Rajiv Mohabir
To Regard: A Whale Watching Object Lesson
Object Lesson 1
regarder to look
surveiller to watch
voir to see
observer to observer
* * *
The ocean rolls its slate tresses out in the North Pacific of Auke Bay while it laps its cornflower of the Hawaiian waters. The same ocean sprawls, the largest on our planet, containing miniscule life and megafauna. Each beach rainbowed in difference. What remains unchanged: the matrix for a population of humpbacks in migration that humans have harried for centuries. I’m often struck by just how often I find myself aboard a ship, a boat, a troller, clutching a guard rail or the gunwale, thinking this very thing.
Whale watching is an ecotourist activity that has transformed the whaling vessel into a tour group, and the harpoon into the camera. The threat of course, changed from that of the exploding tip harpoon into the unbearable acoustic smog created by human movement in the world’s oceans. I have been researching the natural history of marine mammals and their connec- tions with human cultures along the Pacific Rim—starting from Hawai‘i up through the US and Canadian Pacific coast since 2014—and have spawned three book manuscripts from this in-depth look at our ocean-kin. I have watched from shores, from behind books, from museums, and from boats, observing their breath and their bodies in their natural habitats. In doing so, I become a watcher.
I am interested in how the act of watching the whale can be translated into a poetic engagement wherein critical theory, ecopoetry, and lyric investment can show the ways in which my own mind works to make sense of animals I have seen, and those I have read about. My general foot forward in the collection Seabeast has been to take whatever information I have uncovered through either direct observation or research into peer-reviewed and journalist articles I have read pertaining to the cetacean’s natural history as the first glimpse that plumbs into my associative mind’s sea and follows it as the fact sounds into the depth of my own queer, brown interiority. It’s arranged alphabetically, taking a cue from Jeffery Yang’s An Aquarium. It serves as a poetic guidebook to the various species in the Pacific.
I don’t come from a culture that has genealogical connections to the animals of the ocean, though as Caribbean people we are dependent on the ocean to narrate our own origins. Of this Genesis story, the late poet Derek Walcott says of this in his poem “Sea Is History”:
First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
The Coolie was transported across the seas and were likely to hear the humpbacks’ plaintive echoes through the hulls of the repurposed enslavement ships. The BBC says in, “The Loudest Voice in the Animal Kingdom”:
Though ancient sailors were known to hear the calls of whales through the hulls of ships, they likely didn’t know what they were hearing (and it is thought attributed the sounds to mermaids).
So why, then not my ancestors?
I say that this process is akin to whale watching as it takes the whale as a scien- tific object and curio and follows the associative mind into a written expression. In this sense, the whale watching is a catalyst for my own personal anagnorisis or, to be less dramatic, my own realization. My question that I bring to the poem is simple: what psychic and spiritual connections am I making subconsciously
from my engagement with these charismatic species? And how does my own viewing of the animal and the self-as-animal participate in a poetics of object? This question itself becomes its own object lesson.
* * *
Object Lesson 2
An abstract thought routed through a practical example.
* * *
The Object
And what does it mean to watch, to see? What about to regard or to make into an object the beheld thing: animated or not? In poetry, I am interested in the politics and practice of the object lesson, how what the poet sees and writes exist in a state lodged outside of them, placed behind a glass for others to regard, to contemplate, to bring their own neural network of associations to in order to make sense of the thing.
As a person of Caribbean descent, I cannot imagine thinking through this one- way surveillance without thinking about how Empire has made things of so many of us damnés de la terre. Aimé Césaire famously writes in his polemical, fevered essay Discours sur le Colonialisme:
la colonisation travaille à déciviliser le colonisateur, à l’abrutir au sens propre du mot, à le dégrader, à le réveiller aux instincts enfouis, à la convoitise, à la violence, à la haine raciale, au relativisme moral.
colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.
For my sense of things, this quote has stuck with me for ages, simply because of the ways in which, when beholding the Other as brute, as uncivilized, what emerges in the beholder’s psyche is violence and domination—thereby turning
the beholder into the brutalizer. This process feels ongoing to me and deeply personal, I am afraid to admit.
