Instructions for Metamorphosis

While the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, the plantation system continued to churn for almost another century. In many cases the very same ships used to transport enslaved Africans were then used to transport indentured Indian labourers, whose contracts could be bought and sold, to the very same plantations in Mauritius, Guyana and the Caribbean – with the same inhumane accommodations, under the same overseers with the same white supremacist mandate. The colonial appetite for sugar and other commodities ​persisted​​​, as did Empire’s drive for expansion, extraction, calculation, and profiteering. In fact, the plantation system ​itself was not abolished​, but expanded across the Pacific, to Malaysia, Fiji, and elsewhere, continuing to produce wealth for that very same Empire.  

Working conditions for Indian indentured labourers were legally defined, in contrast to slavery, by an agreement or girmit – a contract signed, usually with a fingerprint, by people who very often could not read the document that would bind them to a period of servitude, typically between four and ten years. A new population was thus subjected to an ocean passage where the horrors of the journey bonded those who survived and dissolved caste distinctions, so that they arrived as girmityas all. In interview footage featured in a 2023 Al Jazeera report, an elderly girmitya man describes being routinely beaten with whips and boots. He imitates an overseer commanding him, in a perverse invocation of consent: ‘Get on with your work – this is your agreement!’ Over the almost century-long period of Indian indenture, more than 1.6 million were lured by the promise of work, wealth, and a better future for themselves and their families, not knowing they would lose their freedom and most likely never make the return voyage back to India. British abolitionists began to campaign against indenture from its very inception in the 1830s, calling it ‘A New System of Slavery’. In the early twentieth century, as Indian anti-colonial movements gained momentum, the abuses of indenture became a crucial issue and rallying cry against colonial violence and exploitation.  

I’ve provided this historical context here because, as Naag Mountain’s blurb describes it, this history is ‘little-known’. As historian Maria del Pilar Kaladeen emphasises, this widespread ignorance is not produced by passive forgetting; it is a history that ‘has been deliberately obscured’ in the service of ​E​mpire’s own self-image of atonement. Naag Mountain joins a growing body of poetry – that the poet Rajiv Mohabir has dubbed ‘Coolitude’ – exploring the history, identity, and legacy of the girmitya by their descendants. In writing Naag Mountain, Manisha Anjali, a descendant of girmityas from Fiji, drew on her own personal and familial connection to these histories, as well as conducting archival and oral-historical research in Fiji and Australia. Over sixty thousand girmityas were transported to Fiji between 1875 and 1916 to labour on sugar plantations owned and operated by Australian household-name CSR Sugar, formerly known as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company – ‘the company that once owned [Anjali’s] family’.  

While research was crucial to its writing, Naag Mountain gives something other than, and in excess of, an historical account. Anjali exposes the reader to not only the ‘truth’ of a history long obscured by ​E​mpire’s self-serving narratives, but also the sublime force of a reckoning with that history of violence and vitality, of suffering and survival. This is not about the revelation or recitation of facts, but the throwing down of a gauntlet – a confrontation and an invitation.  

Naag Mountain is a book-length poem in three movements. A metamorphosing vision of girmitya life and afterlife, whose narrator lives and writes and drives around in a bone-grey 1999 Mazda 626, ‘translating the dreams of flowers, waters, mountains and fires’. These translations follow the logic and syntax of dreams, recollected without being differentiated from historical fact, sometimes slipping into an incantatory mode of instruction reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s conceptual event scores (which Anjali herself has performed). ​​​​Elemental, historical, quotidian details accumulate: a nameless ancestor’s inky thumbprint, flowering trees, misty jungle, an Australia-shaped birthmark, a sugar cane plantation ablaze. The ecstatic narration reports what is seen and unseen from the vantage of an all-seeing chronicler.  

We begin with The Naked Saint who is unceremoniously tearing his emigration papers in ‘two unequal pieces’.  In a gesture indifferent or even antagonistic to the document’s power over life, he puts the paper to a different use: folding the larger piece into the shape of a paper jackal who ‘comes to being as a spirit’ appearing and reappearing throughout the book: 

The flight of the paper jackal at the beginning of the book seems to signal the untethering of language from the burden of straightforward communication – the flights of archival materiality and textuality into and beyond the historical record – and an opening onto the pitfalls and pleasures of language foregrounded in poetry: image, rhythm, looser associations of meaning, feeling, haunting. One feels in Naag Mountain the force of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s assertion that: ‘A story is not just a story. Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request.’ The experience of the girmitya, Naag Mountain keeps insisting, cannot be neatly named or represented; it cannot be found only in the paper archive, or rather the paper takes on an agency of its own. There are hidden the seeds of something waiting to be activated: ‘The document contains imaginal cells with instructions for metamorphosis.’

Meanwhile, the Naked Saint takes the smaller half of the emigration document, tearing it smaller still, and, with ‘some Bihari ganja’, rolls it up into a joint and begins to smoke – in an act of destruction and creation, transmuting matter into spirit. The light high and slantwise inspiration that ganja affords displaces the dominance of colonial paperwork – and of the capitalist imperatives of utility and profit – over girmitya storytelling. In this languorous gesture, for pleasure, for transcendence, the Naked Saint defies his own reduction to a unit of labour on a sugar plantation in pursuit of the ecstatic:

As the smoke dissipates, the frame expands beyond the human into an entangled ecology alive with plants, animals, affect.

