Acoustic Trauma

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. — Gaiutra Bahadur, author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture