Maori life and literature: a sensory perception

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XV, Issue 1, 1 May 1982, Page 45

Maori life and literature: a sensory perception

WITI IHIMAERA

Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Ki te tangi a te manu e karanga nei Tui, tui, tuituia! Tuia i runga, tuia i raro Tuia i roto, tuia i waho Tuia i te here tangata. Ka rongo te ao, ka rongo te pd. Tuia i te kawai tangata i heke mai I Hawaiki nui, I Hawaiki roa, I Hawaiki pa-mamao, Te Hono ki Wairua. Ki te whaiao, kite ao-marama.

Tihei mauri ora! Te whenua, tena koe. Te whare, te marae, tena korua. Nga mate, haere kite pd, haere, haere, haere No reira, e nga mana, e nga reo e nga hoa katoa Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

In the beginning was Te Kore, the Void. After the Void was Te Po, the Night. From out of the Night arose Rangi and Papa, the Sky Father above and the Earth Mother below. To them were born children who were gods, who separated their parents so that there was light. And in that light was created all manner of things, animate and inanimate. From one of the gods sprang man. He was the ancestor of the Maori. Within that mythical time when gods communed with man, there arose the demi-god Maui. Among his many feats he fished up New Zealand. It was to this land, the fish of Maui, that the Maori came.

My name is Witi Tame Ihimaera Smiler. My father is Thomas Czar Ihimaera Smiler Jnr., and through him I have links with Te Aitanga A Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, and Ngati Kahungunu. My

father’s parents were Perapunahamoa Ihimaera Smiler and Teria Pere. Through my grandfather’s mother, Hine Te Ariki, I enter Te Whanau A Apanui; through my great-grandfather, Ihimaera Te Hanene, I am Tuhoe. On my grandmother’s side, I am a descendant of Wi Pere. Our marae is the family house of the Pere family, Rongopai, earlier known as Eriopeta, in Waituhi, near Gisborne. My mother is Julia Keelan and through her my children have heritage into Ngati Porou. My mother’s home, where my grandfather Graeme and grandmother, Putiputi Babbington, lived, is Puketawai, near Tolaga Bay, on the East Coast. My family life has been, in the main, lived between the boundaries enclosing Mangatu to the west, Nuhaka to the south, Hikurangi in the north and the sea, Te Moana nui a Kiwa, to the east. It was a rural and small town life from which I began to make incursions into the wider New Zealand world round the early 19605. These are my credentials, limited by language and culture disabilities, for talking about Maori life.

I went to school at Te Karaka District High School, now known as Waikohu College. I also attended the Mormon College near Hamilton, Gisborne Boys’ High School, Auckland University and eventually Victoria University of Wellington. In 1968 I met Jane Cleghorn; we were married in 1970. Her father is Antony Cleghorn; his parents came from the north of England with several other members of the family and settled in and around Auckland. Jane’s mother is Nancy Bridge. On the Bridge side the ties with New Zealand begin much earlier when Major Cyprian Bridge, Jane’s great-great-grandfather, came out in the 52nd Regiment to fight against the Maori in the 1840 s. His paintings of the encounters at Ruapekapeka and other parts of Northland may be found in the Turnbull Library, which in 1961 published two of them as part of the Turnbull’s series of prints of historical paintings. Major Bridge settled in New Zealand; Jane’s great-grandfather, Herbert Bowen Bridge, became assistant editor of the Evening Post. Jane herself is a Wellingtonian from Lyall Bay of four generations’ standing. Her godmother, Aunt Peggy Smythe, is here today. It was throughjane that I began to write. I began to be published in 1970; for reasons that I will outline later, I made a conscious decision to stop. That was in December 1975. Except for one year at Otago, I wrote part time within that period. Again, as limited as they are by language and cultural disabilities in pakeha life, these are my credentials to speak on literature and particularly on Maori literature.

I am now in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I can look across to the Beehive building, and to the Maori Affairs room in Parliament Buildings for clues as to why and how. If I seek the direct whakapapa, I can look to Wi Pere, the forgotten Maori Member of Parliament

who served his people at the turn of the century and I can say, ‘Yes, there is where the link began.’ I can look to Sir Apirana Ngata, to Sir Charles Bennett, New Zealand’s High Commissioner in Malaysia, who spent some time with my grand-uncle, Rongowhakaata Halbert; to Peter Gordon, my uncle, who was in Bangkok. Further afield, I can look academically to my uncles Winiata Smiler and Hani Smiler, both of whom obtained bachelor of arts degrees. I can look to these and more, like Frank Corner, Ken Piddington and Neil Plimmer, who set my feet firmly on this path. I can remember the first, second and third interviews I ever had with Frank Corner about joining Foreign Affairs. I was distrustful and suspicious. But I finally joined Foreign Affairs in 1976. I am pleased that the Ministry considers its Maori members are an asset to its presentation of New Zealand policy internationally. The lesson it still has to learn, however, is that we are highly motivated. We are articulate. For all our disabilities as traditional representatives of the people we are committed to programming Maori concerns into Foreign Affairs policy. Jane and I took our two children to Canberra, Australia, in 1978. We have just returned. We have bought David Matthews’s and Greta Firth’s house in Newtown.

This is the personal context against which this discussion of Maori life and literature must be placed. It draws a genealogy and pattern if you like, to the here and now, to this gathering of you and me in Alexander Turnbull’s library. It is important to make these links between us. On my part, speaking here in this, the former home of a national whare wananga containing Maori material, is a task to approach with considerable respect.

In the Maori body of literature there is a proverb which, when translated into English, asks: ‘What is the greatest thing in life?’ And the answer is: ‘He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.’ It is man, it is man, it is man. It should be apparent that I have therefore been sometimes a writer, something more of a Maori, but that I have inherited a time and space greater than both. If there has ever been a problem for practitioners of Maori literature, it has been in the attempt to make the connection between Maori experience and the art of literature and then to extend the linkages, set and fix them tight, across the empty spaces which we all inhabit. My way has been to endeavour to convey an emotional landscape for the Maori people and this I have attempted to impose across the wastelands where we now live—Otara, Porirua, Newtown. The landscape I wrote about had its roots in the earth. Writing about it was, until 1975, my way of responding to the charge ‘You must work for the Maori people.’

I think this charge is something which only those Maori students who were going through school and university in the 1950 s and 1960 s would understand. We had no option. We had no alternative. Whether we liked it or not, we were given a clear instruction from our people. I can understand and identify with those whom others thought arrogant when they said ‘We are doing this for our people. For the Maori people. ’ What I am often surprised about is that I have yet to hear a pakeha person say ‘I am doing this for the pakeha people of New Zealand.’ It has always been easier to be pakeha than Maori.

What can one say about Maori life and literature up until the 19605? The Maori has been on this planet since the world began. He sought to codify his world, to understand it and live in harmony with it. He crossed Te Moana nui a Kiwa to islands fished up by Maui. He lived, loved, fought, gave birth, died and was reborn in another generation. Then a variable was introduced into Maori life with the coming of the pakeha to Aotearoa. The Maori signed a worthless treaty at Waitangi. He lost his land. He lost his gods. He fought back. Te Whiti O Rongomai. Te Kooti Rikirangi. Te Puea Herangi. The fighters continued to fight. But at the same time the Maori was also being subsumed into pakeha culture. If we look for the signs of this subsumption we can see its effect clearly in evidence when the Maori fought with pakeha New Zealanders in World War 11. More and more New Zealand became the model for race relations.

At that time, the Maori people still lived predominantly in rural hearths. Following the Second World War they began the inevitable drift to the cities. Culturally, they were a rich and vital entity, self-sustaining and secure. For one thing, the language was still intact and localised enough for preservation and transmission of the culture itself. It was an oral literature and its idioms were relatively unknown and inaccessible to outsiders except anthropologists, sociologists and students of Maori history. It is for this reason of being invisible to the world of light that I have termed Maori culture and the oral literary tradition as being the largest underground movement ever known in New Zealand. On the latter, as far as I am concerned, it is time that Maori oral literature took its rightful place in university courses, not in Anthropology but in English. Indeed, there is an interesting exercise for some student in making a comparative analysis of the natural symbol and imagery in Maori literature and Anglo-Saxon.

The oral tradition of Maori literature remains, to all intents and purposes, intact, but its practice and practitioners are today few. Nor is it as understood as it perhaps should be —the whaikorero , the spoken and semi-recitative speeches dealing in highly symbolic

language with the creation, canoe migrations, major tribal and clan events, the relationship that ensued after the coming of the pakeha; the kbrero purakau (stories, myths and legends), the korero pakiwaitara (light-hearted stories), whakatauki (proverbs), pepeha (tribal sayings), haka (vigorous chants with actions), pokeka and ngeri (also forms of chants with actions), whaka-ara-ara-pa (chants by the guards of the watches of the night and day), the tauparapara, karakia, patere, kai-ora-ora, mata, karanga, powhiri, poroporoaki, waiata tangi, waiata aroha, oriori, pao, waiata a ringa and waiata poi. You may hear samples of these at different hui if you are lucky, but the understanding is not easy. The singing word, as Barry Mitcalfe characterised waiata, does not have the power to sing out across generations and the empty spaces as it once had. Yet, by far, the oral literature forms the basis for the underground movement which is the Maori people. Its voice may not be strong but it still survives despite the political and cultural imperialism of the majority in New Zealand.

