I first encountered Jessica Nirvana Ram on what was then Twitter. Her punchy humor and love of poetry effervesced from the phone screen into full belly laughs. When I saw her poetry, I dreamt of this day. Ram comes from Guyana, South America, as do I—or rather we both have roots in the sugar cane plantations of the British Empire. The coolie trade displaced our ancestors, and here, now in the United States, we have resettled. There are not many people from our ethnic community who have published books of poetry in the United States, though the number is growing. For me, this excitement means that there will be more and more poetry books by Indians from the Caribbean that speak to our histories of dispossession, entanglements with Empire, and migration stories.
I first met Jessica Nirvana Ram in real life in San Antonio, the year AWP happened at the Covid epicenter. After following her vibrant social media accounts, I learned that Ram is a poet with a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist while walking the world of her poetic influences such as Aja Monet and Franny Choi, to name just two. The first of her poems that I encountered was published by Barrell House called “incantation to the departed” in which the speaker says, “My faith urges me to say a prayer, / to repeat mantras over the deceased, / to find their loved ones & offer them company.” This is the work of poetry as immigrants or children of immigrants to the United States. It also seems to summon community.
In recent years there have been more and more Guyanese American poets publishing collections: Saida Agostini Bostic, Elizabeth Jaikaran, and Chandanie Somwaru, all form a covey of woman poets changing the landscape of West Indian American poetry, and all of whom make visible an invisibilized diaspora. Earthly Gods was originally published by Variant Lit but only had one print run until being rescued by Game Over Books, whose rerelease sees its second printing forthcoming this year. Ram’s collection moved me with her speakers’ narratives: a Guyanese woman learning the depths of her matrilineal inheritance of sugar cane labor, Hinduism, patriarchal contestations, resistance, and transformation. Themes of misogyny, love, and of being mothered rise into protest.
Our conversation happened over email and manipulating a Google Doc—the newest form of connection that called down our grandmothers to oversee our conversation.
Rajiv Mohabir: Congratulations on your debut collection! I am so excited to talk to another Indo-Guyanese poet publishing in the United States. How did you come to poetry? What was your journey into poetry like?
Jessica Nirvana Ram: Poetry started as a means of survival. My first love was fiction, I always loved telling stories, especially bad self-insert stories with magic and prophecies and improvements on my present-day life. But it was around my preteen years when I found myself in a place of turmoil and turned to poetry to sort through my feelings. Feelings of loneliness and grief and being out of place. In eighth grade I wrote a poem called “The Broken Window” about being on the outside looking in that won second place in a local writing contest. When my mom heard me read it, it was the first time she realized I wasn’t adjusting to our move from New York to Pennsylvania very well. My mental health struggles persisted through high school and poetry was there late into the night to help me put words to the caverns. I tried to fight it, to not commit to the label of poet, to study psychology in college and plan to be a child psychiatrist. But all I did in college was poetry. Spoken word opened up the world of poetry for me at eighteen and from there it’s history. I studied slam poets and practiced reading my own work and fell in love with the stage and subsequently with the page, with the infinite possibilities of words. I wrote a lot of bad poems for a very long time and I am so grateful for it. Exploring those poems led me to the work that eventually became my first book. Also, truthfully, getting medicated for my mental health struggles. It really opened up my mind, provided clarity so I could write about the things most immediate to me. So I could explore family and love and things beyond despair.
Your poetic forms are variable in this collection from contrapuntals, to prose, to the more traditionally lineated lyric. Can you talk a little about how the poem settles on form?
When it comes to traditional forms, sonnets or ghazals, I start with the intention of writing a poem in that form. Sometimes it is intuitive, I know early if a poem wants to be in couplets or tercets, if it is meant to be one prose block or with backslashes. Typically I write first drafts in one sitting, so when the form isn’t intuitive, that initial poem will usually be in one long stanza. I’ll think about line breaks in the sense of where the poem falls on the page, but otherwise I just write. In subsequent revisions I’ll play around with form, with the length of stanzas or the line. I find when I am writing really long lines in an early draft I have to make the decision pretty quickly about whether or not it wants to be a prose poem and oftentimes the answer is yes. I’ve really come to love the prose block, specifically the prose block with backslashes that function as a type of line break. I think the poem tells you what form it wants to be if you listen carefully. I love when a poem is funky and wants weird line breaks or caesuras. I used to utilize white space on the page a lot when I was a younger poet, I’m less experimental with it these days and I think it’s something I’d like to get back to in some ways.