* * *
Object Lesson 3
l’objet object
le but goal
l’objectif the objective
le Chose the Thing
* * *
I remember the regard and awe that I had for the natural world when I grew up outside of Orlando in a small town called Chuluota in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a rural scrubland habitat with sandy soil, tall pine trees, and countless palmetto bushes that made up the main environment. There were also turkey and water oaks that housed the musical green tree frogs whose nightly chorus provided an evening soundtrack. Mourning doves crooned out the music of the morning.
As fascinated as I was, I was schooled in Christian philosophy which believed that the natural world was there for humans to use as we see fit—that the ultimate creation was the Human: godlike in our bodies. I captured green anoles—small lizards that did well in proximity to humans—and tortured them by burning their skin with magnifying glasses, tearing off their tails and sometimes their legs to see what would happen. This all felt like minor, forgivable offenses that could be washed away since my life, as I imagined it, was more valuable than those I destroyed.
In my teenage years, I became acutely aware that my last name is one of the names of the monkey god, Hanuman. That I was a monkey. With this informa- tion and my need for penitence, I became a vegetarian and practiced both mantra and Vipassana meditations, vowing to my animal kin that I would never exploit them again—that even as I live, so should they. They were not lesser than me. A lesser creature of God. Isn’t that what the British said about Indians that they in-
dentured in a new reformulation of racialized enslavement, my ancestors bound to sugarcane plantations and demeaned for their skin and religion?
How we view what we deem as less animated shows us exactly how brutal we can be.
There is also the famous equation that Césaire makes: colonisation = chosifi- cation / colonization = thingification where the colonized person is no longer human but literally made into an object by the beholder, dominated and forced into submission by the colonizer.
There are countless ways to turn others into objects, to become brutalizers and objects ourselves. The colonizers, in turn, dehumanize themselves through their acts of violence against whomever they seek to dehumanize.
Now I ask, is to watch, to observe, to note, necessarily participating in this self-damning, the self-animalizing practice of colonial practice?
* * *
Object Lesson 4
Write your name as Coolie
Hindu and Muslim marriages not sanctified or legal
Asian Exclusion Act
XXX
* * *
Ecopoem
Ecopoetry is a generally broad category for types of poems and poetry that cen- ters human connections with the natural world—to be interpreted to include land, flora, fauna, and ecosystems. It answers the question of how a poem can be an intervention into ecological concerns. Important to an American under- standing of the connections between ecology and poetry is Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring that set into motion a postmodern concern with environmental
crises (Selby 128). Questions of connection, interconnections between people, land, and environment begin to bear on the connections that poets begin to make between reading practices of the environment. This implies an ethics of close reading and responsibility of the poet to the poem to the reader to the environ- mental contexts of each one. There is a gravitas that ecopoetry holds in today’s poetry: one that draws on the binaries of urban/pastoral and the Human/Nature (the archetypes of) and posits the connections and histories, and genealogies of place, identity, and colonization.
The implications of such binaries are mapped on the divides between literature and the natural world; ecopoetry attempts to allow a conscious consideration of the interconnection of all things, between the environment and human culture. A distinction must be made, however, between nature poetry and ecopoetry in that the former is human-centered, or anthropocentric, and implies spectatorship and a way of viewing the world according to capitalist and consumerist commodifi- cation of the earth’s value being related to use-value.
Ecopoetry, on the other hand, assumes a direct engagement and implication of human life and culture with the earth’s biospheres and ecologies and seeks to trouble the binaristic distinctions between the realm of the Human and that of Nature. In his book Ecocriticism Greg Garrard says that there are various ways that people have written about animals—all ultimately serving human ends. These ways include “Otherness” (metaphor) which are denigrating such as mechanomorphism, and allomorphism; and “metonymic” (likeness) such as crude anthropomorphism, critical anthropomorphism, critical zoomorphism, and crude zoomorphism that deal in various ways with how the human-to-ani- mal relationship functions (Garrard 154).
Of this connection between the Human and Nature, ecopoets postulate and the- orize in their poems. How can questions concerning the relationship between the human and the human’s ways of envisioning the natural world as separate constitute a reading and poetry practice that challenges binaries? I consider what is the relationship between the cetacean and the human? and am driven by the question: Is it possible to escape Othering the whale and the crude symbolism attached to writing about them?
