My nana is old school.

She keeps her archives in a faded red Arnott’s biscuit tin

once bright with a macaw parrot,

now worn to a dull blush.

It sits at the back of her wardrobe,

wedged between mountains of clothes,

bags folded inside other bags.

Inside, a Western Union receipt of

$100 Pa’anga to Nukuʻalofa,

loose buttons and thread,

Easter Apitanga program from 2000,

a photograph curled at the edges:

My papa in a tupenu and ta’ovala,

barefoot near the Fortress of Hule.
But my nana has never fit inside a box.

She tells me memories must be aired out,

or they rot into forgetting

like coconut cream left too long in the sun,

separating, turning.

Haʻu, talanoa. Come talk.

We sit on the front lawn

of our caramel brick house on Flushcombe Road,

in the centre of Blacktown City,

where the grass grows uneven in stubborn patches.

We talk in tangled tongues

lau ho lesoni.

Ko hoku tauhi ʻa Sihova, he ʻikai te u masiva.

Then slipping into English, our sentences bending,

doubling back on themselves, words we don’t know replaced

with laughter, with looks, with hands.
My archive sits in her body.

In the pale white scars mapping her hands

knife slips from gutting fish

on Saturday evenings

in preparation for Sunday feasts.

In the salt of her laughter

splitting the air open when she calls my name

Ilafehi Ahosivi!

named after my papa’s sister, so our names live on

in our children,

and theirs

we become legacies of our families.

In the angle of her wrist

when she teaches me tauʻolunga

taulalo, teki,

keep your feet together.

This dance,

she tells me,

is heliaki—metaphor.

Of Nukunuku.

Of where we come from, even when we are no longer there.

In the folds of her ta’ovala, woven from fau hibiscus fibre

And in the ngatu Nana collects,

stacked beneath mattresses

breathing bark, smoke, rain,

and the steady rhythm

of mum and aunty Losa’s hands

beating time into cloth:

tap tap tap.

My nana is old school.

She is the archive.