“This book took three years to write, and in the midst of it, I was in the deepest, darkest despair I’ve ever been in,” says Shilo Kino, who moved to Stanley Bay to work on her new novel. (Photo supplied)

Author Shilo Kino made her name with The Pōrangi Boy, her award-winning debut novel for young adult readers. Her second book, All That We Know, is out now, but as her first adult novel, it’s a different beast altogether — drawing from darker places and delving into the far-reaching consequences of colonisation.

Here’s Shilo in conversation with Siena Yates.

Kia ora e hoa. You’ve packed a lot of heavy material into this book. I feel like it’s safe to say fans of your first book probably weren’t expecting everything that’s in this one. Where did this story come from?

It was initially inspired by a real event that happened at a high school in Auckland. A young girl had posed in blackface in a Snapchat photo, and it was shared all over social media, but her school did nothing to hold her accountable. Instead, it became the responsibility of a couple of Māori and Pasifika students who spoke up against racism and went to the media.

I was struck by the actions of the young girl and the courage of the students who dared to speak out, and I was disappointed by the school’s failure to address racism. What made this event even more poignant was the timing — it coincided with the murder of George Floyd by white police officers in the US.

The story stayed in the news cycle for a few days, but I was still left with a lot of questions. Like did that girl learn from the situation or did she just carry on with her life as if nothing had happened? What happened at the school? Is it still allowing these kinds of things to happen? And more so, I started wondering about the personal cost to the students that spoke up, and what happened to them when the cameras disappeared and they went back to their lives.

So those were the questions in my mind when I started writing the book, and writing the main character Māreikura, who is a young Māori activist navigating life after leaving the spotlight. But then, while I was writing the book, the direction of the story shifted as different things started changing in my own life.

I entered full-immersion study to learn te reo Māori and also started questioning and exploring my sexuality. As a result, I went through a massive crisis of faith — not just as a Mormon, but with religion in general.

I felt like my whole world had turned upside down. It seemed that everything I’d once known suddenly wasn’t true anymore, and I didn’t know how to reconcile that. Writing those themes into Māreikura’s story was the only way I knew to work through some of those questions and that grief.

Writer Shilo Kino. (Photo supplied)

Was the crisis mostly to do with the church’s views on non-heterosexual relationships?

There were many factors, but that was definitely one of them.

I‘ve also often felt conflicted about what it means to be Māori and religious at the same time, because of religion’s role in colonisation, and the harm Christianity has caused to Indigenous peoples around the world. The more I connected to te ao Māori and began to think more deeply about the impacts of colonisation and how it affects us all to this day, the more I had to interrogate that conflict.

Looking back though, I think it was less of a crisis of faith and more of a deconstruction of it.

For me, it was less about questioning my own spirituality and relationship with God and more about figuring out how to separate God from human actions. Spirituality itself is a beautiful thing — the problem is the man-made institutions that seem to go with it.

Was learning more about colonisation a result of starting full-immersion reo classes?

Yes, I studied te reo at Te Wānanga Takiura o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori in 2021, and it was a beautiful experience but also one of the hardest challenges of my life. I had picked up Mandarin very quickly when I was on a mission in Hong Kong, so I couldn’t understand why I found learning te reo so hard.

But when you learn your ancestral language, every new kupu you learn comes with tikanga and history behind it, so you have to reconstruct a lot of how you see the world. It’s never just the language.

Growing up, there was a massive disconnect between me and te ao Māori. I grew up in Waipu, a small town in Northland, and my whānau were one of the only Māori families who lived there. I remember as a little girl celebrating the Scottish culture and pioneers who settled in Waipu. I would dress up in a kilt and attend the yearly Highland games. Yet I knew nothing about my own iwi or culture. We only went back to our marae when someone died. It wasn’t until I went to university in 2009 to study journalism, and started reading articles by Leonie Pihama and Rangimārie Rose Pere, that I became hyper-aware of colonisation and injustice.

That degree changed the course of my whole life. I started working as a journalist and writing books, because I knew that storytelling was more than just a way to share information — it was a way to heal, and for me to give to others what I’d been denied.

And then of course, learning te reo only added to that. The learning is hard, and it hurts sometimes, but it’s also something that opens up your entire world in ways you can’t even imagine.

Shilo and her mum Deborah Nolan, when they lived in Waipu. (Photo supplied)

That’s beautiful e hoa, but at the same time, this is all pretty major territory to go through. What was it like trying to work through that and also put it into your mahi?

I’ll be honest, it wasn’t a great time. This book took three years to write, and in the midst of it, I was in the deepest, darkest despair I’ve ever been in. I was fully in te pō, in darkness.

After I graduated from Takiura, I moved to Stanmore Bay to write, and also because I wanted to be close to the moana. I was doing things like yoga, meditation, walks on the beach — all the things you’re supposed to do to heal. And yet one of the only things that truly helped me was writing.

It’s terrifying holding a mirror up and interrogating parts of yourself though, especially parts that you don’t like. That’s probably the hardest thing anyone can do. But as I wrote every day, the story and characters began to emerge. And through all those characters I was able to understand the different parts of who I am, the contradictions of my own identity, and the intersections of being Māori. They allowed me to bring some light and humour to the story, and I was able to reconcile a lot of the grief and mamae that I was holding on to.

I now see how much of a blessing the book had been, because it pulled me out and into the light. Te pō can be a beautiful place of discovery if you’re not in there for too long. Writing this novel didn’t give me any real solution to what I was going through, but I emerged with more peace and acceptance.

