Telling Truth Aslant

On 14 August, I meet with Selina during her sabbatical in a historical villa of the city of Bad Homburg, Germany, where she is tying up academic and creative projects before embarking on a 779-kilometre-long pilgrimage, the Camino Francés. In the living-room, there are copies of the third volume of her popular graphic novel Mophead; a fourth volume is currently in the making. In her study, the table is covered with printouts of a manuscript for an academic monograph about the first twenty Pasifika women poets to publish a collection of poetry in English. Germany having been hit by a heatwave, we move to the bedroom (the coolest part of the house), and sit opposite one another cross-legged on the floor. Selina has brought her journal, which will accompany her on her walk, and I my questions about how she uses creative work to heal herself and others, and about what sparks her creativity. 

AE: Recently, you’ve become the first-ever Commonwealth Poet Laureate, tasked with – no pressure – ‘work[ing] on behalf of the entire Commonwealth family, connecting its 2.7 billion citizens through poetry’. In your response to this recognition, you quoted a Māori proverb linking artistic excellency to human dignity. Can you tell us more about how you understand this connection, and about how this understanding underpins your vision for your new role? 

STM: I first heard that proverb in a lecture given by Albert Wendt, known as the godfather of Pacific literature. It reads: He toi whakairo, he mana tangata, ‘where there is artistic excellence, there is human dignity’. The lecture emphasised that Pacific creativity, Pacific writing – in this supposed post-colonial era – must be valued on its own creative merits rather than viewed through an anthropological or sociological lens. These lenses are windows into culture, of course, but to have these as the only way into a culture at the expense of looking at art forms is to denigrate a whole people. As a literary critic, I’ve seen that over the years Pacific poetry tended not to be included in anthologies, say in Australasian anthologies or New Zealand anthologies, since poetry from these regions was seen as deficient when held up to certain Eurocentric forms of expression. It became my mission to expose the beauty and the complexity of this art, and to show that art and aesthetics and beauty belong to all of us – to all of humanity.  

AE: From your account of the connection between human dignity and aesthetics, it becomes clear that your Laureateship will be simultaneously political and literary. Can you give us an example of what this work will look like? 

STM: Political work can be laborious and heavy. It entails constant agitation for recognition of basic human rights. My aim is, through creativity, to bring a lightness to dealing with political issues. The first poem that was published under the Laureateship, ‘Uncommon Banyan’, is based on the Commonwealth Charter, which I turned into a rhyming couplet form. I chose this form because of its accessibility, especially when it’s in iambic pentameter – the great walking rhythm. 

AE: You envisage your poetry, as you stated in your acceptance speech, as a means for ‘amplify[ing] the voices that heal, challenge, and unite our Commonwealth family’, and ‘Uncommon Banyan’ features the line: ‘Art heals by telling truth aslant’ (in reference also to Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’). How do you conceive of the healing powers of poetry at work for the Commonwealth?  

STM: What is important to me is the idea that everyone has the right to write. Creativity is the great equaliser, because everyone has, or should have, access to it. I have experienced this equalising force of poetry in various settings. I run workshops in community halls, I work with children in schools, and – a perhaps surprising context – facilitate a program for Pacific leaders in middle management in the corporate and non-government sectors. Many of them were put off poetry and didn’t have access to poetry at school and weren’t made aware of what relevance poetry might have to their lives. It is such a privilege to be able to facilitate that journey from ‘Poetry’s got nothing to do with me’ to ‘Oh my goodness, I just wrote a poem! One that carries not just me, but my family. And it forges my place in this society. And it contains the vision for who I am and everything I want to be.’ For me, this is the healing potential of poetry – and it is for absolutely everyone. 

AE: That brings me to Dark Sparring, a poetry collection that emerged from a grieving period surrounding your mother’s death. When did you begin work on the collection? Was it sparked by a particular idea or event? Do you recall the experiences in response to which specific poems were written?  

