‘Sometimes, writing a personal essay feels like a constant argument about place,” writes Ockham-shortlisted novelist Tina Makereti in her first collection of nonfiction – essays, speeches and more academic cogitations on te ao Māori. “Place” to her includes “the place I belong, how I place myself, my place in between cultures – a constant wrangling between two sides that at its simplest is embodied by my Māori and Pākehā parentages”.
It is both a blessing and a curse that Māori writers – particularly ones like Makereti and me who could pass as Pākehā, though not to each other – are endlessly compelled to write about identity and what that means to us as writers and women. The last two essay collections I read were both by Pākehā who just got to write about quirky stuff that they were passionate about; I confess I felt jealous that they didn’t have to whakapapa at all. In fact, they barely had to introduce themselves. For Māori, and perhaps all writers of colour, who we are, our whakapapa is absolutely our ground zero.
At times, the weight of culture feels too heavy; the things we need to say over and over again. How fortunate we are to have writers like Makereti who can deftly unpick te ao Māori at the seams, running a learned eye across the warp and the weft of what it is to be Māori today, and make sense of it all.
Because of disruption and drift, belonging to a place is not without complications, as Makereti points out. “Fires can always be rekindled,” she insists. “With all the whakamā [shame] in the world you can still go home.” But where and what is home? Makereti herself has difficulty even naming a hometown within a Pākehā context because her childhood was spent with a Pākehā father who was constantly on the move. There was nobody to tell her about the Māori side of the family – this knowledge had vanished with her mother. Fortunately, Taranaki, the mountain of Te Ātiawa, her mother’s people, is unequivocally home, even if those threads of whakapapa that tie Makereti to the maunga were not always visible.
This Compulsion in Us explores Makereti as a writer and a creative writing teacher, and also as daughter, sister, mother and partner, and the very different stories that those roles have thrust upon her. At the heart of the collection, perhaps, is her writing about writing and how, for her, that connects the personal and the cultural.
“Writing is best when it’s intuitive,” she contends, preferring to “trust the words, the inner music, the story unwinding itself in the background of things”. But in an essay first published in the Journal of New Zealand Studies in 2018, Makereti frames the act of writing in a more complex way. She uses a taonga – gifted when she graduated with her doctorate – as a metaphor.
“My taonga has a single eye and two mouths. The two mouths face in opposite directions. On first seeing it I knew that this taonga represented the task of the writer: to speak with two mouths at once; to communicate between two sometimes opposing forces; to exist at the centre of the paradox. In particular, this taonga spoke to me as a Māori-Pākehā individual telling the particular stories I tell, and as a Māori person writing in English. There is a duality in this act for Māori; writing in English is already an act of translation. But there is an added complexity in the modernity of the indigenous writer. We are not performing simple translations into English of traditional ways of being or of pristine cultures ... Our cultures, like any cultures, are in a constant state of flux, so from the very first contact between Māori tribes and European settlers, our cultures transformed. What this means is that what we now think of as traditional is quite often already post-contact or post-colonisation. So my writing practice is always concerned with duality, contradiction, cultural fluidity and paradox.”
The connective tissue between the scholarly and more personal writing in The Compulsion in Us is the museums that Makereti visited as a child with her father and now continues to visit – and sometimes work with – as an adult. This writing may address cultural issues, like stolen artefacts on display in museums and the work of curatorial staff trying to restore or create connections with the lost “home”.
It may address the pain of her childhood, and her own sense of personal failure, as a kid with an alcoholic father and an absent mother, a kid who grows up not knowing how to deal with her father or how to help him when he’s dying. (What happened with Makereti’s mother is not discussed.) This saddest of stories weaves its way through The Compulsion in Us and its raw humanity gives the collection its heartbeat.
A longer version of this review will appear on nzreviewofbooks.com
