from Passiflora

by Juliana Spahr

The politics of the island in the middle of the Pacific were something else altogether. They were a part of the island that bit into them and those around them with bladelike, piercing mouthparts that stabbed through the skin and then injected a saliva that teemed with digestive enzymes, viruses, and anticoagulants. This bite often left behind an annoying itch, a reminder that things were not both the one and the other, could not be both the one and the other because both made no sense because there could not be both colonialism and sovereignty. The uncomfortable itch did not last long, but the bite left in their bloodstream a troubling, a questioning, some new sort of information, some prickly new cells that attached themselves to their blood cells and reshaped them, something that their immune system had to deal with that it hadn’t dealt with before. This thing that entered into their bloodstream changed them. It was not that these prickly new cells made them sick. Instead it was as if they were in the world of science fiction and the cells were a new mutant spawn that changed them into another sort of being as they entered into a symbiotic relationship with them. It was as if there was a preinfection state where they thought of themselves as progressive, as part of the solution, and a postinfection state where they saw themselves as part of the problem. As if they became infected with something that quietly added genetic material to all parts of their body as it slowly mutated all of their cells into some other shape. These prickly new cells would show up in any blood test from now on and they would pass them on to those they had intimate contact with and after years they and those around them would be different people as a result.

As the months went by, they found themselves thinking with this new information in their bloodstream about how to negotiate things, about analogy, about the word we, about how to be in a place where they could not escape from being representative of the government that currently occupied the continent and the islands no matter how much they hated it. We was undeniably a contested word for them. They often felt too large in it, too large because there were three of them instead of two. But too large in other ways also. One of them had moved to the island in the middle of the Pacific to work at the university. At the orientation to their job at the university they were in a room full of people from afar of many different races and nationalities and all of them were told at this meeting that they had three options, they could be a haole, a stupid haole, or a stupid fucking haole. This was the first of many moments where it was pointed out to them that they were not from the island in the middle of the Pacific and that they were there on the island only because of a history of imperialism and colonialism that favored them.

The university cast a large shadow of the one or the other over all that happened there. Shortly after they arrived one of them went to a rally at the university that was protesting the latest round of budget cuts. On the island in the middle of the Pacific, the budget-cut protest, like most budget-cut protests, turned quickly from a budget-cut protest to a protest about other things. The protest became about the hiring practices of the university which hired almost exclusively people from various continents and very few people from any islands, not only few from the one on which the university was located but also few from any other islands in the Pacific. At the protest, a student leader who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived gave a speech that began with the budget cuts but then concluded with an offer to buy any haole professor who wanted one a one-way ticket off the island. When they heard this speech, at first they cringed. They cringed not because they were angry. It was instead a cringe of recognition. A cringe that the university did not hire fairly and that they themselves had gotten their job because of the unfair hiring practices of the university. They cringed because they agreed and because they agreed they longed to follow after them and ask for their ticket back to someplace. But then they wondered to what place? What would be the proper destination for the ticket? Did they belong on the continent, where they had been born? But they were in some sense as new to the continent as they were to the island in the middle of the Pacific. They and their parents had been born on the continent, but none of their parents’ parents had been born there and the continent, too, had a history of arrival by people from afar who came and acted as if the place was theirs.

This was just one reminder among many. There were all sorts of pressures around writing and the island. And the pressure came from all over. When they had first decided to move to the island, a friend who lived on the continent had said to them that they hoped that they were not going to turn into this other person, a person who like them had come to the island from afar and now carried the prickly new cells in their body and as a result of the cells now worked hard to write about and publish the work of writers of the island because the prickly new cells infected them with a commitment to the ideas of the island.

