Matangi Tai by Sia Figiel

A wind has just blown through Malaetoa
But it ain't no ordinary wind
It is a wind that that has woken me up
Calling me from Mesa, Arizona
Sia, wake up
Wake up sis
How can you still sleep at this early hour?
Didn't you hear me back in May
When these motherfuckers came at me with patons...
And fists
In front of a grocery store
Sirens
Confusion
And I'm just there minding my own
Jumped by mens in uniforms
Supposedly here to protect us
To serve and to protect
Das was on the side of da cars dey drive
SIs, even da judge says I don't deserve protec-shun
Threw my ass in jail on the count of mental problems
Mental problems my az
Couldn't find the Ocean in dis here landscape
Dis here desert
Searching for it all 37 years of my life sis
But gotta tell you man
I'm tired
Tired of looking
Tired of always looking out the corner of my eye to catch a wave in this heat
This desert
This purple mountain majesty of A-Me-ri-Caaaaaa!
Just stopped by to say Ofa atu
I gotsa go sis
Epeli and them dudes calling me from Pulotu
I gotsa go
But e! Keep listening to dat SEAL song you laig listening to
And keep rocking 'em bikinis and show em sis
Show em the salt
Showe em that while dey might taste salt in a lake out here
Dere's a whole motherfuckin' ocean where you and I was born
And I going back there
Going back to my roots, yeah, yeah
Reggae Music and water
Is all this brown assed nigger is axing fo'
P.S: Don't go inciting no violence now sis
I know you and that heart of yours
I can see your salt already boilin' girl
But eh, fink of da mens Martin Luther King Jr.
And Mahatma Ghandi
And taste me in your ocean girl.
Is what I axe.
Peace Out

Fa'anoanoa (Melancholy)

by Sia Figiel 

Poem posted with permission.
Author's comment:
Before Matangi Tai was to be buried in Mesa, Arizona, the National Tongan American Association held a peace march for him. Several people spoke: Bishops, Family Members, Singers, Community Members and myself. I had been asked the night before the march to write this poem. It was August 2013.

When I submitted the poem to the president, Mrs. Fahina Passi, a fantastic woman, she told me to tone it down. I understood it was in regard to the word 'motherfucker' in the poem, which I knew stood out like a sore thumb in a Tongan gathering ... it would, too, in a Samoan context.

But when I got there that night and felt the spirit of Matangi Tai and the thickness of grief in the air, I explained to the audience how my poem came about. I also told them that I apologised for offending anyone, and that if my words should offend anyone, to throw them towards an uninhabited island, where they will offend no one. BUT tonight, I will insult Matangi Tai and his memory if I don't read the poem I wrote for him in its entirety. I did read it and it turned out to be the right thing to do as Tongans (the young generation) came up and embraced me afterwards. So did older Tongans who said it was 'powerful'.

Editor Helen McKinlay:
Matangi Tai died in jail a few days after his arrest and imprisonment in Mesa, Arizona. For more information see here. Sia wrote the poem in August this year. The dignity and love which encircles the poem and the tragedy of Matanga Tai, are an example to all.

I am always looking for poetry which speaks of the indigenous origins of the poet. Poetry which springs from the poet’s deep love for their homeland; its culture, its beliefs and its values.  Poetry which sometimes bears the scars of conflict, but never bears a grudge…poetry which makes us laugh from the belly and cry from the heart. A few weeks back I found such a poem: Songs of the fat brown woman, and began a search for the poet.

On the way I discovered an amazing woman, Sia Figiel, a single mum with two boys, an aunty of seven, an award-winning novelist and poet, a performance artist, (the first Pacific Islander to read and perform at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre), an academic with two degrees in liberal arts and history, and a visual artist. Her paintings have been exhibited in Leipzig and Berlin, Germany, where she held an artist's studio and lived for three years from 1991-94. Oh, and did I mention she teaches Polynesian Dance and Culture?

