Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku
We are delighted to share with you an interview with Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, author of Hine Toa
An incredible memoir by a trailblazing voice in women's, queer and Māori liberation movements
'Remarkable. At once heartbreaking and triumphant' Patricia Grace
In the 1950s, a young Ngāhuia is fostered by a family who believe in hard work and community. Although close to her kuia (grandmother), she craves more: she wants higher education and refined living. But whānau dismiss her dreams. To them, she is just a show-off, always getting into trouble, talking back and running away.
In this fiery memoir about identity and belonging, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku describes what was possible for a restless working-class girl from the pā. After moving to Auckland for university, Ngāhuia advocates resistance as a founding member of Ngā Tamatoa and the Women's and Gay Liberation movements, becoming a critical voice in protests from Waitangi to the streets of Wellington.
What does a day in the life of Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku look like?
Usually, a day in my life begins with a long passionate moment with Affie my cat, and crazy encounters with that more yellow cat - my other cat- and then I go on a very meditative and enriching walk with the steam and the bubbling pools and the glories of Kuirau Park which is next to my house. Then I cross the stream and I find myself here in the village where I visit my sisters, and that’s how I begin my day usually. And as I am trundling along I will usually phone my friends too and have a catch-up.
Your voice comes through very strong in Hine Toa; it is sensitive and observant, yet bold and honest. Who are your inspirations, and how did you cultivate such a beautiful tone in your writing?
Here I am, on the great Te Papaiouru Mare [gestures to surroundings in the video footage] which is the great speaking speaking environment of the people of the Ngati Whakaue, where my verbal heritage is from. I am a child of the great orators, I watched the most extraordinary reo karanga enchanters, I was entranced by their skill, their voice projection, their magic, and their ability to externalize, to respond, to create, extraordinary visions of verbal magic. They were my primary exemplars. My elders, my kai korero orators, my kai karanga, the women who composed and performed karanga. I was privileged to experience composers and wordsmiths, weavers of verbal magic who had real genius, and knew how to play an audience, how to read a crowd, who knew what words would garner the maximum effect; they were my exemplars. And of course I went on to do a Masters degree in English Literature, so the classics like Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Spencer- I had a real craze about Spencer for a very long time- and 19th Century poets particularly women. I was an insatiable reader and completely omnivorous consumer of words; I would read the phonebook because there were words in it that I could learn and use.
Hine Toa is a gripping story that doesn’t shy away from difficult times and emotional moments- was this a difficult book to write? And how long did it take you?
No, no, no; it just came out! It was fast. Once I got my head down, and I must acknowledge at this point the support and deep friendship of Deb Challinor; I really need to name her as the person who contacted Harper Collins and got me started in the process, and primarily who told me I could do it. So nga mihi ki a Deb. And once I actually sat down- I had just sat down and finished an incredible and exciting TV series on visual art called Waharoa- on Maori and Pacific art, and the creative juices were really pumping out after working with creatives and visual artists. Within a few months, I was totally engaged with this [Hine Toa] and it took me only 8 months to write in full.
There is a scene in Hine Toa where your kuia is asked to create two korowai for Queen Elizabeth’s visit to New Zealand in 1954, (one which fit her perfectly and is now a part of the Royal Collection, and the other which is now in your wardrobe!) an event which was both an honour and a sore spot as a person of colour in a colonised country. Can you tell us a bit more about this event in your family, and how this moment might stand for a whole on a colonised Aoteoroa?
Te Arawa, and particularly Ngati Whakaue, has a unique, utterly singular relationship with the crown and with the royal family. We have always- and I believed this passionately- that we are not victims. that we have maintained the control of our own destiny since we got off the canoe and came onto land. So questions like that are slightly decontextualised, when you look at us and at the Maori world generally, that is no to say that we as a tribal nation have not got grief and poverty and metamphetamine issues and homelessness and despair and we are trying to deal with those issues within the tribal context. what my grandmother contributed to was really meaningful for her, and a reading of that chapter will show our sense of enjoyment of the right royals was quite genuine, and this sincerity was further demonstrated when Harry and Megan were here in 2018, on this marae, in that house points across the marae. It was a point of celebration, primarily because she was a woman of colour and she looked like us, god she did, and as a radical activist and anti-racism person, of course I question all of that. But one of the points that I constantly hammer in the book is that class is just as important to me. The inequalities of the privileged and the entitled, those Maori, and those who have nowhere to live and can’t get a job, and are finding the world a difficult place to be in.
You are allowed to invite five people to dinner, who are you inviting and why? And what are you cooking..!
Oh I’d get someone else to cook! Probably my cousin Tuatini who catered my book launch and she is totally fantastic, so she’ll be the cook! My guests would be Yayoi Kusama, Amal Alamuddin Cooney, Hullea Tsihnhahjinne - how many am I allowed, five? Pat Barker, I really like her style, she’s fun. I like Joan Baez for her politics and music. As an extra, Ah Wei Wei and another Maori Michael Jonathan the film director, or Merata Mi who is my nephew, or Taika Waititi although he maybe is a bit too volatile for me, and Lisa Reihana who is my great great niece. The list is endless.
Finally, what is next for you, Ngāhuia?
Currently working on another arts documentary, i have discovered the extraordinary challenge of writing for the screen, and for television and that is utterly thrilling. Having to confine my somewhat extensive huge expansive thought processes to one or two minutes- like one minute and 11 seconds. so that’s fun, and we’re looking at doing a sequel to Waharoa, but in the writing context, um, people want me to do a next step, and I’ve done a long short story of creative fiction for a book called Queernesia, being published by the University of Hawaii Press, and its a collection of non-binary pacific writers. In that piece, which is quite a long story, I describe getting off a plane, at the same time period as when Hine Toa ends, Hawaii and looking for the bad girls there in 1975. That is all I can write for now, because too many people are alive for me to write critically and honestly- I couldn’t do that. So then, my next writing project- oh, I’m not going to tell you !