Tina Makarete
Huia
Otago Daily Times, July 17th 2010
Tina Makereti has already proven her versatility as a writer, last year winning both the non-fiction section of the Royal Society’s Manhire Prize for creative science writing and the English language category of the Pikihuia awards for Māori writers. Her newly-published short story collection Once Upon A Time In Aotearoa proves that this success is well deserved.
The thirteen stories range from a relatively conventional description of the creation of Hine (albeit one in which Tāne is much more man than god) to the tale of a woman who is convinced her boyfriend is an alien who has taken possession of her soul.
Although the settings and characters are unmistakably of this country, they are suffused with a magic realism that lends the stories a mythic quality. Thus it is not surprising to find that ‘Topknot’, which begins as a seemingly straightforward depiction of a teenage girl hiding her pregnancy from friends and family unfolds into a contemporary retelling of the birth of Māui. Nor in ‘Shapeshifter’ is it surprising to hear Pania, trapped within the statue erected in her honour, passing comment on her appropriation and commodification in the name of tourism – “Jeez, you’d think they’d have a bit more class. I must’ve been felt up by half the country.”
In the same way that the gods and ancestors are ever present in te ao Māori, Makereti’s New Zealand is one watched over by the mountains and the moon, and the old ways coexist with the new. It is a country where gods and goddesses walk among us, love hope and redemption are powerful forces, and where “there are more than two kinds of people in the world after all.”
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