Black Marks on the White Page Read online

  A stunning collection of Oceanic stories for the twenty-first century.

  ALBERT WENDT / ALEXIS WRIGHT

  ANAHERA GILDEA / ANYA NGAWHARE

  BRYAN KAMAOLI KUWADA / CASSANDRA BARNETT

  COURTNEY SINA MEREDITH / DAVID GEARY

  DÉWÉ GORODÉ / GINA COLE / JIONE HAVEA

  KELLY ANA MOREY / KELLY JOSEPH

  MARY ROKONADRAVU / MICHAEL PULELOA

  NIC LOW / PATRICIA GRACE / PAULA MORRIS

  SELINA TUSITALA MARSH / SERIE BARFORD

  SIA FIGIEL / TINA MAKERETI / TUSIATA AVIA

  VICTOR RODGER / WITI IHIMAERA

  CONTENTS

  FIONA PARDINGTON

  Uncanny Tui/Takahu

  INTRODUCTION

  A NOTE ON IMAGES

  PATI SOLOMONA TYRELL

  FA’AAFA

  ANAHERA GILDEA

  Cicada Cingulata: The Bird of Rehua

  PATRICIA GRACE

  Matariki All-Stars

  NIC LOW

  Rush

  TUSIATA AVIA

  I Dream of Mike Tyson

  MARY ROKONADRAVU

  Famished Eels

  SHANE HANSEN

  I AM MIXED MEDIA

  WITI IHIMAERA

  my father dream new zealand

  ALEXIS WRIGHT

  ‘We mobs got to start acting locally. Show whose got the Dreaming. The Laaaw.’

  GINA COLE

  Black Ice

  DAVID GEARY

  #WATCHLIST

  KELLY JOSEPH

  White Elephant

  ROSANNA RAYMOND

  Beaten

  CASSANDRA BARNETT

  Pitter patter, Papatūānuku

  JIONE HAVEA

  The Vanua is Fo‘ohake

  SERIE BARFORD

  After the Tsunami

  DÉWÉ GORODÉ

  Tribe My Nation

  VICTOR RODGER

  Like Shinderella

  ROBERT JAHNKE

  Navarro tukutuku, Ata tuatahi, Ripeka whero

  TINA MAKERETI

  Black Milk

  MICHAEL PULELOA

  The Stone

  COURTNEY SINA MEREDITH

  The Coconut King

  KELLY ANA MOREY

  Poor Man’s Orange

  SIA FIGIEL

  Extract from Freelove

  CERISSE PALALAGI

  HOLLA BAQ series

  ANYA NGAWHARE

  King of Bones and Hazy Homes

  PAULA MORRIS

  Great Long Story

  SELINA TUSITALA MARSH

  Pouliuli: A Story of Darkness in 13 Lines

  BRYAN KAMAOLI KUWADA

  Ke Kāhea: The Calling

  LISA REIHANA

  in Pursuit of Venus [infected]

  WITI IHIMAERA

  Whakapapa of a Wallpaper

  MARY ROKONADRAVU

  Sepia

  NIC LOW

  Facebook Redux

  ALEXIS WRIGHT

  Whale Bone City

  YUKI KIHARA

  Roman Catholic Church, Apia

  ALBERT WENDT

  Nafanua Unleashes

  NOTES

  CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOLLOW PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

  For all who walk, carve, talk, dance, chant, paint and sing the Pacific into the future

  A talanoa awaits you

  Welcome — join the kōrero

  Fiona Pardington, Uncanny Tui/Kakahu, 2008

  A NOTE ON IMAGES

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Pati Solomona Tyrell’s work was at Fresh Gallery in Otara last year. The image was like a portal to another world, its colours saturated by night and desire and the youthful swagger of its subjects, whose eyes issued a challenge and invitation. They were the Fafswag Collective, creators of the legendary Fafswag Ball. I walked around the gallery, seeing a lot of exciting work, but Tyrell’s image called me back to it.

