50books_poc | Entries tagged with maori

I first read "Shapeshifter" in the #eqnz fundraising anthology Tales for Canterbury, and it made me cry happily again here. It wasn't the only one that made me cry, either, whether in sorrow or joy. I think I loved every story in this collection. "Kaitiaki" and "Blink"; and "Topknot" and "Ahi" and "Mokomoko" which are probably scattered in order to avoid making a trio. From the tamariki to the kuia, Tina Makereti portrays her characters with depth and understanding and flawless prose.

There were one or two I felt I didn't grok as fully as I should -- for example, in "Tree, the Rabbit, and the Moon" I was reading either not enough, too much, or the wrong things into the title: it resonates with face-in-the-moon stories to me, but I couldn't make that connect to the story -- but that's a fault in the reader, not the story. Similarly, so many of the stories connect obviously back to Māori legend that I briefly wondered if they all did and I was just not knowledgeable enough to pick them all up; but the stories all work perfectly as themselves, so it doesn't matter at all.

(I'm not allowed to create new tags for the community, but would have tagged this with: new zealand/aotearoa, māori, a: tina makereti )

zeborah

(A lightly-edited dump of my Goodreads reviews.)

Suckerpunch by Hernandez, David
Hooked me in at the start but the way events followed each other more realistically than determined by a story shape didn't quite work for me. (There was a story shape, it was just more in the gaps between the events.

Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1) by Butler, Octavia E.
So many consent issues... Very good: it's got the claustrophobia, the every-exit-is-a-deadend feel, that I'd normally associate with horror, but manages to retain an optimism about it. The aliens are convincinly alien, and the frustration of their refusal to listen is steadfast without becoming unbelievable.

Straight - A novel in the Irish-Maori tradition by O'Leary, Michael
Straight is the second book in the trilogy; I came to it without having read the first, but felt it stood alone well enough that I had no trouble following the plot. Unfortunately that plot -- the protagonist discovering his father may have been a Nazi, then getting blackmailed and kidnapped by Nazis -- was way too melodramatic for me to take seriously. The prose (especially the dialogue) clunked badly for me, too. I did like the motif of dreamland vs reality vs realism though: that played out well.

My Name Is Number 4 by Ye, Ting-xing
Most disasters bring people and communities together; it seems as if the Cultural Revolution was designed to tear them apart. But this book shows that the struggle to survive and to keep relationships alive is always worth making. --Excuse shallow triteness; reading this book in the aftermath of earthquake I have deeper thoughts on disasters and communities but verbalising is harder especially for fear of simplifying. It was a good book anyway.

People-faces, The by Cherrington, Lisa
This is mostly Nikki's story, of how she's affected by her brother's mental illness and her journey in understanding it - caught between Māori and Pākehā models of understanding - and her journey alongside that of getting to know herself and her strengths. Her grandmother tells her that the dolphin Tepuhi is her guardian, but her grandmother is demonstrably not infallible and with the repeated point that Joshua is of the sea while Nikki is of the land, I think the book bears out that the real/more effective guardian for her is the pīwaiwaka.

Her brother's story is told in the gaps between, and completes the book.

Despite the focus on Nikki and Joshua, we get to see various other points of view, showing the further impact on the rest of their family and their motivations. Some of the point of view shifts are a bit clunky, for example when we get a single scene from the Pākehā doctor's point of view, or just a couple from Nikki's boyfriend.

But this is well-told; the author (of Ngāti Hine) is a clinical psychologist and has worked in Māori mental health services, and the emotions of the story ring very true to me.

Cereus Blooms at Night: A Novel by Mootoo, Shani
This was a fantastic read but at times a very hard one; serious trigger warnings for child abuse (verbal, physical, sexual).

It begins as a beautifully sweet story about racial and sexual and gender identity; about family separations made by force or by choice, and about forbidden liaisons both healthy and unhealthy. Set in the country of Lantanacamara, colonised by the Shivering Northern Wetlands -- more an open code than fantasy countries -- the story focuses on three generations of locals, straight and gay, cis and trans, more and less inculturated by Wetlandish education. The narrator begins by disclaiming any significant role in the story; instantly I want to know more about him, and (though he was right that this is more Mala's story) I was not disappointed.

