Both Sides of the Moon

Jimmy understands all about belonging and not belonging. He sees himself as part of both sides of the moon, ‘… kind of blackman, sort of nigger, in my own country, and kind of white, sort of The Man, but the other half of me. I am torn yet I am more whole since I am both …’

He is part of a fractured family, and it’s only when he learns about his forebear — a brave warrior who became an outcast from his tribe — that he begins to understand the darker implications of his heritage.

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Copyright

I see and am my childhood in the swirl and clarity of being kind of black man, sort of nigger, in my own country: kind of white, sort of ‘The Man’, by the other half of me. I am torn; yet I am more whole, since I am of both understandings, though of no singular one. I am two races, two cultures and, most of all, two different thinkings. I am in a way against myself. But I can speak for both.

The dark half calls my white half, Pakeha. With just a little scorn in the tone, and envy it doesn’t know shows, nor knows the solution to, since envy does not seek to cure itself, it just is. Festering on itself. Hating that which it fears to become.

The Maori put his warrior thinking against the white man and reeled in confoundment at what he confronted: too much diversity, too complex, too wide the chasm of conceptual differences. Maybe the confoundment turned him ugly. But then maybe he gave up too soon. But, hell, what do I know, who am I to say? It certainly caused him a loss of confidence, made him resent what he was: of no importance, no standing, gone was the base of his precious mana concept beside the vaster, more powerful Pakeha scheme of things. The warrior man who once ruled supreme in his own land now found himself in another time, another man’s time. Caught, snared, and enslaved, in another man’s thinking. Does he know, though, what he loses or gains?

The white half calls the dark half Hori, and darkie, and whispers nigger amongst its own. With sneer that cannot help itself, not when his thinking has been pitted against the world and come out evident victor, assumedly and demonstrably superior to other men’s thinking ways. Not when his forebears have colonised a large part of the planet, stamped it empire red on the maps and plastic globes of the world. And if too superior to stoop too far, the white
half pats the dark on the head and calls it simple, good, salt of the earth … that tinge of fear wants you kept in your place, boy.

I am born of each of these. A half-caste being of neither one nor the other. Indigenous yet foreigner. Coloniser and colonised. Not brown; not white. Thus I am everything of my country’s main racial origins and yet nothing.

And then there were my parents. I am born to a household, like fate decided, a destiny different, of reasoning against
unreasoning
. Volatility against calm. Maori married to European. Histories clashing. Ignorance that thinks itself superior to enlightenment. In this case enlightenment on its knees, bowed to warrior will. Oh, the warrior in her was strong all right. In all them.

I see images in the swirl of steam curtains from my little pool place on a steaming earth. They’re in my imagination, they’re real human shapes — when there is light to see them by — apparitions making random patterns of movement through the steam, which closes back on itself like a scientific experiment concluded and proved. Or they emerge from the thermal vapours like ghosts from the Maori past. Old women with tattooed chins and lips and minds chiselled with proud and rigidly notioned traditions. Large, hulking figures,
swift-moving
forms of muscular power, men of violent expression, women of different shapes but same fiercely proud faces as the boys they make and turn into men. I see myself half-mirrored. I am proud. I am afraid.

Sometimes I see the shapes as if coming at me, when it is only villagers to their line-up of communal baths, out here under the stars. They are another way of thinking to me, the outsider. I am familiar, I am related, but still the essential stranger in their midst. I am the paler-skinned cousin sitting earliest in one of their nature-made baths, a not necessarily liked half-caste watching them come out of the steam, the dark, the dawn, awaiting their frowns that I have made first claim to their blessed waters. I feel illicit being here before anyone. And disliked. But I cannot stop myself. Perhaps it is a bizarre form of affirmation better than none at all.

I am in Waiwera, meaning water hot, being water and mud boiling. It is in Two Lakes, New Zealand. I am in my imagination, I am in life, nestled down in the motherlike comfort of warm thermal bath — when my actual mother is not what the comfort is like. I have eye and mind out for her, always. She is the cause of it all. And yet she’s only a singular birth-giving mother born in these steaming acres. Sulphur was her second smell experience after the milk scent
of her mother. I only knew my grandmother briefly before she was more memory of a Maori funeral. Mass singing, old women with tattooed lips and chins. And the people were scary.

These steaming acres were hers and these people are hers; and yet they are not. They share similar thinking ways, but they have set a standard. And she has another.