  I can remember the first times I encountered all the artists in this volume: Fiona Pardington’s black and white visions in books at high school — we were all obsessed with her images — then in 2015 at City Gallery in Wellington. Yuki Kihara’s extraordinary imagery in Landfall journal, and many places since. Lisa Reihana’s astonishing in Pursuit of Venus [infected] online, but also the earlier iconic gateway at Te Papa. Robert Jahnke’s 3D dexterous manipulations of word and symbol, first in metal at Massey University in the 1990s, then in fluorescent tube lights at Pataka Gallery, Porirua 2016. Shane Hansen’s clever graphics on greeting cards in a gift shop. James Ormsby’s delicate linework at Pataka again. Rosanna Raymond’s exquisite tableaus in various publications. Cerisse Palalagi’s playful polyphonics on Tautai’s website. Each of these encounters was marked by searing recognition, a gut-kick of wonder, the curling back of mystery. We are drawn to revisit these images because they represent fresh and significant ways of seeing ourselves.

  This is also what we see in the stories presented in this anthology. Witi and I were keen that this collection should recognise the many ways narrative is expressed in the Pacific, to establish our collection of stories within the context of a wider conversation. We’re keen also to acknowledge the deep relationship between visual and literary storytelling forms. We are only able to present a very small sample of visual works here, but the juxtaposition of Oceanic art and writing is so exciting we hope that, like us, you will continue to seek out these portals to other worlds inside our own.

  TINA MAKERETI

  INTRODUCTION

  STONES MOVE, WHALE BONES rise out of the ground like cities, a man figures out how to raise seven daughters alone. Sometimes gods speak, sometimes we find ourselves in a not-too-distant future. Here are the glorious, painful, sharp and funny stories of Māori and Pasifika writers from all over the world, and one guest Aboriginal writer whose presence asks us to rethink the boundaries we have set up between ourselves and our neighbours, literal and figurative. The editors collected this work from their location in Aotearoa New Zealand, but this is an Oceanic collection. It crosses the borders that have been constructed between nations, genres, languages and between ways of seeing. By making these Black Marks on the White Page, we redraw the map, rewrite the histories, connect lines across globes that were constructed in the last century, or the one before.

  We admire the writers collected here for their work as artists and their individual points of view as fiction writers. Some of them we know not just as writers but also as essayists, teachers of creative writing, reviewers, commentators and opinion makers; not only do they talk the talk, they walk it. Consciously or unconsciously, their work embodies the disruptive act that Māori, Pasifika and Aboriginal writing constitutes in the worldwide literary landscape — still the page is white, and still the marks we make upon it are radical acts of transgression, of forcing others to see us in all our complexity and wonder.

  WE BRING OUR DIVERSE range of writers together as a talanoa, a conversation, and we are grateful that most were able to accept our invitation. The talanoa is a place that one of our contributors, Jione Havea, would characterise as existing in many dimensions, not just in space but in time. We particularly honour Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt, Alexis Wright and Déwé Gorodé at our gathering. They are our elders who, together, represent different communities. Patricia Grace has given us a previously unpublished short story; Déwé Gorodé’s extract from The Wreck is translated from the original French; Alexis Wright has offered a chapter from her new novel; and Albert Wendt is represented by an extract from his verse novel The Adventures of Vela, which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in 2010. We are moved that their writing continues to celebrate the survival of the alternate imagination. />
  Along with Albert Wendt and Witi Ihimaera, we have assembled other Commonwealth Writers: Sia Figiel, who won the South East Asia and South Pacific Prize for Where We Once Belonged in 1997; Mary Rokonadravu, who won the Pacific regional Short Story Prize for ‘Famished Eels’ in 2015; and Tina Makereti, who won that same prize for ‘Black Milk’ in 2016.

  We welcome new and vibrant voices to the talanoa, like Nic Low, and Gina Cole, whose anthology of short stories was published in 2016. Present also are the evocative voices and talents coming out of creative writing classes — writers like Anahera Gildea and Kelly Joseph. Our youngest writer is Anya Ngawhare, whose exploration of youthful male sexuality is an extract from a soon-to-be-completed novel. Dramatists like Victor Rodger and David Geary bring a different formal background to fiction that invigorates and charges it.

  WHAT WE HOPED FOR, and what our writers delivered, was to go beyond the edges of what is expected from Oceanic writing. First boundary: where we live. Māori are a Pacific people, but when we talk about Pasifika writing this does not generally include Māori writing. Aotearoa is a group of islands in the Pacific, but we usually don’t think of ourselves as islanders. For too long we have all been thinking within boxes constructed by old theoretical maps. In Black Marks on the White Page we have taken a more inclusive approach: we wanted to remember our kinship in the wider Pacific.

