by Holly Morris
“Whoa, looks like there’s a fire in our hotel,” I say. There is smoke billowing out of windows above.
TO: JEANNIE
FROM: HOLLY
SUBJECT: A LITTLE PROBLEM
Mom—the good news is that the crew and I are alive and nobody was hurt. Bad news is, well, we had a hotel fire last night. Two floors kinda burned.
Here’s the deal: We went to do the Waring interview and when we got back to the hotel there were fire trucks surrounding the block, preventing our movement. But then we got closer and realized it was Our Hotel; and closer, and realized it was My Floor and . . . well . . . um . . . it started in My Room. Oops.
Not my fault! One of those crazy do-it-yourself, built-in Kiwi kitchenette stoves blew up. Or maybe it was an electrical fire (yesterday the outlet sparked when I plugged in my computer). Anyway, litigiously paranoid that I am, have we paid our insurance premium lately? I was surrounded by hotel security fellows and got the full-on good-cop/bad-cop let’s-make-the-girl-cry routine. It almost worked. (I think they were in bed with the hotel’s insurance company.)
In case the insurance people want to know, nearly everything was destroyed, including my black polyester Wranglers.
Also lost:
1. Mac G3 laptop with all my interview notes
2. Handspring electronic organizer (never figured out how to use it anyway)
3. All clothes and books
4. Canon Elph camera—cute but ineffective—got enough cameras on this shoot anyway
5. Walkman with favorite Trini Lopez tape inside (irreplaceable)
6. Maori language tapes
I’ll borrow a shirt from camerawoman Liza as we’re loaded up with divas for the next few days. No time for shopping. We figure the hotel-burning is a bad omen, so after we leave Auckland we’ll sleep in our caravan, Old Sheila, which we rented yesterday. (We’ve pinned my orange half-burned Sleater-Kinney shirt on its wall.) Will be good for bonding and the budget anyway. Ever the optimist, and ever onward . . .
love, Hol
p.s. Sky Prancer survived! She was in the apparently fireproof bathroom. Her tutu got kinda sooty but she lives to fly again.
“Time to get on the road,” Michael says sweetly when he finds me hunting and pecking around the charred, sprinkler-drenched ashes of my room the next morning for anything salvageable. I have been up all night, and he knows it.
“Yeah, I think we’ve worn out our welcome.” Hitting the road sounds just right. Despite occasional four-alarm production hiccups, such as hotel fires, in recent months road life has made me feel alive and reminded me that I am my best self in motion. When I haven’t been suffering, I have been very happy.
We spend the day driving through a part of the North Island where the oceanic Pacific plate slides under the continental plate. The volcanic plateau that fills Old Sheila’s windows is rife with dramatic geological depressions and thermal pools. We are headed to a hotspot called Rotorua, a town where tourism and the natural world intersect.
The moment we breach the town limits we are swimming in a mix of twee colonial remnants, Maori culture, and sulfuric acid. We pull up at the Whakarewarewa tourist area to film its bubbling-hot mud pools, namely the spouting Pohutu geyser, which erupts twenty times a day, and a faux Maori “village” that features Maori arts and crafts. B-roll.
A package of German tourists are disembarking from a very large air-conditioned bus and being greeted by a young Maori who is doing hongi, the traditional Maori greeting in which foreheads and noses are pressed together. “Let’s get a shot of this,” Michael says to Liza. The greeter goes in for the reverent nose touch to a skinny white fellow in bermudas with binoculars around his neck. The white man gets flustered—Why is this handsome young native entering my personal space?—and in a dazzling display of poor, panicked judgment in the face of a confusing culture clash, he cocks his head and kisses the greeter on the lips.
Michael, Liza, and I double over in laughter.
The kiss, and its awkward after-moment, are a reminder that while New Zealand is at first glance a quiet, controlled place, cultural tensions simmer underneath its surface. Kiwi/Pakeha writer Helen Lehndorf wrote on adventuredivas.com that while “New Zealand has a good reputation for race relations . . . the reality is that Maori make up most of our unemployed, succeed less in the education system, and have lower life expectancy. The current government is attempting to address this discrepancy with ‘closing-the-gaps’ policies. Perhaps in time we can achieve true equality and real biculturalism.”
