We're thrilled to welcome Rajiv Mohabir as he discusses his new hybrid memoir Antiman with Restless Books publisher and Popol Vuh author Ilan Stavans!
About Antiman:
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is a stunning hybrid memoir that blends literary genres to tackle questions of caste, ethnicity, and sexuality, and to explore the author’s experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States.
Born in London to Guyanese Indian parents and immigrating to the United States when he was a toddler, Rajiv Mohabir’s familial history is one of displacement and constant migration. His great grandparents were indentured laborers who worked on British sugar plantations after the (official) abolition of the slave trade in 1834. In South America, his parents were forced into Christianity and colonial education before moving to England. After growing up in Indian immigrant communities in the US, Mohabir is inspired by his own blended identity to approach his experiences in multiple genres.
Full of poetry, prose in distinctive dialects, myth, and family lore, Antiman is a song cycle in which Mohabir wanders the intersections of his stifled history. He returns to Varanasi, India a century after his ancestors left to work the sugar cane fields of the British colony and then to Orlando, Florida where he studies at the feet of his unlettered Aji. When he goes to New York City his cousin labels him “antiman,” a Caribbean slur for queers. His kin show him the fraught side of consanguinity as he is outed to his extended, conservative Guyanese American family. His life changes forever.
Dawning the slur as a cloak, Mohabir moves to New York City to work as an ESL teacher and struggles, without family, to love his brownness in the city known as the second diaspora for Indians from the Caribbean: Queens. He discovers that the word means just that: anti-man, the man who beds men, a word that Mohabir moves into and upsets through his travails with fraught relationships. Throughout the journey, his family’s ancient lore and epics haunt him at every crossroad, lead him into poetry, and ultimately reveal his own story woven into the legacies of myths and legends, the singing of epics, of exile, outings, connections, and desire.
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Rajiv Mohabir is the author of Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021), The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His essays can be found in places like Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College. His debut memoir, Antiman, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."
Antiman will be available at Lost City Books in June!