Hierarchies
In the book Five Manifestoes for the Beautiful World, Joseph M. Pierce, a queer, Cherokee theorist writes in his piece about the relationships between the Animal and the Human is not one of hierarchy, one of subjugation, one of subordination, but rather, one of horizontal kinships. Of this he writes:
By relations I mean the practices developed by Indigenous Peoples over millennia for engaging with human and other-than-human beings in ways that prioritize mutual respect, humility, and balance. Relations— and by extension, living in good relations—means upholding obligations of kinship in an ongoing way, committing to the responsibilities and practices of care that sustain community life, and enacting reciprocal recognition of human and other-than-human beings. (Pierce 14)
He goes on to mark for his audience that there is not just one single way of think- ing of the relationships between the human and the other-than-human being, but rather thousands of configurations that make up the epistemic and phenomeno- logical orientations of various societies. Having studied in Hawai‘i, my friend, queer poet and librarian Keali‘i MacKenzie held my hand through my fumbling settler mistakes. He also narrated me a mo‘olelo that tells of the creation of the Human being sibling to Kalo—the taro plant. The connections he said show us the interrelationships between the ‘āina and the human.
Our conversations illustrated how I was practicing “settled listening” to histories and biological facts measured through single-sense observation. Dylan Robinson in his chapter “Hungry Listening” uses the framework of a multi-sensory listen- ing practice that acknowledges settler positionalities in the West. He writes:
The colonial imposition of settling listening seeks to compel sensory engagement through practices of focusing attention that are “settled”— in the sense of coming to rest or becoming calm—and in doing so effect perceptual reform sought through the “civilizing mission” of missionaries and the Canadian state. Listening regimes imposed and implemented “fixed listening” strategies that are part of a larger reorientation toward Western categorizations of single-sense engagement . . . (Robinson 37)
The implications of hungry listening as a process include listening beyond the “habit, ability, and biases” (37) of our settled positions into the “affective feel, timbre, touch, and texture” (38) of sound. I can think of this as a framework for understanding my settled position of considering the object, how in its chosifica- tion I render it flat, two-dimensional. To be drawn affectively is a queer method of reading. To watch the whale and to be led affectively through one’s associa- tions has the potential to move past envisioning our participation as always being static. Watching and observing, like listening for Robinson, can attain dynamism.
The dominant view of the hierarchy of animacies and how the Western thought that holds anthropocentric beliefs that have shaped my largely Western edu- cation, denies the web of relationships that connects all beings. I remember a professor who studied Native American literature drawing a line on the dry- erase board in green marker, showing us how Western rationalism and Christian thought separated Nature from the Human. On the left side of the board, at the beginning of the line were plants, then as the line moved to the right: rats, eagles, whales, gorillas, then all the way at the end—the stopping point of the line: the Human.
She pointed out that this kind of thinking enabled a settling of the land, birthing the notion of terra nullius, that empty, unused land that led to the American dream (nightmare for most of us) of Manifest Destiny—that the settling of the land and genocide of Indigenous folks was the white person’s God-given right. If the Human (read also white, European-descent, straight) was the ultimate cre- ation then why not show dominion over the “beasts of the fields,” which for science in the 1800s included Black and brown peoples the world over.
tree--rat---eagle---whale---chimpanzees---BIPOC (white) Human
After this, she erased the board and drew instead a web that connected human, fish, plant, rock, mammal, etc. into a constellation that highlighted interconnec- tivity. The notion was that our survival depended on the survival of these other beings, including what we in the West imagine as being inanimate.
The connections between the animal world and the human world were not separate but were in fact intertwined and co-creative—that the animals that we
separate ourselves from are actually our kin rather than objects to dress down. The People (Native to North America and Pasifika) have been saying for years what scientists and ecopoets are now beginning to recognize: that the preserva- tion of ecologies instead of individual species is what will restore populations of endangered animals—animals that human (Western) consumption have perse- cuted and hunted to the brink.
Of course, it’s important to show how this divide has been racialized and main- tained in the settler projects across the globe against Indigenous, Black, brown, and queer people. There is no separating these dimensions from the natural world.
* * *
Object Lesson 5
Thar she blows
She
WTF with this gender
Umbrellas Corsets
Smokeless oil
* * *
Animacy
In their book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel
Y. Chen defines animacy loosely as “much more than the state of being animate, and it is precisely the absence of a consensus around its meaning that leaves it open to both inquiry and resignification” (Chen 4). It is through this opening that Chen can critique a Euro-centric privileging of human-animals. They seek to wager a differing racial, transnational, and sexual politics of engaging the Animal and the Human.
