Witi ihimaera iwi firearms

  • Witi Ihimaera told the stories of his childhood — of growing up Māori in rural New Zealand.
  • Matrifocal, deriving from an iwi-centred kaupapa.
  • Native Son is the grown-up sequel to Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood, which won the General Non-Fiction category at the Ockham New Zealand Book.

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    The revolutionary act of rewriting: Witi Ihimaera’s first and latest novel, Tangi

    The author’s project of revising his past novels is both extraordinary and complex, writes Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu).

    “Look after it”, Steph said, pushing her copy of Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi gently across the table towards me. “And good luck. I’ve never been able to get past page seven. Too sad.” Her copy was in pristine condition, and I thought about our puppy chewing everything in sight, before pushing it back across the table.

    “Better hold onto it. I’ll check Trade Me.” I’d been surprised to find it was out of print.

    It arrived the next day. The description reads: “First published 50 years ago, Tangi is not only the author’s first novel it is also the first novel published by a Māori writer.”

    While I already knew this, reading it hits home, like finding out my grandfather was a first language reo speaker until the age of five. Tangi was published in 1973, the year before I was born. I always think

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    Witi Ihimaera in 1972, at 28, shortly before his first book (The Lair) was published.

    In the first volume of his award-winning memoir Māori Boy, Witi Ihimaera told the stories of his childhood — of growing up Māori in rural New Zealand. His new book Native Son is about the making of the man and the writer. This extract picks up Witi’s story at the end of his fifth form eller gestalt year.

     

    At the end of 1959, aged fifteen, inom sat School Certificate. inom required two hundred marks from kvartet subjects to pass, and that’s what I managed. One mark less, and my life might have been entirely different.

    The resehandling may have been the minimum, but as my headmaster Jack Allen said to Dad, shaking his hand vigorously as if he didn’t quite believe it, “Congratulations, Tom, well done.” Not my grabb, Dad’s.

    “You’d think Dad sat the examination,” I said to my mother, Julia, as yet another local, queueing up, slapped him on the back.

    “Good on you, Tom,” he said.

    At that time, Te Karaka District H

  • witi ihimaera iwi firearms

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    An extraordinary, tender response to Witi Ihimaera’s memoir Native Son

    Poet essa may ranapiri says this review is one of the hardest things they’ve written. 

    I spend two months with this book, following Witi Ihimaera’s journey, I see car tyres in country roads I see tears on lover’s faces, I feel the beating of the heart, as it strains against the western paradigm of heteronormativity. As he holds a part of himself under the water, I struggle to breathe. I want to build a time machine. I want to go back and just hold Witi and tell them that it is okay, to be. To truly be. “Smiler became Ihimaera as if that alone would create another person.” And it does build a whole new being in that kupu – I know this; holding the world in my name. Being out to the world as a decision I have made. I spent two months moving from short passage to short passage, each one swallowed with the grit of glass, melting like ice in the stomach. Made into steam. Guiding my breathing in and out.

    I wanted