THE MOON ON MY TONGUE
THE MOON ON MY TONGUE an anthology of
MÄ€ORI POETRY IN ENGLISH
Edited by Reina Whaitiri, Robert Sullivan and Ben Styles
2017
Published by Arc Publications Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden, OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright in the poems © individual poets as named, 2017 Copyright in the Introduction © Ben Styles, 2017 Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications Ltd, 2017 This anthology represents a selection of work from Puna Wai Kōrero: an Anthology of Māori poetry in English, edited by Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, published in 2014 by Auckland University Press. Design by Ben Styles Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall 978 1911469 03 2 (pbk) 978 1911469 04 9 (ebk) Cover photograph by Steve Evans, with kind permission
This book is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications Ltd.
CONTENTS
Introduction / 11 Hiria Anderson
Forked tongue / 17
Hinemoana Baker
Te tangi a te rito / 18 Matariki, e / 19 My life part II: I think you’re on your own with that one, bro / 19
Hilary Baxter
Reminiscence / 21 October 1972 / 22
Arapera Hineira Blank
Expression of an inward self with a linocut / 23 Rangitukia, soul place / 24
Pearl de Vere Boyed
The changed land / 28
Tania Hinehou Butcher
Māori Bay / 30 In memory of: Hone Tuwhare / 31 Muriwai / 31
Jacq Carter
Our tūpuna remain / 32 Comparatively speaking, there is no struggle / 33 Me aro koe ki te hā o Hineahuone! / 35
Harry Dansey
The old place / 36
Kim Eggleston
On the beach / 37 Before the rains / 38
Amber Esau
Numiamatumua / 39 Tongue / 41
Rangi Faith
Spring star / 43 Official opening / 44 Losing our mana / 45 A measured tread / 46
Marewa Glover
Ngāwhā / 47 Te rerenga kēhua (white flight) / 48 Māori women’s hui / 49
Rowley Habib (Rore Hapipi)
Ōrākau / 50 Composed on a summer’s evening / 50 Early morning meeting / 51
John Hovell
Pāua tide / 53
Keri Hulme
He hōhā / 55 Ends and beginnings / 58
Witi Ihimaera
O numi tutelar / 59 Una storia semplice / 61
Phil Kawana
Rūaumoko, my lovely / 62 Tuatahi: Tūmatauenga taunts Rūaumoko / 62
Tuarua: Rūaumoko stirs / 65 Scenes from a council tenancy / 68 Hinewirangi Kohu
Fried bread / 70 In ritual / 71
Katerina Mataira
Restoring the ancestral house / 73
Trixie Te Arama Menzies
Kōauau / 74 Manuhiri / 75 Watercress / 76
Paula Morris
English grandmother / 77 Where / 78
Deirdre Nehua
The abyss / 79
Michael O’Leary
He waiatanui kia Aroha / 80
Tru Paraha
Knowing entirely everything on Earth that is / 88 Northern territory of my bone-trail dream walking / 89 Elegy / 91
Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan
Summer in the Kaihu Valley / 92 Old man and his dog / 93 Waikato lament / 94 Aboriginal on the last train home / 94
Kiri Piahana-Wong
Hinerangi / 95
Tidelines / 97 On the day you left me it was raining / 98 Brian Potiki
down at bluff / 100 it’s all about feel / 101 hiroki’s song / 102
Roma Pōtiki
Te kōkā, te whare tangata / 103 A cloak and taiaha journey / 103
Maraea Rakuraku
Aunties are Boss / 105
Reihana Robinson
Thinking of my father / 107 Noa Noa makes breakfast for Caroline and me, or, The tea ceremony is introduced to Samoa / 109
Michael Stevens
Let the moon and the sea . . . / 110
Bruce Stewart
Pono / 111
J. C. Sturm
At Red Rocks / 112 The last night at Collingwood / 113 A tricky business / 114 Splitting the stone / 117
Robert Sullivan
Ahi kā – the house of Ngā Puhi / 119 Voice carried my family, their names and stories / 120 Captain Cook / 121 Waka 46 / 121
Apirana Taylor
Poem for a misplaced bushman / 123 Feelings and memories of a kuia / 124
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
Pukeroa / 127 For one trophy of the Waikato war, now in an unnamed museum / 128
Hone Tuwhare
No ordinary sun / 129 On a theme by Hone Taiapa / 130 Rain-maker’s song for Whina / 131 The old place / 132
Haare Williams
Patches hide no scars / 133 Koha / 135
Vernice Wineera
Song from Kapiti / 136 Wellington, circa 1950 / 137 Tāniko / 139
Briar Wood
Rangiputa / 140 Kūmara hōu / 141
Glossary / 143 About the Editors / 157 Acknowledgements / 159
/ 11
