But Where Are You Really From?
Image Credit: Rosheen Fitzgerald
I came to this country
Footloose and fancy free
On the wings of my waka rererangi
Belly full of possibility
As a child I grew fat on manufactured nostalgia
Maudlin mawkish drawls
Penned by plastic Paddies
Who’d never set foot on the aul’ sod
Never felt the squelch of rain drenched peat
And impossibly green grass spring
Between toes moulded by hard-soled brogues
Meant for stomping out the frustration
Of eight hundred years of oppression
Against the famine and the crown
I rebelled; they cut me down
But for all my heartfelt identity
Language, dance and poetry
A simple figment of my pigmentation
Denied my nationality
Could never truly belong to a country
Who defined itself along lines of racial purity
Brown face sticks out amongst the freckled faces
Of kids in the late eighties
Who didn’t know enough to know they were racist
Their ignorance was bliss
Compared to the slings and arrows flung
At the bare-legged barely legal
A star-crossed girl who crossed Kings Cross
In a flurry of fake-it-’til-you-make-it-I-got-this
Red-necked boys who swam in the same ginger-tinged gene pool as my ancestry
Entitled to believe the bottom of the heap was the rightful place for a brown-skinned wahine
Through the slurry of slurs came the
outstretched palms of big-boned Māori boys
Tossing the dross onto Sydney streets
Keeping eyes out for brothers and sisters under the skin
No matter what her time and place of origin
Years later, searching for a fertile place
to release the seeds that grew
inside my ripening womb
I recalled those open arms
and made Aotearoa my home
We are so often pitted in opposition
Migrant and tangata whenua
Set up as natural enemies
New Zealand First rhetoric
Pulls the rug from under our Tower of Babel
Enmity sowed in the cradle
And how could it be anything but
When I define myself by the places I am not
And tūrangawaewae is all and everything you’ve got.