For Chen:
Animacy activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/ death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural body/ cyborg. In its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or at least, how we might theorize them. (Chen 3)
One of the ways that Chen sees the work playing out that has specific implica- tions for poets of color is through the use of grammar as a possible way of chang- ing the animacies of those things deemed inanimate. Chen’s example comes from giving subjective agency back to the “inanimate”—a strategy to de-objectify the object; no longer less animate than the white American subject. Their example of “the hikers that rocks crush” give active voice to the rocks, a subjective auton- omy previously denied them by the more “fluent” sounding “the hikers crushed by rocks” (2). The implications for the queer of color body is that now, myriad subjectivities can hold space, can speak, and can speak back to power harkens back to Cathy Park Hong’s critique of the “Delusions of Whiteness in the Amer- ican Avant-Garde.”
Yet Chen argues still that the act of transmogrification of human into animal is to descend the chain of animacy to a lower level, a kind of dehumanization. I am inspired by this and seek to use my positionality as a queer Indo-Caribbean American and my language(s) in a way that seeks to trouble Chen’s ideas of animacy. I attempt to fold in directly queerness, postcolonial and settler identity, and migration. By doing both I attempt to make visible the speaker of color in the poem and also how the connections between cetacean natural history and biology are constellated in human conceptions of self.
In Caribbean history, Andil Gosine in his book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean charts the ways in which the Caribbean person: Black, Indian, Native, Chinese, etc. were dehumanized by the British Empire in order to morally justify their brutal subjugation, enslavement, exploitation, and torture. For Gosine, the animalization of the Caribbean subject extended into nonnor- mative sexualities, portraying the Caribbean person as in need of governing,
moralizing, and Christianization. But this envisioning of the Other, the Object, was flipped in a new queer-imperialist mist.
Gosine writes:
Once wrought by the European colonial officer, contemporary figurations have new authors: policymakers, politicians, businesses, and local and international activists together co-constitute the nonwhite homophobe as an animal. The world of gay international activists in particular has indulged this representation without acknowledging how the transference, with the Caribbean homosexual’s position as a maligned and animalized figure assumed by the homophobe, is effectively a repositioning of this racialized, hierarchical perspective rather than an emptying out of this colonial dynamic (Gosine 7).
It was recently when the tide turned on the geopolitical area where the Caribbe- an is now written of and spoken of by people in the Global North as homopho- bic and brutal—animalistic, even—in their treatment of queer folks. The irony being that the laws practiced and enforced by the former colonies are those that use the precise language of the Buggery Act written in the 1500s by Henry VIII. Again, the Black and Coolie (and everything in-between) bodies are portrayed as needing Western (Global North) intervention. This is colonial bullshit, main- tained by the United States—including immigrants interpolated into the North American epistemic-machine who call for a liberalized sense of “equality” and not in grassroots organizing.
* * *
Object Lesson 6
At eleven o’clock a fin whale
smaller than its relative the blue fins are easy to spot because
of their distinctive dorsal fins
* * *
The Poem as Whale Watching
I was fortunate to be funded by Emerson College and the Massachusetts Cultur- al Council to travel along the Pacific Rim—from Honolulu to LA to Santa Bar- bara to Monterrey, to Seattle to Vancouver to Juneau. This is one of the poems that surfaces from my active research.
Fin Whale
Balaenoptera physalus
Melville’s razorback, second to the largest whale in the world, at eighty to one hundred
sixty thousand pounds, means there’s some blue bigger
than you. You crave recognition, I know why you migrate far from home, I am a second child—
never the record
even though at forty-four and seven inches
taller than Emile, my brother, whose own ex-family
is four more people
than mine which includes me, my dog, and cat. I tried to but couldn’t impregnate my ex-husband because Science muttered something
about biology, which once said
man is man but now says distinctions are more arbitrary; a Western Rational episteme which also held brown folks
as less-than-sub-human, and in this razor-
country, my brown Caribbean parents, both born before 1965, are still excluded
from America’s settler dream.
