Tina Makereti: Connecting with our better selves

Tina Makereti, writer and creative writing teacher, has a new novel out this month called The Mires. In this kōrero with Dale, she talks about reconnecting with her Māori whānau, and why words and stories have always played a vital part in her life. 

 

Kia ora, Tina. I usually start with names, but first, since you’re a writer, I want to ask, have you got a favourite spot where you like to write?

No. I try not to be too bothered about that because it’s good to be flexible. If you get too precious about it, you create barriers. I should probably write at my desk more, but I tend to do it on the couch, in bed, at a café. I’ll do it anywhere.

So can you tell us your names and roll through how you got to carry them?

My full name is Tina Robyn Makereti Dahlberg. I go by Tina Makereti, because Makereti was my grandmother. I didn’t get a lot of time with my grandmother. She died in her early 60s. But she was very important to me, and when I became a writer, and thought about what name I wanted to go by, I wasn’t comfortable using Dahlberg, my Pākehā father’s name, as my public name, for various reasons. I felt that carrying my grandmother’s name would be a way of honouring her, and also keeping myself on the right kaupapa.

My other middle name, Robyn, is my aunty’s name, my dad’s sister.

Relationships with nanas can be very precious, even if sometimes they’re not long. Talk with us about what she meant to you?

My parents broke up when I was two, and my father took me and my sister away from our whānau. I didn’t come back to my whānau until I was 16. I had no idea I even had a grandmother. I hadn’t been told anything about my whānau, other than some less than positive stories about my mother.

So, when I discovered my grandmother, it was like this whole world opened up. I’d been brought up in a Pākehā setting, and I had no idea what it was to be Māori. My sister was the first to make contact with our mother. And sometime during my final year of high school, we went home to Feilding and here was my kuia and my uncles and aunties and this big warm brown whānau. It was quite something.

Everyone knew my kuia as Aunty Margaret. She was that aunty that looked after the marae, that looked after everybody. She did the mahi of supporting people and doing the karanga and looking after the kitchen, all of that stuff. It was incredible to have this figure in my life, to show me what te ao Māori was about and who was just so full of aroha.

I only had four years with her. I was 20 or 21 when she passed. In a way, my story is the story of what colonisation does to us. You get your culture taken away, and then you get it back. But you feel a little bit cheated as well, because with the health issues of our people, we don’t have as much time as we want and as much immersion in our culture. We don’t get to experience the fullness of that.

You mentioned that your nana was pivotal on the marae. Where is your marae, Tina?

In Feilding. Nan was whāngai’d into the Durie family. Mason and Eddie Durie are her nephews. So she grew up with that whānau at Aorangi in Feilding. When I knew her, she lived next to Aorangi marae, a couple of paddocks over! So she would go over there and do the mahi on the marae and, you know, we’d go over there too back in the day.

But her own marae were Poukura at Lake Taupō and Te Hiiri at Kākāriki. My other marae, through my grandfather, is Waikawa in Picton, as well as Kātere ki te Moana and Parihaka in Taranaki.

Isn’t it fantastic that even though you didn’t realise it, you have connections to all these proud marae across the country? Did you feel the loss of those years when you were kept away from your whānau?

Yeah, I think it’s inside many of us — we feel the loss, we feel the whakamā. And it’s been a really long journey for me to find comfort.

It’s very clear to me that one of the big differences between Pākehā and Māori is that Māori people live within Pākehā spaces, but Pākeha generally don’t live within Māori spaces. That’s part of the reason for the disregard and misunderstanding that occurs from many Pākehā towards Māori.

In my own Pākehā upbringing, I’d never come across any of these places, or these ways of being. But it’s different now with my own husband, my stepfather, and my brother-in-law who do spend time in te ao Māori. They don’t have much choice because of who their wahine are! Change within te ao Pākehā is possible. Not common, but possible.

So there was that. But in coming home, there was also the feeling of my own inadequacy. I know my sister experienced the same thing. So many of us feel this way when we are estranged from our home places.

But whānau were always telling us: “Oh, you’re one of us.” I used to go to Waikawa and surreptitiously wander around. I knew it was my place, but I was too whakamā to go to the marae. I would go up to the urupā with my kids and say: “Those are our tūpuna,” but I was too scared to go to the marae.

Then one day, a kuia saw me and asked who I was, and I told her. And she goes: “You’re one of ours. Come down to the marae for kai.” She took me, and there was a tangi happening for one of my Keenan whānau. She took me straight in and we went into the kitchen, and I was looking at everyone and thinking: “They look familiar.” And they were looking at me thinking I looked familiar, and everybody was like: “Of course we know you. How’s your mum?”

