Produced by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Source is a poetry podcast miniseries hosted by Divya Victor and Ashna Ali featuring conversations with five poets who discuss one of their poems and the story—and source—of its creation. 

Ashna Ali (AA): Alrighty, we are so excited to have Rajiv Mohabir with us. 

Rajiv Mohabir is a poet, author, translator, and educator, and if you don’t mind my stating the obvious, a queer poetry icon born in London, England, to Guyanese parents. He grew up in New York City and in the greater Orlando area in Florida. He is the author of the poetry books The Taxidermist’s Cut from Four Way Books, which was a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry; The Cowherd’s Son from Tupelo Press, which won the 2015 Kundiman Prize; and Cutlish from Four Way Books in 2021, which was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. 

In short, Rajiv has been nominated or awarded a major accolade for every single one of his books of poetry. And these are only a handful of the long list of awards, prizes, and well-earned forms of recognition for the indelible mark he’s made on American and global poetics. His work has been wildly influential for queer postcolonial poets of the Global South everywhere. And I am personally, deeply honored to have him with us here today as our guest. 

Divya Victor (DV): Thank you, Ashna. 

Absolutely an honor to have Rajiv here. And we’re gathering around a poem by Rajiv Mohabir titled “Immigrant Aria.” An aria is a long, complex song, sung solo. Its melodic vehicle carries an equally long, complex emotional arc in an opera, or oratorio. Unlike the recitative, which carries what we might think of as narrative plot and information, arias are the life breath of a story made of the very air that we need as mammals and subjects of history to live. 

In this way, the aria’s source is internal, the air in the lungs emerging through the throat, and external, the environment that is changed by our song and breath. Rajiv’s “Immigrant Aria” transposes this musical form into a poem to sing the story of long immigrant history in the coastal Caribbean inspired by the poet’s own history as a Guyanese subject and thus someone whose identity is informed by successive waves of colonization by the French, the Dutch, and the British. 

The poem imagines immigrants, and before them indentured laborers, and before them enslaved peoples as both mythical and living creatures, as dragons and whales, as prototypical Calibans, and undocumented workers. It considers how naming and devastating taxonomies have reduced and sequestered them into something other than human. 

Yet, in this poem, these figures move fluidly along a spectrum of identities, across the lines of species and origin myths to, we think, reclaim something of the power of transspecies identification. The poem challenges many Western frames of knowing one’s origin, like the story of Adam and Eve embedded in Genesis. It resituates us, or, you might say it migrates us into a different origin myth, or one of many origin myths, situated in Hindu mythology, where demons, the asuras, and gods, the devas, are said to have churned an ocean of milk to create the universe. In this churning together, they participate in an eternal struggle between destructive and creative forces. And it is into this churn that I feel Rajiv has invited us to the soundtrack of an aria. So I invite Rajiv now to introduce this poem to us.

Rajiv Mohabir (RM): Thank you both so much! Getting emotional over here, crying on camera [laughs], right before I talk about this poem. Thank you for your words. What a blessing it is. In relationship to this poem, I feel as though I am the singer itself, or their self, which is both a deeply nonhuman animal, as well as a human animal. This poem was born in response to many different portions of colonial history in the era of Indian indenture, which lasted from 1838 to 1917 officially, but actually began in the early 1800s and lasted till maybe about 1920 according to some scholars. 

During that portion of time, also, was the height of the international whaling industry that fueled empire’s growth. There was something to be said about brown and dark bodies migrating across oceans teaching each other folk songs that I responded to. This poem “Immigrant Aria” is based on the mathematical structure of the humpback whale song as decoded by several scientists and bio acousticians in the early 2000s. 

After the discovery, or the human realizing, that humpback whales sing out in patterns with very particular…let’s call them poetic devices, in order to keep their songs and their histories. I thought about what it meant for me to be an immigrant to the United States facing the neocolonial pressures from global trade that originally brought my ancestors to the Caribbean. 

So, I will read the poem for you now. And it begins with an epigraph by D. H. Lawrence called “Whales Weep Not.”

Immigrant Aria

there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!

—D. H. Lawrence

To swallow new names like krill, dive.
You have few tides before you
return to motion. Once this shrine

was the abyssal plain. Once Empire
shackled you. Once you answered
to monster, to dragon, spewing steam, fire

bellowing in the furnace of your hide,
a migrant captured for brown skin’s
labor. Somewhere inside the darkness

where brews flame, a spirit hovers
over the deep. Once before Adam named
you illegal you snaked, breaking

into air. Spit out his poison, jaw-clap
the swell. With your aft-fin’s trailing edge
churn surface to milk. In the beginning,

you were formed with great light.

