Hiwa, p.13
Hiwa, page 13
He walked towards her.
‘How old are you?’ Like it mattered. His stomach was right there, where his grey shirt parted from the belt of his pants.
The vibration from the crosscut saw stopped.
One of the men said, ‘Right goer,’ and the other laughed. But Angel was long past caring about insults like these.
Sallow looked at her as though she’d never known anything in her life and never wanted to.
‘We’re looking for work,’ she said.
Wai stood watching. The Hana taki doll was sticking out of her side pocket. Its little black hat had slipped down, almost over its eyes.
Sallow smiled at Angel, long and slow. He unbuttoned his shirt, damp with sweat and took it off, dropping it on the ground. A flock of tūturiwhatu sounded from above.
‘I’ll take whatever you have going. I learn quickly. I could help with the Taj Mahal.’
He laughed and turned his body away, stacking the last of the wood. The yard was empty now – the others had gone for their lunch. She watched the birds, their increasing cries a distraction. They were circling, low.
‘Nobody works on that except me.’
‘Bet you’ve never been to the original. Too busy making prefabs.’ Angel circled him too, waiting, counting. From miles away, inside the walls of the mangroves, came a chorus. For an instant, she saw Hana, Miri and Belle standing at the kāpia pot. The doll felt hot against her chest. ‘You’re stealing our wood.’
A tūturiwhatu landed nearby on the stack of timber. It made eye contact with her, and that was all Angel needed. She felt for the knife at her waist.
‘You know what you look like? A scared rāpeti.’ She laughed, screwing up her nose. ‘You’ve taken the wood, so we need something in return.’
A rash climbed up Sallow’s doughy neck, all pink and white. He pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed it over his face. Then, with thick white fingers, he lit a cigarette and leaned against a chair stacked with rubbish.
The knife glimmered as she removed it. ‘Sorry,’ said Angel. Wai was standing up now, ready. ‘But it’s not like you haven’t done worse.’
In one movement Wai pinned Sallow’s hand to the chair. A bead of sweat ran down his nose onto his lip. He seemed paralysed, then after a moment he started to pray. He was wasting his breath. She had imagined being slow and deliberate, but one good push through and it was done. When she held the finger up, it was already changing colour. It left a dark stain in the shape of itself where it had bled onto the chair. She wrapped the bloody finger in the shirt Sallow had dropped on the ground.
When Angel and Wai returned, everyone gathered around the table. They took out their taki dolls and laid them on the table, side by side. Angel offered up her finds, from foraging out on the mangroves and down at the wharf. She saved the finger till last, unfolding the crumpled-up shirt. Hana and Miri leaned in, their arms folded. ‘It’s his,’ Angel said. She passed it to Hana. Angel wasn’t sorry. These past days, Hana had been so altered. Hana grabbed it, and for a moment it was like they were having a wordless conversation.
‘We need some hair from everyone before the sun goes down,’ Hana said.
Angel was too tired to argue. Only Belle complained she was growing hers out, but she lined up behind Wai and Miri and Angel. Hana got a knife and sliced off a lock from everyone. She sent Angel to fetch the kauri gum hair from her room.
Hana unravelled the braid into its three separate strands. Then she wove in the thick black strands of the women’s hair. The result was stunning: a black and gold zigzag, six-strand braid.
Hana slid the finger inside the braid. They set the whole thing in kāpia, attaching the lead from the old ship as base using the tītī fat and a stingray tooth. The women worked on it all night, in candlelight, in silence. They moved from the stove only to follow the patch of moonlight on the floor. Once it was done, Hana put it over Angel’s head and Angel fell asleep.
When the dawn light came in the window, Hana was there beside her. Angel pulled the necklace away from her body so they could see what they had made. They stared at it, taking in its power. If this worked, the wood might be recoverable too.