My mother is a physical existence of Maori going back a thousand years. No invader’s blood taints our ferocious warrior purity. People say she’s a strong bitch. Some say she’s the biggest bitch they know. She is of raw beauty, whom raw men lust after and who lusts back. My oldest brother Warren dismisses my concerns, tells me that men lust, don’t they? But that’s not what bothers me so much as what lust claims of my mother’s mothering capacity: she is indifferent to us. And if it isn’t lust it’s drinking, and playing poker for money, that claim her. That’s why I love the embrace of these warm thermal waters: they give physical as well as emotional succour. Let my mother fuck who she likes. Get drunk. Win or lose at poker. Fight her sisters. I don’t care when I’m here. Or so I tell myself.

I hear the rumble of energy deep in the belly of this fiery earth, of heat pushing, rushing up rock fissure, through water table, to become a boiling geyser as soon as it hits air. I feel lucky and blessed with sight of these people, warm as where they live, as though a tribe moved on from a violent history.

I am here, in this place of thermal activity, it is sight and sound misted all over with meaning. It is Maori place become world place: of locals in their own hours and unchanging humble dwellings and way of life; and sightseeing visitors from the world over, but only in the daylight hours set for tourists. We become one, but they are they and we are we.

The sightseers are mostly American; capitalist conquerors of the world, spreaders of the good word of God and democratic freedom. Yet here in Waiwera the people have resisted most outside influences.

I am the puzzled observer, then, wondering if it is pride or ignorance that the people here should deny the gains to be had from
their paying American visitors. I have hardly ever heard reference other than to their own village affairs in the years I have been growing up with these people.

So I am claimed with them, through this locking out of others’ thinking by the collective culture, the culture that loves you, will protect you — as long as you surrender to its dictates. But then I am compelled, drawn, fascinated by these foreign strangers who come smiling and gaping and exclaiming in witness at this location, who between them must, surely, have access to more answers.

I know that our shyness puzzles them, a people supremely confident in themselves. And their assumptions of us are wrong: we do speak English as well as they do; our licensed adults do drive cars, even if not many own one; we don’t wear grass skirts — we’ve never heard of a grass species that could be made into skirts, we wear clothes the same as them, except inexpensive versions. The difference, I wish I could tell them, is in our thinking. The Americans are fabulously, successfully, what they think. Whilst here we are modestly of what little we think. The Americans have come all this way and will go to other exotic places, expand minds a little, enrich the volumes of their life experiences a little. Whilst we stay here, growing not. Insisting we’re just as happy, just as well off. But I can’t see it, I see only complacency. I find myself wishing an American would take me away. This is where my thoughts betray my Maori half.

I am supposedly a free boy in free country in free heated bathing waters out in free open air, come here of my own volition, from my own home to my mother’s raising place; no one forced me, none shall force me to leave, and yet I feel — they know how I feel (oh, they can see how I feel) quite the stranger.

I can’t throw these thoughts off. So I feel guilt. And yet anger. At all my unanswered questions. No one will give answers. No one seeks them. They think laughter, and song, and getting drunk are answer enough. They show distrust, even hatred for questioning minds, even blood-related ones. Especially blood-related ones. Relatives should know better. To show more loyalty. Which is blind. And accepting. And binds you.

But I love them, my unread and uninterested cousins. I love their place. Even though I soak away in their baths asking answers of
the stars, feeling every bit the betrayer of what they believe in; their paler-skinned cousin traitor in their midst, I love them. But I don’t want to live on the dark side of the conceptual moon. I don’t. I don’t.

And who from this village of simple, honest, answer-inheriting outlook would I have told the day I saw with new eyes an old familiar sight of geyser blowing as … sexual?

And who could I tell why I saw it differently — who could I tell of the witnessed incident I compared it with? My Maori relations are kind of prudish about sexual matters, so I wouldn’t try telling even my cousin Mat. He might betray me as he has with other secrets when they have crossed his inherited cultural bounds. Like when I said I didn’t believe in ghosts, and he told his father, my mother’s brother, Henry. Uncle Henry confronted me about it and asked what the hell did I know about ghosts not existing, where was my proof, who did I think I was, saying such a thing? (Yeah. Who do you think you are?)

I was anyway in awe of my uncle, would never have questioned his authority on anything — but ghosts? But uncle? I said in most fawning tone, Can I ask where the proof is they exist?

No you can’t! And you ever talk to me like that again, boy, I’ll kick your arse so you won’t sit for a week! Yet he was a good uncle, I loved him — normally.

