Potiki Quotes

In school we were given holy pictures and toffees to help us do God’s will. God’s will was for us to sit still, or stand straight on two feet. It was His will that we pray, that we have clean handkerchiefs, wear aprons, bring pennies for souls, eat our crusts, hold our partner’s hand. It was His will that we did not push or dribble, whistle, spit, swear, or make dog’s ears in books. […]

The children who pleased Jesus could put a hand in the green tin for a picture or a toffee—which were little samples of the heaven which was to be the eventual and top reward, where you could reach in and grab a handful and have pictures and toffees poking everywhere between your fingers, and some of them dropping on the ground, or on the clouds the floated past. If you wanted to you could take the whole tin.

Seagulls are the inheritors of the shores where they take up death and renew it, pulling the eyes from fish and pecking the lice that cling to the mouthparts and bone, snatching at the white bloated bodies of porcupine fish which decorate the edge of the water like macabre party balloons, cracking the mussel and pulling it from its shell.

They are also the companions of Tawhiri Matea who dwells forever between Earth and Sky. […] But yet they are free, except from hunger and anger. Free, because although they inhabit the space, they find their place also in and on the sea, and have land as a refuge. The land gives anchorage to the wild matings and also shelters the nest. The gulls, unlike Tawhiri Matea, are not destined to rage in the void forever. They walk the edge, and from the edge fly out, testing and living out their lives.

I did not speak to Hemi again until the evening of the day his mother was buried, or at least I did not speak at length to him. It had been a busy time as I set about to help with catering and caring for the many people who came. We set and cleared the long tables and cleaned and refilled the big pots many times a day. Each evening after karakia we worked well into the night baking bread and preparing meat and vegetables for the next day. It was as though twelve years had never been as I fitted myself back into the known routines.

And so it was because of our little bird that stories became, once more, an important part of all our lives, the lives of all the whanau. And although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted, or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined.

“What are the wars about, Toko?” I asked.

“Fighting,” he said.

“But fighting who?”

“Just enemies.”

“And who are they? Who is the enemy?”

“We don’t know yet, but they have stolen from us.”

[…]

“Well what is it then, the life that’s being stolen?”

“We don’t know yet, but it might be something like a glowing heart of all special colours, pink, green, brown, blue, purple, and silver.”

[…]

“And what will happen?”

“We don’t know. We don’t know if we will get our purple, pink, and silver back that has been snatched from our throats and our eyes. We don’t want our special glowing colours pulled from the insides of us and dropped on the road under the feet that sound like hammers.”

“Whose feet, tramping on the red and silver?”

“We don’t know, we can’t see them, but I think one day we’ll know.”

There is a lot to remember about that night, and some of it is my own remembering, and some of it is from what I have been told since. But what I remember most of all about then, what I remember truly and really was that I knew. I knew that there was a big fish for me. I knew when Hemi said he was going to get herrings, when I went to the shed for the line, when I was lifted into the dinghy, when the water was soft, orange, and bangled, […] And what I have known ever since then is that my knowing, my own knowingness, is different. It is a before, and a now, and an after knowing, and not like the knowing that other people have. It is a now knowing as if everything is now.

My mother Roimata had taken a passionfruit cutting from Granny Tamihana’s vine. At the time when I caught my big fish the cutting was dry and without life, that’s what I’ve been told. But after we buried the fish head and fish guts there the plant began to grow and grow. […] It was as if the big eel head with its little seed-eyes was birthing out trail after trail of its young. […] And the eel-vines had a thousand hidden eyes, a thousand tails and a thousand hidden hearts.

The hearts are dark and warm and fit in the cup of your hand. You can pull out the hearts without pain, and when you open them you find the thousand dark seed-eyes. The seeds are a new beginning, but started from a death. Well, everything is like that—that’s what my mother Roimata says. End is always beginning. Death is life.

Much had been lost, but people hadn’t stopped knowing how to care for each other. It was good. He aha te mea nui i te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. He believed in it.

And people were looking into their land again. They knew that they belonged to the land, had known all along that there had to be a foothold otherwise you were dust blowing here and there and anywhere—you were lost, gone. It was good that there was more focus on it now, and more hope.

For him, being out of a job meant that he would be able to get on with his real work, and that he’d be able to pass on what he’d been given. Everything was meant, that’s what he’d always believed. But if you missed the signs, or let yourself be sidetracked, you could lose out.

He told again of how it had once been, and I was able to see the land again as it had been, and saw people who were gone by then, stooping into the soil. […] There was dark earth which seemed to sit darkly under dark skies. And then as the earth greened, and the green thickened and spread, the skies lightened into broad summers. […]

Bags of potatoes, kumara and carrots were loaded onto the truck, bags that I had often helped Mary and her mother and other members of the family to stitch with a needle and string. Of there were boxes of tomatoes and cabbages and corn to be shared or taken away for sale. I saw myself with the other children carrying pumpkins, as though each of us had snared a sun in the circle of our arms.