Modern-day Maoris are the descendants of a Polynesian tribe that navigated by stars and wind and arrived in New Zealand (Aotearoa) a thousand years ago. In the 1700s, the British and the French showed up and were soon followed by an influx of whalers, traders, and missionaries. Concerned that the French would colonize first, the British rushed to offer the Treaty of Waitangi. Signed by tribal and British leaders on February 6, 1840, the controversial treaty gave the Crown rights to govern and settle, while giving the Maori citizenship and protection of their interests. But today, the treaty is being disputed and land rights debated, amid a growing Maori cultural and political revival. The movement has made major progress in land and cultural rights in the past twenty-five years.
“How much consciousness about the Maori renaissance was there when you were a kid?” I ask our Pakeha-in-residence, Simon.
“I grew up believing New Zealand was truly bicultural—but like most Pakehas, hardly knowing anything about the Maori culture or language. The seventies were a big time for the revival. Lots of sit-ins and protests. Most of it led by women, really,” he says, pulling into a caravan park near Rotorua within whiffing distance of the sulfur from the thermal areas. Kiwi soundwoman Jan slathers Vegemite on white bread for our appetizer. “Mmm. Marvelous,” she says, mooning over the fetid, brown, sticky yeast. Blech.
Hot greasy smells (now that’s an aroma I can get behind) overwhelm the eau de sulfur and soon the back of the caravan teems with vice: unlit cigarettes dangle out of the sides of our mouths; poker chips and playing cards with late-1800s soft porn on the flipside glint in our lantern’s light; and grease-splotched wads of newspaper, which held our fish-and-chips dinner, litter the floor. Between us we drink a half rack of Speight’s and, quite possibly, ingest a half gallon of Bad Fat. “Four of a kind beats a straight flush,” says Michael, incorrectly.
“No, no it doesn’t,” I contend.
By the time we arrive at Hawke’s Bay the next day to meet pop music icon Hinewehi Mohi, we have mostly digested the fish and chips, but we are two hours behind schedule because we ran out of gas, thanks to Old Sheila’s unreliable gauge.
“Kia ora,” says a woman with long, dark, pulled-back hair who walks out of the house bearing the address Simon has typed on our schedule. I check the address. She is almost unrecognizable from her most recent music video, in which a sexy, almost feral Hinewehi strides in a long green dress through a dense rain forest (here referred to as “the bush”), furtively dodging vines. In person, she is all girl-next-door: orange crewneck sweater, brunette ponytail, no makeup, and a sunny, genuine smile.
“Hi, Hinewehi,” I say, leaping out of the Valiant and introducing the crew. “We’re very sorry to be so late.”
I wanted to meet Hinewehi because this rock star next door has become a spokesperson for Maori culture and her commitment to tino rangatiratanga—self-determination for the Maori people—is well known throughout the nation. She’s said to have lots of mana, a Polynesian term for a concentrated spiritual force. In 1999 Mohi shocked and galvanized the country by singing New Zealand’s national anthem in Maori during halftime at a World Cup rugby game. Her radical patriotism (which was more meaningful and alarming than any Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”) aggravated a stress fracture in New Zealanders’ highly regarded commitment to biculturalism.
Today is a family affair. Hinewehi’s husband, George; daughter, Hineraukatauri; and grandmother, Nanny, all pile into Old Sheil
a, as we were due at their local marae an hour and a half ago.
“What’s the deeper meaning of the maraes, Hinewehi? I mean, I know they act as community centers—but they’re more than that, aren’t they?” I ask.
“First, call me Hine,” she says, the initial gesture in a long day that would become increasingly informal. “About the marae, well, we come together at the marae to celebrate life, as a mark of respect for the end of life, but also to bring us all together and acknowledge who we are and where we’ve come from, and the ancestors that have brought us here,” Hinewehi explains as we unload our gear in a parking lot adjacent to the marae, a compound of sturdy reddish wood buildings and grassy lawns.
We cannot enter the grounds until we have been ceremonially invited. All of a sudden a woman’s voice bellows out in Maori from the distance. “The women are always the first to call the visitors on,” Hine says quietly, then lets float the most beautiful notes from her mouth. And so begins an ethereal call and response. We guests go through a small “receiving line,” in which we hongi (touch noses) as a way of cleansing all the spirits, or anything bad that has gone before us. We settle into a line of folding chairs to be welcomed in Maori by the men of the marae, as tradition dictates. We are expected to stand and express our sentiments about being welcomed to the marae. Only men can perform this honor, and as a Kiwi somewhat familiar with the process, Simon stands and speaks on our behalf. “We are honored to be your guests . . .” Simon begins.
That women are forbidden by longstanding tradition to speak in certain contexts on the marae is a divisive issue. There is a shared pride in and commitment to rejuvenating the Maori traditions and cultures, but as was true in the civil rights movement in the United States, many women are not pleased about fighting the Man only to have to get her own man the coffee. As women and progressive men increase their mana-power in contemporary Maori culture, this is likely to change.
Hine tours me around the marae. She takes me into the main meeting-house, where every structural line and post of the building, or wharenui, is ornately carved with representations of ancestors, tribal history, and symbols of ancient legends. It is believed that the Guardian of Peace, Rongomatane, reigns inside the meetinghouse. Framed, crinkly black-and-white photographs of tattooed elders adorn the walls.
We feast for two hours on fried bread and kaimoana (seafood, in this case mussels) before driving back to Nanny’s house to eat more. “I’ve made pavlova. You must have some,” declares Nanny, more forcefully than one might expect from a seventy-eight-year-old in blue stretch pants and a floral top talking about a white fluffy dessert.
Nanny shows us through her own house, pausing at one of many picture walls sagging with photos, pointing with a yardstick.
“So this is the family?” I ask.
“Yes, this is the family, whakapapa.”
“Whakapapa? That’s . . . ?”
“That’s your ancestry. It is very important to the Maori people. It’s very important to know where you come from and who you are. Very important indeed. But I see Granny is crooked there. I’ll have to straighten her up,” Nanny says, whacking the side of a picture of her own grandmother with her yardstick.
“Granny’s got the moko,” I say, noting the dramatic, spiraling facial tattoo in the picture.
“Granny’s got the moko. All the old ladies in the old days had their own moko, and it was just like a coat of arms to that particular family.”
The black facial tattoos were traditionally carved into the skin with a bone rake and the ink, made from the body of a special caterpillar, was tapped into the grooves. Maori women usually only had chin or lip mokos; they were also sometimes tattooed in the pubic area. Maoris ended the tradition in the early 1900s to protect themselves from white colonists who liked to take tattooed warriors’ heads back to Europe as souvenirs. But lately, the moko is coming back into fashion as Maoris reclaim the power of their ancestral traditions. I am fascinated by how its mesmerizing spirals eclipse any natural lines on these old, creased faces. In India, I admired women committed to the (temporary) bindi as a visible symbol of their spiritual agency. But to feel so secure in your identity that you’re willing to permanently chisel it onto your face, that’s real commitment.
Chin moko
“All my pictures,” Nanny says, swooping her yardstick from the wall and around the living room. “There’s nothing by Rembrandt or somebody fancy like that. It’s all my in-laws, out-laws, my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, and my great-great-grandchild,” she says with pride, and with a curious, mischievous smile. “Did you want to know that I started very early in life? I won’t tell any more secrets.”
“They’re all on the wall,” I say.
Hine and I sit down at the kitchen table for tea while Nanny is fiddling with the pavlova.
“What’s your interpretation of mana?” I ask, setting down my mug decisively, trying to get to the essence of this Polynesian notion of concentrated soul power. It reminds me of the force said to be contained in those heads I saw in Borneo.
“Mana is a word that really . . . basically gives you a lot of prestige and a lot of strength of character,” Hine answers.
