Hecate articles from October 1994

Hecate archives from October 1994

New Zealand since 1984: economic restructuring - feminist responses, activity and theory (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The New Right/Deregulation in New Zealand, 1984/94 The rise of the new right, both on political and economic issues, in New Zealand and several countries overseas, involves a substantial actual and threatened backlash against earlier social and...

A Tribute to Elizabeth Bligh. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... From a Sequence of Poems Elizabeth Bligh (nee Betham) is a mark in a family bible that forgets the wives of Betham men and many of their daughters She is recorded as married without children but six daughters reached womanhood twin sons died...

Stillbirth. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Elizabeth tried to contain her womb with a bloody towel and a prayer The midwife shook her head called to the priest hovering in the hall with piles of freshly starched sheets Elizabeth moaned thought of paradise her husband Did he? she wept...

New Zealand via the Bounty. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Once I had a lover a painter who'd lived in Tahiti painting women in oils so thick I could close my eyes read their bodies like braille discover sunshine in their hair the hollows of their throats between their toes mixed with sand He had...

To follow or not. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Geraniums warm window boxes outside our apartment I'm heartened by their appearance wonder if the Wellington wind is a myth surely such profusion is impossible in a city supposedly gripped by gales There are twenty-five steps from footpath to...

I never drive the causeway without thinking of the time. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... i never drive the causeway without thinking of the time the truck flew into the paddock the woman at the intersection hesitated then accelerated through the turnoff we didn't stop we were going the other way and now it's bridge Rangitoto...

The separation. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... why mum came here is because you can hear what they do through the butchery wall in the police cells next to dad's mates shop where he'd go after work for a drink of a night Janet Charman

Force landings. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Titles. Slow rolling. Batten. Close the hatches. Garbo. Hinerangi. Clavel del Aire. Dentist's daughter from Rotorua. Fox furs. Feathers. A government grant in the depression. Adventurer. Gold digger. Jilt. A girl has to do what a girl has to...

Finding the words. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Squeezed in a heap between cousins, sisters, brothers, neighbours complaining. Andre stole my jelly beans. Rob's pinching me. The dog slobbered, whined, farted. Heat increased with every hairpin bend. Tectyl. The youngest retched. Another...

Up from the provinces .... (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... After the mirror-glass skyline and whimsical domes and glistening honeycomb tower - and a winged Valkyrie helmet lit for take-off into the stars - after the Sultan's Cafe and a turquoise-painted archway - not thirteenth century, not - probably...

Night of the queens. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The Night Queen's coming - sending her premonitions on ahead, the Night Queen's coming, beaming - already she looses a shower of small grey grainy drops warning the stars to light - she lifts her arms and shadowy from her underarms fall scents...

In the rotunda. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... We sat in the rotunda, my lover and I - gone cold - and the river slid in greenish coils over a drowning sun - after The Watershed play - a life of Freda Stark - who danced in nothing but gold paint - back in the early war days - at the Civic...

The negation of powerlessness: Maori feminism, a perspective. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... There is a void in our conceptual topography as Maori Women. The void has been created by the internalisation of powerlessness as a consequence of emergent power cliques which are a reflection of dominant power relations. In the clamour to fill...

Journey's end. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... His shoes stuck out in her mind. She wondered if they were the very first thing she looked at. Her eyes were drawn to them because of the colour. A deep rich tan. They were expensive. They held his foot with the type of intimacy only money could...

Interview with Beryl Fletcher. (feminist writer) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue) (Interview)
October 1, 1994... Beryl Fletcher is a New Zealand Writer engaged in writing a trilogy about the lives and concerns of a group of feminist women over a period of years. The first novel of the trilogy, and Fletcher's first published novel, was The Word Burners,...

The marginalization of Maori women. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Colonialism New Zealand was annexed at a period when ideologies of the 'superiority' of particular races over others were very influential. In particular, notions of the development and evolution of races provided major theoretical foundations...

A wilderness of spiders. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Monday A hotel. A word. A welding mat. A punctured point of arrival. What in the world has come over me? Dreaming of a brickle bracky blackberry bed. A level surface to settle these ruined sentences. Lisping. Rasping. To sluice this...

Apnoea. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Don't look at me in that punishing way and say I'm a bad parent because I sleep my baby on its stomach and don't breastfeed it. It was your idea after all - remember? Remember back in 1909? you used to say our lives were full of germs the very...

Haere mai ki te kai! (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The kai steaming pork bones and puha mussels raw bitter kai moana sweeet paraoa sweet bread dripping fish raw soaked in lemon sour hua rakau meat taste soaked riwai and kumara fate glazed cooked deep in earth hua whenua Marewa Glover

Turangawaewae. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... a platform a place to stand a cupboard black and safe te po, the moonless night the comfort of eyes closed shut juxtaposed shades of black and white dead to the world, blacked out anaesthetised, drugged, numb, floating bodyless in empty skies out...

Some things endure. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... years have been kind to the shape of these hills I once called home not blasted or scaped down to bare clay wild bush a steady pulse when I was eight civilisation stopped then yards from our back door people still go missing in fleshy...

