"Ko wai te au, ko te wai ko au / I am the water, the water is me."
From the inspired mind of Tina Makereti (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore and Pākehā) comes a book that's taken the country by storm: The Mires.
I would call The Mires an incredible book, but for the fact that it's so credible. A magical story, The Mires is essentially about place, identity and prejudice.
Overflowing with believable themes, it's about how people leave a heart-place, find a home place, and how they interact with the people and environment surrounding them. The people in this story have faced life-threatening climate change, poverty, racism, classism, white-supremacy and domestic violence. The plot includes internet trolling and terrorism, some cut-to-the-bone pages on the WINZ experience, a sentient swamp, the power of love, friendship, matakite and connection to the spiritual realm.
Tina Makereti's third novel, The Mires is told with detailed, sensually descriptive language. It's a change-up from the historical content of Where the Rekohu Bone Sings and The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke. The Mires is more contemporary: though there is a sense of the past floating ghost-like below the surface of the story.
Makereti's characters, most of them neighbours, are a vehicle for sharing a multitude of powerful experiences, giving this book wide appeal. They are so well-realised I began to think about what was happening to them as I went about my day.
This story is teeming with life: like the deliciously described denizens of the swamp at the centre of this urban legend, the people that make this story tick are resilient iterations of survival. The swamp, or mire, that gives this story its name is in harmony with the tidal flow of emotional wellbeing and wairua of the story which flows through Wairere's connection to its waters.
Wairere (flowing water, waterfall*) has inherited matakite (the gift of sight) from her tūpuna. The heroine of The Mires, Wairere is named after her kuia Kui Wairere; a rangitira who took her people to safety in a place far away from warring iwi and colonists.
"There it is, a sharp drop as if Wairere is in a car that has just gone over a hill and is hurtling downward... She sees it more like the fluid inside her body–the way these waters move always tells a story."
Keri (not Kerry), her mother, is raising four-year-old Walty, and fifteen-year-old Wairere on the smell of an oily rag. Makereti relates a whole chapter (Benificence) to illustrate how horrifying an existence it is when you're beholden to social welfare and it's spot on.
"Everything is so finely balanced on the head of a pin. A few dollars out of place could send her scrambling, but having a fifty per cent cut, even for a week? It'd all fall down."
Mrs B, or Janet, was once a victim of family violence. She hides this behind the veneer of a white woman with strong cultural bias that she would no doubt call nationalism. Her son Conor has suddenly come home, nurturing a chip on his shoulder that leads him to the more extreme end of his mother's views. Janet, too, has connected with herself and the flow of life: is it enough to connect her with the people around her?
"She soon learned to make herself smaller, so as not to attract his attention. Giving birth did not allow a woman to be small. While giving birth, a woman filled up the room."
The arrival of a family of climate refugees, Sera, Adam and their baby daughter Aliana changes the dynamic of this small community. This tight-knit little family have survived emigration camps that were really prisons, drought, fire, food shortages and acts of desperation to make their way to Aotearoa as medically skilled immigrants. Not everyone understands their right to a peaceful existence and recovery from their ordeal.
"This woman has been broken and put together again by her own love, she understands, even though there are still missing pieces." (Wairere)
Sera and Keri form a firm friendship based on the empathy of shared experience, and their distaste for the imperious way Janet treats both of their families. In this way Makereti sheds light on colonisation and displacement:
"Neither of them realised how much they needed this friendship before. And now, if it were to disappear, it'd be like demolishing a room in each of their houses, their lives left open to harsh weather and whatever evils can climb in through the gaps in the wall."
This is a good point at which to clarify the meaning of "mire". It can refer to a wet, swampy place, but it can also mean a difficult situation, or to be bogged down or stuck. Is this community stuck? Will they knit together, or will their differences of culture, beliefs and experience render them dysfunctional?
The Mires shares the concept of some terrific natural justice that puts me in mind of Lee Murray. While I am not of Te Ao Māori, I have gained much from the connectedness of the people in this story with nature and each other: the whenua and tangata that breathe life into this wonderful, satisfying adventure of a story.
Tina Makereti writes essays and short stories as well as novels and is also an editor and creative writing teacher. Her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, won the fiction prize at the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Award for Fiction in 2011. Her first novel, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, won this award in 2014 and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award in 2016. a new essay collection, This Compulsion in Us has just been published.
The Mires was longlisted for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Ngaio Marsh Awards, and was shortlisted for The Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards this year. It's a perfect read for Matariki.
More
- The Swamp Mother takes control: The Mires by Tina Makereti - Moata reports back from a WORD Christchurch session about The Mires
By Tina Makereti
- The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke
- Black Marks on the White Page
- Where the Rekohu Bone Sings
- Once Upon A Time in Aotearoa
*Te Aka Māori Dictionary
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