Collected Memories,Collecting Dust |2011

Collected Memories, Collecting Dust | 2011

Tute rein se turne en déclin/ Tut cheit, tut muert, tut vait à fin.

All things to nothingness descend/ Everything falls, dies. comes to an end.

(Wace 1170. Prologue du Roman de Rou. ll 65-66)

Mate i te tamati, he auru kowhao; mate i te matua te takere.

To loose a child is a leakage, to loose a parent is the bottom dropped out.

(Māori proverb)

Photographs help us to remember by prompting thoughts of the invisible. Going through a box of snapshots that correspond to my childhood, I see a snapshot of my mother, broadly smiling, standing under a Broadway marquee.

Where was I when you and Daddy went to New York?

You stayed with your Grandmother.

There are no pictures of my grandmother and I, sitting in her tiled sunroom (her winter garden), listening to the Saturday evening radio broadcast of the recitation of the rosary, but I remember. (Langford, 2007, p106)

My MA Thesis, Activating a connection: Creating the place where the whakapapa, kōrero and taonga of my islands meet discusses the above themes in more detail. It is available to read in in full text on Academia now.