So the whakamā feeling of loss is something that comes from within you. But the people around the home places, they’re always happy to see your face.

It’s that old saying: You might not know your whakapapa, but your whakapapa knows you. Isn’t that lovely?

Exactly. Yeah, I’m very lucky. I do feel I have absolute riches in terms of my whakapapa.

You’re repaying it, in a way, by your stories and the way that you write. Life’s gone full circle, and you’re now back into the frame. You’re known for words, Tina. Were you writing before this reconnection, or did the reconnection encourage you to delve deeper into the storytelling?

I was definitely writing before that. I was one of those kids who was quite withdrawn and introverted. Words were something that saved me. I loved stories, because stories took me outside of a situation that wasn’t happy for me. Childhood wasn’t a comfortable place for me to be. I found my way through imagination to a sense of self that was outside of the so-called real world in front of me. And when I reconnected with te ao Māori and my whānau, that’s when some of the pieces fell into place.

But when I did come to writing as an adult, all of those things connected. The love of stories and of words, as a way to find myself and keep myself safe when I was a kid, became a more sophisticated version as an adult. It just makes sense to me that the world is full of big, epic stories. Epic things happen to people, like losing your family and finding them again. It’s like a fairy tale, and in fairy tales, awful things happen to kids, but then you get a happy ending.

My happy ending was reconnecting with my whānau and finding that I had this incredibly rich culture to draw from, and my writing has been a case of teasing out that story. What does it mean to be Māori? What does it mean to be unsure of yourself and to be part of te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā, and to speak to both of those worlds? What does it mean to be speaking to the imaginary world or the spiritual world or te kore and te pō, the things in the darkness as well as in te ao marama?

Who would you say encouraged you to be a storyteller?

I feel that I’ve been really lucky. I’ve had some amazing teachers. And in a way I still carry them around with me. I had the encouragement of winning a creative writing prize in high school, and I won an English prize too. But I was still dealing with the stuff that had happened in my childhood, and I wasn’t confident.

I had amazing teachers at university. I had Mason Durie and Robert Jahnke, and they were incredible. Mason would come into class and tell us about what was happening politically in te ao Māori. Robert Jahnke was the head of Māori visual arts at Massey University, and I got to take his classes in the early years. My understanding of the universe from a Māori perspective was formed by Bob’s teaching of art. Those understandings of te kore, te pō, te ao marama, the mythical world, how that’s represented visually in our carving and how our different artforms work, is something that I still think of all the time and carry in my writing as well.

Then I had my children, and I had a bad relationship, and I had to figure out what I was going to do with my life. When you go through something that’s quite devastating, and you come out of it, and you’ve survived, you have a moment where you think: “If I could do anything in the world, what would it be?”

For me, that was to pursue writing. If I hadn’t gone through that dark time, I might have just gone along quite happily — or unhappily. Sometimes the dark things that happen to us are their own form of encouragement.

I took some writing courses at Massey University with Ingrid Horrocks. She was the first writing teacher to say: “You’ve got something.” And sometimes that’s all you need. I took that course, wondering if I had anything, whether I was barking up the wrong tree, whether I should spend my time doing this as a single parent.

I applied for the master’s programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters, where I now teach. And I got in, which was probably the biggest single encouragement I had, because I knew it was a competitive course. I had Bill Manhire as a teacher, and David Geary, who’s an excellent Māori writer who now lives in British Columbia.

Bill is a very quiet man, and just having his quiet tautoko was incredible encouragement. A couple of times, I’d tell him that I was worried about something, and he would just say: “You’ll be fine.” And I would think: “If Bill Manhire thinks I’m going to be fine, then I’m going to be fine.” And from there, once you get to that place, you have peers, you have mates in class and mates in publishing who encourage you, and that keeps you going.

I was interested that you took on Indigenous literature and colonisation for your PhD. That’s a pretty heavy kaupapa, isn’t it? I wonder what that area of study unravelled for you.

When I got to that level, I was surprised at how little scholarship there was. This is about 2009 or 2010. When I’d finished studying in the mid-1990s, Māori literature was looking really good. Things were humming along. And when I came back 15 years later, I thought: “Oh, it hasn’t changed that much.” I think I had imagined that Māori literature would have grown as a field, but it hadn’t. There wasn’t a lot of scholarship being done in Aotearoa. It was being done in Europe and America.

So that was pretty eye opening. I think it’s really flourished since then, but at that time there was very little to look at and to go by, in terms of our own people writing about our literature. I went in looking for a way of writing my own novel about our stories that had been misrepresented or had had false mythologies created around them. That’s when I wrote Where the Rekohu Bone Sings.

