Black Marks on the White Page Read online

  Great kāinga, your winged lion flew triumphant above all the capitals of Europa. You anchor at the navel of your universe just as we, in our island citadel of Tahiti, anchored at the aquamarine, gold and azure pito of ours. We pay tribute to St Theodore and the bestiary which attend him: the crocodile, phoenix, cuttlefish, octopus, swan, basilisk, hawk, centaur, dragon, cat and golden salamander. They are manaia, marakihau and taniwha of equal power to ours.

  Acknowledge our mana.

  FROM IN PURSUIT OF Venus [infected] we have come newly garbed as Emissaries.

  We exist now in new entrées, bringing the wallpaper up to date, and thus we spiral out of the Space–Time continuum. We are still beautiful, hypnotic, haunting, floating but we are garbed in our own ihi, mana and wehi. We have divested ourselves of our original Greco-Roman physicality and the draping of antique clothing. We stand before you as us.

  Man, what a relief.

  And we tax the imagination now with new photographic portraits to include Aboriginal First Australians to complete the work.

  We dance before them. We challenge them.

  This is our apotheosis.

  From being originally a site of European imagination we have become a site of Māori, Pacific and Aboriginal strength. The ten-year-long video project has reached its final triumphant realisation in an immersive multi-channel panoramic video of seductive ravishing beauty and cinematic complexity. So does it reflect the renascence of the Pacific as all our peoples reclaim our mana, our sovereignty.

  Thus do our original narratives continue to twist through Time to you, all of you who live in the Pacific today.

  Our āhua, which had been made whakaāhua, has become real again.

  We have become you. And you are us.

  You are our grandchildren.

  Mokopuna.

  E MOKOPUNA, THIS IS our karakia:

  Continue to reimagine our colonial legacies.

  Reclaim the past in the pursuit of our present.

  Engage in interrogating our diverse histories and make your speculations on the present and future.

  You are all, truly, bronzed inheritors of the Pacific bounty. You are the generation of the future and you have a dual role. Not only are you inheritors of Pacific history, you must also be protectors. What must you protect? Why, the Pacific’s future.

  Therefore, become kaitiaki.

  YOU FACE DAUNTING CHALLENGES.

  The Pacific covers one third of our globe, e mokopuna, and it has become a contested space. The larger nations of the world enforce their militarist technologies, nuclear and other, deliberately coercing the smaller island groups to submit to their experimentation; already some of our citizens suffer from nuclear radiation and the ongoing genetic effects of radiation poisoning. Distant water fishing nations operate illegally, with unregulated fishing bringing all our marine ecosystems to the point of collapse; one day, we may not hear whalesong. Accidental oil spillages create sinister scenarios for our seas and waters. Seabed mining threatens to bring with it a new colonising of the sea; when that happens, the mineral infrastructure will be stripped of its goodness and the sea may die.

  And, of course, climate change has brought radical alterations to our environment. The shelves of Antarctica, the well at the bottom of the world, are already breaking up and we are losing one of our world’s greatest resources of water.

  Sea levels are rising. How many islands will sink below the ocean?

  E MOKOPUNA, ALL OF you come from a long line of ancestors stretching back to Rangiatea or to Europa or America to whom you are accountable and with whom you have an implicit contract.

  That contract is to protect the ocean which is now your home, to protect your history and whakapapa, so that you may go onward and secure the future for your children’s children.

  We hand to you all the tokotoko, the ceremonial stick of

  leadership

  Go forth! Navigate a future for all of us. Haumi ē, hui ē, tāiki ē!

  Let it be done.

  Kia hora te marino,

  May the calm be widespread,

  Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana

  May the ocean glisten as greenstone

  Kia tere te karohirohi i mua i tou huarahi

  And may the shimmer of sunlight

  ever dance across your pathway.

  Notes:

  1 A hee mai te tua: after an ancient Arioi chant.

  2 Forêts paisibles: after Jean-Philippe Rameau, Les Indes Galantes, 1736.

  3 E ngā iwi ē: after Tommy Taurima, E te iwi ē, contemporary Māori action song.

  4 Et mon coeur s’est levé: after Ernest Chausson, Poème de L’amour et de la mer, 1890 (translated by Christopher Goldsack).

  5 A te, sovrana augusta: after Claudio Monteverdi, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, 1642.

  Works consulted:

  Witi Ihimaera: speech, opening of the exhibition in Auckland, 2 May 2015.

  Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected], Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2015.

  SEPIA

  From Aristotle’s Lantern

  MARY ROKONADRAVU

  TIME HAS PLACED A shock of white on her scalp. Loosened her breasts from the vice-grips of her chest. Hung bags under her eyes. For three days I have not called her Atteh. Aunt. Do you need more tea, Shanti? She gnaws her nails to the quick, the stubs of her fingers a raw lamb-chop red. It is a new habit. Her teeth are foreign to it. Her chews run her nails crooked across flesh. She takes almonds to bed. She grinds her teeth in sleep. Where do you keep soap, Shanti? Have we run out of baking powder, Shanti? Her eyes do not register offence.

  Webs of cataracts trap most of the light in her world. She lights the lamps in the afternoons. Wrings her hands at the kitchen door. Look at these chickens, she says. Scratching the ground at night. It’s not proper. The world is about to end soon.

  How Christian her words have become. Pati had forever remained Hindu. I am about to end soon, she said for twenty-five years. Then collapsed under a banyan tree opposite Hop Kee’s. The waft of fresh loaves deluged by ambulance sirens. She was dropped into a hole the Levuka Prison convicts dug. Leaving me alone on the thin, shaky crust of this world.

  Pati’s words were of constant erasure. We lived in Navua, she told Abraham Lazarus. On a rice farm. We made more money from ducks than rice. My son died in a rice field. Buckling under a burst appendix. I hated the floods there. Just a light sprinkle of rain and you walk knee-deep in the fields. I’m grateful for the dry streets here. Fresh fish at the market. Enough sun for the clothes. A clear telephone line. Water in the taps. Good bread.

  In my eye, a thousand coconut palms in a single glance. A gaggle of geese dying of a mysterious illness. Jungle roosters the colour of fire. A half-cabin wood boat floating on a field of seagrass. Saltwater snakes the colour of zebras. My tongue limp with questions.

  My words have yet to arrive. Sometimes I have imagined them to be foreign little people with foreign little hats, waiting at the door of my mouth, begging to be spoken. I need words the crisp of pears, the cold of raspberry ices, to speak my forgetting. I cannot do it in Tamil, or Fijian, or English. These are the languages of my remembering. Their words sit warm and familiar in my palate. Keen to roll out voices.

  I returned on the Amiable Josephine, arrived at Siwati’s jetty in the dark, then 45 dollars for a Yamaha engine to take me to Liverpool. I made the return voyage alone. Captain Edward L. Stockwell’s pupils fastened on a star. The islands of Lomaiviti a scatter of fluffed-up pillows. The sea a black sheet stretched tight and tucked under the horizon. Eighteen hours against a wind blowing knots. Not a wink of sleep alighting on my eye in that chug.

  The man who sent us away is in a pine coffin. In a lemon grove on a quiet hill. Parrots nest there. Their fledglings dark skinny. Hours from sprouting electric-blue tail feathers. Crowfoot grass will cover the oblong patch. Lichen will cover the black stone at its head. The remains of sadness from his knuckles will seep to become the tartness of lemo
ns. I could plant a banyan tree on the oblong patch. Let its massive roots drill holes into his skull, its root hairs accumulate and knot in his sockets to confuse his eyes in death. I am straight-backed at the mahogany table, slicing boiled sweet potatoes into cubes. The man who ruptured his appendix in a rice field finally breathes no more.

  His sister lives on. She wants me to leave. I feel her unease in the ferment of her hesitations. In the pauses between mouthfuls of fried bananas. In the hard tinkle of a teaspoon in a teacup. In the fast melt of butter on a hot scone. In the sweet curl of a sugary lemon rind fished from the marmalade jar. She seeks to delight me into forgetting. She tells me it is not safe to walk alone in the bay. To not bathe in the ocean at dusk. She lies quiet in her lightless bedroom. A checked cotton quilt tangled at her feet. Under her kapok pillow, in page three of a 25-year-old Fiji Times, a fistful of marigold seeds for the lemon grove. She stands outside my bedroom door at night. Curls her fingers to knock. Lets them fall to her side. I picture her like that. Changing her mind. Slipping away with her words.

