Naag Mountain

by Manisha Anjali

**Highly Commended, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
Naag Mountain is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia, which brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and exploited people, that have been lost in time or forgotten or hidden from view. It is a journey in which the living, the dead and the natural world communicate in music, language and dream.
Manisha Anjali’s first collection is an intensely imagined recovery of a little-known cultural inheritance, in which historical figures, folk characters and mythical entities feature in a procession coloured by the metaphors of poetry and the surrealism of dreams. A community in northern Queensland, whose ancestors were indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, receive messages from their friends across the Tasman. A mysterious reel of film washes ashore, depicting harrowing violence on sugarcane plantations under the indenture system. The actors walk out of the film and into the world of the living. The community walk into the projection.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I hold a conch shell to my ear to experience the music of the sea. The shell was made by an animal spirit with a longing to live, and a vision for love that spanned across generations. The seashell outlived the animal but carried their spirit in sound waves. I hear the sounds of paradise from the future. I go to the end of paradise to live my destiny.

We find a foamy part of the ocean and take off our bangles, our blouses and our petticoats. We change into fish and read the water. We cut a circle in the watery mythology. This is how we cut time in half. The Colonial Sugar Refining Company planted our bloodlines in the great southern waters. This is how our tea and biscuits became sweet on red Australian afternoons. There is a name for us. Coolie."

Naag Mountain approaches the same story from two different directions and times. What comes together is a story of being and becoming, of unity of people, sea and land. This is the kind of poetry you must read aloud, tasting the words and feeling into the rhythm which conveys this unity and almost inevitability. Anjali's images bloom in your mind as you read. I times I kept drifting in the moments, losing track of the whole, and this was a wonderful thing. This is really gorgeous poetry, which takes you on a journey and has something to show us. It doesn't get much better than that.

[ariana · Rating 4 out of 5]

lush, interlocking imagery — striking at first, but it lost freshness near the end

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortly after the birth of literature, we became suspicious of the written word.

This is a fascinating collection of unusual prose. Beautifully written this collection expands with lush imagery that can, occasionally, be somewhat opaque in its meaning. But at its heart, it's about diaspora and oppression.

[Natasha (jouljet) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A debut poetry collection by an Australian and New Zealand poet of Indo-Fijian background, the descendant of indentured labourers, bringing to vivid form a chapter of Australian history not spoken of.

The Colonial Sugar Refining Company, still on shelves and tables today, has a history of enslaved workers, from Pacific islands to northern Queensland. The whisps of stories, memories, legacy of slavery, are here. To haunt, inform and remind us.

Mythology and dreams, lineage and trafficked peoples. A displacement.

This forms an interesting piece of conversation with at least one other Stella Prize longlisted books this year.

[L]

"The poetry of rice is in the rituals performed before ingestion. Ingestion is a form of gratitude, and a commitment to living as flesh. But in the present day, ingestion is confused. We line our stomach with counterfeit material before we line our stomachs with old forms of knowledge."

"The written word was a tool for the manipulation of truth. Every untruth that was written down intercepted our oral histories. When a story is shared by mouth, the story is never the same, it changes the way it wants to, and every version is true."

"To be confused by love was the by-product of coercion. To dangle freedom above a hungry coolie's head, so high they cannot reach, but low enough they can be suspended in worship for generations."

[Joshua Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the ocean said: I am an iconoclast. I can feel every time you touch me. I know the names of every creature that lives inside me. You can only hear me now that the sweetened condensed milk has evaporated from your translucent faces. Let's dissolve together the way we did at your birth.


Names of seas are fictitious. The sea does not need to prove its autonomy. There is no beginning. There is no end. Water takes the shape of whomever they love. There is a ringing inside my eardrum which signifies the coming of the waves.I am aligning myself with the coming of the waves.


We will meet again in the cassava field. I will be green like a young pawpaw. And you will be old like me.

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Naked Saint disembarks in Fiji in 1879 from the first ship to arrive from Calcutta in this thrilling collection of prose poetry. From his papers, his "instructions for metamorphosis", he rolls a joint and folds a paper jackal. He is an indentured worker, brought by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company to work the sugar plantations. Over a century later, the poet takes a pilgrimage, from the sugar cane fields of the Queensland-New South Wales border, to Port Douglas where she was conceived when "two cane toads are dancing outside the kitchen in the rain". Those cane toads, introduced to control cane beetles which prey on the sugar, resonate. Read more on my blog

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Admission - the prose of Naag Mountain was challenging for me. I read sentences over and over, thinking I'd missed some vital narrative thread but despite my re-reading, I couldn't pick up the rhythm. And reading shouldn't feel like a chore.

I occasionally grasped onto something concrete. For example -

...at some point, these sugar can fields were owned by Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the company that once owned my family.

Only to be faced with something that made no sense at all. For example -

When I am at the crossroads, I cut the reptiles from my hair. I inherited my eyes from bus drivers and farmers and teaheads. I buried eight of my eyes in my mother's garden.

And there were some slippery bits, were I got it... and then a few words later, I didn't. For example -

When a story is shared by mouth, the story is never the same, it changes the way it wants to, and every version is true. We pull the propaganda instruments out of our throats. We hang our mother's singing shellfish from our ears. Imagination is a political tool designed to keep us in love. It is our responsibility to always be in love.

I'm glad that some readers have understood and relished Anjali's words, and especially the Stella Prize judges - there's no doubt that books that veer from the standard deserve an audience. Alas, this one was not for me.

Will it win? No.

2/5

[David Haberlah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different kind of Australian dreamtime remembering the forgotten history of girmits.

“We find a foamy part of the ocean and take off our bangles, our blouses and our petticoats. We change into fish and read the water. We cut a circle in the watery mythology. This is how we cut time in half. The Colonial Sugar Refining Company planted our bloodlines in the great southern waters. This is how our tea and biscuits became sweet on red Australian afternoons. There is a name for us. Coolie.”

…

“The Colonial Sugar Refining Company had at some point named themselves CSR Sugar “

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

The ocean remembers every time it is touched.

Just a beautiful collection of poetry, stories, imagery. It felt informative yet calming. It was reflective and personal. Manisha Anjali is amazing at harking back to a time and state of being that is so important to her identity. Really beautiful stuff.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

words that come to mind:
beautiful, captivating, painful, celebration, history, storytelling, metaphors, imagery, earth, dreams, community, home