And somewhere along the arc out of my bag onto the kitchen table, the avocado
ripened into me: in the hot haggling of the market, a gift between two strangers
for her sake. In the green globe of one moment, the seed of a whole civilisation.
Really? Had a market woman, hand raised with a gift, from her to me
through Solinah, in that casual gesture traced the curving line that rounds into community?
Romanticism, surely? Yet how else, through centuries of the stock exchange of flesh
– glistened black bodies > < tarnished silver coins transacted on an auction block –
how else had the bought-and-sold kept within their own unchatteled selves?
Gift. The unslaved remembering of hands held out with no calculating fingers, offering
the graciousness that grows out of a ground of knowing: existence is a grace.
Grace eliding into graciousness eliding into gift. The first fruits of civilisation.
And since that glimpse like a green flash, i’ve seen her, the Caribbean,
in unexpected places. Her visitations are a gleam and then a dimming:
a far hillside district, descendant of a freetown settlement, in the midday light;
or a glint of zinc from a house changing half of its roof on a Saturday half-day, given
to a koudmen, lend-hand, gayap, koumbit, fajina, jollification, maroon, gotong rojong,
or whatever people say to try to nail with names the element beyond grasp, above our heads,
holding the sheltering restored roof of community in place. Harder to find now,
and when found, held better lightly, in an open palm; then best unheld, let go
in an unexpected, unexpecting, freehand green thankful of avocado.
Afterword
Sia Figiel
Imagine yourself sitting cross-legged on a mat in a fale, a thatched house without walls or windows, next to the ocean. Before you is a basket of tropical flowers and leaves: fragrant and pungent pua, teuila, pikake, heilala, lauti.
Now picture yourself picking up a flower or a leaf. Using a needle and thread, you’re going to pierce each flower, sewing it to another and another to form one long ula, a necklace of flowers.
In Samoa, we call this su’ifefiloi: the art of sewing one flower to another and another; a technique that is also used when a group of people are singing and they connect one song to another and another to form one long song. No matter how different one song is to another, the group’s ability to harmonise allows for a synthesis that is most soothing to the ear, and before you know it, time ceases to exist altogether as the singers sing and dance and laugh. Enraptured they are by the song of their own creation while they revel in the connections birthed by the song’s harmony.
There’s a felila, a bougainvillea bush in purple bloom, outside the window I’m facing as I write. The vibrant deep purple of its flowers and the fecundity of its green leaves remind me of Samoa, the island of my birth, where my pute, my umbilical cord, and my mother’s fanua or placenta are buried.
The flowers’ movement in the wind reminds me also of what the Tongan scholar and writer Epeli Hau’ofa called our ‘sea of islands’: Oceania, home to my families and friends and fish and birds and boars and plants and the Southern Cross. Home, too, of my ancestors, seafarers and warriors whose intimate knowledge of the stars and the winds and the currents allowed them to venture out fearlessly into the vast and ever-expanding ocean they called Moana, the blue, exploring new possibilities beyond the horizon.
* * *
In 1997, my first novel where we once belonged won the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book for the South-East Asia/South Pacific region, a tremendous honour for a young writer from a small island nation. Such recognition on the international stage meant that the stories I was telling in English (and not the Queen’s English), stories told in isolation that prioritised a female narrative, were not only heard but were celebrated by a wider audience beyond the reefs of my island home.
Now I celebrate the writers and poets and essayists in this uniquely oceanic anthology. Their fresh voices and deeply heartfelt convictions exert a vibrancy of talent onto the international imagination that not only expresses the personal and communal but sheds light for understanding, while defying stereotypes of what it means to be island people, stereotypes that continue to persist today.
Historically, paradise and the exotic are conjured whenever one imagines islands, whether in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean or the blue Pacific of Oceania. But hula girls and Elvis and Disney’s Moana go hand in hand with the imperial legacy of missionisation, militarisation, nuclear weapons testing, nickel and phosphate mining, chronic illnesses and disease, rising sea levels and other realities that have become normalities to indigenous peoples across Oceania.
In her fiercely searing poem ‘Neo-Walt Village Combing’, Mere Taito of Rotuma (Fiji) illustrates the patronising and exploitative practice of one particular entertainment conglomerate asserting its might and the expectations it has from the natives because of its privilege. Samoan poet Fetuolemoana Elisara addresses the issue of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, conducted by Britain on Malden Island, Kiribati and Kiritimati (Christmas Island), by France on Moruroa, Tahiti (French Polynesia), and the United States on the Marshall Islands after the Second World War. The poet questions why islanders who can afford it migrate to France, while those who remain ‘aren’t allowed to eat / the fluorescent fish.’
Elisara’s question is a powerful question. One that has been asked not only by Tahitians but by Marshall Islanders, I-Kiribati and Christmas Islanders whose island homes are still experiencing the aftermath of radiation which has forced some to relocate from severely damaged and poisoned lands and seek medical treatment in either Hawaii or Paris for cancerous tumours and other diseases caused directly or indirectly by exposure to plutonium.
In the first two lines of his fantastical poem ‘Avocado’, Kendel Hippolyte of Saint Lucia imagines what I consider to be the worst-case scenario for anyone living on a small island:
i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone.
She’d definitely been there the night before,
i’d heard her
singing in crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of the oncoming rain.
My first impulse was an immediate substitution of Samoa and Oceania for the Caribbean, which not only heightened a nightmarish fear but gave birth to an exigent unsettling, a grave concern that gripped and stifled me. I found it hard to move on to the next line, stuck as I was at the terrifying notion of an entire island disappearing.
The poet goes ‘looking for her, as I used to, in an unexpectedness of roadside flowers’ – and while he eventually finds it, the island, in an avocado, which is its own kind of wonderfulness, I on the other hand could not share in the poet’s clever use of magical realism and how it gave birth to its title, or in the joy of the poem’s hopeful end. I was still stunned by the potency of that first line and how it pierced my imagination as an islander from a small island in a ‘sea of islands.’ i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone.
For people living on small islands, such a fantastical idea is no longer merely imagined poetics or an exaggeration of rhetoric. It is reality.
As islanders, our concept of land and space is vastly influenced by our environment, our ecosystems and social structures. An island is not merely the land alone, but the heavens and the ocean and the people and the ancestors. This consciousness of the relationality of land to the celestials to oceans to ancestors forms the foundation of the identity of Pacific peoples, one that is held sacred.
Sea levels continue to rise across Oceania, continuously drowning smaller uninhabited islands while threatening those that are populated: Kiribati, Tuvalu, Maldives and the Marshall Islands, whose people have either been forced away from their ancestral coastal lands to move inland, or to relocate altogether to other islands – or,
for those who can afford it, to relatives living in developed countries such as New Zealand, Australia or the United States.
Moving away from the island of one’s birth is an option most Pacific people find difficult to deal with, because of their ancestral ties to the land, the source of their identity. Some older men and women who have seen the receding coastlines and have witnessed extreme weather patterns, violent hurricanes and water shortages, believe it is the ocean’s way of telling us to slow down. To listen.
The urgency of the impact of climate change on small islands is a reality that has opened conversations not only about who is responsible but, most importantly, about what our role should be as islanders.
President Anote Tong of Kiribati, who was nominated in 2015 for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, is a leading voice in asserting our responsibility towards the protection of our islands. Other Pacific leaders and NGO environmentalist agencies, along with artists and writers and poets, follow behind.
In a powerful act of poetic resistance, Kathy Dede Nein Jetnil-Kijiner, a young Marshallese Islander mother, poet, journalist and teacher, stood among the leaders of the world at the 2014 United Nations Summit on Climate Change and read a poem titled ‘For Matafele Peinem’ – a promise to her then-seven-month-old baby, sharing what she and her people have witnessed about the reality and grave dangers of sea levels rising and a ‘lagoon that will devour you’ – which some world leaders, who are directly responsible, refuse to acknowledge and continue to ignore.
* * *
The writers in this anthology have each offered us a poem, a short story, an essay that speaks at times of wounds, anguish, sadness, uncertainty, discontent, anger, fear, misunderstanding, despair, rage, connections and disconnections, passion, desire, yearning and our relationality not only to each other, but to the land, the environment, spirituality, history: an atoau, a basket of tools that allow us to ask ourselves where do we come from, who are we and where are we going.
Each poem and short story and essay is like a flower or a leaf that can be found only on each writer’s small island home. Some of the flowers are dazzling and colourful. Some of them are not. Some of the flowers are nocturnal. Some bloom only in the day. Some of the flowers are bright bright bright and have no scent. Some are so pungent they intoxicate.
These seventeen writers have gifted us their words. Their wounds and sadness and loneliness are our wounds, our sadness and our loneliness. Their discontent and rage is our discontent and our rage. Their questions and struggles and tragedies become our questions and our struggles and our tragedies. Their passions and desires and joys and bravery and courage are ours. Their words illuminate for us what it means to be part of small island communities – and, more starkly, what it means to be isolated. To be alone. For that is what writing is all about, isn’t it? It is the sharing of our aloneness. The connecting of our precious and intimate words, our flowers, our songs to another and another and another to form one long song. And in doing so, we openly invite other worlds into our own. And share in our humanity.
Ia manuia/Blessings to you.
About the Editors
Nicholas Laughlin (Trinidad and Tobago) is the editor of The Caribbean Review of Books and the arts and travel magazine Caribbean Beat, and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest, an annual literature festival and literary development organisation based in Trinidad. He is also co-director of the contemporary art space Alice Yard. His book of poems The Strange Years of My Life was published in 2015. He was born and has always lived in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Nailah Folami Imoja (Barbados) is a Barbadian/British writer, performer and educator. As a poet, novelist and journalist, she has contributed significantly to the Barbadian litscape. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and one of her YA novellas, Pick of the Crop, was published by Heinemann (Oxford) in 2004. She has performed her work in England, Canada, Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad. Many of her novellas are available via smashwords.com.
