I was facebooking with Damon Salesa earlier this evening - Damon is an amazing Samoan historian who has been teaching at Michigan for a past few years but is heading home to take up a position in Pacific Studies at the Uni of Akld. Damon is one of those people who other people expect me to know through academic networks, but I knew him first as someone else who grew up in and around Glen Innes. Or, as those of us from that part of Auckland know to call it, GI.
GI is in the news every once in a while... and it's back again now because Housing NZ is keen to sell off some more of its housing stock and land in GI in order to make the most of the high property values of land in some of the neighbourhoods circling around GI. (Some info here if you aren't up to date with this: http://www.waatea603am.co.nz/News/2011/December/War-on-poor-sparks-GI-hikoi)
This isn't a new story for GI... every few years a few more houses are shaved off the sides of the neighbourhood, and in order to make the newly available land palatable for potential new owners, the names of streets are changed or a whole new 'sub-neighbourhood' is created through the imposition of a new name. I knew someone whose mother's house, which she had bought off Housing NZ a few years earlier and which was located by chance on a particular side of the new line drawn on a map, increased in value by $35000 overnight when a slice of GI was renamed Wai-o-Taiki Bay.
All of this reminded me of a poem I wrote a while ago about the time this process took place near where I lived. I thought I'd share that poem here today.
mad ave.
i.
dave dobbyn wrote a song about madeleine avenue.
dlt helped him out with it
and it’s a good song
to those of us who grew up in the area,
the street they sing about was never the kind of place you’d call ‘madeleine avenue’,
because it just couldn’t carry off that kind of name.
to us it was just mad ave.
ii.
parallel to mad ave was esperance,
the road we walked along on the way home from school.
we’d start off a big group walking slowly at the end of the day
talking and laughing and yelling ‘see ya’
as kids peeled off to go in to their houses.
because my street came off the other end of esperance,
I’d walk all the way to the end.
iii.
walking home down esperance was always a bit scary because of the dogs.
that was also part of the thrill though,
and sometimes I’d imagine a dog waiting till i was all alone
at the end of the road
and choosing that as the time to attack.
my friend stephanie’s big sister saw a dog run over on esperance once.
the car ran straight over its stomach,
then the dog jumped up and kept running down the street.
we would tell and retell that story,
shaking our heads, laughing at that kind of dog
- ‘those dogs on Esperance man’ -
impressed by the sheer resilience of the unsquashable dog
and also (secretly)
horrified by the idea the dog in question might still be out there,
dodging all reasonable efforts to kill it.
the dog that i was most scared of wasn’t an unknown quantity at all, but was a very familiar feature;
the dog I was most scared of was Max,
the giant black dog that hid behind Mrs Mafileo’s flowers,
and when Camille and I used to sneak out of school at lunchtime
to visit our friend Tasha and baby Jessie,
we’d walk up the steps
holding on to each other
stomachs in our throats,
wondering if Max’s head was going to pop up behind the chrysanthemums.
iv.
those trips to see Tasha were a big part of my last two years at school.
after i snuck from school, through mad ave, to esperance,
we’d drink some diet coke, watch oprah or days of our lives,
chatter away about big and small things.
although i didn’t always go back to school afterwards,
when i did I’d sometimes have a little bit of Jessie’s milky sick
on the shoulder of my regulation blouse
and if it was really bad I’d cover it
with Tasha’s old school uniform jumper.
i remember the time Tasha brought Jessie to school as a baby
and that principal of ours
who’d been so mean and so inflexible during the pregnancy
asked Tasha if he could hold Jessie.
to our delight, which we fought hard, but failed, to hide,
as soon as she was in his arms,
Jessie turned her little head
and sicked all over his pristine shirt sleeve.
v.
so why would dave dobbyn write a song about a street?
because
all of the flats up and down mad ave and esperance
were slowly emptied out
- there was a time when there were bits of gardens
and bits of boarded up windows all in the same street –
and then, the final insult,
they were all knocked over,
demolished.
gone.
my mum says the saddest thing about the homes there
was driving though the streets
and seeing that even though the houses were gone
there were still some remaining bits of taro patches
the weedy offcuts of gardens,
resistance at the level of leaves and stems.
vi.
the last time i was in new zealand
although it’s not called mad ave anymore.
it’s mount taylor
after the english name for taurere,
the mountain that’s really much closer to a molehill
and sits doggedly at the end of the street.
each house takes up the space of about three or four mad ave families
there aren’t any cars on blocks in the front yard,
there are no taro patches in the back
or old ladies chatting as they walk up the road
there also aren’t any kids walking home from school
or crysanthemums.
and even though I’m sure the new places don’t have the problems of rot,
mould, burned-out kitchens, or worn-out-ness from overcrowding that the old places had,
to me they look like a gust of wind might make
the walls topple over
the roof fall in
the windowpanes crash to the ground.
‘mount taylor
as much as it’s a new name for a new thing.
vii.
when i was 14
i was in a school production about taurere
and the stories told about the people who’d known the landscape
before mad ave, before mount taylor drive.
I’m still not sure who has the right to mourn
who has the right to say
that their place was taken away.
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