A review for Waitangi weekend
The bestselling novel Kāwai: For Such a Time as This by Monty Soutar feels like the story Matua Monty has been working toward telling his entire life. It aims for the loftiest mountain peak in a valiant attempt at the fabled Great New Zealand Novel, that to this reader, falls just short of greatness.
Kāwai is the first novel in a planned trilogy by Soutar, a respected historian. It's a hugely ambitious and largely successful work of historical fiction. Epic in scope, it spans upward of eight generations and three centuries, while remaining focused and deeply personal through a 1980 set framing device where the young author-surrogate seeks out the understanding of self that can only come from understanding those who came before you.
The book opens with a detailed family tree and an intimidating Dramatis Personae. I briefly worried they were a prelude to a dry recitation of dates, events, and a history robbed of vitality or life. But my concerns were baseless.
The prologue opens with a young, over-eager, would-be scholar returning to their haukāinga, desperate to delve into their family history. He wants to show off his knowledge, but is scared of getting things wrong, mortified by accidental breaches of tikanga, and needs a gentle chiding from his uncle and keeper of knowledge.
"Ka rite te tauira, ka puta te kai-whakaako: When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
Slow down. Take some deep breaths. Find your feet and pay your dues. In the young man’s case, his dues are paid in sweat from mowing the marae lawns. Once the seeker is suitably humbled, then and only then, can the fiercely protected story unfold.
And what a story.
Early 1700s Te Tairāwhiti is introduced through the stench of human blood and brutal massacre of the Ngāpo people. This single event looms over the story and is the burden of our protagonist, Kai. It is the Kāwai of the book’s title, a kupu that means both "a line of descent" or more simply, "Legacy".
Kai is bound by honour and sacred tradition to avenge his people, and this weighty legacy forms the backbone of the story. From Kai’s birth and naming, his gruelling warrior training, his growth from terrified boy to fearless man, to the expected showdown with his enemy.
Then, in a turn both welcome and surprising, the story continues. Beyond vengeance, to the unintended by inevitable tragedy of teaching violence from birth.
The storytelling is deft, skipping over decades and lingering on moments of intimacy as the story requires. The character list and extensive glossary at the back of the volume become useful in keeping track of names, relationships, and unfamiliar terminology. Key dialogue is written first in Te Reo, then in English, making it accessible to all, regardless of your Te Reo proficiency. Each chapter opens with a whakataukī (proverb, some familiar, others entirely new to me) that preview the scenes to follow.
Matua Monty draws on his expertise as a historian to immerse the reader in a pre-colonial Aotearoa that teems with texture, life, and details that will delight, shock, and surprise even readers familiar with the period.
More impressively, he forces the reader to examine this complicated world and how they might’ve fitted into it. To ponder their own place in the rigid class system. How they might have survived the era, and how complicit they might have been in traditions like kaitangata (cannibalism) and pononga (enslaved prisoners of war). Practises that are easy to condemn from the safety of the 21st Century, but less so when embedded in the culture.
*
‘“What punishment have you in England for thieves and runaways?”
“After trial, flogging or hanging.”
“Then,” he replied, “the only difference in our laws is, you flog and hang, but we shoot and eat.”’
- Discussion between Uruti ‘King George’ Te Whareumu, Chief of Kororāreka, and the visiting English artist, Augustus Earle, circa 1828
*
The first scene of kaitangata in Kāwai is unflinching and hard to read in its casual cruelty. Subsequent examples cleverly become less detailed, less shocking, as the reader finds themselves becoming immune to its horrors.
The treatment of pononga is contrasted with the elaborate rituals of care shown for the bodies of the rangatira class, the horror at their own close kin being eaten, and beloved pets being valued over the lives of the enslaved class. This was a flawed society, that required dehumanisation of slaves and enemies in order to justify their treatment. But it was no less complex or sophisticated than its contemporaries, despite enduring colonial myths of a savage, primitive culture in need of saving and civilising.
The overturning of pervasive colonial myths continues through, handled with varying degrees of elegance. The jolt back to the framing story late in the novel felt intent on comparing the action of the story to the far greater atrocities of modern warfare, something readers should be able to do on their own. Cultural norms and practices of the time are occasionally over explained in ways that break the flow of the narrative.
There is a tension at times between not talking down to readers familiar with Te Ao Māori and not alienating readers who know very little of the culture. It’s a difficult balance at the best of times, and I understand wanting to write for the widest possible audience. If it skews a little broad for my personal tastes, the novel’s enormous popularity prove that Matua Monty has hit on a winning formula, and that there is an appetite for our history told by Māori through fiction.
The double-edged sword of writing fiction as a respected historian is that audiences will expect and assume historical accuracy throughout. And the burden of the Māori writer is the expectation that your writing will portray every possible facet of Te Ao Māori. And there was an aspect of pre-colonial Māori life that I kept waiting to be addressed in the novel; but as I finished the novel, I couldn’t help feeling let down.
In almost 400 pages, over 50 named characters, numerous hetero marriages and some intense sex scenes, there wasn’t a single mention of takatāpui characters or relationships.
He writes, "Sex was considered a normal and healthy part of everyday life in the Ngāpo community, with few taboos around it. Carvings depicted copulating couples and Poka and her female relatives often told salacious stories and sang waiata that talked of sexual exploits or the size of men’s penises."
This passage seemed like the ideal place to eradicate the colonial myth that queerness didn’t exist in pre-colonial Māori society. The first comparison that came to mind was the below passage from last year’s winner of our highest prize in fiction, Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka. I don’t accept ignorance by the author as an excuse. I’m not sold on the reasoning that ‘this isn’t what the story is about’ or ‘it’s better not to include queer characters at all than to have a bad or tokenistic portrayal.’
Hereaka wrote in her novel, "Sometimes there is love between a man and man and that would never result in a child, but it is love all the same." Kurangaituku is not a story about men who have sex with men, but it still managed to acknowledge their existence in the era in just that one line.
Takatāpui people and relationships (including same sex relationships, gender fluidity, trans and non-binary people) not only existed in the precolonial era, they were accepted and celebrated. Kāwai would have been rightly criticised if it had omitted other normal aspects of the era such as kaitangata or pononga. So it remains my role to use any platform I’m given to be the hōhā who jumps up and down from the margins, hand in the air, trying to get the attention of his elders and better to ask, "Why are there no people like ME in this story?"
This is merely a symptom of a much larger problem, a lack of diversity in publishing and whose stories get told. When there are enough Māori writers with diverse backgrounds and experiences being published, we won’t have to rely on the still tiny number of writers who are published to represent us all. I can only hope that time comes soon.
The author quotes Professor Ranginui Walker in the preface to Kāwai: "He [once] said, that in his opinion, the Great New Zealand Novel had not been written and that when it was, it would challenge the grand narrative of New Zealand historiography.” I can’t quite call Kāwai the definitive Great New Zealand Novel, but it comes very close. As the first in a planned series, and with much of the exposition and world-building taken care of in this volume, my hopes are high that the sequels will come even closer.
Kāwai: For Such a Time as This by Monty Soutar (David Bateman, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide, and has been longlisted for the fiction prize at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand national book awards.
