Notes on colour
Rangituhia Hollis 2017.
I am colour, as my skin allows. I am feint in winter and glow in summer. Glow only when my friends drag me out. I want to be dark. Like ash. Like my father. The one they called black soap. I have tried to be that too, Black. I tried to fall asleep once on the sand of Waipiro, waking burnt red. My skin peeled for days. After that my mind became addled by the sun, & I think I stayed that way. Addled by trying to overdose. By trying to drown in the sand of a place, that I could only get to for a few days. That's my locus. A pivot point. Waipiro the home of my father. Waipiro of the houses of a thousand children. The red house of Iri-te-kura. The blue house of Taharora. I sink into the turquoise waters of Taharora by entering the door. Like leaving the grounds of the urupa, I wash my hands and flick the water up. It erases tapu. Likewise I pass under the vagina and into the wharekai and tapu is gone. But maybe it's tapu that has me split? When I fell asleep as a baby on the grave of my nanny. I was lost, I was stuck there and maybe lost there forever. Then someone told nanny off, told her to leave me. At least that was what I was told. And I was brought back to the earth. And I stand on that ground now and look where to go next. I look to someone. I am no leader, not there. Maybe not anywhere. I look to be shown. To be told that I am a skin of winter that lasts. A nexus of freckles. & blotches of moles on my drivers arm that make that karanga call. But I am a hidden ally. I speak and know the language of the oppressor that I revile. May I talk more and remember less.