Dunedin writer Talia Marshall's memoir Whaea Blue dazzled critics last year with its wild form and rich, often funny story telling. In this chapter, The Good Brother, Marshall travels to Pōrangahau to attend the tangi of Māori leader Piri Sciascia, and meets a "bitter, mean" woman on the way.
EXTRACT: In January 2020, just before the plague, I am in Hamilton again, staying at Mum’s. I am scrolling through my phone on her deck, baking as much as all her thriving succulents and the shaded heavy purple taro. A cousin posts on Facebook that Piri Sciascia, Jacinda Ardern’s advisor on all things Māori, has died after surgery. He looked a little indigo in the lips in photos online the day before, but fine, surrounded by his whānau after a lunch. I cry at the news, and then feel embarrassed by my reaction because we never met, despite being Facebook friends. I wrote him an email once asking for permission to use the studio portrait of his great-aunt, Polly, with Hoani and their children – Elsie, Enoka, Manny and Jack – before Jack went off to the Olympics. It was for the article I wrote, with Isaac in tow, for Mana magazine about the beach sale at Awaroa. Piri’s reply was immediate, generous and friendly. He made me feel like I belonged in a way that was less fraught than my immediate whānau. I wanted to print out the email and get it framed.
I decide to go to his tangi – to go back to Pōrangahau. I know that I will want to write it all down and I’m pretending that I won’t. I can’t help myself or seem to be stopped.
I have visions of helping in the kitchen, which is equally absurd, but fits with my tendency to try to sneak in through the back door instead of being welcomed through the waharoa, to dodge the hongi line because I’ve had a ciggie. And I’m cack-handed in a kitchen these days, a side-effect of being a bit homeless. The ghost of Polly would slap me around the back of the head because I forget the little things, like putting up my hair so I sweat less and don’t get incriminating black strands in the food.
On the way to the tangi I am enjoying being one of the people on the bus. The feeling kicks in for me just before Tokoroa, even though I’m seated beside a young man in white trainers, white socks, white shorts and a white hoodie who is watching white fascist protestors in America on a live stream. I decide I am seated next to a potential terrorist not a cricket player and change seats after Tokoroa, where I go to McDonald’s because there is no Burger King that I can see.
We stop again in Taupō and I watch a Māori mum with three kids wrangle them so she can use the loo. She tells Dillinger to watch his younger brother. This detail, his gangster name, is as delicious to me as the bizarre architectural pavlova of the old Putāruru post office we passed on the bus. I take a photo of a gangsta in a hoodie and feel like a camera instead of a person, a human recording-machine, but with every detail begging to be taken in. I am a terrible photographer. I can’t make the magic puncture the screen like Ans Westra.
The bus sighs when it lets us down in Napier and I walk into the centre of town, where the surreal little square plays a chiming version of ‘Putting on the Ritz’. I wonder if the music is in my head at first, but Napier is famous for Art Deco and I try not to hold this against it. I go to the gorgeous scalloped pink soundshell and walk across the perfect lawn to take a selfie with the statue of my tuakana, Pania of the Reef. I look very pale in the photo so I hide this by overstating it with a noir filter when I post it online. The question of whether I am white-passing or not has started to plague me, because before I met my father there was no question whether I looked different from Mum, Jim and Gwen.
I find a Burger King and eat my Whopper Jr and cheeseburger stunner meal in peace. I order the same thing at Burger Kings all over New Zealand. It’s the only habit I have that passes for a routine as I drift semi-homeless. I am drifting to Piri’s tangi.
I find a cheap and nasty backpackers’ in a decaying Deco beauty because my travel budget is almost non-existent. On the balcony, looking over the pretty, manicured streets of Napier, a little Indian boy who lives at the backpackers’ tells me he is going to be a doctor one day. I tell him my son is at medical school and his surprise is so cute I ring Boy to tell him. I don’t realise I’m being listened to but afterwards, an older woman and her young companion call me over to sit with them. I am drinking good Cuban rum and they say they didn’t realise I was a native until they heard me using Māori words on the phone. She says that I look too Italian. They assumed I was just a backpacker.
I’m not enjoying their company but the young one, who has snaky eyes and hips and is called Wyatt, after the cowboy, can get me some weed. While he goes and does this the older woman says there are two things she doesn’t talk about: politics and Maoris. As if they aren’t the same thing. I realise too late that I’m socialising with a racist.
Since breaking up with Ben, I have become unpredictable around racists. I used to tolerate drunk white people saying racist dirt to me but now that I imagine I’m damaged by Ben, instead of my own inaction, there comes a point in the evening with these random stand-ins, after I’ve drunk enough to untie my tongue, when I’ll tell them they need their white head cut off because they are a c***.