“From inside? Or is it something you get from . . .” I gesture broadly to no cosmos in particular.
“There’s lots of different ways of describing mana in Maori, like different elements of your innermost strength as well as your physical strength,” she says.
“It’s a special word that’s pretty hard to say in English exactly what it means,” adds Nanny.
“But is it tied to the spiritual?” I ask.
“Yes, spiritual strength and it comes out in what you do, what you say, or how you hold yourself or how you—”
“An aura,” says Nanny.
“An aura, yes,” says Hine, “an ‘innermost ethos’ is what they call it. For many it’s a wonderful way of saying, ‘I get my strength from way back, from my ancestors and from those that have gone before me who have set me up, and who continue to guide and look over me.’ ”
Mana, she tells me, implies prestige, power, and influence. Elders have more mana than the young. Supposedly you can see mana in great souls, people whom you respect for their inner strength and fearless inner calm.
Hearing this, it occurs to be that mana might just be the active ingredient in divadom worldwide. What is it, after all, that the Kiwi women I’m meeting share with those we spoke to in India, Cuba, and elsewhere? “Inner strength and fearless inner calm,” is a good way to put it. Maybe diva = woman with mana.
In any case, some fearless inner calm must have been at work for Hine to use New Zealand’s national passion—rugby—as a forum for declaring the rightful place of Maori cultural heritage in her country.
“What was the fallout from singing the anthem in Maori?” I ask Hine.
“Well, at first it was quite horrific, because the whole country was brought into the debate. We knew that it would create some problems because the rugby fraternity is a very staunch one, and not particularly embracing of things Maori,” she explains.
“Well, they’d sung it in English for a hundred and sixty years. Why couldn’t it be sung in Maori?!” interjects Nanny feistily. “This is our attitude,” Nanny affirms, nodding vigorously. “This is our attitude.” She punctuates her conviction with an index finger to the Formica, and thereby confirms my suspicion that there is more than one diva in the kitchen.
“A comparison would be if someone were to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Navajo or something, with no English. And probably similar to the response when Jimi Hendrix did a pretty wild guitar version of your national anthem,” Hine says. “But it’s turned around so dramatically since then that last year I was paid by the Ministry of Education to record and perform the national anthem in Maori for schools.”
In fact, shortly after Hinewehi’s brave 1999 performance, the law was changed to make Maori an official language of the anthem, thanks in part to the s
upport of Prime Minister Helen Clark, with whom we have a date in exactly four days. The PM supported Hine’s action amid a sea of other high-profile detractors.
“In the scheme of things, that change was quick,” I note, thinking of Malcolm Gladwell’s description of singular events that tip a balance—events that are like a match to an already existing pool of ideological gas. “Tipping points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action,” he wrote.
“Yes, and now I think everyone expects there to be a Maori and English version,” Hine concludes, matter-of-factly, about a cultural shift ushered in by her creative action.
Sitting around eating pavlova on a blue-speckled Formica table in rural New Zealand, it’s easy to forget that Hine is a mega-star. Her hugely popular band, Oceania, fuses traditional Maori instruments with hip-hop and reggae. Their gold album, with its Maori percussion and Western-style ambient tracks, is credited with reawakening native culture and fostering a new culturally based music renaissance among youth.
Hine’s husband, George, wheels their six-year-old daughter, Hineraukatauri, who has cerebral palsy, into the kitchen. George and Hine beam at Hineraukatauri, whose pleasure at seeing all these people in her grandmother’s kitchen eclipses her inability to control her limbs. Hine credits Hineraukatauri as her muse, though she is not saccharine about her daughter’s disability.
“This sort of challenge is a real blessing to us,” Hine says of Hineraukatauri (named for the guardian of all Maori musical instruments). “She teaches us so much every day. Her needs are very basic—breathing, thinking; all the very basic things in life that we take for granted are a struggle for her. She has such a cool attitude,” she says, brushing her curled finger across her daughter’s cheek, “that you can’t help but be inspired by that strength for life.”
She explains that although each of her songs is different, they all celebrate her daughter’s, and the Maori people’s, survival.