Simone Kaho.
Tulia Thompson talks to Simone Kaho about writing, surviving PTSD and the silencing of survivors
When you study poetry at university you are told you can write a poem about anything as long as it is well-crafted, but then you also learn that poetry in Aotearoa actually means restrained, lyric poems about nature. There's an invisible forcefield around what "counts" as a good poem.
Poets like Hera Lindsay Bird and Chris Tse push past the forcefield. Tongan-Pākehā writer Simone Kaho's stunning collection of poetry, Heal!, about being attacked, fighting back and experiencing PTSD, is a vital challenge to the poetry canon.
Kaho is a documentary-maker who works as a reporter/director for Tagata Pasifika. In Heal! the sexual assault acts as a refracting prism for her interactions with men, who are revealed to be rape-complicit by expressing "common-sense" views that support rape. There's the British guy she swims naked with who says, "Perhaps it's because you are so beautiful." When she is stalked, there is a drunk boss: "You're a sexy beast / he said / you / should / expect / stalkers."
When she posts a poem about the stalker, a male in the poetry community says, "What if he'd committed suicide?" It is the ordinary, banal comments from men that convey to women that they see us as sexually available, able to be objectified, and given less empathy. It's a profoundly uncomfortable read, in part because these views are so familiar.
It reminds me a lot of Claudia Rankine's award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric, about white privilege, in which short prose poems about things white people said to her create a sustained, multilayered impression of racism. In both poetry collections, the repeated incidents reveal their force.
While not being strictly narrative, Heal! maintains narrative tension, and a sense of movement. Assault has given Kaho a different lens on past events. In one poem, set during her childhood, she remembers her Tongan dad taking a machete to the bus stop, trying to find a man who sexually assaulted her.
She writes, "The machete is evidence of love and she enjoys the moment quietly." Kaho asked me when we met if anything surprised me about the collection. I said, "No, nothing really surprised me." But it was a lie. What actually surprised me was that another girl had felt about her dad's machete the way I felt about my dad's machete — that it was an ordinary, protective and appropriate weapon.
Tulia Thompson: It's a very brave book. What made you decide to tell this story?
Simone Kaho: Can I just ask you why you think it's brave?
TT: I think it's brave because it's explicitly talking about rape and PTSD. Within New Zealand poetry, it feels like you're discouraged from writing about experiences like this, not necessarily explicitly, but just through the atmosphere.
SK: Yeah, I haven't heard anybody say to me, "You shouldn't write about that." But it feels like there's just a vibe about it. Like it's sharp or the wrong colour or too pungent or visceral or too political. This is not something that fits in.
But I didn't think about that writing this. I'd done the South Seas Film and Television course in 2017, when a lot of my PTSD symptoms were really becoming noticeable. I was really struggling.
I tried to make an action film about a female vigilante. And there was pushback. Pushback can be quite subtle. I was discouraged from making a film about a female protagonist responding violently to male violence. When I was pitching it to industry professionals in front of the whole school, it was questioned whether it was morally right, what the protagonist wanted to do. The horror film pitched straight after me featured a guy eating his mother's face, and got the feedback, "That was a delicious moment!"
So the pushback I got led to an understanding that I was being hushed. And at some point, I just really was like "Nah, f*** this s***." I need to use the most powerful way I have to express myself, which is poetry.
TT: If you're a woman, you are used to men making excuses for male violence. It's just so pervasive.
SK: It's co-opted into politeness. Boys will be boys. That's a blind spot that we all have to agree on. If you respond aggressively or even just assertively to predatory male behaviour, you're being rude. You're the problem. That is definitely something I felt all the time. I was enraged all the time. It was so tiring. And because I'd been in that moment, physically fighting a man during the assault, when I knew there was nothing between us that could protect me, all of those "boys will be boys" behaviours happening afterwards triggered the same sort of horror I'd felt in that moment. Like the only difference between them and the attacker was that he'd made a decision to commit and deal with the consequences.
TT: There's a rigour to your poetry. Is that because of your time at the International Institute of Modern Letters?