  Black Marks on the White Page creates a new star map, a new navigator’s chart. It draws its original template from the Pacific Ocean as our continent, as remembered in Epeli Hau‘ofa’s ‘The Ocean in Us’, Albert Wendt’s ‘Towards A New Oceania’, and Alice Te Punga Somerville’s Once Were Pacific. Our commonalities are more stimulating than our differences; we find ourselves in the same waka when it comes to literature. So Black Marks contains work from all over the Pacific: as far north as Canada, as far west as Australia, as far south as New Zealand, with Hawai‘i, Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia and Tuvalu at the centre.

  Some of the main beneficiaries will be the contributors to the talanoa. We need not live in a Māori or Pasifika or Aboriginal bubble. In greeting each other — we belong to the same community — we can use our synergy to create new ways of looking and working.

  OUR SECOND BOUNDARY: what we write. All writers are subject to preconceived ideas regarding who we write like, but for Māori writers, writers from the Pacific, Indigenous writers and writers of colour, the preconceptions can become widely held stereotypes. Even though we sometimes bemoan the scarcity of an Oceanic fiction that looks like us, smells like us, walks like us and therefore must be us, none of us should be constrained by any sense of what we’re supposed to look or sound like. Creativity doesn’t live there. There must be no compulsion to write in any particular way about any particular topics, outside of the writer’s own creative project. So, whether our work is motivated by whakapapa or by European form, in this volume we can be confident that what our writers write about is endlessly diverse, crossing not only boundaries, but subjects, genres and approaches.

  We head into the political arena in the work of David Geary, Déwé Gorodé, Nic Low and Michael Puleloa, and it is revealing how often political thought is associated with the shifting of stone. Low also takes us into a dystopic future where Facebook is a thing of the past, and Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada takes us along a Kānaka Maoli-Steampunk alternate timeline. We would have been very happy to see more experiments with Indigenous imaginings of the future. On the other side of the same coin, mythology and history inform the work of many writers such as Alexis Wright and Mary Rokonadravu, perhaps giving rise to the notion that the Oceanic present is infused with both the past and the future.

  Some of our most beautiful, subversive and shocking work arises when we write about sex and sexuality, as do Sia Figiel, Anya Ngawhare, Victor Rodger, Tusiata Avia and Albert Wendt. The shock is not that we write about such things so frankly, but that such work still constitutes subversive writing, and that our stories about sex and sexuality still contain experiences of sometimes violent sanction.

  Perhaps at the other end of this scale is work that slips quietly under our noses simply by presenting the lives of ordinary people, at the same time challenging our understandings about the way things are. We’re excited to include a new story by Patricia Grace, the pioneer of this ‘radical ordinariness’, exemplified also in the work of Kelly Ana Morey and Kelly Joseph. These narratives get under our skin with as much tenacity as their flashy brothers who experiment with form.

  OUR THIRD BOUNDARY: how we write. Experiments in voice abound in the work of Cassandra Barnett, or Anahera Gildea, who establishes a successful collective first person narrative. This is an approach that students of creative writing often express an interest in. Reading work from Jione Havea, Serie Barford, Paula Morris and Witi Ihimaera, we might ask: is it fiction or non-fiction? Does it matter? Or, at least, how much are they one and the same? We suspect that the collisions and intersections of contemporary Oceanic lives with literary techniques are enabling our writers to go into rooms hitherto unexplored. There, some interesting encounters allow genre to bend as in, say, Courtney Sina Meredith’s work, or that of Albert Wendt and Selina Tusitala Marsh. Similarly, several writers sent us poetry even though we asked for fiction. When we asked Courtney Sina Meredith about the ‘form’ of one piece, she sent us virtual laughter: I don’t know, she said, I think it’s in the va. Perhaps the division between different forms — fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry — doesn’t necessarily make sense to an Indigenous Oceanic world view. Words | stories | art | songs| dance | mythologies | ancestors | film | contemporary life | poetry — these may all exist in the same moment, in the same space, and none of it is untrue.

