Robert Sullivan. Star Waka. Auckland University Press, 1999.

Recovery Project by Craig Santos Perez

In the Maori language, “waka” can be translated as “canoe”: from the small waka tiwai, used for fishing or river travel, to the large waka taua, once used as war canoes and for oceanic voyaging. Waka also means vessel, vehicle, or container: waka niho (a car’s gearbox), waka hari hino (an oil tanker), waka-rere-rangi (aircraft), and waka huia (a carved box to store the ornamental tail feathers of the extinct huia bird). Waka denotes iwi (tribe) affiliation as Polynesian settlers migrated to New Zealand in large waka, and the names and stories from these migratory canoes passed down in oral history.

Star Waka, Sullivan’s third book of poems, embodies a polysemous vessel of navigation, containment, and voice. In a prefatory note, Sullivan describes the motivating threads for these poems: “each poem must have a star, a waka or the ocean. This sequence is like a waka, members of the crew change, the rhythm and the view changes – it is subject to the laws of nature [...] There is a core of one hundred poems, and 2001 lines.” In this core, all formal elements become imbued with semantic relevance, while its content lyrically reinforces the argument of the form:

Star waka is a knife through time. Crews

change, language of each crew changes [...]

Belief system of heart. And tide.

In ancient days navigators sent waka between.

Now, our speakers send us on waka. Their memories,

memory of people in us, invite, spirit,

compel us aboard, to home government, to centre:

Savai’i, Avaiki, Havaiki, Hawaiiki, from where we peopled

Kiwa’s Great Sea. We left home by a thousand

different stars, but just one waka takes us back (4)

The poems in Star Waka chart the sounds of the crew’s voices (the words) and the “meanings of star” (semantic navigation). Star Waka compels us into its poetic vehicles, guiding us through the “betweenness” of culture, memory, identity, and society.

Although this collection constructs an explicit, guiding analogy, the poems themselves are incredibly diverse in both form and content. As we read, it becomes clear that Sullivan aims to explore the polysemic nature of the waka. In “Honda Waka”, Sullivan tells us the story of his car: “This car took me to Uncle Pat’s tangi in Bluff. / We stopped and gazed at Moeraki, / the dream sky, on the way. /[...] I drove Grandad across the creek in the Honda / at night after the family reunion bash. / Temuera’s first car seat was in the Honda. / […] Now I have left it behind” (8). Another poem, “2140 AD”, imagines a future waka:

We are off to consult with the top boss,

to ask for sovereignty and how to get this

from policy into action back home.

Just when the rocket runs out of fuel—

we didn’t have enough cash for a full tank—

so we drift into an orbit we cannot escape from

until a police escort vessel tows us back

and fines us the equivalent of the fiscal envelope

signed a hundred and fifty years ago.

They confiscate the rocket ship, the only thing

all the iwi agreed to purchase with the last down payment. (7)

Despite the playfulness of some of the poems, other poems journey head-on into the difficult currents of colonization in the Pacific and the racial / social issues of the Maori people. One example is “Independence Day”:

We hear a lot in Aukland these days

about the cost of the Viaduct Basin

The benefits accrued from the Cup challenge

various economic analyses: tourists

property exposure captial: the Americans

are really doing their homework

before they decide to colonise us

(but this time I really mean most kiwis

i.e. 85.1% of the population according

to the 1996 census) it doesn’t mean

much to the rest it’s still going to be

a colony (16)

In addition to the variety of subject matter that Sullivan packs into Star Waka, he utilizes a surprising array of formal experimentation, such as double columned formats, textual sculptures, and serial arrangements (multi-hulled). This formal inventiveness parallels the formal variety of the actual and perceptual waka.

Star Waka bravely navigates the difficult and unpredictable currents of culture, self, and society as Sullivan interweaves the personal, political, historical, and mythological into prosodic and semantic vehicles. The guiding analogy of the waka and the poems’ textual orality hold together the multivocality of this collection. Sullivan, as poet-storyteller-navigator, draws our attention to “the beauty of the waka slicing / through concentration, through the vision / of the mind, lighting the architecture / of every dwelling” (9). In turn, the architectural beauty and light of Star Waka rises in every dwelling and shore of our poetic imagination. Sullivan’s poetry teaches us what it mean “to inhabit a part of the world that is five parts land to a thousand parts water” (Sullivan in an interview from Water Bridge Review, 2005).