The portraits in the Auckland gallery hang flat in a straight line, each frame the same exact size as the one on either side and cramped without an inch of wall between: a row of faces to be pointed out as tour guides rush hurried tourists through. “Goldie,” drones one guide about the artist, “was a master of his time. He painted over 200 of these Maori scenes before his death in 1929.” My feet are tired. I have no bus to catch, so I can sit and rest and stare into a woman’s face strung up and staring from the facing wall. There isn’t any card describing who she is or was or where the artist painted her. Just two short names pressed on a plaque no bigger than my thumb: Te Paea Hingerangi, on top, and “Guide Sophia” smaller, underneath. I remember books on Mexico. How the drawing of a skinny twelve-year old seemed out of place, sandwiched between baroque conquistadors and bloody Aztec gods. I’d skimmed the chapter on Cortez, forgot the girl he bought to translate, raped instead, a small detail compared to larger themes until I learned in college that her name, La Malintzín, means whore in Mexico today, the one who opened up her legs and pushed out slavery and colonies like so much bloody afterbirth. Sophia has a Polynesian face, a moka on her chin that curves around her lips to make her mouth look full, as if she were about to speak when Goldie brushed her dumb, her words still pressing to escape. I think of stories told at Girl Scout camp: the Indian maid who helped Lewis and Clark across the Plains, a lesson helpful girls should learn. Her real name, Sacajawea, deemed ugly sounding in white men’s soft ears, they called her Janey, left her with typhus, a cotton dress on some St. Louis street. I’d like to get up off this bench and leave the face alone, anonymous, a slice of the exotic, blotch of brown hung up to contrast the impressionist pastels and sculpted alabaster guardians that fill this very European place, to walk away and not imagine her, as I would later read, buried alive in mud and soot from Mount Ruapehu, two hundred dead in 1894 and she among them, leading tourists through the still quite active hot springs at its base. But I have been there now, as this shot shows, a self portrait in bathing suit, smiling and wondering how water stays so hot, always bubbling beneath the fallen snow.
Ali Fischer