NATASHA LAMPARD
from Mother Tongue
Extract 1
Which one it was I can’t remember now: the ninth I think. I know it seems strange to lose count – women are made to be counting machines, creatures of moon cycles and chiming body clocks, we are timekeepers. Tick tock, your time is running out, I remember reading on a billboard for Fertility Associates. But to calculate those numbers, to tally the losses, is to dwell there too long. It is to risk being consumed by it. Not thinking about it keeps it distant; means I give it no opportunity to catch me and trap me in its myriad jagged-edged, intricate parts, and send me spiralling.
This one has not the high drama of the previous episode on that packed plane. No clenching or contortion, no sudden saturation; no clots as black as tar, no clots as big as saucers; no ambulance on the tarmac; no sirens; no morphine; no doctors with whispered words and grave faces; no hastily signed forms for surgery to try to stop the draining of blood, of life – of the child’s and of my own.
This one is just me laid out on an examination table, naked from the waist down, ankles together and knees apart. Just a screen with a bean-like shape. Just stillness where sound should be heard and movement should be seen. Just one woman in a white coat standing over me in a dark room, saying, I’m sorry, there is no heartbeat.
With a tilted head and a mouth like an em dash and sad eyes in a perfunctory kind of way, she hands me the scans, a parting gift that is no gift at all.
I wish Ben was here. But also, in a way, I am relieved he is not. I do not want to load him with this. I don’t want him to feel he has to carry the weight of it. And I do not wish my grief in this moment to be observed, even, by – or perhaps especially by – those closest to me. I deserve nothing. No words of comfort. By the time I see him tonight, at home, I will have moderated my emotions. He will find me even-keeled. I will not be a mess for someone to have to clean up.
I walk to the car but I cannot remember where I parked. I go up the steps to the carpark and circle around. I go this way and that: no car here. I go down the stairs to the other parking area and perform the same routine; a lost and meandering Sunday stroll on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Friday, what day is this?
Finally I remember the car’s location. In haste to minimise my lateness – a screech of tires, jettisoned driver, running, panting, puffing, I’m here for a 1 p.m. appointment, sorry I’m late – I must not have noticed the large tree I parked beneath, its arms out high over the bonnet as if to offer shelter, as if to offer shelter to me in this moment. Peppering the car, autumn leaves have fallen, discoloured and dry and withered. The tree has also lost something of itself today.
I cannot find my keys. I chastise myself: always losing things. Finally, keys are found and car is unlocked and I get inside. I sit holding the plastic envelope containing photos of my bean-shaped thing formerly known as a baby. I am silent and still, almost as silent and still as it is, only not quite. I hear voices coming from somewhere, behind me, around me. They sound buoyant. There is laughter. I do not wish to hear their joy. I turn the radio on and Active is playing deep house with a deep bass, which whomps against my nerve endings. I change the channel to Concert, and I hear the haunt of Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The second movement, the lament of a child, a plea to its mother: Oh mama do not cry.
The song sews itself into me, a restitching with blunt needle, wire thread. I do not exhale for what seems like a long time, holding breath inside me as if it could – perhaps, maybe, by some miracle – be repurposed, upcycled. To give breath to that small one whose beat and breath has ceased. I sit there still, there in the car, for the song’s whole movement, my only movement water working its way from eye, down cheek, falling to lap. I remain there for other songs, but I am not listening now. I am not seeing or hearing or thinking or breathing. I feel like a discarded skin, an empty shell. Like something discoloured and dry and withered; something fallen.
I snap back into focus. Re-animate. Ready myself to leave this pity-party of one. Remind self to exhale. Put keys in ignition, turn car on, push lever forward, put car into drive. I do not recall the drive itself – a careless decision really, driving under the influence of excess emotion – but now I am outside work, and I find a park, and turn off the car and get into the lift. I go through the glass doors and walk back to my desk. I can feel my boss looking at me, expecting explanation and apology. I have been gone longer than anticipated. I will email her instead of using my voice, which I just know will fracture if the weight of even the slightest pressure is applied.
