One Day a Taniwha
by Tīhema Baker

Tīhema Baker’s new novel is part of an emerging ground in contemporary local fiction, the Modern Family Man: a male protagonist, often middle-class, deals with the social pressures and conflicted expectations around being a hands-on father, sensitive partner, inoffensive colleague and engaged citizen, while still being one of the bros – with their beer, banter and bullying. Writers like John Prins, Breton Duke, Lawrence Patchett and Craig Cliff have flags posted on this hill, their characters uncertain and sometimes desperate climbers. They are dealing with the 21^st-century version of the Superwoman myth, with Foreskin’s Lament echoing off the rocks. Can these men have it all? Can they at least manage to clamber on, so their own sons don’t have to struggle this hard?

One Day a Taniwha has an added dimension, one that gives it an increasingly raw power as the story builds. Baker’s protagonist, Hepa, is Māori. He traded a government job in Wellington to become a lanyard-wearing Council accountant in Paraparaumu, closer to home: there he is the go-to for every karakia and the target for a throng of NIMBY protestors who hate ‘their rates being used on anything Māori.’

He and partner Āniwa are exhausted because their baby boy, Wī, won’t sleep; money is tight and Hepa sees responsibilities mount.

Feel like I never stop. Wake up, go to work, get home, get screamed at, shat on, get screamed at some more. Always something that needs fixing or doing. A bill that needs paying. All of it on two hours’ sleep a night. Get up and do it again.

Tired of the drinking culture around after-work rugby, Hepa tries a male netball team: all it offers is more humiliation and alienation. Even the escape of PlayStation is tainted by a racist fellow player who derides the Tino flag as the ‘bludger flag, beat ya kids flag.’

Āniwa speaks te reo and has ‘this whole other side to her, another world she knew how to navigate’ while Hepa ‘could barely string a sentence together.’ He has to memorise a mihi to get Wī into the local kōhanga but can’t find the energy.

They live in Waikanae, ‘like a giant retirement village for white people’, where Āniwa’s iwi is mana whenua. Hepa’s roots are in Rarity Cove in the South Island, where he says he longs to take Wī but resists visiting, admitting that he feels a ‘disconnect’ from his marae. ‘All the things you take for granted,’ he tells Āniwa, ‘the stuff that you just know because it was there, part of your world. I never got any of it.’ Now he feels he is judged ‘on how Māori I am’, thinking about the carvings at his marae. ‘I wish someone had taught me [to carve],’ Hepa thinks. ‘Or that I knew who to ask.’

The novel is specific about setting, not just places in the Wellington orbit but politics and what their friend Josie calls ‘the most racist, classist, destructive government we’ve ever had in power’. The role of David Seymour is played by ‘Darren Stewart’ with ‘his circus of anti-Treaty, anti-vax, anti-everything clowns’. On the gym TV, Hepa watches Stewart fend off media questions about missed Māori health targets by insisting we are ‘all responsible for our own lifestyle choices.’ Hepa seethes.

It was all bullshit. Just spin and rhetoric. The truth was always in the numbers. Life expectancy, cancer rates, cardiac and respiratory diseases, surgery wait times. Income, equity, home ownership. By every measure, Māori were worse off. And numbers don’t lie.

Political attacks at home and war around the world intensify Hepa’s inner turmoil. ‘If only I could forget the genocides, the pollution, the Darren Stewarts, the mindless churn, day in, day out.’ He also fears for Wī’s future: ‘His skin, his name, his identity – none of it was safe from attack.’ The attack is more than existential: both Hepa and Āniwa’s marae are hit by arsonists, part of a nationwide anti-Māori terrorist campaign.

Hepa has always had vivid dreams, but now they are haunted by a lizard with paua-shell eyes who grows into a menacing shapeshifter. His mentor Uncle Bush (‘beard like a wizard, never without his blue swanndri’) warns him that dreaming may be the wairua leaving the body.

At night, when you dream, it goes wandering. Other places, other times. Other realities. That world – te Pō – it’s not like ours. Guess you could say the rules don’t apply there. That’s why you see some buzzy stuff in your dreams.

Uncle Bush warms Hepa to take care. Te Pō is ‘not meant for the living’ because there is ‘more than just your wairua wandering around in it’. (The author notes that the concept of ‘astro-travel’ in the novel ‘is drawn from a mix of whānau history and Māori narratives about dreaming’.) Hepa spends time on Reddit investigating ‘lucid dreaming’ but starts to lose his grip on what is real and what is a dream.

Within his dreams the monster rampages. ‘I am wounds untreated,’ it tells him. ‘I am oath broken. I am sun eclipsed.’ Then the monster emerges in his waking life, threatening Āniwa and their baby, ‘wearing my skin. Speaking with my tongue.’ Like many of the ancestors of our myths and history, Hepa wanders too deep in the spiritual realm and finds himself ensnared.

Baker’s first novel for adults, Turncoat, shared some of the same threads (the Māori civil servant, Te Tiriti under attack), but like his YA novels had a sci-fi setting. Now he is with a more commercial publisher and the story‘s milieu is realist, contemporary and more mainstream. It also draws on his own experience of the public service. The ‘taniwha that haunts’ Hepa, Baker writes in the Author’s Note, ‘is very much inspired by real people and stories I encountered while working at Te Aka Whai Ora’. In the novel itself, Josie says the job of a public servant is ‘to give our best advice, in the public interest. Not just do whatever a Minister tells us … Maybe if public service leaders cared more about actually doing their jobs than keeping them, this government wouldn’t have been able to get away with as much as it has.’

At times like these, One Day a Taniwha can feel too pointed in its lessons. About fatherhood, Uncle Bush says there is ‘expectation placed on you fullas that our generation never had to deal with. Be more present, more involved. More gentle. Can’t be easy when you never really had that from us … Mind you, we never had it either. Or our pāpā, or theirs.’ Uncle Bush doesn’t see this as woke or weak, but more ‘like how our tāne used to be’ before colonisation and capitalism. An end note from the author makes his kaupapa in the book clear: ‘Māori men experience the worst mental health outcomes in Aotearoa’ and ‘are most likely to be subject to compulsory mental health care.’

Baker argues that a combination of emotional suppression – informed by ‘the ‘harden up’ mentality’ that persists for New Zealand men – is intensified for Māori by ‘the historical trauma of land, culture and language theft, generations upon generations of poverty and abuse’. Reclamation is needed, he says, including of the ‘knowledge and healing practices of our tupuna, and the mana of fatherhood.’ The novel, intense and vivid, erupting from our particular historic moment, makes a persuasive case.