Rua
by Candice Tutauha

Candice Tutauha could not find the modern wāhine Māori character whom she longed to read, and so she wrote her. Modern, deeply spiritual, funny, complex and inquisitive, Tutauha’s debut novel Rua is narrated by a character who embodies these qualities. This coming-of-age story begins in December 1995, when Rua Rānui turns 16 and begins to move from youth into the responsibilities of adulthood.

Rua is semi-autobiographical. Like Tutauha, Rua has XLH (or genetic rickets), a condition that can cause bone pain and muscle weakness. She makes her way to the local library – her ‘sneakers dragged the littered footpath, scuffing out chalk marks and cigarette butts’ –to protest institutional blindness towards disability. Although the books on the library’s mezzanine remain out of reach, the publicity Rua generates results in greater independence, her ‘new shiny-chromed electric wheelchair a consolation gift’.

Rua dreams big. Small in stature, the first of her ambitions is symbolic: she wishes to be a giraffe. She and her adored cousin Daisy (tall, with model good looks) sit on the porch ‘plucking stinging nettles out of my hair’ because they’ve been sliding down hills on cardboard. Daisy asks, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and Rua says a journalist, though to herself she admits this is a ‘far-fetched idea. The type of lie adults believed from a responsible teenager. All I cared about was reaching for books, the moon and stars when I got older.’ She writes stories in her notebook to read aloud to Daisy, often set in other places and times.

Rua’s dream life is in New York City, distant in every way from her coastal home in Taranaki. The community of their street, Kōwhai Grove, includes her grandmother, Koro, aunt, cousins and childhood friends. Nana Peta tries ‘to protect us from the worst of it’ and has ‘an altercation with the principal on matters related to diversity and inclusion’. Hard-living Auntie Hiwa turns up to taunt Rua ‘with malicious words and drunken rhetoric’, but Rua’s cousin has her back. ‘The summer before, Aunty had almost drowned at the beach, and Daisy had gotten into an argument with the lifeguards who tried to save her.’

Rua is an acute observer of the limitations of her world:

…..Kōwhai Grove was napalm in summer. That’s how I remember it — endless summers of hot, triggered days. A flaming bomb of broken families and troubled teens with idle hands and restless minds. By mid-morning, the air pressed in, sticky and sly, trickling sweat between our thighs. Even the tide seethes in and out with hot water. Our neighbourhood slept as the sun rose, and by the sultry afternoon a hot beach and a hangover didn’t mix well.

…..We were a horseshoe fixed at the bad end, shod with different races. Poor people, pinched tight faces. Then the gangs moved in and spread a violence that no one dared to name.

In time, embroiled in that violence, Rua must reckon with her responsibility to the next generation and acknowledge the burden carried through her whakapapa: ‘I come from a long line of wāhine who lived things the hard way. My mum died when I was born. My nan raised six kids on a cleaning wage.’ The distance between life in Kōwhai Grove and the future Rua imagines is both geographical and social.

As tensions escalate in the novel, Rua’s sense of self and her view of the neighbourhood darken. ‘We were a dead-end street with dead-end people. The rain had soothed the swollen bruise and washed away the blood, but the air was suffocating — wet fur, rotting food, sickly-sweet roses snapped at their necks.’ She goes on the road with cousins Little Day and Kip: her job is keeping track of the significant income amassed through daily drug dealing and other illegal activities. During a hotel stay, she longs for escape:

I was sitting at a table laden with breakfast on the deck of a hotel room overlooking Taranaki, my feet propped on a patio seat. A white robe engulfed me, so thick the collar felt like a luxurious neck brace. This was the life I’d always make-believed for myself. The other giraffe-me that could do anything and go anywhere.

The young people of Kōwhai Grove share a fascination with the US and the gangsta culture of rap; the experiences and music of rap artists offer a mythological lens through which they view their own lives. At a party Rua is ‘stuck between a Pā boy with a bulldog tattoo on his right arm, and a nameless chick wearing sagging black jeans and white Nikes’. Little Day thinks Uncle Pō’s ankle bracelet is cool. When Wiri, another cousin, dies, Rua wonders if a ‘black caddy would creep into our street soon; a lowrider for a young passenger in a casket. Wiri had once asked for one as a joke: a casket with hinges, to mirror the deathbeds in the gangsta songs he glorified.’ The police officers who frequently call on Kōwhai Grove are viewed with disdain. Rua tells one that ‘our koro’s a lot scarier to us than you are.’

