Cousins

by Patricia Grace

  She was talking about the Maori people assembling at Te Hapua to begin the Land March that would bring them from the top of the North Island to Parliament with their Memorial of Rights. ‘Not one more acre,’ she called up to me as I came out onto the balcony.

  This was a different Polly, a more flamboyant, eccentric Polly than the one I remembered as a child. She had put on weight and always dressed in bright clothes. It was as though the parrot house had somehow worked its way into her and shown her the brightness of herself. On the other hand, I suspect she had always known the brightness that was within her.

  I was beginning to hear over radio and television, and to read in the papers, some of the things I’d heard talked about as a child — Raupatu, Te Tiriti o Waitangi; also the Native Land Act, the Public Works Act, the Town and Country Planning Act, the Rating Act, the Counties Amendment Act and all the laws that had been passed that gave Pakeha authorities power to seize or obtain Maori land. ‘Not one more acre’ had become the catch-cry of the land marchers.

  We followed the news every day as the marchers progressed down the island, and when they reached the outskirts of Wellington for the last part of the seven-hundred-mile journey, we decided we must join them. We put our raincoats and a bottle of drink into our car and drove out to meet them, leaving our car and joining them just as they came down the street from the marae where they had spent the night. There were people coming from all directions to join. It was exciting. There were people I hadn’t seen for years, some from home, some I’d gone to school with, some from nursing days, some whom I remembered from going here and there with Kui and my grandparents when I was a child.

  We moved at a much faster pace along the motorway than I thought we would. There was a sense of purpose and strength, feelings of exhilaration and euphoria. We walked under a washed sky, to one side of us the green, rolling hills covered in new spring grass. On the other side cars went by, the people in them sometimes acknowledging us with a wave or a toot of the horn, while others, with averted faces, showed their scorn or hostility.

  Polly and I were near the end of the column, from where we could see the front marchers a mile ahead of us. But we were all like one, a whole. The broad back of us undulated and swayed with the dips and curves of the road. There were times of quiet and times of singing, the songs coming from the front and being picked up row by row, and as we went down through the Gorge our voices echoed off the hillsides. It became overcast, and when we arrived in the city rain began. Beside us on the road the cars and trucks swished through the wet, and the front of our formation turned up the street to Parliament, where we all eventually assembled and the Memorial of Rights was presented.

  That night our house was full of people who needed to wash and rest. We cooked a big meal and had extra mattresses and blankets brought up from Polly’s so that people could sleep. It was a night of singing and talk and stories, one of many such nights, because it was from that time that I began to be involved in the many activities and movements of the people in our determination that our existence, culture and values be recognised — that we as a people survive and have authority over our lives. It may have been the beginning too of what eventually led to the break-up of my marriage.

  Everything I did during those years Mick seemed to support, and I know we really did love each other. I know he really cared for Polly and valued the time she gave to the children. He had a business to run and I supported him in it, I think, in every way I could. I accompanied him to the right social occasions and knew all the right things to do and say. I organised dinner parties and felt at ease in any company. I was interested by any company.

  At the same time I was aware that I was an oddity in the various circles. Exotica of a sort. But I was untroubled by that and found it an interesting challenge to fit myself in to whatever the occasion. People were careful, or careless, when they spoke to me, but the careful and careless alike had an awareness of me, a certain wariness, because there was a whole otherness to me that was beyond their comprehension. I did not exult in this, and nor was I troubled by it. Polly thought it was funny. ‘If you’re a princess,’ she said, ‘that must make me the queen.’

  The outward signs of the distress of our people were there in the streets. For years we had been told through statistics and through the media of our lowly position, our poverty, our bad health, our underachievement, our unemployability and our criminality. We didn’t need to have these things spelled out to us, because we were living them, or living next to them every day. They were the things I’d seen and heard talked about when I was a child. Now our sorrow, our powerlessness and our destitution were out there in the streets for everyone to see.

  There in the streets groups of men terrorised each other, brutalised the women that lived with them and caused fear wherever they went. They were the beaten, the hollowed-out of our people, the rawakore, the truly disinherited, where nothing substantial was inbuilt and nothing was valued or marvellous — where there was no memory, where the void had been defiled by an inrushing of anger and weeping. No one had loved their hair. Or, if sometimes they were not the disowned and disinherited, then they were those who had learned to look at who they were in distorted mirrors, had seen awry reflections of themselves and had become traumatised. And their stories of self-hatred were told in their foulness and self-defacement, their maiming and their havoc. They guarded what was left of themselves with weapons, high walls, and dogs.

  There were children too, mauled and ravaged, committing slow suicide with petrol, pills and glue. Pretty children in large coats who inhabited the subways, doorways and pathways of the town. None of us could be unaffected by them and no one was blameless.

  But we were up and walking, up and talking because we needed our own answers. We were the ones to know the missing pieces that had to be salvaged and reclaimed before they became irretrievable. I think Mick understood these things too, because we talked often about them, but perhaps he didn’t feel the same as I did.

