BROKEN CHANT

Tu Tangata, Issue 19, 1 August 1984, Page 36

BROKEN CHANT

by D.S. Long

KUPU WHAKAATA/REVIEWS

Authors: Rosemary Kohu and Robert de Roo Publisher: Tauranga Moana Press, $6.95

James K. Baxter spoke of ‘five waterworn stones... five spiritual aspects of Maori... life —’

arohanui manuhiritanga korero matewa mahi

This hard-won first book of poems by two Tauranga poets, privately published, takes up these five stones and chisels with them an often anguished but finally rangimarie record of two ara.

Manuhiritanga Broken Chant begins with two poems of passage as Rosemary and Robert explain how they came to Aotearoa, ‘One with links stretching back to the beginnings of this land; the other, the first born of his line’ here.

Takitimu rings in my ears as I spew forth from this earth, Aotearoa I am born in this land.

says Rosemary in the opening poem. Robert remembers

Dutch sailors’ blood and bones enwombed in the tide’s lap

and a “Nazi bombed Holland”. In poems of whakapapa which follow they sing of

sunken, dachau cheeks,

My blue-eyed, ballerina sister bag of bones

and of how

Opa showed us his wedding ring, kept hidden

in bars of soap, there were seventy two in his room the fat ones died first.

Rosemary tells us

I carried proudly the heritage, Kahungunu,

I inherited from Rongomaiwahine a strong spirit.

Memories of chants, voices gathered together, quite mumbles of the old people as they share the open fires. With kuku shells they scrape the potatoes clean. and from a different perspective:

We Pakeha children, emboldened by adventure, walked across the estuary to Motuopae, never quite daring to test the tapu and walk amongst the headstones of dead chiefs.

But there was much pain also, in this bicultural world. How many maori readers will sympathise with this memory of Roberts?

Dutch sailing ships rode triumphant over oceans on my walls. My father and Opa looked through my history books, railing at the English orientation of everything.

And how many survivors of the German or Japanese occupations will empathise with the experiences of a young maori girl documented in the poem ‘Taken’?

Ripped away from the fireside of my parents Thrown into the cold hardness 0f... Bethlehem Native School. a long poem in which Rosemary remembers

seeing no familiar face. Fear filled my lonely, tiny soul. Taken from the language of my kuia, koro, to hear alien voices. ... to have ‘kutu inspection’. Then the de-licing... to have white medicine forced into my small body... only to hear sung: ‘lnto straight lines morning inspection’

dresses up for clean panties stripped of all dignity. to be taught to become an individual destroying whanaungatanga These scraps from ‘Taken’ only begin to suggest the power of Rosemary’s childhood memories but worse was to follow, for Broken Chant then moves towards late adolescence and

Matewa which Baxter saw as ‘the night life of the soul’. Agonies, rape cries on the wind Body beaten, battered, hangs limp. Shame covers like mist. From one of five bruised poems about being raped from a section introduced as ‘the hardest path’. For Robert who went through Asia and Europe for seven years

I cracked my head through drunken nights, buying the chaos of my pleasures cheap and finally finds himself in a Dutch winter

on my knees in the light snow at a dark end.

Both seem to have come ultimately to face the darkness of insanity which one calls the ‘concentration camp of the mind’ where the other found ‘electrodes rape again’.

Arohanui/korero/mahi In the final section of their journey we come at last, through the love of others, to the ‘speech that begets peace’ and ‘work undertaken from communal love’ (Baxter’s phrase their beautiful book) to ‘the human spirit indomitable’. For Rosemary it is a

return to her maoritanga for Robert a more universal affiliation for both any recovery must be based on aroha. You are not Maori, you are New Zealander that surely is your aim. If I should become so, what Gods will guide me? I can no longer lie in the arms of Papa. No, I will not lose my Maoritanga, for to be a New Zealander,

I will no longer be Maori. Robert seems to understand this when he says to her ...... You sing and the land seems to respond as you tie all the threads into a reason for being here. For Robert, the path asks equally hard questions: What do you mean to me, Aotearoa? a santorium in the south seas away from all the sores of Europe? But scratch the surface, here, and your own sores are exposed. . 111 not be bordered by a single tribe, a single race, a single mental structure; let me mix 1 wit ate people, . all the poets, artists, and mystics of the world: their peaks are my turangawaewae. In their brief introduction these two

poets warned us that, ‘we feel that we now have something to say, and are not afraid to say it directly... we look towards this land and see in it something of unique value. It has taken a long time to come to see insights, and they have been hard-won. This book is a record of some of those insights and the experiences along the way. We shall continue to need such honest bravery and difficult thoughts

as we all follow the path into our common future. No one could doubt that either of these Tauranga writers was other than tangata whenua; for Broken Chant has made it clear that this is so. D.S. Long, who wrote this review, is a teacher of the deaf in Wellington, and a poet.