There are three books I have wolfed down in one sitting over the last two years. Colleen Maria Lenihan’s gorgeous and sad debut Kōhine, Noelle McCarthy’s memoir Grand about becoming her mother and then unbecoming her, and now Hine Toa, a staunch yet gentle self-portrait by living legend Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa/Tūhoe/Ngāpuhi/Waikato).
I wonder if she would baulk at being called a legend, because Hine Toa is full of humility, especially in the way she gives the wāhine who raised her their due, even when she was called a know-it-all and a show off with a posh voice. Even when she was running away, it was often back to her kuia, trying to escape Frank, the sober control freak she refused to call her father, and who subjected her to violent abuse in a Rotorua neighbourhood full of Pākehā. She hints that his abuse may have been more than just beatings and psychological warfare. Ngāhuia wanted to be with her kuia Hera and her mother Paparoa in the belching fairyland of Ōhinemutu. A place where performing being Māori was second nature to all her relatives and they still managed to lead authentic lives staring into its magic colour-shifting pools or using the ‘ordinary’ ones for cooking and washing the dishes.
Now Ngāhuia is the kuia and grandmother and I suspect she would own that refusing to be anything other than herself, a Māori lesbian, has required courage and tenacity. Ngāhuia’s advice to others is to never give up, something said to her as a teenager and which became her motto during a hockey game as she floundered in a mushy paddock. Auntie Bonnie, the goalie shouts, ‘Huia! Never give up! Keep going, my girl! Never give up! It is pertinent advice as we lift the scab off how racist this country is. The hot red cells underneath it that appear as racist comments on social media every time there is a positive story about Māori, like the recent article where Indira Stewart profiled Jenny-May Clarkson receiving her moko kauae and hundreds of people demanded to know why this was news? The answer is their reaction, their who cares? I wanted to type underneath: YOU DO!
But I need to conserve my energy for the civil war that is coming if the Treaty Principles Bill makes it past its first reading and the thumb in a suit we have posing as a prime minister unleashes the taniwha that will consume him.
Hine Toa tells the transformation from a determined kōtiro into an activist and academic. Ngāhuia reminds the reader that Nga Tamatoa, the Auckland university activist group was aided by Pākehā, but their allyship was more than performative. My favourite scene from the documentary Te Matakite o Aotearoa: The Māori Land March is when there is a break in the hikoi and Pākehā give the kuia mirimiri as they chuckle at being pampered by earnest whiteys.
And I take heart in the fact that anyone who labels a moko kauae as a WINZ barcode must have a bitter, scared, shitty life, and have also risked cursing themselves for eternity. Change is painful, reading the comments is painful. But this mamae is necessary if we are going to grow. At least we can no longer be smug about our race relations being the best in the world compared to countries like the US and Australia—the wound is finally getting some air before it can heal. And as much as I cleave to their catch-cry Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, the fight without end; really I would like the struggle to cease. And despite its call for action, stories like Ngahuia’s also act as a balm. They remind us that the tīpuna have been through worse to get us this far.
I suppose it’s no coincidence that two of the titles I devoured are memoirs. Memoir is in and I have heard loud whispers that the personal essay is dead. Thank God. I’ve been labelled an essayist and have spent the last three years writing a book — a monstrous hybrid of genres posing as a memoir that I hope will free me from this label. I’m more interested in house interiors than issues. But also, it has been a form that has allowed me to explore aspects of being Māori, to theorise about us. Whereas, Ngāhuia has just lived being Māori, there is no anxious need to prove how Māori she is. She just is.
Ngāhuia also has an extraordinary memory, so the form suits her, and her gift for describing every house or room she has entered and what people were wearing. Here she describes the catholic school uniform which made her feel special during a brief stint in Haitaitai when Paparoa, who she calls “Mummy”, was sick: “Our uniforms were exquisite – and prohibitively expensive. I arrived in summer, so my auntie and uncle provided the pale-taupe silk blouse with a large round collar under a cobalt-blue linen pinafore dress, pale Panama hat and brown Roman sandals.”
Ngāhuia has a taste for fancy things and elegant interiors and maybe some readers will be surprised by how middle class some of her relatives were. Including parts of the whānau who gave her up in a whangai deal brokered by two weeping kuia.
Watching Ngāhuia on a Auckland Women’s Centre zoom interview conducted by Stacey Morrison I could see and hear how carefully Ngahuia measures her words. The long patrician vowels that she was teased for as a child, and her BBC style enunciation reminds me of other Māori elders I have heard speak and who are as careful with their English as they are with their reo. It is shameful that the video only has 115 views on YouTube when the media reports every cynical, stupid thing David Seymour says.He whistles and the kurī form a pack around him.
And despite the rich descriptive details in Hine Toa, she does not waste words. Ngāhuia possesses the deft touch of a natural poet, someone is described as wearing “light forgetful clothes” and she is ruthless regarding her own “fly-shit freckles”. An adolescent chapter begins, “By this time, I had tasted an olive.” What perfect economy, matched with an eye that has been further refined by the discipline of art history.
