Review: Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn

Twelve-year-old Meadow Reed immerses us in the Tongan community in Western Sydney in this uncompromising, tough love novel. We first meet her at her grandmother’s house, where she and her two siblings are staying with their six aunts, including her namesake Meadow, the eldest. Her grandmother is a woman with “fists the size of rockmelons”. Her first husband, a Scotsman, has left them with his surname: “we carried his palangi name … like a tombstone”. Thanks to him, Meadow’s grandmother was “among the first Tongans to live in Australia as ‘Australians'”. Like Ariel in the Disney movies Meadow cites regularly, she is between worlds:

everyone knew each other in both English and Tongan because it was what we were made out of — whiteness and dirt.

Dirt Poor Islanders, a title that evokes Crazy Rich Asians’ exploration of a class and people, follows Meadow and her family as she wrestles with this identity while her aunt Meadow’s marries. Meadow rejects the Tongan cuisine her grandmother cooks, instead sneaking out for fast food with her aunt. She laments the state of her surroundings, the “nits having sex in my hair to the maggots wriggling in lumps of lard to cockroaches crawling in cereal boxes and cushion crevices”. “I knew right then and there that Tongan meant dirty,” she says. This idea of dirt, it’s something thrown in her face by her white neighbours, teachers, the world at large. But what is the thing that ultimately nourishes if not dirt?

Dunn’s novel is wonderfully open-ended, an invitation to hang out on the couch in front of the TV, or at the kitchen table, or maybe dodge a flying fist. We come to love Meadow’s family and their shades of love variously oppressive and liberating, like any family’s. As in the novels of fellow Sweatshopper Michael Mohammad Ahmad, Dunn’s writing operates most intensely at the sentence level, as she smooshes Millennial film and TV references with Tongan legends that introduce each part, fast food with culture, slang with language, love with violence. It is not just her grandmother with the fruit fists; Dunn describes the earthiness of the characters, their skin like bark, evoking the island stories where people and land blur together. Although she may describe her Tongan-ness with distaste, love wriggles between her words:

Real Fob women needed to be big. They carried all that excess chub for their offspring: thighs to steady fidgeting children; guts to entertain toddlers; flabs of dimpled skin to blanket newborns. In this way, God made my aunts the happiest heifers on Earth. I was the exception — a true hafekasi: miserable as Malfoy, skinny as Voldemort’s white-bone wand.

In Meadow’s voice she has bottled an age that is preciously finite, but feels like it might stretch on forever. Dirt Poor Islanders is a novel of coming into one’s skin.

Gay rating: 3/5 for queer characters and relationships.