Hi Leslie
I’m sorry I’m so late back from lunch. I had an appointment and was held up. I should have texted while there to let you know. I will work late tonight to make up the time. So sorry again.
Tash
She replies: OK.
I spend a long time staring intently at my screen, face scrunched like a wrung-out Chux cloth. I adopt the look that says: I am immersed in challenging, meaningful work. I am adding shareholder value by efficiently actioning innovative solutions. I tap letters on the keyboard that do not make words, but make the outward signs and sounds of studious busy-ness, performative action, a mime-like equivalent to a do not disturb sign on a hotel door.
My computer screen feels both too close and too far away. The office feels hot and bright, both too quiet and too loud. Everything is pulsing. Except one thing. I take myself to the bathroom to splash water on my face and lean against a wall, rest my flushed cheeks against cool black tiles, be silent except for my breath beneath dim light. I want to be alone, but here, drying her hands, is Carol, the company’s legal counsel. We used to chat a lot about dogs, John Pilger documentaries, all the travel she has done – Asia, the Americas, onwards and all around. These days, we talk less frequently, small crumbs of hurried conversation as we pass each other en route to meetings.
She says, Hey!, and a strange voice I don’t recognise but that seems to be coming from me says, Hey, back. You okay? she asks, and unexpectedly, to her and to me, a crack forms and spreads fast along the flimsy fault line of my emotional façade, and I begin to cry and I cannot make it stop. Fissures everywhere. She makes a series of small flapping motions with her hands like a cartoon baby bird trying to take flight. What’s wrong? she says, Oh! Oh! And between gushes of tears and gulps of air, I say, I’m sorry, I’ve just had a miscarriage. And she says, Oh my God, I’m so sorry. She tilts her head and says, They’re just so common, right. My friend just had one. And she begins to rub my back gently, and I do not wish to be touched but I do not wish to offend her by moving away, so I stand there, face lowered – pinched and blotchy, torso taut, arms pinned tightly against myself as if compressing my inner core and outer crust and perhaps, maybe, by some miracle, I might disintegrate, turn to dust, a conical pile of grey ash on the black floor. Poof – gone!
I need to be alone. I have said too much. I say, I’m sorry. I just need to go, please don’t tell anyone – about this, and I wave my hand like I’m casting a spell to make her forget all she has witnessed. And she says, Yes, yes, of course. The tears have slowed now, and I wipe my eyes and take a large bite of air as though I am about to flip backwards and submerge into murky depths. I walk back through the office, head lowered so no one can see my smudged, mottled face. I go to Leslie’s desk, and I say in a small voice like it’s coming from inside a large closed box, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to go home. I’m really not feeling well. I look at her and for a brief moment, I think I see her face darken: I have disappointed. Again. She looks at me and narrows her eyes as if trying to compute this person before her, this dishevelled scene.
She stands and turns her hand upward, outward, forward, leading me into one of the little glass meeting rooms. I orient myself so my back is to the rest of the office, I do not want them to see the state of me. She says, Right, what’s up? And I go to tell her, thinking I have it together, that I have a lid on it, but I do not and it all comes out, a pyroclastic flow of fast-moving words, burning my mouth as I say them and my ear as as I hear them: Hospital, scan, no heartbeat, again, another one, so many now, yes they are common but this many is not right, right? Sorry for not telling you, sorry for being late, sorry, sorry, sorry. Her face changes into something far softer, edges melt – maybe from the words I have dropped like a hot dish from the oven – and she says, Oh Tash, you poor ol’ thing. I appreciate this unfamiliar tone and unfamiliar face, this unfamiliar woman. I can see she is trying to be very kind. Why didn’t you tell me about all this earlier? she asks. Why didn’t you say something? I mumble something barely decipherable, something like, I don’t know, even though I do.
She says, You go home. Don’t worry about anything here, okay, and I nod and I thank her, and I turn and go.