The main story, switching among its several timelines, grows darker and winds tighter with perfect pacing. Revelations are neither too delayed nor too forced. And as it heads towards the catastrophe we've foreseen, through horror worse than we could have imagined at the start, so it brings us towards its equally inevitable -- and no less satisfying -- eucatastrophe.

zeborah

(From the intro: "Witi Ihimaera is descended from Te Whānau A Kai, Te Aitanga A Mahaki, Rongowhakaata and Ngati Porou and has close affiliations with other Maori tribes.")

From my half-memories of reading this the first time, I thought of it as science fiction because of the time travel. But reading it now a second time, it really is much more fantasy. While some elements of the story I recognise as Maori mythology, others (like the Book of Birds and avian society) are pure invention, and other allusions could be either for all I know, or merge the two.

The prose is very colloquial and very New Zealand. It's broader than I'm used to and the humour isn't quite to my taste, so it felt a bit clunky to read. I also had problems with the relationship between the two main characters: although Skylark gets to call Arnie chauvinistic, she too readily succumbs to the heron's advice that she needs to "learn how to lose" - in other words don't be too clever, if you want to keep a guy you gotta flatter him.

But all in all, it's a quick and very fun read.

pauraque

Big warning: Child abuse is a major plot element throughout this book and will be mentioned in my review.

I thought I'd read this book over ten years ago, when it was recommended to me by a teacher, and I'm sure I started to read it, but I have a feeling I didn't finish. That or I blocked it out. Don't let me get ahead of myself -- this is a well-written and absorbing novel. But it hurts. It's long, or it feels long, and I found myself always trying to get through it faster, eager both to know what would happen and to escape the brutality of it.

We are introduced to Kerewin, an independently wealthy artist who lives a hermit-like existence in a self-built Tower in New Zealand. By chance she meets Simon, a young, troubled boy who can't speak, and his foster father Joe, who took him in when Simon was washed ashore in a shipwreck. A three-way friendship begins to blossom among these very different, very wounded people.

( Read more... )

If anyone else here has read the book I'd be very interested to hear what you thought of it.

[eta: Possible spoilers in the comments!]

(tags: author: hulme keri, maori (author & characters), setting: new zealand/aotearoa)

zeborah

Song For Night by Chris Abani
About a boy soldier (trained to defuse mines) separated from his platoon after an explosion. A short and easy read (in style if not in content matter. Trigger warnings re the content: skip) the book includes graphic descriptions of violence and of the protagonist being forced to rape a woman.) told in a beautiful prose style. It explores the sign language his platoon uses, his memories of the war, boot camp, the outbreak of violence between Igbo and Fulani, and his childhood.

Huia Short Stories 6
Huia Publishers put out an anthology each year of contemporary Māori fiction. I'm... ultimately not a fan of contemporary fiction, I think. Melanie Drewery's "Weight of the World" stood out for me among the rest, being more humorous in tone. In the author bios at the end, Eru J. Hart, said he "asks that other Māori writers think beyond stories of 'Nanny in the kūmara patch'" -- his own was really interesting stylistically/structurally but in content it wasn't so very distant from what I'm tempted to call 'Sister in the big city' which many stories in this volume shared (and which I recall studying in high school in the form of Witi Ihimaera's "Big Brother Little Sister" (1974)). This isn't a criticism really; it's just that it's not my kind of story so while reading one is fine, reading a dozen in a row is a bit much for me. :-) But if it's the kind of thing you like, then you'll like it.

(The other cool thing about this collection is it includes four stories written in Te Reo, one of which is written in the Kai Tahu dialect. Far beyond my current ability to read, alas, especially as I think I'd have liked to read "Ko Māui me ngā Kūmara a Wiwīwawā".)

Ruahine: mythic women by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
This anthology, on the other hand, I really enjoyed. For each story, the author gives a brief summary of the original folktale/history, then tells her own interpretation of it. All the stories are about strong women; several include female/female relationships and one a male/male relationship. And of course the reason

kitsuchi recommended it to me in the first place was because one of the stories was science fiction and full of awesomeness.

cyphomandra.livejournal.com

Isabel Waiti-Mulholland, Inna Furey. The bit at the back of the book lists four more books in this series, but I’ve never seen any of them (this book came out in 2007) and Google suggests that it’s not just me. Which is a shame, because this book is largely set-up, and I’d like to know where the author was going with it.