The others woke and moved silently around the kitchen, setting down plates for breakfast. Their faces turned to Angel, who looked exhausted, yet in her eyes was a kind of power. She wore the necklace, watching the women notice it, gaze at it.
Everyone sat down to eat.
Witi Ihimaera
TE WHĀNAU A KAI, NGĀTI POROU, TE AITANGA A MĀHAKI, RONGOWHAKAATA, NGĀTI KAHUNGUNU, TŪHOE
Witi Ihimaera (Te Whānau a Kai, Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga a Māhaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Kahungunu, Tūhoe) is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated and influential writers, and a prominent champion of international Indigenous writing. The year 2023 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Tangi, the first novel by a Māori writer, following the publication of the landmark story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972). Ihimaera’s writing career includes novels, plays, opera libretti, and works of nonfiction; he has also edited numerous ground-breaking anthologies of Māori and Indigenous writing. A number of his books have been adapted into movies or television series, including his young adult novel The Whale Rider (1987), made into an internationally successful film released in 2002.
The stories of Pounamu, Pounamu and The New Net Goes Fishing (1977) continue to be widely read, and taught in schools and universities; the first explores the lives and values of a rural Māori community, and the second the consequences of the great post-war migration of Māori to cities. Ihimaera’s subsequent story collections reveal his sharp political eye and social awareness, as well as his wit, whimsy, and delight in intellectual as well as imaginative exploration.
Ihimaera has described his early stories and novels as grounded in the fictionalised version of his East Coast papa kāinga: his ‘work never strayed far from the Waituhi Valley,’ he told Brannavan Gnanalingam in a 2019 interview. But in the twenty-first century, after years spent overseas as a diplomat as well as at international festivals and universities, Ihimaera’s writing ‘started to shift from its central axis to take other, axial, positions’, including ‘setting Māori characters in non-traditional Māori settings’.
The story here, ‘Der Traum’, reflects that international expansion of Ihimaera’s vision, as well as the reality of his experience as an in-demand speaker, scholar and visiting writer. (In 2017 he was appointed a Chevalier Des Arts et Lettres by the French Government.) Its title also suggests the author’s passion for classical music: ‘Der Traum’ is one of Schubert’s lieder. The story exists in the blurred zone between fiction and creative nonfiction, the dreamed and the real, memory and forgetting, the contemporary and the historic, current events and traditional knowledge, the West and the Indigenous.
‘Der Traum’ was written, Ihimaera says, after ‘an extraordinary stay in Berlin during Easter 2018. International travel is important to me in that it has enabled me to look at Māori and Indigenous people within the wider, global, context.’ Ihimaera has revised and republished his first five books, and for this anthology he revised and updated ‘Der Traum’. He is ever open to opportunities ‘to rewrite my work, which ages and matures as I do.’
Der Traum
The man wakes abruptly
The man wakes abruptly after having half a dream.
His dream has been moving in a certain direction that isn’t to his liking. Uncertain as to how it will resolve itself, he says No, very firmly, and forces himself to wake up.
In the dream, the man was in a small van, perhaps an eight-seater. He was on a tour of the South Island with Indigenous friends who were familiar to him but whose names he couldn’t recall; as soon as the dream was over, they disappeared from his subconscious. The dream began just as the van was leaving a busy metropolitan market. His friends were all artists, carvers and craftsmen and among them was a weaver, maybe in her fifties. As the van waited at the lights of the busy intersection, she looked back.
Silhouetted against a red sunset was the marketplace with its jumble of stalls. Close by, was a flax vendor. Oh, what beautiful harakeke, the weaver said. She began to cry, and the sound of her weeping invaded the dream. A tear like lustrous jade fell from her left eye.
For some reason, the man felt sorry for the weaver. He called to the driver, Let the woman go to buy the flax, but then he felt embarrassed. He had overstepped the mark. Such a decision to stop was the responsibility of the tour director, a young woman, so he apologised to her. It was clear that the young woman was annoyed. We are running late, she said, but she nodded to the driver to let the weaver out.