STM: When my mother grew up in Samoa, if you went to the hospital, you were not coming out. The services were poorly resourced. She carried that with her and didn’t trust the Western medical system. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she held a deep spiritual belief against the cutting open of one’s body. She feared the inflow of bad spirits, which, if you were to translate it into the terms of Western medicine, might refer to bacteria. She took Chinese and Samoan traditional medicinal herbs and, while the doctors said, ‘You're not going to live the year out’, she lived for seven years on her own terms. A couple of poems in Dark Sparring were written during that period – when I was helping my siblings, who were primary caregivers, care for mum. ‘To war with story’ talks about mum and Western perspectives on her illness. ‘Genesis’ uses the biblical narrative to explore the growth of tumors in the body. There were also poems about her prescriptions and the endless round of ‘What has she had? What has she got tomorrow?’ Poetry helped during this time, but the main impetus for putting the collection together came after she died. 

AE: Which was when you also took up kickboxing? 

STM: Yes, the two are linked. I wasn’t present when Mum left the earth – she was alone in hospital, which is unthinkable for a Samoan family. I should have stayed the night with her but I had just finished work, had three young children to tend to, was staying at my brother’s house (I live on Waiheke Island), and was just too tired to face a disrupted night of sleep on a guest mattress on the hospital floor. I am a naturally optimistic person with a vibrant spiritual belief system, but the grief and guilt really hit me. I wasn’t sleeping much and didn’t feel like anyone knew what I was going through. I would get the boys ready for school and then go back to bed, covers over my head, and just lie there for the day. Then a friend texted me out of the blue and asked, ‘Are you coming to kickboxing?’ At that moment, the door cracked open, and I thought, if I don’t do something different, today will be like yesterday and yesterday will be my tomorrow. So, I turned up. Because I was new, the trainer would wrap my hands every time I went. It was the most intimate thing: tenderly, gently holding someone’s hands and wrapping them in cotton – that human contact with a stranger who seemed to know me. It was weird and wonderful. It got me out of the spiraling thought cycle about having left my mother to die alone and all the things I should have done. The space was significant, too. We were in a big tin shed with a boxing ring in the middle. There’d be gangster rap music playing and I felt like being in a safe womb-like space where my body learned how to move differently in the world. I had never punched or kicked anything ever before. I had an epiphany that while I thought I knew myself, I didn’t – that I don’t know what I’m capable of and what’s possible. I learned to know myself differently, and this was empowering. This self-discovery through the body was what I had to put language to. 

AE: Why was poetry – and the specific words, forms, and rhythms of Dark Sparring – the appropriate medium for expressing your process of self-discovery? 

STM: While I say that poetry is so emancipatory because you speak your story out into the world, in this particular situation, I couldn’t find voice. What I mean is that I couldn’t express what I was feeling in a way that wasn’t clichéd. I love writing that comes straight from the heart and is unfiltered. I don’t think this kind of confessional writing should be labelled as a lesser genre in the hierarchy of literature. At the same time, I needed to find poetry that would appeal to my own internal aesthetic of saying something slant. So, I borrowed my trainer’s language and the rhythms of kickboxing. He had a dog-eared original manual on Muay Thai kickboxing in Thai, which I drew on. I started writing poems and using the language of Muay Thai to describe what I was feeling and thinking. I started writing about and through that. 

AE: You have spoken about the fatele – the Tuvaluan traditional dance that your extended family performed as part of the mourning rituals – as another epiphany. How did these dance rhythms, in addition to those of kickboxing, transform your writing and your grieving? 

STM: The principle for learning the fatele is the same as that for learning Muay Thai kickboxing: throw on the gloves and follow me. Mum lay in a state for seven days and, when we finally moved her, the aunties just picked me and my sister up and said: ‘Farewell your mother.’ No one had ever showed us what the dance was or told us the meaning. We just copied their movements. The fatele is such a beautiful dance, and very simple – not like the hula, where there’re so many stories to tell with the hands and feet. The fatele involves simple repetitive movements, starting off very slow and then getting faster and faster and faster. As with Muay Thai, it is about copying until you get the technique right, before you speed up and eventually let your body and the movements take over. In the ring, my trainer would teach me to not think. He would say, ‘The body knows what it knows. Let it lead. Let your instinct take over. Let it find its own rhythm.’ When we’d be sparring, everything else in my life would fall away. The purity of that moment and the deep presence in it are the same as in dancing the fatele.  

