Judges’ Report

An incantatory debut collection, Manisha Anjali’s Naag Mountain takes its shape in the brilliant language of dreams. A narrative poem woven from histories and folktales, Naag Mountain depicts the violent and often unspoken history of Indian laborers indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, working on Australian-owned sugar plantations in Fiji from 1879 to 1916. Taking as her subject these lives have been all but obscured from history, Anjali reminds us that the colonial archive is endlessly fallible. Her language of dreams drapes gently over her reader yet following the surreal logic of the dream, never settles. Anjali’s lines are verdant, hungry, thoroughly devastating; it is a book that calls to be read aloud: ‘I ask the road to welcome me. But road has lost its memory too’. A work that obliterates and creates in the same breath, Anjali works to recover history through careful poetics, tracing the shadowed shapes of forgotten lives in a gesture reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or perhaps Sadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. As Anjali writes: ‘The ocean remembers the original version of the story. The ocean remembers every time it is touched’.