The capital of New Zealand writing is set to be Rotorua, as host of the 2023 Māori Writers Festival
The 2023 Māori Writers Festival, Kupu: Ngā Ringa Tuhituhi, is held next week in Rotorua, and the timing is actually quite perfect – the week-long hui is staged just as yet another new and extremely positive renaissance in Māori writing is taking place in New Zealand publishing.
Right now the biggest-selling novel in New Zealand is The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa. It's held the number-one spot for four weeks and fair to say no one predicted that a debut novel by a schoolteacher born and raised in Pātea, who goes about his business far away from the centres of New Zealand writing, would have sped past the sales of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, and the two novels by Catherine Chidgey (The Axeman's Carnival, Pet) which all previously were at number one.
And yet the success of The Bone Tree is a reminder that in fact the biggest-selling novels of 2020 and 2022 were written by Māori authors: Auē by Becky Manawatu, and Kāwai by Monty Soutar (2022). Inbetween, Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (2021) was a critically acclaimed bestseller. As well, Whiti Hereaka won the 2022 Jann Medlicott Acorn fiction prize for her novel Kurangaituku, and one of the guest speakers at Kupu is JP Pomare, a constant presence in the bestseller list with his crime novels.
The festival also coincides with a spate – an actual spate! – of new, exciting anthologies of Māori writing. Paula Morris and Darryn Joseph are editors of Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories, and Penguin have released two companion volumes, Ngā Kupu Wero and Te Awa o Kupu, which collect nonfiction, and fiction and poetry, respectively. A number of contributors are appearing in the Rotorua festival, including the superstar of Aotearoa poetry, Tayi Tibble, who recently became the first Māori writer and only fifth New Zealand writer to have work published in the New Yorker.
The litany of Māori literary achievement goes on – eg, the biggest selling nonfiction book of last year was Aroha by Hinemoa Elder– but the Kupu festival in Rotorua thinks beyond the traditional model of books, of authors, of publishing. Dr Anaha Hiini and Reikura Kahi will speak about their experiences in the revitalisation of te reo. Dr Turuhira Hare will discuss the mōteatea she composed for her daughter, and Tāmati Waaka will speak on research he undertook in relation to language patterns contained in traditional chants, waiata, karakia and haka.
Tickets are selling fast and in fact several sessions (including an event on writing Māori history, featuring Kāwai author Monty Soutar) are already sold out. Kupu culminates with a gala dinner at good old Rydges for $100.
Good that the capital of New Zealand literature next week is Rotorua. Good that Māori literature is experiencing something a lot more than just a moment. New Zealand literature, Māori literature - obviously they overlap, but they're not the same thing. The series editor of the two Penguin volumes, Vaughan Rapatahana, writes in his Introduction, "I do not wish to get caught up in specious definitions as to what writing by Māori is. Suffice to restate what Witi Ihimaera, D.S. Long, Irihapeti Ramsden and Haare Williams penned 30 years ago: ‘If the writer has Māori ancestry, his or her work has been considered, regardless of content.’ He tino pono tēnei kōrero. Such has been our approach also."
Paula Morris, too, shares his oppositional stand. She writes in her Introduction to Hiwa: "That some of us on the great marae of Māori writing advocate narrowing definitions and tighter circles is unfortunate."
What even are these "narrowing definitions" (Morris) and "specious definitions" (Rapatahana) of Māori literature? Morris goes on to remark, "Although I demanded no theme and set no topical or stylist parameters for this anthology, some writers sent me the most explicitly 'Māori' of their stories – anxious, perhaps, that the subject would determine their inclusion. In our collective unconscious, that anxiety about knowing or being enough is a dark seam. I requested a different story from several writers.
"But in an email, one noted, 'As a Māori writer, I consider the story an example of contemporary Māori writing. However, it doesn’t otherwise have a predominant Māori theme.' I replied that, to me, Māori literature is something written by a Māori writer, and that I have no time for the identity border guards insisting that we must pass through the Mātauranga Māori X-ray machines."
Tickets to Kupu 2023: Ngā Ringa Tuhituhi - Māori Writers Festival, held in Rotorua from September 17-September 23, are available now.
