Black Sugarcane
by Nafanua Purcell Kersel

The debut poetry collection by Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) reveals itself vowel by vowel. The book’s first section, ā, begins with ‘Moana Poetics,’ Kersel’s nod to the ‘tidal collection’—the waves of Moana poets who, through stone, carving, bone, and breath, have built homes for other’s words.

We rub sinnet along our thighs and lash
our cache. Our stories kept sound, where words
and names and songs are not forgotten.

A few poems later, in ‘To’ona’i’, the journey is a different kind, local and particular (‘We take the motorway south, going way past / the giant ice cream at Tip Top’); there are aunties and uncles, a table ‘hidden under food / which is hidden under foil’. In ‘But Where Are You From?’ the cast broadens to include ‘Dolly and Elvis’ as well as Jesus and Mary. The poem with its ‘I’m from’ refrain is a song to the ‘diaspora gen’:

I’m from
that state-house anatomy,
light exteriors,
dark native interiors

 

smoked-out kitchens
and shagpile shed floors,
always clean
ever ready for inspection.

Kersel writes with wit, stretching language and moments. In ‘ Men_u’, written without full stops but with every consideration of pace and breath, she distils small violences down to their crust. What first appears as a time-stamped day reveals itself as a clever exploration of the discursive relationship between food, bodies and boys.

he’s far from the farm i think this kid in my class who called me a bitch because i slapped him when really i wish I bit him, is that what a bitch slap is not the slap but the person who owns the hand and uses it against his pocket-monied cheek for squeezing his chubby hands on my butt to check the dough while we were waiting in the tuck-shop line and why am i even in trouble for this, is it because the force of my slap was more than the force of his grip but my armour is the thing that clinks across the concrete floor

If ‘But Where Are You From?’ recalls Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Fast-Talking PI’, ‘Bitch’ shows the imprint – confrontational, funny, smart – of Tusiata Avia.

I’m that bitch.

 

I’m that
thick-thighed,
pumped-up booty,
lumpy-bumpy dimpled-flesh dream bitch.

There’s precision here as well as provocation. ‘Quince’ is the final quiet snap of what feels like a coming-into-body sequence. While waiting for fruit to stew, a woman

… sweeps the floors, scrubs the jars,
bites back the urge to pray

 

and remembers
her own sours
she’s been stewing for years.
A memory—
immersion in blessed waters,
holy waters to gouge
her clean.

There is cooking of a different kind in the second section of the book, ē, where in ‘Grandma lessons (kitchen)’ we learn about making pie crust and cooking bones. It is another example of Kersel’s ability to weave the political and the personal, and to explore the issues around tradition and inheritance:

If you want to cook well,
cook enough for your neighbours.

 

If you want to learn by heart,
be still and watch my hands.

The lips don’t touch when making an ‘ī’ sound: the tongue rises high in the mouth. Tracing whenua and form, ī elevates the collection in technique and scope, beginning with a map of Samoa’s main islands, Savai’i and Upolu. In September 2009, an earthquake in southwest Samoa triggered a tsunami that was responsible for the loss of at least 190 lives.

The poems that follow in ‘ī’ dissolve the geographic distance between the writer and whenua and perhaps hold the greatest sense of intimacy and tenderness in the collection. ‘I dream of palolo’ is about the marine worms that rise from the seabed a few days following an early summer full moon: ‘slurping palmfuls / of slippery green / that taste of / salted iron / and sweet meat

The poem’s vivid detail (‘we’re a ragged line in / the sand’) contrasts the joy of ‘the usual ways’ and deep-rooted customs with the speaker ‘in my cold bed / two thousand miles away’ dreaming of the ritual.

Kersel explores different territories in ō, her focus on language and its definitions and (mis)use. The ‘Fono Ma Aitu’ sequence is formed by black-out poems, their origin text an academic paper, ‘In Search of Tagaloa: Pulemelei, Sāmoan Mythology and Science’. Here it is transformed into an epic poem, its words scattered like islands, and again suggests the influence of Selina Tusitala Marsh and her blackout excerpts from Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli.

‘Vā: Glossary’ addresses – again, with wit and precision – the overuse of Moana metaphors in diaspora poetry, still noting their value as a landing place to map identity and layers of belonging. Lavalava ‘is the sun repeatedly wrapping the va / until it’s had enough, enough’.

The collection’s title poem leans into the sting of land distorted from land(guage), forced to confront its shape and sound at every turn.

Every time I talk barefoot, I get stung.
so I camo-talk a hundredfold, like them who
crawl, drawl and talk good sting.
I cut my tongue twenty-six ways,
swallow my sugar, and still get stung
on my words, my worlds
my tongues, tense—
still.

In the final section, ū, we return to the past: ‘Grandma lessons (voice)’ and ‘Grandma lessons (work)’ take us back in time and belief system, and to the fragmented but intense memories of childhood. ‘Letolo Plantation House’ is placed in Savai’i in 1980, where a ‘palm-green Mustang rolls up the gravel road’; ‘Bee sting’ takes place in 1982 with ‘a group of plantation workers / coming through the pā.’

The prose poem ‘Double crowns’ locates power and pride in the hands of Pasifika mothers whose sacrifices – ‘She returned to the nursing studies she had to abandon upon marriage’ – charted potential pathways of their diasporic daughters.

Decades later, the millennium ticks over and I am a capital-city
twenty-year-old in chunky heels and an oversized attitude

In Black Sugarcane we see how Kersel’s poetry is informed and contributes to a growing, bold Pasifika poetry canon. She is a poet capable of impressive worldbuilding and of careful, high-impact detail. E leai se gaumata’u, na o le gaualofa — what you do in the name of hatred will not survive, but what you do in the name of love will live forever. How lucky are we to find love in Black Sugarcane, a space to ‘return to the banyan tree / with our children’.