Exhibition


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