The Dream Swimmer, page 25
Te Ariki therefore moved Tiana, my three sisters Teria, Erina and Vanessa, Baby Pani and me to the farm. I had my own bedroom and my three sisters shared another.
As well, Grandmother decided that Dad’s sister Aunt Hiraina, Uncle Hepi, Sammy and Raina should come on to Ramaroa Station with us, moving into one of the small houses near the shearing shed. Dad and my uncles hauled all our belongings from Crawford Road on to some trucks. Dad wanted to fence the house off so that the horses and cattle wouldn’t eat the gardens. Mum wanted to buy some new curtains and extra beds. Excited, both our families settled in.
The shearing season was already upon us, so the farm soon became a small community of shearers, musterers and relatives, all knuckling down to the hot and sweaty job of harvesting the wool.
We all loved the farmhouse, which stood on a small knoll in the middle of orchard trees. It was our home until the late 1960s, when Dad shifted back to Gisborne again. A road circled the house, leading down to a gully to the shearing shed, assistant manager’s house, sheep and cattle yards, dip, cowshed and dog kennels, all spread across some three acres of flat land. Just behind the shearing shed was a dam. The only complaint I had was that the farmhouse lost the sun in the afternoons. However, at the height of summer, when the heat came down like the Hammer of God, striking hot sparks from the anvil of the land, I appreciated the wisdom of its location.
One day Teria went with Dad to a cattle sale. There she saw a man mistreating a ferocious-looking dog. It was chained to a fence and the man was beating it, calling it ‘You mongrel bitch!’ The dog was an old huntaway cross, with Australian blue and pigdog strains in her. With a determined look on her face, Teria pushed the man away and unchained the dog. The man was furious at Teria, but the dog turned on him, bristling and snarling until he backed away. Dad bought the dog from him. Mongrel Bitch, as we called her, thought she’d died and gone to heaven. From that day onward Teria and she were inseparable.
Or were supposed to be. For a whole week Mongrel Bitch defected from Teria and went around terrorising horses, cattle, sheep, other dogs, hens and ducks. At night she reverted to her pighunting ancestry and we’d hear her snarling away in the bush. At the end of the week, fully satisfied, Mongrel Bitch came back to us exhausted and bloodied after her various encounters with wild pigs. Teria hadn’t taken too kindly to Mongrel Bitch playing truant, so when the dog tried to put its head in her lap, she pushed her away. Mongrel Bitch serenaded us with mournful dirges for at least three nights before Teria softened. From that day forward Mongrel Bitch always behaved herself.
At the time, my sisters and I were so excited about the farm and about being so intimately part of the Mahana clan, we never saw that we had placed ourselves more at our mother’s mercy. We never saw how isolated the farmhouse was, five kilometres off the main highway and hidden with the shadowed valleys. It was almost as if the valleys were the paws of a sphinx, jealously guarding us from any encroachment by the outside world.
The paws, however, did not belong to the sphinx but to Tiana. When Grandmother Riripeti began to increase her demands for me, Tiana began to increase her violence too. When she saw that we were being possessed by the Mahana iwi, she pawed us back like a possessive cat.
We may have been surrounded by the love of Riripeti and the iwi, but the problem with isolation was that nobody could hear the screams in the night.
Ah yes. Erina thought she had dreamed it all, that Tiana dragged us, apoplectic with fear, into the darkest corner of the universe and left us there as punishment. Even today my sisters and I prefer to think that what happened was a dream. Who would believe us, anyway? Banishment to a dark cupboard or the blackest corner of the basement, yes. But the universe?
Of course we knew it wasn’t our mother’s fault that she was so vicious with us. It was ours, because we were always such bad children. When she punished us, we deserved it. But somewhere in those years when we were growing up, Tiana’s sport with us began to change and become more sinister, as if she was replaying her own past. Psychologists would no doubt understand this, but we didn’t. We knew only what our mother did, not the reasons why.
‘So you think you’re Mister High and Mighty.’
