Hiwa, page 2
The age-old obstacles for Māori writers remain, chief among them the need to make a living in a small market that cannot support literary careers. But openings for Māori to develop as writers and to publish our work continue to grow, along with our confidence and our skills.
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The initial aim of this anthology was to publish work by up to twenty-five contemporary Māori fiction writers. The quality of work available persuaded the publisher to stretch a little, so included here are stories by twenty-seven writers, including four in te reo Māori. All the writers are alive and actively writing and publishing. Three live outside New Zealand, and several more have spent extended periods overseas.
Thirteen of the stories in this anthology have never been published before. I was happy to include previously published work, as some of these stories have not been easily accessed or widely read, and the stories here may lead more readers to the collections, anthologies or journals in which they first appeared. Anthologies restricted to new work often exclude writers who don’t have time to produce something by the deadline, or feature lesser works by those writers because that’s the only unpublished fiction they can supply.
As with A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (2021), which I co-edited with Alison Wong, my kaupapa as an editor was excellence and diversity: this included iwi and location; and a mix of emerging and established writers. I also sought diversity in style, subject, setting and point of view. The contrast between the first and last stories of the anthology – one in the oral tradition by Shelley Burne-Field and one more experimental in form by Nick Twemlow – suggests the range of settings, storytelling modes and stylistic approaches. The shortest stories are three pieces of flash fiction by Jack Remiel Cottrell; the longest is a 10,000-word story from Anthony Lapwood’s recent collection.
To find potential writers, I read anthologies and short story collections stretching back over the past two decades. As noted, the reading process included a widely publicised open call in both English and te reo, which resulted in over a hundred story submissions. The vast majority of the open-call submissions were in English, but two of the te reo writers who submitted were selected for inclusion by Darryn Joseph, the te reo consulting editor. It’s disappointing that we must echo the alarm expressed in 1992, in the introduction to the first volume of Te Ao Mārama, that original creative writing in te reo for adults remains too scant, and the ‘struggle for a bilingual literature’ continues.11
Ten of the English-language submissions were selected from writers who answered the open call. Some of the more established writers, solicited directly, updated and revised stories that had appeared elsewhere, eager for those stories to reach more readers; some had to be coaxed into submitting at all. Some writers I hoped would send a story did not; some writers I admire declared a preference for novels or creative nonfiction. Many good writers, including established authors, submitted work that did not make it into the final selection. The story itself was the most important thing.
Terms like the Māori Renaissance and the title of Te Ao Hou – the new world – emphasise beginnings or fresh starts. This anthology does not pretend to announce a new wave. Two of the writers included here, Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera, were writing and publishing and winning awards before some of the book’s other writers were born. The seas that surround us – wherever we live – produce waves every day; some create a deluge and some never reach the shore. And to ‘think with waves,’ writes Sujit Sundaram, ‘is to think with the push-and-pull dynamic of globalisation’.12 The writers of Hiwa are part of a world in inexorable motion.
Grace and Ihimaera have served as mentors, editors, teachers and collaborators, as well as ground breakers: subsequent generations of Māori writers, including many of us featured in this anthology, have benefitted from their generosity and vision, as well as the precedents set by their publishing success. Like the proverbial rising tide, they have lifted us all, as they were lifted in their time by the Māori writers of the 1950s and 1960s publishing in Te Ao Hou.
At the time of writing, Grace is in her mid-eighties; Ihimaera turns eighty next year. But their achievements as story writers are not confined to the past. Their creative practice continues: Grace is currently working on a new collection. In this kaleidoscopic picture of contemporary short fiction by Māori writers, they remain vivid and distinctive. Like most artists, they continue to explore and expand. Here they are featured alongside other established fiction writers, as well as writers publishing fiction in print form for the first time, or writers with a scattering of publications, or writers who have just published a debut collection.