DV: Thank you very much, Rajiv. 

“In the beginning, you were formed with great light.” Of course, this program is called The Source, so let’s return to the source, the origin, the beginnings. Could you set that origin scene for this poem, set the scene for the writing, the labor, the effort of this poem for you? How did it begin? Where were you? What was the weather? What was on your mind?

RM: Yes, thank you for this. 

I was living in Hawaii. I was living in a town called the Niu Valley, N-I-U, as in the Hawaiian word for coconut. So I was living in this coconut valley, in this studio apartment, maybe five hundred square feet overlooking Paiko Lagoon. Really beautiful place to be while considering the overlapping histories of colonization. You know, Hawaii, where it was also considered to be the whaling capital of the world. Like Nantucket, Lahaina in Maui was particularly the place. So this engagement for me was, you know, one that was, like, largely aquatic, as being underwater hearing the whale songs kind of like, enliven the parts of my body I wasn’t actively feeling. How would I find myself in a place like Hawaii, that is currently occupied by the United States government, as somebody who is brown with a kind of colonial presence, a settler colonial presence, with my own postcolonial history? 

I thought of all of the things that I had been called in life. You know, like, learning the fact that when we migrated to the United States, we didn’t have the correct papers. Right and so my family were illegal immigrants, which is kind of silly because like, is it the Asian Dub Foundation? Who is like, people can’t be illegal, it’s governments that are illegal? And so you know, speaking of the early 2000s This was also like swirling in my head, but then also thinking about legality. The United States is occupying Hawaii, and there is like, a legal-ness to that occupation, right? Which is against the principles of equality, and the United Nations, but what are the United Nations, these days anyway, as we see with Gaza and Palestine in general. And so there’s this idea of, even though you have this postcolonial history—I have this postcolonial history—what does it mean then, to represent the state of the United States in the occupied place of Hawaii as a graduate student? So, as a settler presence there, how can I then consider what it means for me to be in motion in time? 

And one of the things—I say this as maybe a shortcut—where I say, to put postcolonial or occupied identities in resonance with others, is a work that is deeply spiritual. And so these are all of the things that I was holding in my head when I came to write this poem. One of the great joys in life for me is that I have found that sometimes writing in form can be the engine that drives the poem. Which is something that, like, you know, as a young poet, I was like, no, formal constraints are so colonial, only white poets should do that. And then, I  spent eight months writing only in iambic pentameter, and it trained my ear into thinking about sound. And then I looked around and I was like, actually, how can it only be for white poets that, you know, these constraints happen? 

When, you know Marcia Southwick in her articles about bird song, as well as Rebecca Giggs, in her book Fathoms: The World in the Whale, I think that’s what the subtitle is. They talk about the formal constraints of animal song, and how animals are also performing for one another with these constraints. And so having all of this kind of swirl around was the formal and content ketchup packets let’s say, for the fries that emerge. 

But I’m obsessed with origin stories. I love “In the beginning,” whether it’s the book of Genesis, whether it’s like Vishnu Katha, whether it’s like the Quran, I love the beginnings of life. In so many ways, with every poem, we are summoning something out of, you know, the primordial ooze, to even use like evolutionary biological terms, calling out the dry land from the ocean as the beginning of a poem, and I like it. People say this all the time: you don’t really know where the poem is going, you don’t know where the poem is going. And I really do feel like the compass for writing in these particular forms. The compass for writing in these particular forms for me, actually has been the unknown, the Uncharted. Where does the music carry the song?

DV: I’m so glad you’re speaking about formal constraints and pleasure together. I’m thinking about how much volition and agency let us sort of turn the shackle into this pleasure zone. Right? I mean, just the sensuality of it as well as really important to register. And origin myths and origin stories are also forms of constraint. They suggest a beginning, and then it’s up to us, the middle and the end. So there is this utopian thrust that comes out of the constraint that I really treasure in what you’re saying.

AA: But I think within those utopian imaginaries there are also challenges. You’ve written a little bit about some of the ethical questions that you were debating when finding this kind of kinship with the humpback whale, which has been identified as a zoomorphic analog for a queer brown migratory speaker. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about the whale. Your relationship with the whale. What the physical and spiritual and poetic connections are, and also where those connections meet their own formal constraints and challenges? And relatedly, why opera?

