#Alice Te Punga Somerville

[words-and-coffee]

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[ID: A poem titled: Kupu rere kē. [in italics] My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this advice. The convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home. I have been thinking about this advice. Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: every potential reader is reassured that although you're expected to understand the rest of the text, it's fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics. I have been thinking about this advice. Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged — but after a while I could see she had a point: when the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place. I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it. Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in -[end italics]- Aotearoa -[italics]- and which do not.

Next image is the futurama meme: to shreds you say...]

(Image ID by @bisexualshakespeare)

[alarmalade]

"Kupu rere kē" by Alice Te Punga Somerville

from Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised

[wordswithloveee]

[ofmdtereomaori]

I'm begging you, please stop italicising te reo Māori words in your fics.

There's a really excellent article by Khairani Barokka on why italicising non-English words in general is not a great idea. (tl;dr: it's very othering)

For te reo there's an additional reason, which is that most of us in Aotearoa stopped italicising te reo decades ago and now when we see it it looks fucking weird. It feels like you're holding the word with tongs; like you're saying "hey I found this weird foreign word and I don't really know what to do with it!"

Which is a pity, because there's some really good fics out there exploring Ed's Māori identity, and the italicising makes them look less good than they are. (I'm planning a specific recs post, but want it to be 100% positive, also there's stuff I haven't read yet.)

I don't want this to be a call out post, because I hate that shit, and I know that everyone's coming from a good place. If you've been italicising te reo words, you're probably doing what you were taught was the right thing, and I genuinely don't want you to feel bad about it. This is just a learning experience; go forth and use italics as they should be used in fan fiction:

"Oh. Oh."

PS I can't write about italicisation and te reo without mentioning the brilliant Alice Te Punga Somerville and the especially her poem Kupu rere kē.

[tiercel42]

Kupu rere kē

My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth.

I have been thinking about this advice.

The publishing convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home.

I have been thinking about this advice.

Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: Every potential reader is reassured that although obviously you’re expected to understand the rest of the text, it’s fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics.

I have been thinking about this advice.

Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged – but after a while I could see she had a point: When the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place.

I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it.

Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in Aotearoa and which do not.

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: how to write while colonised

I saw this posted as an image with a reaction gif. (Credit: @words-and-coffee, without whom I would never have heard of this poem.)

But: it needs to be accessible.

It doesn't need a reaction gif.

It's powerful enough on its own.

[fatehbaz]

Ever since 310 BC, when Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor in the Peripatetic School, set sealed bottles afloat to prove his theory that the waters of the Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean Sea, drift bottles have been used to chart ocean currents. As conveyors of messages to strangers on faraway coasts, they have long been part of the allure of the sea, whose currents -- predictably for the likes of Theophrastus and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, yet unfathomably for so many -- were central to the exchange of peoples, goods, and biota that so deeply marked the history of the Caribbean archipelago. The currents swirling around the Caribbean region “in Van Gogh-esque grandeur” [...] give the archipelago a distinct current-driven identity, proposing archipelagic connections through winds and water flows that uniquely embrace the islands, “framing” them as a group. These stunningly beautiful Van Gogh-esque swirls -- visual renditions of a painterly sea -- now sadly bear swarms of unwanted (and most decidedly nonalluring) drift bottles in the form of floating plastic debris that reaches the coasts of the Caribbean islands from far-flung places in the world, offering a plastic “frame” that once again embraces the islands as an archipelagic unit.

The very currents that led Columbus and his vessels to the Caribbean Basin, making it the cradle of pan-American colonialism and planting the seeds for the significant environmental revolution that followed in their wake, now bring to the Caribbean shores a plethora of pollutants, from solid waste (mostly plastic waste) to sewage, hydrocarbons, and agricultural runoff.

