The Samoan athlete was Nathaniel Matagi: ‘everyone calls me Nat. Born in Tennessee but am Samoan at heart and muscle and soul.’ The Rock was his hero because ‘The Rock can rock any honky out of the ring and is Samoan and proud of it. Want to be a novelist like Albert Wendt whose novel Sons for the Return Home changed my life.’ Hadn’t written any poetry at all but he wanted to learn from Daniel Malaetau, ‘the greatest poet on the planet and Samoan.’

  Folole Misamalosi, the Samoan woman, was from Pago Pago, American Samoa, and didn’t want to live anywhere else ‘cos Pago is the Paradise of the Pacific.’ She claimed she was living in exile in Honolulu because she wanted the best education so she could help her people. Wanted to be a lawyer. That way she could kick arse, especially those of the ‘ignorant, arrogant Palagis who dominate my beloved country.’ Wanted to be a poet so she could be more eloquent when she argued her court cases. Praise God!

  Shirley Anne Beems was the name of the short obstreperous blonde. She was originally from Iowa City but had lived and studied in numerous other places on the Mainland. This was her first time overseas. She was attracted to Hawai‘i by the ‘surf, sun, and the movies about Hawai‘i.’ ‘Haven’t read or written much fiction but written lots of poetry. Guess it’s what you call “confessional stuff”.’ Hated Sylvia Plath though. ‘I want to write a novel in verse about surfing, sun, the movies about Hawai‘i and getting away from your hopeless parents who are drowning in their expensive middle-class shit.’

  Her friend was ‘Just call me “Michel” with the surname Nargler’. Who loved ‘any kind of poetry written by any kind of woman anywhere.’ Most male poets were full of macho shit and blather, and Bukowski is the ‘blatherest’. Will spend her semester trying ‘to fish love poems out of the female universe that is still becoming.’

  Last but now the most compelling presence – and he was in self-denial that she was attracting the usual fire in his body – was Lanimua, call me Mua. Again he reminded himself that in his whole career as a teacher he had never had an affair with any of his students or colleagues. No. Definitely. Too right he’d suffered huge temptations, which sometimes he had almost given way to, yes. Most difficult were those students who came onto you openly, without shame or false modesty. Almost irresistible moral and jail bait. And now, when some of those lurid episodes threatened to swamp him, he jotted down these notes about Lanimua: in her late thirties, she had not finished her degree when she’d first attended UH fresh out of high school. ‘Too many irresistible distractions.’ (He wondered what those had been.) Then worked. (Nothing about what that had been.) Was now back to finish her BA in English. ‘Love the writing by Kanaka Maoli and Pacific writers, especially John Dominis Holt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Joe Balaz, Victoria Kneubuhl and Imaikalani Kalahele.’ At the bottom of her card she’d scrawled, as an afterthought, ‘My aumakua is the niuhi, the white shark.’ Yet he concluded – but didn’t know why – that that was the most important thing she’d said about herself. The other thing that struck him was that she’d said little about what she’d done since her first stint at UH.

  He finished compiling the information on the students by about ten o’clock, then turned on the TV and watched Law and Order. Lanimua continued infiltrating his attention and diverting it from the dedicated team of detectives as they hunted another devious serial killer.

  The following Wednesday when he arrived for their session, they were all in their seats, trying to appear relaxed and unconcerned about having to read out and discuss the individual poems, on cold, they’d written during the week; their first exercise and leap into the evaluation and critical judgment of people and a professor they didn’t yet know. Strangers to the slaughter. You were putting your head and heart and imagination and everything on the block, in the form of this six-line poem. It was the same every year, and he needed to reassure them, so he did what he did every year. He held up the sheaf of copies of the poems they’d emailed him (and one another), which he’d read and studied carefully, writing careful and encouraging remarks on them, and said, with his most genuine smile: ‘These are good, people. I like them very much.’ He could see their bodies relax, whaarr, releasing the tension and apprehension. (Lanimua looked the most relieved and, without make-up and in a simple yellow t-shirt and jeans and jandals, the most attractive.) ‘Of course, being your first poem for me, there may be things you need to revise.’ Malcolm looked startled. Nigel, Nat, Maria and Folole nodded in agreement. ‘Right now, I have to remind you that you won’t be a good writer if you don’t revise and revise and revise your work.’ Shirley looked superior, above that advice, and Michel copied her.