The oral literature, up until the 19605, was the means of cultural transmission and preservation. It was the voice of the Maori people, carrying their stories and conveying their great passion for living to their descendants so that we were able to understand what we had been and what we were. At the same time, there was also a small body of Maori people writing in English whose concerns were more with recording the traditional aspects of Maori culture. Sir Peter Buck, for instance, wrote about the coming of the Maori and classical Maori culture. Pei Te Hurinui Jones wrote on King Potatau. Professor Joan Metge rightly considers that both these writers ‘deserve recognition for their masterly and evocative style, so entirely suited and subordinated to their purpose, so flowing and effortless that it goes unnoticed by the absorbed reader’. Later exponents of the written word continued to write with an educative intent —Merimeri Penfold on Maori education, Katerina Mataira, Harry Dansey and the wonderful Arapera Blank. It is to my mind regrettable that in so doing their gifts as imaginative writers were not and have still not been fully developed. But until the 19605, the major writers ofimaginative fiction on Maori people were pakehas. Of them all, Noel Hilliard in Maori Girl, which was serialised in the Auckland Weekly News, had the greatest impact amongst Maori people in identifying and foreseeing the political and social reality that lay ahead for them in New Zealand.

Political and social reality is a difficult matter to recognise, and we each come to it in different ways. In my case it happened when I was thirteen and I had seen that my birth certificate had my name as Witi Tame Ihimaera (Smiler). From my recollection I could not remember having heard that name Ihimaera before. My father and I

were sitting at home and I asked him: ‘What’s this name, Ihimaera?’ He told me it was our real name, our Maori name. ‘Well, why are we known around here as “Smiler”?’ My father’s reply was: ‘When your grandfather was younger, the missionaries couldn’t pronounce his name “Ihimaera”. So they gave him another name, “Smiler”.’

I began to use Ihimaera from then on. It means Ishmael, and it was my great-grandfather’s first name. Ishmael was of the desert people in the Old Testament and it seemed entirely appropriate for me—a wanderer in the desert. The more I dwelt on the ‘why’ of the name-change the more I began to see the way in which Maori life was under siege. But it wasn’t until the mid 1960 s that the urgency became apparent, became obvious. It happened this way.

By the 19605, there had occurred a massive discontinuity in Maori life, occasioned by the virtual relocation of Maori people from their traditional homes to urban centres like Gisborne and, further afield, to Wellington or Auckland. It was as if a fault line had suddenly developed in our history—on one side was a people with some cultural assurance, on the other was a generation removed from its roots, who did not understand their language and who had not lived the culture. This occasioned a lot of discussion about the future of the Maori people, the land, the language, the culture, the political and economic disparities, the lack of power in the structure of government. But it was not until later in the sixties, when a group called Nga Tamatoa was established, that we suddenly were made aware of the urgency of the situation. Now, many Maori people have tended to forget how major an impact Nga Tamatoa had on the people. As Rowley Habib would say, it was as if we’d all been given sleeping pills, tranquillisers. Even the literature we were writing lacked strength and direction. It was illustrative, pictorial and of the kind sponsored by Te Ao Hou, the journal of the Department of Maori Affairs. It was what I have termed ‘the pastoral tradition of written Maori literature’ and, with very few exceptions, the work lacks anger or political thought. Contemporary Maori Writing, edited by Margaret Orbell, and published in 1970, is a case in point. So too are the books Pounamu, pounamu, Tangi and, to a certain extent, Whanau, in 1972, 1973 and 1974. They are tender, unabashedly lyrical evocations of a world that once was. But they are a serious mismatch with the reality of the times.

In fairness, one would be hard pressed in fact to name a book of New Zealand literature which would match well with the reality of New Zealand as it was in those times; nor, I think, did the authors of the stories in Contemporary Maori Writing ever have any other objective in mind than to provide glimpses of childhood; of a time in the 1940 s and 1950 s when the emotional values and aroha (love

and sympathy for one another), whanaungatanga (kinship and family responsibility) and manaakitanga (reciprocal assistance to one another) were intact.

