On Thursday March 6, Rajiv Mohabir (Guest Editor of Karahee From the Cane Fields) and Laurel Flores Fantauzzo (Guest Editor of Always Again) joined Gabriella Contratto and Chandanie Somwaru for an interview and conversation held at the English Department of UH Mānoa as part of the Words at Mānoa series. They were asked questions about their experiences as guest editors for Mānoa, and how their collections highlighted the literature and culture of the Philippines/Philippine Diaspora (Laurel) and the global South Asian Labor Diaspora (Rajiv). The interview/conversation was recorded and edited for length and clarity.
Laurel Flores Fantauzzo (Mānoa Journal 36-2 Guest Editor) is the author of My Heart Underwater (Quill Tree Books, 2020) and The First Impulse (Anvil, 2017). Her essays have appeared in CNN Philippines, the New York Times, The Baffler and elsewhere. She has been named a Philippine National Book Award finalist, a PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize finalist, and the recipient of a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award. She was a Fulbright journalism fellow, a Hedgebrook resident, a grantee of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and an arts fellow at the University of Iowa. She has taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and Ateneo de Manila University. She currently lives with her wife between Los Angeles and Metro Manila.
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir (Mānoa Journal 36-1 Guest Editor) is the author of four books of poetry including Whale Aria (Four Way Books, 2023), Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Gabriella Contratto (Contratto): Laurel, you titled this issue “Always Again,” which you describe in your intro as the reversal of the aspirational phrase “Never Again,” “Never again to atrocity and dictatorship.” However, in the context of the Philippines election of Bongbong Marcos and Duterte before him, “Never again” becomes “always again.”. But you also say that “Always Again” highlights the joy of the Filipino people in creating community and finding ways to thrive despite repetitive catastrophes. Can you discuss that resilience more? How do you see this cycle of suffering and joy making in the Philippines in relation to other parts of the world?
Laurel Flores Fantauzzo (Fantauzzo): The word resilient gives me pause. Sometimes I think it can be an unfair assignment, for people who are suffering, to make some kind of meaning out of their suffering. Sometimes suffering is just suffering, and the people who are enduring it need to heal from it, not give the rest of the world a lesson, and not have their pain be praised. At the same time, there is a vitality and a liveliness to the act of the hangout, in the Philippines. There is an incredible lack of loneliness because of the incredible sense of survival and community that you have to cultivate face-to-face when you know you exist in spite of the government, and not in a healthy relationship with your government. The Philippines is a kind of mirror to what we’re enduring in the States and a lot of what the Philippines is experiencing has been imposed historically by the States. Suffering and joy making and similar cycles exist in other postcolonial and neocolonially affected places, too, of course.
Chandanie Somwaru (Somwaru): I also want to talk about your introduction, Rajiv, because you focus on what happens after the theory of kalapani, after you’re crossing through those black waters. And I just wanted to know how you see this journal filling a silence or hole within the study of coolitude, thinking about Indo-Caribbean or Indian indenture and migration today, especially in terms of the political climate it’s being written in.
Rajiv Mohabir (Mohabir): In my reading and thinking about the study of Coolitude, or the kind of understanding of the Indian labor diaspora, South Asian labor diaspora, of folks who’ve survived and descended from indentured labor that was from 1838 to 1917, the racialization of the word “Coolie” has this choke hold over ways of articulating place and time. There was a potential of coolitude to be more progressive and leftist. The way we see it in the Caribbean, however, in its manifestations, it is not always inclusive. The coolie as a figure doesn’t have any kind of ethnic tie to a larger South Asian framework of “this is what you are outside of your service to Empire.” Meaning, the Coolie as such does not represent a particular caste identity, but a relationship to labor.
There was a potential for this anti-caste / anti-communalist identity to be the clay from which we sculpted new selves in diaspora. As we can see, articulations of coolitude, and especially those literary anthologies of coolitude, harp on this fact that the Coolie is Indian. Not South Asian, but Indian. When we say India, we think of the political borders of what India is from 1947. There’s no talking about Kashmir in these spaces. But the India of the Coolie was the India of the 1800s and early 1900s. However, in the service of coolitude there’s been a complete eliding of the potential of creating connection. Also much forgotten in past attempts of anthologizing this particular diaspora is queerness.
