WE ARE COMPOST
APRIL 2025 by SARAH HOPKINSON
Kia tūpato, ko ēnei ngā wāhi pakanga o mua,
Te mana o nāianei hoki,
Take care here, for you walk across a past
That is still very much present.
(Inscription in Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum, NZ Land Wars Gallery.)
I used to think I was separate from the land. That I could tend to a garden as if I were something outside it. A hand that offered care, control, maybe even benevolence. But growing food changed that. With my hands in the soil, the microbes remind my bones, I am nature. An earth-body, organised temporarily as Sarah, part of this celestial system—not above or outside it.
I can’t find English words strong enough to hold this. And maybe that’s the point. The languages of belonging have been stripped away by colonisation, by conquest and expansion. It’s not just land that we stole from others. We stripped ourselves too. The words we once had for understanding ourselves inside ecologies, have floated away.
Eating the last cucumber of summer after a day in the garden, April 2025.
Through healing my relationship to earth, I am forced to reckon with how my people severed theirs. I belong to Aotearoa New Zealand as Pākehā, not through innocence but through recognition. Precisely through responsibility. My ancestors didn’t bring love here—they brought supremacy. And supremacy doesn’t know how to belong, it only knows how to dominate. Right now, this need to dominate is so loud in the kawanatanga sphere. The challenge, for progressives like me, is to call this behaviour in - to call it in, and see it, as mine.
My 5th great-grandfather, Henry Nathaniel Rowe, sailed ships that protected sugar plantations in the Caribbean. He helped deliver enslaved West Africans to Barbados. He helped capture Guadeloupe, St. Martin’s and Puerto Rico. He helped flog a sailor 200 times with a cat o’ nine tails. These aren’t abstract details; they’re in his diary, and in my blood. He is just one of 64 grandparents of his time that fed these behaviours, down and down and down and down. To me.
Captain Henry Nathaniel Rowe Snr, 1779 - 1860.
The policies of control, the practices of dehumanisation, the justification of violence in service to empire—they’ve shaped themselves into new forms that are alive in the Pākehā cultural body.
They are in our healthcare systems, our education systems, our justice systems.
In the protocols that separate mothers from babies.
In the language that turns suffering into statistics.
Henry justified cruelty as a necessary evil.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
I am learning not to flinch from this history and this present.
Not to turn away.
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This moment, this climate, this grief—it’s the big rot.
We are in the composting of spent ideas.
The thing is, composting is not accidental. If we throw everything in without thought, we just get pathogens, or stasis. This is where we are collectively at the moment - we have a heap of spent ideas that are violently replicating themselves and holding on to harm.
When we compost with care and attention—something miraculous happens. The pile becomes fertile. It becomes alive. But it only works with diversity, with air, with time.
Compost needs tending. Compost needs a doula.
A living compost pile, built March 2025.
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Composting has taught me that decay is not failure, that death is not the end.
Vandana Shiva, indigenous seed and soil sovereignty champion, said recently in a quote that is informing me each and every day,
“Death is not the opposite of life. Death is a part of life. The opposite of life is the machine.”
This resonates so deeply. Settler violence the world over is aided and abetted by the artificial, by the machine.
I see it now in Palestine. In the bombs that fall on babies, in the machines that erase entire families. This is not an organic cycle of life and death. This is obliteration. This is a war against tenderness, against memory, against home, against life.
And I wonder, with a cynicism I don’t enjoy, where are all the pro-life people now?
And I see it here in Aotearoa too, not as such a fire, but as an erosion. As policy and paper cuts. The violence of repealing te Tiriti-based initiatives, rewriting history to suit settler comfort. This is not care. This is control, dressed up as neutrality.
It is Henry, still humming. Still hungry.
To be honest, I’ve felt so lost in the face of so many bombs and so much legislative violence.
But I am coming back again, to rest in this rot.
If we lay down loss with laughter, our ignorance with curiosity, our ancestral lineage of harm with intentional care, maybe life can emerge again. I can feel Henry beside me, helping me to lay down the habits I’ve inherited, in his own peculiar way. Later on in his life, after a near death experience fighting against Napoleon, Henry wrote The Rainbow of the Mind, a book full of ye and thee and almost impossible for this granddaughter of his to decipher. But it defends the existence of the soul in a material world.
Somehow, my work is his work too. We are spiralling together.
I am not romanticising pain. I’m saying we are being asked to metabolise it. Not alone, but in intimate, messy, accountable ways with our people passed. We are embroiled, entangled, participating in this decaying mess. There is no absolution from it.
We are not above the rot, we are inside it, we are it.
And through all of this, I have to believe, because the earth tells me that it is true, and because my heart can’t survive it all otherwise, that we are designed for this.
That just like the soil we can break completely apart, and grow again.
