the world of writing and reading; reflection and remembering the connections between all things—the connections between the forced migration of people, encounters with the Other, the disruption of colonization, and our current state of living past post-colonial fallout. Are these things connected? Every slightest bit of my affective reservoir: all of the pinprick hauntings of events, of every time the word antiman or Coolie have been hurled at me or my family, those hauntings of fierce bigotry that cause my hair to stand on end, say yes. They are all connected.
I am currently living outside of Boston in Massachusetts, in a town called Malden. What I have been writing about has been through fevered journals: the ways in which the United States perpetrates settler violence; how Massachusetts and the Caribbean have been in conversation around the forced migrations of African descended people to Barbados and the imprisonment of the Wabenaki and Pawtucket people of Massachusetts and their forced relocation to the Caribbean. I am trying to name the strands of historical and personal hauntings that informed my anxieties from March of 2020 — a March that feels like years ago. The Department of the Interior attempted to disband the Mashpee Reservation lands while neglecting the BIPOC communities hard hit by COVID. What about queer organizing and community work in the face of this ongoing violence? As I’ve said, I have no answers, only questions that I present to you to illustrate how these traumas, living side by side, have been profoundly disorganizing for me.
From wondering about the linkages between this pandemic, the roots of our inheritances, to the very damning of a people robbed of human dignities, I have returned to the idea that survival is who we Caribbean queers are. We suffered under legislation that has made our bodies, our desires, our unique ways of loving, criminal. We come from a long line of people who endured as seeds carried from foreign to where we are today. My own Guyanese family has four continents in our history: Asia, South America, Europe, and North America. Yet these lessons cause me to wonder about the homophobic hauntings that have taken root in my family, causing pain and rupture. Being a queer in my family has not been an easy thing. Being told that I am an abomination and deserve to be shunned has deeply affected the core of me. The time I was attacked in Union Square in New York also haunts me. This pain is evident in the homophobia of our community as well. From Guyana’s Criminal Law (Offences) Act and the maintenance of the colonial laws, to our carrying these hatreds in our suitcases like achaar into the United States, this poison seeps into our homes. This bigotry once hurt a friend dear to me: Zaman Amin who was brutally attacked outside of a club on Liberty Avenue, which just this past May was co-named Little Guyana Avenue to reflect the significance of Guyanese (particularly Indo-Guyanese) migration to this part of Queens, New York. Ironic the name, Liberty Avenue, where our rights to live as Guyanese and Caribbean queers are called into question.
And Zaman’s spark was not tamped down, but raged on through the fierce spirit of activism. When I left New York City to pursue my PhD in Honolulu, the last thing that I did in the city was to attend a rally to bring attention and to seek justice for this attack in Richmond Hill. What moved me was to see the endurance of Zaman through their persona, Sundari the Indian Goddess, who performed with a vigor that bore testament to radical, queer, paradigm shattering joy. I was moved by all of the people who came out to show support for our sibling. She has been a source of inspiration for me as she dances in public with a ferocity that won’t be quelled, with a face that won’t be ignored. In fact for me Sundari represents the opposite of the silencing hand of the cisgender heteropatriarchy and I think of how much I admire her for her strength and just how her truth serves as a torch to light small fires for us along the dark road of ignorance and deadly violences we encounter.
But this was not always the case and the idea of resilience can be damaging to many. We are not supposed to endure. Shouldn’t our elders and communities lift us all up as we attempt to survive in this new country? Its costs drain us emotionally and psychically and scar us in ways that we will have to process for our lifetimes if we are privileged enough to find moments of respite and community. As a queer I have lived through being cast out of my family — of a losing of my kin that I suffered greatly from. It felt as though I lost my kin, my clan…it felt like I lost the only way I knew how to be in the world. I felt alone and fractured and did not in fact feel resilient. I write about this more fully in my memoir: Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, published this year with Restless Books, about how I survived the trauma of being cast out for being what my family called an antiman. I say this word and I know its violence. I hear its shriek. It makes my stomach turn.
I hear it also as a question, a word that I can fully embrace to show a queerness that comes from Guyana, that has travelled across into Britishness, that has lived in the United States and in fact, points to a queerness that allows for the complexities: the concavities and convexities of our migration stories and ethnic heritages. Can I reclaim this word and marvel at the fact that it means that I am categorically against man or men? Can I be so brazen as to say that this word predicted that I would turn against the cisgender heteropatriarchy by being ANTI man? As I think through the devastation of this word, I love all of its avatars: ante-man, aunty-man, anti-man, and of course ant-y-man (a man with the power of an ant, an insect that is remarkably strong for its proportions).
I remember that telling my Aji about the deepest part of myself, my love of another man, felt so outside of the realm of possibility — that I would rather die than admit to her that there was a cock in the fowl house. I imagined a world where I would be safe from the truth: that I could have a split life where there was an outside Rajiv and an inside Rajiv. As though I could only ever be only half a person at any one time — the other half of me hiding in shadow. In editing and rewriting this memoir in the time of the pandemic, I was able to see my story in a different perspective — from a glance where I already knew the outcome: that my Aji would have a reaction completely different from what I imagined. Her grace and acceptance were unparalleled in my family.
And now, as the world opens its arms once more, as NYC opens itself up through vaccination, I find myself back in the city where I learned to be whole, the very place I relearned how to be West Indian but this time without my Guyanese family that lived in Queens. I want to celebrate the broken sidewalks of Richmond Hill and Ozone Park where I saw metaphors for my own survival: bora growing wildly in gardens, backyard parties where queers danced with queers to Soca and Chutney. To Sundari. To all antiman kind. To kissing a boyfriend. To Babla and Kanchan at a Chutney Pride event. I want to praise the poetry of our elders with gold teeth. I want to praise the J and E trains of Jamaica, Queens. I want to do this because every celebration is a celebration of now. I don’t want to put off my life any more, but wish to live wholly. If this whole pandemic taught me anything it was that life is now. That the time to sway with joy is this very instant.
So I say to you all to celebrate the very magic that cast us into bodies: to that very music that beats within us. We don’t have to wait for a time when we will all be “equal” in the eyes of the law. That day is not here now. We are here now with our queernesses, our kinks, our desires, and our Sundaris. Look around you for the things that will help you to keep going, to keep crossing despite the government’s need to destitute us in America, despite being unwanted in our own Caribbean countries. We are forging a new bravery, built through our disjointed and fissures, that is infinitely fertile.
The things that I have learned about my own resilience during the pandemic was that I am stronger when I have others around me, we are stronger together — even through video conferencing. We find new ways to meaningfully connect to one another. In some ways this was the least alone I’ve ever felt. In some ways…. I realized that I need people. That I need to more deliberately celebrate joy. That being Caribbean means that we are a people forged through destitution and colonization and that we are galvanized twice over — made stronger by all of the constituent elements that bring us our beauty and sturdiness. I have learned that yes, I am queer, an antiman and this is my strength. This is our Brown and Black power, a force that when untied can never be torn down no matter how many bottles they smash on our heads. That we will be there to hold one another. Remember we are the children of adventurers and survivors. We have reclaimed our humanity when it was stripped away. We are adaptable and we are goddam beautiful magic.
