Story
Here we are then eh! Out in the air and of lost location. Out as witness – to see this night gradually dissipate the capping sky and the street become elevated. Distances close up. Draw down. The long gets thin & the black dots of the eyes open in the dark to bring in as much light as possible.
Here new interiors are made and hidden. Hell! Look around you, dead is the day; and this night, here in heavens neon shines even brighter.
It could be; if you think off in tangents and broad minded like, be nearby that Tama turned away from the lights. Could be these ones? Just above us shining with insularity. Or if he was here, his head held low. Could be a smoke thrown down – sparks scraped up from the pavement. Alight as New Years’ fireworks, with shadowy figures beneath.
Each row in patterns, icicle perfection, that fall or fly from each centre, an immersing veil of beautiful white light. Maybe he turned and saw lights that burn out before ever really touching the ground, or that shine without ever generating heat.
There were structures in place then that surrounded him. He had those that would help to mediate his grief. Ours tonight are temporal and hollow.
I sit next to you. We, propped up in dust as fine as nebulae; wrapped & warmed in blankets against the chill, night, smoking the casing air of roadside seating. Our’s is, we have, together, the cold. And heat grows more and more the focus, of mind. & Why? Eh! To cling thoughts to every bit of heat makes its increase inevitable. Hell! It works for demons, ‘Works for fear, then why not basic needs - energy invested & expended - to keep the ever fleeting energy in, & by will alone produce heat.
“That there’s the house … “, my cousin pointed out, “… from Ngati … it’s where they filmed that sick boy, and where they sang for him and where he died.” I could barely see the house as waves washed my shoulders and my head bobbed in the water like a crayfish buoy trying to remain afloat.
‘Iri te Kura, too’, he continued, ‘it was in the film.’ Ah, Iri te Kura, I knew better. That was a place of laughter and food, of aunties with lollies and cousins to play with and although it was sort of hidden, obscured by rows of pines, I knew where it was ’cause I had good memories of being on the marae.
‘And your old man’s house, eh,’ he pointed again, ‘it’s up on that other hill.’
‘Yea’, yeah, and all of them grew up there in that small house?’
‘Yep, all around here.’
Then a big wave came closer; we readied to catch it and we’re back to swimming.
While I’m drawing I can hear Annabelle in the next room. She’s reading to Tū Tonu. I sorta can’t hear what’s she’s saying, and I can’t sorta hear his questions. The sound is sorta muffled. The washing machines going. The door to the bedrooms sorta half open. But I can hear him, and sorta can see from when I went in before, I can hear and still see him hanging on her every word. And I can hear the tense parts. The scary parts, and hear his enthusiastic questions. Right now in the room next door ‘its is freezing in the boat’ and someone’s trying to start a fire. And the washing machine just finished. The musical tune just played and I can hear better.
Inside the Auckland War Memorial Museum, I took in the offerings of Maori artefacts in the frontispiece of the Museum. Walking amidst the dim and light restricted corridors of Oceanic art’s display cases, I entered the permanent ‘Maori treasures’ exhibition. Lending my weight to an arm support that eased my transition between spaces and allowed me to balance awkwardly on a gradient aside a successive series of poutokomanawa. These were carvings that seemed wholly divorced from any functional context I had ever seen them in before. The black matte steel supports and similarly painted shelves upon which the carvings were rested, seemed in essence to allude to the linear vertical lines of Hotere or perhaps posterised outlines of textural cloak weaves. There was in evidence some degree of effort on the part of the museum to present the traditional with the neo-traditional or contemporary as a progressing continuum of thought. However the contextual allusion appeared to direct itself better toward the temporary housing qualities of a social welfare home or prison interior. I was standing there, aware of their detachment from their previous lives, realising that they bared little semblance to functional participles of traditional Maori ideology, that supposedly there were objective museum directives at work, when I recognised an example of Ngati Porou carving. Identified by the form of the eyes, and confirmed by a supplicant title to be from my own Iwi. This is where I noted that anyone intending to look at the carvings would have to stand in the same lop sided stance that I was in, in order to view what in my understanding is a symbol of my own Maori identity. It seems almost surreal now but as I was thinking this, a couple of generic American tourists laden with gift shop plastic bags and wearing baseball caps trundled down the slope. They didn’t look at the carving that I had by now identified with, which pissed me off somewhat and I remember raising a discerning eyebrow at them as they waddled off in a centripetal direction toward the wharenui. At this point I realised that in an instant I had accepted how the carvings were displayed, associated my own history with the example provided and wanted some degree of reciprocated validation of its value, from these representatives from America. I’d fallen into the trap that the museum has for the naive viewer – the false impression that it offers more than just a contrived fakeness, of the position of a people. Reading truth into this space reveals a people eclipsed by colonialism. With their artefacts left in fragmented debris for curators to aggrandise the auspices of museums, but maybe that is just one way that colonisations work. With subtle changes in a context to alter the meaning of the texts it supports, then after a little while you begin to forget the change and take things for granted. And think that this is the way it was, or is or should be.