  Not long after that, he invited them to read their poems aloud, and again anticipated that no one would offer to go first. They all avoided his scrutiny. His anticipation was dead right. So he asked again, ‘Isn’t there a courageous poet in this class?’

  ‘I’ll read,’ Lanimua offered, almost inaudibly. Most of the others looked as if they’d been saved from drowning. Her face was now turning pale, as she struggled to swallow back her fear. ‘Okay, this isn’t a good poem – it’s the first poem I’ve ever written.’ Paused, swallowed again.

  ‘Our aumakua lives in Te Moananui-a-Kiwa

  It swims, moves, weaves in the cold depths

  It mustn’t stop – if it does it will drown

  Our niuhi lives in perpetual motion

  beyond the cold and the edge of stillness.’

  ‘Are you sure, Mua, it’s the first poem you’ve ever written?’ he asked deliberately, smiling.

  She started chortling. ‘Well, if you call the couple of poems I tried to write in elementary school poems, professor!’

  Now he invited them to comment on Lanimua’s poem. Most of the others looked away from him. He turned to the hand as it rose. ‘Name’s Jake Nakasone,’ the slender, black-haired young man with the fine bone fish hook pendant said. ‘Ah’m jus’ puzzled, professor; I thought the poem was to be about the cold.’ A few others nodded.

  ‘You want to read your poem again, Mua, and talk about it a little bit?’ he asked.

  Reluctantly she reread it, and then said, ‘Some sharks, especially the niuhi, the great white, are built not to feel the cold, so I think the cold is in the poem but the niuhi can’t feel it. It lives beyond it. It also can’t be stationary; it can’t just lie down on the ocean bed and have a sleep.’ Some laughed. ‘It has to keep moving.’

  ‘Yeah, in perpetual motion,’ Folole remarked. ‘That’s a very apt way of puttin’ it. Imagine, you can’t sleep, you havta keep movin’ and movin’ and movin’ until you die …’

  ‘… Beyond the edge of stillness and the cold,’ Maria added.

  ‘Yeah, I get it now,’ Jake nodded. ‘It’s a beaudiful way of puttin’ it, Mua.’

  ‘Frank’s my name,’ another Hawaiian student said. ‘The poor sharks have had a very bad press since Hollywood turned them into ferocious, man-eating monsters …’

  ‘But that’s true, man,’ Malcolm interjected. ‘I saw a documentary about sharks off the tip of South Africa. They even attacked the scientists who were in steel cages filming them.’

  ‘Hollywood made millions from turnin’ Mua’s aumakua into Jaws, a frightening monster,’ Frank countered.

  ‘Yeah, like haole and the tourist industry continue to make millions by selling everything Hawaiian,’ Lanimua continued.

  ‘So you don’t believe in the sayings about sharks?’ Malcolm said.

  ‘What?’ Lanimua demanded, final and deadly.

  ‘Loan sharks, business sharks etc?’ Malcolm was oblivious to the corner he was painting himself into.

  ‘Those metaphors are in the cultures of people who know fuck-all about sharks!’ Lanimua attacked. And he didn’t want to stop the argument. ‘People who don’t even read the scientific studies done by their own scientists about sharks.’

  ‘Ah thought we were writing and talking about poetry.’ Jake tried rescuing the situation.

  ‘I thought the discussion so far is about that,’ he said. ‘Mua’s poem is about sharks; a particular shark: the niuhi and its role as aumakua.’

  ‘Let her tell us what Hawaiians believe sharks are really like,’ Maria insisted. ‘So much bullshit has been fed us about sharks by haole films and TV!’

  Lanimua glanced over at him and he nodded. ‘Okay, if we believe the films, most sharks are large and ferocious. In fact, most sharks are quite small, ranging from a few inches to a few feet in length. Those movies portray sharks as feeding in packs and doing so in day-long feeding frenzies. In fact most sharks eat less than 10 percent of their body weight each day. That is less than most animals. And they feed individually, not in packs. And they certainly don’t attack out of some innate sense of ferocity and violence. They’re not crazy feeding and attacking machines. I’ll stop there – I’m boring you.’ Some asked that she continue, but she refused.