Later in the poem, a film called Paradise washes ashore, promising to depict the girmitya community as a corrective to historic erasure. Yet this is not so straightforward a task. As Paradise is made and unmade throughout the book by some unknown force, and as the poem’s various figures become actors in the film, often against their will, questions naturally arise: how to represent girmitya experience, history, inheritance? And who has a right to? The narrator, sometimes slipping from an ‘I’ into a communal ‘we’, ponders the possibilities and limits of representation:

A razor’s edge is walked here between two regimes of representation, two modes of abstraction that threaten to erase girmitya agency through reductions economic or romantic. Anjali’s poetics explores both orders of figuration to make room for other possibilities. But this is not an all-out rejection of the film, or of the aspiration to representation. The speaker states her desire: ‘I want to be depicted the way I really am.’ And in order to move closer to this sought-after truth, a truth ‘truer than history’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha again), the poem works to evade, refuse, and complicate singular meanings, identities, and representations by ‘cut[ting] up the language [...] to understand.’ It is through the poetics of cut-up – whereby the materials of the archive are torn up, folded, and smoked – that Anjali unsettles taken-for-granted notions of history, language, and inheritance, opening them up to metamorphosis. The film Paradise stands in as a synecdoche for the struggles of representation, whether aesthetic, political, literary, historical, staged throughout Naag Mountain. In the end, the film becomes a hybrid formation, succeeding only through co-authorship with dreams and with the ocean: ‘Throwing the film into the ocean it emerges infused with salt, kelp, and coral, sea lettuce, jelly-fish and algae.’ Film-like, fragmentary, and fused with ocean flotsam, Naag Mountain dreams into being a lineage, salvaged despite, and in the wake of, dehumanising colonial violence. It answers the problem of fragmentation with a refusal to attempt a realist reconstruction that could only ever create further erasures.

Naag Mountain is also threaded through with stories of girmitya women who become the targets of brutality, sexual violence, and murder. In Fiji, during the girmit, the incredibly high murder-rate of girmitya women was supposedly explained by the asymmetrical demographic ratio of just forty women to every one hundred men, precipitating the ‘sexual jealousy’ that is frequently cited as the motive in colonial court records (Anjali acknowledges her debt to the work of historian Margaret C. Mishra here). In Naag Mountain, these brutalised women, who share names with women mentioned in the colonial archive, become flowering trees: Mira, Sukhrania, Naraini, Devi, and Dirpali transform into camellia, frangipani, and white jasmine. One such passage reads:

The register and syntax shifts from the historical-archival reportage of places, names, dates, births, and deaths toward a mode of testimony that, in rejecting the protocols of realism and emphasising solidarity and sensuality, defies the abject cruelty of this event. Like Ovid’s Daphne fleeing from Apollo, these women find refuge through their metamorphoses: growing rough bark as a defence; planting their roots into soil; standing their ground. The flowering trees of Naag Mountain figure an escape into a new timescale, the slow and long temporality of a tree, through a transfiguration that, in metabolising the violences inflicted slowly, makes them bearable:

It is telling that in the poem the trees flower but do not fruit, having tired of production, of being instrumentalised. They refuse to be of further use for others:

Even the beauty of the flowers becomes self-sufficient.

Like its flowering women, Naag Mountain constantly shape-shifts, eluding multiple kinds of mimetic and administrative capture in its alchemical song where sweat is transmuted into mist, into cloud, sea foam, and shadow. Again and again Naag Mountain returns to the ocean: the ocean that both separates and connects distant shores – Fiji, India, Aotearoa, Australia; the ocean that is always in excess of any colonial purpose. In another subversion of colonial taxonomies, the poem offers this declaration:

The elemental affordances of the ocean underline the poem’s insistences on possibility through fluidity, as well as the inevitability and unstoppable force of the tides of history – and love. Naag Mountain conjures the feeling of staring out into the ocean, confronted with a vastness beyond the self, a boundless force where ‘[e]ach wave brings with it a different vision’. This poem not only sets the historical record straight, but also creates a space of refusal necessary for claiming a life in excess of inadequate representational regimes, and writes toward a reckoning with girmitya inheritance. That is, it aspires not only to read and rewrite the colonial archive, but to write towards the unwriteable. To record a sublime encounter with a history that is not over, and that overflows into Naag Mountain. Struggling even to be contained within its own printed medium, the poem enfolds into itself film, oral storytelling, song, dreams, ritual and performance art:

In the process, history becomes something more vivid and elusive than what is afforded by the presences and absences of archival documentation, moving just out of sight or so close that it engulfs or engrafts itself onto you – like a dream or mystical experience.

As philosopher-poet Édouard Glissant once said: ‘We understand the world better if we tremble with it.’ Anjali’s Naag Mountain trembles with the material and immaterial, breathing the archive in with ganja smoke, and exhaling it in a vision that surges and pulses with the ocean. It is a reckoning without closure – a flowering rupture – all the while never forgetting that colonial history hasn’t ended, but merely changed form. In such a context, metamorphosis is not merely a metaphor. It is a strategy for survival. But it also points to capital’s own fluidity, its adaptation to new conditions in order to continue its dehumanising, extractive churn. Plantation slavery didn’t disappear but metamorphosed into indenture, and ‘The Colonial Sugar Refining Company is still a company [and] still pedalling their sugar at the supermarket.’ Disturbingly, it is not only flowering trees and paper jackals that can wield the power of metamorphosis:

With this insight Naag Mountain points to the need for abolition to go deeper still – to abolish the colonial entities that continue to line our shelves and selves lest they continue to spread and expand according to this cancerous logic. Anjali re- and de-constructs a heavy inheritance, her poem drawing from the past and echoing into the future. Still to come is the fall of Empire, its final abolition, which is this poem’s horizon: