Born in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 1975, with primary affiliations to Te Āti Awa, Alice grew up in the Auckland suburb of Glen Innes. After studying at the University of Auckland (MA) and Cornell University (PhD), she returned home to Wellington and lives again on her iwi homelands which are now known as Lower Hutt. She is proud that this makes her Urban Māori both ways. She is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, where she teaches in English and Maori studies and researches in the fields of Maori, Pacific and indigenous literary studies. She writes the occasional poem and agrees with Thomas King that ‘the truth about stories is that’s all we are’.
Hours and hours in the back seats of family cars,
long trips and waking up:
snuggled in giant jumpers and sleeping bags,
wrapped in night and stars and sleepy breath.
Dreams and conversations mix, then fade,
and Dad’s listening to the radio news:
he’s softly clicking and flicking a switch,
a lullaby for young late-night travellers.
Years later when I learned to drive
I was surprised to rediscover the sound
which I’d grown to link with Dad
and sleeping bags and warmth.
An adult now, I drive through the dark,
long long trips wrapped in stars and night:
I think of Dad and his hours of gentle courtesy,
lights dipping and bobbing for passers-by.
you told us about
old people surrounded by death
two hundred years ago
who designed cradleboards
for babies of not-yet-born generations
displayed in museums now
old cradleboards are carefully pinned by amnesia
to the backing paper of timelessness:
the reverse side of treaties and legislation
smaller more portable displays
on postcards and other consumables
for sale at gallery bookshops
what makes death-soaked people quietly embellish a cradle for an unknown baby?
your carefully tended cradleboards:
balanced and decorated
ready to secure the droopy vulnerable limbs and heads
hunched over a typewriter
you smoothed and reinforced the supple cords
dreamed they would one day knot
around infant shapes of unborn unknown genealogies
what made you gently close the door and lovingly coax a ream of paper to life?
someone else talked about another kind of infant bed
a woven beaded basket
and a baby who slept in her basket until
she was old enough to wake, roll over,
and walk around with it still tied to her back
so her father laughed,
like a small turtle
this week you spoke in ways that shut down space
instead of opening it up
gave people what they wanted to hear
a compromised performance in a soulless place
limbs that had been gently cupped and held
resisted this shifting to another kind of pressure
a diminished constricting: an unwelcome swaddling
you seem to have become
a short-sighted visionary
you weren’t supposed to have feet of clay
a large flat stone is set
in the floor of a longhouse
on a campus
on a turtle
for those who need their feet on the ground to speak
this voice shouldn’t accuse you
but on the stone on the ground on the turtle
it finds a place to stand:
wearing the basket you yourself wove
a turtle on a turtle
an unknown infant of unexpected genealogy
why is it easier for you to lament the forgetting
of cradleboard design
than to recognise your own written cradles
and the revolutionary hope that compelled the act of their creation?