Toward a Poetics of Allyship: Rajiv Mohabir's Radical, Animal Coolitude

I offer one alternative to media depictions of migrant bodies as animalistic threat by tracing animal movement in Rajiv Mohabir's poetry. Mohabir is a queer Indo-Caribbean American poet whose poetry depicts animals' fettered movement, often a consequence of heteropatriarchal and nationalist operations of power. Mohabir suggests that such artistic productions might align and thus ally themselves with disparate imperiled bodies due in part to the ethics of Coolitude, or, the state of having descended from Indo-Caribbean coolies. Mohabir has revitalized the term in a series of manifestos and craft essays published on Jacket2, where he claims Coolitude poetics as a corrective to the kind of nationalist mindset that would condemn imperiled migrants.

Mohabir's poetry prominently features two kinds of creatures: those who enjoy conditional movement, such as the whales that populate verse from across his career, which denotes a subject's attempts to free themselves from the conscripts of heterosexual or imperial legacies; and those such as the taxidermied wren or coyotes that adorn his first published collection, The Taxidermist's Cut (2016). These figures best describe political subjects who have internalized the resentment of their political environment and are consequently destroyed. Mohabir does, however, offer one other figure: the unfettered whale of "Why Whales are Back in New York City" (2017). The whales of this poem represent a subject that succeeds in defending itself from the oppression that distinguishes the rest of his poetry; the poem thus serves as a model of sanctuary.