by Eluned Summers-Bremner
Fog is all around and if you’re going to, the time to run is now. A rūnanga (formal discussion) is held, but no. A show of strength, then in to make munitions, ration water. When grenades are thrown, you go: women, children, elders, hard for the Pūniu River. An autumn sun shines equally on shoulders, bayonets, slaughter. It shines, at some distance, on the river. The river runs to another, and that one runs to this, while the land on its banks whose breath you know is the land that knew you first.
I’m one the land knows second, if at all. At twelve I sit on the floor while our Māoritanga teacher gives us all new-old names and tells us how the world is woven together, from nothing to something, from darkness to light, in living lines that run like ocean currents, sap through trees, a people born from the shadow of a mountain. I walk home on asphalt under which the soil is busy, and which the sun will melt one day, as if in anger.
As we burn the planet’s bones so worldwide, fog is declining. Mixed by gentle wind, air must cool, as on a cloudless night when Earth’s heat burns off to space. Air molecules slow and fuse and water’s warmth rises too until a mute, airy collective turns to liquid, scattering light. Fog has me breathless to the pulled up spine, sixteen, riding to lecture halls to learn how the air of common speech conceals a whole new atmosphere called poetry, which leaps up in it, dense and indispensable as water seeding life into the sky. Or seventeen with Hereward, mist-wild Fenman, taunting the invader with flood and flame. Except that I’m the invader, and the farmland my forbears worked is stolen, facts that have only been taught in school here since 2023.
This town has an ancient name, Kirikiriroa, for the free-draining soil that forms natural terraces along the river. ‘Long stretch of gravel,’ though, connotes another, bitter truth: the rock-cut road the settlers made so the Crown could invade in 1863, since Māori controlled the river. And all the roads cut through battle sites as though they had never been, including Ōrākau, where the people stood firm in fog and rose to the plough a century later. Non-compliance, says an activist I read, is also art, since art changes the known, until what we know is more or less what happened, just as the Earth knows, all the time.
Near the Wellington Street beach there was once an ancestral common garden. Seed kūmara from the earliest strains are given to schools to plant so that, syllable by syllable, line unto line, scrap of soil to decimal point to promise, the gravel breaks the asphalt and we learn that while we breathe we are communal, with ties, bloody or otherwise, to land. I ride through fog at dawn, turning airs for singing. The river that made the people takes me in.
Philip Hoare’s Comment:
This epic piece – in so few words – takes us out of our hemisphere and our mindset. It is fantastically woven around the Māori memory of the land and a people and their occupancy of it.
It is as elementally as powerful as the forces it echoes and evokes. It is poetic and real, responding to a physically-felt history, evoked in someting that is almost nothing: the fog.
Fog reveals, protects, obscures. We are confronted with what we have done. And what we might yet do.
Philip Hoare Competition 