Celebrated literary giant Witi Ihimaera at his home in Herne Bay.
At 80, leading novelist Witi Ihimaera, author of Pounamu, Pounamu and The Whale Rider, returned to school to learn te reo Māori, full-time and full immersion. In his new book, Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer: I te Ao o te Reo, he chronicles that exceptionally challenging year.
In November 2023, Witi Ihimaera was before a crowd at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about to be interviewed on his 50 years in literature. He was, he told himself, at the top of the mountain as a Māori writer, an indigenous writer, a world writer.
He introduced himself with a brief mihi (speech) in te reo that he long ago memorised for such occasions. As the interviewer posed her first question, Ihimaera saw a shadow at the edge of his vision and heard the soft, measured voice of his late father, Tom: “E taku tama aroha [my darling boy], ko ēnei whakatutukitanga katoa i te reo Pākehā, nē rā? All those accomplishments in the English language, eh son?”
The words pierced his heart. “He didn’t criticise me,” says Ihimaera, recalling the moment at his home in Herne Bay, Auckland. “But I knew exactly what he meant.”
In that “illuminating, emotional” moment, Ihimaera (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki) knew what he had to do. Write a book in te reo for his dad. That would mean moving beyond memorising words written by others and learning the language from scratch. As he writes in Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer, it was time to “stop living the falsehood of representing Māori without te reo”.
Once home, Ihimaera paid $8000 to join a one-year, full-immersion crash course at Te Wānanga Takiura o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori o Aotearoa. Known as Takiura and run since 1997 by noted educators Tawhiri Williams and his wife Kaa, it’s a well-regarded private training institution in Mt Albert, Auckland, that primarily trains teachers for Māori-language schools.
In February 2024, the month he turned 80, Ihimaera jumped into the sea of te reo at Takiura. His fellow students, 160 of them, were from all ages and stages of life, from young people to retirees; a supportive whānau united by their hunger for te reo.
From 9.30am to 3pm, Monday to Friday, the students were fast-tracked into speaking te reo. English was banned. All-important oral assessments, called whakapuaki (speeches), were eight minutes by April, increasing to an hour by November. No notes.
It was tough. Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer tracks the peaks and troughs; it is a chronicle, a memoir and a record of Ihimaera’s first efforts at writing in te reo. “It is also,” he says, “a traversal of how a person of my age can go through life and at each turn of that life, can lose his language”.
To understand how a language is lost, we need to return to Ihimaera’s rural village of Waituhi, 20km northwest of Gisborne, in the 1940s. Dad Tom, mum Julia Keelan and the locals were native speakers. But by then, state education came in one language only, and wanting their kids to thrive at school, Tom and Julia spoke English to them at home.
They didn’t realise Ihimaera couldn’t speak te reo at will until the day in 1970 he married Jane Cleghorn, a Pākehā librarian, and mum of Ihimaera’s two daughters. She read her vows in English. Wanting to impress his dad, Ihimaera delivered his in te reo, reading them from an Anglican church book.
In Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer, he writes: “Instead of congratulating me on how revolutionary that act was, he said, ‘What language was that. It sounded like Mongolian and you were calling in a herd of yaks.’”
He was really surprised.
“Mum and I thought you would pick the language up.”
Pick the reo up? When he and Mum didn’t speak te reo in the house?
Loss was also rooted in trauma. When Ihimaera was six, the family moved to Gisborne. At the age of 12, while visiting Waituhi, Ihimaera was raped by a much older relative. This was first revealed in his 2014 book Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood.
Now, Ihimaera says, one of his grandfathers may have known about it; emphasis his. But mouths stayed shut. The perpetrator was not brought to justice, and his continuing presence in Waituhi was traumatising.
“I couldn’t go back to Waituhi, because I would see him all the time there,” says Ihimaera. “Another door was closed to me in terms of having that kāinga [home] to go back to, to learn.”