In the big smoke, in our big building that is its own hill, smokers use the stairwell to draw in and exhale.
I recall the sea in regular wakes. Imagine cicada’s loud, like planes overhead and all around but these are hidden from sight. Walking through long grasses – dried, bleached white. Arms aside. Legs making/following paths, fingertips through grass, brittle, rustling.
A couple who’re seated on fold out stools are selling pendants on the street. Cultural identities are arranged on four large boards, full of greenstone and bone carvings. Looking through there were the usual, fishhooks and manaia, but a carved Nike logo stood out, more than the others, as it irked me. It didn’t live up to the clean image I had seen I don’t know how many times. It’s imperfection is evidence of a human effort that in the medium of bone could not replicate the pure plastic form of the swoosh. With a flecked and creamy inconsistent colour its edges flowed in and outside of the correct lines of the Nike template. It looked chunky almost fat, tapering with incongruent lines to a point. This copy without the same detail becomes an example of how the form of such a highly visible image becomes fixed in memory. I could draw it and redraw it again and again, until I had it perfectly rendered, but what of those tiki and hooks – what can be made of their authenticity. Where is their original form? Perhaps it’s better to ask why is it that the forms of these Tiki and Manaia appear unified into a background. Is there ever an original or standard form, for a fishhook or tiki?
It’s been dark for hours. In the back seat, us kids are too small to see out the front. The roads old, the road’s near empty. & The car shakes on every turn. Revs up and down, with the changing gears. Its only when a car passes – and hi-beams off – that, for a short time we can see each other in the car. Otherwise this is a darkness seems like its not going anywhere. Black sky with a darker tree line. In the back my sisters asleep and I’ve woken somewhere in the darkness. I’ve been watching power lines out the window for a while. They follow the road, but seem to follow the car too. They look like guitar strings being strummed. Cartoon like though, and drawn by a hand I can’t quite see in the distance. Quickly drawn changes, between four strings, five, down to one or two. Rising up, above the window. Flicking past like an old film. Angles change, the camera zooms in and out. The lines, move with the road. We feel the car rise and fall and the lines with us. At times I lose them in the darkness. Seeing only two flat planes of black moving against each other, tress before the sky. Then, I look again and the lines have returned. A soundtrack felt in vibrations inside the car. I rest my head against the window, and feel its song in my head. It’s the sound of the road and of moving. A singing of nearing the next place. Where it’ll be bright, and we can stand and walk, or sleep on the floor in our house.
Ruru sound loud when all is quiet. They know - in the night - that all that scurries around and makes noise is their prey. Ruru only sing when there is another ruru to sing with.
A high whine of air brakes – pick up/drop off. Step on board, with jarring, shifting plate’s tremorring beneath. Each shake resounds as a spectre of Napier’s 1931 earthquake. You know the driver from the night before. He knows you grew up in a city, built on the rubble of the new world, built on the bodies of the old world. Everyone’s worried that this city might fall again. We’ll either be destroyed or all remade – all the same in contemporary artifice. Some won’t be getting back up. Some won’t even be looking at what their looking at, long enough to even notice. After each jolt, we fall back into place. Do we sleep soundly, in each shift of flashing black segue-way? Try looking out the window. We’re moving just fast enough to see that the world is there, then the world is gone. The world is there and gone again.