Vaughan Rapatahana Auē Rona, by Reihana Robinson (Steele Roberts, 2012) 68 pp., $25.
Ka nui te pai tēnei pukapuka hou o ngā whiti o Reihana Robinson. Ka nui te pai notemea ko he reo rerekē i roto i ngā whārangi o te whakaputunga. He reo mārohirohi me tino Māori.
Ngā whakamihi nui ki a koe, Reihana.
Reihana Robinson frames this first collection of her distinctive voice around the well-known legend of Rona and the Moon, indeed frames the entire collection so strongly that of the 52 poems here, well over 20 explicitly relate to Rona –who is quintessentially Reihana anyway. She is a poet who has a perspective from above as well as from below. And, of course, Reihana is also a damned good painter, so she sees scenes as well as details from yet another perspective than her intrinsic mana wahine, mana tuahine/tuakana/teina stance as daubed across the pages here. When we add in Noa Noa van Bassewitz’s fine artwork we get a marvellous overall portrait.
For those unfamiliar about the legend here is a very quick summary:
This is the story of Rona, a woman who fights constantly with her husband. One night Rona storms out of her whare after the couple fight about who should fill their tahā (water containers). As Rona walks away, cursing her husband, Marama (the moon) watches and listens.
When a cloud passes in front of the moon, Rona stumbles in the dark. She falls, then curses the moon for her fall. Marama tells Rona, ‘Be careful what you say, lest you be made to pay’. But Rona only yells more insults at Marama, who gets so angry that he reaches down, grabs Rona and pulls her up into the sky.
The next day Rona’s husband searches for his wife but cannot find her. He misses Rona and is sorry he treated her badly. Meanwhile, Marama welcomes Rona and treats her with kindness. Rona gets happier and happier. When Marama asks her one day if she would like to return to earth, Rona realises she loves Marama, so says she wants to stay with him. Touched, Marama gives Rona a special taonga (gift) in return— a korowai (cloak), adorned with stars. Rona then becomes the controller of tides, Rona-whakamau-tai.
So in these poems not only do we read the entire gambit of the actions and curses of Rona and Te Marama (the moon), but we also learn a great deal about her own emotions, desires, wishes, lamentations — she misses her sons down on Earth very much, and has consistent comments to make about man-woman relationships per se, with the men often the preliminary transgressor — whether Māori or not.
Rona-Reihana, because she has this unique moon-bound perspective, is also totally alarmed about what mankind has done and is doing to his planet. ‘Man’ — that is especially men — is destroying his gift, Earth, and its living components such as te awa (the river) Waikato, sows, pig dogs, ngā wētā. As well, of course, as her children — us. Listen as she wails:
Slowly I am slipping from your grasp –
not fast enough to hide from cruel
inventions, shadows on the seas,
recalcitrant children, Universal Serpent
tangles in tree tips and lanyards of supplejack.
No wonder she is embarrassed:
I blush and quiver to see myself
Related to this pale imitation of the gods.
Robinson is manifestly in tune with her own earthy natural environment and inculcates her own encountered creatures throughout — ngā kererū, pig dogs, rats (good to eat, eh) pāua, kūmarahou, kōwharawhara and kahikatea.
And because of Rona’s longevity, she regales us also with other important personages from far and wide ki te ao Māori: Uenuku, (the rainbow); Maui (on several occasions); the entire creation story diamond-set sparkling with Rangi and Papa and their roguish offspring, ngā ariki Māori; Cape Reinga and its auspicious spiritual resonance for ngā iwi Māori; as well as perspectives on mo ngā mea Māori ināianei (Māori issues now) — Te Tiriti o Waitangi, ngā Pākehā, and ngā Hāmoa (Samoans), amongst others.
Thus this framework of Roma allows for a consistency throughout: all poems are ‘pattern-istically’ interrelated from a matriarchal perspective. The book’s a symbiotic whole. The voice I speak of above is interpolative, powerful, raw-boned (we recall that the poet lives in Coromandel without electricity and other creature comforts, through her own choice) and committed, edgy, willing to rasp.
