For my dad

Sugar. Honey. Iced. Tea.

Last year I broke my tibia and my fibula bones. After many hours spent staring at hospital walls and under many pain medications I realised something.

My bones are sugar cane.

Take a cane knife to me and I will pour out sweet juices.

You see

Sugar came when my tumbuna on my fathers side sailed across two oceans on the Leonidas from south India to Fiji to be met with rows of sugar cane.

Sugar came as the British mixed it with tea and fed it to bodies they felt belonged to them to keep them working long hours in the sun.

Sugar came as my father became the youngest Coca-Cola sales rep from all across Fiji.

Sugar came in the form of every Coca-Cola product found in the many houses I lived in as a child. While babies were drinking milk from baby bottles to grow strong calcium filled bones, I drank coke and filled my bones with sugar.

Sugar, you can say, is why my family moved in “04 to Tāmaki Makaurau, West Auckland” to be exact. We moved to the land of milk and honey - a different kind of sweetened immigrant dream.

I will never know what it was like to spend months on a cramped ship in hopes for a sweeter life or leave everything I know to move to a foreign land.

All I can do is make sure my elders are served with tea.

Hold the sugar please.

- Jolénna Deo