You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.
- Clarice Lispector
Right in the middle of the month of July I made an evening trip home to the island after meeting a newborn baby in the city. The meeting was a life-receiving experience. Earlier that day I had held the baby’s woollen body in my woollen arms and marvelled at the mighty friend that birthed her. Time, too, to marvel at the sensitive people that supported the pair’s passage out of pregnancy and into babyhood and motherhood. The wind whipped about the palm trees outside the bedroom window and it seemed a perfect winter position for a postpartum season. No pressure to be outside, just a cosy room at tree level, in a city on an isthmus between two seas. On the evening sailing home I sat on the upper deck, flecked with sea spray as the ferry found its way through the waves. I would have weathered anything to be out there nursing the glow of that new woollen life. The storm sent us not through the usual straight, but around the back of Te Motu-a-Ihenga and then a hugging chug along the coast of Waiheke, for shelter. As we met the mouth of Matiatia Harbour the sky turned from sunset grey to sundown purple, and the headlands gave up their dimensions to become black paper silhouettes.
One hundred and fifty years before my ferry ride a ship brought a pox into this same Pacific port, and Te Motu-a-Ihenga (Motuihe Island) was chosen as the site for a human quarantine station. It was 1872 when the Steamship Nebraska carried smallpox to the city of Auckland, resulting in seven cases and three deaths. In swift response the Auckland Health Board purchased the island from a settler ‘owner’ and set to work constructing a quarantine facility.* The facility was fashioned from timber salvaged from the demolition of the Albert Barracks (now the site of the University of Auckland). The Barracks had been used to train and house British soldiers for the settler-colonial New Zealand government, and were the headquarters from which their genocidal war against ‘rebellious’ sovereign Indigenous tribes was launched in 1863.** The island quarantine facility was used again when the 1918 influenza pandemic reached the shores of New Zealand. Between April 2020 and March 2022 it was not islands but repurposed commercial hotels that were used as quarantine facilities for the control of SARS-CoV-2. I spent 14 days in one of these facilities in September 2021, as part of a preventative measure to manage the threat of overseas arrivals. I returned three negative PCR test results and was released to rebuild something of a life here.
I currently live in a little house on the littlest isthmus on the island of Waiheke, between two small coasts. Five minutes to the north is white sand swell and five minutes to the south is pebble mud shell. From the north beach you see the Coromandel peninsula and from the south side you see the eastern beaches of Auckland - that bigger place that lies on the littlest isthmus on the larger island of Te Ika-a-Māui, the fish of Māui. Auckland is not only the colonial city of Auckland but something else, Tāmaki Makaurau, the land of a thousand lovers. And the Coromandel peninsula is not really the Coromandel peninsula, but Te Tara-o-te-Ika-a-Māui, the spine of the fish of Māui. Or maybe the land is none of these things and it is just itself, without human names, but the part of cosmology that makes humanity possible. All I know is that right now I feel in my bones that I am not meant to be here.
I love the headland silhouettes with all grateful daily supplication. I love the ferry and the two seas, two coasts, two names. I love my mum and I love my given and chosen families and friends and I love that woollen lamb, born mid-July and already apple of my eye. And I don’t feel right here. I don’t feel right here, and I don’t feel right here, and I might not even be fully feeling right here. The place I feel most like me and most right and most free is back in Scotland, back on the raspberry roads and hairdresser high streets. I miss it and I know that I will be forever split. If I go home to Scotland I will miss the home of my mother - not only my mother’s home and its headlands, but my mother as my home. I miss Scotland but I am trying to be here. Right now I am reading This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir, by Alison Jones. From the same great local publisher - Bridget Williams Books - I am re-reading the short anthology Imagining Decolonisation. In one entry Rebecca Kiddle (Ngāti Porou, Ngāpuhi) generously and necessarily points out that colonisation is bad for everyone. Settlers are those that materially profit most from colonisation, and cause the most material and social harm to others, and they live with the intergenerational trauma of severed ancestral, linguistic and cultural links to abandoned homelands in Europe.
One day this month I was walking home from the village library when I saw a Pākehā couple sitting at the bus stop. It was a man and a woman and they were both staring into space with completely unfocused pupils; each with one of those 150g bags of Bluebird potato chips sitting in their laps. Their detached gazes were paired with a repeated mechanical movement of hand to bag to mouth and I wondered what was going on for them in their lives. It wasn’t a judgement but an affinity. Who among us has not dissociatedly eaten potato chips during a deep funk? This month I have been deeply depressed. I have also felt my fierce desire to be alive, to love new life, to pay attention to our earthly home and to be at home here, while there is still time. Land is foundational to mental health. Land has many names or is no name but itself. I have only a shallow history in this land, but I am alive to the longer histories. As Rebecca Hawkes says in her new poetry collection Meat Lovers, “you are adopting an attitude of manic gratitude, walking barefoot to the swamp to flaunt your scraps.”
Until next month,
H x
share / heart / subscribe - it all helps
*Read more on the colonial smallpox response via 'Chastising Its People With Scorpions' Maori and the 1913 Smallpox Epidemic, Alison Day (New Zealand Journal of History)
**Read more about the legacies and layers of the Army Barracks site in my article ‘Poetry Reading in Colonial War HQ’ (Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics)