used to hedgehogs and clothed in prickles
rather than fluff
and the little sheep would
come out sometimes at night under the moon
and we’d leave them saucers of milk
and feel sad
seeing them squashed on the road
Well anyway here we are with all this
cushioning in the biggest city in the world
its suburbs strung out in a long line
and the civic centre at the bottom of
Cook Strait some of them Hill Suburbs
and some Flat Suburbs and some more prosperous
than others
some with a climate that embarrasses
them and a tendency to grow strange small fruit
some temperate and leafy whose hot streets lull
So here we are again in the biggest
safest city in the world all strung out
over 1500 miles one way and a little bit
the other
each in his woolly protection
so sometimes it’s difficult to see out
the eyes let alone call to each other
which is the reason for the loneliness some
of us feel
and for our particular relations
with the landscape that we trample
or stroke with our toes or eat or lick
tenderly or pull apart
and love like an
old familiar lover who fits us
curve to curve and hate because it
knows us and knows our weakness
We’re calling fiercely to each other
through the muffled spaces grateful for
any wrist-brush
cut of mind or touch of music,
lightning in the intimate weather of the soul.
(1982)
Murray Edmond, ‘Shack’
I read the word shack.
I like it.
It is a good solid small word.
It would be good to live in a shack.
In inflationary times a shack
would be a good place to live.
Welcome to the shack.
It hardly exists.
You are out the exit
before you are in the entrance.
Turn it sideways—
it disappears.
Just a few upright bones hung with flesh.
The beating brain like a soft bunch
of kapok tossed on a derelict floor.
Love this shack, take it to your breast,
wrap your legs around it, it is the best you’ll get
this year, next year, never.
Come, let us put ourselves out on the hillside,
let sunbeat drain and dry us,
windbeat drive out the loving heat,
there’s more we can make
when we light up the fierce furnaces
of this rusty shack.
Let us be done with concrete and steel,
plastic and formica and all the festoonings
of luxury and comfort, all the false triptrap
gadgetry of glamour.
We can boil potatoes in the middle of the floor.
We can stoke the fire.
We can shack it.
This glorious tiny unstable living heap
which hugs the hillside.
In a week of looking for the cheapest
chintziest, ritziest, ripoff place to live in town
I got sick in the mind, sick at the heart
like Lord Randall returning to his mother
from all the agencies who own the land,
I was sick in the balls
from the way this city was dressed up,
a series of Christmas treats under the richman’s
tree I wasn’t allowed to unwrap.
Until I found this word shack.
I took a good bath in the word,
washed myself clean with it,
let its pure language force pour down over me
and give me back the smell
of salt and earth and iron
and the sweet wood smell burned grey by the sun.
(1981)
Bill Manhire, ‘Phar Lap’
Unlikely combinations,
Prayer Wheel and Winkie, Sentiment
and Radium: names that contract and expand
like a big heart pumping
till you get an unlikely starter,
this chestnut colt,
foaled in Timaru, October 4 1926,
by Night Raid out of Entreaty,
with Carbine somewhere
in the background.
*
The hide is in Melbourne,
the heart in Canberra.
The bones are in Wellington,
the big delicate skeleton
of a horse
who used to mean business.
*
Can the name
have been planned as a pun?
In English it is one thing.
In Siamese, Lightning.
And they say it means
something in Egyptian.
*
But he was virtually unbeatable,
the big fellow,
winning race after race in Australia
and never fading,
even after they shot at him,
even after they missed,
*
even after he died in America
of intestinal tympany,
of theory after theory ….
They say that for five days he ate
pasture sprayed with lead arsenate,
they say that his Australian strapper
gave him Fowler’s Solution,
incorrectly mixed,
or maybe even the Mafia ….
Well, let’s say he died in California,
let’s say he died of absence
*
and that when they stopped talking
they sent him home,
made him articulate
bone by bone
*
till one day up at the Museum,
it might be fifty years later,
wandering along
past the days of pioneer settlement,
I walk past Cook’s cannon
and a case of muskets
and hear a woman sing
in another language
from the far side of Phar Lap’s ribcage.
(1991)
The Maori Renaissance, II
Witi Ihimaera, from ‘Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception’
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 1950s and 1960s 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 1960s? 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 II. 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 kōrero pūrākau (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, pōwhiri, 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 1960s, 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 1960s, the major writers of imaginative 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 1960s that the urgency became apparent, became obvious. It happened this way.
By the 1960s, 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 Ngā 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 Ngā 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 1940s and 1950s 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 1960s 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 Ngā 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.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 99