Sia is also a health activist and a self-proclaimed Rainbow Warrior of Maleatoa.  'A rainbow warrior,' explains Sia, 'is someone who has decided to take charge of their life, by becoming more proactive in their own healing or in the healing of close and dear ones who are suffering from Diabesity (diabetes and obesity). Malaetoa means a resting place for warriors.' Her Facebook page is called 'Sia Figiel has diabetes. Diabetes doesn’t have Her'. Sia is successfully fighting diabetes and its causes on a daily basis She has lost over 45 kilos in the last year!

Sia Figiel

Sia says,

As a writer and as a public figure, I hid my diabetes from the public. I was ashamed to admit that I had been diagnosed as I felt it a sign of weakness. That I had lost control. However, as the years went by, and more and more family, loved ones and young people kept dying from diabesity-related complications, I felt that I could no longer stay silent about these killer diseases. That I had to speak up. I had to act.

To read more of Sia’s inspiring story go here.

My emails circled the South Pacific and introduced me to a variety of lovely people, before I finally managed to contact Sia with an invitation to be guest on the Tuesday Poem hub. She was finishing a new novel but somehow found time to say yes and provide a poem, as well as answering all my questions. Thank you for the incredible journey, Sia, and welcome to the Tuesday Poem Blog. Thanks to those who helped me find you.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Where we once belonged (1996), Pasifika Press won the Best First Book award in the South East Asia/South Pacific region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1997.

Two other novels,
Girl in the Moon Circle (1996) (Institute of Pacific Studies) and They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), Kaya Press 2003.

To a Young Artist in Contemplation (1998), is a prose poetry collection.

Terenesia, is a collaborative CD of performance poetry with the poet Dr Teresia Teaiwa.

Sia Figiel, who wrote the novel “Where We Once Belonged” (1996), is 29 and she is now the next phase in Pacific writing in English. The novel is a beautiful mix of satire and parody. It is a pastiche of styles; she breaks into poetry, straight sequences of it, and I think that is where we are heading. That is where my work has been heading....she will influence our literature for many years to come.  Maualaivao Professor, Sir Albert Wendt.

Sia's new novel Headless is written from the perspective of a gay Samoan man who attends a two-year writing program at Stanford University. It is in this class that he starts writing stories of his family which chronicle his family's life history, and - in particular - the historical connections between Samoa, American Samoa and the United States since 1900 to present. The expected publishing date is DECEMBER and the publisher is LITTLE ISLAND PRESS NZ.

Fa'anoanoa II

by Sia Figiel

BIOGRAPHY: Sia Figiel was born in Western Samoa and raised in the villages of Matautu Tai, Tanugamanono and Vaivase, the roots of her literary work. As a teenager, she came to New Zealand to finish her schooling. Sia is acknowledged as Samoa's first contemporary woman writer. Well known as a performance poet, she is a frequent guest at literary festivals.

Her work is translated into German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Her writer’s residencies include the University of Hawaii, the University of Technology, Sydney, the University of the South Pacific, Laucala Campus Fiji, and the Catalan Ministry of Arts and Culture, Barcelona Spain. 

She was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Department of English, and was appointed the Arthur Lynn Andrews Visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, an honour also given to Professor Albert Wendt. 

During a decade spent in American Samoa, Ms. Figiel was a Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Faleomavaega Eni Hunkin and worked with high school students in Pago Pago, until moving to America a year ago. She is now living in Utah, where she will be a language and culture consultant to MANA Academy which opens in September 2013.

This week's editor is Helen McKinlay. Helen is a poet and children's author at present living in the 'Top of the South' (Island), New Zealand. She blogs at gurglewords

Before you leave, check out the rich offerings from other Tuesday Poets in the left hand side bar.

Lines for a New Year by Sam Hunt

I like the branch
I find myself on

a view over the garden
all the way down to the beach

the family below me
gathered in the garden

debating where I’ve gone.
My father’s got a theory.

I like the branch
I find myself on.

      _____

  
You know how it is

to give up the piss
a week to the

day before Christmas

you know how it is

to fall over sober
safe in some spot,

come to later
remembering the lot.

       _____  
  
  
the rugby ball kicked
far as the far paddock
  
where an apple tree caught it.
Was agreed among folk

they'd never seen such a catch,
such a kick, such a match.

        _____

       
I gave it away lately
I had no choice,
no need pump the brakes –
they'd already seized.