Then, there was the collective experience. The fatele is a line dance, so everyone’s doing the same. Something happens in the body where your specific emotion gets carried out and along the wave of movement because you’re looking down the row and there’s people in front and people behind you, and you are moving from person to line to group. Up until then, the grief had been this individual feeling that sat with me, shared with my siblings. The dance became a collective emotional channel in which I still experienced grief intimately on an individual level. It was the most stunning thing. What I found in both practices was that the beauty comes from there being a very quiet silent space, even for a few seconds, where there’s nothing, where you are no longer there, yet you’re part of everything. That, I think, is healing for body and mind. 

AE: Perhaps you can have those moments also in poetry when space and pauses are created through the rhythm of the words and sometimes also typographically on the page. 

STM: Yes, absolutely. I think a fatele works in ways analogous to line breaks in poetry. It is that movement back and forth. I’ve often thought that, once we take poetry into a holographic medium, that’s what it would be like: a thing we could project into internal spaces with, where part of you could pause, while something else continues on to bring the experiences – of nothingness and of being part of everything – together. But, you know, we work in two dimensions with print on paper, so we do the best we can. 

AE: Something you can do in print is arrange – not only the words for each poem, but also different poems in relation to one another. Part I of Dark Sparring contains poems about identity and culture, geographical locations and travel (for example, ‘Chant from Matiatia to Orapiu’, ‘Airport road to Apia’, ‘Teaching Pacific literature’, ‘Girl from Tuvalu’, and ‘New Zealand, the lucky country’), while Part II engages with cancer, death, mourning, and kickboxing (for example, through ‘Genesis’, ‘50 ways to read a mother’, ‘13 ways of looking at mourning’, ‘Boxing’, ‘Fatele’, ‘Floating ribs’, and ‘First spar’). How do these two parts of the volume relate to one another? 

STM: The relation between Part I and Part II is a movement between the individual and the collective, the specific and the universal, which is mirrored in the fatele dance. I wrote most of the poems in Part I before grief started to dominate my consciousness. The first poems are about me, my landlines, my bloodlines. Part II is about me experiencing the universal – cancer, death, grief, and mourning. Both are brought together in the collection under its title; both parts play on dark: the dark end of the world, and the darkness of sparring with death and grief. 

AE: You suggested ‘Kickboxing cancer’ as a poem from the collection we might explore in more detail. This poem, the third-to-last in the collection, formally echoes your poem ‘Fast-Talking PI’, which in turn is a tribute to Anne Waldman’s ‘Fast Speaking Woman’. We have the familiar chant-pattern of lines that go: ‘I am a [fill the blank] woman.’ The blank is filled by references to kickboxing, to specific body parts, to mourning, to family relations, and to poetic creation. What specifically about Waldman’s poem inspired these two works? 

STM: When I first saw Waldman’s performance online, she channeled something. She ranted at that podium with an intensity and bravery that blew my mind. It planted something in me which I knew was going to come up again. I love trying on different forms and seeing where they move in my own world. ‘Fast Talking PI’ is the form of ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ changing the primary lens from gender to ethnicity. I turned it into a channeling poem for me and the community to counter stereotypes about Pacific peoples. In ‘Kickboxing cancer’, I turned the same form into a channeling poem for me as a woman grieving. 

AE: How did you write the poem? Which images and lines came first? Did you revise for meter and rhyme scheme, or was this in place from the start? 

STM: After the first lines –  

– it just came. The language led the way.  

Often, with long poems, I get into a flow state. Time just stops and I’m being led. I am sonically attuned – speaking the words out loud and grabbing the air for sounds to create the next line and stanza. I put the words into place and then I see what happens as I rearrange them and cull them. And as I’m culling, I’m saying yes to this world and no to that world. It’s such a rich experience. This is also what happened with ‘Kickboxing cancer’. The sound of the language led the way: the homonyms and the rhymes. I just followed it. You get visited by the muse and if you don’t take dictation down right there and then, you’re going to miss it. The poem was written as a first draft in one long piece after mum had died when I was still ‘jabbing at my own eyes’. 

