When I first read Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora, I was transformed. I accepted the trauma of my history as a dreamscape that shades my daily life. I accepted that the hauntings of colonization, dehumanization, and diabetes were part of this reckoning with my own history. What was it like for my own ancestors, Latchman and Sant Ram Mahraj, to leave their homes, beset by economic dependence on a colonial system? When they landed in Guyana in 1891 and 1885 what did they see? What colours were the ocean? What songs did they sing aboard the ship? What of all my women ancestors that are not recorded in familial lore – what did they survive? What survives in us because of all of these people’s strains and triumphs?
* * *
My Qoolitude is a sensorial haunting. The first time I held a cutlass I was able to chop down a papaya tree in record time. My Qoolitude is a pinprick or shiver behind me as I feel my Aji watch me travel the world. My Qoolitude is the name Mohabir: Moh- meaning alluring; a British miswriting of Maha- meaning great. My Coolitude is –bir meaning warrior. My Qoolitude is the great warrior’s jingle of bangles.
* * *
Ancestor
My language is petrified
like a Pliocene whalebone fossil
though cane vestiges inside
my brine sugar me daily,
though Hindi no longer lines
my tongue or accessory denticles.
I feel deep tympani, not in hind
limbs, the calcium of sacral
vertebrae, not the daggers of teeth,
nor the alembics of legacy.
O Aji, the litany of your throat
on the SS Jura you stowed
aboard, haunts. A head submerged
hums your wail and guides
calves into breach. To bind you
to my breast, I scrimshaw your
good name onto whale bone. I bear
your sugar-scars like poems,
score your femur into coil.
* * *
When I ask my sister if the person she’s talking about is ‘Coolie’ versus ‘desi’ what I am really asking her is whether that person participates in our same imaginary. Does that person revile the idea of an ‘Old’ versus ‘New’ South Asian diaspora; does that person dream in Guyanese Bhojpuri, Caribbean Hindi, Fiji Hindi, South African Bhojpuri – a language peppered in Portuguese, English, Tamil? This split from the South Asian community is both lamented and celebrated in my reckoning of my heritage through the material conditions of indenture, illiteracy, and chemical dependency.
* * *
My Qoolitude is of humpback whale bone. Something that lends structure, deep, grown of folksong. My skin adapts to the world around, the element of its place. It is my skin, supported and given shape by my ancestry that allows me to ally with others in the spaces that I enter. I am a queer citizen of motion and movement. My home is in journey. My ancestors migrate with me as I learn and re-sing old sohar, kajari, and bhajans, and my skin changes as I learn how to move through unforeseeable currents. I belong nowhere and everywhere. Indeed, the idea of a native country means stasis and I am in constant motion. I am descended from survivors. In fact, my first instinct is to survive – and this is ancestral.
* * *
Incantation
My spirit’s marine, constant
in sea-legs – featureless when you
regard only my skin. I make
skeletal sense, beached. In my myth
I was promised a voyage back
home to an India, borders shifted,
my village renamed. I carry
home in ship-song sternum-deep,
fringed in reef. Put your ear to my chest,
dear heart, you will be overcome
with voyage cut in half. Stay.
Transform. You will grow a fluke and moan
kindly to the Others underwater
in webs of melody, not atavist
but evoking in you vapsi, comeback
to the center, where you now spout.
This poem attempts to harness the structure of humpback whale song, something of Hawai‘i and from without its borders. Song is important to both human and whale as both species have complex reasons to sing and perform. The story I tell here is one of migration and settling in a place and allowing the self to be ‘transformed’. The poem ends with the explicit awareness of the physical location of where the speaker is now. It does not mean that the journey doesn’t matter, on the contrary, it posits that it’s important and required that the speaker and the ‘you’ both acknowledge the ‘you’s’ history and the place the ‘you’ is left spouting needs further consideration. The poem does not end with the last line, instead the word vapsi (Hind for ‘return’) that appears at the end guides the reader back to the beginning – into a new creation myth. Each poem is a performance of a Bhojpuri folksong, a whale/human poetic.
* * *
My Qoolitude is queer, upsetting binaries and status quo. I am a dark body that bounces back from extinction’s brink, almost hunted into ghost by whalers and colonizers alike who both built their empires on trying to eliminate my dreaming and imagination. I sing old songs in old tunes and new songs in new tunes, questioning the distance between the two.
* * *
The queer presence in this history of migration is even now being uncovered. Despite the fleeting mention of queers in colonial records, the practice of reading the holes in the historical record for queer potentiality begins. It is my job as a poet to imagine my connection with these ancestors. I consider the story of a transgender woman was able to journey across the kalapani unexamined by the British in a poem I call ‘Coolie Oddity’. Queerness never had space in the original conception of Coolitude, but in my own ideas it does; it transforms again into Qoolitude, taking the ‘Q’ from Ryan Persadie – a deferral of meaning, hiding in plain speech and plain sight until read and understood. We are more than holes in the record. We will no longer be ignored by the straight, normative folks who deny us again and again. We are in your families. We are in your stories. We were there before you were.
* * *
Pycnonotus cafer
The indentured passerine must not relearn
the sky, alien to its coverts and bones.
Releasing caged species into the wild
is a crime, even if the Bulbul is a poet
dressed as lava rock. It does not belong.
Even when Urdu dries in its throat,
it recalls the sparks of ghazals and leis the wood
in a swollen ache for Mirzapur’s rain-songs.
Perched on the stones piled into the North Shore’s
heiau ruins, flashing its crimson plume –
an offering to the god of war – does it deserve
to be stuffed with zinc and copper bbs?
Its tune a ghost in the throat;
from the branches it vents and invades,
now speaking Creole. It never meant to
displace or to be displaced, nor to die
in the temple; dashed against its stones.
This longing for home is unbearable.
* * *
My Qoolitude is anti-racist. It is the openness to change with my company. My Qoolitude wants to be anti-essentialist unlike its original incarnation. Instead, it is aspirational, queer, not born of a misread Césaire quote as in the Qoolitude of Torabully. It and allows me to see and relate to the suffering of colonized people around me. My Qoolitude is a reminder of destitution: of being erased of my land and name, of diabetes, of alcohol dependency. With the understanding of my skeletal structure I am able to empathize and struggle with the people around me for a common good. My Qoolitude allows me to acknowledge the indigenous people on whose land I live. My Qoolitude is #blacklivesmatter. My Qoolitude is forever movement.
* * *
Yet as I lived in Hawai‘i, a country that has been colonized and occupied by the United States since the late 19th century, I began to question my need to articulate my migration story through the lens of a localized and particularly Hawaiian metaphor. Most conversations that I’ve heard about migration deal with ecological vocabularies that identify indigeneity through an indigenous/invasive paradigm. Colonization and American occupation is invasive and literally an invasion that continues to disenfranchise Native peoples across the globe and particularly in the United States. My Qoolitude allows me to struggle with others in their fight for sovereignty.
* * *
In Praise of Hawai‘i
From Lē‘ahi’s emerald crater
to Mauna a Wākea’s spout of ‘i‘iwi’s
crimson feathers, the glory
of Her Majesty Lili‘uokalani billows
from summits and pyroclastic flow,
land still forged in the core
where ‘Ōiwi resist in dance, in kalo
lo‘i, sovereign hearts crowned in
the verdant halo of Mount Ka‘ala.
Ham samundar se toke dekh sakeli,
aapan anubandhan se mukt bhaili.
Parnaam, hath jordke. Namastasyai.
Namastasyai. Namastasyai namo namah.