POUNAMU, POUNAMU

Te Ao Hou, November 1973, Page 60

POUNAMU, POUNAMU by Witi Ihimaera Heineman, $3.80 and $1.95 reviewed by Paul Katene The book is a collection of short stories, closely knit on various levels by a number of themes. The locality is Waituhi on the east coast, and in the main, the people have their counterparts in real life. The author has garnered from his own experiences and being at one with his characters both in sympathy and kinship he has sketched them adeptly and lovingly. The Other Side of the Fence is the odd ball, having a suburban setting. Its place would more properly have been in a possible sequel to this book, particularly as a follow-on to In Search of the Emerald City. Two themes are important: the death theme and the theme of change. The death theme is strong in four of the ten stories, with oblique allusions in two others. A Game of Cards has its sequel in Fire on Greenstone. Nanny Miro's physical death is recorded in the former, and in the latter, her old house — the museum — becomes her personification. It must die also, if only to let her spirit rest, and its burning satisfies this demand. In Beginning of the Tournament the death allusion is conveyed in the slow decline of the annual fixture. Hockey is dying on the coast, we are told, but the tournament is important for social reasons and the dwindling supporters clutch at the passing shadow. In The Child the death of the old kuia on the beach while gathering shells for her mokopuna is sweetly sad. The death theme in The Whale is heavy with lonliness and impending tragedy but is not without a touch of grandeur. The kaumatua, a desolate, rejected figure sits in the dying meeting house in the fading light and communes with the past. There is the air of ritual about this final act. Death is on the beach and he is inexorably drawn to it. A whale is stranded on the sand. The scavengers are already at work. The

description of the fate of Tangaroa's offspring reflecting the kaumatua's end is powerful writing. Tangi is the return of the son to the village marae where his father's body lay. Rightly, it is the last story and has the effect of gathering all the threads of life's expression into the last surviving ceremonial occassion of ritual Maoritanga. The theme of change is oft times synonymous with the death theme — death being a change in itself. At times it is a change of attitudes as in The Makutu on Mrs Jones. Mr Hohepa, terrible in his arrogance, is challenged by the indomitable Mrs Jones. Out of the conflict is born mutual respect and unity. One wonders if the author is expressing in this microcosmic setting the story of New Zealand — its Maori and Pakeha people. The change in One Summer Morning is physical with the signs of emerging manhood eagerly awaited, enjoyed and exalted in. “Don't be too much in a hurry to be a man,” the father sadly whispers. In Search of the Emerald City tells how the whole family is uprooted and moved off in the direction of Wellington. The theme assumes tragic proportions in The Whale. It is ominous, engulfing and soul-destroying. The kaumatua has painstakingly taught his mokopuna to appreciate things Maori. She had been the only one to show any interest. A visit to the city had changed her. They quarrel. “It is not a Maori world,” she flings at him. His chopping down of the kai-house door and his agonising accusation is a searing indictment against spiritual change — the eroding of values on his turangawaewae. It is incredible that this incident actually took place in real life. It provides the climax for the book. The title is abstracted from Fire on Greenstone. He looks into the greenstone, the rare, milky opalescence of inanga, not the deep, mysterious kawakawa as the cover would suggest. The author sees the richness and spirituality of the values that underline the Maori way of life. Witi Ihimaera is one of the high priests of the reflective movement in contemporary Maori, creative writing. The Te Kaha conference revealed an impatient and strident demand for writings in line with the political and social protestations of today. It claimed that the action was in the city. Witi is a young man, a city man, right in the midst of this great transplant of Maori manawa — heart — from the open hills to the concrete jungle. He has seen the rejection of some tissues resulting in resentment and alienation. His message is spiritual, as a source of strength, a fibre strong enough to support a people in its adjustment. To many, looking into the greenstone would be much like seeing through a glass darkly. But for those who are attumed, the message will be clear. Justification comes from the kaumatua; “He had taught her well and one day her confusion would pass and she would understand.” Two small grizzles: the use of “nanny” for both sexes, and the boob on ‘Haere ra’ in Emerald City. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ We also reprint the review which appeared earlier this year in the ‘Times Literary Supplement’. This collection of short stories is not just a collection. The stories constitute a whole; they are all firmly and deeply grounded in the life of Maoris of today, a life seen through a Maori eye and a Maori memory which fuse truthfulness, faith to the facts, with love. Realism in fiction, because historically it is associated with the battle to give the whole truth and so in practice the battle for the right to include the ugly, is too often loosely assumed to connote only the certain presence of the ugly. Witi Ihimaera's realism is like sunlight which conceals nothing but which, because it contains and controls warmth, a humorous affection, makes the drabbest of detail, the commonplaces of rural and urban poverty, come alive, human, and acceptable. The talent revealed is all the more welcome because this is not only Mr Ihimaera's first book but the first work of fiction (we have already reason to be grateful to Maori poets like Hone Tuwhare) in which the Maoris of our time have emerged through

the imagination of a Maori writer of such skill and power. The repeated word of the title, Pounamu, however translucent to New Zealanders, will be opaque to the English reader. It means ‘greenstone’, a New Zealand form of jade evocative of a past when it was the prized material of axe and ornament; and evoking also an early novel by William Satchell, The Greenstone Door, in which Satchell, a Pakeha, tried to do from the outside for the epic times of the Maori wars and in the romantic idiom of a former day, what Mr Ihimaera has now done from within for a time of transition, when the heroic has faded. The problems of the Maori, making their transition from a communal primitive society to an atomized industrial society, lie behind many of these stories, and the inevitable clash of generations, conflict of loyalties, the pull of the past and the push of the present. Mr Ihimaera handles all this with subtlety and restraint, rightly making the creation of people his priority and leaving their problems to present themselves implicitly through the way his characters behave. There are few writers who can write from love without stumbling into bathos or sentimentality; Mr Ihimaera can. This is the most interesting new writing to come out of New Zealand for a long time and implies a promise of more.