Winnie Dunn’s debut novel Dirt Poor Islanders is an impassioned response to detrimental stereotypes

• Review: Dirt Poor Islanders – Winnie Dunn (Hachette) Although Dirt Poor Islanders is her debut novel, Dunn is not new to the literary scene.
• That Dirt Poor Islanders draws on Dunn’s lived experience is crucial to its mission.
• The novel is an impassioned response to dangerous and detrimental stereotypes, such as Chris Lilley’s character Jonah from Tonga.

Whiteness and dirt

Dirt Poor Islanders traces young Meadow Reed’s negotiation of this tension. The novel is a work of autofiction – a blend of autobiography and fiction – which includes metafictional reflections on the genesis of the resulting book.

• The first chapter of Dirt Poor Islanders is a story she writes in her “gifted and talented” class.
• Dirt Poor Islanders contributes to a tradition of Australian narratives of young second- and third-generation migrants, often blending autobiography and fiction.
• They go as far back as Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992) and Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995).
• But Meadow is even more disgusted by the bugs, dirt and mould that infest the family homes and her body.
• Being both Scottish and Tongan, she thinks, meant “we were made out of – whiteness and dirt”.

Togetherness

• Despite the cultural insistence that “togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan”, Meadow resents this idea for most of the novel.
• Togetherness seems to consist primarily of the expectation that the family are together in suffering and poverty, rather than love and community.
• It is only when she recognises the togetherness of “kith and kin – blended not just by blood but by skin and soil too”, rather than perceiving her abjection, that she begins to understand her identity and heritage.

• In a scene that brings the abjection and resistance full circle, she refuses to use the dirty toilet outside the family home.
• She ends up with constipation: a literal blockage or denial of her body.
• Her anguish is only resolved when her grandmother takes her to a sacred site, promising “Tonga making betta you”.
• And her grandmother is right: as Meadow squats on the ground, she realises they are matched in their abjection.

Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.