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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Holding the Baby

August 1, 2011 1 Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana 
Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, by Tina Makereti (Huia Publishers, 2010)

Kia ora mo tenei pukapuka Tina. Ka nui te pai tau pakiwaitara kei konei.
 I enjoyed this initial collection of tales by Tina Makereti. It’s refreshing, rarely boring, easy to read. The stories rebound and resound with echoes from one to the other, motifs recur as time and legend intertwine in a patterning of melded possibilities and possible meldings.
The quick stick label is ‘magic realism’: Makereti’s craft is in veneering extra-sensory perceptions and other-worldliness onto quotidian contingency. Her quotidian, in turn, is permeated with marginalisations of ethnicity and gender. There is a Borges-like quality to some tales – as in Eli’s massive polyglottism in the god child, which brings to mind Funes the Memorious. Eli also hears the sounds of thoughts. There is the synaesthesia of seeing colour in words in off-beat; while Rosie listens to the talk of inanimate objects in blink. The analogue of Kirlian photography – the suggestion of ghostly auras – segues everywhere in this collection; that is, there is an ambient aura around many of the main protagonists, while dream-like states also billow within narratives, flowing through, for example, top-knot and shapeshifter.
Maori mythology is ever-present, albeit in contemporaneous settings (in Maoritanga, past and present are all one anyway), as for example the way in which the mountains and rivers animate the kuia, her tipuna, her mokopuna in kaitiaki. Everything integrates ki te ao o nga iwi Maori; it’s only the one-dimensional Pakeha boyfriends sketched into these stories who are given to prate such lines as, ‘Perhaps there are things humanity is not aware of’, and ‘It’s just, the world’s so huge, you know? The universe is a freakin’ crazy place and I know nothing about it.’ Tina Makereti senses and depicts the Other as always here. Her magic realism is actually our true diurnal ethos. In effect, she is more a mirror to the Maori experience than she is a second-hand Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. She is one who senses the atua as well as the kehua everywhere. Her stories transmogrify into purakau. The marginal becomes mainstream.
So Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is always around the corner here: as in the tales top-knot, ahi, mokomoko – maybe also via the lizard king allusions in blink. Pania of the Reef scores her own anthropomorphic role in shapeshifter. And, of course, the lead-off piece is a clever reciting/re-siting of Tane Mahuta claymaking Hineahuone, after his schisms with Tumatauenga, in skin and bones. Tihei mauriora indeed: a heart-starter to get the collection pumping, eh.
So also, the whanau situations – growing up in broken homes, broken in more ways than one. Lack of pingers. Lack of love. Lack of food. Violence. Too much piss being drunk. Being a whangai. Being a solo Mum. Losing babies. Loser (Pakeha) boyfriends with grabby hands and grubby potential-to-impregnate. Lack of many male role-models. Multi-generational fluxes and flows. Dying with whanau me whanaunga around, and then the tangi. Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa is essentially about growing up Maori. Just bite into what men do. Savour kaitiaki. Taste the textures in the order of things. Chew on in the end – which, of course, just has to be the last tale in this book, detailing the tangential aspects of tangi.
And what after death but to begin again? After all: ‘There was a woman and a man/there was a man and a woman’ are the words, the thematic words, which not only fuse the cycle of the single story the order of things, but also iterate the cyclical nature of the entire collection.
Furthermore, this is a woman’s book, making it all the more powerful. By this I mean that the book is about female-centred experience: babies, birth, sex (frustrated or enjoyed), best friends (as in off-beat for example), best friends as (twin) sisters in mokomoko and tree, the rabbit and the moon – and the strong bonding thus involved. But even more crucial than all this is the blight and plight of male–female relationships – where the woman, all too often, is left – quite literally – holding the baby, though sometimes voluntarily. For, as Pania reflects: ‘Sometimes I think men just take what they want.’ Which is also why some stories meander, dribble into flaccidity; the relationship entailed was also going nowhere, and it is the woman left staunch or staunching.
All this combined thematic interplay is manifested most clearly in mokomoko, where the strands of Maori wahine in relation to Maui, of madness in relation to men (husband-fathers), of birth/death in relation to dreaming, all weave together. The underlying viewpoint of Makereti’s whole anthology is the one Hine-nui-te-po articulates: ‘There would always be this thing between men and women, both grappling with their fear, both loving and maiming and making a mess of it all. Even the gods made mistakes.’
One sister here learns how to exist again from her twin talking Hine’s story – just as Makereti talks tales, so as to reveal that their telling might indicate states of mind beyond just blather: ‘there was a way of understanding the world that went beyond words … the quiet place … was more real than all the words uttered in Babel.’ In the end, it is Makereti’s gift that her pakiwaitara convey the possibility of a transcendent silence.
Kia ora ano mo te taonga.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand currently living and teaching in Hong Kong.

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Comments

  1. Anonymous says

    August 15, 2011 at 10:25 pm

    Tena koe Vaughan,
    nga mihi nui mo enei whakaaro nui.
    na Tina Makereti

    Reply

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