And a sweet wood smell coming from the strewn chips and the wood stack by the shed. A tangle of damp stinks from the fowl-yard and orchard, and from the cold rustiness of the cow-holed swamp. Some of the earth morning smells had become trapped under the hot bodies of cows, and were being dispensed, along with the cows’ own milk and saliva smells, from the swinging bellies and milk-filled udders as the animals made their way poke-legged to the milking sheds. That was what it was like this morning.
And there was a breath of sea. Somewhere—barely discernible since evening had been long forgotten and the night had been shrugged aside—somewhere the sea was casting its breath at the land. It was as though it were calling to the land, and to us as we woke and walked into the day, ‘I’m here, I’m here. Don’t forget about me.’
The sun fingered the ridges of hills as we pulled the flax and fern from the creek and began to decorate the truck for the parade. We worked quickly, tying and nailing the fronds and leaves into place. And when we had finished, Uncle Hirini drove the truck in under some trees where the sun could not reach it, while we went inside to change into our costumes.
Auntie had sent all the children to wash in the creek, and as I watched them from the window it was like seeing myself as I had been not very long ago. As if it were my own innocence that they cast on to the willow branches with their clothes. Light had filtered through the willow branches on to the creek’s surface, spreading in small pools to the creek banks and on to the patches of watercress and shafts of reed.
The sun had put a finger on almost everything by now. It had touched our houses and the paddocks and tree tops, and stroked its silver over the sea. The beach stones were warming from the sun’s touching, and black weed, thrown up by the sea, lay in heaps on the shore drying and helpless in the sun’s relentless stroking.
I watched the bodies falling into water warmed from the sun’s touching, and fingers, not his, squeezing at large bars of yellow soap. Fingers spreading blistery trails of suds up and over legs and arms. Bodies, heads, ears. ‘Wash your taringas.’ Auntie from the creek bank. Backsides, frontsides, fingers, toes. Then splashing, diving, puffing, and blowing in this pool of light. Out onto the banks, rubbing with towels, wrapping the towels around, scrambling back through the willows, across the yard where the sun caught them for a moment before they ran inside to dress. It was like seeing myself as I had been such a short time ago.
Auntie stood back on the heels of her bare feet, puffing at a cigarette, and looking at me through half-shut eyes. Her round head was nodding at me, and her long hair, which she had brushed out of the two thick plaits that usually circled her head, fell about her shoulders, and two more hanks of hair glistened under her armpits. The skin on her shoulders and back was pale in its unaccustomed bareness, cream-coloured and cool-looking. And there was Granny Rita stretching lips over bare gums to smile at me.
‘Very pretty, dia. Very pretty, dia,’ she kept saying, stroking the cloak that they had put on me, her old hands aged and grey like burnt paper. The little ones admiring, staring.
Setting me apart.
And I stood before them in the precious cloak, trying to smile.
‘I knew our girl would come,’ Auntie was saying again. ‘I knew our girl would come if we sent for her.’
We could hear the truck wheezing out in the yard, and Grandpa Hohepa, who is bent and crabby, was hurrying everyone along, banging his stick on the floor. ‘Kia tere,’ he kept on saying. ‘Kia tere.’
The men helped Granny Rita and Grandpa Hohepa onto the truck and sat them where they could see, then I stepped onto the platform which had been erected for me and sat down for the journey into town. The others formed their lines along each side of the tray and sat down too.
In town, in the heat of the late morning, we moved slowly with the other parade floats along the streets lined with people. Past the railway station and shops, and over bridges and crossings, singing one action song after another. Hakas and pois.
And as I watched I noticed again, as I had on the other carnival days of concerts and socials, the crowd reaction. I tried not to think. Tried not to let my early morning feelings leave me. Tried not to know that there was something different and strange in the people’s reaction to us. And yet I knew this was not something new and strange, but only that during my time away from here my vision and understanding had expanded. I was able now to see myself and other members of my race as others see us. And this new understanding left me as abandoned and dry as an emptied pod of flax that rattles and rattles into the wind.
Everyone was clapping and cheering for Uncle Hirini and my cousin Hoani who kept jumping from the truck to the road, patterning with their taiaha, springing on their toes and doing the pukana, making high pipping noises with their voices. Their tongues lolled and their eyes popped.
But it was as though my uncle and Hoani were a pair of clowns. As though they wore frilled collars and had paint on their noses, and kept dropping baggy pants to display spotted underwear and sock suspenders. As though they turned cartwheels and hit each other on the head, while someone else banged on a tin to show everyone that clowns have tin heads.
And the people’s reaction to the rest of us? The singing and pois? I could see enjoyment on the upturned faces and yet it occurred to me again and again that many people enjoyed zoos. That’s how I felt. Animals in cages to be stared at. This one with stripes, this one with spots—or a trunk, or bad breath, the remains of a third eye. Talking, swinging by the tail, walking in circles, laughing, crying, having babies.
