Dreaming Towards Redress
Gurmeet Kaur on Manisha Anjali
Walk through London’s Canary Wharf today and it’s a capitalist dream—home to some of the city’s highest skyscrapers and biggest corporations in the world: Barclays, Apple, BP, HSBC, Mastercard and many more. It exists on the former West India Docks by the River Thames, a conduit between the West Indies and Britain in the 19th century, which moved goods such as sugar, rum and coffee produced by enslaved African peoples. Canary Wharf today is quiet about its connection to this past, remnants haunting the place through train station names such as East India and West India Quay.
Yet Britain prides itself on being one of the first places to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. What it prefers to forget is that it wasn’t until 1838 that slavery was abolished in the colonies, that slave traders received compensation for their ‘loss of property’, and some enslaved peoples worked for many more years to pay off these ‘debts’ to slave-owners. What’s also obfuscated from this history is that Britain’s wealth today is the result of exploitation of colonised peoples in Asia and Africa, as well as the plundering and theft of lands. For example, the labour gap created at the end of the slave trade gave birth to a new injustice—the Indian indentured labour system. As Britain’s vital colony, India provided cheap labour under a system called girmit: workers would sign a multi-year contract for a meagre monthly sum, travelling to other British colonies to work on sugar plantations.
Informed by Fijian and Australian archival materials, Naag Mountain is a reparative work challenging this amnesia, unravelling the legacies of the girmit that brought labourers to Fiji between 1879 to 1920. A descendant of the girmityas, Manisha Anjali excavates this Indo-Fijian history through her debut book, shifting the gaze away from the colonial centre by flooding the archives with dreams told through a narrative poem.
Dreaming is the crux of Anjali’s practice. In 2020, she set up Neptune, a platform for gathering ‘dreams, hallucinations and visions’ which facilitates creative workshops analysing symbols of the subconscious. In an interview with Verve Zine, Anjali suggests that ‘artists must exist between two worlds, the dream realm and the waking realm’, describing her process as ‘fluttering between the mythic, fragmented, linear, repetitive, automatic and out-of-body’. It’s a compelling method, one that makes diasporic writing like Naag Mountain shapeshift beyond the conventions of poetry into story, performance, documentary and song. For Anjali, dream symbols are sites of collective inheritances.
For diasporic poets, to write is to trouble the past. Cultural histories fragmented through displacement; rituals, connections and ancestral knowledge systems lost—it is an ineffable, unreachable, interminable grief that continues to be translated and transmuted through language. There’s a rich tradition of writers from the Asian diaspora finding ways through this in poetry, such as Jane Wong’s poetics of haunting, Alycia Pirmohamed and Pratyusha’s collaborative essay ‘Second Memory’, as well as the gods, monsters and myths that haunt the poetry of Shivanee Ramlochan, Nisha Ramayya, Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, to name a few. Anjali participates in and borrows from these lineages as ancestors live in the ‘ghost-infested village in Labasa, Vanua Levu’ or where ‘a memory is the same act as summoning a ghost’ through the chilling ‘act of retrieving’.
The use of common metaphors like haunting and ghosts in diasporic literature often gesture to absences. A poetics of dreaming goes beyond this and shapes new paradigms; in Anjali’s work, dreams are used to document, retrieve, remember, translate and mythologise the histories of her people. Though they are fleeting forms of knowledge, there’s a potent, radical potential in dreaming. Estranged expressions of our psyche, dreams de-familiarise our understanding of the waking realm, self-dialoguing from a different vantage point. This builds intimacy with the undigested materials of our inner worlds and perhaps the undigested histories living in our shared consciousness. In this sense, dreaming is to inhabit what Aïcha Mehrez calls a ‘diasporic consciousness’, where historical events echo in all temporal directions, collapsing time and creating connections between and across diasporas, becoming a sensibility where ‘collective memory, song, stories, faith and rituals are […] expressed, and solace is sought’. About halfway into Naag Mountain, an ‘obscure, banned film called Paradise’ washes up on the shores of Port Douglas and plays in the sky. Described as a ‘collaboration with history and dream’, Paradise details the catastrophic injustices of British imperialism:
The movement of two million Indians from the subcontinent to Fiji, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, East Africa, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Reunion, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Myanmar; and the kidnapping of tens of thousands of indigenous people from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Rapa Nui, the Republic of Kiribati, Tuvalu and Rarotonga to the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland and northern New South Wales, Australia were the biggest acts of human trafficking since the transatlantic slave trade. We put the jackfruit hearts on a burning flame and eat them with our fingers. Film and dream are the same language in different worlds.