But there is also a wild child inside her. Her compulsion to escape wasn’t just about running away, she also sought out adventure. This bites her on the arse when she is thirteen and escapes with a friend who calls her Huey to a shady hotel so the friend can fuck her older man. A kindly decent tane, a Whitireia, a surname familiar to me from the Mormon church, offers Ngāhuia refuge in his room. He leaves her with a stack of magazines and warns her not to venture out into the halls. But after reading everything she can’t resist and is violently sexually assaulted by five men, which she manages to stop by bashing one of them in the head with a clock, a scene that amazed and appalled me.
The man returns and after seeing the state of her, and setting her up for a wash, he takes the shocked, less bloody, bruised teenager to what sounds like a brothel. Inside, she ends up sharing a bed with Carol, whose breasts astound her. Carol notices and so Ngāhuia has her first really intense sexual experience with an older Pākehā woman. The modern world would probably demand she receive years and years of trauma therapy but she seems to quickly recover, as people had to back then. I tried to figure out what the source of her resilience was, aside from her natural toughness. I realised it was the man who helped. She has said that all it takes to help a young person is one invested and trusted figure. Like her kuia Hera, who loved everything her moko said and did.
And even though coming to terms with her sexuality was not easy there were plenty of whānau examples of living a queer life under the radar, aside from the flashy whakawahine Regina who had to leave for the bright lights of a bigger city. Her beloved aunties of Maketū set a discrete yet brazen example, distant cousins who share a white embroidered bed for decades. Auntie Wiha and her flagons of beer, wearing trousers on the weekend at home and keeping a pleated skirt in the car for mahi. It’s also refreshing that Ngāhuia describes Māori partying with no problems, that we can get on it without Jake the Muss losing his shit.
Another incident of disrupting stereotypes comes when Nga Tamatoa planned to stage a protest at the sanitised version of a concert party that was about to leave for New York. They felt the paid seals had supplicated to Pākehā demands that everyone in the group be good looking and skinny, when traditionally the stars of kapa haka came in all shapes and sizes and charisma was not dependent on how you look. Some of the radicals, which included Merata Mita realised too late that they would be taking the piss out of their relations and they decide to stage the protest at an airport, wary of the ‘silent bullets’ their cousins could toss as stink eye if they tried to have a go at them on the Māori soil of the marae atea.
Fortunately, they come out of their ill-judged encounter unscathed and are eventually forgiven during awkward reunions. I remembered that the other time I have heard curses referred to as silent bullets was during Vincent Ward’s Rain of the Children. Rena Owen plays Puhi, the Tūhoe woman who married one of Rua Kēnana’s sons and was almost ghosted by her own whānau outside her role as a kaikaranga because of the belief that she had cursed herself for the crime of flashing her bum on the atea, and lost most of her many babies as a result. Ngāhuia’s retelling of the prank reminds us to be careful when judging the choices other Māori make. Their talent was about to take them to New York, and we should take it easy when begrudging our own when it comes to having big dreams and being a success. It is not their fault they were picked out by a Pākehā gaze.
Ngāhuia falls under the gaze of apex predator Germaine Greer when she is sent to interview her by the student rag. She is so flustered the remnants of the steak in red wine sauce she had been looking forward to as a poor student falls into her lap. Their exchange was heavily censored.
Despite not being included in the sodomy laws that criminalised being gay until 1986, it was still dangerous to be a dyke, an attempt in dressing like a boy to pick up girls sees our heroine having to shapeshift back into a girl at a dance, picking a random boy to dance with and they have unsatisfactory sex. It seems doubly cruel that it left her hapū, and the mamae and guilt she experiences, isolated as a student back in Auckland, when she gives up her baby boy named after magic and war. She is cryptic in the acknowledgments about her son but admits to having a wonderful relationship with his daughter, and Hine Toa is dedicated to her.
Even as a grandmother Ngāhuia is sexy as fuck. I pored over the glossy photographs that make up the middle of the book because back in the day she was hot stuff. Watching her korero with Stacey I loved the dramatic flashes of her compassionate eyes and the their quiet intensity when she listens. I sense some resistance from her in the queering of the discourse, when these movements have been siloed in the past. She still favours the word Lesbian to describe herself over queer. Moving between Nga Tamatoa and the women’s movement and the militant demands of the Gay Liberation Front required code switching, and changes of costume. Now we house these movements all together, which is fine, but the rainbow flag and its demand for social justice was partly founded by an exclusive purple sect.
Lesbianism isn’t about not wanting cock, it’s about being hungry for cunt. It’s a sexuality that has been defined by others by what it omits, rather than what it craves. This is why Ngāhuia is insistent on the label. She relishes saying the word lesbian out loud and being with her own kind. I think people forget that having something as antique as ‘genital preferences’ could get you killed. She is one of the elders and it is criminal in Te Ao Māori not to listen to them or even worse, talk over the top of them. The church needs be as busy and broad as the flag and hold a candle for all the missing tane and whakawahine worldwide who died of AIDS.
