Rajiv Mohabir on
THE TAXIDERMIST’S CUT (Four Way Books, 2016)
The Taxidermist’s Cut is my first full-length collection of poems. The oldest poems in the volume I wrote in 2009 before I went to VONA in San Francisco—and took its present incarnation after Kundiman in 2013, so a lot of the songs that I will include will also be a triptych for that particular time of my life to the present. My book concerns the natural world, immigration from the Caribbean, Indian (South Asian) heritage, racism, and queerness. The speaker comes into an awareness of his environment as well as own proclivities. Carved into his body are the rivers whose banks he bathes in, those rivers where he fucks a man for the first time.
But the thing is, the speaker hates himself. The speaker is a cutter who instead of enacting violence on others, enacts it on his own self.
“Lion’s Mane” by Iron and Wine
This first song sets the tone: we are in rural Central Florida—the band is from Florida too. My mother makes sweet tea, mimicking the iced tea that we have in school, except my mother doesn’t put too much sugar in; in this way it’s very much a lo-fi drink that I grow up with and cherish. This song drips with nostalgia. My back porch that overlooked the retention pond where a small gator lived. The blackening sky and their bursting rainstorms.
In adulthood, about the time I wrote most of the poems in the first section of the book, I was listening to this album when I got into a fight with an ex-partner when he physically attacked me for the first time. I thought: I am a big guy, it’s okay. Really it’s never okay for someone to harm you physically. I wish I could go back and tell the speaker what I know now.
“The Devil Had a Hold of Me” by Gillian Welch
This song goes along with the title/long poem “The Taxidermist’s Cut.” For the longest time I really did believe that the devil had a hold on me until I realized the only real devil was a construction of shadows and secrets that I kept. Instead of opening the door and letting the stories scatter like moths I kept them inside and tormented myself. And like the “butcher’s boy” in this song, I “trembled in my hand and voice.”
“Leviticus: Faggot,” by Me’Shell Ndegéocello
Because my mother would pray, “Save him from this life.”
“Kaise Bani” performed by Babla and Kanchan
This song is the last section of The Taxidermist’s Cut is THE song that I learned to take from my home space, that space of familial connection and parties. If you didn’t realize as yet, I’m not a Western person, wholly. It took me a long time to want to identify with being Indo-Caribbean, often obscuring the fact that my immigration story is so folded and complex. Plus internalized racism. Plus white supremacy.
This is a chutney song, a mix of Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Hindi lyrics. I learned to incorporate it into the rest of my queer life; I can play it on a guitar; I have danced to this song in queer spaces. It’s a song that responds to trauma of forced migration and alleviates tension with joyful celebration. The singer says “I beatin’ my drum when I singin’ me song/ the only thing missing is my bottle of rum.” It thematically corresponds to the poems “Ganga,” “Corentyne,” “Thames,” “Econlockhatchee,” and “Hudson.” These are all rivers that my family is “from” and this song is very much part of my experience as an Indo-queer Guyanese.
“Teri Mehfil Mein Kismat Azmakar Ham Bhi Dekhenge” by Shamshad Begum and Lata Mangeshkar
I lay in bed with the man that I write the poem “[Last Night] in Jackson Heights [This Morning] With Him, Not You” after my queer-brown-flight from Central Florida to New York. We lay in my Little India, Queens studio apartment naked. On my computer he pulls up this Bollywood song from 1960s film Mughal-e-Azam and tells me the story of how Salim, son Akbar the Great, was in love with Anarkali, a dancer in his father’s court. Their love was forbidden by the Emperor, which made it all the more sexy. In this song, the more appropriate of partners for the prince battles Anarkali with fierce rhymes, but it’s Anarkali whose shairyi really cuts through to the bone.
This man who lay next to me was several years younger, Punjabi, and not out to his family. This poem is about him and also about some other older white man that I was chasing at the same time. I quote my translations of this song in this poem and make reference to the movie and how momentous this moment between Sef and I felt.
“Dove and Pigeon” by Lord Nelson
When I was a child we took yearly road trips from Chuluota, Florida to Scarborough, Toronto to visit my grandmother. My father would sing this old calypso when he was in a good mood, always wanting to extol the genius of the dove who outwits the pigeon. This is one of my fondest memories of my father who I would betray by writing poems about our hurts.
This song is about failures, as is this penultimate section of my book.
“Heartbeats” by The Knife
The last song of this poetry book playlist needs to involve birds, knives, razors, and dancing. The video shows an animated bird flying, children skateboarding down the road, and 3-D geometric shapes flying off into the sky. We are in New York City, finally at a safe distance from the abuses felt during adolescence in Central Florida. It was not all bad, in fact it was truly a pharmakon—a poison and an antidote. The scrubland forest is what saved me: its animals, its rivers, its quiet. This section shares its heartbeat with that forest where the beautiful emerges.
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