Mo'olelo, Talkstory: To Cause The Spirit To Fly Between People

Selina Tusitala Marsh. Fast Talking Pi (Poetry Collection with CD). Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Cath Koa Dunsford

The poetry of Selina Tusitala Marsh is well known throughout Aotearoa, the Pacific and beyond. Yet how many poets with a first collection could garner heartfelt praise from some of our top Maori  and Pacific writers such as Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel, Witi Ihimaera and Karlo Mila? Sia Figiel compliments Marsh's dedication to the ‘recognition of Pacific voices that have been historically silenced as well as giving breath to the urban realities of the Pacific dispora’. Witi Ihimaera calls her a ‘sassy hip hop streetwise Samoan siren of South Pacific poetry’ while noting her work is also world class. Albert Wendt loves her ‘challenging new fusion’ of Aotearoan/Pacific poetics, while Karlo Mila notes that she ‘joins the “calabash breakers”' of the contemporary New Zealand literature scene and does not leave it as she found it.

As a Maori (Nga Puhi) and Pacific Island (Hawai'ian – Pahala, Ka'u) ‘calabash breaker’ of the seventies who was dubbed by the critics as a ‘literary activist’, I welcome Karlo Mila's astute comments on Marsh's work and also affirm the honesty and power of Selina Tusitala's voice in breaking down some of the academic and literary traditions that get in the way of enjoying empowering, confronting new Pacific voices that refuse to be boxed up in some academic's Post-Colonial Paradise.

Since poetry is, in essence, Talkstory, or mo'olelo from my own Pacific heritage, the Hawai'ian Talkstory, literally meaning ‘to cause the spirit to fly between people’ there could be no more apt description of Marsh's work, especially considering that ‘Tusitala’, in Samoan, embodies te rito, or the heart, of talkstory. All power to Auckland University Press for presenting this collection with a CD of the poet performing her own poetry, which brings the nuances alive for the listener/reader and leaves no doubt of her intention to challenge and confront the reader's assumptions.

Fast Talking PI (Pacific Islander) celebrates a wild range of verse, from the Maori/Pacific diaspora to the grunty urban realities of inner city life in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Marsh also confronts inherited Western traditions where she and Pacific people, especially wahine/vahine, have been raped/ripped off by Western colonialism. The symbol of this in the collection is the painter Gauguin:

Gauguin

you piss me

off

You strip me bare

assed, turn me on my side

shove a fan in my hand

smearing fingers on thigh

pout my lips below an

almond eye and silhouette me

in smouldering ochre.

(Two Nudes on a Tahitian Beach, 1894).

I recall the irony of seeing Gauguin's work in Tahiti while protesing French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Faungata'ufa Atolls and suddenly the whole fusion of French colonialism hit me as a procession of colonised voices/images descending from the ripped skies while the airport at Tahiti Fa'a'a was being rioted and burned by Maohi protestors, claiming their mana whenua, their land rights and protecting their kai moana and seas from radiation poisoning.

Gauguin, who is often seen as romanticising Pacific women, is here labelled a ‘rapist’, just as France was drilling shafts half a mile thick for their underground nuclear tests, raping Papatuanuku, the land/the women, with enough explosives for another Hiroshima. After my Tahitian experiences, I wrote Manawa Toa, an eco-novel detailing the indigenous protests against French nuclear testing and in one passage of that book evoked purakau/talkstory about Muriranga-whenua giving her jawbone to Maui so he could fish up the island we now live on, Te Ika a Maui. This extract shows how we honour the wahine/vahine who created us as tangata whenua, yet France could still tunnel shafts into Papatuanuku, our Earth Mother and blast her apart, in language reminiscent of Marsh's rape imagery:

