Book review: The long-awaited debut from one of the country’s best and most singular writers has arrived, like a voice from the wilderness. This is not an unwarranted embellishment. In her previously published essays, Marshall proved a diviner, to foretell and to judge with eerie and disarming veracity – and with arch wit – at times a damning portent and self-incrimination.
Whaea Blue is broadly a memoir, comprising 37 essays that swerve into fable, myth and whakapapa ‒ stories that bend historical account, the familiar world and personal archive into lucid dream. In the book, Marshall reflects upon her life via the discursive histories, landscapes and people through whom she has been made, remade and undone.
The book resists chronological sequencing, instead unfurling and lacing discontinuous timelines. It ranges from a recent and monstrous relationship to her youth (raised by a feminist single mother in Wellington), her time as an aged-care worker in a dementia unit, her childhood on the marae and in the Mormon church and her years in Tairāwhiti on the lonely coast, raising her son and reading everything and anything she could get her hands on while her mind churned and turned on itself.
She cuts across the islands in a series of inherited vehicles she can’t quite take care of, and follows the movements of her life as it unspools before her and the gaze of her ancestors across the coasts and centuries. On the way, she collects and discards lovers and a kehua, or ghost, which changes form and reveals itself in birds, faces, shadows, shivers down the nape of her neck and remote, silent vistas of empty ocean and impenetrable forest.
Guided by omens and phantom signs that appear against her will, Marshall accepts her fate as damaged oracle and is haunted by blue, by spirits that appear and disappear, and by a desire for retribution and to avenge what is rightfully hers. Unambiguous and shatteringly precise on the history of colonisation, and the catastrophic results of such failed institutions as Oranga Tamariki, Marshall is both journalist and sage.
For the reader she is a Complex Female Character. With her searing self-critique, her honesty, acid tongue and fury, Marshall burns across the land with a desire for spiritual rest that comes only when justice is meted out, or when one’s life and what one must do is accepted.
An ensemble cast shares the stage. There are the dead with whom she is in dialogue as she is the living, and who act as her guides and forewarn her future; her wāhine, who bring a humming lightness and joy, a mutual recognition and understanding; her kuia, with whom she shares her face; and the damaged men towards whom she is drawn. Through these men we follow Marshall’s warring impulses and desires between security and the need to roam.
There is her father, an eccentric wit who dies much too young, and Roman, who Marshall describes as co-creator of the book for his tales and his “long eye” on her. There are her beloved grandfathers, Mugwi and Jim, her Italian tīpuna Nicola Sciascai and his old lighthouse on the remote island of Waipawa.
There is Ans Westra, with whom she feels an uneasy kinship and through whom she examines the fraught nature of one’s own agency. There is her ancestor Tūtepourangi Te Rangatira, with his daughter Hinekawa, who marries a Scottish seaman. Researching for an as-yet unpublished historical novel, Marshall shapes a vivid and lasting portrait of the Musket Wars, Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha and the devastating accounts therein.
The best writers of nonfiction tend to have an ear for poetry and while Marshall is foremost a poet in sensibility, she seals her status as an uncommon writer across essay, memoir, story and reportage. Marshall is more alert to the emotional tenor of her subjects. This is not to dispute her knowledge nor the surprising ways in which these truths are revealed.
Marshall is deft in interrogating accepted truths and the canyons of herself, committed to complexity and never accepting of the easy answer in writing. She doesn’t mask the truth in favour of a flattering narrative. Rare, too, is the writer who pays such close mind to the sound of a sentence and its shape on the page. She writes with demonic velocity, crafting dazzling scenes that digress through sentences careering across the page.
Whaea Blue is an extraordinary achievement. It can be argued that one does not know this country without visiting the East Coast, but likewise one doesn’t know the very best of contemporary writing in this country without Talia Marshall.