  ‘And now that I know all that,’ Jake said, ‘I can see some of the complexity in Mua’s poem.’

  ‘And when we know more about Hawaiian culture and the history out of which the poem has come, obviously, that complexity will increase,’ he added.

  ‘For instance, Mua,’ Michel said, ‘what is an aumakua?’

  Lanimua was trying to be patient. ‘It is a family akua or god. Other families had other creatures as their aumakua. Our niuhi protected us, fed us, provided us with a role model for courage and patience, etc. Even today there is a shark heiau in Kaneohe Bay. And sharks still come there to spawn and grow.’

  ‘In Fiji, the great white shark is one of the important gods,’ he added. When he glanced at the class, he noted most of them wanted to move onto the next poem, the next victim. ‘So, who’s going next?’ Paused. ‘Mua, thank you for being the first in our class.’ She smiled, glad she was no longer the centre of attention.

  ‘Professor, the name’s Shannon; may I read my poem?’ It was one of the Hawaiians who’d joked about the cold at their last session. Dark, black wavy hair, a trace of oriental features. ‘Okay, here we go.’

  ‘Before the haole came we had no words for snow, ice, sleet,

  and all those elements produced by the cold

  Those were not in our lives.

  So what did the first bit of ice feel like

  in the amazed hand of a Hawaiian who didn’t have the vocabulary of the cold?

  That touch would have fired his search for that language.’

  Paused, eyes lowered. ‘Ah’m not happy about it; not happy about the las’ line especially. And I need to condense it further, eh?’

  From past experience, he anticipated that a few – maybe three – would try and cruise their way, with the minimum effort, through the course using smooth articulate talk and bluff, and he was again correct. Jocelyn Kim, a slim young woman who was deliberately trying to be inconspicuous, and whose name he asked for when he sensed she was not going to offer her poem, read her poem with enormous verve and confidence, but that didn’t fool him into believing she’d spent much time on it. After the others had discussed it, saying it was a quality poem, he said, curtly, ‘You need to revise that numerous times and show it to me again next session, okay?’ And as he anticipated, she smiled beautifully and said, ‘Certainly, Professor Malaetau!’ That would have conned other men, but he was used to working with such confidence tricksters! The challenge was to turn her confidence into a talent for using her writing to con readers into believing anything she wanted them to believe. That’s what art was all about.

  He was disappointed that Nathaniel, a fellow Samoan and a straightforward, uncomplicated soul, though not a confidence trickster, was expecting to get through the course with first drafts as final ones. Nathaniel read his poem in the voice and manner of The Rock:

  ‘In winter, bro, it’s cold in Tennessee,

  so cold your ears and other valuables can freeze and break off.’ (A wave of suppressed laughter from the class.)

  ‘Playing football in winter is a shit

  You can’t feel anything in your hands …’

  He lost interest in Nathaniel Matagi’s poem right there. He didn’t even wait for the others to comment. ‘You need to revise that many times, Nathaniel. It’s like practicing a move in football until you get it perfect. How do you do that?’

  ‘Over and over again until it looks and feels easy,’ Nathaniel admitted.

  ‘Yeah, bro, in football you get killed by the opposition if you don’t rehearse and practice, right?’

  ‘Right!’ Nathaniel replied.

  He was also disappointed in Shirley Beems’ effort – or lack of it. He smiled but was blunt. ‘How many times did you rewrite that?’ he asked, immediately after she read it. He refused to set her free from his gaze.

  She squirmed, and then admitted, ‘Twice.’

  ‘So, class, I expect you all to revise and revise your work, otherwise drop out of this course now and do something you can con your way through!’ He laughed; the others didn’t because they knew he wasn’t bluffing.

  Apart from those three, by the time they’d all read and discussed their poems, he was enveloped in the usual feeling of relief and self-satisfaction and euphoric keenness to write their next poems that was emanating from the rest of the class. It was like that in each course, at the end of the first readings and critiquing. He was especially pleased that no one had been insensitive, arrogant and destructive in their analyses.