She strolls over the dunes in the haunting moonlight, toward a cave at the mouth of the harbour. From within, voices, waiata. Then silence. She enters the cave, drawn by a power from within. At the far end, a pinpoint of light. She walks toward it. Nearing, she sees a rounded piece of bone, light shining from its centre. It appears suspended in mid air. She moves closer. The bone hovers at eye level. She reaches out her hand. The bone is placed in her palm. It is in the shape of a fish hook. Light shines through the ribs of the old kuia. A piece of one rib is missing. Cowrie looks down. Her own hei matau lies safe on her breast bone, next to the carved turtle. She clutches it in comfort. A warm glow emanates from the bone, heating her hand. She lies awake, the moon slanting down through the nikau trunks, lying across her body like bars. Then she remembers Moruroa. Invasion. Rape. They tunnel shafts deep into Papatuanuku, put nuclear explosives capable of another Hiroshima into them, blast apart the atoll, and say that the tests are totally safe. She moans, turns over, but cannot sleep. She tries to imagine sailing a waka into the test zone, women from all the islands on board. Gradually, her body begins to relax and she falls into a deep sleep. (32)

Throughout her collection, Selina Tusitala Marsh comments on variations of this essential theme of ‘rape’ that underlines the essence of all colonisation, whether this be the rape of te whenua, the land, or wanine/vahine, the women, or the rape of images, ideas, imagination. She peppers her poetic narrative with the rhythms and staccato of urban hiphop beats, in tune with slick contemporary themes and voices, showing her and their disregard for the romanticisation of the past and for the politics of the present.

Marsh often questions the inherited power of the patriarchal poets and writers, as in ‘Things on Thursday’ which opens:

If Updike could do it

why couldn't she?

She astutely comments on the ‘forest of books’ that were ‘lining his house’, insinuating that for indigenous forests to be slaughtered for the sake of his hallowed words might indeed be a political act, and one that could well be challenged. Then she begins to list all the tasks of a woman writer who has to do so much else than be a writer - manage an entire household of kids and work and also get to her desk ... she ends by saying ‘yeah right’; echoing the impossibility of ‘yeah, write’, which is always so much harder for the woman who has to mother, be a wife, a breadwinner and handle a thousand other tasks beyond just sitting down at the desk.

Then there's the humorous ‘Hone Said’, which refers to words of the late and great Maori poet, Hone Tuwhare, who was reputed to have talked about the only land that he is being the land he stands on ... which is then transmuted and changed via many other voices ... ending up with one who felt that another kiwi (European) poet, Ron Mason had said these lines first. I am tempted to add, as Marsh says in her Tuwhare poem, ‘Yeah, right’, as we see again the assumption, consumption and colonisation of an Indigenous poet, Hone Tuwhare, by his pakeha colonisers.

Marsh's tribute to the ‘Calabash Breakers’ is an energetic poem celebrating literary subversion. Long may this last as she asserts the vital importance of these voices in determining what really is a true voice of Aotearoa/the Pacific, te whenua.

‘Googling Tusitala’ brings up a fascinating range of cross-cultural, cross-referential instances, showing the vast responses to any subject as well as the maze of wandering topics that can confuse the unwary internet explorer.  After reading this, I did a google search for‘Cathie  Dunsford’, and found over 10,000 entries, listing overseas bookfairs, performances and book sales, ranging all over the world from Turkey to Africa to Europe, USA, Canada, the Pacific, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand - many countries and continents which I and my various translators have traversed and performed within for my international publishers.

However, it still raised fascinating new areas of Google-land. The one continent I had never traversed was Africa and yet it seemed there were many African readers of my work ... no doubt due to Amazon.com and the reality of International One-Breasted Warriors of Books! Try this yourself and be amazed at the results. Marsh, yet again, delivers us a modern talkstory of the net, with her hip beat and mo'olelo chant.

