Te reo Māori is thriving, and there are more books by Māori authors, but what about the quality?
These are happy days – or happier, at least – for Māori literature. Tayi Tibble’s two poetry collections now have a US and UK publisher and she recently became the first Māori poet to be published in the New Yorker. The Bone Tree, Airana Ngarewa’s dark debut novel, has spent five straight weeks at the top of the local Nielson Bookscan fiction chart, where Monty Soutar’s gripping historical saga Kāwai continues its top-ten run a full year after publication. Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories, the anthology I edited – with Darryn Joseph as consulting te reo editor – has spent the first month of its life on that top ten chart as well.
The second Kupu Māori Writers Festival, is taking place right now in Rotorua, with six marae events during the week and panels and interviews this Friday and Saturday in Rotorua Library. And on Monday this week Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, dedicated to translating 100 books into te reo Māori, celebrated its fifth birthday at the ANZ HQ in Auckland’s CBD, where CEO Antonia Watson announced that – in the past year alone – a thousand employees have taken up the company’s offer of te reo classes.
Kotahi Rau Pukapuka makes dogged progress: a great deal of time and money is needed to find, mentor and edit translators. With publishing partners like Penguin Random House and Auckland University Press, they’ve produced 13 books to date, including translations of Harry Potter (selling over 30,000 copies here, surely AUP’s biggest-ever success) and Shakespeare, as well as the new multi-translator edition of Witi Ihimaera’s debut story collection, Pounamu, Pounamu – a landmark collection first published, in English only, in 1973.
Patron of the Kotahi Rau Pukapuka Trust, Ihimaera turns 80 next year, and he remains the talisman of Māori publishing. Ihimaera is an ardent champion of Indigenous literature around the world as well as a provocateur and promotional dervish. In his own writing, he roams from fiction and memoir to theatre and opera, from realism to the speculative, from the founding stories of the deepest past to the space stations of the future.
His creative ambition and restlessness speak, too, in the anthologies of Māori writing he summons into being every decade or so: Into the World of Light (1982), edited with D.S. Long; the five-volume set of Te Ao Mārama (1992–96); Get on the Waka: Best Recent Māori Fiction (2007). No surprise, then, that he’s the connective tissue in a new set of anthologies – Te Awa o Kupu and Ngā Kupu Wero, both published by Penguin Random House as a two-set companion – contributing two short stories to the first and taking the role of editor for the second.
In a short introduction to Ngā Kupu Wero, the more compelling and consistent of the two volumes, Ihimaera expands on the connection between these two books and the Te Ao Mārama series: “Te Awa o Kupu covers creative texts, poetry and short fiction; Ngā Kupu Wero provides the political, cultural, social and other contexts.” A wero is the ritual challenge of the marae and “one of our most distinctive literary devices,” Ihimaera writes, describing the writers here as “word warriors.”
The generational spread in Ngā Kupu Wero is wide, including names from Te Ao Mārama luminaries Haare Williams and Hirini Moko Mead, through commentators and scholars like Māmari Stephenson, Morgan Godfery, Alice Te Punga Somerville and Joanna Kidman to high school students having a go at the monstrous question “What are the main problems facing Māori today?”
There are word warriors in Te Awa o Kupu as well: the standouts include poetry by essa mae ranapiri, Tayi Tibble and Ruby Solly. These might have been served better juxtaposed with some of the prose in Ngā Kupu Wero rather than tucked between too many hāngī/tangi stories. It’s possible that the “more is more” model of Te Ao Mārama isn’t the ideal approach 40 years later. The impetus of the 90s was to insert as much Māori writing – and as many Māori writers – as possible into a Pākehā-dominant literature. In 1992 Te Ao Mārama was positioned as “an anthology of written and oral literature by Maori [sic] since 1980”, but we have no similar vast chasm to fill.
Online and print opportunities for Māori poetry, fiction and nonfiction proliferate, evidenced by the range of sources for the work in Te Awa o Kupu and Ngā Kupu Wero, including trad literary journals like Landfall, commercial publishers and “mainstream” media. Newsroom first published Shelley Burne-Field’s wildly popular (and controversial) story “Pinching Out Dahlias” (in Te Awa o Kupu) as well as “Māori Boy” by Emma Espiner (in Ngā Kupu Wero). Without articles first published by e-tangata or the Spinoff, Ngā Kupu Wero would be a much slimmer volume. It’s odd that there is only one excerpt here from Bridget Williams Books, publisher of many books by Māori writers on Māori politics, history, culture and society.
