With swaggers and shed skins, Ranapiri weaves together a chimeric whakapapa of queer, Māori and Pacific writing. This playful, sensual collection invokes the urgency of solidarity under ‘a sky / where you don’t know if what you’re looking at / is stars or satellites’, cars have become the land’s dominant species, and Hinemoana buys an air fryer before going ‘fishing / for more bourgeoisie’.
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Auckland University Press continues the year of excellence for queer poetry with the newly-minted Poet Laureate Chris Tse’s Super Model Minority, a pride flag with skull and crossbones stitched on it in sequins. The collection frequently solicits apocalypse – see poems titled ‘Karaoke ’… or ‘Spoiler alert’ … or ‘Performance Art’ … as incantations … for the end of the world. But it nonetheless speeds toward the possibilities of a blazing horizon, be those distant lights in the shepherd’s-blood dusk the flickering hellfire or aurora.
Tse opens with the prelude ‘Utopia? BIG MOOD!’:
I will use my tongue for good. I say I will because this book needs me to start with the future even though the future has always scared me
Evolving earlier works reckoning with racist violence and homophobia, Super Model Minority looks to the radical potentials of anger and hard-earned joy in a doom-scroller’s world. Bold and defiant, Tse is tired of the bullshit, not to mention being positioned on poetry panels as an expert spokesperson on solutions to racism (‘I can’t predict the death of something / with a robust business continuity plan that involves moving from / host body to host body. I am not an exorcist – I am a sympathetic / vomiter.’) This book also seizes moments of solace – birthdays beneath Icelandic waterfalls, side-splitting hijinks in a family game of Cards Against Humanity, or a fantasy dreamscape in Sam Duckor-Jones sculptures …
they’ll find us in a room stacked with fluorescent vases they’ll find us swilling dry martinis & laughing about how we used to see dust instead of glitter oh, happy celestial bodies oh, dreamsome days of ohs and exes kiss kiss, boys kiss kiss
Technicolour lines sear like comets across my gay little heart – ‘I’ve spent my life ascribing too many meanings to every bloom and blush. / Sometimes I thought I’d die under the weight of a rainbow.’ In Tse’s futures we may end up in flames or inflamed, drenched either way in sweat and non-biodegradable glitter, where acceleration towards uncertain utopia is driven by fury, by grief, spilling over the restrictive acceptabilities of the ‘model minority’. It’s giving Chris Tse as a glam-pop Mad Max, tearing up that Fury Road to a Bjork x Taylor Swift remix in an oil tanker repurposed to carry a giant mirror ball that fractures the gathering storm clouds into rainbows.
Even as Super Model Minority sets its sights to the future, these poems have no intent of neglecting the past. Several poems draw on the ways that demands to forgive and forget oppressive aggression only serve to dredge it up again anew. Forgetfulness and erasure are key tools in hegemonies that constantly assert the innocence of the dominant, whether here in Aotearoa or the conflict in Hong Kong. So too is control of the narrative through language, on which Tse writes in ‘Bilingual’ (about speaking Cantonese):
The radical began with radicalis, radix –
the roots, the basics. That our modern
uprisings are rooted in supposedly
dead languages cannot be ignored by
lawmakers with gangs on speed dial or
government officials who refuse to listen.
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Sovereignty over language and a refusal of narratives of colonial innocence are critical concerns for new books from Taraheke / Bush Lawyer – ‘a collective of indigenous women writers and allies from Aotearoa and so-called Australia’. Committed to #landbackthroughliterature and story sovereignty, this project is founded by Anahera Maire Gildea, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Cassandra Barnett, Michaela Keeble and Nadine Anne Hura, taking in their hands every aspect of the publication process. In 2022, Taraheke simultaneously published a pair of poetry collections – Ngāti Tukorehe poet Anahera Gildea’s Sedition and Michaela Keeble’s Surrender. Just as the collective seeks an alternative to conventional literary hierarchies and institutions, both books are necessary interventions that lay down challenges to the status quo.
Gildea’s Sedition flows hot as lava and bites sharp as obsidian. Generational fight and deep grief are honed into brilliant igneous poems. In the story that opens and closes Sedition, Mahuika’s wildest daughter Hinewaiapu becomes a glow inside of a volcano – her fiery tongue and burning love incandescent, the undeniable fire that drives her inevitable. As Hinewaiapu is a force of nature, so is the irrepressible life force that animates Gildea’s poems. Even through slowing fluxes of tragedy that threatens to drown, a determined radiance flares through Gildea’s words. Whether addressing stolen land and language, commodified culture, the loss of one son and love of another, or the exploitation of Papatuanuku’s earthly body, Gildea’s poems are vital interventions striving for justice – ‘if I was punctured / bored into / penetrated or explored […] would my temperature not rise?’
Sedition’s title poem is a kōrero with suffrage activist Meri Te Tai Mangakahia:
… I s’pose neither of us planned to be in politics, never did do what others told us to — wahanui though, go on, get your sedition on girl, your agitator, your defiant speak to each other eye to eye — Māori been jailed for nouns, phrases; butcher up a clause, get buried in Pākehā kupu, then dig that out like the old people. No one approved of their language either.
Who is empowered to approve language, and who is punished and lauded for speaking, are key concerns as these poems traverse The Queen’s English and Te Reo Māori. Some of Gildea’s most striking poems question conventions of liberal back-patting, linguistic appropriations, and non-natives’ hot-air conversations on ‘how committed they are to decol / to this journey, important journey, correct journey. / Engari, me whakarongo ki ngā tupuna / e kōrero tonu ana ku ngā manu katoa – / this is not a voyage, whānau. We’re here.’ The declaration of the ‘voyage’ is a lip service which, even if heartfelt, only offsets restorative action – and denies restoration to those struggling in the wake of Cook’s Endeavour.
