Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Nothing Inside But Stars

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Rachel Smith

A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha: An anthology of new writing for a changed world edited by Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy (Massey University Press, 2023), 359pp, $39.99

Skip back three years or so to when the world was beginning to understand what the COVID-19 pandemic would be. It’s here that writers and editors Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy began to consider the project that would become A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha. This book is not a pandemic anthology. It encompasses much more, taking the reader to places before, after and through this time, and many voices from Aotearoa and abroad tell stories of who we were and are, and of the challenges that have long been with us—decolonisation, indigeneity, climate change. [Read more…]

Grenades Shaped Like Cans of Coke

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Andrew Paul Wood

Ithaca by Alie Benge (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 264pp, $35.00

I have a love-hate relationship with personal essays. More often than not, they would be better as short fiction without the pretence of being autobiographical. As a rule of thumb, the personal essay should be avoided unless you have something exceptional to say or you can say it in an exceptional way. But as the poet Paul Valéry once said in a lecture: ‘Sometimes something wants to express itself, sometimes a means of expression wants something to say.’ It sounds better in French. [Read more…]

The Tilted Playing Field

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David Eggleton

Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Arcia Tecun, Lana Lopesi and Anisha Sankar (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 256pp, $39.99

Behind the facade of ‘nice New Zealand’ racial discrimination festers away at every level of society, though often in subtle, circuitous, complex ways, and despite so-called affirmative action. One in every three complaints to the Human Rights Commission currently concerns racial discrimination. In November 2022, after his defeat at the polling booths, Auckland Mayoral candidate Efeso Collins, who is of Sāmoan and Tokelauan descent, and was for a time the front-runner, said polling research showed that ‘the race factor’ was a key reason for his loss to Wayne Brown, who implicitly played ‘the race card’. [Read more…]

Difficult Histories

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 244

Emma Gattey

Kārearea by Māmari Stephens (Bridget Williams Books, 2021), 146pp, $14.99; Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, denial and New Zealand history by Joanna Kidman, Vincent O’Malley, Liana MacDonald, Tom Roa and Keziah Wallis (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), 184pp, $14.99

One of Aotearoa’s swiftest birds of prey, the kārearea (New Zealand falcon or sparrowhawk), is beautiful, lethal and a threatened species. Māmari Stephens (Te Rarawa) named her blog after this bird because ‘the kārearea’s flight above has a comforting distance from the ground’, a distance she wished to gain through publishing her opinions anonymously. Thankfully, this initial anonymity gave way to self-identification. Her writing in Kārearea exemplifies the whakataukī, ‘Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini’ (‘My success is not mine alone, but is the strength of many’). As a legal scholar, writer, Anglican priest and wahine Māori, Stephens is incredibly aware of her social reproductive, intellectual and emotional debts to her community. This is a humble book. Through writing these pieces, Stephens realises the extent to which her ‘writing needs the people and experiences I come from, if my words are to make any sense at all’. [Read more…]

Writing Ourselves into Existence

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 244

Laura Toailoa

Sweat and Salt Water: Selected works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa edited and compiled by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson and Terence Wesley-Smith (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 221pp, $40

How does one begin to describe the enormity of Teresia Teaiwa? How does one begin to describe the history of this great thinker, writer, teacher, activist and poet? How does one pay a worthy tribute to the woman who made us laugh and cry and feel and fight, in a place where too many Pasifika minds go to die? How does one begin? [Read more…]

Listening to Our Elders

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Gina Cole

Haare Williams: Words of a kaumātua by Haare Williams (Auckland University Press, 2019), 260pp, $49.99; Tree Sense: Ways of thinking about trees edited by Susette Goldsmith (Massey University Press, 2021), 256pp, $37

Two insightful books of wisdom, beauty and knowledge from the elders. The first is a collection of poetry and prose steeped in mātauranga Māori; the second is an anthology of essays, art and poetry about trees in Aotearoa. Both are well-written, engaging and compelling.

Haare Williams: Words of a kaumātua is a collection of writing introduced and edited by Witi Ihimaera, who describes Williams as ‘one of our greatest elders, a singular bellbird among our native language speakers’, ‘the Grandfather Moses’ of Māori literature and ‘one of New Zealand’s leading changemakers’. It is evident from Ihimaera’s introduction and to all those who walk in te ao Māori that Williams is a kaumātua of great mana and knowledge, a sought-after orator, teacher and creative.  [Read more…]