Natasha Lampard finds acts of resilience, rebellion and resistance in Coco Solid’s debut novel.

Your grandparents live on in the giant pink letterboxes.

They’re inside the roads.

In those big-ass rock walls that only we know how to make.

All their viral flowers these people don’t know the name of?

All those scents and spores we invented?

They’re our fingerprints.

–

What a time to be alive. To be able to read Coco Solid’s (Ngāpuhi/Sāmoa) recently released debut novel, How to Loiter in a Turf War, which you can do in one sitting, because it is quite short and it’s that good. Autobiographical fiction, poetry, art, illustration and so much more besides, it is an invitation into expansive worlds speaking to past, present and to future. Multi-genre, multifaceted, multitudinal, musical, a kaupapa both skux and scholarly, at times irreverent, all-the-time relevant, this is a potent, polyphonic work from a prolific polymath.

How To Loiter in a Turf War was born out of Coco Solid’s time as a Fulbright Creative New Zealand Pacific writer in residence at the University of Hawai’i. The novel gives us a day with Te Hoia, Q and Rosina, three friends in Tāmaki Makaurau – itself also a main character, a city changing, expanding for some, contracting for others. A place from which the writer wrote, where she has burned, bloomed and rebirthed herself several times over.

The story has a vital pulse. It is written beautifully, laden with the infinitely quotable, generously peppered with the poetic and the profound among the quotidian. We mosey, we loiter – small moments spent here and there – and yet at the same time, there is a sense of urgency. It is political, because how it can not be, when such voices have historically been excluded and marginalised, and with each new highrise, community history is erased. Pop culture, Coco Solid has said, is a great way to smuggle ideas to the people, stealthy negotiations toward something better for the collective.

All characters are vividly drawn, the three friends in particular. They are writ large, high-def, fierce, vulnerable, sharp and smart and funny af.  Mana is strong, bonds are tight. “Her friends. Their cluster of mongrel islands. Messy with safety and joy.”

Here’s Te Hoia: carrying a big bag, bejewelled in tin earrings and chains and charms, secretly crushing on Q, opening mourning her grandma and the loss of cultural history. Parts of her day are spent at the mercy of public transport which has little mercy for her, and thus, she waits, and thinks, and poses, and reads, and waits some more. And she is queer and cool and a student studying political sciences with an interest in gentrification law and environmental racism, a pou of this story.

And here’s Rosina, aspiring art jerk, Hawaiian, Rarotongan, Sāmoan and Irish, noisy and exuding the freedom of children who yell at their parents, relishing conflicts and the words “what’s that supposed to mean”? She likes spilling the secrets of her slower-mouthed friends, changing hairstyles, she is quick-tongued and free styling, an undercover queen of the loathsome romantics, with a bone structure that takes no prisoners. “All her cultural arteries to the city were dissolving in real time … Every time I look around another part of my life, of what makes me, ‘me’ is gone.”

And now here’s Q: a bedroom poet who gets up at 4am to work in a bakery. Tongan Fijian, with a dash of Indian and Solomon. Soft voice, powerful words.

Tonight Rosina is selling paintings in a yuck part of town. The girls have to go. No flaking allowed. But first, we wait with Te Hoia for the bus, outside the shuttered fish and chippie of her childhood reopening as a dog groomer and jeweller. Bus arrives. Q’s there too. We ride and read Q’s poetry and disembark, and walk and have a sausage sizzle for fundraising, and walk a bit more encountering a pop-up organic vegan market on the site of a now-gone Chinese gardener and wedding dressmakers. Racist encounters with a woman with a prairie mouse apron and a major problem, a curdling scene with a long acidic aftertaste.

To the gallery, where Rosina is part of an exhibition on gentrification in the block where her beloved grandfather ran the School Uniform Exchange and Scholarship Programme. Rosina is the only brown artist. The block is changing fast; the exhibition is patronised by people they mostly do not know. We meet Angie, a former crush whose life has changed as dramatically as the setting. And we sit across from Rosina’s nanny’s house, bulldozed, as are her nanny’s beloved yellow roses. Picture her eulogy to the vandalised roots of her identity.