These emerging writers are not necessarily young; many have other jobs and careers. It is never too late to write and publish fiction, although for some of the other ground breakers of Māori writing, like J. C. Sturm and Arapera Blank, making a living (and supporting their families) took precedence over writing. ‘Reading Te Ao Hou in the twenty-first century,’ writes scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville, ‘one has a sense of excitement but also of loss and missed opportunities.’13
So rather than the new, this anthology celebrates the season in which we are all writing – yet another time of growth for Māori writers and writing – in the hope that each year will be even more fruitful. The title is a reference to Hiwai-te-rangi, the ninth and final star in the Matariki cluster. In Matariki: The Star of the Year (2017), Rangi Matamua describes Hiwa’s name as
connected to the promise of a prosperous season. The word ‘hiwa’ means ‘vigorous of growth’, and it is to Hiwa that Māori would send their dreams and desires for the year in the hope that they would be realised.14
Hiwa and the star Pōhutukawa are ‘the most sacred of the group,’ Matamua writes, citing a manuscript about Māori star lore begun in the late nineteenth century by Te Kōkau, and completed by his son Timi Rāwiri in the 1930s.
One star, Pōhutukawa, ‘is connected to the dead’ and the other, Hiwa, ‘deals with the deepest desires of the heart’.15 Matamua quotes a karakia to Hiwa:
Takataka te kāhui o te rangi
Koia a pou tō putanga ki te whai ao
Ki te ao mārama.
Let the stars fall from the sky [my wishes]
And be realised in this world
The world of light.16
This anthology follows its predecessors by placing a stake in the ground. Here it marks the vigorous growth of story-writing by Māori writers in the twenty-first century, each of us building on centuries of precedent, both spoken and written. It also sends a wish soaring high into the night: for more writers to give the short story serious consideration, and for more readers to explore its artful pleasures and possibilities. More stories, more readers, more stars falling from the sky and taking shape in a world that is constantly re-written and re-imagined.
Paula Morris
Tāmaki Makaurau, 2023
NOTES
1Peter Stone, ‘Gabriel García Márquez: The Art of Fiction No. 69’, Paris Review, Issue 82, Winter 1981, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fiction-no-69-gabriel-garcia-marquez
2J. C. Sturm, ‘For All the Saints’, Te Ao Hou, December 1955, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/TAH195512.2.16
3Ben Marcus (ed.), The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, New York, Anchor, 2004, p. xv.
4Patricia Grace, From the Centre: A Writer’s Life, Auckland, Penguin, 2021, p. 201.
5Marcus, p. xiii.
6Margaret Orbell, Contemporary Māori Writing, Wellington, Reed, 1970, p. 7.
7Witi Ihimaera and D. S. Long (eds), Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Māori Writing, Auckland, Heinemann, 1982, p. 5.
8Ihimaera and Long, p. 6.
9Brannavan Gnanalingam, ‘By Way of Circularities: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera’, Sydney Review of Books, November 4, 2019, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/interview/interview-witi-ihimaera/
10Broken Journey: The Art and Life of J. C. Sturm, documentary film, directed by Tim Rose, Kapiti Productions, Māori Television, 2007, https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/broken-journey-life-and-art-of-jc-sturm-2007
11Witi Ihimaera, D. S. Long, Irihapeti Ramsden and Haare Williams, ‘Kaupapa’, in Witi Ihimaera (ed.), Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing Volume 1: Te Whakahuatanga o te Ao: Reflections of Reality, Auckland, Reed Books, 1992, p. 18.
12Sujit Sundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire, London, HarperCollins, 2020, p. 5.
13Alice Te Punga Somerville, ‘Te Ao Hou: Te Pataka’, in Mark Williams (ed.), A History of NZ Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 182–94.
14Rangi Matamua, Matariki: The Star of the Year, Wellington, Huia, 2017, p. 33.
15Ibid, p. 35.
16Ibid, p. 62.
Shelley Burne-Field
SĀMOA, NGĀTI MUTUNGA, NGĀTI RĀRUA
Shelley Burne-Field (Sāmoa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Rārua) is from Te Mataua-Māui (Hawke’s Bay). A graduate of the University of Auckland’s Master of Creative Writing and the Te Papa Tupu mentoring programme, Burne-Field is the author of articles, personal essays and fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Huia Short Stories 14 (2021); Strong Words #2: The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition (2021); The Best of E-Tangata II (2022), and First Peoples: Shared Stories (2022). Her fiction has also been broadcast on Radio New Zealand.
