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language: English
country: Kiribati
year: 1995
form: poetry
dates read: 2.8.23-3.8.23
I’m counting Teresia Teaiwa’s collection Searching for Nei Nimʻanoa towards Kiribati, but really it’s a testament to the interconnectedness of Oceania and of Pacific Islander communities — and, indeed, communities further afield: Teaiwa is both I-Kiribati and Black, grew up in Fiji, went to university in Washington, D.C., Hawaiʻi, and California, and a few years after the publication of this collection in 1995, she moved to Aotearoa.
it’s a deeply personal collection, ranging from poems like “Recognition” (“i recognized u / instantly // i know u / from the past // we have been friends / 4 ever”) that I think would do great on Instagram to reflections on diaspora like “No One is an Island—for Georgi” to poems about alienation from academia, the Black community (“i’d like to // beat you over the head // with // my blackness // but i can’t / because // i’m not ‘black enuf’”), and her “home” communities in Kiribati:
(A lot of Banabans and Gilbertese people
don’t bother talking to me
because they think I can’t understand the language.
A lot of times after I hear them saying things
about me, I compose elaborate responses in my mind.
But I refrain from saying anything because I’ve probably got it wrong.)
(from “Refrain”)
many of the poems deal with troubled and abusive relationships, although there are also several poems celebrating men who have been good to her (most obviously “To men who have been my brothers and friends”).
the most affecting pieces, for me, were the several longer prose poems, including “Misplaced Native” and also “Unwed Mother” — which I’m too lazy to transcribe, but which is a series of small reflections on her experience with pregnancy and giving birth as a single mother in her mid-20s, tracing lines of family dismay (“How could you let this happen, Terry? Your father was so proud of you.”), unexpected support from family and friends, and her own complex emotions about her pregnancy and her child —
and “Nei Nana”, which is likewise a bit long to transcribe, about her grandmother’s death, the prospect of “returning home”, and family microhistories.
the collection is not-quite-bracketed by the long poem “For Salome, because your name means ‘Peace’” in the first section, which is grappling with traditional conceptions of gender, the relationship of feminism, and the relationship between “woman” and “land”, circling around the dichotomy between woman/land and man/sea (“Some, in other parts of the Pacific, say / that women belong to the land while / men belong to the sea”) —
and the final lines of “Nei Nana”:
I showed [my grandmother’s] nieces and nephews in Tungaru a photograph of her taken that year she was supposed to come and visit them and her brother, the year she died. They stared at the photograph in silence. Te Karimoa finally spoke, “She looks exactly like her brother—my father.” May they both rest in peace. At least they are reunited in the next world. Brother and sister.
The man stayed on the land. Te mmane ae bon tiku iaon te aba.
And the woman voyaged. Ao te aine ae bon mamananga.
I didn’t love every single poem, but there are some absolutely incredible pieces in here.
moods: emotional, hopeful, reflective