We wait for Q to finish work at the bakery in the morning and we drop off bed linen to Q’s uncle, and we later meet Q’s sister too. We visit a flea-market, and we have a shisha and chips at Kamran’s *Curry* *Burgers* *Kebabs* *Pizza* *Fried Chicken* – Best Restaurant Street Food Winner (nine years ago). And we wait for buses and we ride buses when they turn up, not yet discontinued due to a city disrupted in the name of progress.

Gentrification looms large, threatening a historical amnesia, which, as Jade Kake wrote, is “gentrification’s most insidious by-product … displacement of Māori and Pasifika from the area came largely under the neutral slogan of urban development. Worldwide, urban renewal has usually meant brown removal.”

Descriptions of erasure and destruction feel bodily, reminders of the whenua as both land and placenta, that from which we are nourished and give us life:

That’s the third person I know without a house. 

What the hell is going on? 

They’re pulling us out of our own soil… like weeds.

I’m not a weed.

And this:

Only the evicted can describe what it’s like to sit across from a home you can never return to.

It begs the question, don’t you think: can we call it “progress”, when care and respect for cultural history falls away, often in eager deference to profitability? What is being revitalised? And by whom and for whom and by what means? It ain’t progress if it’s only for some; surely, that’s just privilege with a rebrand.

And yet, these three, Te Hoia, Q and Rosina, despite all this: they’re out there, resilient and hopeful and strong and resistant, supporting each other, showing up for each other, even when it is to a yuck part of town. They exist not just as individuals, but as members of a collective, seeing themselves always in relation to one another; delighting in their tightly woven bond.

Their joy is an act of resistance.

While loitering in the eyes of some, especially in spaces being “revitalised”, is seen as a threat or a sully to progress, and which was once in this country illegal – and which, I read, a woman in Christchurch a few years back wanted to make so again – in the book and in the world, I like to think there is in part a reclamation of the loiter. The American poet, Ross Gay, wrote of the delight in loitering an act of resistance: “It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption … the idea of it is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.”

Throughout the book, in those moments in between – the waiting, the bus-riding – we read with Te Hoia, the words of Piopi Ruta-Chris (a Rangatira in the novel, reminiscent of the likes of Moana Jackson, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask):

We must stay suspicious of those who dismiss gentrification and property development as unrelated to early colonial settlement. I am often forced to ask myself as a critic of such systems what I continue to uphold. Much is inescapable, we are all entangled. However I am talking about those dense, self-aware moments that we have agency and could choose not to comply.

I am grateful for moments like this, when a voice I trust offers me reminders to reflect, to do better. A few years back, I had the honour of hearing Coco Solid speak at an event; the kōrero in its entirety blew my fragile eggshell mind, but it was these words that really took root within me: “Calling someone out on stuff they have done that wasn’t right with you, is the most generous act that you can do for them.”

Hate is not the opposite of love, she said. Rather, it is being ignored, it is being silenced, it is being erased: that is the opposite of love.

This book is a reminder of the importance of the special people in your life. They can be your collective memory, connective tissue to your place, your time, your identity. They can be a home, which is so much more than a spatial or physical or individualistic notion. “Words are a homeland”, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, and Coco Solid’s words are a homeland: they are a refuge, they are a birthplace.

To me, this book is a tohu and a wero. A reference point for possibility. Coco Solid opens up spaces for untold stories and whakaaro not seen on the page before, not given enough space in the world. Stories of rebellion and resistance and resilience and of the richness and complexity and also cosmic randomness and chaotic energy in the interstices of life. She extends a warm invitation to consider our part in the collective, and also systems of transmogrification and inequity: we will not achieve more equitable outcomes through the purchase of multiple blocks of Whittaker’s Miraka Kirimi alone. Soz.

Nor it will happen by posting online about one’s te reo classes and tweeting #landback and #decolonise from the comfort of one’s third or fourth or seventh property, not making that link that these things are all connected. The turf war started in 1840. It continues today. From it, some have made bank, others can’t make do. It’s on us to deeply consider this and try to make this shit better. Stories help. Stories like this one.

This book, and indeed Coco Solid’s body of work, is a karanga, a call to which we respond, connect with, learn from, find courage in. Willing us to be sovereign in our stories, to write them and tell them and weave them and sing them in our own unique ways.

That too is a fine act of resistance.

How to Loiter in a Turf War (Penguin NZ, $28) is available in store and can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.