“Get on over to Aunty’s and talk to [Reuben]. […] He’ll […] tell you to stick at school, make something of yourself.”

“Aren’t I something already? Aren’t I? That’s all I learn at school—that I’m not somebody, that my ancestors were rubbish and so I’m rubbish too. That’s all I learn from the newspapers, that I’m nobody, or I’m bad and I belong in jail. You’re telling me that now too.”

“It’s not that Son. It’s not what we mean. You’ve got the brains. You should use them.”

“I am. That’s what I’m doing right now, using my brains. I’ve thought about it. I tell you. I’ve already thought. And what I know is I’m not learning one thing, not one thing, that’s anything to do with me, or us. And some of the stuff, well, it’s against me and against us. It makes us dumb, paints us wrong.”

There were pictures of Reuben being arrested and of him going quietly away. But others had come to help by then, and after he had been taken away they would move in to take his place, to keep his place warm, that’s what they said. Most were of our race but some were not.

Gradually the older people began to give support to Reuben because they all knew that what he was saying was true. They had always known that the land had been taken, that there had been no payments except for rents being cheaper, that letters had been written, that homes and a dedicated house had been pulled down. They knew that the land had not been returned to them as promised. They knew that they still owned the land. They were ashamed not to support him.

There was in the meeting-house a warmth.

It was the warmth that wood has, but it was also the warmth of people gathered. It was the warmth of past gatherings, and of people that had come and gone, and who gathered now in the memory. It was the warmth of embrace, because the house is a parent, and there was warmth in under the paternal backbone, enclosement amongst the patterned ribs. There was warmth and noise in the house as the people waited for Mr Dolman to speak, Dolman whom they had named ‘Dollarman’ under the breath. Because although he had been officially welcomed he was no in the heart welcome, or at least what he had to say was not.

Earlier when preparing the house for the meeting, some had thought that we should bring in a table for the man’s plans and papers, and a chair for the man to sit on, but my mother Roimata disagreed.

She said to let the man be like everyone else because that would be good psychology.

“You mean let him sit on the floor in his suit and sock feet so he’ll feel a fool, him not being used to our ways?” Tangimoana said.

“Tangi, I didn’t mean that, not exactly. I meant let the boot be on the other foot for a change. Let him feel what we sometimes feel…in different situations.”

“It’s exactly what you meant no matter how nice you put it,” said Tangimoana. And al the women laughed while they unrolled the whariki [floor mats] and the boys put the mattresses down on them.

Right then I saw what the man saw as he turned and looked at the three of us and as my eyes met his eyes. I saw what he saw. What he saw was brokenness, a broken race. He saw in my Granny, my Mary and me, a whole people, decrepit, deranged, deformed. That was what I knew. That was what I understood, not only the thoughts of the man but also I understood the years of hurt, sorrow and enslavement that fisted within my Granny Tamihana’s heart. I understood, all at once, all the pain that she held inside her small and gentle self.

And the pain belonged to all of us, I understood that too. […]

I was the only one who saw the carved hate and anger on the face of the man as he stepped into the afternoon, out into the shouting of kids scrambling after their ball on the marae.

We could not afford books so we made out own. […] It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives.

But our main book was the wharenui which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure, and a taonga. And we are a part of that book along with family past and family yet to come.

The land and the sea and the shores are a book too, and we found ourselves there. They were our science and our sustenance. And they are our own universe about which there are stories of great deeds and relationships and magic and imaginings, love and terror, heroes, heroines, villains and fools. Enough for a lifetime of telling. We found our own universe to be as large and extensive as any other universe there is.

I stood by the fire to warm and dry myself while the nets were unravelled and the fish taken from them to be gutted and scaled. […]

They worked swiftly at cleaning the fish, knowing that the rain would soon be heavy, but also because we were looking forward to the evening meal which would be waiting for us in the wharekai. It was good to feel hunger and know there was food. It was good to know that there was food for the next day. It was good to be cold and to know it would be warm in the wharekai.

And then it was done. The children began to pick up the kahawai, wanting to be the ones to carry them, high-pitched and eager.

“Carry them…”

“Carry…”

“I can, I…”

“I want, I can…”

“Me…”

The stories changed. […]

In the water story the gardens were ruined by rain and mud, and one side of the urupa began to slide. The sea became silted and yellow, the colour of the broken hills. […]

It was like looking out on the long-ago time when the goddess, in anger, had set the world on fire to punish her descendant for his tricks. And the uri was afraid and had to call out to hard and lasting rain to save him and save the earth. It was like looking out on that long-ago, drenched-earth time. […] But, if what happened to our land in the time of rain was like what happened in the long-ago time, what was the wrong that was being punished? Was there a taonga that would be gifted as a result? Was there some good what would come from what was not good?