This list is the only unbroken block of prose within the narrative poem, wherein a closer read reveals the impacts of British colonialism and imperialism on generations of peoples from large swathes of land—it’s difficult to absorb the weight of its consequence(s). Dreams are the medium through which to attempt translation of these events. From these violent ruptures, how do people become shaped by their new—yet imposed—homes, landscape, cultures and languages?
Mythmaking through dream symbols is a way of absorbing multitudinous histories which has given birth to far-reaching communities: Indo-Caribbean, Indo-Pacific, Indo-African, Malaysian-Indian and much more; Australia, too, is complicit in this restructuring of empire. Here, Anjali evokes a kinship between Indian indentured labourers and South Sea Islanders, indigenous people of the Pacific Islands who were kidnapped or ‘blackbirded’ by labour agents. These bloodlines are connected by the oceans that ‘remembers the original version of the story. The ocean remembers every time it is touched’.
We, descendants of the girmityas who still walk in the realm of the living, across many islands in the Pacific Ocean, lived in the lacuna where no dreams are seen.
A kind of purgatory, water holds the histories of displaced peoples in its silence, shifting in form as rivers, tidal waves, seas and holy water. There is a close connection between water and dreams: fluid and permeable, both are ungraspable but their depth becomes a home for collective and personal memories. For Anjali, ‘dream […] began in the water first’, intertwining with the dreams of the girmityas:
The South Seas are smoky and saccharine. Each wave brings with it a different vision. Pilgrim braids her hair to the tails of the water. The paper sun is half in the sky. Half in the sea.
Scenes from Paradise leak with water, and ‘fragments of the story […] are leaking out of the living film’. Like water, dreams leak into the waking world, symbols reappearing until meaning is revealed. Vivid, ancestral characters recall the labourers:
Three women from the girmit—Anarkali, Maya and Guari—with white hair, starchy eggshell saris and milky halos are laughing cross-legged on the mountain floor, laughing and playing cards with the thousand-faced snake. I understood I shared their lineage.
These chimerical women are another way from which the descendants of the girmityas can reflect cultural memories. They are also a way of mythologising the girmityas. Though much is lost through colonisation and archives provide only fragments of truths, Naag Mountain’s unfurling dreamscape constructs pathways for rehabilitative revisionism and renegotiates collective memory.
The book’s three-part sequence frames this flitting, fluctuating content as it alchemises what remains in the archives. In part one, we meet Paper Jackal, Naked Saint and Shaytan, characters that reappear across the book whether in Aotearoa, Australia or Fiji, and in films, mists, oceans. It’s in this section that a haunting refrain is established: ‘Our friends across the Tasman dreaming our dreams’. These are the ‘spirits of hawkers’ who ‘stowed away from Fiji’ and live in the ‘lungs of the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea’. Unable to dream because of ‘sorrow and cataracts’, the girmityas rely on these spirits to interpret dreams and send messages. One early message they deliver is to:
Walk into the film that washes ashore in your place of conception. Climb the moon when it is swollen above the cowrie shell house in the middle of the sea. Eat the jackfruit hearts that flower under the influence of the twins. Follow the folk songs of the thousand-mouthed naag into the heart of the mountain.
This kind of lush imagery defines Anjali’s style; ‘the cowrie shell house’ and ‘jackfruit hearts’ bring island culture to mind while Hindu iconography like the naag create a surreal, spiritual landscape. Against this environment, her matter-of-fact tone is disarming, especially against the distressing, brutal histories. Take for instance a passage from the opening section where we’re introduced to the Naked Saint among tropical ‘palm flowers’, ‘green iguanas’, ‘pawpaw sky’, ‘and some forgotten things’:
The Naked Saint squints and raises his emigration pass up to the saffron Vanua Levu sun. It is written in a language he does not understand. The document is dated 28 February 1879. In bold lettering it says MAN, followed by Trinidad Emigration Agency. The word Trinidad is crossed out and Fiji is handwritten in cursive. The name of the ship is Leonidas. The first vessel to undertake the three-month journey from Calcutta to Levuka, carrying 498 passengers, smallpox and cholera.
