the hospital receptionist, august, 2023
‘anō’ you say, ‘anō’
‘it’s always the other.’
well, let me tell you this, eh
it IS
in fact the other:
the white ignorant other
who still regales me with
inane, insane, insulting
‘you don’t look like a Māori.’
&
when I refuse to relate to such shit,
states their silly question again,
until I stymie them in my own reo
& they recoil, stumble and s t u t t e r, ‘kia ora’,
as if their tongue has been mortally wounded;
- for that is all they know, eh.
it is as if, somehow
I am in the wrong,
have diddled them existentially,
taken away their certitude that all of us
are dark and have thick nostrils,
or some such prehensile crap,
they seem to have grown themselves
d
o
w
n with.
‘anō, I will continue to say, ‘anō’
and then ‘utu’
‘utu utu,
utu too to you,
until the cows come home’ -
and this pākehā nation
cuddled and coddled,
curdled with a milk of human swineness
gets its whey together
and accepts us
as we are.
nā te mea
he tāngata Māori mātou
p ū m a u m a u.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish, Esperanto. He is the author and editor/co-editor of over 50 books. His latest is Sexual Predation and TEFL (De Gruyter Brill, 2025), a further critique of agents pushing the English language on to Indigenous communities.