I told one of the lesbians who helped raise me that I was reviewing Hine Toa and asked her if she had any titbits about her that I could use. She replied that seeing Ngāhuia stride across the Wellington campus in her leather jacket did more for her than the dry women’s studies class ever could. She has been a legend for many years.
Ngāhuia confesses to being a hopeless weaver, same sis same. I attended a workshop once where I made a kete that resembled Wilson, from the movie Castaway. I still have it because it does the mammoth task of keeping me humble, plus it cracks me up. And even though the weaving of words has become something of a cliché in Māori writing, it’s because it contains the silky muka of the truth. Ngāhuia comes from a whānau of accomplished weavers and performers. But it was meeting Ngāpera Hopa, the first Māori woman to receive her PhD that helped her see she had a place in constructing the tukutuku panels of our collective being, with all its distinct iwi and hapū differences.
Now is the time to come together in one wharenui and develop strategies and fight the common enemy, even when the old allies have morphed into foe like cuzzie Shane Jones, who seems drunk on power and whakahihi with it too. He used to be one of the protestors, and it’s hard to know if he is a victim of late-stage capitalism or his own sleepy eye and gift for florid rhetoric. When I’m feeling generous, I wonder if Matua Winston and his lieutenant are rarking us up on purpose, to see how high the taniwha will rear its ugly beautiful head. Like Ngāhuia they were both raised Māori, steeped in whānau lore and are adept at switching codes.
Ngāhuia is aware of her elite status as an academic, she worked bloody hard to get there, but now she is back home in Rotorua where locals are complaining that the emergency housing is turning the town into a centre for poverty tourism. The Rotvegas that the state is paying for and creating a visible transient underclass in its wake. Mums having to chase toddlers across carparks over and over again and cram them into rooms with just a microwave for cooking. The piggy in the middle getting bigger and bigger as successive governments toss our housing crisis between them. Ngāhuia doesn’t look away from the hine, hapū and begging for money outside the pie shop, at the ravages of racist policy lit up with motel lights. She knows that tane are sleeping in parks and acknowledges the stark difference between this and the Māori conference culture where business and academic elites dine on creamed pāua vol-au-vents. It’s the day before my benefit hits my account, and I’m hungry, and God, they sound delicious.
This is not the town she remembers, but colonisation had already disturbed Māori social hierarchies when Ngāhuia was a kōtiro, born at the tail end of the forties. The bloodlines divided into tuakana and teina to avoid quarrels over land rights because people knew their place. Paparoa was an expert in silver service tikanga, she knew how to fold a napkin and which fork to use because she was used to serving Pākehā in their hotels.
I have been inside St Faith’s, the Anglican church across from the whare whakairo at Ōhinemutu. It is the same place Hera and Paparoa took Ngāhuia to get blessed when develops the ability to know when someone was hapū, or see queasy colours hovering around the sick. I was there to pray to the frosted Māori Jesus window that she doesn’t mention, I was trying to undo a badness I brought into my life in a failed attempt to save a broken crackhead. And it worked, although I also tend to know someone is hapū before they tell me.
Maybe because our journey is like a mirror image and I want to touch her hand, walking over the lake and through the glass. I was raised in the purple sect in the 1980s and found my Maoritanga and place on my whenua as I got older, I can count on one hand how many Māori lesbians there were in Wellington. I only loved Violet, and her green Nāti eyes, playing femme for a night in fishnet stockings before a sort of brawl broke out during Womack and Womack’s “Footsteps” at a Brooklyn LESBIAN ONLY dance in my primary school hall. Violet was part of Mum’s crew, and they had made the mistake of trying to bring in a white wahine who had got knocked up and moved to a housetruck in Takaka, double sins.
One Māori dyke had the gall to tell my Pākehā mother that I would be better off with them. Mum had been through enough mamae having me, plus the documented fallout from the brawl. Lesbians document everything. I bet both times Mum just ducked and managed to light up a Winfield Red in the shade, a good former Mormon girl, quietly taking all the blame.
Ngāhuia is proof it is possible to walk through two worlds with grace, followed by an invisible tuatara extracting its utu on the rapists. Maybe her mind is like a razor because the hands that first treasured her as a baby were so soft. Her koro turning the globe so she could choose a spot on the map.
And maybe the struggle will never end, but it would be nice to just purr, like all the ngerū curled at her back, a hine reading, instead of these wāhine lifting their piupiu and flashing their eyes; the steam, rising like a boiling jug, is the sound of their endless roar and scream.
Talia’s review concludes our week-long coverage of the new memoir Hine Toa: A story of bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. Monday: in an extract from her memoir, she recalls two violent incidents (in 1967 and 1971) when being lesbian in Aotearoa put her life in danger. Tuesday: an interview with the author, who tells Dale Husband, “Somehow, as a people, we’ve lost our vision. I’m disgusted at the investment of my own iwi in shopping malls and a luxury spa, when we have a housing crisis.” Wednesday: an interview with Sue Kedgley, her contemporary at Auckland University, who remembers, “She was the first woman in New Zealand to stand up and say she was lesbian, and be proud of it.”