  ‘Next week’s exercise is this: Write a poem no more than eight lines, again without the I, but in any tense, and using in the poem the words she, fire, lava and blue light.’ He wrote it up on the board. ‘You will also continue to revise the poems you wrote for today and keep them in your folios for me to look at again later on.’

  ‘Before we finish, professor, may I ask Mua another question about sharks?’ Nigel ‘the Hammer’ Blathmire, who’d said little during the class, asked.

  ‘Go right ahead, Mano Kihikihi,’ Lanimua replied, with an ironical smile.

  ‘I mean, if sharks were ancestral gods, why did Hawaiians eat them?’ the Hammer asked.

  ‘We, Kanaka Maoli, are a spiritual but very practical people,’ she explained, eyes twinkling mischievously. ‘Not all mano, or sharks, were aumakua. We ate those who were not our aumakua. And we only caught what we needed, and it wasn’t just for the fins to make shark fin soup or to mix some concoction to try and get our limp hopes erect again!’ Most of the class, including the Hammer, laughed with her, and for the first time he sensed they were becoming a class, a group held together by mutual respect and trust.

  That evening at home, he got out his Hawaiian dictionary and looked up ‘mano kihikihi’, and laughed to himself when he saw the meaning: hammerhead shark.

  Hawai‘i

  The automatic doors slid open and as he pushed his suitcase-laden trolley out of the restricted area she waved and smiled and again wondered why David always looked defenceless whenever he came off a long plane trip. He wore a crumpled crimson aloha shirt with yellow frangipani motifs on it, the dark blue linen trousers that she’d gifted him for Christmas, and his favourite sandals. A week in the sun had deepened his tan to a shiny ebony. Defenceless, yes, but strikingly handsome, and she sensed many of the women looking at him.

  It was just after midday, and the arrival area was crowded, so he had to stop and search the crowd for Taimane. She pushed forward between two Polynesian men, raised her arm and waved. He saw her and hurried over, smiling widely. After nine hours crammed into an economy class seat, he felt dirty and smelly, and wanted a hot shower.

  ‘Good conference?’ she asked as they embraced. David kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of sun and sunblock lotion.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘and I missed you.’ But when she nuzzled closer into David’s arms he held her off; it was too public, too many people around. Not long after they’d met, she’d realised he didn’t like showing affection for her in public and she been hurt, believing he was ashamed of being seen with her. But it had been three years now – she knew it was just how he was. He wound his right arm round her shoulders and, holding the trolley with his left hand, steered her towards the exit. ‘It’s good to be home.’

  ‘Great tan – how was Hawai‘i?’ she asked, taking the trolley and steering it. ‘Still paradise?’ David had taken her to Honolulu the year before for another conference, which had been held at the Mānoa Campus of the University of Hawai‘i. They’d stayed at the Rainbow Hotel in Waikīkī, right on the beach. And then explored Hawai‘i and enjoyed the most wonderful holiday she’d ever had.

  ‘Yeah, still has the best climate on the planet.’ As they wove their way through the parking area, Taimane gave him the car keys. ‘My paper went well,’ he added.

  ‘I’m sure it did; I’m sure they loved it.’ She paused. ‘Fantastic title: “The Netherends in Epeli Hau’ofa’s Fiction”.’

  ‘Had a packed audience. I’ve sent a copy of it to Epeli.’

  ‘That’s brave! What if he doesn’t like it?’

  ‘He’s liked my earlier stuff about him.’ David had introduced Taimane to Epeli Hau’ofa at the closing dinner of a conference David and his English department had organised and held at the impressive Fale Pasefika a few months before. Epeli was a tall Tongan with a bushy beard and sparkling, mischievous eyes. Later, Taimane laughed her way through Epeli’s collection of satirical stories, Tales of the Tikongs.

  After accompanying David to the opening of that Hawai‘i conference in a large, nondescript lecture theatre with about two hundred other participants, where she really tried to focus on the keynote address by a stumpy, bald-headed professor from New York as well as three other so-called ‘papers’ (which their presenters crammed into their prescribed fifteen minutes by reading them at a rapid, jargon-filled pace), she’d told him that such academic brilliance about literature and the Pacific diaspora wasn’t for her illiterate mind, and that she would only come to David’s session the following day, before enjoying the ‘sea, sun, and volcanoes of Paradise’ for the rest of their stay.