Banbas/Exile: A Ramayan Retelling

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.

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.

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Obit received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything and several children’s books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.