Jordan Tricklebank
Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer: i te ao o te reo by Witi Ihimaera Smiler (Auckland University Press, 2026), 304pp, $45.00
Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer is built on one of those premises so enticing that it captures the public imagination in a way that few local books can: Witi Ihimaera, trailblazing Māori writer, was going back to school at the age of 80 to learn te reo. Perhaps the appeal lies in the image of one of the country’s most storied writers putting himself in a position of vulnerability. Perhaps there’s something inspiring about such a visible force within te ao Māori undertaking this journey so late in life.
There’s certainly something refreshing about the bluntness with which Ihimaera (credited here as ‘Witi Ihimaera Smiler’) meditates on his decision to attend Te Wānanga Takiura o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori o Aotearoa:
the best available one-year crash course, by way of total immersion, not only in te reo but also in the Māori worldview and Māori cultural contexts. This acquired knowledge would set me up, in the following two years, to write my first novel in te reo. Arrogant, that, eh, but I have never been one to muck around. At this age I was running against the clock.
To me it seems clear that Ihimaera’s status as an ‘almost famous’ writer (in the words of his daughter) is the reason this book—and accompanying podcast—exists in the first place. It’s a celebrity memoir, at its core. But Ihimaera’s visibility is also key to its kaupapa, its understanding of language loss and whakamā. There’s a unique comfort to be found in the fact that even Witi Ihimaera—celebrated Indigenous writer, the ‘Prince of Whales’—has always struggled with te reo. The prose here is similarly comforting: warm and conversational, in a style that will feel familiar to anyone who has had the pleasure of listening to Ihimaera speak at length.
Before reading Te Kaikaukau, I revisited Ihimaera’s debut novel Tangi, just to remind myself of where he started as a writer. I was struck by how much better Ihimaera is when he relaxes, allows the narrative voice to take a step back and lets characters speak for themselves. Much of this book is in that style, and the most compelling moments of Te Kaikaukau are Ihimaera’s loving portraits of the people who have supported and challenged him—particularly the sections dedicated to his father, which act as a nice extension of the father figure presented in Tangi. In fact, it is one comment by his father that underpins the dilemma driving the book: ‘In the blinding lights, in that moment of free fall, I heard my father Tom’s voice: E taku tama aroha, ko ēnei whakatutukitanga katoa i te reo Pākehā, nē ra? All those accomplishments in the English language, eh son?’
As such, my favourite chapters here are the ones that function like small chunks of a memoir, where Ihimaera dips into his childhood, literary career, years spent as a diplomat and more. On one level, this broader examination of the author’s life is essential to fill out the edges of this project. Like many Māori, Ihimaera sees himself as somehow split between the Pākehā and Māori worlds (thus the adoption of ‘Ihimaera Smiler’) and sees his insecurities around te reo—and his attempt at reclamation—as emblematic of this personal, spiritual divide. And so we are guided through this divide and how it has shaped Ihimaera’s life. Perhaps the author feels compelled to probe the forces that continue to push young Māori to conform to English-exclusive, ‘Pākehā-fied’ spaces.
However, while Ihimaera acknowledges his guilt, he certainly doesn’t wallow in it. What is most interesting about these memoir-ish diversions is how they depict the uneasy process of revitalising a culture from which you feel—in certain ways—separated. In a fitting description, the author appears to characterise Takiura itself—off St Lukes Road, squeezed between commercial properties, in the bones of an old TV3 studio space—as representative of the sort of pragmatic ‘good enough’ attitude that defines so many revitalisation efforts. One of the book’s most memorable moments is Ihimaera’s creation of a marae—Te Whare o Ngāti Aorere—on the seventh floor of Stafford House, which housed government offices. He is open about the criticism the move received, particularly over the installation of a whare ‘in the sky’:
Māoridom had to rely on us and our ratshit reo. There was nobody else: the statistics of those who knew te reo and kawa had plummeted to 20 per cent in 1984.
Auntie Maaka said to me, ‘It’s just as well all of you have good intentions!’
And then she clipped me over the ear.
This anecdote highlights one of the book’s key conflicts: the clash between the author’s status in the literary world, his relative naivety in aspects of te ao Māori, and raises the question of the role that the modern writer can play in cultural reclamation. It’s little wonder that Ihimaera writes about Te Hokioi, ‘the newspaper of the Kingitanga [which] disseminated information to those who were part of their resistance’, a project made possible through a printing press gifted by Emperor Franz Joseph and a fascinating historical example of resistance being channelled through the written word.
Within Māori literature, I often read about the guilt and whakamā of language loss, and I often read about empowerment and reclamation. I suppose what appeals to me so much about Te Kaikaukau is how it splits the difference: the Ihimaera depicted here is an inspiration, someone using his art to do right by Māori, but also someone who, by his own admission, was often doing so from a place of relative ignorance. I wasn’t aware of the extent to which the seemingly straightforward decision to write fiction—even fiction heavily grounded in the reality of Ihimaera’s upbringing—was viewed with suspicion by many in his whānau.
