Edge walker
There she is — the ebullient Selina Tusitala Marsh, daughter of the Pacific, newly minted Commonwealth Poet… Avondale Represent! Six-foot tall, absurdly elegant in an electric-blue puletasi (traditional Samoan dress), she stands on Westminster Abbey’s sacrarium steps. Her hair, the mane that caused such childhood anguish — “Mophead”, “Toilet brush”, they called her — frames her face like an immense Elizabethan ruff. She breathes in and wonders: “Should I have worn the gold jandals?”
Yesterday, she was given the tour. She pottered about Poets’ Corner, ran her finger along Chaucer’s name, touched the Brontë sisters’ plaque, stepped on CS Lewis’s by mistake. She saw a faintly familiar face, a man who smiled at her and looked mischievous, as cunning as a weasel. She smiled back at Edmund Blackadder. Later, she’d be formally introduced. Very pleased to meet you, Sir John Major.
She breathes in again. She is focused, primed: then a flash of thoughts fly through her head. Family — aiga — brother Luka, sister Sam, husband Dave, their three sons. And her mother, who died seven years earlier — oh, what she would’ve given to be here. No one was a greater royalist than Sailigi Tusitala “Lina” Crosbie. Ten thousand breakfasts were eaten under the gaze of a portrait of the future Queen, Princess Elizabeth, straight-backed in the saddle, forever 21.
“But her peeps also colonised my peeps,” said the poet in the Guardian. Yes, of course the poet realises the constraints of her commission. “Sell Out!” a colleague had sneered. Suckling at Britannia’s teat? Wow, that hurt. But then an email the night before from the staunchest of Maori activists, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. Another rebuke? “It is not selling out,” Ngahuia wrote. “It is BEING THERE. Where the fuckers need to see, and hear, and watch, and learn from us, on our terms.”
The poem is called “Unity”, 322 words recited from heart, a paean to the Pacific, to her late grandfather’s home of Tuvalu, now threatening to slip beneath the waves:
My grandad’s from Tuvalu and to be specific it’s plop bang in the middle of the South Pacific the smallest of our fifty-three commonwealth nations the largest in terms of reading vast constellations my ancestors were guided by sky and sea trails and way before Columbus even hoisted his sails!
This date — March 14, 2016 — is when Selina Tusitala Marsh goes mainstream. It’s on One News and — more importantly to an insecure little land obsessed with overseas approbation — it’s live on the BBC.
It’s an undeniably significant moment. For New Zealanders of a certain age, Gen X and older, we remember the Oxford Union Debate when David Lange boomed, “I can smell the uranium on your breath.” We cheered our man taking it the world — and yet Selina’s stage was far larger than a couple of hundred self-satisfied Oxford toffs and Bullingdon boys (with the fall guy a second-rate American evangelist). This was the inner sanctum of Empire — with all the lords and ladies, the barons, the viscounts, pretty much the whole Firm, for goodness’ sake. There’s Kofi Annan, there’s (then) British Prime Minister