And some Pākehā laugh then, and some – like this woman, this beaten down, hurt, mean Pākehā woman – narrow their already-vicious eyes and tell me I don’t look Māori enough to be defending my own corner, that I look too much like Amy Winehouse to be the real Mowree she has the bald nerve to complain to me about. She says we are taking the houses, f***ing up the backpackers’ with our shifty ways, that we are not grateful enough. Blah blah blah. She says the local iwi has all the rentals, the housing crisis is their fault – stupid bloody Maoris – and so on. She tells me she lives at the backpackers’ with reduced rent because it is her job to keep the Maoris out. Calling me over to join her on the balcony makes a different kind of sense then.
All of what she says is deeply f***ing wrong and full of malice. And all of it is impossible to argue with. I often think of colonisation as this abstract discourse, because I define myself through Paul’s early absence, but it is in our pores.
I tell her it is our f***ing land and stalk off to bed, but when I get to the feared shared bunk room there are two hulking, snoring Germans in it and no mattress on my bunk. I take photos of the sleeping Germans like it’s a crime scene and lurch back out into the main lounge of the faded Deco lobby. I’ve just managed to find the candy land of Napier charming but now I think, F*** Art Deco. The woman and her unlikely companion Wyatt woo me back over to the balcony, which is sort of nice of them since I have called them white c***s – but really, they are hustlers.
I find myself giving her the rest of the good Cuban rum I bought to survive the communal sleeping arrangements. I don’t know where either of these impulses comes from – to give shit away to people when I am pissed off with them and to shout about my land – but it’s a stolen place; it lurches from hurt to hurt.
I suspect the woman also suffers from a hurt more specific than all her racist venom and I ask if any of her kids are Māori. Two of them, she replies. She tells me she can’t figure out if she likes me or hates me. Join the club, I think. But we have this foul staring contest too, and over the next few days I can’t get rid of what was in her eyes.
Really this poisonous feeling has more to do with waking up after an hour and a half of sleep with a stinking hangover and missing my very early bus, carrying my big black sports bag as I run with the booze smell coming from me everywhere at once. Bus missed, I lie in the quaint square with its fountain and pretend to be homeless using my bag as a pillow and ‘Putting on the Ritz’ comes chiming on again because Art Deco is evil.
I have breakfast in McDonald’s and throw it up later as I try to hitch out of Napier, then give up to lie behind a bush near the motorway. I realise my hangover is making me overly dramatic and catch a taxi back to the bus stop. I suck at hitching because I’m better at giving stuff away than asking for something for free. I can’t manage to stick out my thumb and eyeball the traffic. F*** tourism, f*** Art Deco, f*** everything – especially asking a stranger for help.
When I study the photo of the sleeping Germans on my phone, I realise what happened to my mattress – that greedy, oblivious tourist used it to double up his own bed.
At the bus shelter I make a note of the other potential passengers. News of the plague has started to spread out of China and I wonder who is a tourist and who is slumming it in fugly middle-class sneakers and who is used to catching the bus. The answer to the latter is the Māori around me, who all either seem to know one another or are about to know who their relations are.
I make it to Waipukurau, forty kilometres inland from Pōrangahau, in a tenuous state. I’m still carrying the woman’s hate with me as well as my unsightly hangover and I am close to giving up on getting to Pōrangahau, which, despite being geographically isolated, is not the end of a flat earth. I’m so anxious about hitching that I’m wilfully useless: I refuse to charge my phone to make things easier for myself and for Gina, who is expecting me in the middle of a massive tangi while she does shifts in the shop over the deep fryer.
The tangi is attended by the governor-general, other dignitaries and Jacinda Ardern, but not me. Instead, I eye the crossbars that bisect the park benches on the main drag of Waipukurau. The bars are acts of civic hostility that kick the homeless when they are already down. The bars mean no one can sleep on the benches and be seen. The Māori who are homeless on their own whenua. I think of that woman again and what she said about the Maoris; our vulnerability is contagious and something we are blamed for, when colonisation, that terrible heavy abstraction, is best revealed by things like that park bench. These small-minded acts of council cruelty that make it impossible for Māori to find a place not even to thrive, but just to survive another day after a decent sleep.
I walk in the hot air and heavy sun out to the end of Waipukurau and stick out my thumb. No one stops; I don’t blame them. Even with my theatre degree I fail to impress them with my need. I turn around and start back to the town centre with the sports bag, which has started to feel like a boulder. A bright yellow hatchback pulls over, and a well-dressed woman in black asks if she can help. She’s just come back from the tangi and confirms that I’ve missed it in my wretched state. I lie on a park bench without a bar through the middle, because it’s not on the main street, and pretend to be homeless again but eventually Gina picks me up, and I’m the kids’ weird auntie chatting nonsense in the passenger seat of the seven-seater. This is why the woman hates us so much: we still know how to look after one another.