My hope for this issue is that these things are starting to be woven together. First and foremost, when I think of the word coolie, I begin with the Q as like a practice of showing the space between the C, O, O, L, I, E, of you know, the British and the Indian, and then the potential of the Q, O, O, L, I, E, as bringing this all together. This is Ryan Persadie’s idea from his article “‘Meh Just Realize I’s Ah Coolie Bai’: Indo-Caribbean Masculinities, Chutney Genealogies, and Qoolie Subjectivities.” This, like any kind of qoolie identity, is constantly shifting and is its own diaspora. I think of this anthology as filling those holes, because we are at a place now. People who study Caribbean/Indo-Caribbean writing focus on older folks who have been writing into their conservative politics, people like V.S. Naipaul, who said, “Nothing good was ever created in the Caribbean.” But now, what about the emerging voice? What about the people who are just outside of that spotlight? And that’s what my hope was for this. Like the poem that I read to you wasn’t about crossing the kalapani per se from India into Trinidad, but rather it’s about this very present history of crossing from Trinidad into the United States as immigrants, as people with or without documentation. This is what I’m trying to trouble.
Contratto: The Philippines is a country of many, many languages, including English. There’s over one hundred spoken. Most of the works in your issue, Laurel, contain some mix of English and Filipino. But one of your contributors, Dorian Marina, worked with the Ivatan community, translating poems of Batanes and writing his own Tanagas, which is a traditional Filipino form of poetry. I was wondering what the editorial process was like for you in terms of working with multiple languages, thinking about the resonances and dissonances between Filipino and English, and the importance of including languages and cultures that are often underrepresented in international publications.
Flores Fantauzzo: I always think of this quote from John Jeremiah Sullivan that has resonated with me so much. He talks about the South, and what he says about the South is—and I’m paraphrasing— “I loved it only as someone who will never fully belong to it will.” That’s how I’ve always felt about the Philippines. I always feel like an inadequate medium for its work. Part of that is mixed race anxiety, and part of it is language. So many of us in the US have grown up without the languages of the Philippines because of our parents’ need to assimilate. I knew the multilingual element of this issue would never satisfy the representation of the many, many languages of the Philippines. I would always want more. But I was happy that we did have what we have, especially from Batanes, which is the remotest archipelago of the Philippines, closer to Taiwan than Luzon—Luzon is the biggest, most populated Philippine Island. Ivatan Laji, which is the form of poetry in Batanes that poet Dorian Marina is working to preserve, is oral. Itʻs actually very rare to have it written, because it’s an oral tradition. And Dorian is a very interesting case, because he’s Filipino American. He decided to move to Batanes with his entire family, partly to restore the ancestral loss that he felt in his family. That is a whole other level of needing to belong to a place that didn’t necessarily raise you, a place that your parents left.
Most Filipinos and Filipino Americans have several languages happening in their WhatsApp groups, in their homes. The novelist Elaine Castillo talks about how when you’re at the party, you’re not going to understand all the anecdotes, but you’re not going to leave the party because you’re offended—I mean I hope most folks are not that sort of party goer—and if you don’t understand whatʻs being discussed, you’ll just let it wash over you. You’ll experience it. That’s also the experience of language I hope readers can have.
Somwaru: Thank you, Laurel. I’m definitely always thinking about language, and I think Rajiv as well, you’re also thinking about language, and we’re seeing how multifaceted language can be in this journal, especially when thinking about oral traditions. And so I wanted to talk to you, Rajiv, about your own process, because you had work published in this journal as well. You used Bhojpuri, Guyanese Creole, Urdu, and English. What was that process like for you, especially within this hybrid form of music and poetry, translating this work of song. How are you underlining the nuances within each language that you’re working with, especially to include Urdu songs? I think that’s very nuanced and new, because we don’t actually think about the Muslim community in the Caribbean. And do you think, or how do you feel like you were able to capture the musicality, and why was it important for you to mark this journey of song through the different routes of understanding?
Mohabir: So much of the language work I’m interested in and most excited about is moving from the oral tradition into my own practice of poetics. My desire for translation comes from wanting to understand myself and my ancestors. As a mode of writing, it has taken a big role in my poetic practice. I do have translations that I did in this issue from two different singers who have been influential in Caribbean religion. I had an important conversation with photographer and artist Raqeebah Zaman in the Bronx after I Even Regret Night came out. She asked “Where are the Muslim texts?” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a really great question,” because we have in the Caribbean, specifically in my community, names that are Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, but that doesn’t tell you who belongs to which community. What about my Muslim kin? To see oneself reflected in anthologies became important to me.
