Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 · Uncategorized Fruit bowl Tulia Thompson Here, in the first world in the North, We buy a fruit bowl woven out of cane for CAD$8.00 at a fair trade store I imagine it full of mangoes, oranges and bananas poised on the table still life evoking plentitude. You carry it on the bus jostling against your hip when we stop for lunch in Chinatown you leave it behind at the sushi place where a pony-tailed girl brings a porcelain tray of raw tuna for CAD$1.90. You travel back to claim it two buses and a walk in the hot June streets. Finally on the table, the fruit bowl tips drowsily to one side under the uneven weight of five Californian oranges. Tulia Thompson Tulia Thompson is of Fijian, Tongan and Pākehā descent. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Auckland. She is published in Niu Voices: Contemporary Pacific Fiction 1 and Blackmail Press. Her young adult novel Josefa and the Vu was published by Huia in 2007. She blogs about social justice at www.tuliathompson.wordpress.com. More by Tulia Thompson › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 17 January 202517 January 2025 · rape culture Neil Gaiman and the political economy of rape Emmy Rakete The interactions between Gaiman, Palmer, Pavlovich, and the couple’s young child are all outlined in Shapiro’s article. There is, though, another figure in the narrative whom the article does not name. Auckland city itself is a silent participant in the abuse that Pavlovich suffered. Auckland is not just the place where these things happen to have occurred: this is a story about Auckland. 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.
