Collaborative poetics

An Interview by Alina Stefanescu with Rushi Vyas and Rajiv Mohabir

How can poetry itself be a space of translation? Our guest interviewer Alina Stefanescu explores this question and others in her poignant conversation with Rajiv Mohabir and Rushi Vyas, co-poets of a new chapbook Between Us, Not Half A Saint (GASHER, May 2021). In a time when we’re looking closely at ourselves and our communities, their chapbook suggests how we might confront discomfort with friendships and poetry like prayers.

ALINA STEFANESCU: I spoke to Rajiv Mohabir and Rushi Vyas via email this month about their new chapbook, Between Us, Not Half A Saint. The book itself has been called "an urgent response to virulent, oppressive conservatism, an answer to the rhetorical question: what can writing do in the face of fascism?" At a time when poetry's role remains critical and influential in asking difficult questions, I think it is inspiring to see how community-building occurs on (and across) the page…

STEFANESCU: You both recently collaborated on a chapbook, Between Us, Not Half A Saint, that uses poetry as a space of translation, where the focus seems to be on translating "imaginations into narratives we can experience." I kept thinking of the distance between your countries of origin and the places you live, and how the process of bridging these spaces is part of your creative collaboration. Your biographies, for me as a reader, feel like a loose soil from which this text emerged. Tell me more about your backgrounds, how you define yourselves, which hyphens apply, or don't.

RUSHI VYAS: I think Rajiv and I wanted to play with how different our brownness actually is. While we both might be read as Indian-American or South Asian-American, our ancestral histories are so so different. In terms of both migratory paths and intersections of caste, place, language, and familial upbringing, we have arrived to the present moment from completely different places. My mother taught me these Sanskrit slokas growing up. She taught me that it was part of my inheritance as a “brahmin.” And while she has grown more critical of the caste system in recent years, as an immigrant to the US with an accent who was often shunned by second generation Indian Americans, her cultural inheritance, which included brahminical traditions around spirituality, served as a tether in the foreign lands of Ohio. This is very different from Rajiv’s path into the very same mantras. In our friendship, we had talked about this shared spiritual appreciation despite our divergent paths. We also both struggle with the political inheritances associated with caste. I’m not sure how I define myself. I do wish for a time where we all are not bound by identity markers. While I’m not proud of my brahmin lineage or cis-maleness, I have to acknowledge that those markers and what they represent are part of what has shaped me and the opportunities I have had. Identity for me is difficult. Growing up comparing myself to whiteness, part of my work as an adult has been coming to confidently accept my brownness as beautiful, and embracing some of the cultural inheritances from India such as the spiritual worldview imparted by my mother. The other half of that is grappling with the legacies of patriarchy, caste hierarchies, and remainders of colonialism that shaped my thought. I’m less concerned about the hyphens by which someone defines me, than by making sure I work to better understand how those hyphens shape my position in the world, and the subsequent responsibility that comes with that.

RAJIV MOHABIR: What I like about poetry is that it can provide a space where the importance of categories are loosened through space (either through lineation or the discursive space of the page). In poem categories and type-ness matter, of course, but we can transmute and sublimate them, thinking instead of the process of categorization as its own potential complete system. I think about my connections to my parents’ country of origin (Guyana) as well as our tenuous and almost imaginary connection to India--where our religion and languages started from.

As Rushi says, I am South Asian American but also Caribbean but also Indo-Caribbean American (and British) with foreparents who once spoke Tamil, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Urdu, and Punjabi. How I identify changes with whom I address. Sometimes I’m Guyanese. Sometimes I’m Indian. Both of these are really about migration and are short answers to the longer answer. In these cultural markers are queernesses. There is no Croydon. There is no Chuluota. Are these the literal hyphens in the hyphenated terms--ellisions for simplicity? Translation is my first nature. My coming to Sanskrit mantras is fraught given my own caste and religion story--being from a mix of people and prayers.

Rushi and I decided to put to resonance and discord our thinking through the prayerful, the sonic, and the poem--all of which are routed through our experiences and identities. There is no one universal South Asian American voice/poetic. What would happen, we wondered, if together we puzzled together the current concerns of an India and Indianness that we needed to speak out against.

STEFANESCU: Rushi, your comments about coming to terms with legacy and identity struck me, particularly the challenges of caste. When visiting India back in the early 2000's (the BJP had just ascended to power), I was surprised by caste's enduring significance, surprised by its resilience among my father's engineering friends, whose liberalism didn't prevent them from internalizing a meritocracy hallowed by birthright and genealogy, and I admire so much that you bring this to the table and grapple with its complexity.  And Rajiv, when you said "How I identify changes with whom I address," I thought immediately of how different audiences expect different valences and keynotes from identity, and how being multiply-identifiable sometimes comes across as a form of disloyalty: this pressure to have a singled allegiance, an easily-legible selfhood. You both seem to meet in the desire to imagine a livable "Indianness," and the chapbook sets out to do so by combining so many currents, myths, cultural markers, and histories. How did it start? Which character or piece of Sanskrit? What was the seed of mutual fascination?