Marsh's poem ‘Afakasi’ evokes her work for the Niu Voices collection published by Huia Press. I wrote of that collection in the University of South Pacific's Literary Magazine, Dreadlocks:

Editor, Selina Tusitala Marsh, comments in her afterward on the differences between the first Niu Waves collection based in Fiji and Niu Voices, where the Pacific voices are located/dislocated on these islands of Aotearoa. The feeling of being ripped out of warm islands and being thrown onto wind ravaged shores like those of Poneke, Wellington, are reflected many times in this volume. This becomes a metaphor for the difficulties in negotiating the spaces between those Pacific and Aotearoan waves, some carrying the writer forward, some hurling him/her up on this strange shore. There are even some faint echoes here of Allen Curnow’s poetry where the child lands upside down on these shores and has to negotiate from a strange and foreign place. That could be explored further.

But this volume immediately stands out from other literary voices. Despite the struggles in negotiating a waka through unknown seas, these navigators, unlike their ancestors, do not always have the inner knowledge of the stars, the seascape, the landscape and they have to make new maps for the mind and the senses. They are negotiating multiple identities. This is where the collection becomes fascinating and the writing truly evocative.

This is relevant here for she is traversing past voices and also charting new territory in this current collection, Fast Talking PI. Yet some of the themes are rooted in her earlier work, including Afakasi:

Selina Tusitala Marsh sets the challenge in the opening of her terrific story Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee: ‘That was it in a coconut shell. But how to flesh it out? To scrape out the meat? To flake out the metaphor, imagery, symbolism and a message?

Niu Voices has grounded the waka in Aotearoa. The journeys from here, navigating new identities in these islands and between all our islands, looks to be as fantastic and memorable as all the navigations, past and present, where our words speak to each other about our differences and our similarities, our dreams and our aspirations, our continual rebellions against the forces of colonisation in all their myriad forms.

It is fascinating to draw on both Niu Voices and Fast Talking PI to see the links between the individual voice of poet Selina Tusitala Marsh and the connexion to the Indigenous Pacific poets in Niu Voices, to affirm that the themes of challenge and subversion of the colonial, patriarchal, literary imperative are vital for new Pacifc voices to emerge, fresh and unsuppressed, from the iconic coconut shards of the past.

Only then, as in Marsh's poem, ‘Spare the Rod’, may we see the ‘semi-buried petroglyph’ (or ki'i pohaku) of the new child's body fly into the skies ‘sentenced to freedom’ and ‘trialled by sun and wind’ so that a new reality of Pacific existence, embracing the old island lives and the new urban beats, may be released into freedom so that all can live embraced by the past but nurtured by future imagination.

Indeed, as Pacific writer Sia Figiel says, Marsh is  ‘a poet with a deep dedication  to the recognition of Pacific voices that have been historically silenced as well as giving breath to the urban realities of the Pacific diaspora.’

Renowned and much loved Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera, best sums this up as ‘her aesthetics and indigenous politics are meld-marvellous and her ideas will blow you away.’

Pacific poet Karlo Mila talks of her vital ‘language genealogies’ where ‘under her pen, the precision and principles of Western English literary tradition sway rhythmically with the fluid and flowing oratory of Polyneisa.’

I would go even further to say they consciously and subversively undermine the flow of the Western academic tradition and reclaim indigenous voices of the Pacific in an era where this is essential to our future survival as Pacific Peoples, as tangata whenua (people of the land) and as vital voices of our combined future survival in Aotearoa and throughout the Pacific. Tau ke, awesome,  Selina Tusitala Marsh.

Cathie Koa Dunsford (Nga Puhi Maori/Hawai'ian & Pakeha ancestry) is author of 22 books in print and translation in USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Turkey, including the Cowrie eco-novel series featuring strong indigenous wahine toa from the Pacific region www.spinifexpress.com.au. She is director of Dunsford Publishing Consultants, which has brought 192 new and award winning Pacific authors into print internationally: www.dunsfordpublishing.com. Recipient of two literary grants from Creative New Zealand Arts Council, she was International Woman of the Year in Publishing in 1997. She has taught writing and publishing at Auckland University since 1975.  She tours the world performing from the books with traditional Maori waiata and taonga puoro. Contact: dunsford.publishing@xtra.co.nz