And don’t you be telling your cousins this nonsense when you don’t know anything about our culture, our spiritual beliefs. (And his glistening eyes tell me especially: nor of our thinking ways. That most of all.) Of course ghosts exist — I’ve seen them. And when you do, too, you’ll come and say sorry.

So I said sorry in lieu. To appease him. And he looked at me hard, struggling with the warrior in him; I knew he wanted to punish my heresy. I know how powerful is the desire in warrior man, or woman, to take physical retribution. Sorry, Uncle. I said it again.

He won that inner struggle with himself. He ruffled my hair
and told me, Don’t be upsetting your old uncle like this, nephew. There’s things you can’t say. (Can’t question, can’t ever know the truth, therefore.) Or I’ll get one of our bad ghosts to haunt you!

But I think things were not quite the same between us after that. I had breached a cultural code, I had dared to deny his truth. Men of culture strong and strong on God are the same. They believe truly on behalf of us all that knowledge and meaning are set absolutes. I know, I can see it, that in the times of their ruling supreme, they would kill you for not believing.

As for a geyser, of tourist sight spectacular, having sexual meaning — in another time, I would be boiled alive if I told anyone of this. I couldn’t even tell my father. Not of this. Tell no one. Not even Warren, who I love.

It is her, you see. Her I see … our mother, our illicit mother, bringing on the rumble of strange noise from his throat. His terrifically excited meat; a fat dark upright straining of desperation, even as it was being satisfied. He is a geyser rumbling its coming. And she is a thermal manifestation of her own breathing, a kind of echoing rumble, but at a woman’s higher pitch and of a woman’s sexual elsewhere that comes, we all get to know, from a different boiling within, of knowing what power she has; woman, this woman — in these moments — over excited, reduced, malleable man.

And in my gagging sickness of some ideal betrayed, of knowing what my father probably did know but could not acknowledge, not to himself, my first thought was: how can it be that human life is born from such ugliness of act and sound? But I was excited, too.

I thought about it not being my father she was doing it with — or to, since the man didn’t do anything, except be a proffered and taken erection, and he grabbed at her, and kept giving her nipping kisses, which made her smile and each time turn away so she could look at him thrusting, pushing the unbearable strain of his basic being into the rhythm of her pumping hand — and wondered why I felt a trickle of contempt for my poor cuckolded father, like poison leaked
into my mind, when I’d have thought it be sympathy. Or something tenderer.

The man’s geyser began to rumble from deep down in his throat and his groans became grunts and he thrust and thrust at the hand that had so transformed him, that had so captivated him. And then he stiffened, I saw his arse muscles go tight, and the energy rushed up the vein fissure and became a small fountaining geyser of white, and glad groans, and then an immediate calming and unflexing of his muscles.

And then he gave off a longest sigh, his head slumped like a drunk succumbed. And she stood there with a puddle of potential life ejected uselessly into her hand, and she smiled and stroked his hair with the other, and said, That feel better?

And he was like a child subject to her smiling will, her gifting hand; he smiled at her with such gratitude. And she said, Sorry you picked the wrong time, we won’t make that mistake again. We better get back to the party.

But first she asked, Do I look like I’ve been doing anything? And he chuckled and said, No but bet I do. And she laughed. Then I saw her blue shoes coming towards me, and I slid with most careful silent brilliance of movement under the bed, in my real game now of coming ready or not. I gave my muscle movement to the gathered layer of dust on the floor of this unclean house and sinning visitors, and glided to the far corner like a fleeing person sliding out of harm’s way. There to see her sinning hand come up underneath and wipe off the evidence of this man’s fuss. Of all men’s fuss. And awakening boys, too. I thought how strangely quiet, subdued is man (or boy) after the act. Whether of self or a boy’s mother in illicit act in her marital home.

I heard her say, Mattresses are designed to absorb this stuff, my husband would explain. And the man chuckled again in that softened, tamed way. I thought, yeah, my father would give explanation like that. Mister objective, Mister matter-of-fact, informing from the clinical world of his logic. But missing out on the action. But then I thought he wouldn’t like it wiped away like this. Too casual for the deed done. Would mean that he didn’t mean much, not to her.

I heard whispering and their giggling, the smack of lips coming apart, and then the door quietly close. I knew then my life would be different, if it hadn’t already been clear to me before then.

Not long afterward I heard one of my cousin’s voices saying, he’s in that room, I bet. So I pushed a foot out to give them a victory of finding me. Then it’d be my turn to be seeker. Had my turn of finder.