Though the language seems innocuous, this is a devastating archival record betraying the crimes of empire. There’s the erasure of human dignity on which girmit was predicated (the document states no other identity except for ‘MAN’), the arbitrary, irreparable decision-making that determined the fate of generations of people (‘Trinidad is crossed out and Fiji is handwritten in cursive’), and the seeds of intergenerational trauma stemming from this violence, starting from the ‘three-month journey’ that entailed in ‘smallpox and cholera’. Anjali undercuts the presumed validity of the British legal system that in actuality was an operating tool of empire where agreements were tactically deceptive (the Treaty of Waitangi) or heavily disputed (the Upper Canada Treaties). The girmit too was a bad faith contract; deceived with promises of money and easy work, many labourers signed contracts written in a language unknown to them:
We sign contracts we cannot read, then we wipe the bloods from our brows with our eight hands, then we plant our eight hands into the lungs of the South Pacific.
Naag Mountain reckons with the horrors of these truths in the phantasmic, elegiac film Paradise:
The Woman with the White Veil takes a photograph of Algu and the naag. She wakes. The photograph depicts a black-and-white illustration of SS Wardha, a steamship owned by the British India Steam Navigation Company, for the purpose of transporting Indian indentured labourers to colonies. Translations are obscure. We do not have the means to communicate what we really see.
The flowering white jasmine tree cannot hold the violence of the translation, so she picks herself up and walks into the ocean. She plants her roots in the water so she can dream with the sea.
Violence accumulates in Paradise: there are wailing birds, raging sugar plantation fires, Hindustanis who stop breathing, brutalised women that transform into trees, anti-indenture folk songs that ‘ruptured veins of the yellowing banana leaf’. A cinema of dreams, stories and music begins to repair the historical, cultural and spiritual ruptures of the past; a list of nostalgic Bollywood songs cluster like a playlist and are sung by the dream-characters Bob Singh and Anju ‘before their dreams cancelled each other out’.
But colonial structures continue to leak out to the present. Anjali lays out this in plain, factual language. There’s a charge to this retelling—the straightforward tone is unsettling, highlighting the tension between historical crimes and centres of power today:
It is a film about forgetting.
The Colonial Sugar Refining Company has been established in every place we have ever lived.
The Colonial Sugar Refining Company is now known as CSR Sugar.
Through these quiet declarations, Naag Mountain reveals our enmeshment with ongoing systematic oppressions—CSR Sugar is omnipresent in Australia today, available to purchase from most grocery stores and supermarkets. Look closely enough at colonial sites and they reveal knotted legacies. BP’s oil extraction for western imperial conquest continues to this day in Gaza, while Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds all profited from the slave trade. Anjali’s narrative poem demands close attention to these colonial encounters. Examples like CSR Sugar show how power remains concentrated in existing structures of capital since 1855, and inextricably linked to the sugar plantations of Queensland and New South Wales. Through archival research and poetic interventions like Naag Mountain, Anjali threads these legacies across borders, redressing archival gaps with dreams, myths, rituals and experiences of girmityas.
By the end of the book, ‘the community is dreaming again’, lacunas are filled with singing and ‘our friends across the Tasman’ stop dreaming harrowing dreams. Though it’s impossible for collective healing to be neat or conclusive, Naag Mountain presents ways that histories can be processed around the violence of archives and physical sites of trauma. It’s difficult to put faith in transitory elements like dreams, but Anjali shows that it’s precisely this ephemerality that’s capacious enough for the shifting legacies of empire.
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Gurmeet Kaur is a writer and poet living on Wurundjeri country. Her poems, essays and reviews are published in Cordite, Liminal, Kill Your Darlings, The Suburban Review, Mascara, Sydney Review of Books and elsewhere. She was a 2023 New Critic at Kill Your Darlings and her poetry was Highly Commended in the 2024 Next Chapter program.