Abstract
This is a poetic compost story. It is a situated tale of how I gradually began to shred my fantasy of being a self-contained responsible individual so I could become a more fruitful response-able Pākehā (for the purposes of this paper, a descendant of colonial settlers or colonial settler) from Christchurch (the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand), Aotearoa (The Māori (the Indigenous people of New Zealand) name for New Zealand) New Zealand. Poetic compost storying is a way for me to turn over Donna Haraway’s composting ethico-onto-epistemology with critical family history and critical autoethnography methodologies. To this end, I, in this piece, trace how I foolishly believed that I could separate myself from my colonial family and history only to find that I was reinscribing Western fantasies of transcendence. I learnt by composting, rather than trying to escape my past, that I could become a more response-able Pākehā and family member.
Highlights
Foolishly believed that I could separate myself from my colonial family and history only to find that I
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All manner of critters and lifeforms wriggle around in this natural cultural situated compost pile (Haraway 2016): Words made from keyboards, angry mouths, blood red flesh, sea and estuary smells collide
Summary
All manner of critters and lifeforms wriggle around in this natural cultural situated compost pile (Haraway 2016): Words made from keyboards, angry mouths, blood red flesh, sea and estuary smells collide. Compost storying is Haraway’s (2016) latest call for salvaging, and staying with, troubled worlds It is about response-able composing and decomposing wherein rich matter and meaningful matters are already entwined. This article takes a poetic shape, weaving theory with story in an attempt to illustrate how composting breaks down the Western binary between words and flesh, or matters and matter (Haraway 2016). I use composting in this piece to show how I learnt the fertility of response-ability through encounters with my family and the unsettled violence that we have inherited as Pākehā from Christchurch New Zealand
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