"Acoustic Trauma is a found object. It's a work of the imagination made from shards and scraps of dialect, religious epic and history yoked together, allowing languages to sidle up side by side, allowing multiple identities to co-exist. Where there was danger of loss, Rajiv Mohabir has excavated and refashioned the fractured past into newness and wholeness, in an act deeper than translation. It is trans-creation, his poem a whole sorrow, a whole beauty, both whale song and exile's song; and it is reclamation, a process of self-discovery and rediscovery for the colonized subject fighting against the erasures of history."
A collection of translations from a single Indo-Caribbean Kabira folk song, reimagined into poetry, woven in and out of three languages. An experiment in language and translation, Mohabir merges the Imaginaries of three distinct worldviews into one poetic.
*na mash me bone* fuses original Guyanese folk songs with a spiritually charged English translation, a new rendering that sings its way back into the realm of the sacred.