Introduction In the introduction to the original Auckland University Press edition of this anthology, the editors write that “the kaupapa of Puna Wai Kōrero [the title of that edition] is to explore the one hundred and twenty or so years of poetry written in English by Māori.” There is a lot to unpack in this short opening sentence, a strident and pithy mission statement for a book that demanded our attention the moment we encountered it. There is the ambitious scope of the period it covers, and, to any reader not versed in New Zealand’s history and culture, the unfamiliar idea of Māori poets writing in English. But perhaps the most striking thing is the unglossed use of Māori words within an otherwise linguistically conventional sentence. Indeed, this is a characteristic feature of most of the work in this anthology, and it tells us much about the complex linguistic and political interactions that breathe behind the words of Māori poets. (There is a glossary in the edition, which we reproduce here, but it can be inconvenient to switch pages repeatedly and it is clear that these poems were not written to be accompanied always by a glossary.) Of course, for the Anglophone reader without any knowledge of the Māori language, it can be a frustrating obstacle, a very real barrier to understanding. The word “kaupapa” in the previous paragraph roughly translates to “project”, “theme” or “proposal” – no doubt one could work this out by context. The title of the edition, “Puna Wai Kōrero”, is harder to pin down in English, as is the case for many Māori expressions, but literally “Puna” refers to a spring of water, and “Kōrero” to talk, stories, words. It is a phrase which one might imagine depends (as the title of a collection of voices largely unheard outside New Zealand) upon all the connotations that could coalesce around these few words. This barrier is perhaps better understood, however, as a challenge to the reader to make the effort to engage with a new culture from a position of subordination, without the empowering convenience of a possibly reductive translation.
12 / Introduction
The reader, in the language of the coloniser, is immediately wrong-footed. Arc Publications is primarily a publisher of poetry in translation, and it never regards translation as a negative or destructive process. Indeed, it would assert that translation is an essential channel through which we are able to encounter alternative ideas, although there is no doubt that it can, when used without care, contribute to a process of normalisation, euphemization, cultural sanitisation. The untranslated mixing of Māori and English in these poems is arguably both a defiant refusal to explain away the nuances of the Māori, and a manifest acknowledgement that both of these languages play crucial but distinct roles in the lives of Māori poets, both in contemporary New Zealand and in the history of the nation since the arrival of Europeans. Thus, perhaps unusually for an Arc publication, but importantly for this book and its poets, translation is quite deliberately not a part of the kaupapa. The editors of Puna Wai Kōrero write: For Māori, contact with Pākehā [Europeans] and their literary forms provided an exciting opportunity to express their experiences in new ways. The traditional forms of oral poetry remained – such as waiata ringaringa, waiata tangi, waiata aroha, oriori, karakia, haka and whaikōrero – but writing words down in a new language and using different forms created new genres. Māori quickly and enthusiastically began experimenting with composing, writing and creating, and the work collected here in Puna Wai Kōrero is but a fraction of what has been produced over the years.
There is a strident emphasis here on creation and innovation, not on translation. The Māori poets who first encountered Pākehā people and language chose to use it to develop new forms of literature, but “the traditional forms of oral poetry remained”. Setting aside for a moment the terrible physical and political violence that followed this first encounter, an emphasis on innovation is a vital part of the Māori literary relationship with English. The encounter between Māori and Pākehā writing is, for the Māori writer (whether consciously
Introduction / 13
or by accident) not one of transformation or translation, but rather one of expansion, appropriation, utility and creativity. It becomes increasingly clear as one reads the poems collected in this anthology, peppered as they are with Māori words and phrases untranslated and never italicised, that the European language is not there to explain the Māori consciousness. It is simply another tool in the poet’s toolbox, alongside the Māori language, the Māori and European poetic forms, the scientific names of New Zealand wildlife, the new jargon of modern life… This is a poetry of multiplicity in the most literal sense. The original editors elaborate on another aspect of this multiplicity: The poetry in Puna Wai Kōrero comes out of the countryside, from the towns and cities, and from many countries around the world. The Māori diaspora is spread across the globe but wherever we find ourselves we continue to identify as Māori (mostly) and remain connected to Aotearoa – after all, this is the one and only place on earth where we can claim a tūrangawaewae. The voices are many and diverse: confident, angry, passionate, respectful, proud, despairing and full of hope, expressing the full scope of what it is to be human, and especially, to be Māori.
