Tayi Tibble first exhibited a talent for writing as a young child. Teachers praised her for her sparkling imagination and creativity, then, when the internet came along, she began posting her work on Tumblr and Wattpad. It wasn’t long before she dipped her toes into the thriving IRL poetry scene in Wellington, New Zealand, and countless others began to recognise her talent.

She went on to win the Adam Foundation Prize at the International Institute of Modern Letters where she studied Creative Writing, and then the award for Best First Poetry Book at the 2019 Ockham NZ Book Awards. As a Gemini ascendant with an innate creative flair, you could say that Tibble’s affinity for poetry was literally written in the stars.

The book that won the Ockham was Poukahangatus (pronounced Pochahontas). The poems in the collection, broadly speaking, are about Maōri history, culture, and identity. But Tibble blends past and present by peppering her poems with pop culture references – ‘Vampires versus Werewolves’, for instance, delves into power dynamics in interracial relationships by drawing on the Twilight series.

The collection was first published in New Zealand in 2019, but only recently hit shelves in the UK in July 2022. We spoke to Tibble about her work to mark the UK release of Poukahangatus.

How did you get into writing poetry? 

Tayi Tibble: I always liked writing, ever since I was really little. I was quite a shy kid, and writing was the first thing that teachers pointed out I was good at and gave me attention for. Otherwise I was very much overlooked.

I think I started writing poetry when I was a teenager – around 13 or 14. I was on Tumblr and the internet at the time, like in my early teens, and I would just write horrible little poems and put them on the internet on Tumblr and Wattpad. And there’s quite a decent poetry scene here in Wellington, so in my later teenage years, I would go and read at slam nights and things like that.

You’re a writer in the broad sense, but a poet first and foremost. Do you think it was important to you to tell these stories about Maōri identity as poems, as opposed to prose, given the strong oral storytelling tradition in Maōri culture?

Tayi Tibble: I think poetry is just my favourite form. There’s so much I love about poetry as a medium – I think it’s the most challenging, but also most flexible and accommodating style of writing. But yeah, I also respect and want to be a part of our history of storytellers and oral storytellers, so storytelling is definitely an important aspect of my art practice.

I think a lot of people with complex ethnic backgrounds often have to reckon with their history and identity. Do you find that the process of writing the poems in the collection helped you understand or embrace your identity?

Tayi Tibble: Yeah, this book, especially. The undercurrent of the collection is this idea of searching for your identity. There’s a poem called ‘Identity Politics’ and it repeats this refrain which says “Am I navigating correctly?” – that was a genuine question that I was asking myself at the time of writing this book. Like, am I navigating correctly? Am I doing the right thing by sharing these stories, writing about my family, finding out about our political history?

It’s all been a very reaffirming process, writing these poems and then getting to publish them and share them. I feel like if I wasn’t doing the right thing, if my ancestors didn’t want me to be doing what I was doing, then these opportunities wouldn’t happen for me.

Your undergrad degree was in history, right? Do you think that impacted the collection at all?

Tayi Tibble: Yeah, it definitely did. There’s a historical setting to a lot of the poems and they kind of centre around four generations of women, kind of mirroring the generations of my family back to my great-grandmother.

As well as discussing history, there are a lot of references to modern pop culture in the collection – like the Kardashians and Twilight. Was it like a conscious choice to discuss history alongside pop culture?

Tayi Tibble: It probably wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice – as I was writing it, it just happened naturally – but it was still intentional. I was just drawing on whatever I had at that time and all the different avenues and influences that influenced me.

I think part of being a modern indigenous person is that you have multiple strings of identity that create you, are part of you, or influence your work. It’s not just [about] the history and culture, but you’re also growing up on the internet, growing up with pop culture, growing up with the Kardashians, Twilight, etcetera. Those are all things that I think are as valid a part of my identity as my Maōritanga.

“I feel like if I wasn’t doing the right thing, if my ancestors didn’t want me to be doing what I was doing, then these opportunities wouldn’t happen for me” – Tayi Tibble

Some of the poems, like ‘Vampires versus Werewolves’ and ‘Assimilation’ talk about power dynamics in interracial relationships. It’s kind of obvious that the legacy of colonialism still impacts us in an abstract way, but do you think we sometimes forget that it does have an impact on us in our day to day lives and on a personal level?

Tayi Tibble: I definitely think the political and the personal are intertwined, and it definitely is for indigenous peoples and indigenous bodies. A lot of these poems speak about power dynamics or experiences that are a direct result of the consequences of colonisation.

A lot of these poems talk to people in disenfranchised communities and situations that might not be the most equitable, and I hope people can follow the threads and see that it does go back to land disposition, and lots of people wind up in some of these situations because we’ve lost our land and lost what the land represents to us as indigenous people: community, connection, culture. I hope the poems embody that: the trickle down from the macro to the micro.

And do you have a favourite poem in the collection?

Tayi Tibble: I think my favourite poem is the last in the collection, and it's called ‘Hawaiki’. Hawaiki is the name of our ancestral land, where the Maōri were supposed to come from before they came to Aotearoa. But it’s also like a mythical place, and no one knows where it actually is. Lots of different tribes think it might be different places – some people think we came from Tahiti, some people think we came from Taiwan, some think we came from South America.

But Hawaiki is also the place that we say we go to when we die. When we die, we believe that our spirit leaves our body, travels up to coast, and then dives off the end of Aotearoa and into the sky. And that’s when we go back to Hawaiki. So I liked the poem because I think it's a deft embodiment of a lot of Maōri cosmology. And I just think it’s pretty.

Poukahangatus is available from Penguin now.