Whale Aria

By Rajiv Mohabir

“For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue,” recounts Rajiv Mohabir’s speaker in “Boy with Baleen for Teeth.” As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry. In our search for meaning, in our call and response, kinship resonates; “the echo is amniotic.” “Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you’ve called / since childhood.” Fluid and inexorable as the ocean, Whale Aria articulates the confluence of ecological fate and human history. In “Why Whales Are Back in New York City,” Mohabir notes the coincidence of current events: humpback migration returns to Queens for the first time in a century while the state expedites deportations of undocumented people in the same burrough. The language shared by human and marine creatures in these poems, however, promise that the tides will turn. “Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms,” Mohabir underscores the eternity of water. “Behold the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you.” 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954245693

Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of 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. 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 and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

Book preview

ALSO BY RAJIV MOHABIR

POETRY

The Taxidermist’s Cut

The Cowherd’s Son

Cutlish

NONFICTION

Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir

TRANSLATION

I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara

whale aria

POEMS

RAJIV MOHABIR

FOUR WAY BOOKS

TRIBECA

Copyright 2023 Rajiv Mohabir

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mohabir, Rajiv, author.

Title: Whale aria / Rajiv Mohabir.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023004567 (print) | LCCN 2023004568 (ebook) | ISBN 9781954245686 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781954245693 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Whales--Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3613.O376 W53 2023 (print) | LCC PS3613.O376 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23/eng/20230206

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004567

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004568

This book is manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

Four Way Books is a not-for-profit literary press. We are grateful for the assistance we receive from individual donors, public arts agencies, and private foundations including the NEA, NEA Cares, Literary Arts Emergency Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

We are a proud member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

for Jordan Andrew Miles

CONTENTS

Dominion

Boy with Baleen for Teeth

Immigrant Aria

Whale Story

Boy-Not-Boy

Humpback Vocalizations

Underwater Acoustics

Whalesong

Golden Record

Ancestor

Oral History

Cultural Revolution

Orient Aria

Natural Aesthetics

Interpreting Behaviors

Sacrament

Anatomy Lesson

Vestigial Bones

Inside the Belly

Museum

Dissecting the Tay Whale

Carcass

Birah

Dream

Ghost Aria

Sound Navigation and Ranging

Blowhole

Plastivore

Stomach Full of Trash

Comeback

Return Migration

Shift to Silence

Why Whales Are Back in New York City

Notes

DOMINION

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

—Genesis 1:26

Let there be light

skins and colored

skins. One to rule

the other.

A mandrake quickens

into greed-grab,

tears a page

from Genesis. Clods

of earth are clods

of God. Clods of earth

are clods of dendrites with dirt

skirting the ribs.

Memory of the untouched

is the more beautiful object.

From the streets

gashed bodies lament

this justice, burn-scarred

lives owned by light.

I strike a candle

against ruin, against

the separation of day

and night.

BOY WITH BALEEN FOR TEETH

My father wished

                         to cast me back-

wards caste and