  She cannot tell whether I remember. I will not say that in those days I lay awake in the dark. Watching Ratio slip into my bedroom to take my sea urchins for a walk. Listening to his footfalls join hers in the long verandah. The crush of her skirt. The pop of buttons. The stealth of a quiet zipper. Her hair spilling like a black waterfall from the kitchen table. Afterward, she buttons a wool cardigan and drops me into Pati’s marigolds for my trudge to the cows. I grab a fistful of hair while sinking into marigolds. Smell apples on my fingers while looking at blue threads in the udders of cows. Horatio’s hands gentle on the flanks of a Friesian. I smell apples on cows.

  She does not know that for twenty-five years I laboured to forget. A cat the colour of Japanese oranges. Three sea urchins. Frothing milk in a tin bucket. The tale of two Gilbertese who sucked the juice of raw fish eyes and almost ate a newborn.

  But my pen moves far ahead here. Way, way ahead. Because that was never the beginning. The start of things seeps from a pond dyed olive with dying water plants. It is not safe to go there. You need shoes with grip. Sensible shoes. Wet green stones lace the pond. It is possible to slip. To feel the hem of your skirt stir a cloud of mud from the pond floor. To see a frog leg kick above your right eye. To die with a water hyacinth stem lodged in your throat. They are as long and soft as garden snakes. As slippery too. It is safer to skirt the stones and sit on a grassy knoll. To watch for a trickle from a rising lip. The beginning is not one. The beginning is many.

  I separate the beginnings by tongue. The start is when I have not spoken English. I have not heard the sounds. The beginning is when everyone on Makare says Opal. My only English word for five years. I am two when I first speak it. It does not qualify as English though. For when it is spoken it does not mean a sky-coloured stone that may hang from one’s ear or rest on one’s breast. When it is spoken it means the white man who won a gold prize for Sea Island cotton in Paris. It means the white man who broke his violin against a Solomon labourer’s back for not holding music at an ample angle to a moonlit window. It means the white man who bought Pati’s mother and Pati’s father for eleven pounds and two shillings on a stormy pier in Levuka.

  The egg and sleek-tailed seed that are to sculpt me are still apart. Couched and alive in this man and this woman. Deaf to the whipping foam under the pier. The hundreds who with them contribute to the curve of my flared nose are scattered in the south tip of India. Some diving for oysters. Some beating coconut husks into coir. Some drying peppers on a sun-scorched ground. Countless drowned in the Palk Strait.

  Opal is God in my family tree. He nails long mirrors to coconut trees and eleven San Cristobal men knife each other. He sends Pati’s mother to fetch a rifle and Pati is born. He sends Pati to look for a red hen and Shanti is conceived in a guava patch. He sends Pati to fetch a gravy boat and Horatio is created roughly against a broom cupboard. He lifts his gun and eight San Cristobal men drop their pants.

  This is years after the rain on the pier in Levuka has dried. Pati’s mother is dead. Pati does not know how to soothe cracks in her right nipple. Pati’s father watches for rain clouds so Opal’s copra does not sprout mould. Shanti cries until dawn. The day Opal puts a shotgun to his own mouth, Pati’s father rides a horse for the first time. Opal walks the verandah with a loaded rifle when I am born. The pigeons he intends to shoot hatch their young under the eaves. But even this is far ahead into the tale.

  There is another trickle from the green pond. Another happening revealed. It is possible to see a pearl diver fill his chest with air. Sinking into the depths between Madras and Ceylon. It is possible to see the glint of a knife between his teeth. Pried oysters in a string bag around his neck. The measured let of air from his cavernous nostrils. A kick for the rise to the surface. From day’s break to day’s end. At night, in the captain’s pouch, pried pearls from pried oysters. Rice and salted fish under the moon. I marvel at the length and breadth of his breath. Marvel at the sharks that do not shred him. For in him rests a seed that is to halfway across the world become a fraction of me.

  There is a woman also. She works in a mustard field. She will fold a banana-leaf parcel of mint chutney and rice. Add a mango pickle. She will give her cat a sardine. She will walk away from her husband’s house. Her five daughters will be playing under a tamarind tree. She will meet the pearl diver at the bazaar. Between the cardamom seller and the pounder of turmeric. As planned, he will have robbed the Portuguese merchant who presses orchids and paints filigrees on heron eggs for nieces in Lisbon. With his eyes, he will frisk her cotton sari for bulges and lumps. Bring nothing with you, he will have whispered a week earlier. Bring nothing with you.

