Author Airana Ngarewa has written a book specifically for intermediate-level speakers of te reo Māori. (Photo supplied)

Books for te reo Māori readers tend to cater either to those at the beginning of their learning journey — or those at the other end of the scale: expert readers, translators, teachers and orators.  

But what about everyone who’s stuck somewhere in the middle? Airana Ngarewa reflects on the gap in reo reading material, and the work he’s doing to bridge it.

Learning to speak te reo Māori is a mission. It must be among the hardest things I’ve tried to do. And that mission is made even harder when you’re learning it on your own, with little to no local experts to guide you.

You spend your evenings, weekends and even your daily commutes pulling together resources and having one-sided conversations with Somethin’ for the People and Te Karere. You do whatever you can to steal a few more minutes to immerse yourself in the language and add to your kete kōrero, your own basket of knowledge.

One of the things I found most useful was reading books. While a sentence or expression in person or over the radio might fly right over my head, reading the same thing in a book allowed me the time to digest exactly what was meant.

And so I swallowed up Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy, Hona Black’s He Iti Te Kupu, and even Ray Harlow’s A Māori Reference to Grammar, because I love the big little things in the language: things like i, ki, a, o and ai.

But when I tried to make the leap to full-length works written in te reo Māori, I found I still wasn’t quite ready to take them on. Most of them were written by the incredible translators of Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, and I was blown away by the elegance of their reo. These were books written by modern Māori Shakespeares.

However, just like when I tried reading the real Shakespeare in high school, I was often left scratching my head. I knew in my chest that what each of these writers had written was extraordinary, I simply wasn’t able to breathe it all in.

I tried book after book. But it was like I’d pushed myself and my waka out to sea only to flip over at the first wave. And that, to be completely honest, is less a metaphor and more exactly what happened the first time I tried to paddle solo with the local waka ama club: I threw myself in the waka and, not one minute later, the waka threw me into the sea.

For a while, I thought it might just be me. I was never a good reader in English, so it came as no great surprise that reading in te reo Māori was equally as hard. After getting over the embarrassment though, I started talking about it to people on the marae, at whare wānanga and kura reo. And I found that even very capable speakers of the language were struggling to get through these books.

That’s when I began to see the huge gap in the reo Māori books available to us. There were plenty of books for beginners and experts, but in between these two solitary islands were the rest of us: the tens of thousands of intermediate learners who were years into our Māori language learning journey but had many years still in front of us.

So, just as I’d spent years reading te reo Māori, I then spent years writing it. And from those many hours, the hundreds of highs and lows, Pātea Boys and Ngāti Pātea were born.

It’s a book that flips like an old cassette tape with English on one side and te reo Māori on the other, written with the intermediate learner in mind. It’s filled from cover to cover with the version of te reo Māori that my cousins and I speak in the kitchen while we’re washing dishes. The words, the sentence structures, the expressions, the adulterated versions of famous whakataukī, and the jokes. Especially the jokes.

While it’s nowhere near as elegant as the Kotahi Rau Pukapuka books (I am in no way a modern Māori Shakespeare in either language), I wrote this book to bridge the gap between beginner and expert-level books. I wrote it to help those who, like me, found themselves stuck in the middle of their language-learning journey.

I also wrote it to tell Māori stories in a Māori way and create a reo Māori book full of familiar words, names, and references — one that you could read without having to check Te Aka Māori Dictionary every couple of sentences.

This meant using words that the typical speaker of te reo Māori would use and easily understand, referencing the kinds of people and places a speaker would know well — with the addition of a Taranaki twang to add a little extra swagger to the boys and girls in the book.

One of my favourite stories from the book is about two boys just chilling on a bridge after school, daydreaming and gossiping about the people in the cars breezing by. It’s called I am a Māori.

They tease the passers-by and they tease each other and the whole story feels like being 16 again, hanging with your best friend and putting off going home where Mum, Aunty or Nan will surely ask you to clean your room or vacuum the house. This is what the book is about.

It is a mirror for those who have lived these sorts of lives, and a mirror into this life for those who lived a little differently.

While I love books about faraway people and places, and they sell like hotcakes because so many others feel the same, there’s nothing quite like stories about home told in the languages we use at home.

Born and raised in Pātea, Airana Ngarewa (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngā Rauru, Ngāruahine) is a teacher, MMA fighter, and award-winning author. His writing has been published by RNZ, NZ Herald, Newsroom and Landfall. He won the short story and poetry competitions at the Ronald Hugh Morrieson Literary Awards in 2022. His debut novel, The Bone Tree, became a bestseller, holding the number one fiction spot for 12 weeks. His second novel, Pātea Boys / Ngāti Pātea, was released in August.

E-Tangata, 2024