[03/18/25] Mohabir, Rajiv (ed.): I Will Not Go

Kaya Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 18, 2025

Publisher Marketing: I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations, and Chutney Fractals collects translations and fractals of chutney music by multiple Indo-Caribbean writers in an experiment to locate what of chutney poetry survives the loss of language and academic derision. Caribbean Hindustanis are no longer spoken with the frequency that they were two generations ago, causing some to speculate that the chutney music's poetics and poetic practices are lost to new generations of writers and things. To this end, poet and translator Rajiv Mohabir asked Caribbean writers and poets to "translate" two famous chutney songs using their own voices, engaging what they know of chutney poetics in the music. While this is a kind of Caribbean, diasporic response to 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, it differs in its scope as it includes reimaginings, reinterpretations, and treatises on chutney music by each of the writers gathered here. Chutney music as cultural production is a poetry: oral and performed, embodied and danced-the poetry does not fall short of this spiritual and physical movement. There is flexibility in the writing down of these words, the singing of them, the performance of them, replete with lexical fluidity, associative nature, and a Caribbean methodology of translation that is on display in the poems collected here. This is poetry inherited by the descendants of indenture, a poetry of migration, a poetry of survival.