Ko Ōkāhuatiu te maunga,
Ko Waipāoa me Repongaere ngā wai tapu
Ko Rongopai te marae,
Ko Te Whānau a Kai te iwi,
Ko ahau he uri o Teria Pere te wahine,
Tihei mauriora
Tangi was originally written as a short story in 1969, when I was twenty-six, and appeared in Contemporary Māori Writing (1970), the first anthology of creative writing by Māori to be published. I had just begun writing fiction in that year, with the objective of a novel in mind, after reading an essay by Bill Pearson in which he noted there was as yet no Māori novelist.
No novelist after all these years? Oho ake, e tama!
I used the short story as the narrative template. I began Tangi in Wellington prior to embarking with Jane for London on our honeymoon in 1971. But the bulk of my debut novel was written in a small bedsitting room at 67 Harcourt Terrace, South Kensington, London. Every day when Jane went to work as a relief teacher in Hounslow, I sat at a small Olivetti typewriter and bashed away on it. I fiddled with carbon paper to make sure I had a duplicate copy. Sometimes May, the housekeeper at Harcourt Terrace, would look in to see that I was not slacking on the job, and Mr Way, who owned the four-storey building, would invite me up to his apartment for a beer.
I was twenty-seven when I completed the manuscript. I wrapped it up and sent it by sea mail to David Heap, Heinemann Educational Books (NZ) Ltd; after having tried to interest three publishers in my work, I was fortunate to have novelist Noel Hilliard write to his publisher (David), who expressed interest in a short story collection but, even more, a novel. And then Jane and I started travelling to France, Greece and elsewhere in Europe and embarked on a hilarious tour in a small minivan around England, Scotland and Wales.
Tangi was one of three books that David accepted to publish. They comprise a publishing trifecta of Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), Tangi (1973) and Whānau (1974). With these three books, I began to create what might be called the Ihimaera multiverse, the world of a fictional Waituhi. I borrowed the idea of interconnected books from William Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. I was a great fan.
The novel was published when I was twenty-nine, which was young, at the time, for a novelist. Given that I was Māori, when world literature had very few indigenous novelists (I can count them almost on one hand), the book was also personally challenging: what should Māori literature look like? And so, although the subject, about a boy going home to the funeral of his father, fitted into a well-known Western literary frame, I chose the tangihanga to centre it. The ceremonials were the most intact in all Māoridom, and therefore my writing would be intensely concentrated, a depiction of Māori culture at its most ritualistic and authentic. I would be able to use waiata and haka and transfer their accents and modulations into English: Māori urtext, Māori characters, Māori story, Māori setting, not a Pākehā as main character in sight. A spiralling narrative, not a linear one.
After all, you wouldn’t expect a Māori writer to operate under the same assumptions and expectations as Pākehā writers, would you? Of course not.
In New Zealand, Tangi won the Wattie Book of the Year Award (1974). Overseas, the book had a welcoming review in the Times Literary Supplement, UK, and was published in a very handsome edition in France some years later (Belfond, 1998).
I took my father, Te Haa o Rūhia Ihimaera Smiler Jnr, to the Wattie celebration and enjoyed watching people’s reactions. Most readers thought the narrative had been based on experience, and when I told my mother I was writing it her only stipulation was to make sure it was done while Dad was still alive. She wanted to ensure the fictional intent so that the people who mattered, the hau kāinga, would know that it wasn’t about him or them.
I can’t tell you how nervous I was during the entire time between sending the book off to print and it being published. I told David we would have to cancel publication if Dad died in the interim, and I meant it, but whether or not Heinemann would have done that is another story. Thank God, I and they were not tested.
Dad’s avatar in the novel is the same age as he was in 1971. My wonderful father (he belonged to my sisters and brothers too) had a long life and died in 2010 at the age of ninety-five, moe mai rā, Dad.
The original Tangi is a young writer’s novel, and a work I am extremely proud of. It takes place in a day and on a train, but time and memory make the journey longer than that. Even now, spiralling time still remains at the centre of my work.
As most people will know, I have a habit of rewriting my books: three editions of Pounamu, Pounamu, three, possibly four of The Whale Rider, there’s a redux edition of The Matriarch, two versions of Medicine Woman (aka White Lies) and also Whānau II. It will therefore come as no surprise that I repurposed Tangi as The Rope of Man in 2006 and that this 50th Anniversary edition is a third rewriting. All my alternate universes!
My reasons for rewriting are cultural as well as aesthetic. Māori culture has undergone huge transformation since I began writing — so have I — and I always seek to reflect these changes according to evolving mātauranga knowledge, increased use of te reo, and the lessons that life has taught me. I’ve also never believed that a text is static; it’s akin to Māori house-building traditions. In my own history, for instance, there are two meeting houses that have had incarnations as Poho-o-Rāwiri I, II and III and Ruatepupuke I and II. I developed very early in my career the view that my work must change to mirror evolving contemporary cultural, political and racial contexts as well. And when I am offered the opportunity, I take it.
Aesthetics — that too, is something I pay attention to. The striving for excellence is something that constantly motivates me. As far as Māori aesthetics are concerned, an example is my revisiting the mythic and historic underpinnings of the story. In the case of this 50th Anniversary edition, I have brought a stronger Ringatū worldview into play.
Again, in the original Tangi I used the em-dash to mark when people are speaking, in The Rope of Man I deployed the single quotation mark, in this 50th Anniversary edition there are no quotation indications at all. When speaking to Jane recently, she reminded me that this was, in fact, what I had wanted to do in 1973. The reason I gave her then is the same now: Māori don’t speak in speech marks.
The 1973 Tangi was also written in first person present, not common in New Zealand novels in those days where the realist mode flourished and novels were written in third person past. I changed it to third person past for The Rope of Man but have reinstated first person present for this 50th Anniversary edition. Writing in this mode, I like to think, keeps my work contemporary.
You could, if you like, think of all the versions of Tangi as conforming to the principle enunciated in Te tōrino haere whakamua, whakamuri: At the same time as the spiral is going forward it is returning. In this 50th Anniversary edition, the text begins as the 1973 edition does. Within it, however, spiralling time takes it back and forward through its 2006 edition and further forward to this 50th Anniversary edition. But it spirals back to the centre, ending as the 1973 edition does, with the same kupu.
Waituhi lies at the centre of this spiralling gyre, as it does in just about all my work. And Rongopai meeting house, which exemplifies what earlier young artisans did to pictorialise their changing world, is the pūtake, the source of its mana. Don’t go looking for the farm in this fiction, though; geographically, my family’s farm is up the Whakarau Road near Motu.
The handsome pictorial divisions are as they appeared in the original version.
I thank my original publishers David Heap, Heinemann Education (NZ) Ltd and Maurice Dowthwaite, Heinemann Publishers for having the faith to publish Tangi (1973); David, you were amazing. Thanks also to Harriet Allan and the team at Penguin Random House for marking the 50th Anniversary with this superb edition.
I pay my tribute to Te Whānau a Kai, to the Waituhi Valley and the people of Waituhi. To Rongopai the meeting house. To my kuia Teria Pere and Mini Tupara. To my immediate whānau, Turiteretimana, my mother, sisters Caroline, Polly, Viki and Gay and brothers Derek and Neil Lamarr. Especially to my beloved father Te Haa o Rūhia aka Tom Smiler Jnr.
In October of last year, I was at the Aotea Centre attending a concert, and during the interval I leaned over to talk to the Pākehā man sitting a few seats along from me. Although I had never met him (or maybe I had but couldn’t remember), he surprised me by explaining to his wife:
This is Tom’s son.
He had been a friend of my younger brother Derek and worked with him in Dad’s shearing gang.
My yell of joy must have echoed around the entire building.
Even at this age, Tom’s son is all I’ve ever wanted to be.
Nā reira koutou, rātou, tātou,
Tēnā tātou katoa.
Te Whānau a Kai
whana pana mārō
We are a people who
never retreat.