There is a sense of violence in many of the poems, as if the poet has a fury at what has happened and is happening to Māori, but also because of what Māori have done and are doing to themselves: your rage inhabits the earth Rona spleens at ngā tamariki o Papa raua ko Rangi. Death is a powerful image skulking along the chords of Robinson’s opus: in three separate eulogies she bewails her own loved ones.
This, then, is not the banal lyric-play which afflicts all too many of the effete bloodless wordsmiths of Aotearoa-New Zealand. This is Tu Māori stuff, yet to such an empathetic extent that while the poet castigates some Pākehā in some poems, she can feel sorry for them, as in Rona feels compassion for pale men. Unlike Rona remonstrating the moon, her stunt double, Reihana Robinson, is not continuously cursing pōkokohua.
Moreover, there is a marked gulf between the two cultures as depicted in the Auē Rona collection, and a pretty clear grievance as to which is the dominant one. Take, for example, the poem Portion of flesh. Captain Cook cooked and ate turtle and goat and apportioned his kill; his Polynesian captors cooked Cook and ate him. The repeated portion of flesh refrain stresses the portioning quotient at play here above all else, with the irony being the role-reversal involved. The Great Subdivider becomes subdivided.
As such this book serves up a major alterity, which may well not serve the ‘tastes’ of the non-Māori socio-economic striates. There’s no smooth and soft edges here at all. Great, is all I can state.
Mind you, ironically, there is certainly no extensive te reo Māori here either.
Great also, because so many of these taut poems are so well-written — not in a conventional Pākehā sense either, as in abounding with word games, multiple metaphor and proto-post-modern digressional vaguenesses, but in a mōteatea Māori manner: repetitions and word echo-mirrors abound and I can hear them as chants as I pursue them through the text. Especially the demonic mnemonic of Treaty and its Tin of cocoa mantra.
Great also, because so many of these taut poems are so well-written — not in a conventional Pākehā sense either, as in abounding with word games, multiple metaphor and proto-post-modern digressional vaguenesses, but in a mōteatea Māori manner: repetitions and word echo-mirrors abound and I can hear them as chants as I pursue them through the text. Especially the demonic mnemonic of Treaty and its Tin of cocoa mantra.
There is, in this poet’s rugged contemplation of loss and illness and betrayal and drowning, a plethora of brilliant one-liners, as at the end of this quote:
Her brats grow, invent haka.
You know where that got them –
No land, no language
Free entertainment every rugby match.
While, in writing about Maui later on, Robinson equates Maui’s hooking-up of Te Ika a Maui to:
It is the first land grab
There’s some staggeringly spot-on imagery too. Witness these examples:
— his letter a tattoo yet to be translated
— I sniff like a dog because eyes are koretake (useless)
— Grandad like clockwork on a clock-less atoll
This book is, then, one mighty mythopoetic mélange — and not just Maori mythology either, for here and there are splinters of Greek (Antigone) and the more esoteric European nomenclature of Paul Gauguin and Baltazar Garzon shaved onto the woodpile too — bolstered by as copious and cogent Notes at the back.
Given all this, however, I have to also say that on one or two occasions, I was completely buggered as to what the poet was going on about — some lines and titles were are just too oblique for me. Example: All the haunted men are breathing from their testicles. Now I’ve stated my case about the clever and sheer vibrant différance of Reihana’s work — its importance, its honesty, its necessity to New Zealand in 2013 — it is only fair to give you a real taste of the deal, by unfolding a complete poem from the collection. Hard to decide actually, and I was torn between ‘Cape Reinga’ and the ‘Island Girls’. The latter one won out:
Who can they talk to?
What can they say?
Motherless discards
Frigate birds decorate their bedrooms,
breadfruit blocks the long drop.
Will someone come?
Will there be a rescue party?
You can recognize them –
padding about on the sea floor,
picking detritus from freighters
bargaining with their lives.
(‘Island Girls’)
Tight, spare, straight-up stuff. Auē Rona indeed. So kia ora Reihana Robinson – it’s about bloody time, eh.
VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA (Te Ātiawa, Ngati Te Whiti teaches English in Hong Kong. His poems, articles and reviews have been widely published, and his poetry collections include China As Kafka (Kilmog Press) and Home, Away and Elsewhere (Proverse Press).
E hiahia ana au ki tēnei pukapuka!