Te Kaikaukau / The Swimmer
by Witi Ihimaera Smiler

In 2023, Witi Ihimaera attended a large event in Santa Barbara to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his first novel, Tangi. He was introduced and applauded by the audience. There were TV cameras there and ‘blinding lights’, and the first question – to talk about his career as a ‘Maori writer’ – set Ihimaera adrift. He saw himself as a swimmer in a pounamu sea ‘of mounting, boundless waves’ – an ‘ocean of dreams,’ he writes, propelling him upwards into the sky. He heard his father’s voice speaking to him, observing that all Ihimaera’s accomplishments had been in ‘te reo Pākehā’.

Ihimaera was shaken by the ‘gentle unspoken criticism’. This was a wero, a challenge. Ihimaera decided that he ‘owed at least one book written in te reo to Dad, [his grandaunt] Nani Mini and my ancestors’. Such a pledge meant that Ihimaera had to confront what he lacked. He had been living and writing ‘in the wrong culture and wrong language’. Heralded around the world as a ‘Māori writer’, he had ‘never been truly and sufficiently present in that culture, let alone the reo’.

Although Ihimaera had knowledge to gain, he had responded to slights against Māori identity from a young age. At high school he was appalled by the ‘erasure’ of Māori writers from assigned reading lists. In an anthology of New Zealand stories, he encountered a Pākehā-written story that ‘demonised’ its Māori characters. The offending text was thereby jettisoned through the library’s window, an act of literary valour for which Ihimaera was caned. Later impulses were met more favourably. Ihimaera vowed to correct the absence of Māori writers, and stories featuring everyday Māori life. He wanted books that would be ‘compulsory for Pākehā students whether they would like it or not’. Success on this front is indisputable. Books and stories written by Witi Ihimaera have been read in Aotearoa New Zealand classrooms for the last half-century.

Ihimaera’s resolution to write in te reo meant he had ‘to go back to the beginning of my craft and learn te reo, not only to talk it but to write it’. Ihimaera  signed up for the year-long rumaki reo course at Te Wānanga Takiura in Auckland. The course began the week he turned eighty. Fellow students in the cohort of 150 included broadcaster Miriama Kamo and former netball international Courtney Tairi. Recognisable in his own right, Ihimaera drew attention from the outset. When he overheard comments of shock and surprise — ‘Oh my god, that can’t be who we think it is’ — a familiar duality resurfaced.

The duality began with Ihimaera’s surname. Ihimaera had been unaware he had a Māori surname until he needed to register for high-school exams and saw his birth certificate arrived. ‘Smiler’, the only surname he had known, was in parentheses: ‘Ihimaera’ was the original surname. The name came from his great grandfather, Ihimaera [Ishmael] Te Hānene. Mormon missionaries who ‘converted’ Te Hānene mispronounced ‘Ihimaera’ and replaced it with ‘Smiler’, which remained the family surname for generations. Witi revitalised the ‘Ringatu surname Ihimaera’ to sit his exams and then for his writing life. For Ihimaera, the two names have indicated a split in identity: ‘Witi Smiler has remained my personal self. Witi Ihimaera is the eidolon, the construct, the person who goes out and does the mahi, the political self.’ As the dust jacket of this book reveals, the writer has now reclaimed his complete identity of Witi Ihimaera Smiler.

At Te Wānanga Takiura, he wished only to be known only as Witi, a learner no different from his classmates. However, because of Ihimaera’s age and accomplishments, his classmates decided to call him Papa Witi. So began his rumaki: an immersion that would do more than test his command of te reo. It would confront these private fractures of identity before returning him to a more settled sense of himself.

‘Rumaki’ is often translated as immersion, but Ihimaera notes its various te reo meanings, including drowning and disappearing below the surface. ‘I was going to be, literally, drowned in the language and te ao Māori’. This is why the six-part podcast he recorded for Radio New Zealand is called Witi Underwater. It is a ‘companion text,’ he says to this book — Te Kaikaukau / The Swimmer, which has given him ‘most proudly, a record of my first efforts in writing in te reo’.

At the wānanga, he encountered a well-developed teaching style grounded in the etymology of kupu, where students learned language and culture together. ‘It was a delirious, superb voyaging beyond the words,’ he writes, ‘to the worlds they came from’. The learning challenges were quite different from those of an English-speaker learning a European language with common words and familiar sentence patterns. Concepts in te reo and tikanga, as well as sentence structure, do not map to English so neatly.

Ihimaera realised that his plan to write a novel in te reo meant he would ‘have to think through a Māori worldview and deliver it from within the Māori thought process’. The biggest challenge: ‘I will have to decolonise myself’. This decolonisation process included swapping out the Gregorian and Julian calendars for the Māori lunar calendar, moving ‘from one language and world to another’. Te reo demands a reorientation in perspective from Western thinking where ‘the ego is the principal definition of the individual.’ A Māori alternative to Descartes’ dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’ was devised by Ihimaera’s aunt, Ngoingoi Pēwhairangi: ‘I am before I think, ko au i mua i aku whakairo’.

The course was rigorous. Ihimaera felt too slow in the pop quizzes; and when he stood up to speak, ‘the words I had rehearsed so hard and so long had gone completely out the window’. Sometimes, he admits, ‘my pauses in presentation were so long, I must have looked like a possum caught in the headlight glare of an oncoming truck.’

Te Kaikaukau also reveals the shame and self-doubt Ihimaera and other Māori experience because of ‘not growing up’ in te reo. When his group is told that they are no longer permitted to speak English in class at all, he feels ‘vulnerable to my greatest fear’ – that the others would ‘discover I was an imposter after all … a pretend Māori, passing as brown.’ Even though his written and oral presentations improved, Ihimaera still worried. ‘While I had mastered breathing underwater, there were still the abyssal depths to cope with and the bends, nitrogen poisoning, if I tried to ascend too quickly.’

In the end there are no bends, no nitrogen poisoning. Papa Witi makes it. Although his year of study coincided with what felt like a war, waged by the new government, on Te Tiriti and Māori place names, Ihimaera remains positive:

Māoridom is at the beginning of an amazing period of transformation. The language and culture are at stronger moments in time than they have been before. The pāhūhū of it, the explosive energy, is resounding through the country.

If at one time, Ihimaera held the view that he ‘had no career options in Māoritanga or te reo,’ this is no longer the case. Our previous government’s goal of one million te reo speakers by 2040 still seems possible. The demand for literature in te reo Māori, evidenced in the Kotahi Rau Pukapuka initiative [link: https://www.kotahiraupukapuka.org.nz/] grows. Ihimaera accepts that it will take him years rather than months to write a book, ‘because the writing process is slower than the talking process’:

In a year or two, my written reo will provide the keys to open up the treasury of oral literature in te reo from the beginning of Time: the classic histories, the catechisms of genealogies, mātauranga, pūrākau and traditional sayings of the people.

I will need that inheritance to write a novel in te reo.