INGRID VOORENDT

1.


A  PALIMPSEST: WHY THE ELEPHANT?

There is an elephant in the room, and she laughs; a peculiar chortle from deep-time bones, and I with her. We guffaw. We weep. ‘Oh, you are here’, I say, ‘Oh here you are’, I say. I smile a shrew smile, and sit on the front step, wrap in my leopard print faux fur and sip tea. I am in a lounge room, a school, a birth, a dying, a song, a tiny school, a play, a loving, a people, a fury. I am sat at the end of the long corridor into my urban house. One giant foot after another, up-down-up-shift-land: my elephant, my talisman, my haunting, has been tramping and trumpeting. For how much time have you been here mystical creature, wise matriarch, dust-swirler – enormous while somehow able to be ignored: for how much time?







The amorphous siren sound of the whale, matches the trumpeting of the impatient white elephant, meets body-cries of mothers who wail in Iran, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Australia – for children lost to the strike of power, and the thrust of worlds subjected to so much whiteness. Why is the elephant white? The sounds of the world fall-in and through songs of people who have been, like the elephant, in my body since before I was born. Songs carried in the hulls of wakas, tossed into skies and caught in our waiting throats. Shucked down as a penguin gulps a single fish. What do we carry and carry (?), asks the goddess of death and time, after she killed the man who tried to invade her via her vagina. As though she would not notice. She is on my fridge.


When I watched the children’s movie Moana for the first time, I cried. Prickling bits of what-was rise-up, the whale in me turns, the elephant stomps one large leg. In the body of my body, in the nest of the nest, is a crucible tinkling and brimming: fragments, knock knock knocking on my heart door.



2.
At some point, I was surrounded by Māori – young men and young women – fathers and mothers – and only now do I notice them stood there.

A photo arrived – she is in the font row. She is maybe nine years old. How can it be that I recognise her?

The soul travels. It threads where it will. Even to fathers undeserving. The soul is defiant like that.

At some point, I was stood before a body of Māori ancestors – tīpuna – arranged in diamond form. I turned to see them in my wake. Only then did I notice them standing there and realised it was I who was in their wake: inverted perception, backwards time: ka mura, ka muri. We walk backwards into the future, as the whakatauī goes.










I am stood in my sister’s kitchen. We are in Aotearoa. She is in the process of dying, and we are drinking whiskey and cooking. And there is nothing more profound than a scratch of time like this.

(The sacred in the mundane).

At some point a list of 40 things arrives: a list of things that have been shared: kea birds, songs, verandahs, fragments.

I am sat on the step and I say, “my grandmother was interested in Māoridom, but she was also above it”.

Fear governs flight and,









3.
I turn, but it is some 30 years later that I note I am arrived.

Three decades to complete a shift from front body to back,
to place weight into heels.
Time of course, is a construct, and we are in delayed wakes of our own living.

“Our people order their time in songs and calls, because how else do you ‘count the time’?”

Ah ha! The whale, the elephant, a heavy being unfixing other heavy things held by the anchor of time.







































4. 


“What is the name for the room in the meeting house, where people gather? What is that called”?






I am in old time, and old La Nouvelle Zealandé. And I am here in my kitchen and I listened to the reading you recorded and sent to me, though I was a bit miffed – I wanted to read it. But I listened to you, and I realised, this, too, can crack something open in me. I was experiencing reading and reading, and it was night and I was in the kitchen alone. Prayer has all kinds of manifestations.












I am being pushed up through time with new, luminescent details in my hands. Versions of myself recalled differently, because of this time; because of our souls here – the second ones – fed by a past I recall and you did not live.


“You know there is the sacred and the mundane in Māoridom”.

::::::



Hine-nui-te-po has been on my fridge for a long time.
I was compelled to find that image and all I could find was a postcard at the gallery.

And so there she is.

She has been listening in to us for years now.



(interlude)

Excerpt:
'Second soul, Old Land: a Karakia in 9 breaths'

by Whalerider

30 July 2020

She: Front step, Fitzroy, Melbourne
I: Retaining wall, near front step (1.5m away)
Fitzroy, Melbourne

INGRID is a performance maker, director and dramaturge. Movement and writing are integral to her practice and she is currently obsessed with lorikeets.

1.
When I was a very small child, growing up in the Manawatu, my father would stop the car at railway crossings and tell me to look out for pink elephants. And I saw them.







3.
I was thinking about a flight I took, when I was probably 25 or 26, from Wellington to Sydney. I sat next to a man whose face was partially paralysed. He’d got blackout drunk one night and woke up days later in hospital. He’d jumped through a window. It took a whole year for him to recover. We talked about Rangitikei, the area where I’d gone to high school and he’d worked for a while. He knew some people I’d gone to school with, people I hadn’t seen or thought of for a decade. He told me a girl I’d known had died in a car accident.

4.
On a Friday night a couple of weeks ago I texted you:

9.
I used to feel homesick. I don’t anymore. I just feel ambivalent.

RESPONSE (an excerpt):
'White Elephant: a response in 9'

by Ingrid

(ABOVE) IMAGE:
Personal photo (Voorendt), Brooklyn Primary School, Aotearoa, 1982.