It was always something simple that started it. All I had asked her to do was to sign my school report. Her eyes were glittering like knives. Her feet were beginning to paddle. I tried to avert the danger.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said. ‘It can wait until Dad gets home.’
But it was too late. ‘Oh, isn’t my signature good enough?’
‘Mum –’
My mother dashed her hands across the table, sending my school books spilling on the floor.
‘Get me a pen, you damn kid. After all, we do want you to be a lawyer, don’t we.’
Then she threw a chair across the room.
I gave Teria a quick look. Teria began to shepherd our sisters from the room.
Tiana had a pen in her hand. Her eyes were blinking fast. She was spiralling down, down, down, beyond my reach. She began slashing the pen in the air.
Teria hesitated. ‘Teria, get out,’ I called.
‘So you want me to sign my name, Tamatea?’ my mother asked.
She stabbed the pen at my report, slashing crosses all over it – then as I backed away from her, slashing crosses over everything. The chairs, the walls, anything. She turned on me, slashing the pen across my face, my arms, my legs. A deep strike and blood welled like stigmata from my right palm.
‘See? You can still bleed.’
That’s when Teria came rushing back to the kitchen to protect me. With her came Erina and Vanessa.
‘So you girls want to be punished along with your brother?’
‘Leave them alone,’ I said.
That night was the first of many when Tiana put us in dog chains. She got them from the back shed, brought them into the sitting room and chained us together to teach us obedience. I think she did it, that first time, without thinking, and I can remember her laughing and laughing. But later, when she did it again, she meant it. She did it because we were bad children and needed to be punished. And it wasn’t all that bad, really, because although we were in dog chains, at least we were together. And, oh yes, we became obedient. For a year, whenever she said, ‘Come, children,’ we came. Whenever she said, ‘Sit,’ we sat.
I know now, but I didn’t know it then, that my sisters were the innocent victims of Tiana’s anger. A year later, I began to fight Tiana back. I grew taller, stronger. When Te Ariki was around I was able to resist her and force her to back off. One night, when he wasn’t there and she was hunting me, I was able to wrestle the knife from her. On another, when she was using the bullwhip, I caught the lash in mid-stroke and pulled.
‘So,’ Tiana said.
She changed the rules. To bring me back under her control she began to threaten my sisters. She knew she had me trapped. I had nowhere to turn. Would Te Ariki believe me? Grandmother Riripeti? And if they did, would that release us from our mother? No.
Oh, my sister Erina, you thought it was all a dream. You thought we had all been taken to Te Kore. The truth is it was just you, Teria and Vanessa. One crazed, vicious night I managed to turn the tables on our mother. I think it was a shock for both of us. I tore the dog chain from around my neck and threw it at her.
‘Never again, Tiana.’
Enraged beyond endurance, I began to hunt her, pursuing her from room to room, fending off her knife thrusts, punching her whenever I got in close enough. I was enjoying it so much, Erina – God, the power I felt. Paying her back for those years of abuse. For not letting me be brought up by Riripeti. For all those scars on our backs. Whenever she tried to escape I would stop her feet from paddling, crushing them in my hands. Whenever she tried to dive into her sea of dreams I would pull her back. She had forgotten I had grown. She thought I was still a young boy. She soon realised, Erina, I was a young boy no longer.
I took the knife from her.
With a howl, I slashed at her face.
A spurt of blood arched into the air, and she cried out.
With a hiss, I slashed at her breasts.
You and Teria tried to stop me, didn’t you, Erina? But I was beyond being stopped.
With a moan, I turned Tiana around and slashed through her clothes, the tip spinning red blood across her shoulders.
Our mother fell. And you, foolish sisters, went into her arms, protecting her from me. She grabbed you all in a tight embrace.
As Tiana had done to me many times, I placed the tip of the knife above her heart.
‘Don’t ever try to punish me again,’ I said. ‘Next time I will aim for the heart, cut it out and eat it.’