These pollutants, as Alice Te Punga Somerville has argued about the Great Pacific Patch, embody, as waste, a complex set of natural and cultural processes bound with colonialism and empire: “proximity, movement, disposability, invisibility, history, excess, destruction, reconfiguration, giant multimodal currents, and their life-changing effects on marine as well as human life” [...]. The result is that, according to the 2004 GIWA Regional Assessment of the Caribbean Islands, “pollution of aquatic ecosystems [...] is the most severe and recurrent transboundary environmental concern in the region” [...]. Ramon E. Soto-Crespo, writing about Jean Rhys and the Sargasso Sea -- the portion of the North Atlantic region where ocean currents form a gyre that now contains a high concentration of nonbiodegradable plastic waste -- describes it as “a living archipelago of unanchored trash forms” [...]. Rhys herself, writing about waste in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) -- before developments in chemical technology allowed for mass production of plastic in the 1940s and 1950s -- proposed a “grotesque bilge theory of subjectivity” rooted in a preplastics understanding of the inevitability of ocean pollution [...].

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Among the most eloquent voices inviting action against the seemingly insurmountable problem of accumulating plastic debris in the Caribbean have been those of regional and international artists whose waste-focused projects have brought attention to plastic accumulation [...]. Through waste-based installations and waterscapes -- which represent the antithesis of what Krista Thompson has called “the Caribbean picturesque” [...] -- these projects intervene in the reimagining of “landscape” as it has been understood in the European/colonial/tourism imaginary [...]. Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued that “islands and their inhabitants are paradoxically positioned as ‘contained’ and ‘isolated’ yet this belies the consistent visitation by colonials, shipwreck, antrh0pology, and tourism” [...] -- and, we must add now, plastic debris. [...]

[These art] projects [...] address plastic debris not as an isolated “tropical island” concern but as evidence of the archipelago’s engagement in networks of global distribution and consumption that bring the “unnatural” to archetypal tropical landscapes.

In an installation deeply engaged with the suppressed history of slavery in Martinique, like Jean-Francois Bocle’s Tout doit disparaitre/Everything Must Go (2014), the use of cobalt plastic shopping bags as artistic material links environmental pollution to the pernicious and lasting impact of the institution of slavery [...] and colonial history of racism, thus inserting human exploitation into the critical dis/course on imperial debris.

Another group of artists working with plastic debris, like Cuba’s Tomas Sanchez, is particularly concerned with bringing attention to the visual and ecological pollution stemming from the failure to adequately dispose of solid waste in small island nations [...]. Sanchez, known primarily for the idealized forest landscapes through which he captures [...] the tropical sublime, has also produced hyperrealistic paintings of seascapes marred with accumulations of domestic garbage mixed with plastic flotsam. These photorealistic waterscapes juxtapose “pure” Edenic landscapes with [...] the debris of consumerist accumulation [...].

Mexico’s Alejandro Duran has focused instead on plastic debris as an international problem whose solution requires deep systemic changes in how we approach our understanding of the earth as a shared ecology. [...] His Washed Up series consists of photographs of ephemeral installations constructed from plastic trash collected by the artist from the shores of what should be an archetypal tropical Edenic landscape, the UNESCO World Heritage site at Sian Ka’an in Yucatan, Mexico. [...]

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For Capellan, the proliferation of plastic debris on the beaches of Santo Domingo speaks as eloquently [...] about environmental pollution [...] as about the environmental vulnerability of a population that has been doubly displaced; he described the flip-flops that make up Mar Caribe as encompassing the stories of those who used to wear them -- “farmers without land who migrated to the city where everything has been taken from them and sealed off by barbed wire” and who live now at the mercy of a river and a sea [...]. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has written about Capellan’s Mar invadido, “Turning to Caribbean allegories of waste, we can interpret Capellan’s installations in terms of creating not a colonial archive but, rather, a site of witnessing, rendering the ‘secret’ of wasted lives visible to the more privileged classes who benefit from the labor and the sacrifices made by the undifferentiated poor” (2019, 121). Capellan, like Sanchez in his rising sea in Espejismo, addressed the growing impacts of climate change in the Caribbean region in his awareness of the tidal nature of the increasing vulnerability of the Dominican poor and its connections to rising sea levels. [...]