  My life became extremely busy, my knowledge of our language and culture being needed everywhere as we sought our own solutions. There were issues of land, language, health and welfare, money, work, education, customs and culture to be discussed, promoted and worked on. And I began to hear our language in places where I had never heard it used before, in places where I never thought I would hear it. I began to see our rituals and ceremonies used in unusual ways and places, not always in ways that I thought the old people would approve, and sometimes taken over by people who didn’t understand them and who had their own agendas — which is another theft, another treachery. Sometimes, for all the work we did, the hopes we built up, the results obtained were mere dressings that covered ever-deepening abscesses.

  There were those among us too, building their own empires, who postured and posed and traded on the mystique of being Maori, and there was, therefore, a need to challenge, expose, confront — the way that women often do, not that women were always the blameless ones. As a people we had our own convoluted minds to straighten out, our own anger to deal with, our own priorities to set, our own hakihaki, our own mortiferous sores to tend to.

  Double everything.

  There were frustrating times and good times. There were times when I was away from home for days on end, times when Mick and I saw each other as one arrived and one departed from an airport, but I felt the importance of the work I was doing. I had been given knowledge, understandings in my childhood that I knew I must share, yet all the time there were obstacles — because culture is deep. It is deep. Even the remnants or the memories of it are deep. It is not something that can be adequately explained to those of another culture, but neither should it need to be explained, I think. It only needs, at the least, to be allowed, to be let be, to be trusted. But there was, is, fear out there, fear that is difficult to allay and difficult to comprehend. Polly said, ‘They think if our children are taught their language we’ll all have to cook in a kerosene tin on an outside fire again
and we won’t be able to count our own toes.’ My beautiful mother.

  One afternoon she came with the children to pick me up at the airport. ‘I’ve ordered swings and things for the yard and I’m having the fences done,’ she said, ‘then we’re going to have a kohanga at my place.’ It was a bitter Wellington day with wind blasting from the south. She was wearing a red poncho with a black fringe and a knitted hat of Rastafarian colours. She looked like the sun. Michael and Kate were nudging each other and making eyes at me as we made our way to the luggage claim. ‘About eight kids,’ she said. ‘Bonnie and me.’ All the exhaustion that I had been feeling from work and travel fell away from me as she outlined what she had in mind.

  It was ten years or more since I’d heard, with some surprise, the demand, by a small group who were being labelled radical, that Maori language be taught in the schools. I was even more surprised at the anger and controversy that these demands engendered in some circles, because I couldn’t think how it would hurt or harm anyone if our children learned to speak the language of their parents and grandparents. I could only think how good it would be. I could only think of the hollowed-out amongst our people, the disinherited who were the truly poor, and of what we must do to make them whole again, what we must be allowed to do for the sake, not only of ourselves, but of everyone. I was incredulous that many people, some of them our own, would see this as detrimental, retrogressive, even sinister.

  I attended the national gathering of elders held at Parliament where discussions were held on the various aspects that affected our people. I had been invited even though I was not an elder. The promotion of our language was discussed eagerly, and we talked about commitment, leadership, training programmes, the setting up of language boards, and of the language needing to be given official recognition and equal constitutional and legal status to English. It was painful to me to think that we were asking for official recognition of, equal status for, a language in its own homeland. How could that be? And this state of affairs, regarding the language, seemed to epitomise all that had happened to do with our land, our lives and our culture — having to ask, having to fight to retain what was our own and that belonged nowhere else in the world but here.

  This didn’t dampen the optimism of the group, however, and the following year, at a similar gathering, proposals were put forward for Maori language pre-schools to be set up. It was an exciting time with these kohanga springing up all over the country, and people having renewed hope that our language, through our own initiatives and via the little children, would revive and survive after having been suppressed for so long.

  So I became excited over Polly’s idea of a kohanga at her place and I helped her to set it up, remembering all the stories Kui Hinemate had told me, all the songs she’d taught me and all the games we’d played together. I realised with some sorrow that I had not taught these things to my own children. Nor had I taught Michael and Kate our own language, and at fourteen years of age they were wanting to know why.

  Why indeed? I had as a child, or at least as I saw it, kept my life at home separate from my life at school. At school I saw my first language as something to be ashamed of, something that should be kept secret, a wrong, punishable thing — even though another part of me told me that it was language, and all that went with it, that gave me to myself, made me know who I was. And I realised later that having that knowledge, that security, that sound base, allowed me to reach out and to know that I could do anything else in the world that I wanted to do.

  But my life had a different focus once I started work, and by the time I married Mick I hadn’t spoken my first language for more than ten years. I remember him being really surprised when he found out, after several years of marriage, that I had this other tongue that was part of me, this other self that was also me, a whole other imprint. He was surprised and interested, and believed in me. That’s what I thought. He came to understand that I was someone with the knowledge and upbringing that would enable me to take initiatives in the new activism. It seemed that way.

