‏My mother was born Monica Valeria Timo. When she met my father she became Monica Smith. Her family call her ‘blackie’ because her skin is the darkest shade of brown out of all of them. To me, she is Mumma or Mum. To my Father she is honey.
To my niece and nephew she is Granny.

On our first trip to the Cook Islands when Mum turned 40 I remember seeing the face of a Grandmother I had never met everywhere I went. We only had a few photos of her, so I would see her in older Cook Island women and their eyes, or smiles or the way they would titter in a language far removed from me.

Would she have cared for me as much as I seem to care for her memory? Sometimes I think that maybe it is a bit strange how much I make work about a place I didn’t grow up in and a person who I never got to meet or speak to. The ties that bind even through death become stronger the older I get.

In Rarotongan culture Tangaroa is the god of sea and fertility. The island of Manihiki believe that he is the god
of fire. Those from Mangaia believe that he, along with his twin brother Rongo, are the bringers of fish and food. He
was also believed to have blonde hair, it is said that when Europeans were first sighted they were thought to be Tangaroa’s children.

They tell me the world is drowning.

Will it be Tangaroa who will come and wash it all away
or will that be left to us.

Do you think I will remember you when it happens,
or will that too be washed away?

‏I couldn’t sleep properly at Uncle Tom’s. His sadness left me feeling adrift. I never knew what to say to fill the gap of someone who had passed on. The air was too thick inside at night. Sometimes I would imagine sleeping in the car with the air conditioning going. I would think about going for a walk when I couldn’t sleep but with not many street lights on the island I was too scared.

Once I dreamed that I was out in the lagoon drifting on my back and squinting into the sun, the skin on my face slowly turning a deep pink. I needed to go back to shore, my skin was now beginning to blister. Slowly peeling and flaking away. I couldn’t move, I was stranded in the water, my skin slowly boiling.

‏I remember waking up to a dry mouth and sweat dripping down my back.

‏My mother snored loudly next to me.

‏The stitches of the Tivaevae dug into the back of my bare legs.

Sunsets always make me cry. The older I get the more I can’t let go. I wonder if I got my curly hair from my ancestors whose bones are buried on this island. Do you think my great grandfather, the witch doctor, knew that long after he had passed away my Mother would come to the island to seek connections to a past that she never knew first hand?
Do bloodlines run that deep and long?