In typical maverick-y fashion, Alan Duff drops in to announce that “unless you’re writing in te reo, then it is not Māori writing”, directly contradicting the book’s foreword
“More is more” seems to be the sole kaupapa of Te Awa o Kupu: its page-long introduction by Rapatahana and Piahana-Wong is an extended metaphor about “a river of words” which is “presented for everyone to plunge into, enjoy, reflect, savour.” There is quantity here – 66 poems and 28 prose works, plus two conversations with writers – but an inconsistent quality. Piahana-Wong’s interview on writing for children and YA should have included more than two (very new) writers. In typical maverick-y fashion, Alan Duff drops in at the very end of Rapatahana’s conversation with fiction writers to announce that “unless you’re writing in te reo, then it is not Māori writing”, directly contradicting the book’s foreword. Given that the majority of Te Awa o Kupu is poetry, and its editors both poets, a conversation between poets here might have been a good inclusion.
Recent Māori poetry finalists and winners from the Ockham NZ Book Awards – Hinemoana Baker, Anahera Gildea, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tayi Tibble – are well-represented in Te Awa o Kupu, reflecting the vitality of Māori poetry publishing in university and independent presses. Fiction is less well served. The big fiction winners of late at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards include Becky Manawatu and Whiti Hereaka; the past two ‘best first book’ winners in fiction were Rebecca K. Reilly and Anthony Lapwood. Two of the fiction finalists this year were bestselling novelists Monty Soutar and Michael Bennett. But of these six writers, only Hereaka appears in Te Awa o Kupu, with a story first published in Penguin’s Pūrākau anthology, another publishing success that’s enjoyed multiple printings. (Again, no surprise: Ihimaera was that anthology’s co-editor.)
The prose in Te Awa o Kupu includes novel excerpts – including something from my own forthcoming book – but work by our new wave of award-winning Māori fiction writers would have enhanced the depth and breadth.
In a short foreword published in both volumes, Rapatahana cites “the surging growth of writing by Māori nowadays in both te reo and te reo Ingarihi.” But in the close-to-100 creative works published in Te Awa o Kupu, only three poems (two by Rapatahana himself) and two works of fiction are wholly in te reo Māori; in Ngā Kupu Wero the only te reo piece is Maisey Rika’s lyrics to “Waitī, Waitā”.
Books for adults in te reo remain few in number: this is one reason Kotahi Rau Pukapuka was founded. There’s a prize at the Ockham NZ Book Awards for a book originally written in te reo, but it’s only been awarded twice in the past five years. In 1992, in the introduction to the first volume of Te Ao Mārama, Ihimaera noted the lack of original creative writing in te reo for adults and talked of the “struggle for a bilingual literature”.
This struggle continues, as I wrote in the introduction to Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories. Darryn Joseph cast the net wide for well-written stories in te reo, but ultimately only four of the 27 stories selected were original te reo compositions. One of them, “Wairua” by Atakohu Middleton, first appeared in Huia Short Stories 14 in 2021. That it is published again here in Te Awa o Kupu, along with a short dialogue piece from Zeb Nicklin as the only examples of fiction in te reo suggests the extent of the issue.
In the Hiwa introduction I wrote that this is “another time of growth for Māori writers and writing.” It’s also a time of growth in te reo learning and in te reo publishing, and a time of increasing critical and commercial success for books by Māori writers. More can be more, it’s true. We all need to buy and read – or borrow from the library and read – more Māori books, in English and te reo. This means more will be published, encouraging a new generation of writers and a new generation of readers. Ihimaera has known this for a long time. Let’s follow his lead.
The fiction and poetry anthology Te Awa o Kupu edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong (Penguin Random House, $37), and the nonfiction anthology Ngā Kupu Wero edited by Witi Ihimaera (Penguin Random House, $37) are available in bookstores nationwide.
ReadingRoom has devoted all week to the books. Monday: an essay by Shilo Kino on the power of Māori journalism. Tuesday: "Reasons why I called in sick rather than go to the mihi whakatau for new employees last Friday" by Jack Remiel Cottrell. Wednesday: "Identity Politics" by Tayi Tibble.
Several of the authors featured in the Penguin anthologies are appearing this week at the 2023 Māori Writers Festival, Kupu: Ngā Ringa Tuhituhi, in Rotorua.