RM: [Laughs] Yeah. I’m going to start with this kind of, I’m going to unpack it, but I love that last question, and I’m gonna end there for sure. But to begin answering this question, I think that like when it comes to the contemporary ecopoetics scene, there’s a large kind of disambiguation that people are trying to do where we are not exploiting the animal world for human gain. For me, this is like, white construct. I’m sorry, my ancestors were not the ones that were like, out there, murdering whales, and now like, having to be held accountable for this. In fact, there have been many documented cases where in the stories of Indian indenture of South Asian labor diaspora and South Asian indenture, that people thought the arkatias—the recruiters—people thought the recruiters were bringing people to the colonies so that they could decapitate them, and take the oil from their heads and use the oil. That’s exactly what happened to sperm whales. They were caught by colonial engines, decapitated, or like, opened up, and then the oils were taken, shipped all over the world like lighting up all of Europe. 

This concern that I, by writing a poem that tries to play migration into the brown or the racialized body, to me, it feels like it misses the mark. I’m not interested in eco poetry as a practice of aesthetics, because that is fascist, in my opinion. This is like that, that kind of, I mean, strong words, right? I’m a poet. I’m supposed to be really opinionated. 

When I think about my own relationship to the whale, I think about how in my family stories, there are no stories of whales, at all! I mean, there are dolphins and rivers and things like that, but, what is the whale? It’s such a strange thing. But then there are biblical stories, right? The Jonah character being swallowed by the whale because he’s not following the will of God. So God sends this great fish. It’s such a wonderful, beautiful story. I wish God would speak to me like that sometimes, you know what I mean? Like really, I can’t deny that this is the hand of God. What incredible mystery, ancestrally, to encounter the whale. 

There have been these accounts also of sailors, when they were crossing the oceans, would hear, echoed in the halls of their ships, whale song, humpback whale song. And I think about what it means to be in the hull of a ship as like carded cargo, and listening to this music without having any kind of point of reference. How does it inhabit the body? How does it then haunt you? Sea is history, as Derek Walcott says, and I think that for Caribbean folks, the whale is like the symbol of like migration, who doesn’t have these national borders, but also beings that are relatively new to our creation stories. 

All of this is kind of like the background of me growing up in Orlando! One of the joys in my life is that my parents were never really concerned about how dark we would get in the sun. So we would spend summers in the forest and in the rivers and in the lakes and at the ocean. And encountering these whales—It would never be humpbacks. I would see things like pilot whales and all kinds of dolphin species. But then also like, the beauty of going to the beach was the animal that you’ll see. And it’s unexpected and unknown, completely unknown. 

When I was living in New York—fast forward, and here’s where I get really woo-woo—is that I would have these dreams, and in my dreams, there would be whales. Like one whale opened its mouth and I went inside of its mouth, and it closed it, and then we dove deep into the water. And our consciousnesses kind of merged into one, so I was whale, and I was Rajiv. Which was a really moving dream. I woke up and I told one of my one of my dearest friends, Atin Mehra. He’s a filmmaker, documentarian. And he’s like, Rajiv, I have dreams about whales, too. And he’s like, “You and I are whale people,” in that like, you know, these things like haunt us.

People have these wonderful dreams of flying. I’ve never had dreams of flying. My flying dreams are always dreams of being in the ocean, swimming deep and fast. I had this recurring dream where humpback whales would come to me and be like, soon, Rajiv soon. As though my subconscious mind were guiding me, or maybe it was, you know, God speaking—what’s the difference? 

The first time I went to Hawaii was to Maui in 2007, when I was applying to teach ESL in the public school system there. And I happened to go during humpback whale migration season. And I was like, Oh, I didn’t know that the humpbacks actually migrated then and there. And I was like, Oh, this is a big sign for me. I went back to New York and I started planning my life: how am I going to get there, what am I going to be doing? I tried to write poems about whales. I tried to like, have that be enacted for me. It just wasn’t the time. The whale poems were not coming. They were clunky. They were trying to do something else. Maybe they were trying to do too much. Maybe I was forcing them in a way that the whale song and whale beings didn’t enter my consciousness in that moment that’s just right. 