Ihimaera was in his 70s when he could finally acknowledge the damage wrought by the rape, and in this new book, he draws a link between writing about it in Māori Boy and going to Takiura a decade later. In Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer, he writes, ‘Isn’t it interesting that 10 years later, in 2024, I began my language recovery?’ However, he leaves the question dangling.
Asked to try and answer it, Ihimaera responds carefully, with several long pauses to formulate his thoughts. “I think, in life, you open portals at various times. When you open one portal, there’s another one that’s waiting to be opened.”
He adds, “That rape … was an attempt to destroy my mana, my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my sense of identity, my sense of dignity. So when I finally admitted it to myself … that enabled me to say, my mana wasn’t destroyed. You didn’t destroy it.”
He adds, “I reclaimed it. I had to go through that portal to be able to open the next one … I reclaimed my mana, and now, I reclaim my reo.”
He has also reclaimed his birth name, Witi Ihimaera Smiler; the book is the first of his to bear it. The surname Smiler, he says, “represented a boy I really didn’t want to think about, and what had happened to him; that trauma needed to be settled”.
Witi Ihimaera, he says, was the constructed, public self. The traumatised boy, Witi Ihimaera Smiler, “had also been a colonised person and that history, including his loss of te reo, had no place in my authorised version of myself”.
Now, he says, “using the name Witi Ihimaera Smiler is an atonement, a reconciliation with myself”.
Learning any language as an adult is hard, but if you are Māori, there’s emotional baggage as well. Anger that the forces of colonisation smothered a language that should have been our right. Despair at endless mistakes. Envy of those who pick up the language quickly. Faltering confidence. Being a competent adult who feels like an incompetent child in reo-speaking spaces is a very existential kind of torture.
There is also joy: not just in mastery, but the broader horizons that come with a better understanding of te ao Māori.
Ihimaera Smiler encounters all of these things. He also finds, to great frustration, that his 80-year-old brain struggles to retain information, and this makes the compulsory oral assessments a nightmare. But he keeps his head above water, and on graduation day, his sister Viki and youngest daughter Olivia are there to sing for him.
Takiura, says Ihimaera Smiler in the book, “has given me the competence to speak everyday Māori as well as to write in it. I will relish the spontaneous combustion of speaking this daily language. It will take longer than I think, though, to be fluent. Give me time, nē?”
It’s a little incongruous, then, that the book lists 13 criticisms of the way Takiura does things. Among them: students should be allowed to use speaking notes; women should be able to speak on the school marae; the 80% attendance requirement is unkind; some of the mātauranga (knowledge) taught is outdated.
Asked what he is trying to achieve by doing this, Ihimaera Smiler says: “Because they have also gone too far not to go further.” Here, he’s paraphrasing late Ngāti Hine leader Sir James Henare, who in 1989 famously said, ‘You have come too far, not to go further. You have done too much, not to do more.’
Asked for comment, Takiura’s head Tawhiri Williams rejects the criticisms. Takiura, he writes, is based on Māori educational practises and values, not Pākehā ones. He and Kaa have “done the hard yards; we have learnt from the ups and downs of close to 50 years of a total commitment to have what we have done, and what we are currently achieving with thousands of students over the last 29 years at Te Wānanga Takiura. I am absolutely positive what we are doing is right”.
Ihimaera Smiler says that as soon as he left the immersion environment, he started losing what he had learned: “My reo went into an abyss because of the busyness of my life; within six months, I basically lost two-thirds of it”.
Still, he perseveres. The book he wants to write for Tom is titled Waenga, which means "between"; It’s about a tribe of tūrehu, fair-skinned fairy people from Māori lore. He’s developing the story arc, “writing little bits and pieces of it in te reo”.
Time is weighing heavily. “I’m now 82, so I think I’ve got another five or so good years of creativity left,” he says. “I could put my feet up, but I have to do it.”
Kia kaha, e Witi, e. Keep swimming.
Witi Ihimaera’s tips to stay afloat in te reo Māori
Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer (AUP, RRP $45).