Erik Kennedy
Always Italicise: How to write while colonised by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Auckland University Press, 2022), 88pp, $24.99; We Enter The by Piet Nieuwland (Cyberwit, 2022), 68pp, US$15; Dirge Bucolic by Jasmine Gallagher (Compound Press, 2022), 92pp, $25
Alice Te Punga Somerville’s potent debut Always Italicise stakes out its ambition in its subtitle: How to write while colonised. At first glance, if you focus on the ‘how to write’ part, it might be a sort of craft book, a manual for generating words and ideas and practices. But if you focus on the ‘while colonised’ part, it’s a survival guide, an emergency companion for Indigenous artists in Aotearoa. And it’s both, of course. Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki), who teaches critical Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia, has what I would describe as an uncommon gift: a gift for writing poetry that lays out convincing arguments. You could say that she brings scholarship to her art, but it would be just as accurate to say that she brings art to her scholarship.
The book begins with the second-hand dictum ‘My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems’, and Te Punga Somerville decides to follow that advice, too. In a neat feat of malicious compliance, she interprets English as foreign. As a result, nearly the entire book is in italics, apart from a small number of words in te reo Māori, an ever-present reminder, should you forget, that these poems are being marked out as ‘foreign’ language: ‘Now all of my readers will be able to remember / which words truly belong in Aotearoa and which do not.’ (She is not the only Aotearoa writer to do this. Vaughan Rapatahana, for example, in te pāhikahikatanga | incommensurability, writes first in te reo and italicises his English translations.)
This places Te Punga Somerville in a delicate position. She herself has language anxiety. She doesn’t have the reo to the standard she would like. In ‘kia tūpato’, she addresses other Māori language users, saying, ‘don’t apologise for not speaking our language as well as me’, but she seems to perceive herself as a monoglot. In the poem ‘ielts’, about the laughable situation of her having to demonstrate English proficiency to work in Canada, she asks:
what humour is this
the girl who only speaks english
with a phd in english
having to prove
she knows english
The only poem entirely in te reo was translated from Te Punga Somerville’s English by someone else (Te Ataahia Hurihanganui). This language lack, described as a ‘falling away’, is a predictable result of the operations of colonisation. And it makes it all the more important that Indigenous artists and scholars work together so that the massive, systemic forces of colonisation can be countered by a collective effort.
Always Italicise is a book of Pacific connectedness, in some ways not unlike Te Punga Somerville’s 2012 monograph Once Were Pacific, a study of indigeneity, migration, and culture across Oceania. My favourite section of the book at hand, the last section, ‘Aroha’, is a series of graceful, grateful elegies for Māori and Pacific scholars and artists, including Te Rangihiroa, Epeli Hauʻofa, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, J.C. Sturm, Teresia Teaiwa, and Tracey Banivanua Mar. These poems are for the dead and the larger community of mourners. In fact, the book addresses many audiences—one of its great strengths. There are poems about struggles and outrages in Banaba, Mexico, Cyprus and West Papua. The fantastic ‘An Indigenous scholar’s request to other scholars’ consists of 16 words of text and 738 words of footnotes; it’s both a joke (as if academics can only understand things with lengthy footnotes) and a serious way of making a poem say something almost under its breath. There are poems to good neighbourhoods. Poems to bad neighbours. Poems to friends. And, above all, to the future—to the scholars and artists who will come next:
Whatever happens next, remember this:
this is our sea of small decisions, big risks and maybe even coincidences
that turned out to be history-making
to be vast
to be oceanic.
Piet Nieuwland’s We Enter The is about collectivity in a rather different, formal way. Nieuwland tends to avoid the lyric ‘I’. The lyric ‘we’ gets a good workout. Sometimes it’s a relational ‘we’ (a couple), and sometimes a universal, almost grand ‘we’. The human ‘we’. Or sometimes there is no real sense of a speaker per se; in ‘Weather Report’, for example, nature is described with a disembodied critical eye, and the concrete is made abstract as sea swells ‘Fall into a jumble of meter and structure / Cultural theories of life/art as object / practice / process’.
Often a Nieuwland poem is like an album cover by Roger Dean, the artist-in-residence of prog rock. You know the type of image I mean. Jagged stalagmites against a magenta sky, odd vegetation, reflective surfaces everywhere, sculpted clouds, maybe a floating island or two, suggesting outer space and a Mediterranean archipelago at the same time. Take the book’s title poem, for example:
We enter the same river as shadows / dissolving black mosaics
put calculations aside / and examine our selves
amongst jumbled ice floes / in the polar night
with waves re-naming the beaches
in communions / on a hundred thousand altars of oak and stone
at deserts of windmills / and turbines of light
with Panthalassa crying / eternities of hot tears
at our theatrical spectacle / of frantic dance
chants of masks banners and flags
of feathers, leaves and painted faces
building the momentum / of unheard-of terms
in galloping downpours of hyper-typhoons
It’s Rimbaud via the American surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. It sounds closely observed, but it doesn’t actually look like any referents that can be found in the world. It’s a way of heightening experience, of etherealising, of making things strange and wonderful and dumbfounding. Sometimes climate change is invoked and it’s clear that we really are reading about a world out of kilter, a time out of joint. Sometimes the reason is less clear. In my experience, some readers like this technique a lot more than others.
