A Review of Rajiv Mohabir's Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, by Shankar Narayan
Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir
by Rajiv Mohabir
Memoir, ISBN 978-1-6320628-0-2,
Winner of Restless Book Prize for Immigrant Writing
Restless Books, 232 3rd Street, Suite A101
Brooklyn, NY 11215
2021, Hardcover, 352 pages, $27.00
In 1885, a man is taken from a tiny village near Barabanki in what is now the Indian state of Bihar to board a steamship, indentured by the British East India Company to work the sugar plantations in Guyana on the unimaginably distant continent of South America. Over a century later, that man’s queer great-grandson—raised in intolerant Florida by a father who has vehemently disavowed his own heritage, religion, and language in hopes of more favorable treatment in the U.S.—returns to India, seeking out the roots of his grandmother’s Caribbean Bhojpuri songs amidst a tangled web of colonialism and racism, homophobia and casteism, assimilation and the myths that survive it. That search is a seminal episode in his lifelong quest for identity and belonging—one that sees him find community and resilience through the work of the journey itself.
Each chapter, echoing with parables drawn from Hindu mythology, weaves a new thread into the tapestry of what it is to find one’s place in a diaspora and an empire that routinely practices erasure—of cultures, languages, and human beings
Uncovering hidden histories and languages buried in the rubble of colonialism is just one of the many wonders of Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, Rajiv Mohabir’s new memoir, which, like its author, is a beautifully hybrid creation that defies convention and categorization. Through interwoven language that’s part poetry and part prose, part witness and part myth, we are invited into Mohabir’s journey—fleeing the racism and homophobia of semi-rural Florida, studying Hindi and searching for roots in Varanasi and Bihar, teaching Latinx students in New York City while seeking connection with South Asian progressives and queers. Each chapter, echoing with parables drawn from Hindu mythology, weaves a new thread into the tapestry of what it is to find one’s place in a diaspora and an empire that routinely practices erasure—of cultures, languages, and human beings. There is no guidebook, and nothing comes easy.
Like the best memoirs, Mohabir’s tells us as much about ourselves as it does about him, inviting us to turn the mirror inward and find resonances of our own lives with his. We step forward or backward with him—cheering Mohabir’s emerging voice as a creative and activist, agonizing with his struggles over his own worthiness to be loved. This is a book of becomings—adult, artist, activist, out queer, Guyanese, South Asian. It’s also a book of intersectional traumas that hurt to read. Mohabir being unwillingly outed to his conservative family by a trusted cousin, resulting in excommunication. Mohabir conflictedly perpetuating an oppressive caste system by concealing his bloodlines. The derision and isolation of Mohabir’s Aji (grandmother), the last speaker of Caribbean Bhojpuri in his family, even as Mohabir tries to learn and preserve her songs for posterity. And it is a book of celebrations—of weathering that matrix of traumas to move closer to identity, belonging, and voice; of the power of art to save lives.
I’ll admit my bias here—Mohabir’s work is far from new to me, and I’ve long known his voice to hold special resonance. Mohabir’s poetry collections, with their interweavings of language, theology, mythology, sexuality, identity, and ecology, spoke strongly to me when I first came across them—I remember thinking he was the first writer whose poems felt to me as though I’d written them myself. This was at least in part because I’m what might be called a 50-50 immigrant, one with equal footing (or lack thereof) in the new country and the old. As an Indian who grew up around the world and came to the U.S. as an adult, I began to navigate the complex politics of our diaspora, with its many onionskins of othering, as one of the few South Asians in Lewiston, Maine. I recall my bewilderment at meeting assimilated South Asian Americans, struggling to understand their evident distaste for Hinduism and Indianness—while at the same time modifying my own name in an effort to fit in, as Mohabir himself did.
In unexpected ways, Mohabir’s and my wildly divergent upbringings—his in an intolerant Florida town, mine in farflung global cities—converge through experiences of always being the other in those places. I recognized Mohabir’s experiences of failing to fit in with other South Asians either in the U.S. or in India, of fronting and covering, of wandering through lovers and communities, all the while struggling to find the right cut of diaspora to call home—sometimes in the same South Asian progressive spaces I myself have touched. And his narrative shines light on an uncomfortable truth—I myself, with many others, have perpetuated those very systems of othering and exclusion within the diaspora, just as Mohabir himself did, with all the same self-disgust in tow.
Of course, there are limits to those resonances—I never had to contend with being gay in a conservative South Asian family in Florida, and Mohabir’s narrative of self-hatred, exclusion, and loneliness while seeking home in his lovers’ unstable embraces is a shattering one. The body itself is fundamental to the immigrant and diaspora narrative—which bodies were taken where, where which bodies have the right to exist now, and with what agency and freedom. Mohabir’s experience of the body as a locus of belonging or exclusion, like mine, begins with his own lovers before expanding to external spaces (for example, the Caribbean and South Asian communities in Queens). This is a story told in sweat and semen, expressed and suppressed desires, trysts in clubs and apartments, betrayals and moments of succor. And even as those relationships encompass rejection, abuse, and violence, they reveal fundamental truths—the ways broken expectations of love and kinship can themselves be a pathway to finding one’s people.
Mohabir’s absolute and unflinching honesty—even through intense vulnerability, even when turning the mirror inward on less-than-proud moments and motivations—drives the book forward through its disparate phases. It would have been easy enough to make this a narrative of victimization—but in Mohabir’s telling, his considerable pain and struggle stand more as a witnessing, and one critical to the ultimate transformation of the protagonist. Branded antiman—a derogatory term for gay men—by his own family, Mohabir appropriates the term as tool of self-empowerment. And he fights back through reclaimed mythology, reinventing himself as Prahlad—the boy devotee saved from the persecutions of his father by Narasimha, Vishnu incarnated as man-lion, who burst from a broken pillar to disembowel the cruel king.
Working in concert with its narrative, the construction of the book itself is a joy—an interweaving of languages, forms, and myths. It’s telling that Mohabir’s initial dive into his roots is driven by the ridiculing of his grandmother’s Caribbean Bhojpuri as “broken Hindi.” In a pushback against this language othering, the book presents its non-English languages—Guyanese Bhojpuri and Guyanese Creole—as an integral part of its tapestry. Both languages enthrall—the Bhojpuri with its evocations of Kabir Das and other great bhakti poets, yet with new hues acquired in its long evolution in the Caribbean; in direct conversation with the Creole, with its less-familiar yet enchanting cadences. Mohabir frequently presents these languages without direct translation, a decision that quietly gains ground for equity in itself. How many multilingual writers, myself included, have been told to make their work “more accessible”—meaning modify it to allow a majority-white audience to remain in their comfort zone? Mohabir’s always-engaging poetic passages, together with his progressive interpretations of Hindu mythology and theology—sorely needed given the current weaponization of intolerant Hinduism—complete the heady mix, giving me the sense of a memoir written in a language tailor-made for me.
The Upanishads—a foundational Hindu text—speak of the search for Self as follows:
He who sees
all beings in the Self
and the Self in all beings
no longer hides in fear.
(Isha Upanishad 6, trans. Katz and Egenes)
Mohabir’s truths are many, but ultimately, they too, reflect this truth about finding the Self, which transforms into a vehicle for becoming visible and shedding fear. His journey has been different from mine in important ways, but the many echoes of our respective journeys through the diaspora we share are unmistakable. I now better understand the reasons why his voice speaks to me so directly. And for that, and all the other small miracles of this book, I am deeply grateful.
Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, Jack Straw, Flyway, and River Heron. He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards From the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work at the intersection of civil rights and technology. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi. Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net.