Mauatua Fa’ara-REynolds
Are you there? Of course you are.
Fermented kapa
I spent hours chasing fermented wauke bubbles with an e’e of shame under the O’ahu sun. My bones were tired, frustrated I couldn’t just pop them. It’s a crime against ancestors for young ones to get tired and give up. But I did it anyway, my face red hot. I show Auntie A’ia’i the carcass of my kapa, looking sore and sad. ‘I’m sorry, Auntie, I just couldn’t do it’, expecting Kamehameha’s ghost to come alive. Instead, ‘That’s okay, my dear. Grab yourself a glass of water and sit in the shade.’ I shuffled back to the shadowed porch in my neon-green flip-flops. The other women were still out the front, scraping bark with shells, slicing the shoots with shark teeth. It was like a proverb come to life. But I was watching it on a flat-screen TV.
The circle
Auntie A’ia’i invited her fellow healers and regulars for a Wāhine Gathering. Under the corrugated iron of the carport, we formed a circle of white plastic chairs. The women went round and round and round, sharing stories of the old days and the old ways. Two Navajo sisters talked about their mother who’d recently transitioned from kanaka to kupuna, ‘We feel her every day.’ Mum spoke of our tupuna vāhine, that they send her moonlit pathways. I gulped when it got to me, feeling like an overheated MacBook, insides spinning round and round and round trying to stay cool. I chose the horror of honesty – aired out my namesake’s silence and cosmic absence and maybe I don’t know how to look and maybe I’m not good enough? Then something bit my heel and I screamed all-mighty thunder. Wriggling away on the concrete was a short black centipede. Auntie said, ‘There she is. You’re good, girl.’
Firm-breasted young raiatean girls
were once gummy smiles
dancing on shorelines
when white fingers came crawling
pointing in the wrong direction
down throats
up skirts
then the guns and knives
and paints and brushes
the artist captures those already captured
dismembers bark-skinned bodies
reassembles them stretched white
on canvas
the south sea maiden immortalised
the young girl dead
✹
My first love. We were head over heels for each other.
It was the beginning of summer, and I’d come down with an awful cold. He stayed by my side the entire time, cooked me soup, collected all my snotty tissues, listened to me groan about my headaches, and watched stupid rom-coms with me. After a week, I finally felt well enough to go outside. Sunlight would do me good, and we hadn’t gone on a date in a while. We walked along the waterfront, and he took photos of me looking at birds I didn’t know the names of on his disposable camera. One of those ones with black-and-white film.
We reached Te Papa, and I realised in the couple months we’d been dating, he still hadn’t met any of my family. So I led him upstairs to the art gallery, and walked over to the big portrait, left of the centre.
‘This is my ancestor, Poeatua. She was a princess, held hostage by Cook. This painting was done while she was on the ship, probably fucking terrified. It was the first portrait of a Pasifika woman to circulate Europe, and kinda started the whole Dusky Maiden trope.’
This was a big moment for me; he was meeting my grandmother’s grave.
He leaned back in his slightly oversized Lacostes, really took in the painting, and said,
‘You know, your tits kinda look the same.’
I was 19.
So was she.
Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds (she/they) is a Mā’ohi-Norf’k poet and tapa-maker studying at Te Herenga Waka. Her work is fuelled by mana vāhine and trans-indigenous networks of solidarity, and can be found in Salient, bad apple, and Toi Pōneke.
Mauatua writes: ‘The title ‘firm-breasted young raiatean girls’ is a quote from James Cook’s diary.’