10 years of great Kiwi reads

Elizabeth Heritage reflects on the past decade of reading homegrown pukapuka (books), sharing the ones that have most surprised and stayed with her. Pu¯ ra¯ kau: Ma¯ ori Myths Retold by Ma¯ ori Writers

I love Barbara Anderson so much that I have to ignore her. I eke out her novels like secret treats, trying to put off the day when I will have read them all.

Long Hot Summer is set in 1936, at the kind of place Kiwis go to spend their summer at the beach. The story is told from two points of view: 30-something Lorna and her small daughter, Ann, both keha¯ . Lorna has a terrible crush on James, who is busy making an amateur cowboy film. It’s a coloniser tale imported to another colonised country.

There is something about being a keha¯ that I cannot describe, but when I see it in other people’s art I immediately recognise it.

Anderson captures that. It’s not that she talks explicitly about race, it’s more that her detailed observations of people and their behaviour convey a sense of keha¯ -ness, of my own culture, that I am hungry to understand.

She is also wonderfully funny, and Long Hot Summer contains what I firmly believe to be the funniest scene in any Kiwi novel.

You will need to read it yourself to discover it.

You don’t need a poetry degree to read this pukapuka: Hera Lindsay Bird has already done that mahi (work) for you. She takes the elite language of poetry and the internet-inflected language of Millennials and smashes them together. It really touched a nerve, and not just with me. Bird became wildly successful in a way that is unheard of in poetry publishing.

I was in the audience at a literary festival where she read aloud her Leonardo da Vinci RPF (real person fanfiction).

RPF is a literary form where writers use real people as characters in their fictitious stories. It is written mostly by women and published mostly online and, as such, tends to be culturally devalued. But Bird had everyone in stitches.

‘‘Leonardo da Vinci laughed anciently, like a great man from the past might. He . . . looked out over all the brick-coloured houses made by dead Italian people, stacked to the tits with frescoes and ivies and little brown dogs running everywhere and people carrying loaves of bread around in their arms, like soft gluten purses, like vigilante mayors of breadtown.’’

If you’ve never read a poetry pukapuka before, please read Hera Lindsay Bird – out loud.

Three Words reminds us that the literature of Aotearoa doesn’t just happen in creative writing programmes, it is being scribbled on napkins, posted on Instagram, and added to greeting cards.

I found this collection astonishing. I had no idea how limited my understanding of comics had been until I was exposed to Three Words’ variety and depth. The title comes from the links between the writers: each sent the next three words, from which they created a comic. The results are wildly different, covering a vast range of styles.

Some comics are ugly, sprawling, painful. Others are delicate, controlled, funny. Some have the familiar square frames with characters talking to each other in speech bubbles. Others are abstract, often without words or letters at all.

Three Words functions as a gathering place and a crowded sign post. Each of the dozens of writers only gets a few pages, so you’ll need to go beyond this pukapuka to find more of their work.

Three Words is one to keep handy so you can return to it again and again.

What even is this pukapuka? You could call it contemporary fiction, or literary fiction, or magic realism. Is there such a thing as Millennial fiction?

Lonely Asian Woman comprises prose, tables, lists, emails, and digital chat conversations. Some of it is all in caps.

A few bits are in Cantonese.

Paula, the central character, is a drifting Chinese-Kiwi 20-something who spends a lot of time at home alone.

One day she accidentally steals a baby from a supermarket.

Well . . . it’s sort of a baby.

The word that keeps coming to mind with this pukapuka is ‘‘dreamy’’.

You have to let go of a lot of reasonable questions and just let Sharon Lam’s storytelling carry you along.

Lonely Asian Woman is funny and engaging, while also being deeply odd and unpredictable.

Lam lays open the strangeness of living in your own head.

This pukapuka helped me become a bit less racist. I had vaguely assumed that Ma¯ ori pu¯ ra¯ kau (myths) had no real application to the present.

Not only was I wrong, but this assumption betrayed my Eurocentric misunderstanding of te ao Ma¯ ori (the Ma¯ ori world).

Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka say in their introduction that there is no separation of the ‘‘real from the imagined, rational from the irrational, or what can be believed in and what cannot’’.

‘‘Ma¯ ori do not make those distinctions’’. This anthology opened up a new ara (pathway) for me to know my own country, as writers from many different iwi across the motu retell how the world came to be.

These are stories of tı¯puna and taniwha in contemporary Aotearoa, all linked as a single tokotoko (walking-talking stick).

I started to dimly grasp the aliveness of the landscapes we all live in.

The pu¯ ra¯ kau tell not only of the past and present, but also of the future.

Nic Low’s Te Ara Poutini is set in Nga¯ i Tahu-run touristic facilities that recreate pu¯ ra¯ kau with hi-tech animatronics and artificial intelligence.

In Rarohenga and the Reformation,

David Geary incorporates the languages of gaming and interactive fiction.

Whatever else the future will be, it will also be Ma¯ ori.

The past decade has been an energising time for New Zealand readers, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the 2020s have in store.

Haere mai ki te ao pukapuka (come into the world of New Zealand books)!