(Photo supplied)

What’s interesting is that, although you describe it as grief and despair, in the book that grief presents more like rage. Is that also what you experienced? And have you managed to make peace with that side of it as well?

Oh yeah. There have been times I have been absolutely enraged by injustice. To be honest, I am still enraged. How can we not be? Just look at everything that’s been happening in parliament lately.

Rage is something we as wāhine Māori have suppressed for so long, so I liked actually being able to voice that rage through Māreikura. But while I’m still mad, I think perhaps the rage manifests in different ways for me than for that character.

I feel like Māreikura shows us what it’s like to be blinded by rage. When you’re in that space, you can start to see everything as black and white. She’s very much running around saying: “You’re good, you’re evil, and if you don’t believe this or know that, then you’re just a bad person.”

I’m fortunate enough to be in a place now where I’m a bit more tau, or at peace, with who I am, and I think that changes things a lot. When we’re connected to ourselves, our whakapapa, and our language, then I think our love for others will naturally grow. There is more room for grace, for patience. And that’s a big lesson Māreikura learns in the book too. How to love despite differences in beliefs.

That said, I do believe that rage is necessary sometimes. But in most cases, we should be less enraged at individuals, and more enraged at the institutions that fuel their beliefs.

I feel like you brought in a lot of characters who openly oppose or challenge Māreikura — was that to help her learn to redirect her rage?

I think so. I know writing all of those characters helped me personally. Seeing how they felt, how they interacted with Māreikura, helped me not only to reconcile contradictions within myself but to humanise other people as well — to understand the complexities and layers in others.

It was also important to me to have a lot of those contradictions come from within te ao Māori. From Māreikura’s best friends Eru and Jordana, her Nan, her classmates — all of them offer a different perspective.

Māreikura and her best friend Eru are both Māori, but they’re complete opposites in the way that they think, how they were brought up, and the relationships they have with their families. Their relationship asks the question of whether it is possible for two people, both Māori, with opposing and conflicting beliefs to remain friends, especially at a time where the world feels more divisive and more polarised than ever?

We’ve been pigeonholed in stories for so long as one-dimensional characters with one way of thinking, and of course, we know that’s not true. There is such diversity and richness to us, and that’s what I really love about who we are as Māori, so I’ve tried to reflect that in the book.

Shilo with Witi Ihimaera, and her first book. (Photo supplied)

On that note, Māreikura has a lot of whakaaro that are going to rub some people up the wrong way — Pākehā and Māori alike. It’s stuff a lot of people are scared to talk about, like white-passing privilege and whether Pākehā should learn te reo. Were you worried about giving voice to those things, especially through a character like Māreikura who has no filter?

Well, that’s the great thing about fiction, right? While a lot of themes in the book are based on what I was going through, it’s not actually based on my life. That said, there’s a quote which says: “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.”

I think there should be a level of discomfort when reading a book, even more so if the experience being described is not your own. Because no one changes their thinking without some level of discomfort coming first.

Maybe readers will learn something new. Maybe not. It’s not as if Māreikura is always necessarily right. These are her own thoughts, experiences and feelings. And even when she is technically “right” in her whakaaro, or her rage is totally justified, the ways she deals with those emotions isn’t always right.

I don’t expect everyone to like my book or agree with everything in it. But I’d urge anyone reading it to stay to the end, because it’s worth it!

How’s it been for you, finally having it out there?

I’m actually feeling really blown away by the support, the messages I’ve received and how people feel seen, how much they resonate with the characters — from all ages and ethnicities. In a way, it feels like a relief too. I’ve lived with these characters in my head for so long and now suddenly I get to share them with the world. It feels surreal.

I think the one thing I care about is that my own community likes the book. If Pākehā like my book, that’s awesome. But if only Pākehā and no Māori come back and say: “I love your book,” to me that’s not a great sign.

In the reviews so far, there’s one weird thing that keeps coming up, which is a lot of reviewers saying: “Oh, the book’s really heavy on colonisation.”

I mean, they’re not wrong, but are they saying that’s a bad thing?

They’re saying it’s “controversial”. But I feel like any book with Māori characters that challenges the systems and the Crown will be labelled as controversial.

Besides, being “heavy on colonisation” was sort of the whole point. I wanted to show what colonisation is like today, because a lot of people seem to think of it as a one-time historical event. But it’s actually an ongoing process that has seeped into our everyday lives — and this applies whether you’re Māori or not.

People tend to think about the obvious impacts of colonisation on Māori, things like incarceration, gangs, alcoholism. They don’t think about how it impacts relationships, friendships, our self-esteem, our values and beliefs, and how we observe and interact with the world. How it impacts our parents’ minds, our elders’ minds. These are the things that can’t be measured in statistics.

Especially right now, at a time when there’s an assault by the current government on who we are as Māori. I want people to understand what colonisation really was, and still is.

There is no reconciliation or healing without truth. How can we know who we are now if we don’t know who we once were?

So this is what I’m attempting to do with All That We Know, to shine a light on the wounds of this country. I like what the poet Rumi said: “The wounds are in the place where the light enters.”

In the end, colonisation has misplaced all of us, and we are all trying to find our way home.

Shilo signing copies of her new book. (Photo supplied)

Shilo Kino is an author from Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Te Ata. Her debut novel, The Pōrangi Boy, won the Young Adult Fiction Award at the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards. Her second book, All That We Know, was released on July 9 and took the number one spot in the NZ Fiction bestsellers list. Shilo lives in Tāmaki Makaurau and is currently undertaking a master’s in Indigenous studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau or the University of Auckland.

E-Tangata, 2024