MAYHEM
Issue Three – October 2015
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
K-T. Harrison
Theoretical Fringe Benefits
I.
The pages that I write
My black stories on
Are all white.
And when I
Turn each page,
I see
Resistance
In the white papers
To soak up my ink taggings
From the other side
See – here’s me, black as ever
And just as menacing
As the beast
Beauty loved
And looked for
Beneath the bed
Each night...
To sate a curious appetite
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
Issue Three – October 2015
MAYHEM
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
…let us merge
On the page at least:
He iwi tahi tatou?
Nah bro’
I live inside the sentences passed down
When you gave me your word
Your honour
Let my people go
Edward said
To re-orient towards the reference points of the occident
See – we got lost on our way
Along the pathway to the fringe
To this, to here; senselessly decentered; homeless & demented.
A non-essentialist unity
Homogenizes me – see
A commonality – my black face
Over-written to dislocate
By one stroke of the goose feather pen
Hordes displaced to othered space
Shoved to the string-tied outer apron
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
MAYHEM
Issue Three – October 2015
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
Of the not-negotiable settler nation
Across a maintained difference
Of mapped out treacherous seas.
By
Foucault’s institutional power lines
&
Fanon’s wretched fact of my whenua scorched black,
Where I was left to die
But did not
Fall off the edge of the tarnished parchment,
Tainted at conception a well-conceived deception.
Learnt instead how to think in ink and bled
And bled all over that page
Now read & redressed
Confiscation compensated.
“Kia ora for that.”
See – we cannot distance ourselves
Too far from the implications of our histories
It was,
Not too long ago,
When,
At the intertextual frontiers
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
MAYHEM
Issue Three – October 2015
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
Of our black and white beginnings
When,
The Cross of good and evil came; and in the name of
Ruptured harmony and balance:
Where Kauri were felled, and now die-back
Where water was poisoned, and now poisons
Where stoat killed Kiwi
And iwi died-out
Or were supposed to.
Ahi kaa, keepers of the fire
Kept the embers aglow
Let’s sit down and there we’ll toast
The bread we broke
And drink the water of life – to life – kia ora koutou katoa.
II
…allow me entry into the institutions of dominant discourse
And estrange the basis of its authority and identification
Where my sub-texted sacred is reduced to simulacrum
But, hey ehoa, my treaty partner
Take my hand
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author
Issue Three – October 2015
MAYHEM
ISSN 2382-0322
______________________________________________________________________________
I’ll show you how to poi – ay?
Watch me, see me spiral away,
From a con-structured narrative centre
To a thematically, culturally safe one
I watch; learn, know, perfect
See – I make myself my own.
Nemesis in mimesis.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
© Copyright remains with the individual author