Another Icarus poem. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... I too could write of Icarus but not that he fell That year the cows are serviced by A1 man with long rubber gloves & glass pipette large-boned bull sperm fuses with egg of matron and heifer alike and large-boned calves as they must begin...

Maybe I broke a tapu. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... I didn't mean to but that doesn't count: tapu's without redemption. I took food-and-drink to the whare nui forgot apple and juice in my bag when we went in to make our beds. Didn't know till too late: in secret dumped them in the women's...

Coercion .... (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... for Damon inspired by the choreopoem "for coloured girls . . ." by Ntozake Shange Black is one uneasy word It rolls off my tongue as fast and slick as the cow lick clinging to your forehead she/i whispered sweetlilnothin' jesus boy black... ..

Lotus hook. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... As a rule Chinese men don't make good lovers my mother said their hands are too soft their bodies too hairless and they have voices like little girls besides which they only think about money She was the youngest in a great line of Cantonese...

Feminism and unionism in New Zealand. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... In 1991, a new labour relations regime was introduced in New Zealand that overturned a hundred year old pattern of bargaining between capital and labour. In a labour market heavily inflected by gender and race, the radical change from...

Migrant women's writing in New Zealand: Amelia Batistich's three-dimensional world. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Our Main Street, where you were part of a three-dimensional world. Walk down there any day and hear the singing Maori speech, the sharper English, the rolled Dalmatian 'r's. A street where three peoples met and never really merged. Maori,...

Conversation in a garden. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The sprinklers are on. They stretch like telegraph poles down the rows of lettuce, closer and closer to each other as they get further away. The rows of lettuce converge at the end. That the sprinklers get closer and all rows converge to a...

In search of a language and a shareable imaginative world e kore taku moe e riro i a koe. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Readers and writers both struggle to interpret and perform within a common language shareable imaginative worlds. What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's own race...

Between the roses and the taupata. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... J. C. Sturm has been writing for more than fifty years. Since 1947, when one of her poems was accepted by a student newspaper, her stories, articles, reviews and poetry have appeared in various periodicals and anthologies. A collection of short...

Splitting the stone (for John). (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... (for John) You brought back carefully, nervously A heavy grey boulder From that other beach Up north - The place I call home When I feel inclined - A narrow iron strip Between land and sea With several old battlefields Close by And a guardian...

Under threat (for Janet). (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... (for Janet) I do not remember the purpose Of your call, only you telling me So lightly, almost gaily The last stroke of luck Could fall any time. Whether good luck or bad - Depending on how it strikes you - Will make no difference, All...

To an old flame. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Do not greet me Like an old friend, I feel neither old nor friendly. Do not embrace me Like a relative, I am not your favourite cousin. Do not stand so close And murmur in my ear, We are no longer lovers. Do not surprise me With unexpected...

From Picasso: fish-hat. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The renaissance invented noses. Afterwards reality went to the devil. A bogey to frighten children. Miracles don't exist. You start with an egg and end with a portrait. Simple and simply a search. Beauty has nothing on it. Look how the woman rubs...

From Picasso: simply. (poem) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... ideas are points of departure. A train might leave as readily. Just something that comes and goes. You set to work and in no time it begins. A page, a line, a garden with rain. Searching doesn't bring rainbows. All you have to do is look in the...

Over the edge of the world. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... I have a story to tell . . . My mother, Anne, is about to return to her country of birth for the first time in forty years. She has been married for longer than she was single, and has lived in New Zealand since she was eight. It has never...

Opening the archive: Robin Hyde, Eileen Duggan and the persistence of record. (poets) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Eileen Duggan and Robin Hyde may between them lay the foundation of a New Zealand literature.(1) When Gillian Boddy in 1991 quotes Pat Lawlor in 1935 quoting Jessie Mackay several years previously on the subject of her younger contemporaries...

Where to from here? Contemporary New Zealand women's fiction. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The eighties has been the decade of women's fiction in New Zealand. It is true that this period has also seen an "explosion" of local literary activity in general, and especially of local publishing, whose impact has only been approached by the...

Women for Aotearoa: feminism and Maori sovereignty. (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... The impetus for this paper, prepared for the Women's Studies Association Conference in Wellington in 1994, came after the publication in 1993 of Anne Else's book, Women Together: A History of Women's Organisations in New Zealand,(1) which did not...

Are films dangerous? A Maori woman's perspective on 'The Piano.' (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... In 1987 Maori writer Patricia Grace wrote "Books are dangerous." Books, she argued, contribute to the setting and affirmation of social, ethical values and identity. They contribute to what is seen as important about groups of people through...

What we want and what we get: Renee's 'Jeannie Once.' (play) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Dunedin, New Zealand, 1879: the voyage out to New Zealand from Scotland and Ireland has been longer and has taken more of a toll on the passengers than anyone expected. The jobs that were to be "hanging from every tree just waiting to be picked...

Dualities and differences revisited: recent books on Janet Frame. (author) (Special Aotearoa/New Zealand Issue)
October 1, 1994... Reviewing these five books offers an opportunity to discuss the past and current state of criticism of the work of Janet Frame. Jeanne Delbaere's The Ring of Fire is an expanded and updated edition of a collection of critical essays first...