Karlo Mila

Matariki 2008

2008-06-29T06:27:00Z

Alternative ways of ascribing meaning and the negotiated spaces in-between

I was lucky enough to be one of “seven sisters” performing at Te Papa last night. Seven “wahine toa” from a range of ethnic origins, including Hinemoana Baker, Tusiata Avia, Jo Randerson, Keri Kaa, Teresia Teawaia to name a few. It was a fabulous line-up with all performers opting to sit in on the other performances, instead of practising alone and ‘missing out’ upstairs.

Wellington did itself proud “representing” as New Zealand’s true hub of arts and culture. A full house and several rows of extra chairs needed. The contemporary marae in Te Papa would have to be the loveliest place I’ve ever read in. You can’t really go wrong in that kind of performance space.

There is something very exciting about Matariki, Maori New Year, and the way it has been revitalised and celebrated over the last decade. This is tangible evidence of the renaissance for me. And the celebration in New Zealand of an alternative New Year, Matariki, in particular, can open up the way we think about seasons, beginnings, endings, stars, the environment and the cosmos itself.

In fact, if you ponder long enough, it can get you thinking about how whole cohering systems of meaning are ascribed differently to our natural environment. Clearly, there is not just one way of viewing the world. And if you have more than one system of meaning (more than one version at hand of how you might interpret events, emotions, incidents, environments,) it can create some quite interesting cracks and fissures in “reality” as you could potentially understand it… When “meaning-making” fights it out inside your head it can be a very challenging place to be… but also a creative place.

A friend of mine writes about the “negotiated space” between worldviews. What I like about this is the sense of power that “negotiating” exudes. I’ve had culture clash sold to me, hybridity, third space, fusion, collision – but negotiation provides some room for options – either detrimental or to your advantage… It also gives a sense that with some skill, persuasion and dexterity you could get yourself a pretty good cultural deal. I like that.

One of the poems I read for the Matariki performance was called: “Inside Us the Dead: The New Zealand-born Version”. This was my attempt at illuminating the differences between world-views of self, life, humanity, existence. Actually, the title is stolen from Albert Wendt’s book of poetry by the same title. I still recall getting this book out of the library many years ago. The Pakeha woman librarian shivered as she issued it to me. “Inside Us the Dead,” she commented, “How morbid”. And again, meaning making collides… Here is the poem:

Inside us the dead (the NZ-born version)

(for al wendt)

Albert said,
“inside us the dead”
maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely
if my body could recall those connections
there are only silences.

I am
bound
this place
time and space
the va with the past is broken.

Even when pregnant
my body feels like a ship lost in water
afloat, remote, solitary and
heaving with sea-sickness.

I did not feel the mercury line
connecting those before me
to their destiny.

I am not capable of thinking
this blood is a ripple
in an ocean
of our blood / I am
the next wave
of a tide that has been coming
for a long time / this vein
leads back to my bones.

This is what I have learned from books.
I am an individual.

But I suspect my body remembers you all.

The curve of my legs,
the shape of my fingers,
the face of my son.

Yes, every limb,
every bend
every bone
is a recollection of
who has been before.

A memory
of all the bodies that have been
the making of me.

Inside us the dead.

Barack Obama is just as “white” as he is “black”: the lack of language for “in-between”

2008-06-17T22:41:00Z

As the child of parents from different ethnic backgrounds, I have found that being of two ethnicities equally, can sometimes seem like a bit of “an inconvenient truth”. Especially, in a world that is anything but equal.

And race-mixing – if you want to call it that – tends to be one of those areas where language itself provides no salve, nor refuge. In fact, the word race itself has been scientifically debunked and in academic circles its usage requires “inverted commas”.

When “race” can be such a difficult thing to talk about (and write about) it would seem that the English language does not give us many breaks. In fact, it would seem that societies attitudes about people of “multiple ethnic origins” is more relaxed than our language which remains fairly black and white about these things. It gets rather outdated and embarrassing with its attempts at “in-between”. We have had half-caste – which I happily spent the first half of my life defining myself as. Until enough people took offence to the self-description.

Half breed was something I never deigned to call myself, feeling just a little too horsey. The word mulatto also conjures up a sense of something four-legged. Mulatto also rather romantically (for my over-worked teenage imagination), conjured up beautiful, doe-eyed, ironed-haired tragedy. Fairly obviously, that term seems best left to a time period of Southern belles when there was such a thing as “bad blood”.