In many ways therefore, written Maori fiction of the time suffered the same constraints as New Zealand literature at the time. This was generally literature characterised by understatement. It was the time of the small story seen at a remove, at a distance. The way of telling was curiously flat. The pastoral tradition was also at work both in Maori and pakeha fiction with stories of rural New Zealand, of a world overlain with puritanism. Read through Landfall and the New Zealand Listener and you will be struck by the lack of punch, the lack of energy in the fiction. The action is all interior, not overt. Social realism, described for its own sake, was, it seems, to be studiously avoided. Craft, technique, the art of writing was the prime directive.

Apart from the constraints on subject and style, Maori fiction was also saddled with some incredible presumptions on the parts of editors. Most of the writers who appeared in the 1960 s have had to create a publisher willingness and an audience, both Maori and pakeha, for their work. There is the classic tale of the writer who, when asked by a publisher ‘Who will read your books?’ responded that Maori people would. The publisher’s reply was ‘But Maoris don’t read books.’ The fact that publisher willingness and a bicultural audience does now exist is therefore more a matter of tenacity than luck. My own first anthology, in its original form, was turned down by two publishers before being considered by the third. I am sure that Patricia Grace will not mind my telling you that her first book was declined by the same publisher who published my work. That’s show business. That’s the market.

I guess it is the prerogative of respective generations to consider that their time is the one in which events were made to happen, directions and aims were rethought. So it is with my generation, which straddled the years of the sixties and seventies. To look at the international context, these were the years of hope and optimism, personified by John Kennedy’s reign in a mythic American Camelot. It was the Age of Aquarius. It was the age of our own Kennedy, the late Norman Kirk. Of Vietnam protests. Of ‘No Maoris, No Tour.’ It was the time when we were looking, Maori and pakeha, for a way out of a cul-de-sac. Of trying to mould a new future. Of trying to regenerate an obsessively myopic New Zealand. Of making the linkages with our own culture, with pakeha New Zealand, with the South Pacific and with Third World concerns. We were a young Maori generation, trained in European techniques and aware of the personal price paid in cultural terms for such training. We saw that continued alienation of Maori land and

the Maori people from their culture meant that the Maori was becoming landless and cultureless in his own country. This was the time which therefore saw Nga Tamatoa petitioning Parliament for the establishment of courses in Maori language and culture in all schools ‘as a gift to the pakeha from the Maori’. It was the time of sit-ins in Parliament grounds and annual protests at Waitangi Day celebrations to draw attention to Maori grievances regarding land, culture, sporting contacts, educational and economic under-achievement, necessity for a bicultural bureaucracy and, particularly, the innate rights of Maoris to be able to have control over their destiny in Aotearoa.

Despite the intensity of the debate that surrounded Maori-pakeha relationships then, my own view is that ultimately we were all prepared to listen and prepared to redesign this waka, this national canoe of ours, to ensure that it took both Maori and pakeha aspirations, directions, into account. Maori writing of the time at the very least established what was offering from the Maori side—a basic emotional superstructure, a feeling of affinity which we felt was needed if we were to make balanced decisions about plotting our course —which stars to navigate by, which reefs to avoid. So, for all my criticism about the mismatch of Maori fiction with the political reality, it did have a major importance in establishing a basic values system, the trim to the waka. Hone Tuwhare, Patricia Grace, and Rowley Habib’s earlier work all belong here. Am I wrong, now, in believing that New Zealand today is not so prepared to listen, prepared to even negotiate a new future for us all? Is it so responsive to Maori needs?

I made reference earlier to my having stopped writing in 1975. The basic purpose for writing had been to establish and describe the emotional landscape of the Maori people. The landscapes of the heart. I used to think that even if all the land were taken away, our rnaraes razed, our children turned into brown pakehas, that nothing could take away the heart, the way we feel. In many respects, the heart is really all that I’ve ever had. My knowledge of the language is minimal. My understanding of the culture has mainly been learnt at school and at university. It embarrassed me to be berated by my own people for not knowing Maori. Once I responded to Ngoi Pewhairangi that ‘You’re not Maori with your mouth. You’re Maori here, in your heart. Anybody can learn how to speak Maori, but that won’t make you one.’ But increasingly the emotional reality became less and less important to describe and the political reality assumed a higher

profile. I could not, in all conscience, allow people ever to consider my work was the definitive portrayal of the world of the Maori. In my attempts to help, I considered I had created a stereotype. Of warm caring relationships. Of a people who lived in rural communities. But what was the reality? The reality in 1975 was a hardening of attitudes on both sides. Of inflexibility. Of infighting. By 1975 I felt my vision was out of date and, tragically, so encompassing and so established that it wasn’t leaving room enough for the new reality to punch through. I made a conscious decision to stop writing. I said that I would place a ten year embargo on my work. It was the right decision to make. I am, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. A man, a man, a man.