Duran’s work -- with its focus on plastic bottles blown to the Caribbean from far-flung geographies by wind and sea currents [...] -- has brought us quite far from Theophrastus’s original drift bottles. [...] For Duran, as for the other artists [...], the Caribbean archipelago is defined through the currents of wind and ocean that flow through it, currents that brought us [...] European conquerors and the horrors of the Middle Passage and now countless pieces of plastic debris that remind us of our connection to a global capitalism that began with the global enterprise that was our discovery by Spanish sailors. In the scourge of plastic -- as tide-wrack on our beaches, pollution in our ecosystems, and a threat to our marine fauna -- we have a daily reminder that our archipelago and its history have been bound by ocean currents, framed by the swirling [...] flows [...].

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Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “The Debris of Caribbean History: Literature, Art, and Archipelagic Plastic.” A chapter in Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations. Edited by Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel and Michelle Stephens. 2020.

[hotpoetryqueen]

W.I.P. still don't have the title yet.

I was inspired by this poem by Alice Te Punga Somerville

[marigoldsnail]

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[chadwriter]

Today’s #NaNoWriMo Preptober prompt is a Shelfie. There are many shelves I could take a picture of, but here is my current read pile (!!!)

From the top:

Dr Hinemoa Elder, Wawata - Moon Dreaming Ben Aaronovitch, Amongst Our Weapons Marie Cardno, How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster) Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to write while colonised Young & Ramos, Strange Academy: Wish-Craft Nalini Singh, Angel's Blood R.B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves Shilo Kino, The Pōrangi Boy Jared Davidson, The History of a Riot The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Anne McCaffrey, No One Noticed the Cat Marisa Silver, The Mysteries Eleanor Fitzsimmons, Wilde's Women F.C. Yee, The Iron Will of Genie Lo Sascha Stronach, The Dawnhounds Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic Ryan North, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (x3) Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

[bryregrad702]

Fear: a wall in the process

- I think that a fear: of appropriating and of being brave, and of navigating my faith in a different way - I think these things are stealing my joy, my love for the poetry of Te Ao Māori, and my love for people, my love for creating

My point of connection is  a poetic approach, is words

Conversation is going to break down those walls

Key words, exploring poetically, will help me to ideate

There’s also an opportunity here for hand made typography, a sort of making I love and have engaged with previously 

My project ‘Rākau’ a carved typographic poem https://www.behance.net/gallery/125666017/Rakau-Alice-Te-Punga-Somerville-Carved-Typography

Or could media be a place of connection? Carving? Connection through making, yet not appropriation of style?

My project Church Plaques, metal etching and tempering

https://www.behance.net/gallery/128619971/Plaques-Experimental-type-etching-and-tempering

Potentially type is a place where I cannot so much appropriate.... where illustration would appropriate 

[words-and-coffee]

Kupu rere kē My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this advice. The convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home. I have been thinking about this advice. Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: every potential reader is reassured that although you’re expected to understand the rest of the text, it’s fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics. I have been thinking about this advice. Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged — but after a while I could see she had a point: when the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place. I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it. Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in Aotearoa and which do not.

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[youtastelike-sunlight]

11 for the not US ask!

Oh, I love this one, thanks pal!

11. favourite native writer/poet?

Oh gosh, easy answer! Alice Te Punga Somerville is an incredible poet. Kupu rere kē is amazing and I pull it out every Māori Language Week. Rākau is stunning. EVERYTHING she writes is incredible.

[“hi, I’m not from the US” ask set]

[wordswithloveee]

[locatingself]

Some previous carved type, a typographical work of poet Alice Te Punga somerville’s poem ‘Rākau’. linking to context: voice and physically creating in a way that’s connecting to context. Some previous work linking to where I’d like to head with this typographic voice context