Reappropriating the Colonisers' Language to Contest Racist and Sexist Stereotyping Processes in Kiwi Asian Poetry Written by Women

Asian New Zealanders compose the second largest minority of Aotearoa New Zealand, after Māori and before Pasifika. Even though the first Chinese settlers were invited to work in the Otago goldmines in 1866, New Zealanders of Asian descent have long been perceived as mere sojourners. Constructed as the refused Other in a post-Treaty of Waitangi New Zealand, Kiwi Asians have suffered from a series of discriminatory laws, limiting and disempowering their community. Labour Prime Minister Helen Clarke officially apologised in 2002 for the institutional racism Kiwi Asians endured during colonisation. Following this historical redress, memory sites were preserved in the South Island to commemorate the role of this minority in the construction of Aotearoa New Zealand.
This article compares six poems composed by three women writers: Nina Mingya Powles, Lily Ng, and Vanessa Mei Crofskey. It examines how these poems can be read as excavation sites which may testify to the cultural trauma of the Kiwi Asian community. Beyond the study of the impact of insidious trauma, a transpacific methodology is used to analyse herstory as a rewriting of the literary borders of Aotearoa New Zealand. I then observe how trauma-telling can be interpreted as a form of translation, transforming poems into multicultural and multilingual spaces where women writers can feel at home.