Since then, it has seemed to me that New Zealand has been in the throes of some massive nervous breakdown. Something has been going wrong out there. Instead of looking outward, we are increasingly turning inward. We feel under siege. We feel defensive. Our first response is distrust and outrage at any attack on the fidelity of New Zealand. We have become divided. We have started to withdraw into our own divisions. We have become autistic. Totally withdrawn.

That doesn’t mean that we haven’t been struggling to repair ourselves. In the Maori world, this has meant vociferous exchanges, most often bitter, but no dialogue. We are either too tired or too hardened to listen to each other. One of the heartening aspects, however, is that the literature, as it applies to race relations, is developing a most commanding voice. I welcome the development of this literature of race relations. It has a role in making the connections, perhaps even better than with fiction about Maori life as mine has been, and reaching across the empty spaces between Maori and pakeha in a more hard-hitting and realistic fashion. How well it has succeeded will only become obvious to you when an anthology entitled Into the World of Light is published later this year. The anthology collects the work of Maori writers over the last decade about Maori life and race relations between Maori and pakeha.

For the future, what can we say about the kind of people we have become? About us? Who are we? We are Maori. We are Polynesian. We inhabit a minority space within a majority framework. We are the unemployed, the social time bomb. About eighty per cent of us live in city areas. Half of us are under the age of 19 and without skills in our culture. Our world is beset with pressures from within and without. We are against the Springbok tour but we have also agreed to welcome the Springbok team on Poho-o-rawiri marae in Gisborne. We are the dispossessed, the under-educated. Yet it saddens many of us to see the Race Relations Conciliator to all

intents and purposes sneaking out of the country to take up an invitation to visit South Africa. We are the unemployed. We are one in four children who appear before the Children’s Court. We have a Minister of Maori Affairs of whom it was said last week that he was ‘profoundly ignorant’ of South Africa. He was on television last night saying, incredibly, that he supported apartheid in South Africa. We are hi tangata\ we are also members of the Mongrel Mob.

This is the bleak scenario. One hopes that it will not be our future. For there are many positive aspects, and so much optimism about sorting out a future for all of us. The problem is, for we who observe, a matter of timing. There is urgency now. We wish to chart a course for our culture towards life, not death.

Last week, the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, in his speech to the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Hobart, said that leadership must be positive, optimistic but not divisive. He then said that inverted racists were trying to create a split between Maori and pakeha in New Zealand. ‘My answer to them is a very practical one. In my party in the House I have three Maori members of Parliament, each of whom was elected for a general seat or what we used to call European seat, where the Maori vote would be no higher than five per cent.’ There were a small number of Maori radicals in New Zealand who did their best to exacerbate whatever problems there might be between Maori and pakeha. ‘But they are small in number and very small as a proportion of the total. We are an integrated society. Something in excess of sixty per cent of Maori marriages today have one European partner.’

I do not find such comments positive or optimistic. I find them divisive to a degree that can barely be tolerated. Mr Muldoon is making the mistake of assuming that where you have integration of people that you have integration of culture also. Integration of people does not automatically make for integration of culture.

We still have a long way to go. We still need to force a reconsideration of New Zealand’s monocultural perception of itself. We still require that national identity should be bilingual and bicultural. Only then will Maori and pakeha heritages and culture be enriched. There is still a need for New Zealand to take its Maori personality into account. Despite the bleakness of what I have said, Maori literature has a place in ensuring this occurs. If to be hopeful and to push for change in New Zealand is radical, then here I am, here we are.

All of us who write, or who are concerned, about Maori life, have this in common: the commitment to our people. For us, the challenge today is rather as described by Patricia Grace in her magnificent short story ‘Parade’:

I took in a big breath, filling my lungs with sea and air and land and people. And with past and present and future, and felt a new strength course through me. I lifted my voice to sing and heard and felt the others join with me. Singing loudly into the darkest of nights. Calling on the strength of the people. Calling them to paddle the canoes and to paddle on and on. To haul the canoes down and paddle. On and on

Aotea, Tainui, Kurahaupo Mataatua, Te Arawa, Takitimu, Tokomaru Hoea hoea ra No reira, ko te whakamutunga tenei o taku korero. Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

Footnote The Record is following current practice in marking vowel lengths, choosing the macron rather than the double vowel. The author’s preference would have been to leave vowel lengths unmarked. {Ed.)