Purakau

  A LIVELY RETELLING OF PŪRĀKAU — MĀORI MYTHS — BY CONTEMPORARY MĀORI WRITERS.

  Ancient Māori creation myths, portrayals of larger-than-life heroes and tales of engrossing magical beings have endured through the ages. Some hail back to Hawaiki, some are firmly grounded in New Zealand and its landscape. Through countless generations, the stories have been reshaped and passed on. This new collection presents a wide range of traditional myths that have been retold by some of our best Māori wordsmiths. The writers have added their own creativity, perspectives and sometimes wonderfully unexpected twists, bringing new life and energy to these rich, spellbinding and significant taonga.

  Take a fresh look at Papatūānuku, a wild ride with Māui, or have a creepy encounter with Rūruhi-Kerepō, for these and many more mythical figures await you.

  Ka mua, ka muri …

  Explore the past, from it shape the future …

  CONTENTS

  James Ormsby Decodes his Tokotoko Form

  INTRODUCTION / Witi Ihimaera & Whiti Hereaka

  PROLOGUE / Whiti Hereaka

  PART ONE: CREATION

  Chapter 1 The Beginning

  Te Pō / Patricia Grace

  Chapter 2 Ranginui and Papatūānuku

  We, Who Live in Darkness / Hone Tuwhare

  Papatūānuku / Whiti Hereaka

  Chapter 3 Mankind and Mortality

  Skin and Bones / Tina Makereti

  Hine-ahu-one / Patricia Grace

  Hine-tītama — Ask the Posts of the House / Witi Ihimaera

  PART TWO: THE ANCESTORS

  Chapter 4 Māui

  Headnote to a Māui Tale / Keri Hulme

  Born. Still. / Briar Grace-Smith

  Māui Goes to Hollywood / David Geary

  Me aro koe ki te hā o Hineahuone! / Jacqueline Carter

  Chapter 5 Tāwhaki and Rata

  Tāwhaki: Real Life / Paula Morris

  Rata / Hēmi Kelly

  Chapter 6 Moon and Mist

  Moon Story / Patricia Grace

  Hinepūkohurangi and Uenuku / Kelly Joseph

  Chapter 7 Kupe

  Kuramārōtini / Briar Wood

  Waka 86 / Robert Sullivan

  PART THREE: THE SEA TO THE LAND

  Chapter 8 From the Sea

  A Story from the Sea / Witi Ihimaera

  Shapeshifter / Tina Makereti

  Chapter 9 Pounamu

  I Have a Stone / Keri Hulme

  Te Ara Poutini / Nic Low

  Chapter 10 From the Earth

  Moving Mountains / Clayton Te Kohe

  The Kūmara God Smiles Fatly / Hone Tuwhare

  The Potato / Witi Ihimaera

  PART FOUR: MYTHICAL BEINGS

  Chapter 11 Ogresses

  Kurungaituku / Ngāhuia Te Awekotuku

  Blind / Kelly Ana Morey

  Chapter 12 Taniwha and Patupaiarehe

  Te Pura, Warrior Taniwha of Te Wairoa / Renée

  Getting It / Keri Hulme

  Hine Tai / Apirana Taylor

  Īhe & Her / Frazer Rangihuna

  PART FIVE: RAROHENGA

  Chapter 13 Journey to the Underworld

  Rarohenga and the Reformation / D.Avid Gear.y

  Niwareka and Mataora / Witi Ihimaera

  EPILOGUE: THE FUTURE

  Waka 99 / Robert Sullivan

  Biographical Notes

  Follow Penguin Random House

  James Ormsby Decodes his Tokotoko Form

  The drawing of a tokotoko, the walking–talking stick held by speakers on the marae, depicts the versions of the creation myth that tell of Tāne using his trees to help separate Ranginui and Papatūānuku. It was Tāne, too, who became the progenitor of humankind, so the tokotoko shaft also represents his ure. The tokotoko has small forms extending from it, with a thin shadow of aho, or fishing, lines behind.

  There are five sections down the shaft, which relate directly to the book’s parts: Creation; The Ancestors; The Sea to the Land; Mythical Beings; and Rarohenga.

