Black Marks on the White Page

by Witi Ihimaera

  So this was the truth of the anxiety that was befuddling in this little boy’s brain, of what lurked in the shadows. Tears of outrage gathered and rolled down Tomahawk’s tortured face, now fed up from having to endure the indignity and injustice of standing around all night on behalf of his brother, and because of Aboriginal Sovereignty taking his time — again, he was being covered by a rouge-coloured cloud of insects hording and massing for fresh child flesh.

  Tomahawk became convinced that his brother was being totally selfish by taking his time to die, and making him wait. He watched his older brother moving even more slowly in the shallow water of a high tide that stretched forever over the mudflats, and Tomahawk was convinced that even he could move faster than that. Yet it was true. Aboriginal Sovereignty was taking his time — perhaps weighing up the future, and he was not just disappearing in a puff like he should so as not to be continually inconveniencing everyone, but was instead, just inching himself further and deeper out to sea like a moron, Tomahawk thought, and again as far as he was concerned, it felt just like a number of other aborted attempts of Aboriginal Sovereignty trying to take his own life where he had been forced to stand around like this, wasting time to keep watch, and now it was happening all over again, this having to just stand there willing him on, having to over and over watch him die.

  The little scholar boy fretted that he still needed to do his homework for the night and the way things were going, he was never going to get it done, so he was growing even more impatient even though everything seemed to be going according to plan, though unbearably slow, and while being constantly bitten. Then what became worse, after finally reconciling himself to how he could rush off his homework in the morning before school anyhow because it was nothing — he was that smart — Tomahawk’s own journey started to sneakily flick through his mind. These were the images of seeing himself living like a rich prince mind you in his new home — the flashiest place in Australia, Parliament House. Best place to live. Yes, he was fully convinced that he was going to live in the big white building in Canberra, as soon as he was adopted by the government, whom he already knew from watching the news and current affairs on the TV, going on and on for months about how Aboriginal people did not know how to care for their children, that only the government loved Aboriginal children, and wanted to save them from their paedophiliac parents.

  Tomahawk had to pinch himself from daydreaming about his plans for future happiness, when the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs would become his mother. But Tomahawk had to stop thinking about the golden-hair mother swivelling around in her office chair in the sky, because Aboriginal Sovereignty’s askew suicide was beginning to overwhelm his own belief in himself. There was too much happening, and he started questioning himself — if the government would really adopt him; whether his older brother’s self-doubt was being projected onto him; and he spiralled downhill.

  What if, Tomahawk reasoned, his power to make things happen would not come true, and what if he had missed a step in the synchronisation of his plan? What if Aboriginal Sovereignty was just trying to stuff everything up for him and was playing games with him? And Tomahawk started itching to just run off from the mosquitoes and sandflies, get down to the beach and rush straight through the sea, and get the whole suicide thing over and done with by drowning Aboriginal Sovereignty himself. He knew he could do it, even though he was half the size of his older brother. But nothing like the facts of who was physically stronger mattered right then, because Tomahawk believed in the strength of his own mind even if it felt a bit dubious at the moment, and his confidence was starting to feel a bit wobbly. Yet why worry? Tomahawk knew enough about the sea in his eight years of life to know that he could run through the water after his brother and, if it occurred to him, even try to save him if he wanted to, but wait a minute, he realised this was not what a proper Ninja with a self-preservation plan would do.

  He knew precisely what a real assassin would do, because he had already studied a lot of internet games about how to knock out an enemy on his brand new Apple Mac Pro, and his new MacBook Air, and his new iPad, all gifts from the government for being a spy boy, which was not what his teachers had told him about winning a donated prize for his essays about the failings of Aboriginal parents. They said he was lying when he said he really did have a hotline to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs so that he could tell her about paedophiles the government was looking for to prove Aboriginal children were not safe with their parents. Well! It was the apparent truth of the moment screaming across the country’s TVs. Tomahawk pointed to his brother’s dark form, now waist-deep in water, and thought the future would be easier if someone could just go click, click, click on a newer iPad to speed up reality, and then kind of go pow! And see streaks of laser lightning spitting across the water like on the computer screen.

  Why couldn’t the dream just go as planned for once without Aboriginal Sovereignty stuffing everything up, Tomahawk kept repeating to himself, for God’s sake stop mucking around and hurry up you gutless idiot, take the journey, you know you are going to die anyway if you go to jail, because the government is after you for being one of those paedophile people they are going to stop to save us children. That was why the police arrested you for marrying your underage girlfriend. Just get it over and done with. Go out to her. It is pretty easy. I have seen even little kids get it over and done with faster than you. It was true. Tomahawk had seen the other children from Praiseworthy commit suicide too, from where he was standing now. Well! For sure people thought it was a trend, but Tomahawk always stayed and watched them walk out to sea, and he had never left until he was sure they were not coming back.

