Selina Tusitala Marsh

Afakasi Pours herself Afa Cuppa Coffee

That was it in a coconut shell. But how to flesh it out? To scrape out the meat? To flake out metaphor, imagery, symbolism and a message? She remembers when the youngest uncle with the dead eyes would sit on the DB crate with an arc of canned metal teeth tied at the end. A delicate skull of coconut palmed and halved by an efficient swipe of the machete. Dig dig scrape dig dig scrape. Afa and her sister would stare at the growing pile of dandruff at his feet. Falling on his cracked toes. Ugly toes. Dead eyes. All the kids stayed away from him.

Afa’s thoughts cowered under the shadow of her pen about to trek the unexplored terrain of her paper. Its whiteness mocked her. But hasn’t that always been the case? The brown edges of her newly inked words mocked her. Hasn’t that always been the case? She liked the sound of that first line. She liked its wit, the charm of its rhythm. But nothing would come after that. She was stalled by the intangible voices all vying for attention. Used to being dismissed, they refused to sound above a whisper.

She found herself at the front of a crowded hall, leaning over a tapa-covered podium noosed by happy-coloured lei. She was to give the keynote speech to six hundred freshly capped students. All of Pacific descent. She was here because of her brownness. Specifically, the rarity of her brownness in the upper echelons of the science world. She was the first brown chromosomologist, a specialist in renegade DNA, focusing on the hybrid genome’s rejection of the purity of the helix structure. She had discovered it on Lapanaka, a little-known archipelago just a nautical left of Tuvalu and still under the paternal protectorate of New Zealand. She was here to speak as a first, as a brown.

She could feel the ribbon-threaded black betel-nut lei pulsating against her chest. Each nut with its hand-painted blood-red mini hibiscus quivering above the tell-tale signs of a treacherous heart. This was not acceptable. She was a professional. Hasn’t she made it this far? Hadn’t she spoken in front of international audiences in Bordeaux, Kuala Lumpur and San Francisco? Her words were caught in the phlegm of her throat. Did that make them phlegmatic? Still a sense of humour under pressure. Afa marvelled at her outward composure and that geeky side of herself that was trying to save her right this minute.

She had prepared an excerpt from a well-known oratorical speech. Honorific and respectful. Geared to gain the aahs and oohs from older brownies flooding the hall. She’d do her mother proud. But then she faltered. Frozen in the deep of their faces, their expectations, her projection of their expectations on how one does brown publicly. Would her second-hand knowledge slap her in the face? Would she lose face? Would they see through her earnest machinations of endeavouring to carry off a seamless cultural performance? She swallowed her borrowed words and cleared her throat. She spoke. In the only tongue she’d ever known. Talofa lava and hello. Welcome honoured guests. Congratulations to the graduating students of …

This, of course, was too awkward to be inked.

Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee

contemplates her full day

Yes. Maybe a poem. Maybe a space-filled, fragmented but titillating poem. No need to be anchored by times, dates, places. Anchors dig. Then wound. Then bleed. Then fester. Nuances. And the creation of. Hinted moments. And suggestions of. Glimpses of colour. And the mixing of on a poetic palette. Less demanding. Less of a mirror held up to one’s own face. More complete in its incompleteness. More realised in the va, the spaces in between. Intake of breath. Pauses of memory. Teasing with tiny gasps of comprehension. An afakasi ambiance.

Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee

contemplates her full day

The media decided it was a front-pager. The first brownie girlie with a rare qualification. 1ZB named her Viva Diva for a day. On graduation day she wore someone else’s sky-blue pants, bagging at its strung waist. Its unfortunate faded partner, a pillowcase masquerading as a top, completed the tent ensemble. She wandered along shiny hospital corridors in her mother’s old kiss-me-don’t-miss-me fluffy slippers. She should have been in black. Batman black as her son once described it. A red-and-yellow-trimmed black satin cape. A soft hat sitting smug as a fat black cat on her head. He’d be eight years old, that cat in the hat. But a mother’s heroic deeds are mostly done on the side of a rugby field, icing yet another bloody knee. After wiping a bench clean from strategically grated veggies hidden in a shepherd’s pie. During the turn of a well-fingered page, cushioned by softly breathing pyjama-clad bodies. And here. At a hospital bedside of a bone-tumoured child and another precautionary CAT scan. She caught the end of her delayed-broadcast interview at the nurse’s station and kept the source of her wry smile to herself.

And how her body

Will be read

Every

Which

Way

Every public appearance is a negotiation between earrings. Afa had earrings for Africa. And from Africa too. Stripy zebra ones (so eighties now). Maui shmaui. She’s hooked up the whole of Oceania, netted on soft fala hanging on her wall. Coconut shells from Aitutaki. Some wrapped with tapa. Some not. Melted down vinyl triangles from Apia. Some inlaid with pāua. Some not. Pandanus woven stars from Tongatapu. Some dyed. Some not. Woven wired spirals from the $2 Shop. Some pierced with shell. Some not. Polished shell discs from Ōtara. Some carved. Some not. Ethnicity on a hook. Pick an Oceanic village and be charmed by their sway on the lobe of a lady whose brownness will stump most guesses. Today, she wears simple gold hoops. The mother-of-pearl brooch encircled by green-blue cat’s eyes will suffice.

but

loose

(so her mother prays)

It’s she who lies at the crux of it. Tina. Like no one else’s mother. A face lined with regret and the bitterness of it all. A faife‘au’s daughter. A black sheep in Samoa. A working teen who would hide her rum in a hollowed-out coconut shell and give it to her father to put in the village’s solitary fridge. No one would touch the coconut of the faife‘au. Ran away from an Island fool spouting words like alofa and tamaiti. Right into the arms of a mercantile Scotsman. Who was convenient. Who was self-made. Who held a New Zealand passport. Who was twenty-five years her senior. She ran. Right into Bigger Dreams land. They became a KiwiBaconEgg family. As long as mother and children did not compete with the vodka and Coke partnership of the father. Which they didn’t. He was an absent presence anyway. And she. No church for this reformist. Born again in the house of the un-churched. No falesa, loto, aufaipese, gagana, White Sundays for this one. Except when she lay white tablecloths across the factory floor for the kids’ feed at the boozy Christmas parties out at Māngere. She remembers green serviettes on red paper plates smiling back mistletoe and bells, ringing out Happy New Year 1974 in Bigger Dreams land.

(Her mother prays.)

Family meetings were tired orange lounges yawning with brown bodies and coconut oil. Lavalava and bibles and mother being massaged with green and yellow leaves. Fingers of steaming herbs circling towards the ceiling. A gout-ridden man with his swollen purpling foot, skin stretched transparent. An old lady with a lump dangling heavy from the side of her face. Waiting for healing. Kids shushed into bare back rooms. Ripped wallpaper revealing accidental friezes of dancing figures demanding the children guess the nature of their silhouetted souls. In the boredom. Of waiting. Tongues poked and fingers pinched at the otherness of Afa and her sister. Holding pee. The damp stink of the bathroom a deterrent to relief. They escaped outside. Picking up sticks, the girls would dig mud pies. Or dare to explore the vacant lot and the beached rusted Triumph with stubborn doors. Bejewelled with webbing in the aftermath of rain. The neighbours had chickens and pigs. They’d hear them through the hedge. Lynn Mall was across the road. And getting bigger. It would swallow up these Victoria Street state houses sooner than anyone expected. The girls went back inside to see if mother was healed yet. Hoping for a slice of bread, pankeke if they were really lucky.

Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee

contemplates her full day

and how her body will be read

every

which

way

but

loose

(so her mother prays).