  (1) At the top, Matariki stars drift behind the handle/ure, spilling whakapapa marks. The lashing of the handle’s binding symbolises the whakapapa or the layered stages of creation itself (Te Kore, Te Pō, Te Ao, etc). A crushed Māui attempts to separate the handle from the shaft, the first part of the creation. (2) Beneath this, a moon cycle orbits the ancestors. (3) The water cycle (encompassing cloud, waterfall and rainbow colours) floats from the third part of the tokotoko, referencing the Sea to the Land section. (4) Further down, taniwha arms escape from the tokotoko to depict the mythical beings. (5) The fifth part of the book, Rarohenga or the underworld, is represented with whakarei lines (customary whakairo or carving ornamentation).

  Ngā mihi —

  James F. Ormsby

  Introduction

  BY WITI IHIMAERA & WHITI HEREAKA

  1.

  Gods and monsters are at the very beginning of all cultures.

  Horus and Set battled each other for the rule of Egypt. Zeus and his fellow gods arbitrated over the world from the heights of Mount Olympus. In the Norse pantheon, Odin presided over Valhalla, riding his winged eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, over the land. Ahura Mazda was a god of light in Persia fighting against Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness, who controlled a three-headed demon known as Aži Dahāka.

  In New Zealand, where Earth and Sky were the first parents, one of their sons — the mighty Tānemahuta — did nothing less than raise the sky so that life and light could flood the world between. This act might have freed the sons, but it also led to aeons-long battles between them.

  Such tales come from long-ago times when people saw divinity in everything. They worshipped the gods, and from their veneration developed entire belief systems which flourished long before Christianity.

  Mazdayasna (or Zoroastrianism) was one of the world’s oldest extant religions. Hinduism was particularly polytheistic, with 33 million gods and goddesses. The Celts, who could count 1200 named deities, were, like Māori, animists. They believed that all aspects of the natural world were imbued with spirits and, therefore, gods were forces within nature. For instance, the sun was a god, the wind was a god, the ocean was a god and so on. Whenever thunder boomed, the gods were said to be walking overhead. If the crops failed, the gods must have been angry at some slight and therefore needed to be appeased.

  Pity the poor human race. You negotiated your way through life very carefully.

  One misstep and you could be zapped.

  2.

  Scientists consider that Māori came from the last of the migrations out of Africa, making the final push from Asia into Polynesia and then down to Aotearoa. Thus Māori share our gods and monsters with other Polynesian cultures. However, it is astounding that from a people considered to be the youngest of all human populations has come one of the most magnificent and richest inventories of origin narratives. From our ancestral homeland, Hawaiki (Ra‘iātea, French Polynesia) around 700 AD, we carried our atua and taniwha with us and installed them in the new land.

  Are the stories, myths and folklore imaginary? Not to Māori. The narratives that have come down — as Māori say, i ngā wā o mua, from the times in front of us — may be fabulous and fantastic but they are also real. They are so actual that today, although mostly Christianised now, Māori still ritually acknowledge sky and earth whenever in formal Māori settings:

  Ko Ranginui kei runga — The Sky Father is above.

  Ko Papatūānuku kei raro — The Earth Mother is below.

  In so doing, Māori affirm the first parents of most indigenous civilisations and our kinship with all native peoples.

  Not only do Māori do this, but we still pay homage to our gods (for instance, the first fish of any catch is ritually returned to Tangaroa, the sea
god). We are also still able to establish our mythology on the landscape. In 2002, Transit New Zealand modified its roading plans for State Highway One when local Māori protested that the upgrade would infringe on the habitat of taniwha, swamp-living monsters.

  Our funeral services may begin within a Christian setting but, most often, they end with the farewelling of our dead back to Hawaiki.

  The Māori inventory of gods and monsters is still, therefore, relevant today.

  Nor is there any separation of the ‘fanciful’ stories of our origin, i.e. mythology and folklore, from the believable or factual, the real from the imagined, rational from the irrational, or what can be believed in and what cannot. Māori do not make those distinctions. It’s all history, fluid, holistic, inclusive — not necessarily linear — and it may be being told backwards, which is why, to orient ourselves, we always place our origin stories in front. The stories are actually the beginning of a whakapapa, a genealogy. And what they establish is the beginning of a distinctive world view.

