Opposite directions

Nonfiction collection reveals the dualities, paradoxes and sadness at the heart of a Māori-Pākehā writer’s life.

- BY KELLY ANA MOREY

Sometimes, writing a personal essay feels like a constant argument about place,” writes Ockham-shortlisted novelist Tina Makereti in her first collection of nonfiction - essays, speeches and more academic cogitations on te ao Māori. “Place” to her includes “the place I belong, how I place myself, my place in between cultures - a constant wrangling between two sides that at its simplest is embodied by my Māori and Pākehā parentages”.

It is both a blessing and a curse that Māori writers - particularly ones like Makereti and me who could pass as Pākehā, though not to each other - are endlessly compelled to write about identity and what that means to us as writers and women. The last two essay collections I read were both by Pākehā who just got to write about quirky stuff that they were passionate about; I confess I felt jealous that they didn’t have to whakapapa at all. In fact, they barely had to introduce themselves. For Māori, and perhaps all writers of colour, who we are, our whakapapa is absolutely our ground zero.

At times, the weight of culture feels too heavy; the things we need to say over and over again. How fortunate we are to have writers like Makereti who can deftly unpick te ao Māori at the seams, running a learned eye across the warp and the weft of what it is to be Māori today, and make sense of it all.