Black Sugarcane

Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s debut poetry collection Black Sugarcane is a generous invitation into
community and family, storytelling and history in their many layers – presenting cycles of birth,
destruction and rebirth.

The cover art is Toto maligi i le ele‘ele by Momoe i manu ae ala atea‘e Tasker. Tasker notes
on her website: ‘Re-Generation of Indigenous land our tupuga are always present. Above and
below, they surround us . . . The connection between blood and land is very significant to Fa’a
Sāmoa, the Sāmoan Way.’ And the collection is, not surprisingly, dedicated to generations of
women – ending with ‘…and all grandmothers’.

The poet’s attention to language is especially important; there is a song quality to the poems.
The book is divided into the long vowel sounds of her Sāmoan language: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. It’s as if we
are being led through five acts of a play, or five conversations: each has its own integrity with
clear threads, but the five parts work together to create a story arc.

Parts one and two – the ā and ē sections – introduce us to the themes and characters that recur
throughout. We hear laughter and mourning notes; we sit in frustration with bureaucracy; we
are introduced to feelings of exposure and protection. The opening invites us into an
intimate portrait:

We build a safe around our birth stones.
Craft it with a dream, a gourd, a drum-made
chant

Pile it high with frigate bird bones,
song bones, bones of 
cherished names 
(“Moana Pōetics”)

These lines set the tone for the sonic and tactile storytelling that resonates throughout the collection – a ‘drum-made / chant’ and ‘song bones’ settling on the reader’s ears. There are prayers and gifts and affirmations, and the rhythms are playful, sometimes echoing the sounds that bond people together:

Aunty Sia’s laugh is like a perfectly ripe pineapple
A sweet refresh of vowel sounds –
Ha ha ha ha! Hi hi hi hi! O ‘o o ‘o! U ‘u u ‘u!
(“To‘ono‘I”)

Family is a central structure. “Grandma’s lessons”, for instance, takes us to fashion,
garden, kitchen and voice, looking backwards and forwards, carrying the wisdom of place and
experience. In this way, the poet demonstrates a kind of calm and grace, and I found myself
thinking of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s poetry.

Kersel also brings her observational eye with a keen sense of sound and metaphor. Often, the
reader is struck by the poet’s wit. Connected to this, inevitably, is also bite:

Even before you know all of my names,
you ask me to teach you
how to say shit in Samoan
so you can, what? offend me in
my own language?
(“Names ’n shit”)

More bite comes with the titular poem, which carries a subtitle: “Black Sugarcane (is a remedy
for centipede sting)”. The ideas of sting and remedy, venom and sugar, weave this poem into
a sharp rumination on the poet’s existence. There is a fierceness here, reminiscent of Tusiata Avia.
See, too, lines from another poem:

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

That stirs-up-all-the-cream bitch.
(“Bitch”)

Two longer sequences must be noted. The ‘ī’ section includes a set of poems depicting the
impact, devastation and aftermath of the tsunami that struck Sāmoa in September 2009. The reader
is transported to this place, with some poems in the Sāmoan language, bringing the weight of
distance and time. Here, the opening lines of “I dream of palolo”:

I spy the palolo moon
as I turn in my cold bed
two thousand miles away

In my sleep
I am there with my mother
by the predawn fires

where we commit
to the usual ways of waiting –
cups of loko and playing cards

that feeling of stories
that feeling of
before
and before.
(“I dream of palolo”)

In the ō section, we come to a series of erasure poems, created from the essay ‘In Search of
Tagaloa’ by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta‘isi Efi. Here we have a striking visual presentation – white
lettering on black pages – recalling the vastness of space. Reading these poems is like floating:
the experience is disorienting, startling, illuminating. In the hands of the poet, images are
linked with conceptual frames. Again, we see the poet’s close attention to language and detail. One
poem opens with:

I want to begin           for Tagaloa
(“Artefact I”)

and the final poem opens with

I want to                     legacy / for Tagaloa
(“Artefact VIII”)

Each segment holds space, significantly, for ‘wind’ and ‘people’.

This collection of poems is a finely tuned songbook of generations and geography, of threads that connect the poet’s family across tumultuous seas. The ū section lands soundly with themes of home, with the final three poems: “Great-grandmother”, “Great-grandchild” and “Koko Sāmoa”, which closes with these lines:

we mature by the moon
and return to the banyan tree
with our children.
(“Koko Sāmoa”)

This takes us back to the beginning. See here, how the poet gently tugs and encourages the
voices that sing out – always a ‘we’ – from the past, through the present, into the future:

We are a tidal collection, hind-waters of
the forever we rally on,
to break the staple
       metaphors from the fringes.

Safe.
We sound together on a dance or
bark an intricate rhyme.

We, the filaments of a devoted rope. We,
who contain a continuance

and call it poetry.
(“Moana Pōetics”)