Existing & Resisting
Image Credit: Hana Pera Aoake
Otane
I dream that Hine-te-iwaiwa rises up from a pool of water growing puuwhaa.
The thistles cut my hands and she forced me to eat it, forcing the placenta out from my body.
Hine-te-iwaiwa guides life in and out of this world.
Everyday, I try and keep myself alive and it’s a struggle. Maybe I’m Jim Carrey and it’s the Truman show. I remind myself that with each monotonous movement my body makes, the blood and bones inside me scream of histories that were almost erased and taken from me. Thousands of years coarse through my veins.
Although my body
has stiffened in loneliness
trapped by systems
socialising me to believe that
social life is a field of war.
Orongonui
My tears are never helpful
Everytime I swim in Te Tai Tokerau my dreams are haunted by Maaori women in colonial times swimming to trade ships and exchanging their bodies for muskets.
The whiteness etched on to the page. There is a danger in whiteness, in how it takes up space and language (1). The centre is everywhere, marked by the shimmering, a shimmering in dance, shimmering in the Tama-nui-te-raa, on the waves of Tangaroa, in Taane Mahuta’s forest (2). A space far from the Missionaries and their whitened god (his son of course was born a Jewish, Palenstinian refugee). It is a space where indigenous knowledge comes into being (3).
I stretch my knowledge, I dip and weave between different histories and structures, everything I add is a collection of usefulness, adding to the baskets of knowledge like my tuupuna zipping along currents, chasing Pane-iraira. It’s important to imagine and to have hope.
Don’t read the text, think of yourself as an actor, perform the text, enact the world you want to see.
Hine-te-iwaiwa tattoos moko on to my lips
Interview with Jake Skeet, The centre is everywhere, on Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150999/the-center-is-everywhere
Adapted from Leuli Eshrāghi speaking on Priority to Indigenous Pleasures on A Moment of True Colonisation #8 https://soundcloud.com/the-funambulist/a-moment-of-true-decolonization-08-leuli-eshraghi-priority-to-indigenous-pleasures
Ibid
Omutu
The difference between ‘kaawananatanga’ and ‘complete sovereignty’
In using kaawanatanga, Maaori sought to grant the right of kaawanatanga over the Crown’s own people (settlers) and over what Maaori called ‘ngaa tangata whai muri’, those who came to Aotearoa after the signing of Te Tiriti. The idea was that the Crown could exercise kaawanatanga over all European settlers, but the authority to control and exercise power over Maaori stayed where it had been, with Maaori.
We steal a musket and fire it once, twice, three times. The feeling is electric, but also terrifying.
The sly smile your lips make when you say the first
Tina!
before screaming
Huia e!
Taaiki e!
My atua waahine streams down my thigh, as I wake dripping in steaming wai.
Hine-te-iwaiwa my cycle can’t keep up with your shifting of the moon. Of course Maaui never died, he lives on, crushed into the atua waahine dripping from the womb.
He wanted to become the moon and so they are forever entwined.
Mutuwhenua
I get told I am pretty because I am mixed race.
It’s really just uncomfortable and a conversation I’d rather not have.
It’s never a compliment and in these moments
I wish obsidian teeth would grow out of my vagina,
cutting off their heads.
I’ve been told this by strangers all my life.
Now I just say I’m an alien.
It must have been strange for my parents to be asked about their child’s genetic makeup.
Sometimes people would say my dad was not my dad.
Are you okay?
Do you need help?
Where is your Mummy and Daddy?
Clinging to my dad’s hand.
They say most children learn about racism through the experience of others, particular family.
I think about what it wouldbe like to just live on an incognito page on the internet.
I want to disappear, watch me as I want to go full abstraction deep into virtual emotional sphere.
I’m a subject-body, a technoliving system that makes possible the materialization of political imagination (4).
4. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era. Feminist Press: New York, USA, 2013, 139.
Takirua
Traditional Maaori society can only be comprehended through the context of having a Maaori world view. This acknowledged the whanaungatanga of all living beings and their relationship between the natural order or balance of the world. Men and women are parts of this collective whole and our bodies both formed the whakapapa that describes the beginning of the world (5). Our bodies are porous, non-linear and linked to the past, present and future. We are made of mountains, water and bodies who have passed through.
I was once bacteria (6).
It once rained and rained until small pools became oceans.
Then the water evaporated and the seans became empty.
Then an explosion caused by Ruuaumoko filled the world with water again.
I will become bacteria again.
5. Ani Mikaere, “Maaori Women: Caught in the Contradictions of a Colonised Reality” in Mana Wahine Reader: A Collection of Writtings 1987 - 1998 Volume I, edited by Leonie Pihama, Linda Tuhiwai Smioth, Naomi Simmonds, Joeliee Seed-Pihama and Kristen Gabel, Te Kotahi Research Institute: Hamilton, New Zealand, 2019, 138, https://leoniepihama.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/mana-wahine-volume-1.pdf
6. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era. Feminist Press: New York, USA, 2013, 134
Existing & Resisting:
We are the descendants of our strongest ancestors
- Hana Pera Aoake