About the Contributors
Tracy Assing (Trinidad and Tobago) is a writer, editor and filmmaker. Her first film, The Amerindians, was a pioneering work exploring Trinidad and Tobago’s indigenous community, Assing’s own identity, the indigenous history of the islands and the political structure of the Santa Rosa Carib Community (now the First People’s Community). It premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2010. Her writing has been published in the Caribbean Review of Books and the Encyclopaedia of Caribbean Archaeology.
Heather Barker (Barbados) writes about girls and women at the intersection of race, religion and relationships. Her short story ‘African Burial Ground’ was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Axe Literary Competition and in 2010 she was a finalist in Barbados’s foremost literary prize, the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment. Barker’s writing has appeared in Callaloo (John Hopkins University Press), Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean (Peekash Press), and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Press). She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, holds an MSc in Electronic Publishing from City University, London, and runs a communications company in Barbados.
Angela Barry (Bermuda) was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in 2012. Her writing has been published in journals including The Massachusetts Review, BIM: Arts for the 21st Century and Anales Caribe. A recipient of the James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship and the Brian Burland Award for Adult Fiction, she is the author of Endangered Species and Other Stories and the novel Gorée: Point of Departure. She is currently completing a second novel set in Bermuda with the working title The Drowned Forest.
Cecil Browne (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) was born in 1957. He is the author of two collections of short stories, The Moon Is Following Me and Feather Your Tingaling. His passions include cricket, running half-marathons, cryptic crosswords, soca, reggae and all things to do with the Caribbean. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters and plans to return to his home island in two years’ time.
Tammi Browne-Bannister (Antigua and Barbuda) was born in Antigua to a Kittitian mother and an Antiguan father. She is an alumna of the Cropper Foundation Residential Creative Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Jewels of the Caribbean: An Anthology of West Indian Short Stories (Potbake), New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean (Peekash Press), Mondays are Murder (Akashic Books), Susumba’s Book Bag and The Caribbean Writer. She lives in Barbados.
Sabah Carrim (Mauritius) has authored two novels: Humeirah and Semi-Apes. Both are set in Mauritius, where she was born. She is a regular contributor to The Bangalore Review and has publications in various journals and magazines across the world. Humeirah was the subject of a thesis at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She now lives in Kuala Lumpur and is currently writing a doctoral thesis on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
Damon Chua (Singapore) is a writer, playwright and filmmaker. Born and raised in Singapore, he now makes his home on another small island – Manhattan. His short story ‘Mango’ was published in the anthology Twenty-Two New Asian Short Stories and ‘Saiful and the Pink Edward VII’ was published in Singapore Noir, a series of city noir books from Akashic Books. His stories have been published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Tall Tales Press and Nordland Publishing. He is currently working on his first collection of short fiction.
Marita Davies (Kiribati) is an I-Kiribati writer. A storyteller at heart, she explores Pacific issues including gender, health, domestic violence and climate change. For the past seven years, she has run thelittleislandthatcould.com – a website dedicated to sharing Kiribati topics with a wider audience. Davies’ first children’s book Teaote and the Wall told the story of a Kiribati woman living with rising sea waters, an issue that currently effects every I-Kiribati person. She has written for numerous websites and magazines and is a regular lecturer and speaker on panels.
Fetuolemoana Elisara (Samoa) i
s a daughter of Samoa. She emigrated with her parents Evotia Gale and Alipa Elisara together with brother Kepi to Aotearoa, where she grew up in Takapuwahia, Porirua, along with three more siblings – Cliff, Elaine and Lagisi. To escape a cold, wet 1989 winter, she and Michael Buhre, the father of her future children (Maea Lenei, Aliaolevanu and Taisala), moved to the Cook Islands. While living on Rarotonga and visiting other Pacific nations she recorded people’s accounts of the effects of the 175 French nuclear tests conducted in their waters without regional consent. She now lives in Hong Kong, teaches English and writes poetry.
Sia Figiel (Samoa) is a contemporary Samoan novelist, poet and painter. She grew up amid traditional Samoan singing and poetry, which heavily influenced her writing. She has won awards for her poetry and her first novel, where we once belonged, was awarded the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for fiction (South East Asia/South Pacific region). Her works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Danish, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Portuguese.
Kendel Hippolyte (Saint Lucia) is a poet, playwright and director and sporadic researcher into areas of Saint Lucian and Caribbean arts and culture. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies regionally and internationally. He has taught poetry workshops in various countries and performed at literary events within the Caribbean and beyond. His latest book, Fault Lines, won the OCM Bocas Prize in Poetry in 2013. Retired from the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, where he taught literature and theatre, his present focus is to use his skills as a writer and dramatist to raise public awareness and contribute to active solutions of critical social issues.
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