And I’ve been thinking about rightness of time a lot. A friend of mine gave me this deck of tarot cards, The Collective Tarot, have you seen this? Genderqueer, like really activist centered. They gave me this deck maybe like fifteen years ago, and I’ve only started using them now. Because they had to find me. The whales also had to find me. I remember in 2013 when I was accepted to the University of Hawaii to do my doctoral work after my MFA at Queens College. I was in the water. And I was thinking, okay, like, how is this going to happen? I have this idea, is this going to manifest? And, I just knew that it was time. I don’t—it’s like the weirdest thing. My body, my mind, my spirit was all saying, okay. I was at Diamondhead, this particular beach and I crawled up out of the ocean. And, I started to write a whale poem. I began a poem that would be the blueprint of how the poems would come up. 

These three different things that I had in consideration: it was queer studies, or queer theory, migration—the history of migration and indenture—and then also the natural history of the humpback. So whenever I would write these poems, I would only aim for two of these like overarching things, so that after I amassed what would be the collection, they would come at this similar subject matter from different positions. And this is like, I would say, part of that constraint that you’re asking about. I had to really challenge myself: okay, how do I then not have all of these poems sound the same? Maybe they do! [Laughs] Maybe they do; in my mind, they don’t. And so that was something that I was really, really interested in. 

To answer the last part of the question about why opera: It’s so dramatic to say, but I was like, trained in singing when I was young. So actually, I sang like Italian arias and stuff like that, once upon a time. Talking about origin and origin stories. The previous book was obsessed with Chutney music, like the music from the Caribbean. That was like my home music, the music that I like, became like human into. The aria was something that I was trained in. There’s kind of like a remove. My own history with the whale, what that means, feels a little culturally removed. Not that we have to have cultural similarity with everything that we write about. I think that’s kind of anti-exploratory. But all of that to say: there’s such wonder in the Italian aria, the way that they are trilled, and the way that they happen between people on stage, that, to me, feels analogous to the symphonies that happen underwater.

AA: It seems like this exploration that you went through by thinking about constraint in whale song and constraint in poetry and returning to things that were part of your Euro American training, and how to subvert them and rework them so that they are also your inheritance, authentically so, is a really important part of the construction of these poems. And I love that trajectory very much, and I feel like the really beautiful response you just gave is particularly useful for the kinds of conversations that we’re trying to have at The Source, which is: so much about the production of poetry is about a psychospiritual maturity. And sometimes, you’ve just, you know, you sit down and you decide you’re going to write something a particular way, and you are not the person you need to be before you can come to that work. There’s a sort of spiritual patience that, as this book shows, reaps tremendous benefit, if we’re able to sit still and listen. 

DV: I’m enjoying this phrase spiritual patience, because it connects so many things, Rajiv, that you’ve brought up. This idea of, or rather the experience of ancestral mystery, how it arrives to us. And that for me is so connected with the image you gave me of being a child waiting for the unexpected animal to appear at the shore or at the horizon. This aquatic horizon, the story of the whale as a womb in which the dream lets you come to this realization: I was whale, I was Rajiv. 

And that dream space which, in so many traditions, allows us to let divine speech enter us and then become embodied in our organs through the apparatus of our throat and tongue, that permeable membrane for me absolutely echoes and mirrors that permeable membrane between the whale and Rajiv, as well of course. So we’re moving beyond the triangulation of the Divine, the animal and the human. We are entering a new logic, which I think for me feels so much more true to how I’d want to live in this world.

For years, for almost a decade, I used to have dreams of conversing with ghosts, and I would have this I was kind of against the wall, or trapped in a room trying to translate for them and I’d keep trying to get out of the room saying, there are things that need to be said. And I was so full of fear, genuinely, afraid, afraid, afraid, of speaking about these ghosts. And I have to say, I wrote Curb, and those dreams completely stopped. 

RM: Wow. 

DV: I feel like the translation work, the transpositional body that’s taken from one kind of consciousness into another—I had fulfilled that body, for myself and for my community in some way. So Rajiv, thank you so much for speaking about dream spaces as a zone of address, being addressed by ancestral mystery, as well as something divine and beyond our species. 

So I would really like to hear you say more about this, the addressee, the speaker, in this poem, but also in the book in general—who are the speakers? To whom are you speaking? And, as you’re making these decisions about who’s the speaker, do you have a sense of representational responsibility that emerges? Or who you’re speaking as, and so on, as you grapple with point of view, pronoun choices, questions of persona? 