Burne-Field’s story ‘Speaking in Tongues’ was the only New Zealand finalist in the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Another work of short fiction, ‘Pinching out Dahlias’ (2021) – with its deluded Pākehā narrator who believes that ‘Māori children have different values’ – is the most-read short story ever published on the Newsroom site.
The form of ‘The Bargain and the Pūtōrino’ employs the oral tradition as a literary device: a grandmother telling a story to her mokopuna, including a story-within-a-story of her mother’s accident at the meat works. The self-sufficient rural life that Whina, the first-person narrator, evokes suggests the world of an early Patricia Grace or Witi Ihimaera story, as do the supernatural dimensions – visionary dreams; a belief in atua and kēhua; the discovery of a carved pūtōrino that grants wishes but demands a price. But Burne-Field tempers the idyll with contemporary complexity: Whina’s mother must risk injury on the factory floor to support the family. Whina – who has interned at the Natural History Museum in New York – understands the tensions between Western science and mātauranga Māori, and chooses to embrace the mystery of belief.
The story also reflects Burne-Field’s passion for social justice and workers’ rights. Some of her own whānau have worked in forestry and the local meat works, industries where, she points out, Māori are over-represented. ‘Forestry has the worst health and safety and death record in Aotearoa,’ she says. ‘Accidents are all too common. I wanted to highlight the fear that whānau carry on their shoulders and in their wairua, and the financial constraints of relying on unsafe work just to survive.’
The Bargain and the Pūtōrino
So, mokopuna nui, you want me to tell you a story? You’ve picked all the yellow beans and think you’ve earned some time to play? Which story, eh? The bargain and the pūtōrino? Ah! And the bit about me and your tupuna tāne drowning? I thought I related all this to you when you were five? Kāo, you say? Alright. Before I start … you probably didn’t realise you could make a deal with a mighty atua of the ocean, eh? Don’t argue with me, you can!
When you’re twelve years old like I was, and half of your māmā’s hand is ripped off on the night shift – no not your māmā’s hand, my māmā’s hand, your great-kuia – when you’re twelve years old like I was, you’d do anything to save your whānau from an uneasy life? Eh? Now you sit on your ottoman and listen, and I’ll lie in my bed and tell.
When I was a pēpi, even before Māmā had half of her hand torn off, I’d grown anxious about life. Everything seemed uneasy. Never calm. As a tamaiti, each night I dreamed about our tapu rock. In the dream, I used my shoulders to push the rock to the top of our maunga, only to have it slide down again and again. My pāpā, your tupuna tāne, was my saviour during worrying times.
‘Calm will come, my Whina,’ he would say. ‘Breathe.’
Pāpā was the type who kept us fed and warm. He swam after penguins and cut fishing line from their necks. He was the type who rubbed my māmā’s back and elbows after a hard day at mahi. When the world overwhelmed me, Pāpā would drive me out to the rock pools where my restlessness about the absurd would fizzle away in the wash of the sea.
The morning after the accident, I was skipping across the kitchen. Pāpā sat at one end of the table while Māmā sat at the other end, fussing with feijoa jam, bread, butter and knives.
‘Last night,’ he told me, ‘three fingers and half of Māmā’s hand was cut off.’
Her leftover index finger and thumb were taped up with crinkled bandages that bloomed crimson at the place where the rest should’ve been. I inched over to Pāpā’s chair and leaned against his shoulder.
‘It’s in the freezer.’
Now, like any kōtiro who had seen a monster in the night, I might have screamed our rickety house down right then and there, but instead I began to twirl the end of Pāpā’s ponytail around my twelve-year-old fingers. It was something I’d done since I was little. The curl of his hair was smooth and smelled like green apple shampoo. Pāpā held my other hand to his heart while Māmā told her story, her words flicking out like talk bubbles.
