project #2/all about Campbell… and the Cook Islands too

Project 2: All about Campbell

For my second project I decided to research Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and how his legacy opened the window for so many other poets of his time from the Pacific Islands. To start I figured I’d give a brief description of the Pacific Islands and how they play a role in this. The Pacific Islands have three main groups of islands which are Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Depending on what you think the Pacific Islands are, you can include all the islands in the Pacific Ocean as well. Such as Hawaii, Bora Bora, Tahiti, The Cook Islands, etc. For this essay we are primary going to focus on the Cook Islands and New Zealand though.

Around 5,000 years ago the first canoes were developed in China and people from all over the pacific took to the ocean to find new lands among the thousands of islands in Oceania. The people who settled here grew these islands into fertile lands using sustainable techniques in agriculture that lead to some we still use today. Even though there is evidence on the islands that settlers have been there for as long as 40,000 years originating from Australia and New Guinea according to nhm.org the Chinese used their canoes and watched the stars, sun, and wind patterns to navigate the ocean currents. The Cook Islands located north of New Zealand is a chain of 15 islands scattered over a wide space area. The largest island of Rarotonga is covered in a large mountain range and is home to the caption of the Cook Islands. The Cook Islands have political ties to New Zealand but is technically its own free country, which means the citizens of the Cook Islands are New Zealand citizens and can live in New Zealand if they choose. Over 60,000 Cook Island people live in New Zealand. Looking at their tourist page on google I found that this is a heavily visited area, with lagoon cruises, snorkeling, scuba diving and anything a tropical beach vacation can give you. Their moto on their website states “no hotel larger than a coconut tree” which I think shows they want to keep their home from tall skyscraper hotels. It looks like a beautiful place. Why am I telling you all this tourist stuff? I don’t know either, but I promise I have somewhat of a plan.

The Cook Islands is where Alistar Te Ariki Campbell is from, He was born on June 25^th, 1925. His mother was a native to the Cook Islander also known as a Cook Island Māori. His father is a native from New Zealand or a Pākehā, his father was also descended from Scotland. when he was 6 his mother died from what would have been tuberculosis. Then when he was 7 his father drank himself into a grave, meaning Campbell was now an orphan. Campbell and his brothers got sent to their grandmother’s house for a few years till she could not handle their care. Due to it being during The Great Depression and she could not handle 4 children so the boys were then sent to an orphanage in New Zealand where he would spend the next 6 years of his life. While living in the orphanage he attended an all-boys high school called Otago Boys’ High School where he was bullied for his nationality since he looked like his mother with his Cook Island Heritage. He started writing poetry around that time and wrote about his feelings and how he struggled with depression and the loss of his parents. In 1944 until 1952 he attended college on and off, while doing so he worked odd jobs to help support himself. In 1949 his first poem The Elegy was published. In 1950 his first collection of poems was published. He wrote about love and his poems were lyrical and romantic in style. He didn’t include anything about his Cook Island heritage in his first collection.

I believe Campbell influenced many people throughout the years as he worked on his poetry. He received many honorable awards during his life one including the New Zealand Book Award for poetry for his collected poems in 1982. His childhood was shitty, and he showed that through his later poems. This giving poets hope that if someone whose early life was so challenging and hard then he was able to turn it around and be one of the most successful Pacific Island poets today than anyone can if they work hard enough. He gave people the courage they needed to stick up for themselves and write what they wanted to. Campbells later work was about his childhood and how depressing it was but still used a romantic style of writing.

I wanted to see if I could find any other Pacific Island poets who also had a kind of dark past or their poems gave a lot of emotion. One poet I really want to focus on is Tusiata Avia who is originally from New Zealand and is a children’s poet. I want to focus on her poem Demonstration which is about how she was raped and through reading it we can see how her emotions fly when she saw a young woman protesting rape in the square. She says in her poem “you wonder again, whether it was rape, and whether it might have been your fault.” The emotion in her poems stand out to me the most. While I can’t fully connect her work to Campbell, I can see how they are similar. For Campbell I looked at the poem Breath of Life and how Campbell also used emotion in this poem. He writes “it should retaliate with intemperate displays of bloody-mindedness, tossing trees and other furniture about the sky, and anything that’s breathing and will die.” He is talking about his childhood and how sad and depressing it was. The emotions he is feeling and how he was able to conquer this and move on and never look back.

Overall, I believe Campbell was an amazing poet of his time. When he died in 2009, he had won many awards over the years, wrote children’s books, radio plays, novels, a memoir of his life, and many many poems. Campbells life wasn’t easy, and he struggled with it a lot. He went through a divorce with his first wife and his second wife had depression issues. He had two sons and lived a long fulfilling life. I wanted to write about Campbell because I wanted to explore more into his life and find out why he wrote in the style he did. After learning about how he was orphaned at a young age and how he had to grow up in a orphanage I started to truly understand why he wrote the way he did. Why his poems were filled with so much emotion. In the past I’ve written poems of my own, but the emotion never shown through. If I could say anything on what this essay taught me, I’d say that understanding a person’s past shows you a lot about that person writing and how emotionally deep, it can go. While with Campbell the words that he wrote flow and are like a beautiful river in the New Hampshire wilderness, inviting you to read on.

Works sited

“Alistair Te Ariki Campbell.” Poetry Archive, 2 June 2020, https://poetryarchive.org/poet/alistair-te-ariki-campbell/. 

“Pacific Islander Poetry and Culture.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/142017/pacific-islander-poetry-and-culture-5913874061754. 

“Home.” Cook Islands, 26 Apr. 2022, https://cookislands.travel/home. 

“The Pacific Islands.” Natural History Museum, https://nhm.org/experience-nhm/exhibitions-natural-history-museum/fabric-community/pacific-islands. 