If there is a unifying theme in this anthology, it is the robustness of the Māori spirit when confronted with difference and dislocation. John Hovell, in ‘Pāua Tide’ (p. 53) explains how, in the face of “the sea’s keenness / reckoning each item of depredation”: the wind and stone and water sing an idle warning in the ears, to homeward company.
There is a sense that no matter the cultural, physical, economic or psychological threats faced by Māori, whether in diaspora or in New Zealand, there is a shared voice, a cultural anchor line, that roots them to a common source, in “homeward
14 / Introduction
company”. Furthermore, the reader will notice that many of the biographical notes in this edition list the tribal roots of the author. Origin – both familial and geographical – is a primary feature in the poetry collected here. As Hilary Baxter writes in ‘October 1972’ (p. 22): My joy is a tribal joy my loneliness is strong loneliness and my sorrow is pathways of flowers leading to the river where the taniwha moves
In equating so deeply her emotions and her art with the tribe and the place, the poet reveals the crucial role played by the concept of home in the Māori consciousness. This rootedness is not restrictive or conservative, however. Briar Wood, in the deceptively unassuming final poem of this book, in which she longs for the kūmara (sweet potatoes) of New Zealand, concludes: But I do, kūmara, proclaim your sweetness, your links to the future, may you prosper spread your wāina tendrils – and grow around the glowing globe.
We find, in this quiet poem about the earthy, homespun pleasures of rural life, the ultimate expression of the Māori kaupapa that courses so brilliantly throughout this collection – a thirst for survival and enrichment that thrives in the face of any darkness. Ben Styles
THE MOON ON MY TONGUE
Hiria Anderson / 17
Hiria Anderson Hiria Anderson (Ngāti Maniapoto) lives with her whānau in what was once her grandparents’ home in Ōtorohanga and has established a small studio there. She attended Queen Victoria School: ‘Hone Tuwhare visited our English classes as a guest and was most influential.’ In the mid-1990s she was involved in Ngā Puna Waihanga o Tainui – Māori Artists and Writers – and formally trained in visual art under the tutelage of James F. Ormsby. Visual arts and creative writing are a big part of her life. Her work “does not commit or conform to traditional or romantic versions of Maori, but searches for a narrative that describes aspects of our modern day lives as we are.”
Forked tongue You stared me in the face even looked me in the eye without a flinch of your furrowed brow not a wrinkle in your upturned, thin-lipped mouth with flailing hands you uttered: ‘And even though we govern the waterways it won’t stop you praying to “your” god of the sea’ and you expected me to smile, and then you said: ‘We will be better caretakers because we have money’ and you expected me to feel better, and then you said: ‘It’s not just “us” that pollute the water, it’s all of us’ and you expected me to agree with this, and then you said: ‘You “can” eat the shellfish, after we clean the sewerage up’ and you expected my child to eat, and then you said: ‘We will all benefit from this sale, they need our sand’ and you expected me to believe this! I will never believe this!
Hinemoana Baker Hinemoana Baker (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Ātiawa, Ngāi Tahu, Germany, England) was born in Christchurch and raised in Whakatāne and Nelson. She is a poet, recording artist, singer-songwriter,
18 / Hinemoana Baker occasional broadcaster and tutor of creative writing. Her first collection of poetry, mātuhi | needle (VUP, 2004), and her second, kōiwi kōiwi (VUP, 2010), draw on aspects of her mixed Māori and Pākehā heritage. Her third, waha | mouth, was published during her 2014 term as writer in residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington.
Te tangi a te rito
Bones, in this place the soles of my feet are not null; how must I walk? My throat has not woven the call. My throat has not spoken the harakeke. The north you say, is thick with it. Open-mouthed for the host but not so silenced in the throat. In this kitchen violence placed its thumbs on the bud of the call. In this garden violence pinched us back. The softness drops from your forehead, shame darkens my mouth to a museum, to a purple gallery of pūhā and pāua and the sounds of these things that keep a family well-fed and its friends at your table in the singing summer.
