Remembering Tuwhare

I work part-time at the information desk beside the Maori Court in Auckland's museum; I wasn't there when Tuwhare died a couple of weeks ago, but one of my co-workers commemorated him by placing piles of copies of 'Rain' and 'No Ordinary Sun' on the desk, and by laminating and mounting this timeline of the man's life. When I came to work the next day, I noticed a group of the museum's security guards huddled in a corner, passing Tuwhare's poems around and discussing them excitedly. I can't imagine poems by Allen Curnow or Kendrick Smithyman or any of New Zealand's other great twentieth century poets getting the same response.

Tributes to Tuwhare have tended to focus on the wide appeal of his poems, and on his 'man of the people' persona: Hone Harawira said that he 'could say what people felt in their bones'; Willie Jackson noted Hone's chiefly lineage, and told talkback radio listeners that the poet was the embodiment of Maori culture; and the estimable Tim Bowron told readers of his Socialist Democracy blog that Tuwhare was amongst the first Kiwi writers to 'find a voice' which was 'rooted in the people and landscape of New Zealand'.

It's easy enough to complicate the stock tribute to Tuwhare. Those who imagine the great man as some sort of straightforward Maori nationalist might be surprised to know that his first-ever publication was a shrill, strange letter to The People's Voice, the newspaper of the Communist Party of New Zealand, in which Hone condemned his own father for planning to run on a Maori nationalist ticket in the Northern Maori electorate during the election of 1943. Toeing the party line, which was to give total support to Labour and the war effort, Hone argued that his 'crackpot' Dad's candidacy would give heart Hitler and set back the cause of the Soviet Union. I'm not sure if Field Marshall Stalin was losing too much sleep in his dacha on the night they counted the Northern Maori ballot.

And anybody who believes that Tuwhare was some sort of intuitive, strictly vernacular poet - a sort of Maori John Clare - ought to examine his early work more closely. The poems in his first book No Ordinary Sun were published three decades after Frank Sargeson and other members of the 'thirties generation' vernacularised NZlit, yet they are very formal both in language and design:

Your sap shall not rise again
to the moon’s pull.
No more incline a deferential head
to the wind’s talk, or stir
to the tickle of coursing rain.

Your former shagginess shall not be
wreathed with the delightful flight
of birds nor shield
nor cool the ardour of unheeding
lovers from the monstrous sun.

Not exactly the sort of talk you hear down the Mangakino Tavern, is it, Tim? It was only in the 1970s, when a new generation of poets fed on the Beats and Black Mountain had brought the ampersand and the four-letter word into the canon, that Hone really let his hair down, and achieved the casual yet lyrical tone which marks his best poems.

I've talked about Hone's 1943 letter and the extreme artifice of his early poems because they are puzzles that can only be explained with reference to his membership of the Communist Party. A lot of the obituarists have neglected this subject, preferring to focus on 'safer' aspects of his political history, especially his involvement in Maori land rights activism and his campaigns to protect the environment. Those were and are very important causes, but I think the neglect of 'Hone the commie' is a mistake because, even if he eventually rejected some of the party's core ideas, Tuwhare was in many ways formed intellectually by his time in the organisation. But I'm getting ahead of myself, as usual. I'll save the details of the argument for another day. I was going to post a poem which I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

Tuwhare

Tangaroa scuttles whales
and beaches fleets of dolphins,
Rehua flies moreporks
into an overpass,
Tane sends chainsaws
to chew on totara:
let’s face it, Hone,
the Gods are bloody stupid.
They give, and they take
away. They were stupid
again, this week.

I’m drinking Hone Hikoi
in the Harlequin Bar,
watching the TV,
watching them dig your hole.

Hine-nui-te-po was a bird
in the pub at Mangakino.
Not the blonde,
not the brunette, whatever
their names were –
the other one,
the one with the dampness
of the earth in her veins.
The one with the blackhead
on her chin -
the one filling an ashtray
in the corner of the pub,
under the dartboard
that had lost its numbers.

You ignored her,
but she was watching.
At closing time she sidled home
to sew you a suit.
She had to leave room,
knowing you’d fill out,
with Common Room sausage rolls
and literary dinners,
with Kaka Point homebrew
and with hot air.
Years, decades passed,
but the suit was waiting.
You’re wearing it now
as they squeeze you into the hole.

To write is to take
some little thing from death,
from Hine-nui-te-po,
'the Great Lady of Night'.
You took a dozen toi toi
and the rain on
a corrugated roof;
the Southern Ocean
and the walk down Highway One.
You left her a mound of earth
on the edge of Kaikohe,
and noon traffic backing up
to Ngawha Springs.