“Looking down from the road. You can see. Half hidden, but you can see. Put there, by … someone, to take the water down and do … harm. Someone from the job.”

“And all this too,” Hemi said. “It took a man and a machine to do all this.”

[…]

[Matiu] and Timoti and the other three men, as well as Tangimoana and Tania, took over the work that we’d been doing.

No one spoke then. We stood in silence about the dinghy, our feet being pulled further and further into the mud of our own turangawaewae, our own standing place. It was a world of silence, an unfamiliar world, a world of other, a world of almost drowning. We stood, not speaking, only trying to search and sort the other, the almost drowning, to find a pattern and a sense, to work through piece by piece to get us home.

We did not work in the gardens at all that day […] I could not work in the gardens on any day, but I could be there, and be useful in many ways. I could sort seed, or count out the little plants ready for transplanting, and I could label boxes, bags and trays.

We stood looking at the remains of the house for a long time, then when Granny Tamihana turned away to go back to the wharekai we followed her.

“What shall we do?” someone said […]

Then Granny Tamihana said, “Manaakitia te manuhiri […] Look after the visitors.”

We began to move round, rolling the white paper on to the tables, cutting bread, putting the water on to boil, taking cups from the cupboard […] Our bodies moved, our hands moved, doing the familiar things, but our thoughts, our spirits, were in ruin, fallen to broken earth.

He did not want anger, or sorrow to turn him … against people. It wasn’t his way. In his whole life he had never kept anger in him, against people. Now … it was hard. Now, it was the soil that saved him, the need to feed the whanau. And there it was again. People. People needing people. Tangimoana wouldn’t agree with driving feelings into the soil, digging over the loss and hurt, just struggling day to day. “The minute you’re born,” she’d say to him, “You nose is in the ground. But I’ll die, no sweat, if I can do it saying I’m me, and knowing that someone believes it. […]

Well he wasn’t sure. It sounded wrong. He’d tried to say things to her, to help her with … anger. Tried to dig her anger in, alongside his own. But no […]

[My] brother had looked back in the genealogies until he found a common ancestress from whom both people could show descent. He carved the head and shoulders of this ancestress at the centre of the door lintel, showing her to face both out and in the two thick, strong arms of the woman stretched out to embrace the two poles that made the door frames on either side. Down these two poles the people were interspersed, the people of our iwi and the people of Te Ope, but linked at the top of the columns by the woman. […] And these children were working, laughing, crying, singing people, some small and some larger than life. They were young and old, and were joined by their fingers or toes, hands, feet, arms, legs, foreheads or tongues until all had become part of one another.

We have known what it is to have had a gift, and have not ever questioned from where the gift came, only sometimes wondered. The gift has not been taken away because gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still.

His death had been with us a long time but not the manner of it. The manner of his death, that is where the pain is—the manner of his death, and the brokenness and suffering of the little bird. His death brought Tangimoana back to us, brought others to us, gave us much that is good, but is it enough, can it be enough?

“We all got up and went out. It was still too dark to see but we heard the machines start up. We could hear them pushing rubble down the hill, pushing down what had been built. We saw the torches and the fires. Then we all went back to bed.”

“All of you?”

“All.”

“Didn’t you want to know what was happening?”

“We did, so we got up and went out. Once we found out what it was we went back to bed.”

“Could you identify …”

“We could not. It was not light enough to see.”

“Surely you would have been interested in knowing who …?”

“We were not interested.”

“Why not?”

“If we’d been able to identify people we’d have been able to help you with your inquiry. We’ve helped you before on two occasions, as you know. We were not satisfied, not happy with what you made the inquiries show …”

The young man said to his people, “There’s a story that says that the finishing of this poupou—this last for the old house, first for the new—goes into the future. That the completion will be done once it is known who the lower figure should be. I know now who must go there. I know now who it is that has been fathered by one who, in his own time, had no children of his own. I can do it now. But you might want me to wait until I’m older. You could think that this should be done by an older man.”

“We want you to complete it now,” they said. […]

When the blessings had been done the young man put mattresses down in the meeting-house for himself, his brother and his aunt, and took up his tools.

But the doorway, suddenly, had become the toothed aperture. It was suddenly the toothed aperture through which all must pass.

The night was edged now, and clamorous.

All the stars were falling.

*

And from this place of now, behind, and in, and beyond the tree, from where I have eversight, I watch the people.

The people work and watch and wait. They pace the tides and turn the earth. They stand, listening on the shores.

They listen, hearing mostly the quiet. It is the quiet that is trees growing, the sidling of fish through water, the hovering cloud, the open-eyed quiet of the night.