*
I get home and I sit on the couch and try to watch Seinfeld to take my mind off matters: George Costanza is upset with a woman for taking credit for a big salad he purchased for Elaine. I wait for Ben to get home from work. With all the talk of a big salad, I realise I have not eaten all day but I am not hungry, can’t be bothered to put something in my mouth and be required to chew. Can’t even be bothered to take to the drink. I sit with my cheeks blazing at what I said to Carol, to Leslie, at what I let slip, slide, congeal. I cry out and groan in a pitch that only a dog or a god understands. And I think of how familiar this scene is to me now: nod my head to the calcifying belief that this is all my doing. How can it not be? This many, surely, cannot be random, cannot be purely medical. Surely, it is a reckoning. I have caused it. This is all my fault.
Our dog, Bird, rambunctious and loud in his affection, sits quietly, lightly beside me. Making himself small and careful. When I am thrown back by another steelcapped kick of sadness, he places his little paw gently, gingerly, on my leg, and looks up at me, turns his sweet face this way and that, says comforting things without saying anything at all.
The phone rings and it is my GP, Dr McIllroy, a good man, and thorough. Honourable. We have been through a few of these together now. I transferred to him from a woman I had been seeing for a few years after noticing blood that seemed ancient, like it had rusted and been abandoned. When I told this doctor about it, she said, Don’t worry it’s very common, very normal, but I knew, felt in my waters, my wairua – a whisper within me that said, no, this is not normal. And it wasn’t. And after that, I went and found a new doctor.
He says he’s heard, and he is sorry. He is not one for performative emotion, so these words mean more, seem more tender to me coming from him. He says I’ll need a D&C. The hospital will be in touch as to when to come in; maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. He says he has referred me to a specialist, so we can get to the bottom of all this. I nod in gratitude, which of course he cannot see. Bird, sweet boy, watches me still, so my gesture is not in vain. Dr McIllroy says they’ll be in touch; the specialist he means. May take a while though. Waitlists and all. He does not say it’s just so common, so normal, which I appreciate. Instead, he says again: I’m sorry. And I say to him, Thank you, thank you so much Doctor.
*
When I arrive at the hospital, I am told that instead of a D&C, the surgical procedure I am expecting, I will instead have the drug Misoprostol. I change into the papery gown, and wait on the paper-covered bed, and after some time, a doctor wearing blue scrubs and a little blue hat like my mother’s old shower cap announces his arrival by pulling the fabric curtain, sweeping it like a vampire’s cape, to create a flimsy veil of faux-privacy around us. We form a sort of huddle and he asks me questions and I whisper replies. I try to be upbeat but also discreet but also efficient in my answers, and he tries to be kindly and attentive, but it is clear he has things to do and people to see, so without further chatter, the medication is given, and he says, Now, we wait. And after some time I begin to bleed a little and cramp a lot. The process will go on for many hours. I am told I can go home, and complete there.
*
Except I do not fully complete. I am not surprised: my sixth form school reports were filled with such sentiments: Natasha is great at starting things, but lacks follow-through and often fails to finish.
And so, matter remains. I am a mobile mausoleum, carrying around with me a physical reminder of what once was, but is no more.
I am brought back to the hospital for surgery, to be cleaned. But not cleansed. No hospital procedure can offer me that.
Extract 2
I do not remember the exact moment I recognised the extent of the whiteness of the world I had been inhabiting. But when I saw it, the glare was so bright it burnt my eyes. Burnt them like the time my love interest took me skiing for the first time, and the bright sun, reflecting off Ruapehu’s bright snow, turned the whites of my naked goggle-less eyes a foul, flaming red. Sore eyes. Like Sith eyes. Like Darth Maul, or Darth Hall as people called me – that being my last name at the time. Good joke. Very funny. Ho ho.
Not a single person I knew spoke te reo Māori. Not a single person I knew knew tikanga Māori. Not a single person I knew referenced the Māori world, or Māori sovereignty, at least not in any way that reflected positively. In our local primary school, I remember a few words and waiata taught; I remember one Māori teacher. During the course of my secondary education: nothing. My parents were determined to send me to a good school, my mother especially. She wanted opportunities for me that she never had.