RM: I really love the way that you have articulated the dream space as like that place to be addressed by the unknown, by the ancestors, by spirit. I think that’s also really important and epistemological, the fact that our consciousness that we think of as people who are trained in Western rational thought, are not allowed to incorporate this kind of being in the world and the worlds, in what we do. As poets we have a little bit more space for this because there’s Western precedent, right? I know in my family, like, the dream world is so incredibly important. What my mom dreams is something that’s a topic of regular conversation, where we all take turns, all of her children take turns interpreting what her dream means, and what it means for us, particularly in the day. How could this not be part of the ways in which I imagine poetry existing in the world?  

The Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad once said, to me, in this workshop that we were doing at Vona, Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation, she said: “Humans created God. And then we put poetry in God’s mouth.” So then, for me, the space of poetry has always been like, as you say, this permeable membrane. Kind of like, oh yeah, I’m allowed to bring my whole self into constructing this art that I feel speaks in multiple directions, not just from me to the reader, but also from that dream space, and being addressed by the Divine, by the ancestors, to my corporeal entity. Like how I can feel an idea outside of language before I put it into language.

There were so many things, there are so many things that I cannot articulate about spirit, about the spiritual world, about the way in which that I live as a human being thinking about consciousness, thinking about my own psychology, that poetry allows for that plasticity of meaning. And I’m drawn to it, as though we, as poets, are also, like everyone else—like, I’ll be like, St. Thomas—are the mouthpieces of God. Or have the potential to be that.

So when I think about the speaker and who the speaker is, I used to, as a younger poet and as a younger person, be a little bit more obsessed, I think. “Who is this poem speaking to? Who is going to read this poem? Who is my audience?” And then, I kind of took a couple steps back. And I mean, this sounds really simplistic to say but, if I am my own audience, then I will allow myself the space of poetry to encapsulate everything that makes sense to me spiritually through this idea of spiritual patience, right? We can also call poetry a trace of our passing in this world.

And I think that with that idea of to whom I’m speaking, or as the poem happens, who the audience is, there is this representational responsibility. There are very few—there are exactly two Indo Caribbean poets who are publishing in the United States. A third one has a book that’s coming out, which I’m really excited about. These are Elizabeth Jaikaran, as well as Jessica Nirvana RAM. So these are the other two Indo Caribbean poets who are in the United States that are writing who are coming up. And as someone who’s published before them, I think about: How am I going to clear space for my ethnic community? How am I going to make the American poetry world receptive to voices from this particular diaspora? And so there is a lot of that responsibility and partially with this book, Whale Aria, I wanted to show that a voice like mine, or what people can imagine from my own subject position, could encapsulate more than just cultural critique. It could also be engaging the natural world, it can be engaging, you know, formal constraint that is ecopoetic. 

So there’s this kind of thing that I feel like I’m plagued by and haunted by, and it changes from poem to poem, book to book, the way that I handle this. Because I feel as though the conversation is constantly changing, right? In some ways, Cutlish, where I had developed the form of chutney poem, had performed really well in the American poetry circuit, because I think that’s what people are expecting from a brown body that’s writing. This kind of like, oh, of course, this is cultural. Oh, it’s multilingual. It does this thing. And in some ways, it was a love song. It was a love song to my grandmother that I let people overhear. 

For this book, it’s kind of like a love song to my own obsession. And my engagement with the whale actually is spawning, I think three books. So this is, yeah—the second one is called Sea Beast. I just got a contract for it from Four Way Books, it’s coming out in 2025. And the third one, I call it Whale Lore: A Journal of Return Migration. I was so incredibly lucky to be able to experience human cultures along the North American Pacific Rim, from Hawaii all the way up to Juneau, Alaska, thinking about humpback whale natural history, and the engagements that people have culturally with them in those places. So this is nonfiction, it’s like flash essay, it’s like poetry, it’s also photo essay. So [laughs], Whale Aria is what I carved out from all of this writing that I have about whales. 

