Sally Blundell
Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 352pp, $40
The last thing you should do, said Chris Kraus in a 2017 interview, ‘is believe the writer’. Beauty, argued the United States-born writer and critic who grew up in New Zealand, arises from contradiction, even when it’s under the surface. ‘Any report of experience will be contradictory. And part of the reportage is to include those contradictions.’
For her first book, Ōtepoti Dunedin poet and essayist Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Takihiku) was going to write an historical novel about the musket wars. But, as she explains in Whaea Blue, how could she enter the consciousness of a rangatira? Besides, ‘my brain is too white to conceive of a world untouched by Pākehā for six hundred years’.
Instead, she turned to what writer John Dolan in his reader endorsement calls ‘a fiercely original memoir’, but what Marshall herself told Noelle McCarthy in a Newsroom interview is ‘not a memoir’, and what Te Herenga Waka Press describes as a ‘tribute to collective memory’.
As with Kraus’s fiction/non-fiction, the genre-bending nature of Whaea Blue is its strength. The book is a maelstrom of people, places, whakapapa, love, loss, drugs, psychosis, visions and revisions laundered through personal recollection that even the author finds less than reliable. ‘None of these early memories can be really trusted,’ she writes, ‘but maybe the story can? This urge, to make details into a proper meal.’
Whaea Blue is an exceptional meal. Restive, irrepressible and nonsequential, it is also smart, funny, and frustrating as hell in some parts. Always it has a driving energy: the sense of a text driven through with a fearless curiosity and a coruscating honesty.
The ‘driven’ analogy is hard to ignore; it’s a wild ride. Near the end of the book, in a scene quoted on the back cover, Marshall and her friend Kerry take their kids to the beach with dead ancestors in noisy tow:
Polly and Wiki and all the other kuia ride on the roof of Kerry’s Toyota Corona with its navy blistered bonnet, like duchesses at the opera being carried on a litter, but also like unruly hens squawking in crates. They do this for all the moko; they are everywhere and roam inside us as they keep weaving the net.
Earlier, with her kurī Tonka, she flees Riwaka in a silver Audi called Ariel, on the run from a life that ‘wouldn’t stop imploding’. Three years later, ‘almost homeless’, she and Tonka are in a beat-up red Nissan called Bobby-Jo. (Bobby-Jo meets a sorry end in Matawai.)
She drives to her son’s father’s place on the East Coast, a combative ‘family road trip of doom’, for the unveiling of her son’s great-grandmother’s headstone. She feels out of place, ‘a mongrel with desperate eyes’.
On she goes, leaving a trail of abandoned people (boyfriends, friends, flatmates) and objects (cars, red gumboots, a sequined top) scattered on the road behind like clamorous tins tied to the bumper of a wedding car. Looking through the rear-view mirror, we see Marshall as a toddler, left behind in a Mormon church in Dunedin and later found holding a man’s hand: ‘But that doesn’t sound quite like me, either—I hate holding hands.’
As a child she moves from house to house in Wellington with her solo mother and her radical lesbian friends—there are Tarot cards, mullets and ‘some fracas in a class Phillida Bunkle taught at Victoria University’. Then she’s a 10-year-old in summery Foxton Beach, riding a pink 10-speed hands free down to the dairy, cutting her Malibu Barbie’s locks into a mullet to match her mother’s. Back in Dunedin in 1991 she’s huffing aerosol cans, wearing matching tartan tights with her tight band of friends.
Soon, as an angry teenager, she’s meeting her estranged father, part of this ‘massive Māori clan’ of the Macdonalds in Wellington. Young Marshall is defiant, more used to gin and cigarettes than yum cha and a three-storey villa with a teenagers’ wing—‘wing’ she stresses—in Thorndon: ‘I battle hurt and anger for Mum and the way these people, my new whānau, excluded her when she was sent home to Dunedin from Blenheim in pregnant unwed Mormon shame.’
Part-way through a theatre studies degree, a magic mushroom trip tips her into psychosis and a period of psych services. She comes back from the Marlborough Sounds with a blue kēhua; on a bus she encounters a ghost in hot-pink lipstick and bleeding gums. ‘I get thinner and thinner,’ she writes, ‘because I can’t stop dancing.’ She takes medication, she wades into the ‘pop psychology paddling pool’, but: ‘The older tropes are better and tell me to slash at myself with mussel shells until I’m running with red, that my task is to mimic and exaggerate the precise shape and feel of the wound.’
This personal story is threaded through with whakapapa. She traces her lineage back to Kupe’s descendant Matua Hautere, who came to Te Waipounamu guided by the kaitiaki Kaikaiawaro, who took the form of a dolphin. But it’s complicated. She believes her recently deceased grandfather Jim is now a dolphin, but ‘dolphins are tacky … no one has ever made great art from a dolphin’. She drills down: ‘That dolphin is a kind of fame slut, tbh. He spent years helping Pākehā get through our gaps. But he is my taniwha.’