What does it mean to be a Guyanese writing this book in a landscape where we do not have many role models in the American Academy? How did you see yourself in the landscape of American poetry?
Until I found your work I honestly knew very few Caribbean poets working in the world. The one volume of poetry I found in college was of Guyanese poets who have long since died. Monica Prince only arrived at my alma mater when I was a senior in college so for most of my life I had very few reference points for my particular experience. I guess in a way it felt like necessary work to put my experiences and voice into the sphere of contemporary poetry. I think we don’t always fit neatly into preordained boxes like Asian American or even Caribbean–so to explore and write about the Indo-Guyanese experience, I felt certain levels of pressure as well. How do I do this right? How do I be true to my experiences while also being true to my family’s history? Can I include creole in my poetry even though it feels foreign on my tongue? When we moved away from New York it felt like severing a connection to a community I might have been more immersed in had we stayed. Sometimes I still feel like an outsider to my own cultures. I don’t fully know how I fit into the landscape of American poetry quite yet. I think with this book I’m learning how other people place me and starting to get an understanding of who I’m in communication with through my work.
You include many poems about your grandmother (Nani or Aji?) and your mother. Can you speak about the importance of these role models, the themes that haunt you, and how they influence your poetic mind?
Nani! Though my mom didn’t raise us to use those words so I just call her grandma. I am who I am because of these women. I grew up in a very matriarchal family dynamic. My grandmother was sixteen when she got married, she started a farm and raised animals and nurtured a livelihood in order to keep herself busy and keep her family fed. She is a strong woman. She was a business woman, which made her different than the other people in her village. She helped people and helped herself, and yes my grandfather worked in the sugarcane fields but she wasn’t reliant on him for everything. And then there’s my mother. The breadwinner of the family. The one with more education. My dad worked so she could get her advanced degrees when they lived in Astoria. Then she went on to do data analysis! My mother is the smartest person I know and my father was never intimidated by her. He always propped her up, supported her, let her do what she wanted. I guess between these two women I grew up knowing no one could control me or tell me who to be. I didn’t need someone beside me to make me worthwhile, it was about being independent and strong willed. My mom looks at me sometimes and sees herself and I wonder what that’s like. If I’ll have a daughter one day and pass on parts of myself the way my mother has. If the matrilineal line is really that strong.
I think I circle their independence a lot but more than that, their willingness to be caretakers. This cycle of care that floats between women in a Guyanese household. The expectations. My grandmother raised seven children. My mother now takes care of my grandmother full time. I think American culture is big on nursing homes and outsourcing care and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But culturally there’s an expectation that the children will one day care for the parents. My mother’s struggled being the only child of her siblings to take on that responsibility to the point where she’s told me she doesn’t want to put the burden of her care on me. But honestly, if I’m married with a house one day, and my mother needs somewhere to go and needs care, I’d do it without hesitation. I think a lot about my mother and grandmother as girls. Young girls with dreams and aspirations and thoughts about love. In the manuscript I’m currently working on there’s even exploration about their relationship with sex which is such a risk to be writing about because these aren’t things we talk about. I wonder a lot about my mother and grandmother at my age. How I parallel to them. If I do. I find when I write about having children one day it is heavily influenced by how I was parented both by my mother and my grandmother. The values they instilled. What I want to keep, what I want to improve. The one fiction story I’ve written that got published is all about intergenerational trauma. It informs the way I think about relationships, about love. Even when I’m not writing about my mother, I think I’m always writing about my mother.
I find it so risky to write about our Guyanese families! What have been your struggles and delights writing about family?