  The slap, slap of squatting insects continued, and Tomahawk felt the dampness covering his skin, running down his stomach and back, from his shoulders and down his arms, and his legs, from the mixture of his own perspiration and blood from mosquitoes and sandflies that he had now killed. This was the sticky blood on his hands. Yet he remained unmovable. No, he would not be stolen from this place he argued. He was going to become the richest child in the country, as rich as the government when he was living at Parliament House. Grieve for his brother? Sorrow for losing Aboriginal Sovereignty? Not Ninja. He was Aboriginal Ninja. Neat. Complete. The teachers warned about untidiness, of something only half done, and said he was the model of the class.

  So Tomahawk! Not a muscle stirred, and he knew he would have to be even tidier in the future, where he never had to watch something like this for hours again, and now at the threshold, he no longer felt mosquito proboscis puncturing his skin and feasting on his blood, because a real assassin would not feel pain. A proper Ninja kid held the line, not like lesser kids who gave up and believed they were going on a journey to paradise and everything would be okay, when it was never going to be okay for him. Tomahawk had made a game out of their belief of leaving to be in the Dreamtime, to see who was weaker, to see who gave up.

  AB-SO HAD TO DIE. Could anyone risk this ordeal again, of creating more lies to make his brother want to kill himself for nothing. Not really. Killing your brother was not an easy thing to do, not with everything that had to go according to plan for Tomahawk’s own life to begin.

  Yuki Kihara, Roman Catholic Church, Apia, 2013

  NAFANUA UNLEASHES

  From The Adventures of Vela

  ALBERT WENDT

  (1) Introduction

  At evening after the last pilgrims had melted

  into the diving light Auva‘a and I would

  sit in the Temple and let Her filter

  through the sieves of our selves

  Sometimes the old priest interpreted Her messages

  Other times She whispered to me as She flowed

  So much to record She said my centuries as atua

  never to be plain girl wife

  or to know the kiss of decay

  Tired of Atuahood but too corrupt to relinquish

  It arguing indispensibility

  and anarchy if I abdicat
ed

  What have the centuries of power meant?

  To you Vela flatterer most flatulent

  I’ll unleash my flatulence that we

  may savour all the ingredients

  in the stench — badwind locked in

  can blast open the mana-gluttonous moa

  (2) Origins

  I was the prophesied tail of a genealogy:

  my father Saveasi‘uleo was my uncle

  Tilafaiga my mother was his brother’s daughter

  No incest taboos for atua only mortals

  must keep blood apart or degenerate insanely

  (Guilt has not been my inheritance)

  My father was part-beast (eel to

  be exact) but no mark of it on me

  though in my childhood my scrupulous mother

  inspected me for its signs and barred

  me from playing with animals

  (She should have peered inside me!)

  Sonless my father ignored my gender and fed me

  on the ‘manly’ arts of war

  He was an exacting feeder

  My teachers all men he selected each day

  from the new swarms of the Dead

  (His kingdom don’t forget was Pulotu)

  And in Pulotu there was no shortage

  of any variety of man and all being spirit

  could be killed and rekilled to rise again —

  whole armies tribes nations worlds

  of them to do with as I pleased

  in the killing arts

  The Way of the Weapons is the ideal life

  preached by father so blind Ti‘alele

  of Fualuga taught me the swift

  way of the ti‘a Masters Fau and Ogafau

  trained me in the philosophy of spear and club

  until I was the deadliest weapon of the Way

  (but without penis that weapon that defines a man)

  practising my civilised craft from sunrise

  to orgiastic sunset on the recycled Dead

  the ideal warrior with balls

  and liver as they say utterly true

  to the enlightened Way

  (Is it that we feed rapaciously on death

  when we can’t love or know the gift of birth?

  In being immortal value life less —

  forgetting others die? Is Atuahood

  the supreme vice that corrupts supremely

  because we can’t self-destruct?)

  From champion warrior I understudied

  the Commanders of Pulotu’s Armies —

  victims of their own wars now devising

  strategies to reverse those defeats

  With endless supplies of spirits we refought

  those battles and won them (never mind the cost!)

  From the Commanders I learned the details

  of every battle anywhere ever fought

  To prove my ultimate worth they organised

  new wars and led the enemy against me

  Every time I won they reduced my forces

  but I outmanoeuvred them all

  because I had a sight they didn’t have:

  I could read the future and their rooted

  dread of death that stopped them from

  risking all in the deadly game

  Until even my father dared not challenge me

  ‘You’re the ideal atua and warrior now’ he said

  Poor Dad he couldn’t live down

  his tail of the beast though he was

  the most feared atua of all

  By ideal man he’d turned me into

  a soulless beast an atua without gender

  or guilt an eater of darkness like him

  And for a ravenous stretch of my youth

  I devoured the darkness like the tanifa

  that fearless gob of eternal hunger

  (Auva‘a will give you the official gospels

  on which my worship is now rooted —

  soul-food-for-the-swooning-believer!)

