Nadine Hura is the author of Slowing the Sun, a collection of essays. (Photo: Ebony Lamb)

Nadine Hura’s new essay collection, Slowing the Sun, explores big issues — climate change, social disconnection and Indigenous reclamation — through very human stories, as in this essay about her partner’s father, “a man of few words, but a lot of words”.

Nadine Hura’s new essay collection Slowing the Sun, published by Bridget Williams Books.

They come home from the supermarket, tired and quiet. After putting the groceries away, they drift into the lounge and pick up guitars. It has become something of a Sunday routine. My daughter on the floor, my partner Haimana on his bare feet, looking out the window, strumming as a way to transition. He’s playing Pink Floyd, “Pigs on the Wing”, and her fingers anticipate the shapes and follow, even though the song is new to her. Their communication is wordless, reverberating on strings.

When the song ends, he tells her it’s from his favourite Pink Floyd album, and she nods with interest but doesn’t reply. Silence is its own language. The night before, she taught him scales, and I watched as he leaned in close to follow as her fingers darted up and down the frets. I took out my phone and tried to film them but they caught me and delivered matching scowls, so I had to put the camera away.

He has his own daughter, and she has her own father, but in the rugged terrain of relationships love grows wild. We can make space for all kinds of unexpected people. We can form bonds with women who are not our mothers but provide for us as if they were, and men who are not our fathers but know us better. Often what these relationships teach us is how to let go of what we can’t get back, or never had, and just accept what is.

When Haimana’s father passed away, it was a public holiday, and he lay at home for five nights and days. It was a long tangi by any measure, but even more so for a suburban home that wasn’t intrinsically designed, as marae are, to host the endless streams of people that came by day after day to talk and shed tears and sing and eat and drink and remember. Every tangi is unique, every tangi is the same.

One afternoon, during a rare moment of quiet, I joined the whānau downstairs as they prepared to welcome a single visitor. He was a man in his early 30s wearing an orange high-vis vest and dark trousers. He took off his boots and lined them up neatly at the door before being welcomed on in the usual way. When he was invited to respond, he got to his feet and blinked, shaking loose the tears that had begun to pool since he walked in. He looked over at his mate resting in the centre of the room and gulped.

“This guy used to call me Chilly Bin,” he said, and a giggle rippled around the room. “He’s one of my best friends. He’s my mentor. He used to give me shit, but . . .” He looked down at his shaking hands. “I loved him.”

Moses Hirini had seven sons. They all watched and listened as this stranger they had never met before, and whom their father had never mentioned, struggled to compose himself.

“I see his blue helmet there . . . I’m sorry for the waterworks . . . I’m just really going to miss him.”

It’s funny how it can take someone else to reveal a side of your father you hadn’t seen, or didn’t know was there. And it’s funny how, without necessarily realising it, some people give us permission to have another go. To attempt to be who we might have been in different circumstances. Better versions of ourselves.

“Te reo Māori remained out of reach to Moses, no matter how many classes and hui and papamahi he sat in. His tongue couldn’t hold what the body remembered had once been dangerous.” Moses Hirini, in a rare photo, with his wife Vicky Hirini and three of their seven sons in Kōraunui, 1980. (Photo supplied)

Moses was one of 16 children. Almost every person who knew him, knew him as a hard worker of few words. A boilermaker and driver, he lent his skills from Fulton Hogan to Dunlop. I heard someone describe him as “the god of the roads”.

He wasn’t one to tell people he loved them. But he had ways of showing it. That’s what his mokopuna said. They knew their koro loved them because he was always there.

Every night and every day of the tangihanga, the mokos passed his guitar around and took turns singing. The harmonies and laments could be heard all the way down the street.

On the final night, his sons, whose same work ethic had propelled them through the long days and nights putting up gazebos, hauling hāngī stones, lifting, sweeping, peeling and chopping, stood to offer their parting words.

It’s not always easy or possible to say what you mean. Sometimes you have to show it, or borrow from someone else.

“He was a man of few words, but a lot of words,” said Whaea Madge from Te Ataarangi at the final service. “You just had to know how to read him. He was our go-to guitarist back in the day. There was no one else. When we were learning the waiata he couldn’t start us off, so we’d have to sing him in. Two or three lines, then he’d start playing. It was our little joke. I’d say to him, you’re the only one who can play these songs, but you need us angels to start you off.”

Even though both his parents were native speakers, te reo Māori remained out of reach to Moses, no matter how many classes and hui and papamahi he sat in. His tongue couldn’t hold what the body remembered had once been dangerous.

Madge said they’d once performed a skit at Te Ataarangi many years ago, and Moses had one line to deliver, one line, the all-important punchline which consisted of no more than four short words. But either he forgot them or couldn’t bring himself to utter them in a room packed with people, so instead he feigned fainting, collapsing on stage in an improvised ending that still fit the storyline.

Because humour is often an effective cover for shame. The steamroller of Pākehā assimilation, combined with patriarchal notions of masculinity, flattened all the words out of Moses, in any language. This left only his hands to demonstrate what could not be uttered out loud.

But the same hands that tear down and instil fear can one day come back and rebuild and start over. Can make music so others may sing. Can model and show and teach, become the hands of a man who is a mentor to the sons of other men. It takes a special kind of person to make that kind of change.

Haimana, playing his father’s guitar at his tangi, singing “a love song to all the words that have ever been crushed inside the chests of hard-working men.” (Photo supplied)

In the final kōrero, to an audience of hundreds gathered at Akatārawa, his second son — the same man who plays guitar with my daughter on Sunday afternoons as a way to transition between life’s hectic moments — said he’d grown up observing his father’s efforts to reclaim the language first-hand.

“It wasn’t for lack of ability that he couldn’t speak Māori,” Haimana said, in a long speech unbroken with a single word of English.

“I saw the hurt in him when he couldn’t get it. That hurt me too. That’s what motivates me today.”

“Māku,” he said, raising his fist to his chest.

Māku, meaning, “I will do it.”

Māku, meaning “I will get it back, and I will pass it on.”

With that, the whānau from Te Ataarangi came up and stood behind Haimana. Someone passed him his father’s guitar, a guitar which all his descendants can play with a level of skill that can only come from hands that remember how to make music, hands fluent in silence, and he began to sing a love song to all the words that have ever been crushed inside the chests of hard-working men.

Ka pinea koe

ki te pine Raukura

o Te Ataarangi

kia kore koe e ngaro

taku reo Rangatira.

This extract by Nadine Hura is from her new essay collection, Slowing the Sun, published by Bridget Williams Books (RRP $39.99).

Nadine Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is a writer whose work connects literature, social policy and environmental justice. Her work with Māori communities on climate research for the Deep South National Science Challenge led to many of the essays in Slowing the Sun. She has written extensively for E-Tangata, The Spinoff, and other platforms. Hura, a māmā, poet and essayist, lives in Titahi Bay, Wellington, while pursuing her writing and advocacy for the protection of Papatūānuku and revitalisation of mātauranga Māori.