Sione Tuívailala Monū

A Rectangle Sun

essa may ranapiri

What promise, what phrase, what ancient text calls us home? And what do we do when we get there? The water is wet, the trees swaying in the breeze. An arm still quivering. You can hear them snuffling in their sties. O swine of a true believer o cliffs edge and space for all. What God breathes over the oceans, what ocean is already a God? Ready to pull that idol of Coloniser and Whiteness out from the lips of a Jewish rebel, where it never belonged? What Pacific home will bring us queers dignity? Where does it melt our bodies into sand? Islands in a slipstream. I can hear voices are they my own? I can see faces are they my home?

We are brought into a space, by Sione Tuívailala Monū. A space they have created. It is mostly white. A blank space of paleness. A white coconut tree stretches to the digital ceiling. There is a sow, her pigs are suckling, the sow is white and the pigs are white. There are coconuts strewn across the ground, they are also white. Different kinds of milk, in different kinds of bodies. There is a seat to sit on. A place to find rest, to breathe deep in the things we can taste and touch. The seat is also white.

There is a window or a simulacrum of a window looking out onto a blue sky. The only things of colour are a series of images and masks that hang from the wall. There are flowers growing from each one, a direct link to the whenua of Tonga, of Sione’s home village their tūrangawaewae, Kanokupolu. We see the name Kanokupolu on one of the masks. There is no doubt. The masks reflect the identities we wear on our faces; as a queer Pacific person these masks speak to the multitudes that we must inhabit. As a queer Māori person I think of Christmas with my family, I think of first dates, I think of going out to get bread; do I wear this mask for safety or that mask for truth? We can hide from some. We can sink back into culture. We can become inscrutable to the pākehā gaze. But we have to carry our homes, our whakapapa inside us. We can’t creep away from that.

Sione finds themselves here in this space, but also in images of this space on Instagram. The four photos on the opposing sides of the room speak to this, images of their trip to Tonga. We can build an identity online an identity that is still tied to whenua, still tied to the land. Sione has found their confidence through the online has reclaimed their identity in this private yet so public space; something I identify with myself. There are so many things I would not know about myself without the internet and social media, but they are still ideologically loaded. The whiteness in the room speaks to this; we can find ourselves here but it isn’t what the pixels want, a few rich white men who care nothing for indigenous lives have constructed this space. And the white man’s touch has stretched across the Moana and has dug its roots in deep and for so long. This can be felt in the queerphobia that emanates from those in power in Tonga this is the mark of the white invader which has whitewashed what was once a culture of acceptance. The legacy of a certain distorted Christianity.

There is no movement in the space but it would be easy to imagine it, the pigs snuffling and the leaves blowing in the breeze, the salt air and water lapping against the beach, the coconuts pivoting where they lie swinging ovoids, they almost look like eggs waiting to be cracked waiting to hatch. There is a nervousness here that is childlike. Where do we grow up and how hidden must we be when we do? There is a light, halogen bars, form a twisted rectangle sun on the ceiling where the light scatters through the trees. We are many things at once, twisting in the white haze. The colour of the masks and the photos speaks to the stillness as it cuts through it, oh how we standout and how brave we are to claim both queerness and indigeneity in doing so! Oh here we are and don’t you dare ignore us!

ESSA MAY RANAPIRI (Ngāti Wehi Wehi, Ngāti Raukawa-ki-te-Tonga, Te Arawa, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Pukeko, Ngāti Takatāpui, Clan Gunn, Highgate) is a poet from Kirikiriroa. Their first book of poetry ransack (VUP) was longlisted for the Ockham Awards 2020. They are also the featured writer inPoetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020 with their work 'HAUNT|HUNT'. They also dabble in visual arts; their redinblack series of paintings was hosted in the Gus Fisher Gallery as part of the queer algorithms exhibition in 2020. Currently they are working on their second book of poems tentatively titled Echidna. They will write until they're dead.