Yet, while these examinations of the past—what Māori might call onemata—provide the book’s richest ground, they also highlight its limitations. It becomes clear that these sections touch on topics already covered in Ihimaera’s existing memoirs. On a few occasions he pulls back so as not to get too sidetracked, even making remarks to the effect of ‘But this is covered in more detail in my memoir’. There are times when the book teases interesting material—such as Ihimaera’s wild experiences as a student in Auckland—but seems hesitant to go into detail. Basically, there are a few too many times when I wish I was reading the two memoirs instead.
Likewise, Ihimaera clearly intends his year of full-immersion education at Takiura to be the centrepiece of Te Kaikaukau. The narrative is bookended by the metaphor of its author ‘swimming’. Its most notable structural choice is to reflect the development of Ihimaera’s whaikōrero (formal oral greetings) and whakapuaki (oral essay presentations) throughout the programme; readers track these oral presentations in the order they were delivered. Ihimaera seemingly knows that the classroom doesn’t always make for great storytelling, and so he flexes his experience in wringing narrative blood from stones. It can be blunt at times, such as when the author climactically ‘wander[s] around [his] Herne Bay house in a daze’ before rediscovering a crystal tortoise, a memento from his past, and resolving to get through Takiura—‘Hold firm,’ he writes, ‘rise up with the upwelling currents out of Te Kore.’
The pacing of the final stretch feels a bit too relentless. To its credit, this aspect of the book is an intentional reflection of Takiura’s programme structure; Ihimaera discusses in detail the increasing pace and length of the required oral presentations. But this means that readers receive less and less about the process of crafting these pieces and more of the pieces themselves. I’d argue that the book is often at its best when Ihimaera engages in the knotty process of translating (not in the literal sense) his English-language approach to writing into oral works in te reo Māori. That is, after all, the hook that likely birthed this project in the first place: the Māori writer who has achieved everything goes back to square one (or perhaps square two, for Ihimaera is keen to remind us that he did have knowledge and experience to bring into the classroom). As such, I wish there was a little more breathing space for the book to spend time on this aspect of the journey.
I suppose there’s an inherent limitation to a project like this: a book about oral presentation. Ihimaera is well aware of this and warns readers early on that we can never truly know the experience of presenting these increasingly complex oral works:
The written Māori work in this book comprises final drafts of oral presentations. … They therefore don’t truly represent the tauira, student, in physical performance with my training wheels on. If I had been filmed you would have seen me stumbling over my sentences or having memory lapses or dying mid-flight—and there were moments when my pauses in presentation were so long, I must have looked like a possum caught in the headlight glare of an oncoming truck. Believe me, there was a great difference between writing my whakapuaki and speaking them.
Despite these colourful descriptions, Ihimaera is right in suggesting that the written records of these presentations—even with the vitality of the author’s storytelling—lack something essential that they would have contained in person. And yet, these problems make me respect the book more. Writers are generally all too happy to gush about their art, so I appreciate the honesty with which Ihimaera embraces such dilemmas. Māori writers are all too aware that applying their skill with the written word to an oral tradition is never going to be a smooth process—but Ihimaera believes in what he does, and I do too.
There’s something interesting in how Ihimaera positions his year at Takiura as not simply a personal journey of revitalisation but as something broader, symbolic of the shifts within te ao Māori that he has witnessed. Some of the book’s first words are dedicated to the experience of looking back in order to move forward. ‘Tihei mauri ora! Where am I?’ he writes. ‘From the top I can see all the way back to the past. And forward to the future.’ It often feels like Ihimaera takes every opportunity to cast himself as somewhat bumbling: someone wanting to do right by his people but not always knowing exactly how to do that, growing up in a generation of Māori people doing pretty much the same thing. The comparisons he draws between himself and his Takiura peers allow Ihimaera to reflect on these generational differences: ‘Their brains were more attuned to the learning process, and they had managed to counteract the sheer force of white colonialism, race, history and assimilation better than I had; it was less present by the time they had been born.’
I love that he can feel confident in passing the reins to a new generation of Māori, and yes, there are countless young people doing incredible things to fight for Māori interests. However, there are still plenty of well-intentioned bumblers (this author included), and perhaps Te Kaikaukau’s most valuable gift is its earnest exploration of how it can be messy, can be uncertain—and can take a long time—and still happen.
JORDAN TRICKLEBANK (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Mahuta) is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based writer and the curator of Māori Literature Blog, a dedicated exploration of literature written in English by Māori authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also the creator and editor of Pūhia, a literary journal that showcases literature and art by Māori creators. Jordan was a recipient of the 2023 Verb Micro Residency and facilitated events at the festival.
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