Encountering Mīharo | Never storm

Writers encounter Mīharo Wonder

Wonder is a place where writing often begins — and each year, during the first six weeks of the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, we set exercises designed to unlock the kind of wondering unique to each writer. In April 2021 we brought the MA students to the Mīharo exhibition in the hope that some of the resonant objects, images and artefacts might prompt stories, poems or essays. We gave them no brief other than to choose an exhibit and pursue the lines of imagination it prompted.

For these writers, encounters with the past have become acts of invention as well as recovery and re-evaluation. The exhibition becomes an observatory in which old stories give birth to new, the past is encountered with fresh eyes and transformed through the lens of the present. The writing presented here is only a sample of the work produced, and we imagine work by other writers will come to fruition in future. We’re grateful to National Library staff Peter Ireland, Anthony Tedeschi and Fiona Oliver for providing additional insight and background to the exhibition and to Mary Hay and Jay Buzenberg for publishing the student’s work on the website. And we hope you enjoy the wondering Mīharo has produced.

Chris Price, Tina Makereti and Kate Duignan

"While Mīharo Wonder is moored to the walls and arrested in its cases, its imaginative scope ranges freely – here is the best possible evidence of that." — Peter Ireland, Mīharo Wonder co-curator

Never storm | Phoebe Wright

I’m on security at the BNZ the night the world ends, the night I commit grand larceny of priceless art stuffs, the night I finally understand.

Security is boring. I miss bouncing. Courtenay Place during O week, man. All manner of stupid in the ID line, but the chicks were legit. Miss the action, too. I can deal with a decent amount myself, no need to always put a call in. I’m no squawker. You’re invisible till some stupid goes down and then you’re the biggest and soberest guy on the block. Shit doesn’t matter until suddenly, it does. Got ten years and some serious kilos on the tanked late-teen trouble, plus I know how they think cos I was one of them.

Tonight I check my perimeter, secure the premises, fill in the MSD, take instant coffee or a slow toke, depending on the angles of cameras. The wind’s already torn down some branches. I pick up one and spin it like a taiaha in the face of the weather report. Hear that cougar with the hoity voice on RNZ, asking some expert:

— We know this is no hundred-year storm, approaching. Could we call it a 300-year storm?

—I’m calling it a never storm.

Alarmist bullshit. Suddenly the radio voices are lost to a rising tide of static. An alert blares through my phone, like they did with the Covid levels. Storm warning. Move to higher ground, take cover. If you are in one of the following areas, evacuate immediately. Petone, all the bays, CBD. Next minute, I get a call from the boss. Some building nearby needs a hand, though I have every right to evacuate the area immediately if I want. It’s not a disturbance; they want to move some shit. Arty facts (Boss is a wanker). Then he says, millions. Says, priceless. And I’m less bored.

Streets are lockdown empty, and the few people still around are all in a hurry. Running into buildings. Running out of buildings with stuff in their hands, deranged wind tearing at them. Only streeties move slow. We’re supposed to call them vagrants, supposed to be polite to them, it’s in the handbook. Like they’d listen to polite. I know all those hustles, all those cold ks of night-concrete, all that craving. But I’ve done my time. Risen above. Lucky to get a job on bail; I know what I look like. But in this job, guys who look like me are premium. Fresh from the DTU, high on twelve steps and kapa haka. Munted teeth, weird white patches where gang tatts were. The genuine article.

I see this junkie I’ve seen at the strippies or someplace, and she’s got this weird plastic boat made out of trash. She’s trying to put a cat on it, but the cat doesn’t want to be on it, he’s skittish and squawking and smelling the wind. Chick is a walking facepalm. She’s with some other loons of the curb club. Vagrants. I recognize some of them as the ones who beg in shifts outside the Countdown. Different dogs every other week. Where do the dogs go? I’m pretty fucking suspicious regarding those dogs.

Boss says even though the National Library’s built like a bloody fortress, it’s still hooked up to the same shitty water systems as the rest of the city. Pipes have burst in walls, and now the storm has a way in. Floods coming, within and without. I’m met at the door by a thin old bloke with a whispery voice. Thanks me for coming. Tells me we have to pack what we can and get it out before the storm hits. I follow him through the glossy, echoey foyer.

—Did you see the exhibition?

—Don’t reckon I was invited.

—It’s been open to the public.

I know there’s no point explaining that something can be open to the public but everything from the shine of the floors to the suits inside tell you which public it’s really open to, and which it isn’t.

We both hear it. There’s no one here, but there is talking. We creep to look through some giant, suspended nets and what we see is everything.

People in old-time clothes on a log bridge are leaning and tipping and laughing, skylarking like anyone who ever had time to kill by a river. Koru of red and black and white curling off tapa, up the walls. The carved lips of tīpuna creak open, spilling waiata and pakiwaitara. Animals climb and slither and flap out of books with every scale, every feather illuminated by some human hand.

But I wouldn’t want you to think it’s pretty, cos it isn’t, at least not only. There is rage in ghost-faces speaking out of black and white photos, and the smell of blood and burning thatch. A man with moko like smoke lays a tiny bible down like a wero, steps around it with heel-flicking fierceness, spinning taiaha. And them with the pale faces and stiff collars and stuffed pockets, their voices tang and twist and I know they are the screws of back then, the brutal ones who think they win, but their eyes are haunted too. I see what the old codger has tried to do here, make a gathering that wasn’t, stop time, show how really, the volcano is always erupting, the fig tree is always blooming and humming with bees, the ship of fools is roiling with laughter and yelling, how we were always, everywhere, only trying to reach each other.

My phone dings. Someone is live-streaming from up high in the Majestic Centre, and I see the surge in the dark, the wall of water. I imagine fish stacked inside it. Deadly liquid architecture. Worse than predicted. Surge zones extended, further evacuations urged.

The end is so fucking nigh we need a new word for nigh. We hurry. Boxes, gloves, wrapping cloths. Then, in the long snaking glass case, there is this tiny world. Warm to my touch. The big premises, the only real premises that matter, here on my palm. Whose job was it to secure it? What should the globe look like now? No perfect planet with a sharkskin case of constellations. A singed thing, melted, misshapen, acid-pocked, screwed every which way. I check the old bloke isn’t looking and put it in my pocket. Reckon I should say a prayer or something, so I do the only one I know. Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. One big wave of stupid is coming to obliterate all the wonder we ever made. Every book speaking in tongues, every photo of every lover. The courage to change the things we can. And every story still waiting in the mouths of the world to come, the unsung waiata and the poi twirling at the screws of history. Gone, sunk, unheard, dead forever. And the wisdom to know the difference. Like fuck. Not on my watch. I work faster, wrap and pack ancient papyrus and holy books and photographs of buildings and drawings of birds.

Dawn finds us waist high in water, wading up what was Pipitea Street. We rest the weight of the boxes on our heads, balanced with our hands, looking like African ladies in a painting I saw one time, only they were carrying great pots of water in the desert.

When the sea got to our knees, I shifted the little globe in my chest pocket. It sticks out like a tit, or like a cartoon character’s heart who’s in love.

The image that inspired this piece

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