Vaughan Rapatahana

I carry a rage it gnarls my shoulders & corkscrews my eyes into a question mark of conniption. Wittgenstein ultimately       surrendered; just could not punctuate his language      i         n            t               o             sub      m i s s i on. yet the question endures the same:        why      are   we mis   interpreted all      the     time?

e pīkau ana ahau he riri kua rerehe taku pokihiwi tēnei me e wairori taku mata ki he tohu pātai o te keka ki te mutunga i Wittgenstein      kua whakahauraro kāore e tāraro ia tonu nāna te reo      k         i               h                  e      tāpaetanga te pātai anō e whakataumaha anō   e whakaparori       māua te   taima   kātoa he aha ai?

I carry this rage
e pīkau ana ahau tēnei riri

“The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

---

    he patai

           e asked, 
         h               so
       s                   who
                              are
                             you
                           really
                         because
                       you
                  seem
                  to
                  warp
                  constant
                  from
                  day
                  to
                  day?


                  i
                  don’t
                  know.

Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Atiawa) now resides back in Aotearoa-New Zealand, with homes also in Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong and Pampanga, Philippines. He has been fortunate to have been published widely internationally and his latest collection of poetry, Atonement, was jointly published in Hong Kong and Macao earlier in 2015.
 
 
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