In his gorgeous and experimental memoir, Antiman, Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir (The Taxidermist's Cut) delves into his family's history and its tangle of stigmas to locate a powerful literary heritage and the origins of his own artistic life.
From a young age, Mohabir is transfixed by his grandmother's songs, both for the mythological stories they tell and the language in which she sings them: Guyanese Bhojpuri, which he dutifully records and translates. Though his father views their heritage as something shameful, Rajiv is compelled to follow this river of language to its source--to "learn the deep ocean of stories of where we came from and breathe into them new life." Flouting his father's assimilationist attitude ("a kind of postcolonial Stockholm syndrome"), Mohabir travels to India to pursue this project. In his studies, his family's diasporic past becomes a prism through which he comes to understand many facets of his own identity, and his queerness in particular. Ultimately, driven away by his family's virulent homophobia, he lands in New York City. Here, his linguistic fascination blossoms into poetry: "This was the poetry that I descended from and I could hear its music inside of me as I read my own words."
Interspersing experiments in multilingual poetry among sections of conventional memoir, Antiman serves as both a touching account of the author's life and a bold statement of his poetics. Like its title--taken from the homophobic slur Mohabir's own family uses against him--the book itself is an act of reclamation. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.