But that sort of snide pressure not to write about the island was nothing next to what was said at times by those who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived. Once, they went to a reading at the university by a poet with genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived. The poet sang songs and played guitar and read poems that compared those from afar to greedy white pigs. In the middle of the reading the poet announced that they hated haoles, although they clarified, not as much as their brother, who really hated haoles and would not even talk to them. The poet admitted that they hated the university also. But, the poet added, the university was the only place that ever invited them to read and when they read at the university, mainly haoles showed up to listen, so there they were once again, the poet said with some resignation, reading to haoles. Then they read a poem that was about an acquired immune deficiency syndrome and in place of the words acquired immune deficiency syndrome they used the word haole. They did this, they explained, because it was haoles who brought the acquired immune deficiency syndrome to the island in the middle of the Pacific.

At other moments, they would find themselves in their office listening to a friend who was a student, a friend also like them from afar but from a small island nation with a long history of occupation by other nations, talk about how they would never fuck a haole. Haole pussy, they would declaim, was snapping turtle pussy or they would talk about how haoles looked sickly with their unattractive white skin.

At other times, they would go to meetings held at the university to discuss how to end the colonization of the island and someone often got up and said that haoles should not drive this anticolonial bus; haoles should sit at the back of the bus.

Basically, their overall response to all of this the one or the other was ineffectual and often naïve. They negotiated through all this by flailing about and contradicting themselves. Perhaps the poet, they would first think, might want to think more about the question of how their poetry shaped their audience. Then the next moment they would note how the poet who hated haoles was unusually gentle with children, even haole children, and so they would say, oh they are just crazy and they say crazy things so as to not take the poet’s perhaps legitimate hatred of haoles seriously. Then they would admit that the poet was probably partially right, that haoles probably did bring the acquired immune deficiency syndrome to the island because most of the people who came to the island from afar were haoles. And they would next claim to be intellectually interested in how the poem reversed the accusation that was often made by those on the whaling ships that the people, especially the women who were on the island when the whaling ships arrived, were sexually promiscuous. Then they would notice the poem’s myopia, the absence in the poem of a larger history of the syndrome, how it infected so many people of so many different races from so many different places, and the absence of the political movements that had insisted on a nuanced and complicated awareness of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Then they would think about what it felt to be associated with a disease that was often transmitted through intimate contact and what it felt to be of an identity category that was called sexually predatory. And then they would notice how their mind raced to avoid this association and began to make elaborate complaints about how the poem was medically inaccurate and then how their mind moved from medically inaccurate to medically dangerous because it might suggest that as long as they did not indulge in snapping turtle pussy that they could not get the acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Similarly, with their friend who called haole pussy snapping turtle pussy. Their first reaction was to just flail about, to internalize the comment and then to defend themselves, to say to themselves that they did not have snapping turtle pussy, their pussy did not bite, and then to call the friend sexist. And then they would back up and marvel that their friend, who never got any pussy and yet wanted some a great deal perhaps more than they wanted most other things in life, was so confident that their complaint was not with haole culture or haole politics but was with haole pussy. Or they would say to themselves that their friend who claimed to hate haole pussy was less a scary misogynist and more just yet another person made crazy by the difficulties of childhood immigration to the island in the middle of the Pacific, so crushed by these difficulties that they confused haole government with haole pussy.

While the back of the bus metaphor often shocked them as it kept coming up again and again, it shocked them a little less each time. But still they felt troubled with how the metaphor confused slavery’s history with haole privilege or how it made somewhat false comparisons between colonization and slavery and yet the comparisons, they next thought, were also somewhat true because colonization and slavery were both systems where one group of people took over another group of people and denied their status as fully human in the name of things like economic gain.

What they realized about themselves was that most often they dismissed the thinking. They dismissed it in as many different ways as they could. They dismissed it by not taking it seriously and saying it was a performance and by taking it seriously and saying it was insane. They moved between these positions and occasionally threw in other positions such as the position of taking it all seriously and leaving. Every time this idea popped up, they thought to themselves that they did not know where to go. So they would hammer this idea down and back up would pop the performance explanation. They would hammer that down and the crazy explanation would pop back up. It was an elaborate game of anxiety-ridden whack-a-mole....