Archival Utopics: Annamarie Jagose's Slow Water

Abstract

Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water (2003), a novel which looks back to the period before Pākehā occupation of these islands solidified into formal colonial rule, begins, curiously and somewhat provocatively, with a scene of settler absence: “All the night, from the darkness of my blanket, I watch the dead houses, Mr Clarke’s house, Mr Williams’s house, Mr Davis’s house, all dead. Still dead, in the first curve of daylight. . . . The church roof points at the sky and you are gone from here.”^[i] Stressing reciprocity of desire as one of the relations made possible by colonial “entanglement,”^[ii] this letter, narrated by Philip Tohi, intimates the spectacle of eradication by which the expulsion of the missionary William Yate from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was both expressed and enacted: “All your books are burned, your bed, even the picture of your sister. . . . Ashes from the fire fill my mouth and again I cry” (2).

NOTES

^[i] Annamarie Jagose, Slow Water (Wellington: Victoria UP, 2003), 1. Subsequent citations given parenthetically in text.

^[ii] The term is Tony Ballantyne’s, who notes that “while thinking about empires through the metaphors of ‘meetings’ and ‘encounters’ allows us to imagine stable and discrete cultural formations existing after cross-cultural engagements,” the term “entanglement” better evinces the ways in which the period preceding formal colonisation drew together and integrated cultural thought-worlds in “new and durable, if unpredictable, ways.” Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2015), 17.