The weaver ran through the blood-red sunset, passing many other traders before she reached the flax vendor. They began to talk, but something must have gone wrong because the vendor began to shake his fist. He called over another person and the arguing escalated. Clearly the weaver had offended him. The anger was menacing.
You don’t want to pay?
I will pay but your price is not a fair one.
The price I quoted is the market price.
The argument grew louder. The man heard the woman say, Harakeke should not be sold in the first place. He thought he should step in, and got out of the van. But before he could go any further, the flax seller and the person with him – the manager of the market – approached. They had taken the weaver into custody.
She has offended us, the manager said. She asked if she could purchase our harakeke and is now objecting to the price. If you wish to have her freed so that she can re-join you, it will cost 98 dollars.
The man looked at the tour director, expecting her to take charge of the situation. Instead, the young woman looked at him. At that point, not sure if he wanted to take responsibility, he had decided to wake up.
I need to explain
I need to explain a particular circumstance that makes the man’s dream somewhat unusual.
The man was in Berlin when he had the dream. He had flown seventeen hours from Auckland to Dubai and then six hours to Germany, with two stopovers of three hours each. One day he was in the Southern Hemisphere, the next in the Northern.
It also happened to be Easter, a time when the Christian world reflected on its humanity. And as anybody who visits Berlin frequently would tell you, the city at any time of year was an utterly fragmenting experience: it forced you into personal encounters with a history characterised by constant reinvention. On previous visits, for instance, the man had considered the city to be in self-denial about its past, especially its Nazi history and division into East and West Germany. But now he admired Berlin because, ever since the Wall had fallen, it has gained great momentum. The most obliterated country of World War II was now a powerful member country of the EU.
Let me tell you more about the man’s itinerary. He was staying in a well-known hotel just off Unter den Linden. And yes, he was with a tour group from New Zealand and Australia, some of them artists, one a weaver – and there was indeed a tour director, a young woman, concentrating on the operation of the tour rather than her group. Reality had certainly coloured the man’s dream.
So too had the group’s cultural programme. On the first day they had visited the Brandenburg Gate and the Jewish War Memorial, always sufficient to remind him of the city’s troublesome histories. On their first evening out they saw a performance of Adam’s Passion, a new production by Robert Wilson based on music by Arvo Pärt: Adam’s Lament, Miserere, Tabula Rasa and Sequentia. After he’s expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam anticipates all of mankind’s catastrophes, blaming himself for them.
A few days earlier, on a tour to Potsdam, the old city of kings and kaisers, flakes of snow started to fall; the man was reminded, sentimentally, of a snow globe; but there was nothing sentimental about shopping among the expensive shops in the Freidrichstrasse and, there, the snow was real and bitter to the taste. In one of the shops the man saw a beautiful shimmering cloak, made entirely of feathers like a Māori cloak, but reconstructed as a haute couture high-end fashion creation. The price tag was exorbitant.
Although the cloak delighted him, the man had sensed something disturbing. Everything in the world is for sale, he thought, even us.
The night before at the Staatskapelle Berlin the tour group heard a performance of Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. Last evening, they had been at Das Wunder der Heliane, the extraordinary opera about a stranger from a distant land who commits suicide and is then resurrected by his lover.
The sonorities and their dissonance only served to amplify the man’s thoughts on life, its transformation, transfiguration and, yes, transubstantiation. The change of something natural into something manufactured – a feather into a cloak. The placing of a monetary value on a simple item, like flax, even though the essence had not changed.
And so the man had awakened from his dream at 3 o’clock – or was it 4 o’clock? – the change to summer time only adding to his disorientation. He made a cup of tea and watched the grey light seep along the Berlin boulevards. But the dream still disturbed him.
He began to ponder a scenario that might have occurred had he not said, Stop.