  First, there are the accounts of the origin and development of the universe. The stories provide a logical account of the coming of light, increasing by degrees and intensity until, lo, comes the dawning of the first day. Everything is happening all at once and over many aeons; Māori call this period of the making of the solar system ‘the time when the world was shining’. And it is during these first days that the Sky Father and Earth Mother appear in the genealogy, tightly wrapped in each other.

  Second are the accounts which relate the genealogy of the epic Māori pantheon of gods. The primal children are all male and there are more than seventy. Among them are Tānemahuta, god of forests; Tangaroa, god of the oceans; Rongomaraeroa, god of agriculture; Tāwhirimātea, god of winds; and Haumiatiketike, god of the fern root and wilderness plantations. It is Tānemahuta, god of the forests, who devises the plan to separate the parents. This creates huge dissent between the brothers — those who side with him and those who don’t. However, as earlier mentioned, Tānemahuta prevails, kicking with his feet at the sky until Ranginui is pushed forcibly upward and the strand of light which becomes the envelope for existence is created. There is a price, however: rolling wars between the atua during which Tūmatauenga takes upon himself the title of god of war and Rongomaraeroa assumes a second role as god of peace.

  Doesn’t sound as if much has changed, eh.

  Everything is still happening simultaneously, events overlapping. In the events described, while they are fighting, the gods also begin to create overworlds and underworlds. Some people say there are as many as twenty heavens and the same number of worlds below, and each is the place of many kingdoms and inhabitants. Between them is Te Ao Tūroa and, here, the gods really outdo themselves. They create a place that is as bountiful as it is beautiful, a world of trees, fishes, ferns, foods, wind systems and so on. However, in the process, their fighting escalates as they bicker over borders and territories.

  It is during this time that Tānemahuta becomes more than god of forests. His mother, Papatūānuku, provides him with the female element that will allow him to create the first woman, Hineahuone.

  So the third of the major accounts of the whakapapa comes into play. This is the genealogy dealing with arrival of humankind and our relationships with the gods and the many worlds we have inherited.

  The holistic nature of the world is extraordinary. The gods come and go overhead, underground, all around. Mountains move and fall in love with each other. Humankind can converse with trees, fishes and birds. And we share Te Ao Tūroa with supernatural beings like tipua (demons); maero (wilderness beings); ogresses and giants; flying men; taniwha (serpents, dragons and supernatural kidnappers); patupaiarehe (fairy folk); ponaturi (sea devils); and so on.

  It’s certainly a time when humankind needs heroes and heroines who can begin to negotiate with the gods for our tino rangatiratanga, sovereignty. Thus arise the splendid narratives concerning the exploits of Māui, the half-god, half-human hero who tamed the sun, fished up Aotearoa from the sea, and tried to obtain immortality for us. It is also the time of Tāwhaki, three generations later, who climbed the many heavens to secure the baskets of knowledge so that, although we were mortal, we could build one generation after another on the accomplishments of our kind. In this period comes Rata, who built a canoe, and he appears in the genealogy as one of our major waka builders. The great sea-going canoes enable the eventual departure from Hawaiki and arrival in Aotearoa.

  In New Zealand, the whakapapa becomes replenished and enriched by tribal stories of the continuing relationship with all our worlds, but set in our own iwi landscapes. Fights with giant birds above mountains that Air New Zealand flies over. Encounters with taniwha that jealously guard their territories in rivers, swamps and entrances to our harbours. Here, also, we meet with the fairy folk, many of whom form the basis of some of our most enduring love stories.

  What is interesting in the early genealogy is that, ultimately, humankind commits to a kaupapa. The planet created by the gods for us must be cared for. Not only that, but we have a duty as kaitiaki, conservators, to pass our legacy from one generation to another. To improve and add value in each generation, and to keep the whakapapa going forward into the future.

  We’re not doing a good job of it.

  3.

  The times of gods and monsters may be far behind the world now. The deities and demons are human today, existing among our own kind.

  Nevertheless, the stories — as mythologies and folklore — have become huge repositories from which a terrific amount of imaginative work has sprung. Greek mythology is fortunate to have had Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and others creating the basic library from the 12th century BC. In the case of the pre-Christian Norse, German and Viking worlds, the stories initially existed only as a few fragile source stems collected by the eighth-century monk, Bede.

