Te Rangatahi as Literature

Tu Tangata, Issue 31, 1 August 1986, Page 48

Te Rangatahi as Literature

by BRUCE MASON

HE RERENGA KORERO

AS a student in Maori I class at Victoria University in 1969, Bruce Mason was asked to present this paper to a seminar of fellow students on Wednesday, Bth October, 5 p.m.

I think I speak for most Pakeha students in Maori I; 2 that, faced with the two volumes of Te Rangatahi, we have teased out the texts as if they were knotted flax fibres, or used our vocabularies to construct a coherent jigsaw, glad of any gleam of sense in any corner. These laborious practices are no help in estimating literary qualities, and are all to reminiscent of the teaching of our greatest poet in schools, which successfully drains Shakespeare of all eloquence and all beauty.

But again presuming to speak for the non-Maori students in the class, we found towards the end of Te Rangatahi 11, that there were gleams of light, as well as of sense, and it is because of these flashes that I stand here. On the quality of the language itself, I can do no more than draw a few tentative arrows, but I’ll make a few hazards at the end; in the

meantime, I will concentrate on two aspects where I feel reasonably secure: attitudes of mind, and characterisation.

The territory of Te Rangatahi is in, around, or proceeding from, Te Kaha, a small settlement on the eastern Bay of Plenty coast between Opotiki and Cape Runaway. 3 The aim of the early chapters in Te Rangatahi I seems to be aimed directly at the Pakeha student; simply domestic rituals and relationships; mother, father, brother, sister, and friend. They go to school; they milk cows, they fish, they go to the flicks, to town and back. By Chapter 8, Te Awhina i a Pani, we know them quite well. Pani, it seems, has the same trouble as any Pakeha mother, in getting her brood to observe domestic niceties or help in the house. She reveals a rough tongue under stress and is, in this respect no different from any other

over-worked kitchen slave. The girls, Marama and Mere, seem to have as thin a time as their Pakeha sisters; while the boys are out pig-hunting, they are at home, helping to prepare food or engage in other unromantic chores; they have a brief fling at the dance, and then fade back into obscurity. The world of Te Rangatahi is very much a man’s and boy’s world, which may account for some slightly bitter commentaries from the female students.

But by Chapter 13 in Te Rangatahi I the whole community of Te Kaha is marshalled for a communal celebration: the annual football game with Te Kao, again very much a male ritual. But certain aspects of the game, prepared for in Chapter 13, light-heartedly played, and hilariously lost in CJiapter 14, impressed on me the difference between Maori football and that dour humourless test of virility that we Pakeha have made of it. If I could put it for a moment in epigrammatic form: the Pakeha seeks to prove his manhood by the game; for us it is a kind of puberty rite, and, in international terms, a means for over-

coming a national sense of inferiority in almost every field; for the Maori, at least as I judge it from John Waititi’s narrative, it is a light-hearted celebration, where victory is without triumph, and defeat without sting.

Te Rangatahi II is much broader in scope, and the stories, as I need hardly remind any student here, much longer and in language, more complex. Our world now is not only the tiny microcosm of Hata’s household; by the activities initiated by Hata, we move into modern Maoritanga as a whole. The first two episodes, Eeling and Sheep-Shear-ing hardly add to our knowledge from the first volume, but with Chapter 111, Mourning, we see Maoritanga 4 in action, not so much by the rites themselves, which Pakeha law now regulates precisely, but by the total atmosphere of ritual grief, which at once accepts loss and transcends it, in a manner that has disconcerted some of our students. We are sad at funerals; our ladies make tea and offer cakes with great devotion. We are well thought of if our grief is not too obvious, and if we break down under stress, we are led quietly away, that our emotion shall not shatter the unnatural calm of the mourners. Unless we are convinced Irish Catholics, we have no framework in which our grief may be contained; death comes like a natural convulsion, causeless and meaningless. But a Maori tangi allows the fullest expression of grief, accepting death as part of life, and also acknowledges that tears must be followed by laughter, as a life-proclaiming explosion. Thus the end of the funeral of Hata’s grandson, carefully presented to us as an unexpected and seemingly arbitrary event, shows Rewi chaffing Tamahae for his tears, not for the departed, but because, through greed, he has missed out on the funeral baked meats. “Anyone would think you were mourning for the corpse!” shouts Rewi, to Tamahae’s discomfiture. The tangi is as festive an occasion as an Irish wake; grief is real, loss is real, but life must be renewed symbolically by food and laughter. Tangihanga gives a sensitive account of it.