So when it comes to the speakers, it’s kind of like, as I wrote the poems, the speakers were myriad. Andil Gosine, a sociologist and artist from New York University, has this book that has just come out, or has come out maybe in the last two years. It’s called Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean, and he talks about how the Caribbean citizen, be they of African, Indian, or Native origin, have always been seen as bastille by empire. So either these people were homosexual oriented—which is like you know, beneath those draconian anti-sodomy laws written by King Henry the Eighth that were imposed on the colonies—or they’re super homophobic. Now, like the Caribbean subject is super homophobic. Because now, it’s become like, very en vogue to be like, oh, yeah, queer people belong. I mean, queer people do belong, it’s not just the thing that is like en vogue. What I mean to say is like, now the construction of the Caribbean citizen is through this lens of, they’re not progressive enough.

When it comes to the subject position of the speaker, it’s like, keeping all of this in mind, like yes, the speakers are human, but also whale. They’re definable and undefinable, right? They exist in this continuum of queering species, of queering sexual practice or orientations, or even, like, phenomenological reality. What does it mean to hear something in multiple dimensions instead of just this, what we consider linear conversation? 

AA: First and foremost, Rajiv, congratulations on the upcoming book.  We’ve gotten these beautiful outward concentric circles and there are all of these reverberations that are floating around that, I mean, I could ask you a billion more questions. But what I’m actually going to do is reverse the tide a little bit and get very, very, very specific, and ask about the form itself. How did you go about taking the math of whale song, and placing it into the math of a poetic form, until you could hear your own music? What does that process actually look like?

RM: I love these process questions. Because, I don’t know how this occurred to me to do. [Laughs] If I’m gonna be quite honest. But keep in mind that this has come out after Cutlish, and I was just so incredibly astounded by the fact that people like Roger and Katy Payne, Rebecca Giggs,  you know these people who like have done research into whales and have written popular books about them—Philip Hoare also—say things like ‘whale songs rhyme.’ Just completely astounding. What am I witnessing here? So I look to these studies to see exactly what that looks like in terms of the breakdown, like the physical breakdown. The people who came up with this article, called “Stereotypical sound patterns in humpback whale songs: Usage and function” published in Aquatic Animals in 2003, led by Eduardo Mercado, came up with this graphic, where you could kind of see the ways in which the whale songs that they listened to were broken down in terms of a haunting of sound, or rhyme. And I thought, like, how incredible. What would it be like if I were to, you know, play with this a little bit? Is this a thing? So I experimented, really. I made a lot of mistakes. I wrote a lot of poems. 

What I did was I played with this form, where I would try to write five poems a week. And maybe one during that week came out sounding good. Or came out sounding like, oh yeah, here I can find myself in this poem. The other ones were just kind of like, I will recycle words and phrases that feel really good. But this was my practice. In the morning I would read poetry, and then I would clear my desk of everything. I tell my students this, I tell everybody this, like, your first responsibility is to your poetry. Which is really a responsibility to yourself. So whatever it is on your desk, clear it, and write your poem first, before you begin your day. And then you know that your day has begun by your serving of your own integrity. You know? This was my practice. I wish I could say that it still is. Who knows where my integrity is these days. [Laughs]

This generated so much work and like so much thinking. And I not only would be reading these books of poetry, but I would also be reading these books on natural history of whaling, of whales, the scientific studies of, like how whales communicate, and this kind of thing. Like humpback whales can’t and they don’t have the same kind of museau du singe, it’s called, like the toothed whales have. So when they produce sound, it’s not from like, a blowhole or like the melon of the toothed whales, which is the part of the head that is cavernous and has reverberation, but rather a kind of like sliding back and forth of air in the pharynx. But nobody really knows how the humpback whale song is produced. Although I read an article just recently that said, oh, people have discovered it! And this is what’s beautiful, is like, there’s so much left to discover.

One of my favorite facts, also, is not a fact. So, Aimee Nezhukumathatil, had this poem published in the Southern Humanities Review that was about humpback whales using stars in order to migrate. Cause scientists said that! Scientists really believed this. And then it has been, like, debunked since. To where there’s actually like, you know, iron deposits found in the jaws of humpback whales that lead them through the electromagnetic fields of the Earth. And I was like, this is just too beautiful of a mistake, and a poem to exist not in this world of poetry. I was like, I’m going to definitely use this fact. You know, this fact of science that up until, what was it, 1960… 1962 said people like me are not even human, or like, lesser than human. So, you know, question of scientific fact. Well, complicated by the pandemic, of course. Trust in, you know, empirical science, etc. But anyway, this is all kind of part of that thinking around process for me. 

DV: I would love to hear you speak for just months, like just months. Come to me in my dreams, Rajiv,  then I’ll know that God is finally speaking.