There are also poems that are anchored in the nerve-racking circumstances of the early stages of the Covid pandemic. What has the pandemic been if not surreal? In fact, though, these poems are more particular and tangible. ‘Hypothesis’ speaks of ‘hunkering down’ but also has some very Nieuwlandian touches: ‘estuarine alveoli clog with plastic mucus drowned in Covid plasma / we live in constraints of dynamic collapsologies’. And ‘In lockdown love’ concludes almost plainly:
Being quite satisfied with apples harvested
Trees pruned, compost spread, seeds germinating
Dishes and clothes washed, flat breads made
A sociable wave to passing neighbours
And the aroma of stir-fry vegetables curling through
The cottage with our hearts burning
On a beam that goes through the ionosphere
These poems capture the fear-mixed-with-opportunity-for-self-improvement mindset of that time very well. But it was temporary, and inevitably there was, as another poem puts it, a ‘return to another green world’, with, for Nieuwland, its doubtless spectacular shades of malachite and honeydew and viridian.
Illness is a spectre that haunts Jasmine Gallagher’s hybrid work Dirge Bucolic. There is the illness of the poet’s body, chronic fatigue (ME/CFS), which causes an ‘isolation’ that casts ‘a yew-berry skewed tint on my outward looking as I became more and more easily wounded by the voyage of life’. And there is the illness of the body politic of Aotearoa, an illness that has its origins in history. A key text that Gallagher manipulates and erases is Samuel Butler’s A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), a nonfiction prelude to his famous satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872), which is set in a thinly-disguised New Zealand. The passage she is most interested in concerns a poor ‘consumptive’ girl who died ‘on-board the voyage from Gravesend’, that most eerily named of places. The girl is ‘lowered … over the ship’s side into the deep’, and this death and the disposal of the body become, for Gallagher, something like an original sin that echoes through Aotearoa’s post-colonisation literature.
The illness of the body politic manifests itself in numerous symptoms. I’ll highlight a few of them.
Addiction. Pharmaceuticals play different roles, in different eras, in these pieces. The poppy tea in ‘Dunedin Omen’ seems to be connected with health conditions requiring the ‘Invalids Benefit’. The early settlers chucking down laudanum in ‘Straggle Muster’ may not even have been aware of how addictive the drug was, although the famous English opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, who appears here, definitely was. The necessary role of morphine in her father’s palliative care is explored in ‘Death Rattle’. Temazepam, SSRIs, amitriptyline, and their interrelationships are all discussed. The razor-sharp piece ‘Grand View’ poses important questions about whose addiction issues get candy-coated and whose get demonised:
Romanticism propagated the trope of the suffering artist: supposedly so closely attuned to the pain of this world that turning to substances to cope with their intensity of feeling is necessary … In The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison notes how this sort of Romantic mythologising only tends to benefit privileged white men, with women who got caught up in addiction more often chided by society for being irresponsible, incapable and/or negligent, particularly of childcare duties.
Toxic masculinity. Writing about ‘The Other Other: Female Gothic’, Gallagher reckons with the ‘gender disparity in the Christchurch music scene’, including in a ‘New Zealand Gothic themed film and music event’, even though ‘as feminist readings have emphasized, “the female” and “the Gothic” have a pronounced affinity—not surprising since “the female” is the most powerful and persistent “other” of Western culture’. And there are other reminders of how the late patriarchy works in Aotearoa:
During this phase of my recovery, an older male relative verbally attacked me, describing my part-time doctoral research on contemporary poetry as ‘fairy stuff,’ before stating that I should get a proper job and buy a house in Ashburton.
The nor’wester howled for days afterwards, bringing dark clouds that gently enveloped the indigo hills, and behind them, further in the distance: Mt Peel stood blue-black.
It’s not clear if calling poetry ‘fairy stuff’ is just patronising and anti-intellectual or (from this older man) if it’s also a homophobic slur. Probably both.
Broken Tiriti relations. One of the most interesting and adventurous poems in the book, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, juxtaposes material from two collections of Māori ‘fairy folk tales’ and bird lore with material from Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). (Close by is a poem about Gallagher’s own family’s emigration from Ireland.) It’s fruitful to see how these different traditions can map onto each other, but it’s also an implicit intimation that the different traditions have been valued and transmitted in unequal ways.
I feel as if I’m oversimplifying Dirge Bucolic and at the same time not tying the threads together enough. It’s unavoidable—this is a richly allusive and nested work that operates in several registers. It’s the knotty, dark little book of sickness and remembrance that we need.
ERIK KENNEDY is author of the poetry collection Another Beautiful Day Indoors (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand (Auckland University Press, 2022), an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific. He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
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