Te Kaha, as we know, is an isolated community, but one twitch of the chain of Maoritanga, and it instantly rouses itself to communal action. Thus when Wiremu Whata is offered a scholarship to India, 5 Hata at once enrolls the town in fund raising activities to supplement the scholarship. And everyone who attends the card games, auction, knows quite well that the object of the exercise is to be p roperly fleeced in a good cause. Thus a pair of second-hand shoes, 9/(90 cents] new, on Woolworth’s counter are auctioned at 15/- ($1.50); a jar firmly marked Brylcream is stuffed with jam, and various lively characters blandly cheat at cards. But the cause is good and unquestionable; Wiremu has £B3 f 5166.00) more, to send him on his way. I found a poignant and delicate sense

of parody in the Chapter 8, Te Haerenga ki Rotorua, where the School Committee sends the children out for a tourist expedition. We all go to Rotorua, too, for what we imagine is a feel of the very heart-beat of Maoridom; we drop pennies over the bridge at Whakarewarewa for the kids to dive for, pace over Tikitere and The Buried Village. We are there for the sights, where the young people of Te Kaha went to reclaim a mythical landscape. To us the legend of Hinemoa and Tutanekai has a poignant throb, similar to what we remember of Romeo and Juliet, except that these young lovers were not doomed; but to Tamahae, Tutanekai is a brave ancestor, who can stride in his imagination like a god-hero. He claims him perhaps too readily; John Waititi has a good deal of quiet fun at the expense of those Maoris who instantly enroll Maori athletes as close relations; at the time when George Nepia was the best full-back in the world, notes a sardonic observer at King Koroki’s Coronation, he was related to every Maori in New Zealand. 6 But this is simply a comic aspect of something very deep in Maori life: the sense that any achievement, in any field, is a contribution to the entire iwi; 7 the sense also that failure in any field, lets the whole iwi down.

This brings me to what I found the most moving passages of all in Te Rangatahi, exemplifying both of these attitudes. Hata’s foster-son, Hukarere, returns to Te Kaha, a failure because he has dipped out of Teachers’ College and taken up what he feels equipped for, truck-driving. Hata is deeply hurt by his defection from te matauranga o te Pakeha (Pakeha education) but as Hukarere tries to explain he wasn’t cut out for it. I doubt whether there would by any such explosion in a Pakeha community; all right, Jimmy is no good for teaching, so let him take up mechanics. The stars don’t stop in their courses; the heavens don’t fall. But Hata feels, and Hukarere is certainly made to feel, that he has let down the whole community. Then he gets married, and the wedding speeches suggest that Hukarere has all the virtues with which a man can properly be endowed, and Rewi comments, in his mischievous way: “That’s the Maori way. For a feast or a death, a man is spotless.” 8

When in the last chapter, 9 Tamahae goes off to seocndary school, he is exhorted by Hata, with the weight of the whole community, to pursue knowledge relentlessly and steadfastly. A good deal of Hata’s money has been laid out on his education; it is like the initiation of a mediaeval knight. And again the parting counsels: “Pursue Pakeha knowledge. Don’t imaging that the road to knowledge is an easy one” and so on. And these exhortations are reinforced by the headmaster in his welcoming speech to the new recruits.

