In the trailer for Minor Music at the End of the World by Saidiya Hartman, the film artist Arthur Jafa says, ‘black people are like, do you know how many ends of the world we have survived?’ Like Arthur and Saidiya, Hana builds poetry of witness that pulls from a history where ‘memory is a stain’. In the wake of colonial violence and present day collapse, Hana urges the reader to understand the cyclical nature of the end:

Forgetting
of
course
the
end
of
the
world
has
come
many
times
for
us

The end of the world has many afterlives. Colonial ideologies sought to separate the body from the land, so to erase Te Ao Māori, the Māori world. At some point, bodies became commodities for corporations, war, and trade. In ‘Red in the Crevices’, it is established in the first few stanzas that Indigenous knowledge precedes European theory:

The earth, the stars, the oceans, the body and temporality are entwined. Māori have always known this. Mauri translates to ‘life force’, which simultaneously occupies the past, present and future. In this poem, Hana outlines the flowering pōhutukawa tree as a living repository where the placenta is placed. The coastal tree is a ‘portal between worlds’, and as the tree falls to the sea floor, the placenta – which holds the genealogy of ‘our mothers and her mothers’ – becomes part of the earth. Afterbirth is sacred. But in this economy, the sacred is also absurd. Hana writes in ‘MAYBE I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO HAVE SEX WITH WHO WILL LIGHTLY CHOKE ME WHILE I’M ON TOP’:

In this economy, a woman can eat her own body, frame this as a ritual and make millions. Celebrities are scattered throughout the collection, offering a strange and darkly whimsical presence, partly as nostalgic figures, and partly as symbols of disconnection from body and land, saints in devotion to late-stage capitalism and moral collapse. Cameos from Mariah Carey, Halle Barry, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and ‘LIZZIE THE LIZARD’ line the pages with fervent, tabloid sentiment. The way that Mariah Carey appears as a ‘High femme priestess’ in ‘rollerblades and denim cut offs’ brings to mind the infectiously playful way Aṉangu artist Kaylene Whiskey paints Dolly Parton in Dolly visits Indulkana (2020), and Tina Turner in Tina Turner in Coober Pedy (2018). Kaylene paints with vivid acrylic colours, often using plastic jewels, to render the musicians and bring them to Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. The title poem is named for the Milli Vanilli song, gesturing towards sentimental attachment and joy. For the most part, pop culture and celebrity appear as odd and opulent harbingers of the apocalypse:

The contentious body is made corrupt by the presence of celebrity, who turn our attention to aesthetics and uniform ‘beauty’ and bizarre rituals, a distraction from the burning world. Hana assembles distraction and attention together, mimicking our jarring internal monologues in the windswept chaos of morbid consumption. As we open hundreds of tabs, our fleeting engagement with any one thing mimics our thoughts, and the poet dissects and scathes the many surgically enhanced heads of the end times. Perhaps I can say this better by bringing in another celebrity into the body of this text. It is Laura Dern as Lula Fortune in David Lynch’s 1990 film Wild at Heart, who smokes a cigarette and says, ‘this whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.’

In ‘BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON’, the poet looks into the dream realm to understand a past in which the present was always written:

Everytime I swim in Te Tai Tokerau my dreams are haunted

by Maaori women in colonial times swimming to trade ships

exchanging their bodies for muskets

For survival in the colonial paradigm, bodies of Indigenous women become commodities. In ‘Body fluids are poetic, not slime, but nectar’, Hana writes:

In recently published collections, poets partake in similar rituals within the broader catastrophe. Eunice Andrada’s speaker in KONTRA puts on ‘snail mucin, ceramides and peptides, alpha hydroxy / acids, retinol, vitamin C’ amid centuries-long cycles of rape and subjugation of the female body. Eunice, too, perceives the gothic turn towards afterbirth as skincare: ‘we will drink up the placenta of hooved animals / and crushed collagen from their bones’. The speaker in Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot bears witness to genocide and death of Country, while monitoring a shrinking, medicated body – ‘what are you looking for in this body? Can you make it small enough to pass through the eye?’ Hana’s speaker is also troubled by the management of appearances while reality crumbles, and the past exchange of bodies for guns is recreated in the present. For Indigenous women living within ongoing colonisation, being is never enough. Being is a permanent state of crisis. Hana writes in surrender:

Like Eunice and Evelyn, Hana cultivates a palpable voice that screams for women who are haunted by the violence of the past, the abject terror of the present, and longs for an ‘other’ world. Better to throw away the retinol and supplements and deterritorialised placenta capsules and look towards Hine-nui-te-poo, great woman of the night, for beauty secrets of prehistory, for she had genitalia made of black stone:

At the heart of the collection is ‘Invasive weeds or I wish I could give you the world but I was only given mud, rot and the bones of a half eaten fish. (For my seven week old child)’, a prose poem written across six pages, each stanza closing with the pulsing, aching refrain ‘I wish I could give you the world but I was only given mud, rot and the bones of a half eaten fish.’ What is it that we inherit, pass down, dream for future generations? The baby is born with David Bowie playing, and the poet begs the ‘King of goblins’ to take the baby to a safe place. The fantasy world of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), where a baby is kidnapped by the spandex clad blond rockstar, is safer than current conditions. It is a composite world where ‘waste water’ fills the ‘fake beach’, where sand is displaced from one part of the country to another, where ‘the trout that don’t belong there are taking all the food’. But despite this, the tuna returns. This poem was incarnated in an exhibition at The Physics Room of the same name, where Hana, along with Wesley John Fourie and Taarn Scott, placed ceramic bowls of water and rocks collected from their journey Ōtepoti to Ōtautahi in the gallery. When attendees splattered the rocks with water, the rocks embodied the black shimmer of tuna¹.

Like the land, the body is stolen. Land back. Body back. Not the commodified, performative slogans that are ‘written on earrings and sold online’, but a complete overthrow of capitalism, where ‘new knowledge meets old knowledge’, with the agency of ‘water, the birds and all of our kin’. To overthrow corporations, like ‘FONTERR(OR)’, who want both ‘a slice of pie and a seat at the table’. To resist against erasure – ‘the plants that grow through the concrete’ are symbols that call to ‘rebuild but never erase’. In the language of direct action and mourning, Hana incants critical, visionary movements towards recovery, sovereignty and imagination.

The final lyric essay ‘when you want to understand, just look at the plants’ is a manifesto with lucid instructions on how to move through precarity:

To survive the end of the world, just look at the plants. In ‘BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON’, Hana invokes Leuli Eshrāghi speaking on Priority to Indigenous Pleasures on A Moment of True Colonisation in moving away from the page and towards the centre, a ‘space where Indigenous knowledge comes into being’. Like this book, the centre is composed of ‘wild assemblages’ that speak to the interconnectedness, the symbiosis of everything. The ruin, the placenta, the ocean, the celebrities, Hine-nui-te-poo, the mud, the rot and the half-eaten fish. At the end of the world, the body will return to the land, as will this book of poems, ‘to become bacteria again’.