I’ve always been unsure if a man could be a mulatto, because it seemed such a feminine term. And I’m reminded of my (equally) talented and irreverent friend Victor Rodger, who I met up with last Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. A Samoan/Palangi gay playwright, he was wearing a t-shirt saying “Homolatto”.

Who knows, the jury is out on whether “mulatto” will be reclaimed like many other pejorative words once used in a bad way by, let’s face it, white people. But mulatto, like many others is one of those ghosted words haunted with bad historical happenings and overtly racist injustices (a bit like Tiriti). This is the problem with most words used to describe the offspring of “mixed” unions.

I’ve just noticed that I described Victor in a hyphenated way. It’s such a neutral way of doing it – forward slashing ancestral combos. But as our population becomes increasingly multicultural in origins, there is the problematic of the ongoing hyphen. And of course the quasi-political deliberation about the order of the hyphenated! Quite seriously, what comes first? It is not uncommon for other people to demand that you choose and identify with one over the other. It is also not uncommon for the old “one drop” rule, blood quantum thingy meaning that any identification with mixed-ness is considered “purely” mixed-up.

I agree that being “mixed-race” sounds like something called for in a recipe, especially a recipe for fruit-cakes – which is kind of unfortunate really. I’ve heard ‘fruit salad’ used many a time, which has a less “all-sorts” and more delectable, delicious sense about it. Most people who have introduced me as a fruit salad have done it in the most loving way. Unfortunately, however, there is no fruit salad tick box on the census. Which is dumb really, because if they’re willing to put down Star Trek (or was it Star Wars???) as a religion, I don’t see why fruit salad is out of the question.

Coming back to Obama, one word, YAY!

That is very TRULY cool (although I have my sympathies for Hilary). And it is one good thing going for America which hasn’t, as far as I’m concerned, had much to rave about politically for a long time. Potentially not since the Americans’ thought they invented democracy. I guess abolishing slavery was also a big step for them, but you know, other countries did that too. To be perfectly frank, “democratically” to me the United States always seemed like hope assassinated.

However, in a two-horse race. One horse carrying a black presidential candidate in a white-majority country is impressive on anyone’s terms. I have to say, even for me who tends to be relatively (cynically) “hopeful” about things – in America it is almost unbelievable.

I am writing about Obama because I’ve heard some sly comments that he is not a “real” African-American or an authentic “black” person. And the reasons why this has been said, is in part because he is not the descendent of a black slave in America, but the son of a Kenyan “foreign” student, born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia by his white mother. Did you notice the words “white mother” slipped in that sentence? Yes, Barack Obama is what I would have called in the early eighties, a half caste.

To be honest, this is kind of more interesting because of the way he is presented by America itself, as a quintessentially black man. As I write that, I am not sure I really know what it means to be “quintessentially black”. But even I, all for open-signifiers when it comes to ethnic categories – even I understand that African-American “quintessential black” does not usually mean son-of-foreign-student, born-in-Hawaii, raised-in-Indonesia, by-his-white-mother.

Certainly, other parts of Obama’s biography sound much more quintessentially black. Like graduating magna *** laude from Harvard and being the first black president of Harvard Law Review. Like his first date with his wife being Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”. I was told that he married “back” to African-American black. How weird, that there are different degrees of blackness and how odd that I find it weird and at the same time completely understand the illogic.

If you are wondering what prompted this subject matter for my blog, it was not just an ongoing vexation and curiosity about the politics of authenticity (Yes, there is a series of poems in my new book called “Five Poems on Not Being a Real Tongan”) but a ‘letter to the editor’ I read in Vanity Fair. (If you read my other blog for NZ Book Month and are sensing a theme with Vanity Fair, yes, it is the only magazine I subscribe to.)

The author of the letter to the editor wrote: “I am turned off by the big deal being made about his being the first black man to run for the presidency. He is half white. In his own words his father was an alcoholic who didn’t support him financially or emotionally. And for this performance Obama writes a tender, introspective book about him. If I were the candidate, I would write a book about my white mother, who had been there for me”.

I reflected then, as the child of a white mother who similarly “had been there for me” after separating from my father (who was also there, but to be fair, not in the same kind of consistent, stable way) how easy it can be to upset the balance.

It is easy to upset your own balance, and more irritatingly, other people’s sense of what balance ought to be. Whatever that may be! And for the most part, the scales of “race” seem to be tipped towards the weighty melanin.

