Nina Mingya Powles

Small Bodies of Water

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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?

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.

What if dialects are not branches, but roots?

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.

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?’

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.

'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.

"Where is the place your body is anchored? Which body of water is yours? Is it that I've anchored myself in too many places at once, or nowhere at all?"

"Where does spring begin? Where does it end?"

"(...) although my pieces of home are scattered, I will always find my way to them."

Small Bodies of Water quotes

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