SK: I became the poet I am at the IIML, because you're absorbed in it. I had Hinemoana Baker as my supervisor. She said, "Do you care about line breaks? I want you to have no punctuation." And this guttural voice appeared. It's not blaming, even, it's just like brutal truth.
TT: There are men in the book who say sorry that happened, but they don't change their own misogyny. It seems very difficult to create change without men taking more responsibility for talking about sexual violence. What do you think needs to happen?
SK: My concern is with people who've been through sexual violence. My first concern is around our ability to talk about it — it's not a crime that we have done. I don't mean with no regard for context or incessantly but in the same way that if somebody robbed your house and beat you up [you'd talk about it]. It's been really hard, working and going back to life, and trying to find a safe place. It's a lot to navigate. I really want to smash the hushing and shaming that makes survivors of sexual violence have to be brave just to talk about it.
Heal! by Simone Kaho (Saufo'i Press, $30) is out now.
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1. You deliver an ecological message in the guise of a coffee table book. Is the artwork a lure?
It was too good an opportunity to miss. Collectively our early painters and photographers produced a rich and unique record of a relatively pristine New Zealand, at the time when settlement from Europe was just beginning. For example, the book includes two paintings, from 1839 and 1840, by Charles Heaphy of the kauri forests on the Wairoa River, Kaipara.
Such images were used as propaganda by the New Zealand Company, to encourage immigration, with the result that vast areas of kauri were felled – and destroyed in the process – to provide timber for the new settlers' homes. Then there's Alfred Sharpe's 1876 subtly elevated panorama of the Waikato plains, which provides a stark contrast with a photograph of a similar view 140 years later, of the Taupiri interchange on the Waikato Expressway.
2. If a reader takes away one nugget from this book, what do you hope it will be?
My aim in compiling the book was to record the various changes that a thousand or so years of human settlement have inflicted on the New Zealand landscape. With those in mind, I hope it will encourage us to question where we go from here. As we become increasingly aware of the effects of climate change, we must wonder how, and to what extent, we can keep on modifying our natural environment. This is, of course, not just a New Zealand problem. It's worldwide, and at its heart is the ability of the Earth's resources to sustain a growing population in the manner to which it has grown accustomed. As for New Zealanders, this poses such challenges as the degree to which our towns and cities can continue to sprawl, destroying remaining areas of bush and gobbling up good agricultural land.
3. Do you have a favourite image in the book?
There are many "landmark" images, such as the well-known and starkly symbolic Frozen Flames, painted in 1931 by Christopher Perkins, which depicts the aftermath of a bush burn-off. Another of my favourites is Kennett Watkins' 1885 painting, The Haunt of the Moa: A Scene in a Puriri Forest, also in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Deep withIn a dark forest of nīkau palms and gnarled puriri trunks, a hapless moa emerges from behind a tree and is about to reveal itself to a pair of Māori stalkers. The big bird appears to be at the crossroads, for if the hunt is successful it might mark the extinction of the species.
4. You are that rare thing in New Zealand, a full-time writer. How do you make that work?
I had never planned to be a full-time writer. Back in 1997, along with two dozen other staff members, I was made redundant (as Curator of Display) at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. That unexpected change of direction gave me the opportunity to spend more time on what had previously been just an after-hours activity. A quarter of a century and some 40 books later, I'm still at it. I enjoy coming up with ideas for books, and am grateful to publishers who have given me opportunities to realise them. I also enjoy the challenge of dreaming up and researching articles for our leading art quarterly, Art New Zealand.
5. What book have you read this year that you are recommending to others?
I have recently read and enjoyed A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes, by English science writer and genetics expert Adam Rutherford (no relation to Sir Ernest). He divulges the startling fact that anyone of European extraction is descended from Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who lived from 747 to 814AD. The point is that the further we go back up our family trees, the more interconnected and related all of us are. Perhaps if humanity at large was more aware of this fact, the world would be a much happier place.
Footprints on the Land, by Richard Wolfe (Oratia Books, $45), is out now.
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