In All That We Know, her first adult novel, Shilo Kino (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maniapoto), the award-winning writer of young adult novel The Pōrangi Boy, casts a youthful eye over the fraught business of being a Māori activist in contemporary Aotearoa.
Māreikura Pohe had her first taste of going viral when she called out her school for not condemning a fellow student for going black face, which was filmed and posted online, making her an instant cause célèbre. Unfortunately, taking a stand had backfired completely, as the only thing that happened was Māreikura, who was about to be named deputy head girl, was expelled and the university scholarship and place in pre-law that had been hers for the taking had vanished. There might have been a lesson in that.
The novel picks up the story after this event on the eve of Māreikura starting a prestigious full-time, full-immersion te reo Māori course, which quickly activates the activist within. But saving your culture literally one word at a time is full of pitfalls, as Māreikura, who is full of good intentions, discovers.
Of course, her cause isn’t helped by the fact that Māreikura only sees things in black and white and as absolutes – because she’s young, because she’s human, because she’s learning.
Her activism centres on her own “inter-generational trauma” and the mantra that the Pākehā beat the reo Māori out of Māori. The centering of Māreikura’s and, to a lesser extent, her friends’ rhetoric on their own pain, as they loll about multimillion-dollar villas and expensive apartments in Auckland’s inner-city suburbs, is brilliantly revelatory of the current wave of activism and how it’s shaped by social media.
The time of 507 days of occupation at Bastion Point as a form of protest is something of a distant history. One does podcasts these days. One talks about their own pain. One runs around negating everyone else’s experience except their own. And one sometimes misses the big picture, as proves to be the case with Māreikura.
She and her friend Jordana – who Māreikura judges constantly for her drinking – start a te reo activism podcast that they call Wahine Chat. Yes, Chat! Te reo has been beaten out of the culture, but when Māreikura finally goes up north to her home marae she discovers that pretty much everyone has a conversational level of proficiency and there’s this brief moment, no more than a sentence, when she ponders that perhaps urban drift has been a contributing factor in erosion of the language.
But then she concludes that urban drift was forced upon Māori, which simply isn’t true. Yes, the loss of tribal land and therefore livelihood was a factor, but just as the current generation of young Māori respond to the world they live in, so, too, did young Māori post-World War II, and they were looking for something different. Something more exciting than the rural communities and small towns that were their tūrangawaewae.
But Māreikura hasn’t got to that level of understanding about the nuances of history yet. She’s at the stage where she gets upset and decides it’s a colonist plot when the Pākehā students in her class do better than she does. Still, it’s a hard road getting everything right. It’s a process. A journey.
Kino manages to mostly keep the didactic voice of the novel contained within her characters, though it does sometime spill out over the edges of this frame. But satire, when it’s this close to the the bone, isn’t the easiest thing to pull off.
Fortunately, Kino provides a nice balance to Māreikura’s relentlessness, with a cast of utterly delightful, authentic and extremely well-written secondary characters whose take on things te ao Māori is less vehement. The other students in Māreikura’s intake at the kura are well observed, as is the class dynamic, and apart from wanting more, these parts of the novel are impossible to fault.
Glennis, Māreikura’s grandmother, Lois her great aunt, and Grandma Simpson, another older woman who’s the grandmother of one of the Pākehā students, are absolute standouts and bring some much-needed kuia energy to All That We Know.
The writing is consistently tight and a joy to read as it rattles along at pace with frequent laugh-out-loud moments, mainly, in my instance, at the intense self-involvement of the various young characters. It did make me want to go and plant a flag on the local billionaire’s private golf course, though.