I also reflected about how “quintessentially black” guys like Barack Obama, often aren’t. Just like how Bob Marley, another legendary black man was also half white in a neglected and often overlooked kind of way.

And I guess many icons, like Bob Marley, like Obama is bound to become (as long as he doesn’t let interns smoke cigars in the Oval Office) who are presented as “black” are indeed black. But that is only half the story. And the silent story is often white.

I also wonder to what extent we mixed “people of colour” do have a choice in this? To people of only one ethnic background, we are essentially a mix of “same” and “other”. Let’s face it there is really no middle ground between “same” and “other”. Except maybe “daughter” or “son”, as the case may be.

In my own experience, certainly among many Tongans I am considered Palangi (white). And among most Palangi people, I am considered Tongan. And then of course, there are some people for whom I am just Karlo.

But is it our default legacy, to go with whatever we are ascribed with, by whoever, recognising that the “whatever” will change with every “whoever”? Surely, even the most unsympathetic among readers will sense how unsatisfying this might be. And I am back to thinking about the “inconvenient truth” of it all – especially in presidential elections.

I once read a quote that said all race politics is sex politics. I guess this is especially the case in terms of miscegenation – and there goes another term that is past its prejudicial use-by date. Yet, funnily enough it is still used in New Zealand government documents to describe issues facing the Pacific population. Yes, among Pacific peoples, of which I am one, belonging to more than one ethnic group is a defining demographic characteristic.

Actually we know very little about what this might mean in an empirical sense: whether it is linked to better or worse outcomes, health, wealth, quality of life, etc. In a youth survey I am examining for my PhD, of one thousand randomly selected Pacific High School students, less than a third were of only one ethnic background. Yet despite the fact that two thirds of Pacific students were of multiple ethnicities (as I am myself), strangely there are few words we can use to language this experience. Many words have been taken off the shelf like Noddy and Little Black Sambo. And notably, there have been very few new words on offer. Hybridity is one term, which is for obvious reasons problematic; reminiscent of fruit, flora and fauna and experiments conducted in glass-houses. Fusion is another word I’ve heard bandied about which feels like it belongs to a type of cooking that in a few decades will seem very passé and “noughty”.

The terms that provide the most relief seem to be those in indigenous languages “totolua” in Samoan meaning literally “two bloods” and “kailoma” in Fijian meaning “blended people”. In an article I read titled “Fragmented Identities Among Postcolonial Fijians”, some of the complexity with naming is apparent:

“In the days before and after colonisation our community was commonly known as 'halfcastes' or 'Part European'. Other labels proposed on our behalf were 'PMEND' (People of Mixed European and Native Descent', 'Euronesian', and 'Anglo-Fijian').”

Imagine self-defining as an acronym!

My last thought on this is the way we biracial people are often presented as having “fragmented identities” or are framed in terms of half-ness, cultural loss and being a “part” of something else. I mean isn’t it the classic “half empty or half full” optimist / pessimist dilemma? Nobody ever really seems to celebrate the double-cheeseburger aspect of being more than one. In most cases in life, having more than one is a good thing. Why wouldn’t you carry a spare type? (Unless it is around your waist of course)! Personally, I love having more than one lip-gloss to choose from. And I would certainly prefer a double-cheese-burger over a single-cheese-burger any day (is there even such a thing as single-cheeseburger and why would you want it?) Now this is just getting silly, silly as fruit salad on the census potentially. But then I have a lack of “sensible” language for it.

So, Go Obama! Watch out for the weirdos that seem to proliferate in your country. Especially those weirdos carrying guns! And if you get into the Oval Office, try and do something about that will you?

I will finish with a poem that is included in my new book A Well Written Body. It is called, “There are no words for us”.

There are no words for us

There is no language

half castes, half breed
mulatto, miscegenation.

These words rest
with our lovely dead.

There is no language

genome, germlines, genomics
that captures
the rupture and joy
of gene pool crossings

a channel as wide
as humankind.

There is no language

cross-pollinate, hybrid
that cultivates
insight and pain
of embodied
cultural exchange.

There is no language
for our sweet nashi offerings

the original forbidden fruit

widening the palate of the world.

The flashing blue line between fiction and real life

2008-06-03T22:43:00Z

In the latest Vanity Fair, I was intrigued to read the story about the writer James Frey. In case you missed out on the story about him, basically he wrote a “memoir” about his life as a drug addict (styled as novel) which turned out to be largely (or partly) fictitious.