  Simply put, Black Marks on the White Page demonstrates stylistic innovation that comes from the border crossings that many of our writers are making between literature and theatre (opera, dance, play, musical theatre), literature and film (television, feature film, short film, video installation, gaming), books and other literature platforms (blogs, Twitter, iPhones and other digital screens), the various genres of literature (poetry, non-fiction, essay, long-form story) and, in particular, between literature and visual art. In Black Marks on the White Page we therefore offer a portfolio of work by such artists as Fiona Pardington, whose work deeply influenced Tina Makereti’s ‘Black Milk’. Cassandra Barnett’s piece references Alex Monteith’s digital artwork and shows the kinds of experimentation that can take place when the art and writing worlds intersect. Witi Ihimaera’s ‘Whakapapa of a Wallpaper: A chimerical fiction’ comes from the catalogue for Lisa Reihana’s Venice Biennale show Emissaries. James Ormsby’s remarkable cover illustration exemplifies the kaupapa of our volume in visual language that draws from our complex, diverse and rich histories and cultures.

  At the talanoa, the stories do the talking. This work comes from the ten-year window since 2007, and we hope the juxtaposition of the stories within excites you. These are stories that expand our world aesthetically, politically, linguistically and culturally. At the 2016 Te Hā Māori Writers Hui we talked about writing ourselves into existence. We talked about how writing has always been a subversive act for us, from the moment each one of us learnt about the power of the pen. Sometimes there have been black marks against us for our writing. This book provides only a taste of the abundance offered up by Te Moananui-a-Kiwa — our great Pacific. It is up to us — it has always been up to us — to keep carrying this medium that we have loved from the first moment it landed in Aotearoa and elsewhere, and to make it our own. To make our own Black Marks on the White Page.

  Pati Solomona Tyrell, FA’AAFA, 2015, still from video work

  CICADA CINGULATA: THE BIRD OF REHUA

  ANAHERA GILDEA

  WE HATE BLOWFLIES. THEIR fat glossy eyes, green and blue, come to drone through the summer of our houses. Mean and heavy. Make noise like the tarakihi instead, girl; train your ear to their clacking applause, singing with voices like the roaring rain, we say, calling for mates from
between the leaves.

  We see the dog. We see him come round the back of the house. We see him. Lolling panting hound wolf. Hound of god. Nah that old kurī been here for donkeys, we say. Mangy beast. Bloody dog animal. We don’t like your dog, girl. Dangerous teeth. Hazard. Bloody hazard. Our kōtiro chooses tāne like dogs. Wild boy men. Pretend heart. Savage.

  Our girl loves church. That Jesus. Her best tāne, all the kuia say. Rubbish. Rubbish, say the koro. Rubbish, say the whaea. Leave all those kurī behind. Sing your big song, girl. Listen to the cicada; make your voice loud, girl, loud.

  Jesus didn’t put that pēpe in there. Get off your knees.

  SHE LEFT HIM. KAWHENA with her rolling gait and massive puku, walked away from her ahi kā and her tāne and her kāinga. For herself she could do nothing, but for her baby she could raze heaven.

  Make noise, Kawhena, whisper the kuia. Pātere start small. The drumming? Safe. We say. Safe Pēpe. She’s going to change the world, this girl.

  She carried us inside, from the flanks of Ruapehu up to Tāmaki-makaurau on the overnight flyer. Her phone lit up, over and over, the whole way so that she barely slept. She thought about hiffing it out the window but there was no money for a new one. Her parents, Nick, her friends, all calling and calling. The bus stopped under the Sky Tower and she had nowhere to go. In the toilets she washed her face. She had a month or so before the baby would come and that meant she had to find a place to stay. Her duffel bag was heavy. She put it on to balance out the weight of her stomach, and turned toward K’road. It was going to be a hot one. The few trees she passed were already alive with the tympani of cicadas. At home she used to lie on her bed and listen to them through the open window. Make noise, Kawhena, they’d say.

  HE HAD SEDUCED HER. Or she had seduced him. Or both. In Korea. Nick was there teaching English too. From her home town. Turned out it was common to go overseas and meet someone from right where you left. K’road reminded her of Itaewon. Dirty streets perfumed with a strange combination of seaweed and steak. Vendors in their dozens, hawking and disdainful because here in the American quarter you were probably associated with GIs, and everyone hates someone.