Nina Mingya Powles

Small Bodies of Water

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'A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit,’ Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass. I think of the last bodies of water I have touched sustaining me, connecting me to places I can’t reach.

But being tauiwi doesn’t mean I’m left drifting, rootless, untethered to an ancestral homeland. It means tracing the threads back to the roots of my history, my colonial history, and holding all the pieces in my hands. It means always looking for the sea.

As the Aotearoa writer K. Emma Ng asks: ‘How can we belong here, become “from here”, without re-enacting the violence that is historically embedded in the gesture of trying to belong?’

As the American writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman writes, when I step into this room, I must confront ‘the authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters’. This room is beautiful, but I feel the weight of its history.

What if dialects are not branches, but roots?

I am longing now more than ever to touch the sea, or even just to be within sight of the sea for a moment: for some small reminder that it’s still there, that I am still surrounded by water.

I observe my little garden passing through the micro-seasons. Season of sunflower seedlings, season of wet jasmine, season of cabbage butterflies alighting on brassica leaves. But what does it mean to attempt to put roots down in a country that forever finds you alien, an outsider, exotically mixed?

'A remarkable book' Robert Macfarlane 'A distinctive new voice: attentive and tender' Amy Liptrot 'Elegant, understated, urgent and nourishing' Jessica J. Lee Home is many people and places and languages, some separated by oceans. Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo – where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London. This lyrical collection of interconnected essays explores the bodies of water that separate and connect us, as well as everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar to butterflies. In powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together personal memories, dreams and nature writing. It reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and explores what it means to belong.

azliana aziz

i was most stunned by the range of themes and powles' prowess in effortlessly seaming them all together. also the structure ? how it flows ? amazing.

reflections on identity, belongingness, and the ways nature reveals to us the connection between our environment and what we see as our 'homes,' this book vividly captured powles' life brimming with intimacy towards the places she has made a home in. the fragmented format of writing in a number of chapters did not break away from the tenderness in how she writes of water, of swimming, of pools, of whales, of nature in their garden cultivated by her family. it's a really contemplative memoir that makes you invite questions of your own culture, heritage, and relationships with nature in the end. 

3.75 stars~ I love Nina Mingya Powles’ writing. Journals and essays full of memory, emotion, experience, tastes, feeling, history. Check my highlights for some excerpts!

Small Bodies of Water

Reviews

Highlights