The man heard with anxiety
The man heard with anxiety the manager’s decision, If you wish to have the woman returned to you …
The situation could quickly spiral out of control and he had to think fast. The manager held the upper hand, he the lower. This was the world as a global marketplace whereas the man and his colleagues were Indigenous visitors. And so the man began to negotiate for the weaver’s release by being conciliatory.
I respect your decision, he said in a contrite fashion, an attitude against his nature. However, he continued, asserting his own mana, sovereignty, it has been taken unilaterally, and you present it to me and my fellow companions as a fait accompli.
Experience had taught the man that sometimes it was better to establish an arena of negotiation as fast as possible, and he was pleased to see the manager take an unconscious step backward; sometimes, negotiation skills from people of colour were unexpected.
Your woman was disrespectful to the principles of our business, the manager said.
Let us see if she was, the man interposed, preferring not to seek permission to proceed from the manager. After all, both you and I were not witness to the encounter between her and the flax vendor. You were in your office before being attracted by the commotion and I was in the van. Shall we talk to the vendor first?
A large crowd had gathered to observe the proceedings. The manager called the vendor of the harakeke to come forward. The woman was rude to me, he said. She came running to my stall and ordered me about, rummaging through my flax and choosing the best stalks. And when I told her what the price was she refused to pay it.
The man gestured to the crowd. Can anyone among you verify the vendor’s story?
An elderly man spoke up. The woman was certainly in a hurry, he said, but perhaps she was less rude and more anxious to finalise her purchase.
And what price did you charge her? the man asked the flax vendor.
Ninety-eight dollars.
A murmur rustled through the crowd. Clearly, $98 was on the high side. But the flax vendor defended himself. It’s the market price. The stocks are based on supply and demand.
The woman’s offence still stands, the manager said. She refused to pay.
The man paused, wanting the crowd to know that he was pondering the manager’s words with care. But clearly there are mitigating circumstances, he began, and we are adjudicating not just on the commercial value you put on the transaction but, at origin, an even larger question to do with custom not cash. Who owns harakeke?
The crowd appreciated his observation and there were some nodding heads. The man pressed home his point. Therefore, he suggested to the manager, if we expand the focus of the offence, perhaps the woman’s error might be considered against a wider, more informed, background? After all, cultural context – whether it be Māori or for that matter, Syrian, Palestinian or Turk – was both a minefield and a valid defence.
It was appropriate that the man should direct the question above to the manager because that allowed the manager to make the judgement and, by it, prove his magnanimity to strangers. It would also reveal his essential fairness to the vendors who rented the stalls in the marketplace.
Okay, the manager agreed, and the man sighed with relief. He wondered why the tour director herself had not joined the debate and realised that such people occupied a curious position in any negotiation. They had their own agenda, in particular the need to continue to maintain their contracts with the market.
Once this scenario was agreed, the man was happy to add it to his dream. But as he continued to drink his tea, he became irritated about not finding a way to resolve the dream and give it a satisfactory conclusion.
What had caused him to dream the dream in the first place? Certainly, I have earlier pointed out the external factors: Berlin, Easter, the resonances from his stay in the city.
There were others.
Sometimes a dream
Sometimes a dream is a metaphor for what is engaging our brain at the time. In this respect, perhaps I should tell you more about the man. In particular, what he had been thinking about while on sojourn in Berlin.
It had not helped that – in haste, as he left the house – he had chosen a novel by Salman Rushdie to read on the plane. It was a gesture of sympathy to the Indian author who had been stabbed in the neck by an Islamist fanatic acting out a religious directive from decades ago.
The novel was Rushdie’s The Golden House, in which an uncrowned seventy-something king from a faraway country arrives in New York City with his three motherless sons to take possession of the palace of his exile, behaving as if nothing is wrong with the country or the world or his own story. But clearly there is. With all three. A new president, Barack Obama, is elected at the beginning of the book and by its end, his successor – to whom the protagonist refers as ‘the Joker’ – is appointed.