What happens in this poem is that we as the readers are along with the speaker in the boat when information about the fin whale breaches the surface. Let’s listen hungrily to the poem itself now a representation of following the mind. What happens is the linking of associations between being the first of a kind, to the coming in second place. Why does it feel like, for me, I’m always coming in sec- ond in the writing world and in life? Here is where the poem betrays my own psy- chology as a second child. And this is precisely where the poem goes with the line
I am a second child— never the record
The speaker follows this line of thinking from how he does not measure up to his brother and into Western Rationalism that holds the ordering of species and hierarchies as central to its imagining of the Human. For this poem, my inten- tion or attention (a poem attends—waits—or entends—listens—as Dean Young says in The Art of Recklessness) was to put the human on the same level as the cetacean, with the difference being the following of the human mind and not the animal mind, given that presuming human-like thought for the animal is an anthropocentric move I actively try to avoid since one of the ways that nature writing seeks to flatten out the Umwelten of the animal world trivializes their phenomenological realities to be as ours are:implicit in this speciesist bias is that ours, our human realities and paradigms, are the only ones worthy of sympathy. As a writer and poet, I am mired in my human-animal paradigm, of course, and am not beyond reproach when it comes to the clumsiness of my thinking, the centering of my humanness. Other anthropocentric moves that I make: writing about animals in English and Bhojpuri, have a little more crystalline investment.
According to Western science, brown people: Coolies of the Empire were less than white British people. We were owned and treated, through colonial law, as inferior in class, religion, language, customs, sexual practices, and the list goes on. Indians (South Asians but in the 1800s) abroad in the British colonies did not have the state recognize their marriages and unions as they were not conducted by the state-sanctioned church. The colonial story of how Europe raped and pillaged the non-white world is long and dramatic, with traumas that still ghost the psyches of the post-colonized.
There is also the fact of the queer, post-colonized becoming the settler and the brutal colonial force, especially when thinking about the migration from the Caribbean to North America, despite the fact of our arrival to the Western Hemi- sphere was through dubious means or reformulated enslavement and indenture- ship. Empire makes even us into the latest weapon used against the Native peo- ples of these lands. Queerness, immigrant-ness, and Othered-ness are not excuses for the active imperial project of a settler-colonial nation.
As Asian Americans from the Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean, or even simply as Guyanese, the migration is one that is troubled for me, and thinking about the United States’ Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 as being the time when people like my parents would be allowed to move to the US—though my mother was a pre-Guyanese-independence British citizen. In 1965 my father was fifteen and my mother was nine years old. This was not that long ago. It was not long ago, either, the purloining of the land—the particular land I grew up on of Seminoles, Hitachi, and Miccosukee, and Mvskoke—that the American govern- ment enforced.
This is where my mind goes when I whale watch, when I consider the history or the web of relationships between beings. I think this process highlights this connection, and my intention is not to think hierarchically, as the hierarchies of Empire erupt through the poem. The contestations are that of colonial record, the distinctions between Human and Nature, as well as the place it leaves me to consider the settler state. The whale watching of this poem begins with the whale and ends up with the speaker watching his own mind.
* * *
Object Lesson 7
Who is the object
the whale?
the observed
mind?
Waves crest and foam. Bull kelp snakes in the waters of Santa Barbara. Semiah- moo Bay shakes its coastal rocks. Mendenhall Glacier retreats from Auke Bay. The North Shore swell pounds the sand at Waimea. Inside this great expanse, even more expansion. There are so many species that the human-animal has not encountered. There are so many mythic creatures we filled it with. The ocean can be that place of creation—if there is a god, it is she: She who governs the water cycles, home to the minute and the immense. We are all Her children. Animal. Human. Every being in between and without definition or name. Doesn’t this sound like the space of a poem? Unknown and experienced only in the writing of it—the bathing in its saline depths? A mirror in which we create ourselves?
CITATIONS
Césaire, Aimé, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Joan Pinkham. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Print.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Gosine, Andil. Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Print.
Pierce, Joseph M., et al. “Manifesto for Speculative Relations.” In Five Manifes- tos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.22730455.
Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Selby, Nick. “Ecopoetries in America.” In The Cambridge Companion to Amer- ican Poetry since 1945, edited by Jennifer Ashton, 127-142. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2013.
Walcott, Derek. “The Sea Is History.” The Academy of American Poets, 2007. https://poets.org/poem/sea-history.
Young, Dean. The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradic- tion. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010. Print.