Untitled

Te Ao Hou, December 1966, Page 51

squandered in some doubtful cause'. He tells Mataora that ‘… last year's enemy may be next year's ally, but the dead remain dead’. One can argue that in a people so steeped in warfare for warfare's sake it is doubtful if such thoughts could gain currency, particularly in one of the warrior caste. Yet such a theory would be tantamount to saying that a race which could produce warrior-poets could not produce warrior-philosophers. The seed which made the Maori people of later times so susceptible to the message of Christianity is contained in Hotoke's words: ‘Living is hard, thinking is harder, the hardest is to live, think and be content in a world made thus’ (where everything lives by destroying other life). ‘Life that comes from nothingness may easily be sent back to the nothingness from whence it sprung.’ Later Kuri the dog comes to Mataora in the delirium of his dreams. Kuri is a personification of the dog that dwells in every man—of the untamed animal within. He is the voice of Mataora's conscience and reminds him of various things which he has done and which are unworthy of a leader—of ‘the Ariki begetting slave-brats without pangs and then rising from the warm ground shaking all consequences from your back; of the shrieks of the women raped by Mataora's war party and of the children killed and eaten afterwards to the sounds of fire crackling in the conquered village. Namunamu the sandfly expresses the universality of human suffering, a suffering which was as real and omnipresent to the ancient Maori as it is to mankind to-day: ‘I am not part of you. I am part of life. I am the long persistent sting of every day. Occasionally the listener is jolted back to reality from the world of spirits with language which is evocative of a more modern age (‘I was only pulling your fat leg’; ‘If you were as tall as you're crazy …') or which refers to things unknown by the ancient Maori. Such lapses though are rare. More frequent is the interpolation of Maori words which tend to obscure the meaning in many places for those listeners without a working knowledge of the language. (‘Your wairua wakes while you slumber’) However, these are superficialities in a play of great depth and perception. Unfortunately, but unavoidably, the radio listeners could not savour fully the rich flavour of Adele Schafer's language as the play moved swiftly on. She uses words deftly to create passages of startling beauty and deep tenderness. Such a passage is when Humarire, Mataora's mother, appears to her son in a dream and says of his wife, Niwareka: ‘Woman, dear son, is more than the delight she gives your flesh and your flesh gives her. She is the warm-swept house, the cooked food in the evening when you come cold and hungry from the outside. She is the summer-sea rocking you in her arms, birdsong, chuckling creek and rattling rain; she is the garden for the next world's crop, the wind driving your swelling sail upon the crests. She is the other half of all creation … she is the earth. Be you her Heaven.’ From the beginning of the play, when Mataora and his uncle, Hohonu come to Te Reinga, the leaping place of the spirits, image piles on image as the listener is wafted into an eerie half-world of creaking trees, rushing waters and spirit voices, into a kaleidoscope of savagery and splendour, fierceness and tender mother-love, sexuality and spirituality. This indeed is the world of the old-time Maori—a world in which the natural and the super-natural blended to make the stuff of life. The Spiral Tattoo provides us with a window into this world and in so doing takes the listener close to the very heart of the Maori people. It is indeed a sad commentary that most of our daily newspapers, which devote endless columns to silly prattle about the comparative merits on TV of the Danny Kaye and Dean Martin shows, failed to examine, criticise and acclaim a notable work of New Zealand drama.