VYAS: I don’t know that I can trace a specific moment that started this. Really, it might have been the start of our friendship. I think it was AWP 2017 in D.C. when I walked by a stage while Rajiv was reading. “They [hindi songs] will clink like ice in your glass of rum,” I heard Rajiv read this line and I stopped mid-stride to listen to the rest of his reading. While in my mind, I translated rum to the Johnnie Walker Red that Uncles in my community often drink, I felt in Rajiv’s poetry this ambivalence and complexity to cultural inheritance. I was in an MFA, and having never studied poetry before graduate school, I had yet to encounter the work of many other poets tied to South Asian diasporas. I approached Rajiv then, and he kindly invited me to share lunch. I think that lunch is where we first sowed the seeds for this project. We talked about difficulties we both experienced within our families, particularly the heaviness of patriarchy. We shared our interest in meditative practices and our struggles with the institutions around Indian spiritual practices. Fast forward a few years, and our friendship had grown through the occasional shared drink or lengthy phone conversation about poetry. I had just moved to Aotearoa New Zealand in the latter half of 2019, and Rajiv had moved to Boston. After reading Kenji Liu’s The Monsters I Have Been, I thought about how interesting it would be to read a book where multiple poets engaged with the same formal constraints and source texts. How different would the resulting poetry be? Rajiv and I started to share potential mantras we could use as the basis for formal constraints and realized we had quite a bit of overlap. Again, what the mantras meant to us personally or how we used them was quite different. But the syllables themselves, the music, was common. And maybe it’s that shared love of music that is the seed. I’ve always loved the rich sonic texture of Rajiv’s poetry, and I think he admires the different music in mine. I was thrilled at his excitement over the proposed project. And our mutual energy led to a relatively quick process, waking up excited to read what the other had written on the opposite side of the globe.

MOHABIR: I like what Rushi says about how our collaboration actually began in 2016. It’s so true. We started off talking about sound and form and are still having this conversation. The shift to the page was just one of the ways that we stage our interventions both poetically and politically. The process for me was like Rushi describes: excitement at reading the other’s words. I really admire the way Rushi can bend sound at the line level and make the poem feel effortless, with a depth that blooms after sitting with each utterance. His poems read like prayers. When the chapbook was finally put together we removed our names from the individual poems because the who-ness did not feel as important to the book itself.

I like what you say, Alina, about how the poet lives in various worlds and the expectation on the poet is to produce what is legible. I like to think of my own allegiances to the world of poetry and writing as a dhobi ka kutta--the washer-person’s god: it doesn’t live on the steps that lead down to the river, nor does it live in anyone’s home.

I think I expected Rushi and I to have many conversations at once, and I expect the reader to pick up what they can. This chapbook is faceted that when looking from various angles and/or life experiences different things occur/emit/emote. If you are Caribbean you can understand the alienation to Sanskritic brahminnical culture differently than would a South Asian Hindu person in the United States or even let’s say a Muslim or Christian South Asian non-Hindu person in Britain. It’s just this: South Asia/India/Hinduism is not just one thing. You can be a full on atheist and still belong to a Hindu philosophical tradition; the poets Kabir and Ravidas were devotional poets who did not believe in caste and religious distinctions. It’s diasporic alienation from prayer and “the right way to pray” (which always meant to be straight, upper casted, India-Indian) that drew me to thinking of how to use the tools of the Hindu right to speak back. I am also a fool for formal experimentation and sound.

STEFANESCU: What a gorgeous way to begin, to meet in sound, to harness the echoes and layers of origins in order to queer the inheritance . . . There is something deeply hopeful and optimistic about this project: a sense in which it refuses a teleological direction by making time coterminous, or layered. There isn't an end-times feel to Between Us, and I value the subversion of apocalypse as a catastrophic end-state, as something humanity can't move beyond. I value the beyond-ness of this book, and it seems to carve out a new kind of collaborative devotional poetics (particularly the mantras, formal constraints, and spiritual meeting points). Would you consider yourselves as writers of devotional poetry or hybrids? Why or why not?

