Given
Lately, our girl has been remembering the caves. One day, you’ll know her through this remembering, if you don’t already. Beige, dry, chalky, crumbly caves – to the touch of her mind’s eye, anyway. How faithfully they have held on to their red marks of kōkōwai, our stars and waka, through the centuries, while making this show of crumbling.
She’s been remembering the tunnels as well. They are dark and wet, such that the nose awakens. Dank, she whispers, feeling the mineral qualities of that cool heavy gloom abrade her nasal passages. A raw, interior touching – bringing her differently to seeing. The wet dark is also audible. It sounds rare geometries, nameless textures first, then makes way for the looming of more known rhythms: scurry and slither, scuttle and flap. Some like it dark. Some like it so dark they need no ears. Look out for tokoriro! Taking your kōrero in through his feet. Look out for Māui’s fantail!
As for you, moko – you still are the earless dark, curled up inside her.
She remembers these earth-threading tunnels in her nose and ears. The twinkling pūrātoke glow-worms come as an afterthought. She remembers them when the stories of trolls and a Troll Cave are batted about lifelessly at work. She remembers them through other chuckling stories in half-caught reo. She remembers them in her feet and knees and hands that have traversed the tunnels off and on through many ages. A tunnel is a long cave, ana roa.
Like many of our uri now, she was born far from the caves and the tunnels, far from our whare tūpuna. You, moko, will land a little nearer. Remember: the borders of your home are hollows. But you come with other homes too.
Taken
This happened before you, just. It was two, maybe three, weeks in. Long enough for our girl to have surrendered to the wrapping, cloaking, blinging of her body in the fabrics of the place. The fabrics rose up – on wide peopled beaches, in corrugated shacks, in bony hands or spread out on rocks the better to bleach out their stains. Even there, in the heat shimmer of intoxicating colour and the staccato jump step of their patterns, they rose – insisting on exchange. To a constant beat, the fabrics shook themselves out, whip cracking, then folded themselves around and in, finding the pockets between breaths and sighs in which to tuck their edges, in which to hold her limbs, her hips, her chest, her shoulders. With the certainty of that salt-blue Atlantic, they rose, encompassing. The fabric of the place, a dazzle, all colour, all pattern.
Not those woven kente cloths nor the cartoon-happy wax prints, which even our spirit cousins wave about from time to time. No. In that land of loud sabar and sacred white robes, Baye Fall and Mouride, Gorée Island and Ngor cave, things were stitched. Patch by patch, the colours aggregated as little squares or stripes or diamonds on trousers, tunics and robes. And when not stitched, they were most gloriously tie-dyed: prism colours radiating but softly, softly.
To these, our girl surrendered – the dye swirls and the stitch shapes with all their brazen pinks. And when, three weeks in, they had reached all the way to her head, wrapping her crown and her mana too in the sunlit-blinding cornucopia of the small, neat work of their hands, she said yes.
Yes, I will pay your marabou. Yes, I approve in my name a goat sacrifice (to be fed to the village kids, they said). Yes, I will, at the allotted time, observe a silence and wash myself with this small bag of grit you have given me. Yes, I confess my heart-most longing to you, a stranger, and entreat all your spirits to smile upon me a child.
But, like all her predecessors, she stuttered it. Explained herself this way and that, in the Wolof-mangling, French-studded pidgin-like English of the tongue-tied visitor. Hoped through wryness and eye-rolls to mark herself out from the tourists. Crosswise hoped to wear the depths of her aroha and all her sincerity clearly on her bright-striped sleeve. Hoped to receive return aroha, return care from those – the smiling go-between, the unmet marabou, the spirit cousins – she was submitting to. Yes, our girl hoped with hope alone to erase cynicism or ill intent from their transaction. So she leapt. She was forgetting us of course. She never went to their cave. But we did.
Made
Then you arrived, and her focus shifted, as did ours – though not completely. Our girl goes to Zealandia when she’s missing something now. To the old goldmine. Takes two steps in, reaching out, willing herself not to push the lamp button. Thinks of Krubera Cave, two kilometres down and still they swim further. Reaching for what? Thinks of Mponeng mine, back there on your other homeland, e moko. Deeper. Worse. A digging not so freely given. Doesn’t think of the beige crumbling caves, nor the wet tunnels near home. There’s just too much to think. So the dark yawning cavity wins, wringing her nervous system dizzy, and she reaches for light. Bravely unfurls herself again to the relief of slight sight, pupils dilating. Blue salt rises, tears shudder out; she forgets why. Then her hair is catching on antennae – live cave wētā overhead! Laughter sputters out, and we join in, silently. Thatagirl. Stay present.
She wants to bring you to the caves too, moko. Wants you to feel at home there. And she wants you to only read about such things. And she wants you never ever knowing that you have cousins who are still unfree. And she wants rock. Wants a worldwide Papatūānuku to protect you, moko.
Held
Lucky we followed her over there. Lucky she left a bit of the bargaining work to us – amidst all the paying and washing and surrendering and leaping. And lucky, most lucky, when recalling that first fabric-swathed eye-twinkling or when gazing in awe at you – her fiercely loved son who did come (yes, you, moko!) and is their kin as well as ours – or when doubting her own agency in any part of your story, it’s lucky that she can laugh. Even underground, fearing the worst and forgetting what’s been given you, she joins us in our belly laughs. She laughs with us, and all our African tūpuna laugh too, until no one’s sure who’s who and who’s had the last laugh.
But we’re up here in the stars, and you’ve got tunnelling to do. You whisper your first word: dank. You breathe it in, start chuckling.