An Ode to the Pacific

I want to write a poem…

Of freedom and liberation,

speak the words that free the nation.

I want my voice to sing the cry of our generation,

be a verse of black innovation

and completely erase and re-write every white equation

that we live by.

I want to write a poem…

One that seeks truths and brings discomfort.

I want to commit

to transmit

and outwit

every damn hypocrite

that can’t seem to admit

that we just can’t help but submit

to comfort.

Real quick, listen to me spit.

I wanna write a poem…

So let me draw your attention

and provide a reflection

of my intention

to bring disruption to your comfortability.

Think of it as corruption: an informed humility

of how to understand our ways of being

and all that we choose to be seeing

and how it’s ignorance that we need to be freeing

ourselves from.

Much like a bomb,

let me blow up your world

like water to flat ironed locks that are meant to be curled.

They took culture and steamed the life out of it,

took all moisture and every bit of nutrients,

then called dead fibre pretty,

made straight what was all curve,

and robbed you of beauty they thought you didn’t deserve.

I want to write a poem…

Weaponise vocabulary like an academic warrior

while I navigate my space as a born-to-the-land foreigner,

grapple with the notion of being mistaken for an islander

when my make up is only that of Africa and her coloniser.

I want to write a poem…

I what to ask the question:

where is my space?

Where do I put the guilt of walking these streets and feeling more safe 

than those who actually whakapapa to this land,

where should I stand?

I want to write a poem…

An Ode to the Pacific. 

Lands that are not mine,

but the only ones I feel safe in calling home,

the only home I’ve ever known.

Let me define who the Pacific is to me,

please?

A Queen,

arms opened wide, palms made of security and a scent so warm

She makes salt water sweet

because She homed me, my parents and my entire family,

made space on Her soil for mamma’s roots and my father’s seeds

for them to plant our a disposed family tree,

nothing but grace and beauty,

She watered us until we grew free.

Because She saved my father’s life,

stopped him from missing his kids grow up and hurting his wife,

then introduced him to a world that wasn’t centred by strife.

Then She comforted my mother while she birthed an unplanned baby,

one that they couldn’t afford but that didn’t matter

because in what world would she ever abort.

The Pacific held her hand, wrapped her arms around my mother’s body and whispered prayers of strength in her ear

welcomed a first generation South African girl and negated every sense of fear.

The Pacific, She welcomed us with warmth and love

and I’ll never be able to thank her enough.

So I must do this instead:

share the stories of those who bled

so I could read, write, speak and profess,

everything necessary, and to start I must confess

that I am complicit, just as we all are.

And this is where we start

to begin to break those four walls apart,

the house may be cracking

but if apathy remains then it’s change that will be lacking,

and it’s again them who will come back attacking

because when their modernity is threatened, it’s their nerves that start racking,

like a weighted blanket that’s lost its heavy,

modernity will lighten,

cracked walls will crumble

and the house will no longer be steady.

I want to write a poem…

I want to tell you the tales,

not the fake ones they said come from fairies,

the ones they told us when we were young,

real words that weren’t written

but passed down only by mother tongue,

the truths that hurt, that we can no longer desert,

the truths that we need to learn in order to save this place we call earth.

I want to write a poem…

I want to read you stories,

not the ones they put on the bookshelf for us, not the ones from the box.

‘I think, therefore I am’, is our shameful paradox

like an equinox, the Pacific is the sun and we are her equator,

time stands still and she becomes the creator.

Two times a year is framed as a privileged luxury

but re-centring brings a new type of normality.

So, this is what we do:

bring their stories to you.

It may be the white man’s bookstore

but it’s no longer his mercy that we have to implore,

nor is it his fragility we have to account for

but rather his four walls that we will commodore.

Of the land he has stolen, we will colonise his shop floor,

drown out white voices that won’t speak for us anymore.

Paternalism will be made extinct,

exist only in the space we left the remains of dinosaurs.

I want to write a poem…

About how sociology is an art form,

one that homes artists who refuse to conform,

accumulating truths rather than capital,

creating practice from understanding theory is our initial battle.

Checking out at the end of the lecture

leaves space only for conjecture,

so we continue past the classroom and outside of the box,

burn the flat iron instead of the locks,

exist in modernity but intervene it’s absurdity.

I want to write a poem…
Because when security is promised through invisible mechanisms,

and hierarchical structures create point value systems

by which we define the worth of a life and call it humanism,

when the priority 

for the majority 

is the aesthetic of four walls to uphold,

but it comes at the expense of the Pacific in a chokehold,

existing in their space and creating our own just doesn’t equate

when the Pacific is drowning

its environmentalism we should be sounding,

but it’s not too late

to break what’s been made

deflate white ego

and decolonize the neo,

separate our reality from what they’re selling,

separate like they did all the entities that to them were too compelling.

It was her Maunga, her Moana, her Whenua, her Tangata,

the Pacific they found too overwhelming.

So “give back”, “reclaim”, “decolonize” and “reparations” is the modern cry,

words that leak naturally from oppressions eye.

I want so badly to write this poem.

To take back what they stole,

to give back control,

to make every indigenous heart whole,

or is this really a shameless attempt to immortalise my soul?

Because…

Maybe this poem is not mine to write,

maybe these English words are colourless. 

They may come from Black lips 

but maybe they’re still 

just white.

by Leah Siljeur