Or museums. Stuffed birds, rows of shells under glass, the wingspan of an albatross, preserved bodies, shrunken heads. Empty gourds, and meeting houses where no one met any more.
I kept thinking and trying not to think, ‘Is that what we are to them?’ Museum pieces, curios, antiques, shells under glass. A travelling circus, a floating zoo. People clapping and cheering to show that they know about such things.
The sun was hot. Auntie at the end of the row was beaming, shining, as though she were the sun. A happy sun, smiling and singing to fill the whole world with song. And with her were all the little sunlets singing too, and stamping. Arms out, fingers to the heart, fists clenched, hands open, head to one side, face the front. Piupius swinging, making their own music, pois bobbing. And voices calling the names of the canoes—Tainui, Takitimu, Kurahaupo, Te Arawa … the little ones in the front bursting with the fullness of their own high voices and their dancing hands and stamping feet, unaware that the crowd had put us under glass and that our uncle and cousin with their rolling eyes and prancing feet wore frilled collars and size nineteen shoes and had had pointed hats clapped down upon their heads.
Suddenly I felt a need to reach out to my auntie and uncle, to Hoani and the little ones, to old Rita and Hohepa.
We entered the sports ground, and when the truck stopped, the little ones scrambled down and ran off to look for their mates from school. Auntie and Hoani helped Granny Rita and Grandpa Hohepa down. I felt older than any of them.
And it was hot. The sun threw down his spinnings of heat and weavings of light on to the cracked summer earth as we walked towards the pavilion.
‘Do you ever feel as though you’re in a circus?’ I said to Hoani, who is the same age as I am. He flipped onto his hands and walked the rest of the way upside down. I had a feeling Hoani knew what I was talking about.
Tea. Tea and curling sandwiches. Slabs of crumbling fruit cake, bottles of bloodwarm fizz, and someone saying, ‘What’re you doing in that outfit?’ Boys from cousin Lena’s school.
‘Didn’t you see us on the truck?’ Lena was saying.
‘Yeh, we saw.’ One of the boys had Lena’s poi and was swinging it round and round and making aeroplane noises.
Mr Goodwin, town councillor, town butcher, touching Uncle Hirini’s shoulder and saying, ‘Great, great,’ to show what a great person he himself was, being one of the carnival organisers and having lived in the township all his life amongst
dangling sausages, crescents of black pudding, leg roasts, rib roasts, flannelled tripe, silverside, rolled beef, cutlets, dripping. ‘Great.’ He was Great. You could tell by the prime steak hand on Uncle’s shoulder.
Uncle Hirini believed the hand. Everyone who saw the hand believed it too, or so it seemed to me. They were all believers on days such as these.
And the woman president of the CWI shouting at Granny Rita as though Granny were deaf or simple. Granny Rita nodding her head, waiting for the woman to go away so she could eat her cake.
It was stuffy and hot in the hall with the stale beer and smoke smell clinging to its walls and floor, and to the old chipped forms and sagging trestle tables. Bird dirt, spider webs, mice droppings. The little ones had had enough to eat and were running up and down with their mates from school, their piupius swinging and clacking about their legs. Auntie rounding them all up and whispering to go outside. Auntie on her best behaviour wishing those kids would get out and stop shaming her. Wanting to yell, ‘Get out, you kids. Get outside and play. You spoil those piupius and I’ll whack your bums.’ Auntie sipping tea and nibbling at a sandwich.
We began to collect the dishes. Squashed raisins, tea dregs. The men were stacking the trestles and shifting forms. Mrs President put her hands into the soapy water and smiled at the ceiling, smiled to show what sort of day it was. ‘Many hands make light work,’ she sang out. We reached for towels, we reached for wet plates to prove how right she was.
Outside, people were buying and selling, guessing weights and stepping chains, but I went to where Granny Rita and Grandpa Hohepa were sitting in the shade of a tree, guarding the cloak between them.
More entertainment. The lines were forming again but I sat down by old Rita and Hohepa out of the sun’s heat.
‘Go,’ Granny Rita was saying to me. ‘Take your place.’
‘I think I’ll watch this time, Nanny.’
‘You’re very sad today, dia. Very sad.’
Granny Rita’s eyes pricking at my skin. Old Hohepa’s too.
‘It’s hot Nanny.’
A crowd had gathered to watch the group and the singing had begun, but those two
put their eyes on me, waiting for me to speak.
‘They think that’s all we’re good for,’ I said. ‘A laugh and that’s all. Amusement. In any other week of the year we don’t exist. Once a year we’re taken out and put on show, like relics.’
And silence.
Silence with people laughing and talking.
Silence with the singing lifting skyward, and children playing.
Silence. Waiting for them to say something to me. Wondering what they would say.
‘You grow older, you understand more,’ Granny Rita said to me.
Silence and waiting.
‘No one can take your eyes from you,’ she said. Which is true.