At exactly thirty-three minutes to midnight, Māmā thought she’d dropped a piece of meat – a strip of mutton meant for the mincer. But the fleshy thing on the factory floor looked more familiar than an offcut. Māmā recognised the black ink tattoo in the folds of skin that had bunched up over her third finger – her wedding ring tā moko. She got such a fright that she booted her own severed fingers across the concrete where they skidded and thudded against a trolley wheel. She spent the next five hours in emergency surgery, closing up the wound, then insisted on coming home as soon as the anaesthetic wore off.
‘No good taking up a bed,’ Māmā said, matter-of-fact. My memories are a bit blurry, moko, but I’m sure she sideways looked into the corner of the kitchen where the freezer sat like an ice coffin. Its metal edges were expanded with rust and the sides wore pockmarks and mud where the cat and dog rubbed past. Her fingers and flesh lay curled up inside that freezer. One day we would put them in Māmā’s coffin.
I sat next to Pāpā in our warm kitchen, feeling sick and sad, wondering if the accident would squeeze our whānau as tight as a boa constrictor. Imagine it! Māmā had lost most of her hand – and I was worried about how we would buy our next groceries! Horrible. Āe, moko, we were poor. Very poor. I tried to check Pāpā’s eyes for panic but his gaze was fixed on the stack of toast. Māmā must’ve seen me gasp, because she thrust out the end of her arm.
‘Here, love,’ she said. ‘It’s not that bad. I can still do stuff.’
She had beautiful lips, did our kui, and those bee-stung lips smiled as if she were a runway model. She kept buttering and buttering, and held down the corner of each piece of toast with her elbow. ‘I’ll be back at mahi soon, Whina. We’re okay.’
‘I don’t want you to die, Mum,’ I whispered.
‘We’ll be all right,’ she said.
Your Aunty Ereni and Uncle Beau were only five and six years old, and they surely were the clowns of the house. That morning, they ran downstairs and began to eat their toast before their bums even hit the chairs. They were clueless, and babbled about buying Lucky Books and microscopes as Māmā moved from the table to the sink, then from the fridge to the stove, stirring porridge, popping the toaster, carrying jars with her one good arm and a tea towel over her wounded hand. I’ll never forget watching her forefinger and thumb pinch together in the empty air. Māmā kept looking over her shoulder to catch any trickster sneaking up on her. She was like that. Studious. No kēhua would ever be quick enough to fool her into becoming lazy or useless.
The next day we went to the beach. Pāpā gave Māmā some space and piled us kids into the ute. The deck was packed with goggles and snorkels and sacks. My old sheep slept in the sky. What I mean was that on grey days, the sky looked matted with clouds. I imagined it was a shaggy old ewe tipped on its side. Its curly coat covered Ranginui and kept the sun from making a new day, or burning more freckles onto my cheeks.
Along the dark sand, with the smell of mussel juice in the air, we walked towards the rocks – Ereni, Beau and me. Your Aunty Ereni’s hair crackled like a gorse bush and she puffed it out into a bigger and bigger afro. Uncle Beau was so handsome, even then, like a cute cartoon boy with a button nose and long shorts down to his shins. Soon they ran off with a squeal to kick the foam, while I found my feet at the edge of the rock pool. Little flecks of seaweed and coloured sand swirled with the tide … and then I saw it. A pūtōrino: a flute. I’d learned about them at kura. If you blew into one and played a melody, then dreamed a song in your heart, the pūtōrino could make wishes come true. But there was one tricky thing, moko: wishes from a pūtōrino always come at a price.
‘Kia ora! Tangaroa! Kia ora! E hoa!’
I remember calling out to the sea, like only a tamaiti with the cool wind in her hair and wet sand between her toes would. ‘Harikoa katoa ana au!’ I’d been sent a message of hope.
The pūtōrino was made from two bent pieces of hollow wood bound at the ends with flax strips. Carvings swirled over finger holes that were worn and smooth. It was made for my lips, and I held it under the water and blew as hard as I could. A tiny crab burst out with a blast of sand. I blew into it again and heard a faraway whistle. A beautiful melody.