Hinemoana Baker / 19
Matariki, e
you have gone home you made me feel I had discovered fire you have left the room you made me feel I had invented the wheel in the end room we gather round you you made me feel the sun wheeled in me the moon on my tongue
My life part II: I think you’re on your own with that one, bro
My father’s curling kidney. A funeral a month. The mackerel sky and a steam train. Red dust from the 1920s. Blue fountain pen trailing up and off the page. Matilda’s metatarsals, Banjo’s jaw. And still and still. Slowest jump ever. I make the joke about how I taught her everything she knows. Until one of us got chilblains and the dachsund ruined it. Or the dalmatian. Everyone but me in aprons. Butter glazing my fingers. Welsh rarebit lumpy with flour; crumbling fudge.
20 / Hinemoana Baker
We all say it wasn’t a shark it was your kidney. Peace lifts the photograph off the wall. They weren’t just sisters they were two white horses. The sun glanced off the windscreen I swerved and you swore. My scarf pink, my mother’s blue, bone tipping above the surface of noon. She sweats and still, and still, she sleeps while they bandage her. What to do with fabric and skin. Your ankles are weeping pus. Your eyelids. Keep kneading and still and still. Butter glazes. He died on the operating table, nineteen years old. Watched his girlfriend crying over him and came back. Fuck that priest and his last rites. The bed was the one you held me down on instead I bled out. Or a wētā. And still and still, screech-giggling, a sour smell in my armpits, hoards of them following me up the footpath. The black and silver radio, dial like a safe. Tongue-burn, clouds of steam, crowds waving identical flags. The crows are children who have had something taken from them, something edible. What are you… thirty-two? Thirty-three? Wood tells the truth. Outside the room I shook and shuddered while the Zimbabweans laughed at me. There will never be a gap in this State Highway 1 traffic that someone will not willingly close before you can join in. The wind makes a sound through eight different chimes. It’s not the fault of the game, says Peace. I draw the ferns in a chart alongside mucus and masturbation. I put down the books and say a prayer for concentration. That place online where you can listen
Hinemoana Baker / 21
to thousands of crickets slowed down and they sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Yes, and a Lakota soprano sings with them in Italian.
Hilary Baxter Hilary Baxter, of Taranaki, Whakatōhea, was born in 1949 to James K. Baxter and J. C. Sturm. She had several poems published in university magazines and her collection of poetry, The Other Side of Dawn, was published in 1987. Although a long-time resident of Darwin, Australia, she eventually returned to Aotearoa and died in Paekākāriki in 2013.
Reminiscence
I remember as a child my father would carry me high up on his shoulders or head I would suffocate in the red knitted jumpsuit and father wearing his old gabardine coat He would gallop through the Karori bush with me precariously above across the paths banks lost streams made of wet brown leaves Then coming up the gravel drive onto the old road no more would I feel as though my throne of trees
22 / Hilary Baxter
looked down on the world that lay there waiting for me to grow
October 1972
My joy is a tribal joy my loneliness is strong loneliness and my sorrow is pathways of flowers leading to the river where the taniwha moves and the moreporks called for a barefoot father my father disciple of the Māori Christ I hear an old man singing and there is sunlight in his hair
Arapera Hineira Blank Arapera Hineira Blank (1932–2002) was a descendant of the tribes of Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongowhakaata and Te Aitanga a Māhaki. She was born in Rangitukia on the East Coast of the North Island, was a teacher and poet, and one of a small group of Māori writers in English during the 1950s. In 1959 she was awarded a special Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for her essay ‘Ko taku kūmara hei wai-ū mō tama’. She said of herself: ‘I enjoy words that sparkle, whether they be Māori, my mother tongue, or English.’
Arapera Hineira Blank / 23
Expression of an inward self with a linocut
I build something up, complicated and complex, I hope, but alas! nothing so deep emerges. Only simple lines – hacked out of a piece of worn-out lino – that curve and dip to a traditional line almost moronic in their upward outward bend to the left to the right what the hell! Why should I lie to myself? I am what I am carved out of a long line of heavy-footed deep-rooted simplicity wanting to love well eat well die with the thought of kūmara vine stretched out reproducing an image – many images of itself, its hopes drenched in warmth with roots forever seeking the sun.