And so I wanted to include Urdu as the script when writing these oral songs, in order to show this kind of vibrancy in our Coolie diaspora. The process of translation and preserving musicality is always in the foreground of my mind, as I am obsessed with not just languages, but language as this existential idea. The idea of language and not the expression of language. Meaning, how language functions and how the inclusion of some lyrics written in Nastaliq (Urdu) and not in Devanagari (Hindi) could signal something, despite being the same language–the rhetorical spell that this kind of craft move casts. How then do you take a song (which has its own lexical fluidity) that could be written in two alphabets and pin it to the page that has a different life, scope, span, paradigm? It’s impossible. I’m really grateful to Mānoa Journal for publishing these songs trilingually, in that they’re published in the original language they were written in (“original” I use in quotations). Every performance of these songs becomes a new iteration, which is context specific. The jumping off points for these are on particular albums that mediate the original text through a creole or pidgin translation. I wanted to translate to show the journey the song and poem makes through languages of my home community. Thankfully, I’ve always been close to somebody who would give me the translations of the Hindustani, of the Urdu, of the Bhojpuri in Guyanese Creole English. The English I migrate these song into is what call my own particular kind of literary English. My translations represent multiple crossings for me, as I think of how music, poetry and song exist in translation in this national space of the United States, where only certain people are encouraged to learn foreign languages. It’s never the immigrant who is given funds to preserve their languages. It’s always somebody else who’s funded to go and study them from the outside. What I wanted to do in “Karahee from the Cane Fields”_ is to offer a trace of this passing for the people that would read it, kind of like learning language in reverse, and to show my hope for our community and our communities.
Contratto: Thank you, Rajiv. My next question is for Laurel. So, something I really enjoyed about your issue was how multifaceted it was. It contains a variety of pieces, from poems to short stories. You have a screenplay in there, and there are several comics that were written by a bunch of different authors, but you had also personally interviewed six individuals who were preserving aspects of the Philippines’ past. I particularly liked the one about Baybayin, because I’m using Baybayin in my thesis. So when I saw that interview, I was like, “Oh, this is a wonderful resource right here for me.” I was wondering if you could talk about why it was so important for you to conduct those interviews and include them in the journal, and what your interview process was like, reaching out to these individuals and building trust with them.
Flores Fantauzzo: I’m so glad you’re using Baybayin in your thesis, that’s wonderful. There are many precolonial scripts in the Philippines, but Baybayin is sort of the most known and well-used one. There’s an interview with Howie Severino, who’s a very well-known news anchor in the Philippines. He’s not really known for his Baybayin preservation, but it became a very intense project of his because he had access to so many people who were Baybayin experts. He became fluent in written Baybayin, and he actually also texts in Baybayin now. There’s a Baybayin keyboard on iPhone, there’s Baybayin at the end of that interview as well. I think the act of preservation in the Philippines is often mourned as something that does not happen. But the reason [it] does not happen historically is because of the concentration of resources in the hands of very few. If the powerful and wealthy do not want to invest in preservation, preservation will not happen, especially in physical spaces. In Metro Manila, many older sites are torn down, and there are not a lot of placards that you’ll find that say, for example, “this is where a battle happened” or “this is where the first traders arrived from Malaysia and China.” There are some, but not as many as there could be. So to me, if there’s not a lot of physical preservation happening, there’s not a lot of reflecting on the preservation that is happening.
Part of the process in the Philippines is reaching out to people on Facebook Messenger, so I was Facebook messaging people who were engaged in this kind of work. One of them is a photographer and photojournalist whose images are becoming evidence for the International Criminal Court because of the drug murders. His preservation had to do with mailing hard drives and making sure his images—which were horrific—were all captioned correctly. In doing that, he actually helped to create a living preservation of what these families were still enduring years later.
Another act of preservation is putting back into print novels from Philippine literature, giving them beautiful new covers and making sure the physical page feels substantial. A lot of publishing is physical preservation, and then a lot of it is cultural preservation.
So that space of reflection on preservation was something I thought would be great in the magazine. I also simply enjoy reading interviews, and I made sure not to have a template for each of them. I wanted each to kind of look like an organic conversation, albeit ones had online.
Somwaru: Okay, I really love your idea of preservation, like in which ways do we preserve? And I think a form of doing that can be done through hybridization. After reading Antiman [by Rajiv Mohabir], I’m always thinking about the hybrid form. So I’m really thinking about your issue, Rajiv, and how it’s a culmination of song, poetry, memory, nonfiction, art, comic-poetry, like there’s so much going on in this journal that makes it a hybrid form. It really is the karahee that’s mixing all this work together in the pot. So I would love to hear how you were thinking about the image of the mixed karahee and hybridization when you were arranging this work together into one whole journal. What did you take into account?
