At 80, Witi Ihimaera threw himself in the deep end: a year-long commitment to a full-time Māori language immersion class.
It was May 2024, and Witi Ihimaera was meant to be at a noho marae in Port Waikato, flexing his growing vocabulary in kōrerorero with his fellow students; maybe even risking a moe on the wharenui floor overnight, snorers allowing.
Instead, the eminent writer was 18,000km away, zipping between appearances in Paris for the launch of his sixth book translated into French, then over to Saint-Malo for an international indigenous peoples’ conference. There was a flying visit to Tahiti in there somewhere, too.
But kei te pai. Ihimaera might have missed a noho and a bit of akomanga (class) time during his fortnight away, but he took his homework with him. Everywhere he travelled, he’d ask people to hold up his whakapuaki workbook (which he nicknamed “Puaki”). “I sent back these wonderful photos of Puaki being held by all these French people who came to my events. So I never really left the class, and the class never really left me.”
Ihimaera relayed this to me and my podcast co-producer Eugene Bingham a few days after his return to Aotearoa. We were hovering with our microphones and recorders in the corridor of Te Wānanga Takiura o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori o Aotearoa, a language school in Ōwairaka Mt Albert in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
We had just finished recording another fly-on-the-wall session from inside the language course that, book tours permitting, Ihimaera would attend 9am to 3pm, Monday to Friday, February to November: a course called “Rumaki Reo”. This is a language immersion course where lessons are conducted solely in te reo Māori, without using any explanatory English.
It sounds great in theory – after all, that’s how children learn their first language. But check the online dictionary Te Aka and you’ll notice that “rumaki” can also translate as “to drown” or “to disappear below the surface”. That makes perfect sense, because sometimes when you’re trying to learn a new language without a more familiar language to cling to, it can certainly feel like drowning.
Fly on the wall
In late 2023, Bingham and I heard that Ihimaera was planning to take Takiura’s Rumaki Reo course the following year. We both thought it might be a fascinating journey to document. I called Ihimaera and asked if he’d be willing to be the subject of a fly-on-the-wall podcast documentary following this year-long haerenga reo (language journey). He said yes.
So from February to November last year, we tailed Ihimaera with mics in hand, collecting the raw material for what would become a five-part podcast called Witi Underwater. We had the tape rolling as he struggled to keep his head above water in the rumaki environment; as he and fellow Takiura tauira (students) travelled to the annual Koroneihana coronation celebrations at Tūrangawaewae marae in Ngāruawāhia, and as he and a fellow tauira spent time at a central Auckland kōhanga reo, where a dramatically younger cohort of learners were painlessly soaking up their tūpuna reo (ancestors’ language).
One of the fundamental questions we were asking in the podcast was, “Why is Ihimaera doing this course?” There were many answers to that through the year, some of them surprising.
I’m particularly fond, though, of the one Ihimaera gave us that day in the Takiura corridor, just after telling us about his book tour and the French people holding Puaki aloft. From a classroom further along the corridor, we could hear the strains of another rumaki class practising Kōhine Pōnika’s famous waiata, Aku Mahi.
Ihimaera stopped on the spot and stood listening, in a kind of trance. He might even have shut his eyes briefly. Then he said: “He rongoā. Ka haere au i te mōrena, kei te oho ake ahau ki Herne Bay ki roto o te whairawa Pākehā, ki te hīkoi ahau ki tēnei whare wānanga, ki te karakia. Mīharo.” Which loosely means, “That music is medicine. Each morning I wake up in Herne Bay among the rich Pākehā, but then I come to this place of learning, with its karakia. It’s wonderful.”
A fussy kaiako (teacher) might notice some grammatical slips in there, but the fact that Ihimaera can come out with a sentence like that mid-corridor changes the emphasis of that basic question. It becomes: Why is he, specifically, doing this course?
After all, this is the man widely credited as being New Zealand’s first published Māori fiction author; someone who has spent a lifetime writing widely read stories of Māori life: from the rural vignettes of the first short-story collection Pounamu Pounamu (1972) to the grittier accounts of rural life in The New Net Goes Fishing (1977); from a historical saga like The Parihaka Woman (2011) to a study of the intersection of gay and Māori worlds in The Uncle’s Story (2000).
With The Whale Rider (1987), Ihimaera repurposed themes from Māori pūrākau (legends) to write a touching young-adult novel that became a hit movie. In Navigating the Stars (2020) he dug even deeper into pūrākau, recontextualising Māori creation stories for a modern audience. And even though these books are principally in English, there’s always some te reo Māori in there. Does he really need an immersion crash course?
For the podcast, we sat down with Ihimaera for four extended interviews throughout the year. In the first of them, Ihimaera explained how, despite growing up in Gisborne with parents and grandparents who were native speakers, he had not ended up with a deep knowledge of te reo.
“I think that surprised the class – that I don’t know anything. Because I was brought up at a time when Māori wasn’t spoken at school, and where my English was privileged. When you put me in a Pākehā setting where I speak English I am second to none, but when it comes to being able to speak on the marae according to Māori precepts, I am a tauira.”