So I was looking at the stories we’ve been told or that we’ve been brought up with around who Moriori are, and what had happened to them. We all know those myths that are thrown about, about what Māori did to Moriori. But what happened to the Moriori happened after European contact, and European contact facilitated it. It happened between specific Taranaki tribes and Moriori, not Māori imposing themselves as a people on Moriori.

One myth was that Moriori were the tangata whenua of the main islands of Aotearoa, but they are tangata whenua of Rēkohu, the Chatham Islands. I grew up with these myths, particularly coming from a Pākehā family.

The reason I went to Rēkohu was that my youngest daughter was given a name that my mother said was from our Moriori tūpuna. I went looking for that story, but when I did the whakapapa and the hokopapa (Moriori for whakapapa), I didn’t find that ancestral connection. But I did find out more about my ancestral connection to the Taranaki peoples who’d imposed themselves on Rēkohu. This is not to say that the Moriori connection doesn’t exist. Lots of hūnau (whānau) lost their connections to their hokopapa due to the invasion and what happened afterwards. I think we’ll probably never know for sure.

So I do have some ancestral involvement in the story, but at the time, I didn’t know what it was — and I chose to privilege the Moriori experience of that history because it was the most maligned, and the one that we’d heard the most false stories about.

And I tried to also give much more context to what my Taranaki tūpuna were doing and what they were experiencing and how that was a result of guns and ships and trade, and how tribal warfare had been warped by the introduction of those things.

A beautiful thing about Indigenous literatures is that, quite often when we go into these traumatic stories and retell these histories, there’s a flourishing of creativity as a result. I wrote my own story, but I also looked at other people who were writing similar things, and often they would end with people recreating their cultures, people reconnecting with their cultures, but also making them into something new.

We tend to have a perception that novelists sit there and dream things up in their head. But a lot of historical research goes in behind the scenes to develop story lines, and you’ve got this artistic side to yourself, too. It’s not like words are your only tools of trade. When you’re developing a story line, how important is research to your work?

You read everything you can get your hands on, but you walk the land as well. Maybe the artistic background helps with paying attention. I sometimes say to my students, it’s not just reading books, it’s reading the world. You might be just looking at the way the land sits, the way it’s been transformed. What’s happening? What is different from when you were a kid? That’s when the artistic training is helpful. If you’re making a film, or perhaps a piece of theatre, you can present things to the audience visually, and they can see it in action. But with writing, you have to take the whole world and put it into language.

I’m really pleased that you touched on walking the land. I sometimes wonder what it is about this country that holds us here, because many people are upping sticks and going to Aussie. What does the land mean to you? And how much strength do you derive from it?

When I was younger, I really underestimated ties to the land, but now I couldn’t live elsewhere. The land evokes our sense of the world and ourselves, and I wouldn’t be at peace living in another country. I live in Ōtautahi now, and this is not my home place, but I can still go to a swamp or walk along the river and see all the different native trees and plants, and it gives me a sense of peace to see the awa.

I had cancer a couple of years ago, and I would listen to a podcast while I walked on the beach, where I wrote The Mires, actually. I was thinking about The Mires, I was thinking about how to be well, I was walking the beach listening to this podcast, and the person was talking about the way being in nature affects us through something called fractals. When you look at water or when you look at a forest, the shapes that you see moving through nature are fractals, like patterns, and they’re good for your wellbeing.

Our people have long known that nature is important to our wellbeing, that our places are important to our wellbeing. But now we also have these western science ways of understanding it, which explain the way that you feel good when you look at the water, or when you look at the trees and the land.

But in terms of writing, I’ve gone to places such as Rēkohu, where if you can just be still enough, if you can just watch, if you can just listen, the land will tell you its stories.

By the same token, when I was writing The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke, there’s a lot of stuff I couldn’t have known until I went to London and looked at the way the buildings are. You can still see so much of what was there 200 years ago or earlier. There are so many layers of history in that city. And the awa is telling you stuff in the way it moves. There’s a story in how easy it is to walk around that city, despite its immense size and history. All of these things are amazing information for a writer to take in. So you really have to spend a lot of time walking around and just being open to what comes. It’s not a fast process, at least for me.

I know it sounds a bit cliché, but musicians often speak of songs coming to them, and they don’t feel like the words were from them at all, that they’re just the conduit. And I wonder if sometimes, when a piece comes to you, it feels the same.

Absolutely. It’s the best possible thing that can happen. Quite often you have to do a lot of writing before the good stuff will come in. You’ve got to get yourself out of the way and let those words come. Or sometimes you’re going for a walk or you’re looking at something, and a perfect phrase will come into your mind, and you have to quickly write it down before it goes again. It doesn’t feel like you invented it. It just seems to arrive fully formed.

