For poets rooted in communities whose histories may not reside in traditional Western libraries or official records, the question of source material is profound. How do you access and draw inspiration from a past that is largely oral, sensory, or fragmented across diasporic landscapes? This challenge, and the creative ways poets meet it, sheds essential light on the diverse nature of poet archives. It challenges conventional notions of what constitutes a literary archive and reveals the rich, non-traditional sources that fuel significant poetic work.
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Rajiv Mohabir, a poet whose work often explores the Indo-Caribbean experience, eloquently articulates this journey. He views his writing process and identity as intricately woven threads – a blend of Hindi, Guyanese Creole, Bhojpuri, religious texts like the Ramayana and Hadith, historical ship records, and vibrant calypso music. This complex layering of influences highlights that a poet’s archive is rarely monolithic; it is often a confluence of linguistic, cultural, historical, and personal currents.
The Struggle for the Traditional Archive
Mohabir speaks to a fundamental issue for many from oral traditions: reading and writing are relatively new technologies in their family histories. The expected archive of neatly cataloged books and documents is sparse or inaccessible. His community’s history is deeply embedded not in written texts but in sound and sensation. The archive, for him, is primarily aural and sensory – the rustle of his Aji’s (grandmother’s) ordhni, the chanting of his Nana’s Ramcharitamansa, the echoes of his Aja’s biraha songs, the texture of his Nani’s (maternal grandmother’s) disintegrating saris.
Each object, each sound, each memory holds a “multiverse of stories.” The crucial point Mohabir makes is that an archive that doesn’t conform to the standard Western academic model is by no means lesser. In fact, he finds it more alive, invigorated by imagination, touch, smell, and sound. Holding a bangle, for instance, can evoke the sound of a harmonium, the feel of rice grains, the smell of incense and curry, the music of clapping roti, and the visual memory of communal eating. This sensory depth is a powerful, non-traditional wellspring for creating poetry. Learning how to write poetry that captures such sensory detail often involves drawing from these unique sources.
Beyond the Western Concept of the Archive
While official archives exist, such as the ship records kept by the British during the indenture period, these are often difficult for diaspora communities to access and are filtered through the perspective of the colonizer. There are also archives created by well-meaning, often white, academics who sought to “preserve” these cultures. While these contributions lend a certain academic legitimacy, Mohabir notes the irony and discomfort that it often requires external validation for these traditions to be recognized, especially given the historical context of immigration pressures and cultural assimilation faced by the communities themselves.
Contemporary artists across various forms – filmmakers, journalists, writers, and visual artists – are actively building new archives. These cross-genre explorations dissolve the artificial boundaries created by capitalist notions of genre, recognizing that stories, songs, images, and memories are all interconnected sources for creative expression. Whether exploring form poetry or free verse, poets can draw from this fluid pool.
Poet Rajiv Mohabir, author discussing his approach to poet archives
Building Your Own Indo-Diaspora Poet Archives
Creating a personal archive, according to Mohabir’s approach, is about intentionally gathering the sources that resonate deeply – the things that “haunt you with their songs and stories.” This process inherently blurs genre lines. Is a story sung about a historical event not also a form of verse? Poetics, in this context, is found in the creolizations of visual art, novels, poems, songs, and stories working together to form what might be called a “Coolitude Poetics.” When assembling these poet archives, one should consider items or experiences “charged with psychic power” – events, memories, objects, songs, anything that holds significant personal or communal weight.
Mohabir shares a detailed list of items that constitute his personal Coolie archive, illustrating the sheer diversity of sources available when thinking beyond the traditional:
- Historical Documents: Ship records or fragments, often digitized by scholars.
- Published Works: Books of songs (Holi Songs of Demerara), collections of accounts (The Still Cry), anthologies of prose and poetry (They Came In Ships).
- Personal Recordings: Interviews with elders, like his Aji, capturing oral histories, songs, and spiritual understanding.
- Folk Music: Recordings of various folk song genres (biraha, sohar, bhajan, etc.) sought out in community hubs like Richmond Hill.
- Oral Histories: Stories shared by elders, remembered or recorded.
- Commercial Music: Chutney music recordings by key artists.
- Material Objects: Old tools (cutlass, lordha and sil, chimta, etc.), traditional jewelry (jhumka, kangan, payal, etc.).
- Films: Documentaries and films exploring the diaspora experience.
- Linguistic Resources: Dictionaries of Guyanese Bhojpuri, historical linguistic texts (Hobson-Jobson), dissertations, articles on “overseas Hindi.”
This extensive list demonstrates that poet archives can encompass a vast, interdisciplinary, and deeply personal collection of materials. Whether seeking sources for love poems for lost love or epic narratives of migration, the sources are everywhere.
The Enduring Practice of Aural Poetry
By assembling such diverse poet archives, the poet is empowered to create new works rooted in the “enduring practice of aural poetry.” This poetry manifests not only as words on a page but also as song, as epic accounts, or even as laughter (buss belly laugh). The archive allows the poet to be “haunted by fragmentation and wholeness” simultaneously – reflecting the brokenness of history while celebrating the resilience and richness that persists. This approach to archives provides a framework for understanding how poets draw inspiration from the complex tapestries of identity and history, creating work that resonates with authenticity and power. This process is fundamental to the creation of any significant body of work, much like preserving a classic poem of the day involves understanding its context and sources.
In essence, Rajiv Mohabir’s perspective on archives is a call for poets, particularly those from marginalized or oral traditions, to recognize the validity and richness of their own source materials, regardless of whether they fit conventional definitions. These personal, sensory, and aural poet archives are not just repositories of the past; they are dynamic, living wellsprings for the creation of vibrant, authentic poetry in the present.