  When they sail for Fiji, he will have eighteen white pearls the size of gecko eggs nestling in his rectum. They will strain excrement all the way across the Indian and the Pacific. They will not find a single pearl. The pearl diver will believe the pearls swam up and lodged themselves in his spine. Years later, he will insist his family strain their faeces by his deathbed for chances he passed them on in the seeds that grew them. Pati will tell me these things after she tucks smooth coral in the spaces between my big and second toes. She will tell me these things on Makare, at home, in a dead cotton planter’s house, where she still speaks the truth.

  This is way before she and I are rowed to the Catherine May. Before she walks into Edna Stanhope’s kitchen and pulls out a gilt-framed portrait of Queen Victoria from under her skirt. The she-monarch sits bejewelled in sepia in the kitchen Tom Partridge built for Eberhard Karl Muller, Esquire. She holds the world in her hand. She sits between a mound of peeled taro and a cleaned pig’s head on the porcelain kitchen sink. She feels pig-blood dropping off the chopping board, inching toward her royal carpet. The she-monarch does not look amused.

  Pati wipes a vermilion dot from the she-monarch’s forehead and proceeds to wail. I stare at the pig’s teeth. I smell ginger. In my head, I slide my fingers along the silken down of its ears. Edna Stanhope bolts the kitchen door. Runs water into a kettle. I will squeeze the juice of half a kumquat into your dhal soup, Pati says to Edna Stanhope in Fijian. I will scrub your kettle with steel wool. Pati and I have chugged the Lomaiviti waters for exactly twelve days. The number of eggs in a blue cardboard tray. One less than the ill-omened thirteen. I let a cinnamon cookie soften against the roof of my mouth. Queen Victoria is the colour of egg yolk. Her royal carpets and the round world she holds in her hand are egg yolky too. I am seven years and twelve days old. This is the last day my name is Dewane Nair.

  FACEBOOK REDUX

  NIC LOW

  MICHAEL SHOWERS AND SHAVES, then snaps a few self-portraits in the mirror. He lifts his phone high, tilts his head and pouts. Click.

  He’s a substantial man, with ruddy jowls, a small, pleasant mouth and cheerful eyes. At sixty-seven his head is a gleaming dome. Most of his male friends are doing that ridiculous neo-comb-over thing: a few last pathetic hairs brushed down over one eye, emo-sty
le. He prefers total baldness — chemo-style. Click.

  Michael stands back and takes a coy full-length shot, half-turned to hide his cock. He’s in good shape these days. He used to have to watch his weight, with all the dinner parties and long lunches, the breakfasts of salmon hollandaise eaten in bed with Margot. Click.

  His smile is captured mid-collapse. He deletes the shot. These days he mostly steams a few vegetables. He really has lost a lot of weight. He thinks of it as a small, positive side-effect of his wife’s death.

  IN THE KITCHEN THERE’S no sign of Sophie. It’s half seven, and she has classes at eight. While Michael waits for coffee, morning images from friends blink up in his retina overlay. He’s intrigued, and mildly annoyed, that the system keeps choosing sequences from women his age. There’s more from a Bernadette. Her dyed black hair is glossy and tousled, and she holds one hand across her breasts. She looks wonderful at seventy, though the effect hasn’t been the same since her mastectomy.

  These days, he thinks, we’re all a bit maimed.

  There’s a knock at the front door. Michael blinks. Odd — nothing registers in his overlay. He hears Sophie’s bedroom door open, then the shower. He carries his coffee down the hall and opens the door.

  He can’t see anyone there; just a jogger across the street, kids ambling off to school, two gaunt shanty-dwellers having their morning bucket-bath on the footpath. Each of them appears in his overlay as a faint swarm of data, visible, available.

  Morning!

  It’s Sophie’s friend Eloise, standing on the bottom step. He stares. She’s wearing an emerald headscarf that surrounds her face like a cowl. Is Sophie ready? she asks.

  Surprise makes Michael abrupt. No, he says. What’s with the scarf?

  I’ve taken the vow. Sophie didn’t tell you?

  No. Come in.

  He stands aside and sips his coffee to hide his distaste. He sees more kids wearing the scarves every day. To him, their cloistered faces look like they have something to hide. He wonders what her parents think. It was one of the few things he and Margot had argued about. He agreed with the papers: privacy led to unrest. Nonsense, Margot had said. They’ve got every right to disappear.