I thought it was all over, but it wasn’t. I could not see our mother’s feet paddling. I was not aware that already she was approaching the cliff of her dreams.
Our mother lifted her face to the light. She looked to Mount Hikurangi.
There, and mark.
‘You think you’re so smart, Tamatea,’ Tiana said.
She took me by surprise. With a swift movement she dived.
And this time, she took my sisters with her.
(I personally don’t have any difficulty, the psychologist said, in believing that your mother could swim in her dreams. Somehow or other, she was able to send her ‘second self on a journey, physically tangible to you and all those connected with her.
Obviously, your mother’s second self was highly developed. At moments of great psychic stress, of trauma, she could send her second self to warn you of some impending danger. This was the loving Tiana and, as happened at Venice, this love could create the ambience within which she could actively participate in the events to hand. She didn’t come just to warn but also to save you.
The angry, vindictive Tiana is another matter. Perhaps this was a different power. Whatever the case, again she could create the circumstance that you describe. I find it almost impossible to comprehend the power to be able to draw your sisters, in actuality, into her world of the second self – draw them from this world into that world. To be so psychically involved in your life, she must have loved you so much. Or hated you.)
She rendered me powerless.
She took my sisters, screaming, into a blood-red world of dreams. She took Vanessa in her mouth, as a lioness does her cub, and dragged Teria and Erina in both hands through a journey terrifying to them, because it was beyond the bounds of their comprehension. She took them down through the black hole of Te Kore, The Void, and left them huddling, catatonic, in its darkest corner.
Then she returned to me.
‘Do you want your sisters back?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘Come, Tamatea,’ she said.
I came.
‘Sit,’ she said.
I sat.
Warrior of Judah
Twenty-four
Ohime.
Di guerra fremere l’atroce grido io sento, per l’infelice patria, per me, per voi pavento … Alas, I hear the dreadful cry of war raging. For my unhappy country and for myself, for you, I fear.
‘Events don’t just stop and start,’ Sylvia had said in Paris. ‘Sometimes we come into a story in the middle without knowing its beginning or its real ending.’
Real ending? There is no ending to the fight against Pharaoh, no ending to the millennial dream. Even before Te Kooti there were others. There were also others who came after him, among them Rua Kenana who called himself Te Kooti’s son, and Riripeti in whose veins flowed the blood of both Te Kooti and Wi Pere Halbert. And while this story has to do with the Beloved of Artemis, there was another who arose, twinned with him, among another iwi.
His name was Chris Campbell but he called himself Kara. He arose during the 1970s, the great years of Maori protest, in the lands of the Ngati Porou. His hybrid sect incorporated Ringatu with the Rastafarian movement.
Kara said that theirs was a Holy War. It was another revolt of the slaves. They believed that Jah was coming.
They thought Raina was Mary, the mother of God.
Nobody who ever met Kara, Chris Campbell, during his years of triumph forgot him. It was not just a matter of his striking looks, his eyes full of dreams, and face framed by dreads. It was also a matter of his voice and his manner of speaking, which was soft but determined. He spoke in parables, quoting the Bible, and had the power to win people unto him. In America he could have been an itinerant black preacher, wooing the people to him with love and the spirit.
Kara was regarded as a man of mana and wisdom. He did not come into his calling as Rastafarian leader until his mid-twenties. He was educated at Gisborne Boys’ High School. He was a gifted boxer. When he finished school he worked in his father’s shearing gang. Then, in the late seventies, he and his equally charismatic brother, Joe, became members of the Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. He became involved in large-scale cannabis growing.
Like many prophets, Kara was jailed. During his period in jail and shortly afterward, he became converted to a new vision. From Black Power antecedents he created the East Coast Rastafarians.
At first he preached peace with other Rasta brothers. Then he heard the voice of Jah.
He followed that voice.
He struggled with two other brothers for control of the East Coast Rastafarians. Once he had obtained the leadership, he ascended unto his glory.