VYAS: Thank you for your words and reading of the “beyond-ness” within the book. I haven’t put much thought into the idea of being a writer of “devotional” poetry. But I do think Rajiv and I are both drawn toward poets in the Bhakti tradition from South Asia, particularly those who were radically against social discrimination whether related to gender, religion or caste. And there, Rajiv is much more educated than me. In fact, he translates devotional poems such as those by Kabir. There was one poem by the twelfth-century poet Basavanna that we talked about several times after Rajiv brought my attention to it. The poem captures the feeling of seeing God in everything from a pot, to a comb, to other people. In fact, Rajiv quoted an excerpt from A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of the poem at the end of our book: “Gods, gods there are so many / there’s no place left / for a foot.” For me, while I am drawn to devotional poetry such as this, I don’t set out to write devotional poetry. But that has to do with the fact that I am grappling with my own caste inheritance. I don’t think it’s too interesting for another person of brahmin descent to be using devotion as a shield from confronting the systemic and material inadequacies in the world. That was me in my early twenties, when I first started deepening my practice of meditation and study of Indian and Shaivaite texts. It has taken me years of listening to friends who are smarter than me to come to grips with the fact that “mindfulness” is no panacea. Yes, I still have a strong spiritual practice. I still strive to be able to see the world in the way Basavanna describes—to see Shiva in everyone and everything. But I feel a responsibility to center my life around a practice of deep listening—hence the importance of the source texts in our manuscript. I guess I’m not really too concerned with labels for what type of poetry this is. I’m content to leave that to other people to decide. Maybe this is a devotional poetry that insists on the material/spiritual reality of political circumstances. Maybe this is a hybrid poetics between something devotional, something conceptual, and collaborative. I don’t know.

MOHABIR: I think that the idea of a mantra actually works toward the dogmatic sense of religion: those prescribed rituals and prayers that actually (for me personally) counter the spiritual experience. This is a very me thing--the fear of religious dogma. It’s of course based in history and the psychic baggage these mantras and ritual recitation have for me: things that I love and are problematic--both deeply. Rushi articulates this ambivalence that I share. When people ask me about what prayer and devotion are, I say that for me the act of writing poetry is a form of devotion in that it requires concentration and the releasing of ego--or at least that part of the self that seeks control to reveal the realization of the Self. I am so very much drawn to bhakti poetry in both North and South Indian articulations as well as the Sufi poetry of South Asia. The rigor of zikr, the movement of the body, the silencing of idle chatter. Very different worldviews practiced in the same place. To be honest there were five years where all the poems that I wrote had some kind of spiritual gravitas that they steered me into. I have been thinking about putting these (I’m calling the “praise poems”) together sometime. For Between Us, I would say our devotion was to contest bigotry, and this is perhaps the most important devotion I can think of given our relative privileges and positions.

STEFANESCU: Just noting the power of your words, Rushi: "It has taken me years of listening to friends who are smarter than me to come to grips with the fact that “mindfulness” is no panacea." And the relationship between openness, wonder, and humility: the poetry. Did any movies or music exist in the background of your correspondence and writings?

VYAS: Birdsong! That’s for sure. A few times when Rajiv and I have talked over FaceTime he could hear the birdsong. A few times I sent him videos. I think part of moving to a place with a totally different flora/fauna in Aotearoa is that I have taken notice of the birds much more here. The Tūī makes sounds I never knew birds can make. They will mime the calls of other birds, but then layer that melody with scratches and squeaks and trills. It is beautiful. There has been some scholarship done I think on the relationship between birdsong and mantra, but I admittedly have not dug into that yet. Other than birdsong, we did have some conversations about different songs, often recommendations from Rajiv so I’ll let him speak more to them. But the last two “rounds” of our collaboration looked to language from poems that are most commonly sung in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Ham Dekhenge” and the ghazal “Khuda humko aisi khudai na de”. I consider myself so lucky to have been able to collaborate with someone who pulls all these beautiful songs and pieces of art into our conversation!

MOHABIR: I love so much the birdsong aspect of this chapbook! I’m so glad Rushi is the listener to nature that he is. I find it quite moving that he is able to maintain the silence and calm required to have these enter the poems as they do. If I remember part of our conversation was based on the fact that the earliest known mantras were actually not in human words but in human-voiced echoes of birds singing. Can you imagine, Rushi, that our poems, charged as they are with forest fire, are descendants of those ancient birds? Damn. Talk about a soundtrack to our chapbook!

 The song recommendations were definitely spots where I still find mountains of poetic value. Poetry and music are so inherently linked in South Asian cultures and I find that aspect of my genealogical inheritance still emerging in my own writing. My first studies in poetry were routed through instruments and performance. They can change the world as they carry ideas from thinkers and dreams, inspiring readers and listeners into action. In this way the actual music that we used in collaboration was just the tip of so much more that undergird our poetic transmissions and poems. Consider even the ghazal form: its collaborative and aural as well as written. This profound history is dammed by English letters that imagine it decontextualized and with its own genealogy.