Mohabir: We do not always tell stories through chronological, linear prose. I don’t think narration goes like this: one person says, “I’m gonna tell you the story,” and speaks for 30 minutes without anyone else saying anything, right? Oh, God, that just sounds miserable and nobody wants to read that. To me it’s more vibrant if we’re sitting around the dinner table and my cousin will start telling a story and then my father interrupts to add, “Oh, that reminds me of this,” and then he’ll break off into this other story. He and my aunt will have a different kind of conversation, and then the cousin will bring us back, “Okay, time for me to continue,” his story continues, and then all of a sudden, someone bursts into a song that some kind of memory unlocked and triggered. Then everyone sits, and they sing the song, and then they laugh. And then someone says, “Okay, okay, finally, tell us what happened. Tell us what happened.” I think this kind of hybridity is inherent to the ways in which story is passed on, how we tell one another stories, and how we exist together. And for me, I…Gabby, in your bio, it said that you favor prose. It makes me think, What do I favor? As I put the anthology together, I thought maybe I favor people. A lot of what emerged for this issue was obviously from tapping folks that I knew, and then asking for them to send me things, and being really excited. There was this student that I met in Tampa who was working on graphic poems, and I was like, “That’s so neat,” we need that memoir in our communities.
If you ask a poet for a poem, they’ll probably give you a flower. I can rely on that kind of interaction from a lot of these writers. I asked for poems, prose, and hybrid genre writing to be published in this journal, but what is published now is also multilingual, is also playing with the page, is deeply asking questions, is thinking deeply about translation and iteration. For example, I was really happy to get songs in Sarnami Hindustani from the world renowned superstar Raj Mohan, who has beautiful album, after album, after album, and he does his own translations from Sarnami into Dutch or Taki Taki and then into English. We can’t tell our story, we can’t paint our story using only one color, right? The hybridity of who we are as displaced people is incredibly profound and deep.
Contratto: I’m gonna have to change my bio now.
Mohabir: It was great and provocative.
Contratto: Thank you. I’m glad that it went somewhere. I’m taking a poetry class with Noʻu Revilla, and she’s gently introducing me to the world of poetry. We’ll get there someday. Now, I’m going to ask a little more of a boring process question. Putting together these issues takes months, as me and Chandanie have discovered with our work at the journal. We reach out to you guys, you think of a central theme, you’re gathering all the contributors, soliciting pieces, sending those pieces to us at Mānoa so we can begin the process of creating the issue, which is back and forth between Mānoa and you, and Mānoa and UH Press. What is your favorite part of that process and what drives you to keep working on it through all the back and forth emails from Amanda and Shankar, the nitpicking over contracts, and all the editing?
Flores Fantauzzo: Thank you for that. And also, I just wanted to say thank you, Rajiv, down with the linear, down with glossaries, down with it all!
When you’re an editor, it makes you a kind of perpetual fan, and then you can put your fandom to work. So to me, that was my favorite part. I really liked the conversations about particularities in each writerʻs work. I now had this institutional backing to approach people I really admired and whose work that I had loved for a long time. That was my favorite part of it, and a driver for me. I also dedicated the issue to three mentors who I lost to COVID, to make sure that small act of preservation happened to acknowledge the grief the Philippine and Philippine American community went through during that time. Keeping their names as a kind of motivator was also a very important driver. And also the pleasure of reading. I’m very down on myself, you know, always thinking “nothing’s going to work,” with my drafts. But when I was reading other peoples’ drafts, I thought, “Oh, this, this is delightful, so much is working.” From that feeling of generosity, I could then collaborate with them on anything. With Glenn Diaz, I said, “Glenn, I’m greedy. Can you just add, like, eight more scenes?” And he did, and I was amazed.
It’s like a request of the DJ for more songs, you know? There are a lot of delightful parts of the process, and so it wasn’t difficult to stay motivated. I was very happy with the backing of the journal, and everyone who supported it.
Rajiv: Yeah, thank you for this question. It’s not boring at all. It’s actually quite great. There’s so many favorite parts that I have. Working with Amanda and Shankar was really amazing. I have deep sympathy for people who have to herd poets. I think working with me probably wasn’t so easy, considering it was a very dark time in my life, and it was really kind of wonderful to have this project to work on while I was going through some emotional difficulties. I think another thing that I really love is bringing people from Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, South Africa, Fiji, and Mauritius, bringing them together to do something brand new. It felt really exciting, as though we were all having tea together, speaking of the particularities of our Indian or South Asian experience in such different countries. I was really happy to have included in this journal people who have never been published before.
In all humility and gratitude, thank you to Mānoa Journal, really, for giving me this opportunity. And then also, working with the design folks. Oh my god, this cover is sick! And that was also another kind of joy to hold this in my hand and to see the quality of the paper.