My parents worked double time and then some to afford to send me to a private girls’ school in town that aimed for the holistic development of young women and their personal excellence. I look back now and think it was a bleaching. I learned French, Japanese, Latin and Classics. By our Social Studies teacher, an ex-pat from Cornwall, we were taught that colonisation was overwhelmingly a positive for our nation, the point at which progress began: an enlightened innovative people arriving to bring technology and modernity and civility to a race living in, as Jerningham Wakefield said, wild and uncivilised anarchy. I remember degrading terms being used, in books definitely; from mouths, possibly. Primitive. Savage. No written language, just an oral culture.
I remember in Classics we learned ancient tales that long-existed in the great Greek tradition, used to explain the creation of our world. I remember we learned of Prometheus, trickster god, Lightbringer, the one to whom the Greeks attribute the discovery or bestowal of fire for humans. I remember thinking this sounds like Maui. He too was a trickster, a bringer of light. The stories were similar, the method of their telling too – received then transmitted from one generation to another, not punctuated by full stops and commas on a page, but learned by heart and passed on with its beat. By cadence and by breath of air from mouth to ear. I remember wondering why Greek oral tradition was heralded as great and noble, and Māori oral tradition as a mark of a primitive people.
Sometimes it was not what was said, but the way it was said. I remember in the first month of the first year, a teacher asked, Is anyone here a Māori? It sounded like a polite yet peremptory request for confession. No one raised their hand. I remember people’s heads turning left and right. I remember the teacher looking at me, I remember her resemblance to Nell Mangel, I remember her curled hair, its silver wisps and curls, standing high above her head, like a child’s drawing of a puff of smoke out a chimney top. No one in the class was Māori. Except me. And I did not raise my hand. My face, my whole body rushes to red when I think of this and I think of it often. I am red and flaming at my silence, my weakness, my whiteness, my whakamā.
*
Gradually, so gradually, things begin to shift, and then all at once, I am overcome with an urgent need. Like wading out into a warm sea, it engulfs me. I am homesick for a place I’ve never been. I’m missing people I’ve never met. I am longing for a language I’ve never spoken. There is a yearning for things I’ve never seen or done or heard; I am struck with a profound grief for things I never felt I had to begin with.
Other things I felt too, which I cannot succinctly word: things I am ashamed to admit for they are the uglier members of the emotional family: resentment, frustration, even a kind of anger – cold, teeth-bared, occasionally snarling – at privilege. At hypocrisy. At people who are not Māori learning the reo by night, who then desecrate the land and lives of Māori by day. Have I become bitter? I wondered to myself. Is that what this is? Perhaps. Our ancestors evolved to taste bitterness in order to recognise that which harms us.
Despite my sense of otherness, the curdle of it, I became increasingly aware of the privilege afforded me, the tone of my skin being more my father’s than my mother’s. I remember, aged 10 or 11, being in a shop in Kaiti in Gisborne with my cousin. Her skin is much darker than mine, much more like our Nana’s. I remember the woman in the shop – the owner or a staff member I do not know – coming out from behind the counter to follow closely behind my cousin, watching her every move with eyes like beads, like currants. The woman did not say anything, but the coldness of her eyes and the closeness of her body, her sense of looming like a storm cloud, communicated everything.
I felt a keen awareness of how being kiritea means I have a responsibility to make spaces safer for our darker-skinned whānau. And that for me to do that, in the right way, with respect and humility, I must do the work to learn the words and the ways; the times to talk, and the times to listen.
The desire to learn, the need for it, became urgent, so I signed up for anything that was available and that would have me.
*
Pōwhiri at 4pm. But I am late and I am flustered, because I overslept. And because the kids, upset at my leaving, are screaming like three dial-up modems. And because I cannot find my sleeping bag or my coat or my shoes or the keys. And because just as I am closing the door to the house, I spill hot coffee down my white T-shirt. Back in to change, rushing about like a single-cell thunderstorm, and then, for the second time today, I say to my children, my husband, my dog: Bye-bye, I love you, I’ll see you in a few days. Then I close the door and they are at the window and we wave, and blow kisses, and make hearts with our hands.