That loss of a language from one generation to the next is something Ihimaera has been addressing in his fiction for half a century. In one story in Pounamu Pounamu, there’s a scene where a boy – a proxy for young Witi – sits at the table as his parents switch into te reo, so they can discreetly discuss something without their children understanding.
In The New Net Goes Fishing, a young man’s celebration of his university graduation is thrown off axis when he has to admit to a kuia that he hasn’t understood her words of congratulations, because “I’m sorry – I don’t understand. I don’t understand Māori.”
Immersed in pākehā world
But for all his engagement with the cruel dynamics of language loss, you might still presume Ihimaera might have got around to becoming fluent long before turning 80.
Well, yes, Ihimaera says, there is “the assumption that because I am this age and because I’ve done what I’ve done in terms of creating a career and a reputation in writing about Māori, that I know a lot – and in fact I don’t. My practice has been driven by Pākehā academic and scholastic practices.”
Learning again from scratch isn’t easy. A couple of months into the Takiura course, Ihimaera said he was still struggling with the requirement that tauira get to their feet and kōrero in reo off the cuff.
“I am not accustomed to standing to speak every day.”
Nor was he accustomed to regularly memorising lists of new words – vocabulary doesn’t always stick, especially when you’re entering your ninth decade.
“So I’m not at that stage yet where I can stand up the language within my kupu hou [new words]. I think that’s going to take me quite a few months yet before I feel confident and competent enough to be able to speak even conversationally.”
He also found the distance between his deep knowledge of the Māori world and his relatively weak grasp of the language at times deeply frustrating.
“There have been times when I’ve been really, really angry because I have been unable to contribute to the class in te reo.”
Such as the times when his kaiako would refer to a Māori legend or creation story to help explain a particular concept. Ihimaera literally wrote the book on this – Navigating the Stars was published just five years ago – so “I know all of these pūrākau and I keep on thinking, ‘Well, if only I could speak in Māori, I’d be able to tell them.’ But because I can’t, I just shut down. There’s nothing that I can do about it, except say to myself: ‘Sorry, if I could, I would do this for you, but I can’t.’”
Ihimaera wasn’t struggling alone. Takiura’s course has developed a reputation among te reo learners for being tough going. Some Rumaki tauira do make an extraordinarily swift journey from absolute beginner to fluent speaker, but others make smaller gains. Others sink entirely, and drop out before year’s end.
For many, the toughest bits are the whakapuaki, the speeches students must make along the way. At regular intervals, every tauira is required to stand and deliver, without notes, a verbal presentation to the rest of the class, solely in te reo Māori.
The first whakapuaki is eight minutes, but they get longer each time, so for the seventh and final one at the end of the year, you’re speaking te reo for 60 minutes.
Pain and optimism
Although Ihimaera and his fellow students were kindly tolerant of us and our microphones in the classroom, the corridors, at the “hui whānau” gatherings of the entire school, during kōhanga reo placements and during their trip to Ngāruawāhia, we kept having trouble arranging to be there when Ihimaera did his whakapuaki. When we eventually asked what was going on, his response was devastating.
It was partly, said Ihimaera, because he was feeling protective of his hoa akomanga (fellow students), given the stress everyone felt around the whakapuaki. But also: “Because of my ineptness with te reo, I didn’t want to have myself recorded with my damaged reo. And I mean damaged – damaged by colonisation, damaged by trauma. I didn’t feel as if I wanted to be represented by damage.”
That idea of damage, and of mamae (pain) and whakamā (shame), is a dark current that flows beneath the surface of many te reo classes. It’s a well-documented legacy of the colonial suppression of an indigenous language.
In interviews with Ihimaera and his hoa akomanga, we heard about trauma passed from generation to generation. We heard about the volume of tears that are shed when you’re reclaiming your tūpuna reo.
Yet we also heard about the optimism that comes with trying to turn things around; that comes from taking te reo classes alongside your spouse so you’ll be ready to pass it on to the children you’ve not yet had; that comes from watching toddlers burbling in te reo at a kōhanga reo, blithely unaware of the pivotal role they’re playing in the revitalisation of a language and a culture.
We also saw first-hand how much fun the adult learners at Takiura were having on a good day, splashing around in the deceptively deep waters of Rumaki Reo – whether it was Ihimaera and his hoa akomanga cracking up during a game of te reo charades, or belting out the high notes during a class practise of Aku Mahi.
Even though Ihimaera found whakapuaki challenging, and his performances were weighed down by dark histories, he was also ready to befriend the word, as he has done in the Pākehā world for the past eight decades.
“Witi Underwater” will be released on June 16 at rnz.co.nz, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast players. All five episodes will also be broadcast on Radio Waatea and an excerpt will play on RNZ’s Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan during the week of Matariki, with full episodes every Sunday at 5pm from June 22. Made with support from Te Māngai Pāho.