Banbas/Exile - by Rajiv Mohabir (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From acclaimed poet and scholar Rajiv Mohabir, a brilliantly crafted retelling of the ancient Ramayan that valorizes the epic poem's queer heart.

Rajiv Mohabir first learned of the Ramayan from his grandmother while sitting on his parents' brown-tiled porch, surrounded by the scrub forest of central Florida. Descended from generations of Indian indentured laborers who were brought to Guyana under nefarious contracts, they receive the ancient Hindu epic poem as a tale of exile in anthropomorphic wilderness, passed along as it was in stories and songs shared vocally in the cane fields.

Here, in a singular gesture of deeply layered translation, this ember of song is passed along again. Drawing on his grandmother's Creole, Caribbean Hindustani, and the King's English on his own decolonized terms, Mohabir reimagines the Ramayan anew. Classical in form yet rooted in Guyanese ancestry and its diasporas, Banbas / Exile is a genre-bending collection of poetry, stories, songs, and reflective prose. Speaking through heroes, villains, and animal deities, this extraordinary translation gives voice to lives shaped by exile and to the enduring search for a world that can hold both difference and communion.

About the Author

Rajiv Mohabir is a memoirist, translator, and the author of five collections of poems, most recently Seabeast. His books have been awarded with Foreword Indies Gold and the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. He's also been honored as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and as both a second place winner and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Mohabir teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder.