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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

We Were the Wall of a Pātaka

March 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Te Motunui Epa by Rachel Buchanan (Bridget William Books, 2022), 256pp, $49.99

Wind the clock back to the early 1800s, when Pākehā have just started establishing a significant presence in Aotearoa. Te Ātiawa hapū has occupied Taranaki for generations, but a new menace has arrived to disturb the peaceful equilibrium: European muskets, and with them, nearly a century of intertribal warfare in North Taranaki.

Te Ātiawa rushed to dismantle the most precious taonga from their carved buildings and hide them in Peropero swamp, intending to retrieve them later. Alas, that did not happen. Those who knew where they were hidden were captured or killed. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, maori and pacific

Matrix of Shape-Shifting

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2022), 392pp, $65

‘The Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one, forged in journeys across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea’, the late Moana Jackson writes in his foreword to the book Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art. The book is based on the blockbuster exhibition of the same name presented by Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, between December 2020 and May 2021, which took over the entire Gallery building and also spilled out into areas in the downtown Britomart precinct. [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, maori and pacific

Writing Ourselves into Existence

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: essays, maori and pacific

Poems as Memory 

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Arihia Latham

Sedition by Anahera Maire Gildea (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 150pp, $30; A Book of Rongo and Te Rangahau by Briar Wood (Anahera Press, 2022), 85pp, $30

Ka maumahara te awa.
The river is memory,
Letters and feathers swim it,
(‘Channelling Rongo’ by Briar Wood)

If water is our memory, its every iteration has existed before, has informed us and becomes us. When we look at history and the notion i te ao Māori that we move into the future facing our past, whatever we embody and create is because of what and, particularly, who has gone before us. What we know about history documentation in the western world is that, like our awa that have been piped, diverted and polluted, so too have our stories. Records were inherently marred with racism and sexism, and many stories were altered or lost. Ka maumahara tātou. Let us remember like water. Let us flow memories like words through time. Let our memories flow like cool water, like hot lava; let them flow to meet us. [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

Standing Strong

July 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 242

Tina Shaw

Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu women’s anthology, edited by Mikaela Nyman and Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen (Victoria University Press, 2021), 192pp, $30

If ever one has viewed Vanuatu as an idyllic paradise where life is easy, Sista, Stanap Strong! will soon dispel the myth. This anthology of writing by Vanuatu women—the first of its kind—shines a light on women’s lives in the archipelago. In poems, non-fiction pieces, stories and song, themes emerge of violence towards women, a misogynistic and patriarchal society, colonialism, the importance of education, and concern for the kind of world children will one day inherit. [Read more…]

Filed Under: anthology, maori and pacific, memoir, poetry, short stories

On Not Judging Books by Their Covers

June 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana

Goddess Muscle by Karlo Mila (Huia Publishers, 2020), 220pp, $35; The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25; Home Base by Keith Westwater (The Cuba Press, 2021), 184pp, $25

On first inspection, including reading the cover blurbs, I saw that these were three very different books. Indeed, the only common thread seemed that all were published by separate Wellington-based publishers. Each one is particular in its own way. Two are poetry collections, while the third—Westwater’s—has more prose and realia than poetry crammed regimentally inside and deals solely with his army cadet years of 1964–1966. Upperton’s intriguing rich runnel of poetry never touches on Aotearoa New Zealand, contemporary or otherwise. Mila’s longer collection spans her mahi internationally from over a decade, across a variety of sectioned topoi.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: maori and pacific, poetry

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