The glamour, danger and defiance borrowed from rap culture give the young characters – Māori and Pakehā – the language and attitude they use to assert themselves, despite the increasing stakes. Because of her disability and her dreams, Rua is both complicit and a questioning observer. At Wiri’s tangi she wonders

why the aunties and uncles were partying with the young ones. Wiri’s death was unnatural; something that needed reflection. A cautionary tale of how not to survive, then. Instead, at the back of the marae they were smoking and getting stoned together, acting like nothing had changed and nothing ever would.

Robbie Turner, the Pākehā boy Rua likes, ‘always smelled fresh and clean, like soap’, but he is also in thrall to her cousins and ‘reckons he’s Black, too’:

…..Robbie wasn’t the only white kid that wanted to hang out. My cousins were adventure seekers high on sugar, thieves of the night, makers of mayhem’ who earned ‘the titles of ‘gang’, ‘thugs’, ‘hood rats’. Or, as the mums and dads of the white kids would say, ‘those bloody little Māori shits’.

…..But we were kids who didn’t know any better, young minds yet to be challenged by the knowledge that one day our ‘blackness’ would be forced to mould itself into white spaces.

…..The spaces Robbie already fit into.

In the novel’s mid-sections, the phrase ‘white spaces’ gains historical weight. Aunty Hiwa believes the area is ‘cursed’ and steals a manuscript from the marae office for Rua. (‘You’re good with books – you can decipher it for us.’)  It is the old diary of a British soldier and its entries reveal how Rua’s tūpuna were entangled in colonial violence. In December 1865, Major General Chute led British regiments in an invasion of Taranaki that decimated numerous pā sites and 21 kāinga, including Pātahi, the village of Rua’s tūpuna. Johnson, the diary’s author, declares: ‘To possess the land, we must first dispossess the people.’

These diary excerpts ground Rua and the novel’s whānau in ancestral richness and contextualise the hardships and delinquency of the present. Tutauha draws compelling connections between the British attacks on Taranaki iwi and Rua’s own perilous situation, deftly interweaving the two narratives. As Johnson’s unit positions ‘the first cannon’ while ‘soldiers lay in wait’, Rua anticipates the violence stirred up by Little Day. (‘If I die tonight in a drive-by, waiting for these assholes, please tell Daisy Heaven IS real.’) She mocks the diary writer for his fear of going into battle: ‘All their muskets and firepower, and Johnson was still scared shitless.’ Rua seems almost numb from the violence she witnesses – ‘the sound of someone’s phone ringing right after the gunfire like it was the most normal thing in the world’ – but she is deeply affected and knows that ‘something has shifted’.

In the diary sections we meet the character Hōne Rānui, ‘the Māori contingent’s leader’ who Johnson comes to admire. Through Hōne, the perspective of the people the regiment is preparing to attack enters the story and unsettles Johnson’s account. Johnson’s view of the ‘savages’ whose chiefs are ‘devils in the making’ is undermined when Hōne reveals that Māori view the British as ‘white devils’. When the Office of Colonial Affairs wants to send Māori remains back to Britain for ‘preservation, curation, display’, Johnson is told to offer Hōne a ‘voyage to the Empire’s heart as curator and cultural advisor, though we all know the role is ceremonial at best’. Johnson is unsure how to ‘dress the offer in civilty’ because Hōne has “seen too much of what lies beneath our ‘civil tongues’.”

The novel’s strength lies in Tutauha’s juxtaposition of historical testimony and the social complexity of Rua’s experience. Gang or gangsta; ghost or devil; pastor or prophet: each name shifts the way the characters can be seen. By the novel’s end, Rua has a way out – an ‘open door’ to a place that offers her a ‘fresh start’ – but no neat conclusions are drawn. Like her protagonist, Tutauha is a storyteller who ‘covers the spaces most people overlook – stories that aren’t easy, but true’.