We aren’t supposed to talk about family outside of the family. I grew up under the assumption that we were meant to be secretive and if I ever talked about family matters outside of the house and got caught, there was hell to pay. When I first started this book I thought I was documenting my family’s history. I was keeping myself out of it. Recording facts. I realized very quickly I could not keep myself and my opinions out of my writing. It is hilarious that I tried. The thing is, I love my family. They have their flaws but I love them. I think that was the conceit of the book. Your parents are your earthly gods. What does it mean to be an earthly god? Does it not mean an imperfect god? How do you worship someone who can make mistakes? I was terrified of my parents reading this book because there are a few poems where I address not so happy moments. With them, with myself. But my thesis director, Melissa Crowe, kept telling me that this book was so imbued with love. That everything written in it was written with love, with grace, with kindness and an open mind. I wasn’t blaming anyone for anything I was just talking through my experiences, explaining the way I saw the world. I think growing up there were moments where I believed I didn’t have a right to view the world the way I did. That if it didn’t align with my mother’s view I was wrong. I struggled with a lot of guilt at first, writing about my family. But ever since the book came out they’ve been nothing but wonderful. My biggest fans. My dad read the book and called it beautiful. My mother read the book and said it made her realize how alike we are. I think the love came through in the book. I think as I continue to write about my family some of the topics have become a little more complex, a little more leaning toward taboo and it’ll be interesting to see how they react to those in the future. Things like sex and death. But I’ve learned, if it is important to me, I have to write about it. I can’t worry about what my family thinks before I’ve drafted a thing. I can’t let anyone else into the writing process, it has to just be me and the page. The rest of the world comes after.
Are there any particular Caribbean poets and writers that you are in conversation with?
As she was one of my first poetic mentors, Monica Prince was a pretty big influence early on. Finding out she was Guyanese was a highlight of my college experience. I made her adopt me, really. She writes choreopoems which lead to poems of a very cinematic quality and I think I pull from that a lot. Someone read a poem of mine recently and said they thought I’d write a great screenplay because of how grounded in image and movement the words were. Which I think is fascinating and probably something I stole from Prince’s work. Other poets I’ve read or interacted with over the years have worked their way in, Shara McCallum, Nabila Lovelace, Saida Agostini. I find that I discover Caribbean poets by accident. We get paired in a reading or a workshop and somehow it slips out and it is a beautiful revelation. I’d love to spend more time reading and studying the Caribbean canon, finding kin.
With epigraphs from Aja Monet and Kaveh Akbar to Jericho Brown’s duplex form, you have poetic inspirations and influences. Who and what else do you see as influencing this collection?
I was asked something similar to this at a reading recently and it was really interesting to think through what I’d been consuming during the length of writing this collection. For one, I think Bollywood movies played some part in the drama of it all. The splayed out scenes, the dramatic effects, the poignant language. But also, the occasional joke? Bollywood can of course be very camp and it was only in rereading my collection aloud do I notice that there are some funny lines in there as well! I’ve learned to slow down reading certain pieces for an audience because people laugh! Which has been fascinating.
I think the ambiance of certain music affects my mood when writing as well. I look back at my most listened to songs from 2021 to get a feel for what I was listening to most during the bulk of this book and there’s a lot of Hozier, The Band Camino, RnB. I don’t often listen to music while drafting initial poems but I do listen to lo-fi when revising. Anime lo-fi in particular! Or instrumental strings. I love a violin.
There are a few poems in the collection that were inspired by anime also, I have a note about one of them in the back of the book! Eastern modes of storytelling are so intriguing to me and I think that makes its way into how I shape poems sometimes. I think eastern storytelling is a slower medium than western media and I think that comes through in my writing. I prefer a slow burn. Taking time in a space instead of rushing to the point. I circle around concepts, linger on images. I tend to write longer poems for these reasons, too.
What is your hope for this collection? What is your dream for its work in the world?
I want it to find its readers. Whether that means other Indo-Guyanese people, children of immigrants, other people trying to understand their faith. I want it to find readers who are asking the same questions I am and looking for someone to understand them. So far, my family and friends have been reading this book and loving it and that’s meant more than I can put into words. To be seen and loved is a wild, beautiful gift. But then there are the strangers, the people who made an active decision to pick up my book without knowing me, who are kind enough to tell me they enjoyed it. Saw something in it for them. I want to be known as a Caribbean writer, alongside my peers. I’d love for some of my idols to read it. These are pipe dreams of course, but dreams nonetheless. If five people read it, that’s enough. Everything beyond that is a blessing, a dream, a wild imagining come true.
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Seabeast (Four Way Books 2025) is his fifth collection of poetry is forthcoming this September and he is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
This post may contain affiliate links.