  When Polly’s kohanga had been running for two years she became ill and we persuaded her to have the children moved to another venue, where she could go as a helper two or three times a week until she was better.

  But she didn’t get better. Not long after her kohanga closed she was diagnosed as having cancer. She wanted so much to live, fought her death in a way I have never known anyone to fight, and took every treatment with real hope. Despite what I’d seen all through my working years, despite what I really knew, I hoped too.

  She stayed on in the little cottage — the parrot house — for as long as she could. It was a comfortable house, which she had had renovated and modernised after I had come there to live. She was active for as long as she could manage, and liked nothing more than to take Michael and Kate to town on a Friday night. This was something they’d done together since the children were little. She’d buy clothes for them that they didn’t need, and of a brightness never seen in a suburb such as this. They’d buy a packet of fish and chips each and eat from a hole torn in the paper, then go to the pictures or any circus or fair that might be on. The children were her life. She spoilt them.

  When she could no longer cope on her own we brought her home and gave her the best care we could. It was during this time that Mick left. I suppose it was too much for him having Polly there, but he never said. He had agreed that we should bring my mother home and had always treated her with love and respect. It was the unhappiest time of my life when he left. I did love Mick and I did need him. I have never thought of love as not being forever.

  I showed the children how to care for their grandmother and let them tend to her as much as they would, not wanting to deprive them of her dying.

  Before she died she said, ‘Take me home to Mum and Dad and Cissie when I go.’

  It hurt me badly to hear her say that, and she saw that I was hurt. ‘Remember that your home is not my home. Your turangawaewae is not my turangawaewae, although mine is also yours. You must remember I only lived there a little more than five years, and remember I was only married to your father for two or three years.’

  ‘But it’s my home,’ I said. ‘It must be yours too.’

  ‘It could have been my second home if I’d decided to stay, but you know how it is. I ran away from there.’

  ‘They’ll want …’

  ‘No, my daughter, they won’t ask for me. Or if they do it will be out of respect for you, and only because your grandparents are no longer alive. If Keita was still alive she wouldn’t let them ask for me.’

  ‘What about me?’ She didn’t answer. ‘I only have one home,’ I said. She wouldn’t look at me. ‘And when I go back there to live, you won’t be there, with Kui, Keita, Wi, the others who’ve gone.’ She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t answer because there was nothing she could say.

  And it was as Polly said. Her younger brother and older sister came to live in the house with us during her last days, and as soon as she died my Uncle Mat began preparations to return her to their turangawaewae. I rang through to Missy, begging her to bring the old people down to ask for Polly. They came, but as Polly had said, it was out of love for me. Our elder made a long and proper speech of it, giving his oratory the prestige of movement, gesticulation, haka tawhito and waiata tawhito, reciting the whakapapa, explaining all that was already known, about my father — who he was and who I was. He did all that in the living room of this mansion in the suburb of mansions, where nothing like it had ever been done before. There was no dishonouring of me, no affront to my mother’s family, but the gist of it was that there was a place for my mother where my father would have been buried, had he been brought home. There was a place for my mother amongst her husband’s relatives if her own family would allow it. If her own family allowed it, her husband’s family would take her with them and she would be honoured as one of their own. He told them of my strong desire for my mother to be buried in our family burial place, where her de
scendants would one day go.

  He asked, but I had wanted him to demand, even though demanding wouldn’t have made any difference.

  My Uncle Mat was brief in his reply, but it was not because he wished to be curt. It was because speechmaking was not his usual role, and also he was taken unawares. He thanked Nonny for the honour to his sister of wanting to take her to the turangawaewae of her husband’s family. He said that their own home marae was already being prepared for her homecoming and that they were all depending on him to bring her there. He couldn’t go away without her. He spoke of their love for me and reminded me that my mother’s home was also my home.

  We sat in silence for a time after Uncle Mat sat down. I knew there would be no further plea. It was as Polly had said.

  After a while Nonny stood again and said that our home marae was also being prepared, and that Polly must be taken there for a day and a night, to allow those who knew her to farewell her in a proper way.

  So that is what we did. It may have been incongruous for this neighbourhood to have an arrival of old-model cars and vans, and a large group of mourners crying on the footpaths, the very elderly being assisted through our gateway and up our paths by the younger ones. The people may have looked shabby in their best-pressed black, their headscarves, their shawls, blazers and bomber jackets. It may have been quite shocking to those living round about to hear the karanga that called my mother’s family, my father’s family and the groups of friends into the house, and the calls of sorrow and acknowledgement as the groups filed in. It may have upset neighbours and passers-by perhaps, or it may have intrigued them. It comforted me to see the people coming up through the trees.

  We took my mother back home for a day and a night before moving on to where all her family waited for her at her own place. I had to be satisfied with that but I found it difficult.