I like your poison, lady,
I like it too much:
which is why I am
        where I am today
outside of thought, beyond your touch.

I said I'll be seeing you.
You knew what I meant,
at least you seemed to.
Was the message you got
the same one I sent?

        _____   


It's a love song
between a mother and son.

The son plays the drums
and wrote the song.

On the recording
mother sings the song

like mothers do. And the
son plays the drums

like a good boy. It's a
love song.

        _____


A friend used to say
my dog and I
had the same way of walking,

especially walking away.
Which was
often the case.

These days there's
not much happening.
It's people walking toward me

asking, where's the dog,
the dog? And they're
right. Where is he?

        _____


You live in this world
you have no choice.
Silence would be fine.
But you give it voice –

you have to, you cannot
help yourself.
Your mother says you never knew
when enough was enough.

        _____


Dreamt I met Thomas Hardy
walking a local back road.
He was an old man
but coped okay with his cane.

He said he was looking for
a woman called Lizbie Brown.
I said I knew her name –
but only from his poem.

        _____


Sitting on a clifftop
was always a dream
that more or less came true.
Just the words dried up.

        _____


Friends disappear
off the face of the earth.
For what it's worth
I loved you.
But you can't hear.

        _____


Is  said (what few
elders we have left)
anyone for whom birds sing
all night through to dawn

are themselves
close to eternal bird-song:
their time, among these branches,
that of the elders  – not long.

        _____


If this were the view
I got all year through –
a branch of a tree at the window –

I would become that
branch of tree and with it
grow.

The nurses agree
I never complain
about the rain, or pain.

Easy, when you know
you're a tree
at the window.

        _____


When I poured her a cup of tea
and asked her, strong or weak?
she held out a dark wrist:
same colour as this.

        _____


I'm off to look at angels.
And toetoe if I see it.

The family move in close.
No way out but

close my eyes to see

if anything's left of the toetoe,
and the angels.

        _____
   

  
© Sam Hunt. Posted with Sam Hunt's permission.
                                                             

Sam Hunt

                                 Editor: Helen McKinlay.

Lines for a New Year is from Sam Hunt's latest collection, Knucklebones: Poems 1962-2012 (Craig Potton 2012).  I think there are few New Zealanders who have not heard of this poet, but just in case here is his bio courtesy of Craig Potton Publishers. [Go here to view the poet's website, read more poetry and/or purchase a book.]

Sam Hunt was born in 1946 at Castor Bay, Auckland. As a child, he was surrounded by poetry and performance: his mother, father and grandfather regularly read poems out loud or recited from memory; and his father was a somewhat eccentric barrister who came from a family of actors, troupers and musicians.

From a young age Sam wrote poetry, and has since become one of New Zealand's best-known and best-loved poets, touring the length and breadth of the country for over 40 years, performing his poems in pubs, theatres, schools and countless other venues. Fuelled always by his lifelong commitment to 'lifting the words off the page and giving them a good listen to,' he has introduced poetry to generations of New Zealanders.

In 1985, Sam Hunt was awarded a QSM for his contribution to New Zealand literature, and in 2010 he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to poetry.

As well as these well-deserved accolades, congratulations are due to Sam for being the 2012 recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. He lives with his son on the Kaipara Harbour in Northland, New Zealand.

Along with his permission to publish 'Lines for a New Year', Sam very generously sent me a new unpublished poem (below). I was a fan before .... have seen him perform and admired his lack of pretentiousness, amazing memory and wonderful inclusiveness .... and I am even more of a fan now, and finding Knucklebones hard to put down.So many delicious lines. It's hard to choose any poems let alone just one.

Tell me what

Tell me what I don’t know –
not what I know now

or what I’ll know tomorrow.
Tell me something new,

a story that will blow
this steady head apart.

Maybe that’s about where
the best stories start:

or you could go on, and on,
talking of the morning after:

the storm, the break up at sea.
And all of it gone,

gone down deep
where no one should go –

gone as that! . . Tell me
what I won’t know tomorrow.

©  Sam Hunt 2012

This week's editor Helen McKinlay is a published children's author and poet who lives in the South Island of New Zealand. To read about her and her writing visit her blog here.