By the time I am in the car, ready to go, it is after 10 a.m. Estimated journey time: 7 hours 14 minutes, Google says. I wonder to myself if there’s any way I can make it in time for the pōwhiri. I did not want a fast drive; I wanted to ease into it, make it leisurely, scenic. It is a road I am unfamiliar with, a journey all new to me.
On the drive up the motu, I meet all the seasons. Winds and rains, both gentle and pelting; sun and warmth. Microclimates of calm and moments of chaos; traffic jams, then, quiet – total isolation. I drive and drive and I am quite peckish, but I decide not to stop because despite all signs to the contrary, despite it being against the laws of physics, I continue to hold onto the hope that I will get there in time. But, looking at the time, I know I have missed so much already.
When I’m finally on Whakatōhea land, it is almost half-six, and the sky is a deep bruised purple. I have not breathed in the sea. Have not touched grass. Did not give the trees and the hills and the sky and the land all around its proper regard as I had hoped to do.
When I get to the marae, which sits off a stretch of highway between Ōpōtiki and Gisborne, the lawn to the side and all along the front is filled with cars. Down further, far along from its gates, I find a spot on a sloped verge. I get out, the ground underneath me is muddy from earlier rains. I move on unsteady legs. I turn on the torch of my phone to light my path, and I walk back to the marae, trying to be careful where I place my feet, lest I stumble. A realisation wraps me like cling film: I know no one here. And I do not know what to do: my tikanga is out of a book, not passed down from those who came before me. My reo is shallow and limited to the point where it would be hard to say I know any reo at all. And, when nervous, I have a habit of losing what reo I do have, like the other day at the supermarket, standing there, patting down my pockets where I keep what I need, to find they are empty, and I am holding up the line, and people are staring, and I am embarrassed, and I do not know what to do.
The pōwhiri is over, everyone has been welcomed, they know what’s what. Welcoming manuhiri on to the marae became a tikanga story of border crossings between the distance of visitors, the bringing together of hoped-for relationships. It is relationships I am hoping for here. But I’ve missed this now. Having been to many Kura Reo before, and to years of other fixtures and events on the marae, everyone will know everything anyway, just as they will all know each other. There will have been much joy in reuniting with whānau and friends from all over: hugs and hongi and high fives. This is all assumption of course, because I cannot find anyone. I try to look for someone who might be able to give me a steer as to what to do and where to go. It is a cold night and I wander around with my arms across my chest, both for warmth and to keep myself together. A white marquee sits empty, a piece of vinyl that acts as a door flaps in the wind. The sound is an echo of both silence and the pounding of my heart in my ears. I see no one. I wait a while longer and walk around further, but still no one is there, so I end up walking back to my little car and I get inside and sit there – I don’t know how long for – in silence, but for the occasional large ute or even larger truck whizzing past me, blurring my eyes with its size and speed. I look out the window up at the sky and think, what the hell am I doing here? I am a 43-year-old woman hiding in my car, too nervous to go for the first ever time onto a marae of my tīpuna that I have spent 8 hours today driving to.
I think, maybe the time is not right. I think I was wrong to come.
*
Fuck it, I say out loud, to no one but me. I get out of the car into the pitch of the night, turn the torch on, and head back toward the marae. I give myself both a scolding and a pep talk as I go: I have travelled too far for this wonky bullshit, pull yourself together woman. You’re from stronger stuff than this. As I walk through the gates, I see signs of movement and hear noises from the marquee. I walk over, pop my head in. A man standing behind a trestle table, holding a clipboard, turns and smiles, beckons with his hand. He is tall, unsettlingly handsome, which does nothing to help the state of my nerves. I say things, in English, but I am not sure what they are or for how long I have been speaking and when I finally take a breath, he seizes that gap to say: Kei te pai. He hands me a glossy book, a programme, and he begins to tell me things, and what he tells me is in te reo and like a child poorly positioned in a lolly scramble, I’m catching very little of it, and I smile and nod my head pretending I understand, because I’m too embarrassed to say I don’t. And then I say, Kia ora. And at that moment, a lady, older than this man who has helped me, enters the marquee and smiles and says something to him in a tone that says, Come! He nods to me again to mark the end of our exchange and off he goes. I am alone again, and I think of what the man said, so much of it unknowable to me right now. I imagine what it will be like to speak te reo in a fluent tongue, but more than that, I imagine what it will be like to listen, and to understand.