  (3) Conquest and Queendom

  Auva‘a said You mustn’t believe everything She says

  She loves to exaggerate — who doesn’t —

  goodness and immortality can be boring

  and we in decrepit old age confess to

  imagined misspent youths riddled with juicy

  sins and guilt! She wasn’t the monster

  She professes How could She have been? She was

  the most civilised knower of the future and

  every crevice of human behaviour My ancestors

  — wise and sensitive taulaaitu — wouldn’t

  have established our religion around Her if

  She’d been the raging beast She’s professing!

  Remember taulaaitu make atua through

  dedicated proselytising and conquest

  My aiga made Her who She is now

  (She’s never refuted that!) Without us

  She would’ve remained mere local atua

  insignificant destined to fade into oblivion

  Admittedly She loved to kill and conquer

  (and was superb at it) but of what use

  is that without informed stateswomanship

  and cunning — use others to war with

  and you receive the glory and honour.

  That art She learned from the first Auva‘a

  True She arrived at Taliifiti Falealupo from

  Pulotu with Her four magic clubs

  and it was an anonymous couple Matuna

  and Matuna who found Her asleep and helped Her

  recruit Her army of aitu She disguised

  as dragonflies se and lelefua

  True She slaughtered our enemies

  who’d enslaved our district but She

  didn’t know the full potential of Her mana

  and accidentally killed Matuna and Matuna

  and loyal squads of Her own forces

  It was Auva‘a Leo‘o my illustrious

  ancestor who after She appointed High Taulaaitu

  taught Her She was both Destroyer

  and Creator — to conquer sanely so as

  to have subjects (even Her followers) to rule over

  It was he who through clever publicity

  spread Her fame throughout Samoa

  and made every hungry ali‘i warrior

  scurry to Her for help to grow into power

  First the local warlords came with

  their petty quarrels and ambitions

  Auva‘a offered Her protection at the price

  of becoming Her subjects

  Those who refused Tupa‘i General of Her

  Armies whipped into submission while She

  enjoyed the watching (It was unbecoming

  of an atua to participate in

  petty quarrels they persuaded Her

  So she marvelled at Her general’s undeniable ability)

  Then the ali‘i of ali‘i the Tama‘aiga

  came and beseeched Her through Her taulaaitu

  to reconquer titles they’d lost to tougher rivals

  (including brothers): Auva‘a and Tupa‘i agreed but at

  the price of the Tafa‘ifa our country’s highest titles

  being returned and bestowed on Nafanua

  Tuiatua a miserable braggart begged Her help

  and Tupa‘i and our armies fought

  his enemies and gave him the victory

  Tuia‘ana Tamaalelagi asked the same

  and was victorious (with Tupa‘i’s aid)

  So did Malietoa and Aiga Tunumafono

  Until Nafanua (and our religion) held all

  the Tafa‘ifa Titles — the first in history

  Now there was unity in Her person

  and wars were outlawed (as Auva‘a

  and Tupa‘i had planned for)

  She was hailed Diviner and Uniter

  (4) Ailalolagi

  To Her subjects Her devoted taulaaitu

  projected a noble gracious and
loving atua

  with all the undeniable virtues of a Mother

  But behind that front we had to cover up

  Her enormous misdeeds to do with

  Her appetites and preferences

  In Her youth — the first hundred years or so — She

  was to put it crudely insatiable even

  by the licentious standards of atua (atua

  of course are excused from incest animalism

  sadism masochism fetishism and all vices

  we consider inhumanly deviant)

  Toothless hypocrite! Nafanua interjected

  unexpectedly You schizoid guilt-ridden

  humans want us atua to play out all

  your secret yearnings and cravings!

  True replied Auva‘a but you my dear

  overindulged our sins and vices

  Really wallowed in your meaty excesses

  You were an Eater-of-the-World like

  Mulialofa Vela’s special friend and we’ve

  never blamed you — after all your

  brainless eel-tailed father raised you totally

  as male with not one but four hefty clubs

  Consequently You were four times

  more greedy than other atua

  four times more a World-Eater than Mulialofa

  chasing four times more women than even

  Tuialamu of the Endless Penis (but alas

  you’re cockless!)

  Up you with a spear She swore I’m go-

  ing to bed (Auva‘a chuckled as She

  rushed into the inner chamber) You’re

  just a dirty oldman wormripe for

  death and hooked on shit-stench

  pissings-on obscene whispers and raw dog testicles