Rajiv, I love this question that was very off the cuff, where’s my integrity these days? [Laughs] And I like thinking about that question, where’s my integrity, as a kind of response to The Pixies, “Where’s my mind?” from 1988. But also thinking about integrity coming from that, that same root word as intactness. So asking it as a sort of, where’s my intactness, where do I feel intact, whole, beyond the triangulation in that space of the permeable whole? When we named The Source, we thought about what kind of fertilities, what kind of soils we write from; where our sense of intactness emerges from, our earth, our ground. And in your case here, that oceanic, amniotic. The space which makes your ideas germinate. So answer this question however you please: at this very moment, what is in your soil, what is in your waters?

RM: Oh my god. [Laughs] I feel so overwhelmed because this is such a beautiful question, and having it being posed at me is disarming. I’ll say this. Now that I live in Colorado, it’s been really hard for me to reconsider my connection to land. I write so much about the ocean. Where is the ocean, right? Is it a dohe by Kabir that says, it takes an advanced soul to recognize the ocean in the drop. And so this has been something that I’ve been considering. I love Kabir for his anti-caste, anti-bantwara of religions. So like his belief in the sameness of God. Whether that extends into sciences, you know, post 1500s, who knows? [Laughs] Sure, let’s say yes. So I feel a lot of like my home soil in Shabnam Virmani’s collection of kabiras. God, she sings such beautiful songs by people like Prahlad Tipaniya, Dalit singer of kabiras that I feel like, there’s something about that spirituality that moves me so much. The idea that the separation that we imagine between all of us is just a construction. It’s so incredibly moving and beautiful and spiritual that I can’t really put it into words until I can write a poem about it.

So there’s that, but then I was talking to a friend yesterday, saying like how, I used to—when I started to go hiking here in the Boulder County area and in Colorado—I was looking for forests. [Laughs] Because I’m from the East Coast! I was looking for forests to have that sense of, okay, now I’m in a place that’s the natural world. Boulder, Colorado is like, it abuts the Rocky Mountains. But what comes before it on the eastern side is the plains. So the land here, while it’s not flat, is grassland. So the eastern part of the city, of the state, don’t have that forested kind of feel.

As I was walking in the mountains—I went, oh my god, I went on a four hour hike yesterday! This is like where I locate my intactness: I am obsessed with being outside! Learning the ways to let the mountain and these mountain ranges of flat lands into my heart, to like help me feel a little bit more stable as I’m going through a divorce, and finding new love. I want to feel groundedness, so being outside and in the mountains does this. And I find myself excited for, and craving, the slope of a grassland. So, the idea that the landscape and my interactions with the Earth is changing me subtly is something that’s incredibly moving. So I think my intactness is letting myself change and evolve. Cause, you know, I wanted so much to hold on… to a lot. But that’s not what a coolie is, man. That’s not who we are as people, so. 

AA: God is change.

RM: Yes. Amen.

AA: [Laughs] Rajiv, I’m so grateful to you, too, for coming on this note of things kind of saturating each other such that we can hear ourselves in our intactness, and our authenticity, and in our own integrity, in ways that don’t have to be separatist. And using language in ways that break down the taxonomical hierarchies that have kept the human and the nonhuman away from, frankly, just more interesting possibilities of both thought and connection and love, and integrity as a form of sustainability that doesn’t necessarily pivot on the politics of sustainability that are ultimately imperialist in how they play out on our planet.

And I’m also very grateful to you for the ways that you’re thinking about your practice and your poetry lending itself to future poets and making space, which is also what we’re about here at The Source, because we’re trying to understand, explain, and probe what makes a poem and what makes a poet, and I couldn’t be more more moved and spiritually provoked and inspired by everything that you’ve had to gift us with today. Thank you so much for being here.

RM: Thank you so much for inviting me. What a complete pleasure and honor it is to be seen by both of you, like really, truly, thank you. Like, I feel like feeling unread and unheld is like a thing in poetry, but it’s really lovely to actually be here with you and to hear you and your thoughts about my work, like my goodness, how incredibly moving. Thank you both so much for your consideration and your hearts, and everything.

AA: It’s such an honor.

This interview, which took place on May 16, 2024, has been edited for length and clarity.

Rajiv Mohabir, “Immigrant Aria” from Whale Aria. Copyright © 2023 by Rajiv Mohabir. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.