Gina takes me to her place to have a shower and change and then to the marquee where all Piri’s whānau are winding down after burying their father, brother and uncle. I sit with the niece who led the haka in the matrilineal tradition Piri massaged back into the area and she is the one who tells me Riria and Nicola, our tīpuna, were a love story.
People start to laugh and sing and dance. After all the sadness there is so much good feeling the tent bulges with it.
I take photo after photo I will never share. Gina introduces me as her sister-in-law, and I explain that Polly, Nicola and Riria’s daughter, is my connection to the place, although Gina is the reason I have a backstage pass.
In the morning, Gina’s partner, my less-reluctant cousin, makes a loud speech that seems partly for my benefit about how the real work at a tangi is done by the people cleaning up, and I don’t take the hint and go back to the queen bed Gina has given me and eat one exquisite local golden peach after another and wonder what I can write about being here. The peaches are so good I decide to write about them. There is also the harder issue of deciding what I will have to leave out and what I can put in. I decide to leave out the koro who told me he was kicked out of the kaumātua flats for his crack parties because this detail is riper than the peaches. I add it to the list of things Pākehā must not know about us.
I wonder if I can include sitting beside Piri’s brother, who was telling me that Piri was the person people went to if they didn’t know what to do. He asks me if I believe in kēhua and mākutu and wonders if it was really his brother’s time; the last thing Piri was working on before he died was a speech for Jacinda to make at Waitangi.
The bourbon and the deepness of the brother’s conversation make me reel; I am too hungover and messy to be partying again. I walk over the bridge into the village in the dark by myself. I always feel safe walking alone at night – it’s no different here.
The urupā where Piri lies freshly covered with his relatives is twinkling with fairy lights. It reminds me of the rainbow phosphorescence I saw once in the Sounds, the place all these Sciascia of Pōrangahau whakapapa to through Riria, like me. One grave is sparklier than a drag costume and I am lucky my phone is dead because what idiot takes photos of an urupā in the dark? I would just be asking for trouble again from the dead, who deserve their privacy, which is partly why we bury them.
Although, our Ngāti Kuia kōiwi used to be trussed up in trees in the Sounds before Christianity changed how we do tangi, turning them from an eternal haul to a three-day event like the Resurrection. I read in a Treaty claim that our bones were later taken to the mountains near Nelson, where there were two lakes bluer than the sky reflecting in them. The bones were taken to the wai to be chanted over and scraped. One lake was for the wāhine and the other was for the men. The dead need privacy but they also need to be clean.
The sky above the fairy lights twinkling in the urupā is unbearably clear and crisp with stars. The constellations Nicola Sciascia taught to his children from the lighthouse and that Jim gave to me.
I manage to leave Pōrangahau with ease. Gina is going to Tokoroa to visit her father and there is a mix-up between them on the phone about what day to come. He says, Aww, not on a Friday.
But as a staunch Rātana he means that his eldest granddaughter shouldn’t be getting her hair cut on a Friday when we drop her off in Waipukurau on the way. Driving there we pass the sign for the longest place name in the world, and Gina’s children know it so well one of them is known to sing it in her sleep. They chant it to me in the seven-seater: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, which describes the hill above Pōrangahau where Tamatea, their Ngāti Kere tipuna with the big knees who slid around and climbed summits, plays the nose flute, the kōauau, for his dead brother. These girls speak their own tongue with such rhythmic confidence because of Piri and the mahi he did to give ourselves back to us. It seems a more important and profound act by their uncle than when he made Barack Obama and Prince Charles feel so welcome. But I will never be a visiting dignitary: I will feel like I have truly arrived only when I can stick out my thumb to beg for a lift.
And I want to tell the bitter, mean woman at the backpackers’ that there is nothing here without us – there is no here without us – but instead I leave a one-star review and complain that there was not even a mattress to sleep on. I don’t mention the woman for the sake of the little boy who wants to be a doctor. His parents managed the place and maybe she was lying about doing their dirty work. Tauiwi are not responsible for the finality of her statement about politics and Māori. It was a poisonous, Pākehā sentiment and I will not carry it inside me when I can instead billow like a tent with all my good feeling for us.
I tell Gina’s girls in the backseat that Kim Kardashian is our cousin because her mother is a McGregor, like Riria Sciascia, our tipuna. Finally, a receptive audience.
Extracted with permission from Whaea Blue, by Talia Marshall (Te Herenga Waka University Press).
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