Everywhere Mother
By Eunice Andrada
Published 20 August 2025
i.
To recollect the womb,
sink a fishing line down
the rain-darkened river.
ii.
To corrugate iron without
machinery, take it upon
your lap like a baby.
All afternoon, tell it the colour
of the wise woman’s palms
on the day of your birth.
Recount in slow detail.
Watch new lines form in
the skin-warmed metal.
We will place it on the roof
like a shield against
the next cyclone.
iii.
Wait for a fog without origin.
Walk into it backward, humming
a lullaby only your ancestors knew.
If your throat feels heavier
than your history,
continue.
iv.
In the [no location], everywhere
mothers squat and scale the day’s
catch, preparing for a banquet.
We will sit together and feast
whether or not the others
come home.
Smoke rides the wet air.
On the radio, a ballad plays
over the ambition of rain.
v.
I know a story about a woman
who fished with her long hair.
Casting her net of dripping locks,
she dragged the bodies
of revolutionaries back
to shore.
Underneath that river is another
river of women, threading
your islands to mine.
vi.
Will you tell me which stories
I have forgotten
by morning?
I will let you decide
which ones
I can keep.
vii.
And what have you
gathered here today
in between the dark?
Commissioned in partnership with National Gallery of Australia in response to a work of art in the national collection, Eunice selected Salote Tawale's 'Burebasaga Maramas'.
'Burebasaga Maramas' is a celebration of the resilience of Salote Tawale's matrilineal line. 'Burebasaga' refers to the confederacy Tawale's family belongs to in the Fiji Islands and 'Marama' is the Fijian word for women or ladies.
The discrete elements of the work explore different cultural mythologies, contemporary realities and future prospects for Fijian women, given the enduring traumas wrought by colonisation - including loss of culture and low life expectancy. The wall painting refers to the traditional weaving practice of the artist’s grandmother; the diorama figure is a representation of her aunt on a fishing expedition; one of the videos shows the artist herself, draped in Salu Salu (decorative lei); and the other, filmed on Fiji, records the social aspect of food preparation.
Tawale often makes use of materials such as calico, tarpaulin and corrugated iron, which act as contemporary substitutes for traditional Fijian materials – such as masi (bark cloth) and palm leaves. For the artist, these materials embody cultural continuities and signal her place in the Pacific diaspora.
The figure of the faceless fisher-woman lingered in my mind for a long time. Each time I returned to the collection of works in Burebasaga Maramas, there was a sadness that was getting louder, a dislocation that was becoming more pronounced. The works had been assembled in a gallery room and spotlit against stark black walls that could have been anywhere.
Although I was struck by the placelessness of the installation, the sensory memories that crept up to me were specific: the sound of my aunt scaling fish in Parañaque, the smell of rain on hot concrete in Molo, walking around sheets of corrugated iron scattered on the path after a typhoon, smoke coasting on vegetal air.
There was something these sensory memories were saying in their totality that I had to reach back and grasp. Poems, for me, are rooms where I can walk around, talk to myself, unblur the connections in my mind. Often, I emerge from a poem not so much with an understanding of the things I brought to it, but a deeper recognition of how much I don’t know and probably never will.
With this poem, I’ve tried to build a space for stories I grew up with and stories I found—fragments that only make sense to me when I hold them together. One of these fragments alludes to Merlinda Bobis’ novel Fish-Hair Woman.
I love the way there can be shared sensory and material experiences among people from tropical, climate-vulnerable places, where women take on essential roles in homes and communities. I’m reminded of the loving words Indo-Fijian poet Manisha Anjali once offered me: “from one island girl to another.” I think these fragments are a way of reaching out—to place, to memory, to futures shaped by us and the women we love.
Write a poem about someone who once mothered you.
Work in fragments—think of a story they once told you,
the scent of their living room, their superstitions.
Gather the fragments into a poem.
Eunice Andrada
#30in30 #PoetryMonth
Poems, for me, are rooms where I can walk around,
talk to myself, unblur the connections in my mind.
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