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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Comprising ten individual graphite-on-paper drawings, only two of which are shown here, Tangi (which means ‘lament’) is a mournful dialogue between a kōtiro (young girl) removed from her whānau (family) and the ‘caregiver’ entrusted with her welfare by the state. The artist makes the viewer/listener privy to the mechanics of this removal by imagining the brutal attempt to construct a new family identity. The texts — between six and twenty-two lines per drawing — outlining this state invention or intervention are troubling and racist. They concern the kōtiro’s painful questions about her separation from loved ones and the disturbing replies of her caregiver.
A single tear dominates this heart-rending dialogue. ‘Say goodbye to your brother,’ the caregiver says. ‘He is going to a good home. Do not weep … Your brother is better off where he is going …’ ‘When will I be going home?’ says the kōtiro. ‘Where is my mother?’
The artist then makes her viewers witnesses to the theft of the girl’s identity and to the deception of an adult Pākehā who is supposed to be caring for her. Three of the drawings stress conformity and the burying of cultural difference beneath the demands of a crude ‘one nation’ homogeneity: ‘We are the same. Maori people and white people are all the same. … You bring up the distinction. We are all N.Z.ers …’
The aesthetic frame for this grim conversation implies an all-powerful state and a clean slate. Everything is pared back: whiteness of paper, sparseness of text and empty space, which surrounds carefully arranged blocks of words that form the figurative shape of the kōtiro. Areas of erasure, scratching and rubbing-out suggest cultural erasure and mental confusion regarding the new facts and fictions — the critiques of the girl’s parents and her ethnic identity — being dogmatically and repetitively programmed into the child against her own memories. It ends up as self-loathing: ‘My father is a Maori. I am a Maori,’ she repeats. ‘Maori Maori Dirty … Maori Maori lazy. Maori Maori vicious.’
If any hope is offered to the viewer, it comes in the form of the box shapes in seven of the drawings which double as mātenga (heads) — while suggesting psychological trauma, they may also function as windows to some future form of escape.
Rangihīroa Panoho
I started drawing over a period of 2–3 weeks. It was almost like a record, I wanted to mark [that event] … then put it away again …
They are probably the most personal of all my works, probably the most vulnerable … I thought they were too close to me … very quickly, I actually wanted to burn them.
Shona Rapira Davies
These highly personal drawings centre on Shona Rapira Davies’ experience, when she was 9, of losing her mother to mental illness. The family was broken apart, with her youngest brother being adopted by a Pākēha (European) family. Like a lament, the works express deep grief, pain, and loss.