I find all this worrying. We know, most of us, what a heap of useless lumber

most Pakeha knowledge io, the log-jam of centuries of cultural driftwood; only we could say, perhaps, knowing this, that education consists of what you remember when you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned. Tamahae enters Tipene with the burden of the whole of his hapu 10 on his shoulders, and I hope your relief was as great as mine, that he made the grade. I read recently, in an article in Focus, 11 that Maori elders expect far too much of their young people and lay at their door a failure of character which may often be no more than a difficulty in responding to European conventions and idioms. I knew once a young Maori, highly thought of in his home town, who began a medical course and gave it up in despair after two terms; he never showed his face in his home town again. I devoted a whole play, Awatea, 12 to this theme; my medical student, Matt Paku, constructs an elaborate myth and ritual to bypass the disapproval of his tipuna 13 and hapu for a failure that was not his responsibility. We concede our young people the right to fail, and their lives are not blighted by a false start. Sylvia Ashton-Warner says, in her remarkable book Teacher 14 that it is not a teacher’s concern ever to criticise the contents of a child’s mind, only to find out what’s in it. These words should be hung in letters, if not of fire, then of gold, outside every educational institution in the country. When we learn them and live them, perhaps the Maori people will be released from what seems to me an intolerable burden.

If I have to criticise any of the themes of Te Rangatahi, I confess that I find the attitudes to animals revealed in several stories, not very attractive, but then, in a country whose prosperity depends on wholesale slaughter of animals, I don’t find Pakeha attitudes very winning, either. Mutton bird may be, for all I know, never having tasted it, a very succulent dish, but the manner of iis capture, as told in Te Mahi Titi, 15, makes me hope I never taste it. Birds and pigs are shot without compunction in Te Rangatahi I, 16 Tamahae in a moment of frustration beats a cow in one of the examples, 17 and Hata vividly recalls the death of a whale, in which he casually notes that, after harpooning, the water of the bay was covered with blood. 18 It may be that, in defusing the electrical circuit which lit up the whole natural words of Maoridom, we have released the Maori imagination to look on animals as we do, as things without rights. The ancient Maori was as ready as William Blake to declare that “all that lives is holy”; the Maori seems now to have adopted our motto towards the animal kingdom that “all that lives is wholly mine and in my power.”

Te Rangatahi has three main characters, Hata, Tamahae and Rewi. Pani, the wife, hardly exists, except to drudge and scold. We know nothing of how he

regards her, nor of what she means to Tamahae. She is a housewife, faceless and put-upon, or so I judge. But Hata bestrides the book with his vigour, his power to galvanise his community to action, and in his hopes for the young. He is sometimes over-confident, as in his ready assumption that his team will take the shield for the action songs at Turangawaewae, but he takes defeat with a wry dignity. Tamahae and Rewi are beautifully contrasted throughout, like air and earth. Tamahae, in whom I find a good deal of myself I have to confess, has his head so high in the air that he never sees the stone he is about to trip over, and Rewi, grinning ferociously, probably put it there. Rewi is like a modern incarnation of Maui, 19 endlessly mischievous, chirping from the tree which seems his natural perch, like the sliest of birds. He can be relied upon to turn every mishap into comedy, and he and Tamahae are a comic team and turn, inseparable one from the other. Rewi has no ambition, but he has a function: to deflate the balloon of pretension; Tamahae is endlessly overreaching himself and must be brought down to size. But to my relief, and doubtless to yours, Tamahae at length realises the hopes of his family and hapu and his career is set for law. I can’t help feeling that Rewi would probably make a much better advocate, and I can see him in court, knocking the struts from under witnesses’ feet, and reducing learned judges to gibbering furies. It seems to me a considerable achievement for John Waititi to present the complexities of Maori syntax through two such engaging characters, whose relationship keeps the narrative in motion and provides its interest.