You have to make space for that possibility to happen, and by that, I mean you have to be sitting down and writing and writing and writing — and then the stuff comes. And yes, the best stuff doesn’t feel like you wrote it, it feels unconscious or subconscious.

It’s like you’ve created the opportunity, or you’ve distracted your mind and you’ve made that space for whatever we call it. I always think of it as a connection to te kore, a place of pure potentiality where all creativity arises. And if you can connect yourself, however briefly, to that, those things will come through. I think we’re all capable of creativity, but I think our minds sometimes get in the way.

We like to think we’re clever as humans. But I think the least interesting stuff comes from my mind. It’s the stuff I don’t feel in control of, or I haven’t thought up, that’s the best.

Is there a line or a sentence that you are particularly proud of that might illustrate that?

I can’t think of a line. I know that once I’m in the process, lines will come to me, but I probably forget which ones are which. But I can tell you two characters that have come from that place. One is Imi from Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings. He just started waking me up at night. I think I was scared of telling his story, so he had to be quite insistent that it be told. I don’t know if it was perfect the way I wrote it down. But, you know, he became a very real voice to me. And when I say voice, all the characters are voices, but his was quite urgent.

And then the other one is in The Mires. I was at the Michael King Writers Centre for just one week. Writing, walking, writing, walking. And that’s when Swamp Mother came to me. I don’t know why she’s called that, she just is. Until that point, there was just a vague omniscient narrator, and then suddenly there was this Swamp Mother, and she was telling the story. I think she might have even given me the ending at that point.

So, those are the times that I remember thinking: “Well, I didn’t make that up.” I mean, obviously, maybe it came out of my subconscious, but it didn’t feel like it came from me.

Who must we read? Who stands out for you?

Who must we read? I can’t tell you, because I feel that everybody just needs to find what speaks to them. I do so much reading for work and with my students, and I love that, but I don’t do a lot of reading for pleasure. So I’ve got to the point where, if I’ve got time to read for pleasure, I’ll pick up a book and if the voice speaks to me, then I’ll just go for it.

When people ask me this question, I get overwhelmed because there are so many good writers in the world, and I wonder: “Who do I name?”

But okay, who have I been talking about lately? Tusiata Avia. If you’re into poetry, read Tusiata. I’ve just read Nic Low’s newish book, Little Doomsdays, a collaboration with Phil Dadson. It’s beautiful, mythical and futuristic. I like stuff that takes me somewhere else. I’m really enjoying a book by Lauren Groff at the moment, which is like a dark fairy tale. She’s American, and the book’s called The Vaster Wild. The two recent Māori books that I’ve been recommending most are Tauhou by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall and Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan.

I think we need to read widely, from different cultures. I like a lot of international fiction. For instance, Shankari Chandran, who won the Miles Franklin Award in Australia last year for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. She’s a great writer. She’s Tamil Sri Lankan Australian.

Why do we need stories? You said before that stories saved you when you were growing up.

We’re living through really hard times. I don’t have to tell E-Tangata readers that. And I think of our artforms, our literature, our stories, as a way to reconnect with who we are as people, whether it’s stories by our own writers or stories from around the world.

Some people say it’s the end of the Empire and things are going to get worse before they get better. I mean, here’s hoping it’s the end of the Empire! But things do seem to be getting worse. It would be easy to ask: “Why are you sitting around writing stories or making art of any kind?”

My answer is that I think we have to find ways to connect with our higher selves, our better selves, and our love for our people and for each other. And for me that happens through literature, through stories. And I hope that’s something that other people can get from our stories as well.

It’s been a lovely kōrero, and I really appreciate it. Last question, we’ve talked about walking and Swamp Mother. But what else do you do? How do you keep yourself fresh?

I have a dog. I’m a dog fanatic. In fact, there are three dogs in the family. They get a lot of the family adoration.

Also, I’m on a whānau trust and we’re getting a papakāinga built on our land. It’s more mahi, but it’s also more connection. It feeds you as much as it takes your time.

At heart, I’m a big nerd. I’m getting into miniatures. I’ve only just started so I buy kitsets. It’s kind of like making three dimensional puzzles. I don’t have enough time for “proper” art, but I find it quite relaxing to put little miniature worlds together. It’s a whole world in there.

 

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Tina Makereti (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) is a writer who also teaches creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her novels include The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and Where The Rēkohu Bone Sings.

She also co-edited Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing, with Witi Ihimaera. Tina wrote The Mires while living on the Kāpiti Coast.

E-Tangata, 2024