The problem with this was that his book was a major best-seller. In fact, such a best seller that it was ‘Oprah’ material. He was invited on Oprah and then while onscreen in front of millions, he was ‘outed’ by the nation’s favourite talk-show host as being a “liar”.

James Frey’s credibility was “shattered”. He achieved, according to Vanity Fair, “nation-wide infamy”. The Vanity Fair story is for the most part sympathetic. He was, they say, a drug addict. (Well, then we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief – all is well in the world again!) However, he was a rich kid who had a relatively minor addiction, no brushes with the law (as detailed in the book) and he could indeed string a sentence together…The book is written in a quasi-illiterate style with no grammar, punctuation and long oozing, ranting sentences. (For me, who has 100% instinctive grammar and punctuation, this sounds like a sort of undisciplined writing heaven.)

The whole story proved rather perplexing. Frey felt that he’d written a novel – a novel styled as “memoir”. Others (obviously) felt that it was autobiography that ought to be free from any kind of (making-yourself-sound-cooler-than-you-actually-are) embellishment.

This brings me to my own writing and the extent to which it is “real” or not. As I was driving back from dropping my boys at day-care today (their first real half-day with bribes of Gordon and Henry from Thomas the Tank Engine if they let mummy leave)… I reflected on how much we as a society love fiction.

I am not going by book sales or reading rates to draw that conclusion. I am thinking about movies and television as well. In fact, any medium that passes on creative stories about fictive lives and people. I think there is an almost primal sense of relief that a story is ‘only a story’ which allows us to drop some guards that are worth dropping now and then.

However, to complicate this, the more real a story seems the better. And going by all the awful reality TV of late, there is something intriguing about a blurred line between. We seem increasingly demanding of the ‘real’.

A lot of my poetry is autobiographical in the sense that it is drawn from my own life and experiences. However, I am prone to waving the wand of magical realism to sparkle things up. Similarly, I draw from the lives of others – not like a thief – more like a borrower – of feelings, situations and tight-spots.

In my new book A Well Written Body there is a long sequence of poems titled “The Black Butterfly”. This is a series of ‘sort-of’ love poems. Glenn Colquhoun, when editing the collection joked about them being my “sicko love poems”. Why? There is nothing about necrophilia or anything truly sick like that. It’s just they are about desire, essentially. And desire that isn’t really supposed to exist when you are a mother, happily married (and all those attached etceteras). It is about connection and communion and attraction to ‘Other’ (yes, with a capital O) people.

Glenn recommended that I gather together all my sicko love poems, carefully stashed and hidden among other poems, and turn them into a narrative sequence. I decided to give this a go, remembering from my teens how much I loved McGough’s “Summer with Monica”. I had a go. It wasn’t “Summer with Monica” but it was better than a random 50 cent mix of poems. What happened though, when I did this, is that I turned a rag-tag bag of poems into a story. And subsequently, instead of a series of moments / attractions – or perhaps more accurately – imagined moments and imagined attractions with random people, I created an uber-affair. Or at least, the sense that one significant Other (clearly not my husband) had me writing screeds of poems in angst.

Following Glenn’s advice also led me to see what was missing in this narrative sequence. Out came the purely fictitious pen – to fill in those blanks and connect those imaginary dots.

Is the critical question always going to be – is it real? Does it have to be? Is it better when it’s real? I don’t have the answers to any of this. Do I have a self-assured husband with high self-esteem? Yes.

Although I have few conclusions about the line between fact and fiction I can assure you it is a thin, flashing, blurry line that many of us criss-cross. And to be honest, god help us if we didn’t.

I can also definitively conclude that it is not a good idea to get romantically involved with a poet unless you have high self esteem or are keen to see some dirty laundry and selected juicy bits in print… Personally, I don’t think I could handle it but I don’t mind being in control of the pen! To finish, here’s a poem that was edited out of A Well Written Body…

Never offer your heart to a poet

Well-dressed words
rolling off her tongue
as if it were the red carpet
leading to white balcony of teeth
shining at her door.

Never offer your heart to a poet.
She can go fishing for feelings
with a translucent string of letters
and catch something inside you
substantial enough
to feed a family of four.

Never offer your heart to a poet!
(and the proverbial cock crows)
Luggage full of glittering metaphors.
A make-up bag full of sharp
literary devices.
Hand-mirrors of
rear-view
autobiographical
verse.

If you hear the moon mentioned
step back
you don’t want to learn
the hard way that writing fiction means
never having to admit
she’s lying.