*
There must be at least 150 people in the wharenui. I can hear laughing, clapping, responding in unison. I can see through the ranch-slider door people talking – standing up, sitting down – introductions. Pepeha. I am not ready for that. Not in front of that many people. Not with my reo. I will mess up in front of everyone. And my face will go a searing red, my whole body will. And then I’ll burst into flames. And the worst part about that is not the agonising demise, but the fire damage I will cause to the marae, and the shame I will bring on my family: reports of my immolation and fiery desecration of a sacred meeting house will go global. I’ll never live it down, even in death.
I return to the car. Mentally administer a few lashes. What did I think I was doing here? There’s no answer to that question. I continue to burn bright in shame at the thought of there being so many Pākehā who would be able to kōrero Māori better than I can in this moment. Better than I can in any moment.
*
I sleep in my car. I wait for the day to begin and I return to the wharenui and I sit and I spend the day silent, listening, learning. We sit on our mattresses and hear whaikōrero, and waiata, and I am trying to pick up something, anything, to unlock what is being said and sung. When we gather in the wharekai, people are kind and say things to me in greeting, but my tongue is like a fatberg and I am unable to speak. Instead I listen to the chatter, people all in tune with each other, a way of talking like music itself.
I continue to think I’m imposing. This is a space for Māori and right now, I do not feel Māori. I feel whiter than ever, luminescent, like a glow worm. It is an honour to be here, and I don’t feel like I’ve done the work to earn it. My mother has always said that things feel so much more satisfying when you work hard for them, rather than just have them handed to you on a silver platter. I don’t know if my mother has ever had anything handed to her on a silver platter, but I understand the point that she makes.
I try to breathe, to acknowledge this first step. Over and again, I say, unworded, to myself: Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu, though it is small it is precious – and it is. In this moment, which is not small to me at all, I feel small, and that is precious because the space I have entered is so much larger than me. It inspires awe. And I say, again unworded, to myself: this fear I am feeling is because this means something. I am scared because it is sacred.
I wondered then and I wonder still when the disconnect began, at what point within our whānau we lost our language? I wonder, who held the reo alive on their tongue? And who had it ripped from them? Who was made to curl and flatten and contort their mouth in strange ways? Who was made to suppress the sounds their body knew? And I wonder why we say loss of language; why we use these words: lose, loss, lost. Not lost like my brothers and sisters were lost from my mother; not lost like the ones I carried within me. Not lost like a pen or a parking ticket or a small child’s toy. To lose implies some act of errant thinking, some distraction or carelessness. Or something outside of what can be controlled, an act of God, an angry one. Our reo was not lost. It was taken so the well of our language would run dry.
Did the reo linger there, on my ancestors’ tongues? Did they say it in their sleep? Did they dream in it? Did they whisper it to themselves? The voice of their wairua, was that in our mother tongue?
Yes. Surely, yes. Our wairua exists beyond death. And our reo never fully died, despite sanctioned strategies to rip up the land and scorch the seeds of language and connection. All cruelty comes from weakness. But we are a strong people. And because of resistance, persistence, and courage, our language is being cultivated again, sown even stronger, nourishing more and more every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natasha Lampard (Whakatōhea, Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is the co-founder and director of Webstock, co-founder of Lil Regie and creator of Extraordinary Tales of Strength & Daring. She recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at Te Pūtahu Tuhi Auaha o te Ao, IIML.
Listen to Natasha Lampard read from Mother Tongue