  In New Zealand, the Māori repository — oral — was kept by tohunga, priests and scholars, and primarily archived within whare wānanga — houses of learning. Different tribes and generations passed on their own versions of the stories so, for instance, some say that Tāne gathered the three baskets of knowledge but others that it was Tāwhaki. Some say Tiki was the first human to be created rather than Hineahuone. Not until the early 19th century, once Pākehā story collectors like Johannes C. Andersen, Elsdon Best and Reverend J. F. H. Wohlers spoke to local Māori keepers of the whakapapa like Te Rangikaheke or Te Whatahoro, did the diverse oral stories begin to be transcribed into English.

  Subsequently, every generation has been marked by the work of sterling folklorists and story collectors who have painstakingly pieced together larger and more panoramic views. Often, as earlier alluded to, these exist in various versions and sometimes contradict each other, but they are all versions of what might be called our first origins. In New Zealand, a huge amount of recovery has occurred since the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975. Here, most land claims were characterised by genealogies including those from our earliest inventories. Using mythology to prove the existence or not of certain historical figures, or to map out locations in the ancient world, has authenticated our earlier stories within legal process.

  ‘This is where we start,’ writes Whiti Hereaka in the prologue that begins Pūrākau: Māori myths retold by Māori writers.

  ‘We are creatures of words,’ she continues. ‘We are creatures of imagination. We live on the edges of dreams and the margins of thought. We live in the whisper of the page.’

  With these words Hereaka speaks for a new generation of creative writers among the Māori iwi, writers who have begun to explore their origin stories in a different, imaginative way. While the primary stories are considered sacrosanct, there has been a huge amount of interest in looking at contemporary society against a mythical template, either explicit or implicit. By doing so, certain truths reflecting society or that might have contemporary worth can be compared or contrasted — or affirmed.

  The stories keep
our gods and monsters as alive in our literature as they are in our landscape. Keri Hulme’s ‘Getting It’ concerns the surprise arrival at a courtroom land dispute of claimants from legendary times, and is as pertinent to Waitangi Tribunal dealings today. Paula Morris’s ‘Real Life’ creates a biography of the famed heavens-climbing hero Tāwhaki against the background of homelessness in Auckland, where the Sky Tower is the tip of a taiaha pointing into the sky. Kelly Ana Morey in ‘Blind’ imagines the ogress Rūruhi-Kerepō as an inmate of Kingseat mental asylum in a story that is also about elderly within the hospital system.

  Witi Ihimaera’s ‘The Potato’ takes that simple tuber as the subject for a story about feeding the world. And David Geary, in the virtuosic ‘Māui Goes to Hollywood’, considers Māui’s death as occurring within a dreamlike setting — part-nightclub, part carnival — which could be the world in the Trump era.

  Indeed, in Pūrākau Māoridom’s best writers act as modern-day storytellers for the same purposes as their forebears. They mirror political events within fabular settings — and endeavour to be entertaining and instructional while they are at it. Take, for instance, Hemi Kelly’s clever story ‘Rata’, or Tina Makereti’s ‘Shapeshifter’, which invokes Pānia of the Reef. While the DNA of the origin story is honoured, Makereti shifts the telling to Pānia (the sculpture), thus offering us a glimpse of what Pānia sees today. The retelling sits in relation to the origin story through audience memory — but offering contemporary relevance.

  Thus, like the oral tale spinners of old, the writers assembled in the collection are aware of storytelling as performance and, therefore, you can expect great drama and style in the indigenous fashion. ‘Strike from the page,’ Whiti Hereaka says, ‘all that has been written before. Let the words and letters slip from your mind; pile them one upon another obliterating their meaning — their ink bleeds into the white spaces: they become pōngerengere, dark and suffocating.’

  The first Māori poet to be published, Hone Tuwhare, led the way in the 1950s, and we represent his stunning poetics with ‘We, Who Live in Darkness’. Similarly, Patricia Grace has been an exemplar of Māori writing since the 1960s, and ‘Hine-ahu-one’ is a perfect word portrait in miniature by one of our best literary stylists. Renée keeps on surprising with her trademark lilt and humour, as in ‘Te Pura, Warrior Taniwha of Te Wairoa’, and affirms just why she continues to be admired today. Ngāhuia Te Awekotuku shows in ‘Kurungaituku’ the qualities that have made her one of our leading academics: her story is marked by nuance and sly inflection.