Gina Cole
Te Awa o Kupu edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong (Penguin, 2023), 416pp, $37
Te Awa o Kupu is a recent addition to the growing number of anthologies featuring fiction and poetry by Māori writers. This collection is a stunning and joyful celebration of contemporary Māori short stories and poems, bringing together works from over 80 contemporary Māori writers. It includes interviews with Māori novelists Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Cassie Hart, Whiti Hereaka, Josh Pomare, and YA novelists Ataria Sharman and Shilo Kino. Te Awa o Kupu is a companion volume to Ngā Kupu Wero, a non-fiction collection by contemporary Māori writers edited by Witi Ihimaera and Jacinta Ruru.
The editors of Te Awa o Kupu, Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong, write in the introduction:
There is a river. It has flowed through Aotearoa for aeons. Across and through Te Ika a Māui, Te Waipounamu, Rakiura. It has many tributaries, cascades, curvatures, currents. In places it is majestically serene, in places fierce and forbidding. It is forever mighty … It is a river of words. Always ngā kupu Māori. More recently, ngā kupu Ingarihi.
There are indeed many currents that feed into the river of words in this collection. Many of the contributions have been published elsewhere, their words having thus threaded through multiple publications flowing across the Aotearoa literary landscape. Several pieces of original work also contribute to the wonderful array of writing from a te ao Māori worldview. It is an incredible showcase of the sheer volume of talent in contemporary Māori literature, including well-known and celebrated writers such as Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Whiti Hereaka, Tina Makereti, Paula Morris, Hinemoana Baker, Tayi Tibble, Robert Sullivan, Kelly Ana Morey, essa may ranapiri, Ruby Solly (you get my drift? I could go on), through to new emerging writers.
The editors have carefully curated the flow of the collection, beginning with the poem ‘Karanga’ by Apirana Taylor, which leads to broad groupings of subject matter throughout the book. The pieces interconnect from one to the next, containing maybe a common word or theme, gathering pace and volume as the book builds. The subject matter of the poems and stories spans a wide range of topics, concerns and kōrero—including atua, pūrākau, history, tikanga, te reo, whakapapa, colonial violence, protest, racism, te Tiriti, whānau and identity. Many of the pieces stayed with me long after I’d read them. I think this was due to the commonality of themes that different writers dealt with in varied and intriguing ways. For instance, atua and pūrākau weave through many of the works. One of my favourite pieces in the collection, by Witi Ihimaera, is a science fiction story titled ‘Tāwhaki’. Ihimaera weaves stories about Papatuanuku, Ranginui, Māui and Tāwhaki into a tale set in a future where the main character, Tāwhaki, works in a space station overlooking Earth. Global warming has melted the ice caps, and Earth’s surface is so hot that people live underground. Tāwhaki asks his father: ‘What would all your Māori gods of creation think of this? I reckon God of all gods, in his uppermost heaven, would be truly pissed off.’
In one of several works about identity, Kiri Piahana-Wong’s piece ‘Nō hea koe?’ traverses multiple aspects of the narrator’s whakapapa from ‘my grandfather’s English village, where the pace of life remains slow’ to ‘my Māori grandmother’s town, where the Crown took our land and on it built the city of Tauranga’, to the marae where ‘our iwi is hosting the Māori King’ to ‘the Chinese side of my family … at Yum Cha on a Sunday afternoon in Wellington’.
The issue of identity is also discussed in the interviews with writers. In answer to the question, ‘Is there any such thing as “The Māori novel?”’, Whiti Hereaka answers, ‘I am of the opinion that if a Māori writer writes a novel then it is a Māori novel—it doesn’t matter what its content might be.’ Cassie Hart, who says her writing leans heavily towards ‘science fiction, fantasy and horror, with the occasional crime or mystery novel thrown in the mix’, echoes this view and states, ‘Any novel written by Māori is Māori, just by its very nature. It doesn’t have to have te reo, or a marae, or anything specific to our culture to make it so.’ While Alan Duff says, ‘Unless you are writing in te reo, then it is not Māori writing. Just writing.’ Although he does admit that the ‘richness of Māori experience helped inform so much of my writing’.
One of the many enjoyable aspects of the collection is the innovative use of form that many contributors employ. Aroha Awarau’s story ‘The African Stars’ is an achingly beautiful epistolary story that speaks to the ability of writing to empower people. Miriama Gemmell’s poem ‘gimme a bone’ explores identity in a way that resembles a tukutuku panel. Fabian Waenga’s poem ‘Māori Homelessness in New Zealand’ is a stark four words long, which ironically speaks eloquently to the issue. Zeb Tamihana Nicklin’s poem ‘Iti te Kupu, Nui te Kōrero’ is a dialogue in te reo between a koro and his moko, which cleverly uses the power of kīwaha, colloquial sayings, and short sentences to explore complex subject matter.
‘I aha rā?’
‘Kua raru au—karekau he putanga māku!’
‘E hē, ahakoa te aha, he ara whakaputanga.’
The play between te reo and English in the collection is one way to comment on the violent colonial oppression of Māori language. For instance, the collection includes the poem ‘Kupu rere kē’ by Alice Te Punga Sommerville from her incredible collection Always Italicise: How to write while colonised. The opening lines of the poem read:
‘My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poem.’
The poem is written in English with all the English words italicised. ‘Aotearoa’ is the only Māori word in the poem and the only word that is not italicised.
Tania Roxborogh’s poem ‘Rapurapu/Searching’ dextrously weaves words about the speaker, switching from knitting to raranga. The first part of the poem is written in English with the te reo words italicised, and it begins with these lines:
Five of us sit, harakeke strips at our feet
Threads of conversation tangling into a problem.
The second part is the te reo version where English words are italicised and begins as follows:
E noho ana mātou, kei te papa i ngā flax mātātara
Pōwhīwhiwhi haere ngā miro kōrero, raru ana.
Te reo Māori is a beautiful language, and although I’m not a fluent speaker, I loved the opportunity to read stories and poems in this collection written in te reo.
To return to the confluence metaphor once again, this multiple-braided river of words spans a wide expanse, converging in one place like a delta flowing out to us, the sea of readers. Reading these stories and poems made me eager to seek out more writing by contemporary Māori writers. I can’t wait to read the companion volume and continue swimming in this incredible awa.
GINA COLE (Fijian, Pākehā) has a PhD in creative writing from Massey University and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her collection Black Ice Matter won Best First Book Fiction at the 2017 Ockham Book Awards. Her most recent book, Na Viro, is a work of Pasifikafuturism, a word coined by the author to describe science fiction written by indigenous Pasifika writers.
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