Then there’s Captain Cook, his statue in Gisborne tagged with ‘Pakeha’ and ‘Thief’. But her Kurahaupō iwi, Ngāti Kuia and Rangitāne o Wairau, chose to meet the Tuia 250 Endeavour replica in 2019, ‘if only to remind people who the whenua and the wai truly belong to in Te Tau Ihu.’ Anyway, she adds, the real problems with Pākehā began after the signing of Te Tiriti, when settlers descended en masse. ‘Cook was just the first to wedge open the gate using his silly naval flag.’
Still she keeps moving, weaving the stories of warriors and defiant wahine into a broken chronology of war, utu, rescue: ‘All the old trouble, bubbling and boiling away.’ Her writing is defiant, even insubordinate (she is ‘half convinced’ the ancestors want her to keep her mouth shut, especially if they are Māori and not directly related).
‘I don’t know why I’m being trite like this,’ she writes, ‘why my tone undulates from sad and scary to poor attempts at jokes when I write about hard, indigestible things like slavery and cannibalism—the very things in our histories other Māori seem to know not to touch.’ But the caveat is discerning in its honesty: ‘It’s harder still to write about not being loved.’
At times, as she puts her foot to the floor, people and places recede too fast for us to identify each ancestor, each boyfriend, but she doubles back, returning to places we have flashed past, people we have met, people who have died, people who still cling to the car bonnet. This momentum is fuelled by a kind of relentless rage (she blames her inflammatory nature on her ‘minestrone boil-up of being Italian and Māori’).
She is angry at the newly installed bars on the park benches in Waipukurau that stop people lying down; at Māori history told ‘through the murky filter of [settlers’] colonising sentiments, and worse, their anxieties’; at drunk white racists: ‘There comes a point … after I’ve drunk enough to untie my tongue, when I’ll tell them they need their white head cut off because they are a cunt.’
When she and her boyfriend Ben break up, she burns his personal memories—school reports, Father’s Day cards, love letters. ‘You might regret that later,’ says flatmate Jaq. ‘No. I will not,’ Marshall replies. She mourns, briefly, on hearing of his death, ‘before I started cackling over my prosecco’ (there is lot of cackling going on here). She enrols in a karanga course to cure herself of the ‘volcanic anger, dragging grief and endless anxiety’. Instead, she spends three days getting on the piss with ‘the girls’.
Like Kraus, Marshall builds her story from the perspective of an ‘unreliable narrator’ but also, and more importantly, as a writer.
She is asked to review A Record of the Great Te Rauparaha, written by Te Rauparaha’s son Tamihana and translated by descendant Ross Calman. But again it is complicated. Te Rauparaha was a terrorist, she writes, a rampaging war leader, a ‘capitalist and vengeful opportunist’. Her iwi, Rangitane o Wairau, were made captives by Ngāti Toa during the musket wars but she is also descended from Ngāti Rārua, who assisted Te Rauparaha’s attacks on Te Waipounamu. The more she tries to understand him, ‘the more I find we are just the same or, rather, have a lot in common’.
Now she is wary that Calman’s book ‘will make me feel sick about what happened to my people and the uncomfortable fact that my other taha helped do it to them. It’s not the sort of book Pākehā should read and yet I know they will be the main consumers of it, when really the only audience it is intended for is Ngāti Toa.’
She feels seduced by the ‘vibrating dream’ of the photos in Ans Westra’s 1967 book Maori, but she comes to believe Westra built her career on a ‘simplistic, homogenous view of Māori’. She writes an essay on Maori online, becomes Facebook friends with Westra. When the photographer dies in 2023 Marshall writes a lyrical prose poem, included here, in which Westra shares crayfish with her old e hoa Hone Tuwhare in Kākā Point.
Marshall is commissioned to write a profile of a wahine Māori. The job funds a new Audi but, ‘It seemed ridiculous that I was asked to write a profile about someone else when my only subject is myself.’
Living in a crib in Aramoana, she agrees with locals that making a movie about David Gray’s murderous spree in the seaside town in 1990 was wrong, ‘but here I am writing about it anyway, with the thinnest excuse that I chose to live there.’
But her writing is fine. Furious at times but courageous and astute. Her observations of the residents of the rest home where she worked as a caregiver are empathetic and raw. Her description of feeling she is turning into a wharenui (she is stoned) is startling and poetic: ‘I felt my spine turn into the ridgeline of the whare and my ribs spreads out flat as butter knives to make the rafters ready for the kōwhaiwhai.’
Most poignant perhaps, is her childhood memory of holidaying with her grandparents in their orange and white caravan at Glendhu Lake, Jim sharing his wonder with his young granddaughter: ‘Look at it Talia, he’d say, meaning the all and awe of it.’
This review was first published in Landfall 249.
SALLY BLUNDELL is a freelance journalist and writer living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury and was formerly the books and culture editor for the NZ Listener. She has contributed essays, reviews and articles to a wide range of publications.
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