“My Coolitude Is of Whale Bone”: Rajiv Mohabir’s Interspecies Songs

This essay aims to call critical attention to the decolonial interspecies poetics of the Indo-Caribbean American poet, Rajiv Mohabir, with a focus on poems from his two collections Whale Aria (2023) and Seabeast (2025). Mohabir reclaims the coolie identity defined by colonial discourses and systems, and reinscribes the legacies of indenture through an interspecies poetics of migration, displacement, and resistance. Drawing on the concept and poetics of coolitude theorized by the Indo-Trinidadian Mauritian poet Khal Torabully, Mohabir develops an interpecies poetics by expanding on the subject matter and the conceptual framework in his poems about South Asian diasporas, which include representations of queerness and marine life, particularly whales, in relation to colonial empires, extractive capitalism, and imperial militarism. In so doing, he extends the concept and poetics of coolitude significantly through an interspecies ecopoetics, which makes visible the erased, neglected, or marginalized queerness and environmental destruction. I argue that Mohabir’s engagement with urgent ecological crises calls critical attention to the connection between epistemological and physical violence against nature and colonized, racialized, and stigmatized people of color. While critiquing the coloniality of knowledge, his decolonial interspecies poetics enacts and fosters an ecological ethics.