SELINA TUSITALA MARSH
Black white desiring
After all the Post Colonial Theory
Oceanic Literary Study
Pacific Epistemology
Global Indigenous Research Methodology
Imperial Geo-Political Cartography
Capitalist Topography
Racist Iconography
Sexist Typography
Black Skin / White Mask Psychology
Margin / Centre Ontology
Ethno-Poetic Ethnography
MLA or APA Bibliography?
I watch The Vampire Diaries
Blood sucking, triangulating tyrannies
Love lorned, love lost, love lust diarizing
Fang-bangers, wolf-jammers conspiring
Scholarly and pop culture re-wiring
After a day of territorial indigenizing
It’s all a transfusion of desiring
Selina Tusitala Marsh is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland where she teaches Postcolonial, New Zealand and Pacific Literature and Creative Writing. Her award-winning poetry collection, Fast Talking PI (Auckland University Press, 2009), featured at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair and has been translated into Ukrainian and Spanish. Her second poetry collection, Dark Sparring was also published by Auckland University Press (2013). She is due to complete her own critical book on first wave Pacific women poets (1974-2008) with the University of Hawai'i Press. In 2016 she was commissioned to write and perform a poem for HRH Queen Elizabeth on behalf of the Commonwealth for Commonwealth Observance Day in Westminster Abbey. She hopes to get a selfie.
Marsh comments: ‘This is a poem reflecting “a day in the life of” … someone who teaches Postcolonial, Pacific, Oceanic, Indigenous and/or any number of combinations of those fields in Literary Studies. It’s a chant and its playful sound and rhythm, along with its cheeky beat, teases the sober discourses into pulsing with some life and real-life passion. Two very different modes of thinking, talking and behaving—one elitist, the other popular culture—clash, and the similarities are made to bleed out in a noun that becomes a very sensual verb: “desiring”.’
Links
Auckland University Press author page
New Zealand Book Council writer file