Written piece
The Unbroken Line of Rarawai Lanes
Sarojini Harris
Fiji
About this piece
I was born in Ba Fiji and still remain a Fiji citizen while live in USA as a dual citizen.
This poem is about the indenture system of my ancestors who were brought to Fiji in 1906. Finding my roots back in India is my mission as I hold the Immigrant passes of my ancestors.
The Unbroken Line of Rarawai Lanes
They came with incomplete names,
But left their crowns behind
Lured by the promise of a sweeter sun,
Two toddlers clinging to a mother’s gown.
Before the bitter Girmit had begun.
Across the Kala Pani, deep and blind,
The Fazilka rode the unforgiving crest.
Mana carried the future in her blood,
And planted roots in an unchosen west
The fields of sugar drank their heavy sweat.
The system broke, but borders locked the gates.
No ships returned to their village Maudha’s distant plains.
They learned to love a soil designed by fate.
Yet land is fickle when the leases fade,
And birthrights wither under changing laws.
The home they built pronounced them guests again,
A quiet exile with a phantom cause.
Now oceans turn, and history repeats,
Upon this vast and new American shore
The same cold shadows fall across the street.
The migrant stands outside the closing door.
It is a heavy grief to feel displaced,
To wonder where the drifting spirit lands,
To watch my children, grow in foreign light,
While siblings hold the earth with trembling hands
Back in the valleys where the cane still grows,
My old mother watches,
Her toiled land with teary eyes.
My people tend to the fields,
That reserve might be a claim tomorrow.
More than a century of farming in the sun,
Still bound to cycles of a rented sorrow.
But listen close beneath the anxious noise:
The blood of Mana,
Who was my great, great grandmother,
Ganeshi, my great grandmother
Sursati, my grandmother
And Jasoda, my dearest mother
Does not fade or pine.
We are the people of the shifting soil,
Bound by an endless,
unbowed, breathing line.
Sarojini Asha
Daughter of a "Girmitiya "