Scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville was asked to contribute a piece for a journal to mark the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's arrival in Aotearoa – that article is now published as Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, in the BWB Texts series. In this extract, Te Punga Somerville explores pushing back against Cook's global colonial legacy.
34. By pushing back
One of the projects of Indigenous people is to push back against colonial narratives. This is the bit I describe to my students as walking into a room on the television show Hoarders, getting a broom and a rubbish bag, climbing over all the junk until you get to the centre and making a space that reveals some of the floor underneath. If you started at the door and tried to work your way in, you would get discouraged by the sheer size of the job. This is probably how people end up on Hoarders in the first place. It's not that they trashed their room in one day, and it's not that they can't see there's a problem. They just get tired when they stand at the doorway and start timidly picking through things. So tired they can't tell the difference between rubbish and keepsakes anymore. So overwhelmed they confuse tiredness with sentimentality. But when you clamber over the junk to the centre you can see how much of it can be discarded. And when you see the floor again, for the first time in years maybe, you feel a bit emotional. You see a glimpse of the floor, and you suddenly remember how the room used to be – but also how it could be. You suddenly realise, with a shock, that when you see the floor you shift your focus on the junk piled on top of it. You used to see a room full of hard work. Now you see an alternative future. You could live in this room again.
35 By holding the space
There is quite a process between starting the clean-up and getting to the part of Hoarders where the shiny, clean room is revealed in its glory. Most of this is edited out because it's not compelling viewing. There is a lot of trudging in and out, there are a lot of rubbish bags, there is a lot of stopping for meals and sleep. There are a thousand tiny decisions and daily conversations about the hoarder, about how this is a good decision even though it feels so painful and disorienting right now. There is a long period of time where the clean-up crew have to expend as much energy holding back the towers of trash from falling into the clean centre as they do actually cleaning. Things could topple – but not in a riveting, adrenalin-pumping, suspenseful way. Things are just really precarious for a really long time and people need to hold back the mess while other people clear out the accumulation of decades. No one wants to watch this bit.
36 With a clean room I
Finally there is a room again - and this is where everyone is so happy and excited about the future. It looks amazing and the audience can't believe anyone could have let such a nice room get so chaotic and dangerous. Of course, the mess is psychological. It's a pattern of coping (or not coping). The risk is that the mess reappears. The hope is that, having seen the room with new eyes, the psychological side of things has changed too. Despite or maybe because of the painful process, the hoarder has found other ways to cope with being in this space.
37 With a clean room II
Once the room has been cleared and cleaned, something glimpsed through the chaos is now the foundation of the space. You can do so much in a room that is this clean. When you look at it, you see a room. You don't see a pile of junk. You aren't involved in endless conversations about the hoarder anymore – you can find new things to talk about. You can see out the windows. It's not a perfect room, but it's a room that allows you people to live in it. And this, after all, is all you need.
