the nonbinary individual
So this started out as a lyric essay and it is the first of three parts that kind of divide the book in two, ‘the nonbinary individual’, ‘enby’ and ‘takatāpui’ kind of relate a moving closer to te Ao Māori and the body.
Anyways I get ahead of myself; ‘the nonbinary individual’ has a strange distance to it that makes me feel like I’m watching something awful happen to someone from behind like three layers of glass. I guess the someone is me.
The poem starts with a section in italics which is something I’ve been doing a lot lately putting what I consider a mini-poem at the start of a longer piece, I like having sections and part and what not in my work. I enjoy the layers that happen when there is some sense of separateness in something whole. We start close in we start with an ‘I’ that breaks through and then are thrown back to the third person.
I wanted to make two statements with this poem – that the gender binary is nonsense and that how we talk about gender and the body can be alienating and violent. I think there are ways that I wouldn’t talk about gender here but I wonder if that was for the sense of alienation or just because I think about gender differently now?
Favourite line: ‘The rocks are all frozen people’ I like this because it again returns to thinking about the earth as a body and relates back to te Ao Māori. This is a rather big leap but I’m trying to get at the gendered body as a frozen body as a body that isn’t allowed to move or be fluid. I also like it because it’s direct! When I think of ransack I don’t imagine it as direct as it is and would have probably been horrified by how direct it is if someone had travelled back in time and told me this was the first book of mine put into the world.. that got away from me. Hmm.
Where I was when I wrote it: Why did I think this would be a fruitful section? Like I guess since this was based on a prompt (we had to write a lyric essay) I feel like there is more connection to the Victoria University campus in this piece than there is others? I don’t know where I was when I wrote it – I wrote parts of it in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and some parts in Kirikiriroa – it took a long time to properly finish this piece?
Also an earlier version of it, which you can find here, was performed for a Mana Wahine event that was put on by Mayhem at the Meteor theatre in Kirikiriroa. It was really weird and cool to read it next to four actors all rushing headlong into the lines. Also as you can see the earlier version has a very different order to it (and incorporates the poem enby) which I don’t know maybe it works better like that… maybe it doesn’t. I certainly prefer the version in the book / but of course I would.
Recommendations: This poem by Jackson Nieuwland. Live inside of it as it lives inside of me; a song made of knives dancing in the wind.
essa may ranapiri 