Rajiv Mohabir’s Whale Aria is as much a gorgeous, sonically lush love poem to whales and queer immigrant kinships with them as it is a powerful indictment of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and white oppressors’ harm of people of color and whales alike. Whalesong, more than birdsong, is what fills the speaker’s mouth and poetry in this book, as these poems speak from both whale and human at once. It is never anything less than absolutely astonishing. In these poems, Mohabir insists both immigrants and whales’ “songs will pierce the dark / fathoms. Behold the miracle: / what was once lost / now leaps before you” (“Why Whales Are Back in New York City”). Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American poet and the author of The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016), The Cowherd’s Son, (Tupelo Press, 2017, and winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and Cutlish (Four Way Books, 2021), among other works. Mohabir’s stunning new book is a multilingual, ecological aria in refutation to white settler colonizers’ violence, oppression, and silence.

A beautiful example of this is the poem “Immigrant Aria,” in which the speaker addresses both whale and immigrant:

…Once you answered

to monster, to dragon, spewing steam, fire

bellowing in the furnace of your hide,

a migrant captured for brown skin’s

labor. Somewhere inside the darkness

where brews flame, a spirit hovers

over the deep. Once before Adam named

you illegal you snaked, breaking

into air. Spit out his poison, jaw-clap

the swell….

In the beginning,

you were formed with great light.

In tide-like tercets with sentences that swell and spill over from one stanza to the next, refusing the neat closure or container of a quatrain in favor of the motion of a wave, this poem offers respite, refuge, resistance for the marginalized and oppressed (human and whale alike). Mohabir rejects the poison of settler colonialism with, among other techniques, language that sonically refutes the word “illegal” with bellowing, jaw-clap, swell, spew, snake, migrant. Other poems include lines in multiple languages. The precision of Mohabir’s sonic lushness throughout this collection is as beautiful as it is exacting in its anti-colonialism.

Elsewhere in the collection, as in the long poem sequence “Invocation,” Mohabir does this work by offering a poetic response and conversation with humpback vocalizations. Over several pages rich with imagery, Mohabir interweaves pages of lyric stanzas that are rightside up with pages that are upside down, or pages in which stanzas zigzag back and forth across the page. Mohabir’s formal innovation and use of page space (both here and throughout the whole collection) are astonishing, transforming the page less into a field and more into an ocean with wide range from the margins and no bottom on sight. The whale-speakers of these pages command the reader to “Listen. You will hear my strain’s / echo ripple across the bay’s sandy breast… / A faint breeze will cause the maroon / kestrel of your breast to crest / coral face…” Other pages visually chart notes of humpback vocalizations, like so:

O

O O

O O O

O O O O

O

O O

O O O

In this docupoetic lyrical sequence that examines whalesong as “poetry’s gesture,” Mohabir honors the way whales can never be truly translated. He also witnesses the way that acoustic trauma and plastics — white settler colonizers’ ecological violence — have harmed whales and their language. With stunning lyricism, Mohabir collapses the boundaries between human and nonhuman to illuminate how bound we are to one another’s fates: “I am you and you are me, despite / the moon’s cold light….a constellation’s salve. We are / many bound in one plastiglomerate.” The plurality of self in the interplay of pronouns changes from transcendence to profound dread in the knitting together of bodies and selves in plastics and trash, in the horrifying sonic textures of the Anthropocene. Yet Whale Aria ultimately refuses to be an elegy. Instead, as in the poem “Why Whales Are Back in New York City,” Mohabir’s lyricism is an act of resistance and endurance: “no matter how / white supremacy gathers / at the sidewalks, flows down / the streets, we still beat our drums / wild….They won’t keep us out / though they send us back.” The poem “Invocation,” and the entirety of Whale Aria, is a beating of that drum, refusing to be languaged as annihilation.

Too, Whale Aria explores queer kinship with whales. A poem early in the book, “Boy with Baleen for Teeth,” explores an extended metaphor for queerness in which a boy is born with baleen teeth:

drawn to any

glimmer. A whaler

tore my dress

then stuck me

with his iron

after we kissed

in a haze of chanteys

and Cutty Sark.

I want

to taste any

body that shines

in the dark.

Here, as in several other poems in the collection, Mohabir’s formal innovation and range across the page is in fine display, as he explores the push and pull of stanzas back and forth across the page in the tide of ocean and desire. Water, dark, shine are sites of the erotic, where starlight moves through holes in the body and transformation into fluke and breach become zones of poetic possibility for the speaker. The sensual pleasure of the rhyme of Sark and dark, and the more subtle rhyme of kiss and dress, creates tension with the images of the torn dress and being stuck with iron. Throughout Whale Aria, Mohabir’s sonic play becomes a way to engage with the crises of the poems.

Docupoetic and global in its sweep, Whale Aria manages to be at once expansive in its subject matter and always intimate in its direct address, in its insistence on the you as much as on an I/we of human and whale. In doing so, Mohabir manages to both honor queer immigrant kinship with whales and to honor whales as nonhuman others with their own language and consciousness unto themselves that can never be fully understood or translated. In this way, Whale Aria grapples with the crisis of its title: to create a song with whales as opposed to imposing a song, metaphor, and consciousness onto whales. Mohabir does it masterfully in a collection of rich imagistic beauty and expansive formal movement across the page. He shows us the way the whale, like a poem, is a site in which our unknowing sings back to us in ways we still remember, in ways that will continue to survive and endure.

poetic conversations: Whalesong in Many Mouths: a Review of Rajiv Mohabir’s “Whale Aria” was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.