essa may ranapiri

I read Tayi’s work for the first time; it is the poem ‘Blood Pacts’ from the first issue of Starling, a short and heart-breaking look at a relationship between what feels like siblings or a woman talking to her past self. Dark text on a grey screen late in the night, more reading to see what Starling likes than to find something new. But I do. This poem is short; 8 lines, but full of promises, a promise of community a promise of rebellion, a promise of razor wit. I think a poem isn’t necessarily the person who writes it, but we do hold pieces of ourselves in the poem and we hold pieces of the poem inside us. Tayi is her poems; rebellious, intelligent and committed to lifting up others (seen recently in her fantastic work with the Toi Māori blog). I think of this piece of writing and the anxiety of imagining back to your past self.

The water is so cold. I flail in the wet. Arms flapping in the sea. Salt glimmers in the eyes. The water is cold. It must be sharp to cross between this world and the next. To cut through the veil. There is no veil in liquid. I drift towards white froth. There is no light house to tower over. To be a part of the cliff. I travel backwards down a path I must take one day. Darkness waving at my back. 

We meet for the first time waiting outside of Manhire House (imagine being the poet with the building named after you?) I have just moved down from Kirikiriroa, I am still adjusting. My legs sore from the hill. I’m sweating, my breath catching in my mouth like thick fog. Tayi is waiting outside. She’s wearing all glitter and pink. Boots that go past the knee, I add them to my list of aspirational style choices, along with big hoop earrings. I can’t remember if the sun shone down, lights breaching through the branches or if it was the usual weather that those who live in Pōneke have grown accustomed to. Tawhīrimātea making himself known. There is a big hook in the ground, a tribute to Maui’s great fishing trip. Surely this is a place of violence and the wind continues to blow. We pass words; packages of anxiety and nerves, between crinkled lips. Pitching bewilderment excitement and fear into air. Through the front door is the Landfall desk, fucking Janet Frames writing desk; what is this place?! The imposter syndrome lands hard. I read the poster on the door to the IIML library a delivery suite for writers. I think of wailing babies with ink on their pukus.

My mum sends me videos of her diary, I don’t know why she doesn’t take photos. Not all the pages. Just the ones around the time I was born. Sounded fucking awful, she was in labour for a week, and I came out halfdead. The stress of the labour versus the stress of knowing your second child might blink out at any moment. It’s strange looking past the red fog and through to a time where no memory lives. My bones remember a time before the invaders arrived or a time when I was an invader a Viking or a warrior in Clan Gunn. Whakapapa as a tree sprawling outwards. I mentally cross out every instance of my old name and feel guilty for doing so. My mother’s diary mentions nothing about what happens to my whenua. I assume it ends up in a bin.

We are the youngest on the course and the only Māori people in the class. We sit together. She sees me in a way most people don’t, not as a white dude who dresses eccentric, but as takatāpui and Māori. She uses my name, and my pronouns. I feel like I have found tūrangawaewae in her gaze.  And that is the thing with new beginnings and new people. The fences come down and you can be whoever the fuck you want to be. This class and these people were the first to know me only as Essa. I hadn’t decided on a last name yet.

I don’t have a maternal instinct in my body. And it makes me feel like I’m a fake. Which is shit. I’m standing in a room with Alfie. A beautiful baby crying for food, I hold the bottle in my hand. There is no force that could get me to bring the bottle to their lips, what if they choke? What if I pour the food all down their front; what a waste that would be? What if, what if, what if. I stand there paralyzed until their parents are done sorting out something in the other room. I leave ashamed. My body unable to grow whenua inside it.

As part of the first six weeks of the course we all have to respond to a prompt; take a picture and draw a poem out of its surfaces, use two lines in another text to generate a rhyme scheme, introduce yourself with one lie hiding in the skin of your face, the final one is; write a lyric essay. We don’t know what that is. I still don’t know what that is. But this gives us an opportunity to lay down what our collections are about. Tayi writes “In the earliest memory to survive the red fog…” and I write “I make smoke and foam into whistles…”  we both begin in interstitial spaces. We stake our claim in margins. Her essay becomes ‘Pōukahangatus’ and mine becomes three poems ‘The Nonbinary Individual’, ‘ENBY’ & ‘Takatāpui’ interrogating what it means to be outside of the gender binary. In her piece she ends up with her sister and her hair and in mine I end up with Tūtānekai and Tiki waiting for the sun to rise.

The mind as colonized; an ocean that has been pissed into your brain. And the stink is just seasalt and you mistake the blue for yellow. And you just lie in it, ferment in it. I am swimming trying to catch up. But I never call my father. I never really make the effort. I read articles in magazines from the 1950s and pretend they bring me closer to my atua my tīpuna. I even write tīpuna instead of ancestor to combat my insecurities. One day I will dive into an ocean, green as pounamu. Green as the manaia around my neck. One day.

Tayi and I talk about feeling out of place about sitting in the dust of being ‘half-caste’ (a thoroughly colonial idea of Māori identity that holds no water in tikanga). This gives us an added sense of pressure, and gets us asking questions about how we represent a whole group in our work. How do we write the best trans book or Māori book? We decide what is best is to write without thinking about what the establishment want from us, we write for those made invisible by our sickeningly white NZ literary scene.

When I cut my hair (and I always cut my own hair now, these curls are hard won) it is always dark. I comb out brown-gone-black strands and snip at them with scissors rusting at the hinge. This is how I become myself. When I cut I control who I am, I decide where my gender lies. Some hair gets caught in the throat of my body. Speckles work their way across a landscape carved out by testosterone I never wanted. I think my hair does not grow snakes but little maggots. I am a flying thing with a splintered view. I look in the mirror and I see myself and I see everything else.

We both feel that pull of our wairua; straining in the wings of colonizing angels. Horn-blasted in the ears. We want to use more of the Reo, bring more of the song of the manu into being, into our toikupu. I remember her bringing the poem ‘Haiwaiki’ to class, and the beauty of it. The drawing of our world back to paradise; to the future and the past, the koru twisting and turning in an endless cycle. A cycle not of poverty and alienation, but of aroha and whānaungatanga, where we are free again. And in toikupu, in poetry, we can sing a song of a radically different country where we are free. And I have Tayi to thank for that. For helping me find a space in our world. For giving me a new view of myself.

I’ve turned around or all of the world has shifted. The ocean is before me, the land behind. I take a step towards the green and find something solid to catch me.