Then old Hohepa, who is bent and sometimes crabby, said, ‘It is your job, this. To show others who we are.’
And I sat there with them for a long time. Quiet. Realising what had been put upon me. Then I went towards the group and took my place, and began to stamp my feet on to the cracked earth, and to lift my voice to the sun, who holds the earth’s strength within himself.
And gradually the sun withdrew his touch and the grounds began to empty, leaving a flutter of paper, trampled heads of dandelion and clover, and insects finding a way into the sticky sweet necks of empty bottles.
The truck had been in the sun all afternoon. The withered curling fern and drooping flax gave it the appearance of a scaly monster, asleep and forgotten, left in a corner to die. I helped Granny Rita into the cab beside Grandpa Hohepa.
‘This old bum gets too sore on those hard boards. This old bum wants a soft chair for going home. Ah lovely, dia. Move your fat bum ova, Hepa.’ The old parched hand on my cheek. ‘Not to worry, dia, not to worry.’
And on the back of the truck we all moved close together against the small chill that evening had brought in. Through the town’s centre then along the blackening roads. On into the night until the road ended. Opening gates, closing them. Crossing the dark paddocks with the hills dense on one hand, the black patch of sea on the other. And the only visible thing the narrow rind of foam curling shoreward under a sky emptied of light. Listening, I could hear the shuffle of water on stone, and rising above this were the groans and sighs of a derelict monster with his scales withered and dropping, making his short-sighted way through prickles and fern, over cow pats and stinging nettle, along fence lines, past the lupin bushes, their fingers crimped against the withdrawal of the day.
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—
‘Hoea ra nga waka
E te iwi e,
Hoea hoea ra,
Aotea, Tainui, Kurahaupo,
Hoea hoea ra.
Toia mai nga waka
E te iwi e,
Hoea hoea ra,
Mataatua, Te Arawa,
Takitimu, Tokomaru,
Hoea hoea ra.’
(1975)
Apirana Taylor, ‘Sad Joke on a Marae’
Tihei Mauriora I called
Kupe Paikea Te Kooti
Rewi and Te Rauparaha
I saw them
grim death and wooden ghosts
carved on the meeting house wall.
In the only Maori I knew
I called
Tihei Mauriora.
Above me the tekoteko raged.
He ripped his tongue from his mouth
and threw it at my feet.
Then I spoke.
My name is Tu the freezing worker.
Ngati DB is my tribe.
The pub is my Marae.
My fist is my Taiaha.
Jail is my home.
Tihei Mauriora I cried.
They understood
the tekoteko and the ghosts
though I said nothing but
Tihei Mauriora
For that’s all I knew.
(1979)
Because He Was a Man: Speaking of War
Ian Wedde, ‘37 land-mine casualty Amman 1970’, from Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos
Because he was a man he retreated
instantly ‘inside’/
His extremities
flipped off: feet genitals chin fingers nose.
Then he was sealed in what was left, a kind
of atavic stump. He had been erased
from the personal familiar surface
of his skin. I couldn’t look him in the face.
When to greet him I took him by the hand
or what was left of it it was glossy
as though the gorgeous facets of minerals
were cicatrices.
He’d become stone
warmed by the sun. It was the kite season.
Above scorching hillsides whose flint scars blazed
his children’s weightless toys quivered & spun.
(1975)
David Mitchell, ‘my lai/remuera/ponsonby’
she
holds th mirror to her eye
whole villages burn
2 million years have proved nothing
she
did not already know.
th lines on hr hand
speak out clear &
serene
also those beneath her eyes
& in between …
she
sits in th kitchen
‘ boiling an egg ’
she
inverts th tiny
‘ hourglass ’ &
30 seconds pass &
she
contemplates th sand
&
she
holds a hand over each dark eye
in turn
&
children burn
(1972)
David Mitchell, ‘ponsonby/remuera/my lai’
th warrior’s come home
there he goes!
right
here
& now
up queen street
in a gun carrier
palm to th clear brow
in th oldest, most obscene
salute
& in th eyes
th mandrake root—
th blackened bone.
2 million years
have proved nothing
he did not already know
ah! there he goes!
th kiwi’s come home.
he
sits in th barber’s chair
‘short back & sides’
& he
lingers in th chemist
buying coloured slides
& he
ponders on time / yeah. &
destiny;/
also th fates …
& he
sits in th kitchen
playing poker with his mates
& he
contemplates his hand
& he
holds a king
to each soft lip
in turn
& th others pass
( & he waits his turn )
& 30 seconds pass
& he
plays his hand
&
children burn.
(1972)
Michael Harlow, ‘The Nannies Are Coming!’
What do the tanks know, dreaming
at night under a full moon or none?
Idle in their slots they design parades.
Their devices are intact: swivel heads
scattering birds, visions of coughing
up shells, they purr in earnest.
As prams they are remodelled
for nestling under the Acropolis,
strolling the esplanade in Rio.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 97