A new, strange, girl – Inna Furey – starts at Leanne’s school. When Leanne meets Inna late one night in the reserve outside her house, she discovers Inna’s secret – she can transform into a giant bird (Haast’s eagle, the largest known raptor – now extinct). But, when she changes, she isn’t herself anymore, and whatever she transforms into is taking over more and more often…

( Isabel Waiti-Mulholland, Inna Furey. )

Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque. Two women working as prostitutes in Tokyo are murdered. Years earlier, they attended the same exclusive high school, along with the first, unnamed narrator, the older sister of one of those murdered (Yuriko). Yuriko was abnormally beautiful – a beauty described as grotesque – and the subsequent distortions this created for her and her sister reverberate through their lives.

( Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque. )

zeborah

Peter Tashkoff is Ngāti Porou; his novel Arapeta (on Amazon - and it's print-on-demand so it's *always* going to be 'only one left' - or for the Kindle) takes us a couple thousand years into the future, when humanity is scattered among the stars and Earth is half myth. Arapeta is the second son of the chief of the backwater planet Aotea, where the people follow traditional ways of farming, fishing, fighting, and living. Only problem is that his family has a secret vein of pounamu (NZ-English: greenstone; overseas-English: jade) which is this universe's dilithium crystals, needed to power pretty much everything - and the secret leaks out to the broader universe. Colonialism ensues.

I found the book hard to get into to start with because of the prose. Particularly noticeable was the way every time a Māori word or phrase was introduced, it was immediately followed by the English translation, without regard to how clunky this ended up being. I'm more used to "incluing" techniques where you carefully place the unfamiliar word in a context that lets the reader figure it out for themself. I can see though why the author used this technique: there's a lot of vocabulary to introduce, and us Pākehā aren't famous for working hard at learning the Māori language....

But after I picked the book up again, I really got into it. It's set mostly in a completely Māori-centric world - plus space travel, nanites for medical care and body modification, genetic engineered soldiers, forcefields, hovercraft, and planet-destroying bombs. Through the main characters we get to care about his world, and through other characters we get a sense of the wider universe.

( Spoilery discussion of something cool about the structure/unfolding of the plot; and then more spoilery discussion which I sum up as: Not very feminist, absolutely heteronormative. )

A couple random sentences I liked:

When you looked past the surprise attack and porridgey accent, this guy was quite a hoot.
Seven and a half minutes away, if you were a sunbeam, and happened to be lost at an awkward tangent off the horizontal plane of the planetary system [...]

Summary: The prose wasn't great and the book could have done with a copy-edit. The plot was mostly battles, preparation for battles, diplomacy to delay battles, and retreat from battles, with some romance as light relief and ultimate reward. But I really appreciated the way the plot unfolded, adding complications to the situation; it was a fun read, which I think just got better as it went along.

---
I'd like to read a lot more sf by Māori authors but first this means discovering it. So far, the combined research of me and another librarian have turned up Arapeta and:

Skydancer by Witi Ihimaera (read; I'll try to read it again and review it as time allows)
Inna Furey by Isabel Waiti-Mulholland
Ripples on the Lake by Dawn Rotarangi

If anyone knows of more, I'd be over the moon!

The nice librarian also pointed me to Huia Publishing, which prints mainly Māori and indigenous authors and works.

rootedinsong.livejournal.com

27. Good Enough, by Paula Yoo

YA novel about a Korean-American girl whose parents push her to take all AP classes, get at least a 2300 (new scale...) on the SATs, etc. so she can get into an Ivy League college. She's also a very talented violinist, and her parents push her to achieve as much as she can in music so it will look good on her college applications.

She meets a boy at All-State orchestra rehearsal that she's very attracted to, and over the course of the book she gets closer and closer to him, sneaking out to his house to play music with him when her parents forbid her to hang out with boys or to waste any time that she could be spending studying. He teaches her about improvisation and the value of rock music, and helps her realize how truly passionate about music she is (he encourages her to apply to Juilliard behind her parents' backs).

And then, of course, there's the climax where they sneak out to a concert, she gets caught, there are consequences... and then it all wraps up nicely in the end. (I don't think I need to give a spoiler warning for any of this; how could the ending be anything else?)