I am in one of the five bathing vessels, the first user before dawn. I hear eruption of charged steam, which comes as the same waste as man’s coming to air (hand) and not womb (but we won’t make that mistake again). It is wasted ejaculation, of water hurtled to a sightless sky, a man’s excited ejaculation has more meaning. I wonder if it hasn’t done something to me before my time. I fear that all my turgid, seething thoughts are wasted to the ether where thoughts go, while words would at least leave a little trace behind. I keep meaning to get a diary.

The early hours are ours, before the hours rented out to the tourists. Foreign takers of sight in our land. As our Waiwera World War II men were takers of sight — and life — in other lands.

They come here to exclaim, to take incessant photographs of thermal sights but always with themselves in it, as if nothing is separable from an individual’s intrusion into what he experiences. This place, the villagers’ place, half my place, has no meaning but its physical manifestations, since the insight they gain into village Maori life is but surface. There is nothing to tell the tourists about behind the steam curtains and vapour veils. It is private and anyway jealously guarded. Besides, a communal people have fewer secrets; probably why my mother moved away from them. To practise her not-
as-secret
-as-she-thinks life away from prying eyes.

I have strained eyes at the jagged pencil-line of tree-covered hill, trying to catch the erupting water cutting the hill breasts in two. I have come an hour before dawn and stared till my eyes water to pick out the faintest sign of charged eruption breaking the black, becoming the cleavage between those hilly breasts. I have ached my eyes to catch the evidence of blocked-out section of stars; turned myself into a rigid statue of stare to catch a missing sliver of star-sprinkled sky so to claim back lost sight of a geyser blooming. I don’t know why, unless to capture the elusive. To confirm, or answer, a question.

Geyser roar and choked stranglings (He’s coming! The man is coming!) from ground fissures, of heated pressure squeezing through cracks, and tourists make much the same fuss of an exit from a ground eye-hole as a man in private makes of sperm exit from his cock-hole. They gasp. So did he. Oh, this is some place to find meanings and metaphors, parallels and paradoxes. The more when you have to relate. And a mind that tends that way.

Mud-laden thermal breath struggles and fights up through thick, bubbling fluid clay and sits, suspended for a last held moment, a bubble, a bubblegum blow, a set of swollen cheeks and pursed lips, a statement about to be made to the upper-world as it pops into the infinity of sky, slish, slish. All over the grey fluid surfaces it does this. (All over the town, we her children had to find out, she and men were doing that, slishing in the groaning dark.)

It is angry struggle here: roars, hisses, squeaks, screams, moans and gargles. See the metaphor, grab a comparison, of rock and water and a molten inner core far below the cause of it, it could be society, it could human life. Hear the same seething surface echo with actual song, and laughter, and tales being told, and lovings being made, and funerals carried out. Hear the villagers in their own eruptive outbursts of being what we all are. So, of lovings all over again. (And questions never answered.)

It used to be the duty of the first arrival at the changing shed to light the single kerosine lamp. But Uncle Henry persuaded the town council to run an electric cable along the river bank and up to the shed.

The better to choose from a row of five small warm water vessels, each large enough to take seven, eight, ten at a happy squeeze,
sited here on this blessed, free-heated soil, and a ceiling of stars when they are not over with cloud. Slide into warmth fed from a large pool down concrete channels, dark feeding shadows arrow-straight along the ground and, when first light comes, like mercury flowing, thick and graceful and silvery. And then the sun moves to higher angle and it is like rivulets of gold running into your submerged lap. This is some place even without imagination.

The shed, like the houses, is being rotted by its surroundings; the timbers are giving, the wooden hardness is surrendering a little more each day to the unceasing attack from soft of water and sting of sulphur. My own thoughts attack the life here, telling how it has a certain rotting to it, pays not enough mind to the wider world, which yet presents itself for the taking from every foreign tourist. Like ships being waved away when they could be laden with treasures. I look at them, my related villagers, and think of their history: it is too singular to be a means of adaption to the modern. I feel like a heretic, that my thinking betrays these who make up half my existence. I feel the person not of his times. But a yearning to be of them.

I am Maori in this place by dint of my Uncle Henry being my mother’s respected brother. My own brothers and home are a half hour walk away. I have always been drawn to this place. I wish Warren had been. But, with his responsibilities … The arrangement has become that I move between my two worlds, my two homes, as if no one really misses me so much that any makes stronger claim to me. But for which I am glad. I have to be, or what point in being not one nor the other?