On points of style, I will be mercifully, and perforce, brief. After a year of laborious teasing, Maori begins to reveal itself to me as a language of great elegance and subtlety of expression. If one can master the particles, a narrative can proceed with great freshness and variety, with a constantly changing tone and pace. As one would expect from a language for so many centuries an oral medium, great use is made of onomatapoeia, and a word like whawhewhawhe

for meddle r, or busybody, exactly suggests a fluttering bird like the fantail. In formal structures like the waiata, 20 it is capable of great nobility and terseness of expression. In John Waititi’s narrative, the exigencies of instruction made it impossible for him to reveal these finer points, but I will mention one, which seemed to me an excellent example of language exactly clothing and expressing an action; it is quite early on, in Te Kanikani from Te Rangatahi I. Tamahae has approached Makere at the dance and asks her to rock and roll with him. In English, his view of the incident would read: “They began to jump about. The people applauded,” which gives no more feeling for the action than a telegram. But the Maori reads: “Kua timata raua kite pekepeke. Kei te pekepeke nga tangata.” I know of nothing which so exactly expresses the frenetic jerking of rock ’n roll; I have a feeling that John Waititi found the dance little to his taste; he has remorselessly exposed its twitching, jerky character.

Throughout the two volumes, there is no trace of resentment for the Pakeha who, simply by occupying the land, has defused an oral universe and, if not quite smashed a culture, has inevitably fragmented it. I find the narratives impressive in demonstrating how readily the fragments unite to become a chain, whose links can support a whole community. Yet the Queen is toasted as respectfully at Hukarere’s wedding 22 as if it had been a Pakeha ceremony, and the cries of admiration at the technological wonders of the Kawerau mill 23 are quite unfeigned. There is no suggestion anywhere that Pakeha technology is viewed in the light of the more militant negroes as “tricknology”. 24 And while the traditions of the great oral bards have gone, the whale episode 5 charmingly reveals how readily the young will still listen to the whaikorero. 26

There are probably as many reasons for taking this course as there are members of the class, but I feel sure that one attitude unites all the Pakeha students: 27 respect. Te Rangatahi cannot but increase our respect and admiration for the qualities of strength, communal solidarity and humour it reveals to us,

and, as such, it is John Waititi’s most eloquent memorial. 28

FOOTNOTES: 1. Te Rangatahi I by Hoani R. Waititi, Government Printer 1962. Te Rangatahi II by Hoani R. Waititi, Government Printer 1964. 2. Enrolments in Maori I, 1969, totalled 41. Internals were 27 (Pakeha 16). Extramurals were 14 (Pakeha 11). 3. See map in Te Rangatahi 11, page 108. 4. Maori way of life, Maori culture, Maori values. 5. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 7, Te Mahi Moni. 6. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 11, Te Hui Nui. 7. People, community, tribe. 8. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 6, Te Marena. 9. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 12, Te KuraTuarua. 10. Community of relatives, sub-tribe. 11. A student magazine. 12. Stages in the Wellington Town Hall in 1968 with Inia Te Wiata. The play was produced by Dick Johnstone. 13. Grandparent, ancestor. 14. Authoress also of: ‘Spinster’ and ‘lncense to Idols’. She taught the Editor for 3 years, at Horoera Maori School, near East Cape. 15. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 9. 16. Te Rangatahi I, Chapter 9, Te Whakangau Poaka. 17. Te Rangatahi I, Chapter 4, Te Miraka Kau. 18. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 10, Te Mahi Tohora. 19. A Polynesian and Maori culture hero. 20. Song-poetry there are several classes of waiata, old and new. 21. Chapter 11. 22. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 6, Te Marena. 23. Te Rangatahi 11, chapter 8, Te Haerenga ki Rotorua. 24. A widely held view by negro militants in the U.S.A. that American technical expertise is one way of exploiting them. 25. Te Rangatahi 11, Chapter 10, Te Mahi Tohora. 26. Orator (noun), speech (verb) Kaikorero (speaker or story-teller) is perhaps the better word to use here. (Editor) 27. The Pakeha (internal students) who persisted with the course into the Third Term were Sue Cheeseman, Fay Feast, Patricia Hall, Sheila Williams, David Gregg, Bruce Mason, Ross Piper, David Worboys. 28. See page 12, suggested project for 19691970.