AE: The way you’ve just described the writing process – the sounds of the language leading the way – sounds similar to how you described kickboxing and the fatele. You copy and follow until the body takes over. 

STM: That’s right. You repeat the line and then you vary a tiny bit. 

AE: When you follow and vary in this way, do you know where the process will take you? 

STM: Not fully, no. I love poems that juxtapose things – things that you wouldn’t normally put together. That clash creates fresh insight for me and enables me to get around that ever-present challenge of not writing things in the same way everyone else has. In ‘Kickboxing cancer’, new things emerge from the juxtaposition of principles and language from kickboxing, the fatele, and grief, and the result entails surprises for myself, too. 

AE: In addition to juxtapositions, you play with words quite a lot, for example, changing or adding single letters, as in ‘Culling words as I go’ / ‘Culling worlds as I go’, or ‘knowing woman’ and ‘knotting woman’. Does this strategy of following and varying work in similar ways, entail similar surprises?  

STM: This strategy, too, is based on the principle of contiguity. You place two dissimilar things together and the space between them allows the reader – and me – to forge connections. One must ask: What’s the knowing and the knotting? What are our knots? In which ways do we know? When I go into schools, I often put words and worlds on a blackboard and then I say, the difference is only one letter. That’s the power of language; that’s how magical it is. Words always know more than I do at a given time when I choreograph them. 

AE: You have spoken about performing poetry as cathartic. What about the process of writing? Does writing change how you feel in the moment or afterwards? Are there moments and moods in which you cannot write? Others in which you must write, perhaps? 

STM: There certainly is cross-influence between how I feel and how I write. I’ve got a morning page practice that I take from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (1992). I write three pages longhand. This kind of writing helps me to know what I think, and that includes again and again, if need be, writing out my grief and writing out the gifts mum has given me, speaking that out into reality through writing. How my morning free writing goes gives an indication about whether I’m in an open or closed state. At times, I’m in flow; at others, my thoughts are jammed up and I can’t even complete a page. When this happens, I know there’s something inside that doesn’t want to get loose through writing.  

AE: What do you do when that happens? 

SMT: Then, I need to move my body. I walk in the forest, or do some yoga, or put on a song and dance. Usually, though, writing is my go-to for all kinds of life challenges. You’ve got the science that proves how powerful longhand writing is for brain health, but I can tell you from my experience that it’s very therapeutic even just to watch my own hand move across the page. 

AE: There’s clearly something to forming words on paper by hand. 

STM: Yes, and it also matters how you write. Two years ago, I learned about the handwriting style pioneered by Vimala Rogers. This is a handwriting system linked to several spiritual traditions and to psychology. Rogers points out, for example, that typically we draw our zeroes or Os anticlockwise and recommends changing this to a clockwise loop that enforces positive, forward thinking. I write the way I feel and while I like to be neat, my handwriting is often a messy reflection of my inner state. So, I decided in my late forties, to finally develop a style. And now I’ve got this beautiful cursive, psychologically informed and deeply satisfying handwriting which I use. 

AE: Which kinds of pen and paper do you work with? Do you feel that different materials enable different forms of thinking, feeling, and writing?  

STM: Materials are quite important. I like to write in flowy ink and in a journal with no lines. It has to be A4 since I need the expansiveness of the page. I’ve found that the ideal notebook is the A4 Moleskine journal. I’ve tried writing in smaller journals, but I can’t. I’ve tried working in twenty-cent school exercise books to save money, but I don’t complete them. Here, right now I have a slightly bigger version of what I normally write in, and that is proving a bit difficult too.  

Choosing the material I intuitively respond to is a small but significant way for me to honour this time for just me – a kind of ritual. A lot of women have issues with spending money on themselves. This has been one of my challenges, too, because I’m the head of a large household I need to keep fed and happy. Therefore, when I decided that these materials are central to my mental health, this was quite significant. Now I know it is worth spending thirty New Zealand dollars for the month on a journal and another ten on an ink pen. I owe that to my wellbeing, and I no longer justify it to anyone anymore. 