‘Kororia ki to Ingoa tapu.’
And Jamaica, at the turn of the century, was the place where the Rastafarian religion was born. There, where Blacks had been dominated by White plantation owners and subdued by the chain and the whip, a prophet came among the people. His name was Marcus Garvey and he said unto the Black nation, ‘Look to Africa when a Black king shall be crowned for the day of deliverance is near.’
And, lo, the prophecy came to pass when, in November 1930, Ras Tafari, Prince Regent of Ethiopia, ascended unto the throne. And at his coronation he took upon himself the name Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the all-conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Divinity was his. He was the Living God, the Messiah, two hundred and twenty-fifth King in direct descent from King Solomon and his consort the Queen of Sheba.
Thus arose the followers of Rasta who in 1956, like the followers of Rua Kenana had done, assembled at the wharves of Kingston to await the ships from Ras Tafari that would take them from bondage into the holy land of Ethiopia.
Aue, the ships never came.
Nevertheless, the Rastafarians multiplied and, when Jamaicans moved out into the world, Rasta went with them. To London, to the streets of Birmingham, into the White world. Wherever the Rastafarians went, so did the colours red, yellow and green, the colours of Ethiopia. They grew their hair as dreadlocks, wore Ethiopian dress, used prayer sticks, adopted the Jamaican patois and way of walking. They smoked ganja, and they introduced reggae into the world.
And lo, it was through reggae that the Rasta religion flew to all corners of the world. The songs sang of the pain of the Black man, of liberation from Babylon, the White man’s world, and of return to Zion. And many Babylonians were afraid of the Rastaman, but no matter how hard they tried to put him down, he could not be beaten.
And it came to pass that Rastafarian religion came to Aotearoa when cult heroes Bob Marley and the Wailers sang at Western Springs Stadium in 1979. Bob Marley sang cool, sang sweet, the reggae songs of protest, dispossession and loss. The audience was a red, yellow and green rainbow. They swayed in slow motion like sleepwalkers, somnambulists, lost in some dream induced by nostalgia and ganja.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.
The black Lion of Judah pounced from the huge Rasta flag. Right in the front there was a second flag, a Black Power banner. Arms were raised in the sign of protest, the clenched fist.
Thus it was that throughout Aotearoa many young dispossessed Maori identified with the Rastafarian cause. But it was in the lands of the Ngati Porou that the Rastafarian dream melded with the Maori dream of liberation.
There is a land far away, where there is no night, only day.
‘So you’ve heard about Kara, have you?’ my friend from the Gisborne Museum and Art Gallery, John Robertson, asked. ‘You’ve been overseas so long, no wonder you’re not aware of what’s been happening. You’re not the only one. For some reason the news media and newspapers in New Zealand did not pick the story up either. Look through the newspapers of the main centres – nothing. It’s as if the story never happened. Wasn’t Chris related to your mother? They looked so alike. He could have been her son. Your brother.
‘What is remarkable,’ John continued, ‘is that Kara and the East Coast Rastafarians came out of the same condition, the same circumstances, as Te Kooti and Rua Kenana. Social depression. Demoralisation. All the land gone. And the Pakeha was victor. More interesting in Kara’s case was that his brand of politics melded Maori grievances and the Rastafarian dream of liberation with Black Power tactics and marijuana culture. All in all, a potent mixture.’
‘Glory be to Thy holy name.’
By the time Ngati Porou realised how strong a force Kara and the Rastafar-ians were, it was too late.
The Rastafarians took over empty houses on anybody’s land. Their infiltration was subtle, and came without warning. At first there were only one or two on the streets of Ruatoria and they looked no different from Black Power. Then they began to sport their own iconography and you could not mistake them. On their bodies they tattooed images of Armageddon, swords, sacred sayings, flames that cleansed as well as destroyed, crosses and other symbols drawn from the teachings of Te Kooti and Haile Selassie. Their services combined Maori chant with negritude. They were said to smoke dope, which they called the sacred weed.
