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HE KŌRERO
AROHA
Tanea Heke’s heroes, Nancy Brunning and Briar Grace-Smith.
Recently, I heard Dr Emalani Case talk about the politics of place. She referred to Thomas King who wrote: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” And I think about the potency of that statement and how that plays out in an Indigenous space. And the impact of story as mauri or the essence of our beings as people, how stories shape us as humans. We all need heroes, people that we can look up to and identify with. My two heroes were rangatahi when they had their imagination captured by Māori storytellers. Stories linked my heroes to their culture, their whakapapa, their identity. It was stories that set them on the road to becoming two of Aotearoa’s most celebrated and esteemed Māori playwrights: Nan Brunning and Briar Grace-Smith. Nancy Brunning became a fan of Witi Ihimaera’s when she read Pounamu Pounamu in her Māori class at the age of 14. Her Māori teacher introduced her to this iconic book, not her English teacher. In English she read books by predominantly European male novelists, so to be introduced to the first ever collection of short stories published by a Māori writer stunned her. It had never occurred to her that we could do that. She read the stories, the competitive and passionate friendships in ‘A Game of Cards’, the fragility of ‘The Child’,
the opportunistic Heremaia children in ‘The Other Side of the Fence’, to name a few. These were stories with characters that looked like her, sounded like her, except for one major difference. Their lives were filled with wāhine, young and old. Nannies, mothers, aunties, cousins, sisters. Influential women that grew and growled and graced the lives of the children in these pages, a privilege she no longer could access in her own life. And that experience became the catalyst for Nancy writing her play, Witi’s Wāhine. In Briar Grace-Smith’s case, her parents were both teachers. Her whare was filled with books and she believes that reading empowered her to write and tell her own stories. At 13 she read Patricia Grace’s book, Muruwhenua and much like Nancy had discovered, the story validated her as a young Māori woman. It was the first time she had read something that so profoundly echoed her life and she began to think about telling her own stories. I first met Nan and Briar when I was a student at Toi Whakaari in the 90s. I saw Nan in a number of plays at Taki Rua: Ngā Tāngata Toa, Whaea Kairau. I also saw her in the NZ International Arts Festival’s production of Waiora. Such a remarkable physical teller
