Poūkahangatus
Written in her early 20s, Tayi Tibble’s debut collection, Poūkahangatus (a Māori word of her own invention meant to sound like and evoke “Pocahontas”), depicts what it’s like to come of age as an Indigenous woman in New Zealand today, drawing on still-fresh memories of childhood and family—aunties with “sloppy juju lips,” a naughty brother who turns “soft and whakamā” after hearing a ghost story—and the discovery of one’s sexuality in a world of clubs, hook-ups, and unreliable men, like the one who “touches you in / a place that makes you wish your hair was a crown of snakes.” Tibble’s talent is the opposite of Medusa’s, melting stony hearts with confident characterization and subtle takes on how the eros of racial difference contends uneasily with traditional culture, as in “LBD”:
there is a dark-skinned darkness in me / I wear her like a little
black
dress / Gucci / velvet-pressed / embroidered roses on thin blue
eyelids /
a fault in my blood like I’m violent / moving in the club like
I’m
walking on water / no miracle though / mouth red like a fire
engine /
hair falling like debris / I grew up / on the sound of women
wailing /
Tibble depicts her parents’ and grandparents’ generations with affectionate precision, as when she describes the bored Māori housewives of the sixties who “[s]lip into an apricot / nylon nightgown freshly ordered off a catalogue” or the wise mother who demythologizes Disney’s Pocahontas: “Representation is important.” What makes Poūkahangatus memorable is its youthful verve, its life-affirming erotic charge, and the bold way it embraces contradiction (“We crave otherness. / We hate otherness.”), while pushing back against imposed understandings of personal identity, as in “wtn boys,” a revealing look at poetry, class, power, and sex:
soft wellington boys in six hundred
dollar leather want to send me their poetry
& tie me to their beds so I tell them I like their
fathers instead & listen to their aluminium skulls
crack like coke cans and thunder.