AE: I assume the computer comes in quite late in your creative practice? 

STM: Yes, and for two reasons. Firstly, often it isn’t there. What I love to use instead are small non-stick notes, which I always carry on me. Often, a line or an image will come out on it in writing, and then I’ll tuck it away. On the computer, I’ll transcribe stuff; and then, if it is a significant poem, I need to print it out, scribble on the piece of paper, edit it online, read it out, and this goes back and forth between paper medium, screen medium, and also my voice medium. If it’s a significant poem, I’ll record it and then I’ll listen to it – while I’m walking, for example – and then refine it that way. I work with a range of media, but the start is most commonly on paper. There have also been cases when I would have used a computer but wasn’t near a printer and therefore had to write the poem out on paper. Retrospectively, in those cases I was glad that I didn’t let that poem go on the screen. There’s something deceptive about looking at a poem on a screen because things look polished and finished. That’s the second reason why I bring in the computer quite late. 

AE: You must be facing some constraints when it comes to these rituals and materials during your sabbatical, especially next month on the Camino. How many notebooks will you be carrying? 

STM: [Laughs out loud.] When my family come from New Zealand, I tell them, ‘You better have five kilos less so I can give you journals as I go along.’ For the Camino, smaller notebooks would make so much sense, but I will carry the extra load because it’s important. The writing materials are my faithful companion, my consort. 

AE: You have spoken earlier about the landlines and bloodlines at the core of Dark Sparring, and you have developed a ‘Led-by-Line’ methodology entwining such lines with lines of poetry and drawing. Will the landline of the Camino be feeding into your art? Can we look forward to poems from this walk?  

STM: Absolutely. The poems I have been working on most recently have been about being led by the line of this thousand-years-old pilgrimage, which moreover crosses over ley lines – these significant energetic lines connecting the earth’s ancient sites. I know that the walk will be fantastic for my creative work and, beyond that and deeper, just good for me to be led by line, putting one foot in front of the other. How much more embodied can you get? What I’m wanting to do, without controlling it, is to create little poems along the way, even though the most important thing for me is just to be experiencing the lines of the land. 

AE: How does the led-by-line praxis play out when you are not literally walking? 

STM: On the page, being led by line is all about play. A few weeks ago, I was stuck with my writing. I had put so much pressure on myself; I needed to play again. So, I did a task from Lynda Barry’s Making Comics (2019): painting quick self-portraits, sometimes with the dominant and sometimes with the non-dominant hand. The purpose is to get a line on the page without evaluating whether it is good or bad. I did body shapes that would start with a circle or long object and added my own aesthetic to that. Those playful lines that didn’t have to conform to any rules helped me write again, brought back my creative energy, and made everything lighter. That is an example of being led by the literal line on the page.  

Another way of being led by line is visible in my monograph on Pasifika poets, an academic book but slightly unconventional as those go. I’m led by these women’s key working metaphors, which are often in the titles of their poetry collections. In deciding which poems and metaphors to discuss, I let myself be led by the title’s line, so I don’t have to choose. I just go through that single, direct line to lead me into their world. It is essentially the way that I work as a poet, too, through the magic of synchronicities and happenstance.  

In addition, my led by line methodology is an Indigenous praxis. I write about it in this sense in an article on Indigenous pedagogy in the context of teaching and writing in Oceania. There, I explain how my tatau lines [shows tattoos on her lower arm and hand] function as portals into cultural ways of knowing, doing, and being. In this sense, my led-by-line methodology is both very old and very new.  

AE: You said that your book will not be the standard academic monograph. What makes it different and who are you writing it for? 

STM: There is another line – a line running through the book, connecting these poets. They are all deeply involved in recuperating their humanity as colonised, or formerly colonised, subjects as well as the humanity and the spirit of their people. They’re all involved in the business of healing by speaking through their words as poets. That’s what makes my book relevant to everybody because each of these poets offers wisdom for living today. And because of where I am now – now that I don’t have to prove myself in the academy anymore – I get to write the book my way: in a more conversational tone, reading with a Pasifika poet-scholar’s eye and ear. My aim is to bring healing and light and joy and release to a readership, to a community, to people.