I liked this well enough. The author's a musician and gets the music parts of the story exactly right (I'm picky about that sort of thing). And she gets math much better than Justina Chen Headley (although the part where the protagonist says that she doesn't have enough time to solve the last problem on her extra credit homework, d/dx(sin(x²+5)) or something like that, between homeroom and when she has to hand it in in the middle of the day... came off as false - how long could it really take her? 30 seconds?)...

And there is not too much girliness.

28. The Whale Rider, by Witi Ihimaera

I thought this was just lovely. I decided to read it after reading a friend's review of the movie, in which she said that the movie's message seemed to be inconsistent - that it seemed to be alternatingly sending the messages "The hope of indigenous peoples is returning to the Old Ways" and "Sexism is bad, and the Old Ways are sexist," when it should have been a real examination of how to keep indigenous cultures alive, living, evolving to survive in their times.

The book didn't seem to me to have that inconsistency at all. It actually seemed to be exactly what my friend wanted to see... except that it was less an examination and more that... both themes, returning to the ways of the Maori people and letting those ways evolve, were just there, pervading the book. The sexism of some of the traditions was challenged, but that challenge came from within the culture; it was not imposed on it from outside. This was not about a conflict between The Enlightened White Conception Of Human Rights and Our People's Cultural Identity And Traditions. Not at all.

Once again... lovely.

cyphomandra.livejournal.com

Ip is a professor of Asian Studies at Auckland University, and she’s written a number of books about the Chinese experience in New Zealand/Aotearoa; this one is a collection of interviews with members of seven Māori -Chinese families, loosely grouped in order of the earliest Chinese arrival (1920s – Chinese were arriving in NZ almost 100 years earlier, but my understanding is that this was largely in gold-mining areas in the South Island where there were far fewer Māori, and none of the families are from there). The interviews were also conducted around the time of the 2002 NZ government’s apology for the poll tax only Chinese immigrants had to pay (10 pounds initially, increased to 100 pounds in 1896 when “too many” Chinese were still getting in, with subsequent legislation adding in an English test and denying permanent residency), which was seen as a major step forward by the NZ Chinese community.

( Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities. )

Anyway. I thought this was interesting, and although it is highly selective in terms of experiences, it also obviously fits into the broader context of Ip’s work – her latest book, The Dragon and the Taniwha, is an edited collection with a wide range of authors that includes quite a bit more historical detail, including the pre-1900s period.

twistedchick

This, the second book of poetry by the author of the bone people, is hard to find but worth the search. From Keri Hulme's own description of the book:

Describe strands? O, fishing and death. Angry women/angry earth chants, and funny inserts/insights/snippets/snappings. Winesongs of fifteen years maturation. Plait together land and air and sea: interweave the eye and the word and the ear. Show people that I take life seriously, but not so seriously as to ruin my chance of getting out of it alive...I am a strand-dweller in reality, a strand-loper of sorts -- nau mai! Come share a land, a lagoon, a mind, a glass...

A sample: ( cut for space )

It's probably not in your local library, but this Amazon link has some copies. The ISBN number is: 0-86806-475-0

sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera (Reed, 2002)

I need to have my own copy of this book. And I will possibly buy two copies and donate one to the library where I work, because they need to have a copy too.

This book is brilliant. I haven't seen the movie (although I've been reliably informed that I really must see it), and I have to admit that now I'm not entirely certain how the book would transfer to the screen (although clearly it must have done). The magical-realism elements (I'm not sure what else to call the sections of the book from the whales' point of view) took a while to get into, and yet once I did, were magnificent. The whole book showed up, in a way, the paucity of the way that Australians relate to our indigenous peoples, when this book can be written, become a best seller, and then an international success as a movie, while books of Australian "folklore" are full of stories about bushrangers. (More)

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Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

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Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Entries tagged with maori

Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa by Tina Makereti

Catching up: Hernandez, Butler, O'Leary, Ye, Cherrington, Mootoo

Sky Dancer by Witi Ihimaera

9. Keri Hulme, the bone people

Song For Night, Huia Short Stories, Ruahine

22 & 23/50: Waiti-Mulholland, Kirino

Arapeta, by Peter Tashkoff

Good Enough; The Whale Rider

Being Māori-Chinese: mixed identities. Manying Ip, 7/50.

Strands, by Keri Hulme

#4: "The Whale Rider" by Witi Ihimaera (Reed, 2002)

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