I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations, and Chutney Fractals

 Kaya Press 2024

Playful and celebratory, yet also mourning the loss of language, this poetry anthology revives the fading tradition of Caribbean Hindustani songs

In a new groundbreaking anthology, award-winning poet, memoirist and translator Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) engages with Indo-Caribbean language and culture, this time by inviting 17 diasporic writers to experiment with their own personal interpretations of two famous Chutney songs. Chutney music is a syncretic, Caribbean music born out of North Indian tunes and African beats. Caribbean Hindustani songs and poems, the basis for Chutney music, are no longer spoken with the frequency that they were two generations ago. To this end, Mohabir asked some of the most exciting Caribbean writers and poets working today to “translate” two popular Chutney songs. A Caribbean diasporic response in the manner of Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, this book expands on the idea of that translation classic with reimaginings, reinterpretations and compelling treatises on Chutney music. I Will Not Go collects poetry inherited by the descendants of indenture and, through its innovative reimagining, celebrates the poetry of survival.

Contributors include: Anita Baksh, Divya Persaud, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Will Depoo, Anu Lakhan, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Natasha Ramoutar and more.

The inventive translations of chutney lyrics by these Caribbean writers collectively creates an intricate and many-layered sonic experience.  But even more profound is the way in which by exploring the lyrics via multiple lenses, the voices and troubled experiences of Indo-Caribbean women are excavated and released—entwined, but also, hauntingly distinct from the high spirit of chutney beat. The result is powerful and very moving.

-Marcia Douglas, author of The Marvelllous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim

I WILL NOT GO is Mohabir’s Caribbean, diasporic response to Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei—and beyond: He offers us seventeen rich and innovative renditions of two Chutney songs as “translated” by a diverse group of poets and translators residing in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Trinidad, and Guyana.  This book, on one hand, is their invitation to reckon and explore this fusion music genre of “Afro-Caribbean beats with Indo-Caribbean experience and music.”  These “translations” – poetic renditions – further mirror the soul, freedom, flexibility, and richness of this syncretic Caribbean-borne language.  Mohabir modestly calls his project an “experiment” – it is a bold achievement documenting how this language, with its history of attempted annihilation, has managed to survive, evolve, migrate, and keep on singing.

-R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the Rs 

 [This book] is vital, and genius—chutney music as a source, creatively translated into a variety of Indo-Caribbean Englishes, a cultural resource, a map of origins, and a proclamation of resilience and survival. 

-Shani Mootoo