Thrice Over The Fire: Some Reflections On Contact, Culture, Context And Whiteness – Emma Green

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. The seed of a poem, first conceived at a noho marae at Te Puea in 2012, offers a way into some reflections on contact, culture, context and whiteness, particularly in relation to whakapapa and tūrangawaewae. Writings unfolding from that original poem have been growing and developing inside the writer since that time and some of those thoughts will be shared here in an open forum intended to be a place for discussion, conversation and thinking together. Poetry and poetical thinking can illuminate hard to reach places, surfacing lived experiences that hide in their everydayness. Poetry might open up “branches of the otherwise intractable psychic cave system that runs through the bodies of all humans… a resourceful imagination audaciously pushing forward into still unsecured galleries… expanding the confines of our shared imaginaries” (Grünbein, 2010, pp. 90-91). This resourceful imagination might bring whiteness out of its invisibility, might lay it bare for closer inspection, facilitating greater understandings and openness. The intention of the presentation is to provoke thinking and conversation about whiteness and identity in relation to biculturalism, as well as to stimulate potential for personal and political change and possibilities for using poetry and poetical thinking in the therapeutic endeavour.