Written piece
My indentured ancestors
Kavita Nandan
Australia
About this piece
'My Indentured Ancestors' is a single line of poetry that aims to remember my Indian forebears who were transported from India to work on the sugar plantations of Fiji from 1879-1916. Their bravery built a new world for us, we who are migrants of many new worlds today.
'My Indentured Ancestors'
A host of purple sugarcane stalks,
sharp as cane knives,
our indentured ancestors did plant,
to bloom brightly
in a new field of migrants,
slicing memory apart.