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”.’

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Links
Auckland University Press author page
New Zealand Book Council writer file