This Compulsion In Us
by Tina Makereti

This Compulsion in Us is a collection of 28 pieces of nonfiction writing by Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā), some of it either published or presented as keynote speeches at conferences or events like the Auckland Writers Festival, combined with personal essays, literary discussions and more academic cogitations on te ao Māori.

The book reveals a writer – and a writing teacher – who has spent two decades talking about Māori culture and literature on a global stage over the last two decades. Then there is Makereti the daughter, sister, mother and partner, telling very different personal stories about those roles and their tensions.

‘Sometimes writing a personal essay feels like a constant argument about place,’ Makereti writes. This includes ‘the place I belong, how I place myself, my place in-between cultures – a constant wrangling between two sides that at its simplest is embodied by my Māori and Pākehā parentages.’ Brought up without one dominant papakāinga and in a family that moved so often she has no ‘hometown’, Makereti must live with ‘something paradoxical’, being ‘a Māori who doesn’t come from any place in particular’.

It is both a blessing and a curse that Māori writers – particularly Māori writers like Makereti and me who could pass as Pākehā, though not to each other – that we are endlessly compelled to write about identity and what that means to us as writers and as women. The last two essay collections I read were both by Pākehā who just got to write about quirky stuff that they were passionate about; I confess I felt jealous that they didn’t have to whakapapa at all. In fact, they barely had to introduce themselves. For Māori, and perhaps all writers of colour, who we are, our whakapapa, is absolutely our ground zero.

At times the weight of culture feels too heavy, the things we need to say over and over again. How fortunate we are to have writers like Makereti who can deftly unpick te ao Māori at the seams, running a learned eye across the warp and the weft of what it is to be Māori today, and make sense of it all.

Because of disruption and drift, belonging to a place is not without complications, as Makereti points out. ‘Fires can always be rekindled,’ she insists. ‘With all the whakamā [shame] in the world you can still go home’. But where and what is home? Makereti herself has difficulty even naming a hometown within a Pākehā context because her childhood was spent with a Pākehā father who was constantly on the move. There was nobody to tell her about the Māori side of the family; this knowledge had vanished with her mother. Fortunately, Taranaki, the mountain of Te Ātiawa, her mother’s people, is unequivocally home even if those threads of whakapapa that tie Makereti to the maunga were not always visible.

At the heart of This Compulsion in Us is Makereti’s writing about writing and how, for her, that connects the personal and the cultural.

Writing is best when it’s intuitive. It’s the most fun when words arrive on the page without too much thinking, and that’s also, in my experience, when the best work is produced. I get a hunch, I follow it. Sometimes a line arrives in my head fully formed, so I write it down and take the concrete path or dirt track it reveals. I trust the words. the inner music, the story unwinding itself in the background of things.

But in an essay first published in the Journal of New Zealand Studies in 2018, Makereti frames the act of writing in a more complex way. She uses a taonga – gifted when she graduated with her doctorate – as a metaphor.

My taonga has a single eye and two mouths. The two mouths face in opposite directions. On first seeing it I knew that this taonga represented the task of the writer: to speak with two mouths at once, to communicate two sometimes opposing forces, to exist at the centre of the paradox. In particular this taonga spoke to me as a Māori-Pākehā individual telling the particular stories I tell, and as a Māori person writing in English. There is a duality in this act for Māori; writing in English is already an act of translation. But there is an added complexity in the modernity of the Indigenous writer. We are not performing simple translations into English of traditional ways of being or of pristine cultures. If we try and describe our cultures that way we end up solidifying something that was never solid. Our cultures, like every cultures, are in a constant state of flux, so from the very first contact between Māori  tribes and European settlers, our cultures transformed. What this means is that what we now think of as traditional is quite often already post-contact or post-colonisation. So my writing practice is always concerned with duality, contradiction, cultural fluidity and paradox.

The connective tissue between the scholarly and more personal writing in The Compulsion in Us is the museums that Makereti visited as a child with her father and now continues to visit – and sometimes work with – as an adult. This writing may address cultural issues, like stolen artefacts on display in museums and the work of curatorial staff trying to restore or create connections with the lost ‘home’. It may address the pain of her childhood, and her own sense of personal failure, as a kid with an alcoholic father and an absent mother, a kid who grows up not knowing how to deal with her father – an ‘impossible human’ – or how to help him when he’s dying.

What happened with Makereti’s mother is not discussed: it’s ‘not important to go into the details of that,’ she says. Earlier in the book she tells us that before ‘I have memorised her in a way that will last forever, my mother is gone’. Later, as a teenager, she decides that her parents’ relationship and its failure was ‘a microcosm of the historical relationship between Pākehā and Māori’. In her teens, Makereti ‘became reacquainted with the mother I had never known and a heritage that was richer than I had imagined. Mothers brought with them whole tribes, I discovered’.

Still, she writes, ‘nature and nurture continue to tug at each other and negotiate some kind of uneasy truce. I’m learning to live with the discord between one inheritance and another’. This saddest of stories weaves its way through The Compulsion in Us and its raw humanity gives the collection its heartbeat.