After you've read Sam Hunt's poems check out the poems posted in the left-hand sidebar chosen or written by our thirty Tuesday Poets.
      

The Cheese Room by Judy Brown

Here it is, on the back of the menu.

How, instead of a pudding, an extra fiver
will buy you the choice of the Cheese Room.
It shines in the corner, a treasury,
the moony glow of the cheeses walled round
with glass. As soon as she sees it, she's lost.
Before anyone spots her, she strips,
soaks a sari in buttermilk, wraps herself up
and goes in. She shivers to think of the air
full of spores, the shag-pile that fluffs
on things that slip your mind for a moment –
green islands on milk, jam lidded with wool.
A couple who've paid to pick slices of Reblochon,
Vignotte, Manchego, tap on the glass;
they can't believe how she stands,
drenched in whey, her hair wet to strings.
How she touches the rinds – dusted
with charcoal, or soft, that hidden-flesh bloom
you get on a Brie. There's the tightness
of smoke in some of the cheese, the fissured
and granular rock of a Parmesan split
into wheels. Then the diners lose interest,
return to their claret. Despite how oddly
she's dressed – the flimsy sarong,
the milky place where the muslin pulls into
the crack of her arse – perhaps they assume
she's some kind of expert assessing
the cheese? But she won't even taste,
pulls the cheesecloth over her face
and curls up on the floor. She's happy
to wait, passive like milk, for the birth,
for the journey from death into food.

©Judy Brown

The Cheese Room comes from Judy’s 2011 collection Loudness.
It appears here with permission from Judy and her publishers Seren Books.
Thank you both.

Editor Helen McKinlay

The first three words of this poem, ‘Here it is’… propel us into a lavish sensory experience.  Resist and be left tapping on the glass. Like a fine camembert cheese, rich and creamy in the centre but well contained within its rind, The Cheese Room’s  magic is spun within a well-crafted structure. I particularly admire the way Judy uses line breaks and caesuras to halt the momentum before her next piece of unexpectedness, for example:

'Despite how oddly
she's dressed – the flimsy sarong,
the milky place where the muslin pulls into
the crack of her arse – perhaps they assume
she's some kind of expert assessing'

The Cheese Room is capable of deep analysis and surmise.  For myself, I am happy to delight in it for its own sake, a reminder to let go, take a leap, enjoy. When asked to comment, Judy replied, ‘the trigger for it, a visit to a restaurant, no longer has any connection to what the poem becomes.’   I like it that she said 'becomes' … Nice to think of it as still becoming!
It was GK Chesterton who led me to Judy Brown.  I was researching his comment, ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.’  Of course GK died in 1936, well before the power of the internet, which now abounds with cheese poems. Cheese, like love, crosses boundaries.

Topics range from the discovery of one’s inner cheese to a comparison between the qualities of cheese and humans. And what would GK have thought of his contemporary, James McIntyre (1828- 1906)?  Sometimes referred to as Canada's Worst Poet-thanks, it is said, to his cheese poems, James is remembered and anthologised still and is the inspiration of the annual Ingersoll, Ontario, Poetry contest.  James aside, I think GK would have been as thrilled as I was to discover Judy’s poem. The silence can be declared well broken!

Enjoy Gk’s short essay on Cheese from his book of essays,‘Alarms and Discursions’ here.


LINKS TO OTHER POEMS BY JUDY BROWN

Loudness    The Worst Journey in The World   Passenger     

and Best Drink of the Day a youtube clip

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and studied English at the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has lived in Northumberland, Cumbria and Hong Kong and now divides her time between London and Derbyshire. Judy’s first book Loudness (Seren, 2011) was shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Felix Dennis prize for best first collection. She has been widely published. Her awards include the Manchester Poetry Prize 2010, the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize 2005 and the Poetry London Competition 2009.

In November 2011 'The Cheese Room' was selected as Poem of the Week in The Guardian.

Before you go, leap into the side bar and enjoy the wide selection of 30 Tuesday Poets who live there.

Helen McKinlay is a published children’s author and poet  from New Zealand.  She blogs at gurglewords.