Halftime, and the game seems to be going well
Half the year has gone – already – and it is time for my report. I left work as a journalist earlier this year to learn te reo Ma¯ ori fulltime. It’s now halfway through the course (I’m on a two-week study break), and to my continuing surprise I can speak enough of the language to string together whole rudimentary sentences.
The sentences need a lot of work, and are still heavily structured around Pa¯ keha¯ grammar, but speaking every sentence is a joy. And I mean that literally. As a Ma¯ ori person, I feel enjoyment, I get a kick, I experience euphoric surprise, from speaking whole Ma¯ ori sentences.
Seriously, it’s some kind of magic. I’ve never been a big conversationalist in te reo Pa¯ keha¯ . But in Ma¯ ori I could talk rubbish for as long as people can reasonably be expected to listen. (To be fair, that’s usually my daughter, a fluent speaker.)
Additionally, they say that you’re well on the road to learning a language when you start dreaming in that language. I have dreamed in Ma¯ ori.
In my dreams, my te reo Ma¯ ori is as bad as it is in real life. I don’t say much in my dreams. Other people don’t say anything at all. I might be the first person to successfully run out of conversation with my subconscious. I’m at least trying to dream in Ma¯ ori, which is a start.
The result of reaching this level is that, when I speak to my daughter out in the everyday world, most, if not all, of the people around us don’t understand what we’re saying.
I have to admit, I’ve been wary of the reaction of some people out there who don’t like hearing te reo Ma¯ ori. I’ve been looking out for the paranoid ones: those who look like someone just threw a cup of slime in their face when they hear others with the audacity to not communicate in Pa¯ keha¯ .
Nobody has had the nerve to complain to my face, which is good (although it might be different if I was a woman, not a pushing-100kg bloke).
My move to embrace te reo Ma¯ ori in public life has made me realise that, as long as I can remember, the most common threat I’ve faced as a Ma¯ ori hasn’t been outright Pa¯ keha¯ aggression. It was pleasant assimilation. It was friendship.
Having mates is often more messy than having enemies. Take rugby, for example. I will never play another game – I’ve aged out – but I’m still learning lessons from the code.
You play rugby long enough and the individual pre-match pep talks are the first to fade from memory. They blur into a scrapbook of jangled nerves and excitement and senior players circling the shed like circus barkers, eyes smouldering, swearing, thumping linimented chests.
From about 20 years of playing rugby, undoubtedly hundreds of games, I remember only one motivational speech. It was, I guess, a lesson about friendship.
We sat in our club’s changing room before a particular game and a senior player barked – with throwaway disdain, contempt – that we were not going to lose to a bunch of Ma¯ oris. (This particular Ma¯ ori gritted his mouthguard a little more tightly between his teeth.)
It is fair to say my team was largely a bunch of Pa¯ keha¯ : working class, middle class, urban and rural, with a smattering of Ma¯ ori. The opposition team was almost entirely Ma¯ ori. I guess the belief implicit in the not-losing-to-Ma¯ oris speech was that, while the opposition might be strong and aggressive, they were unorganised, undisciplined, and a bit dumb. Pa¯ keha¯ smarts should therefore triumph, I presume.
I don’t bring this up to speak about the prevalence of racism in rugby. I have no idea what it’s like now, or whether it was widespread then. But I do still wonder whether I should have said something. I never did. They were mates.
And it was something that flew past, in the final rush before we headed out onto the field. Some would say it was nothing – a bit of non-PC bonding between team-mates – but then why do I still remember it, above everything else, from that time? Why does it still bother me now?
In the end, I think I took a swinging forearm from an (also Ma¯ ori) opposition player that almost took my head off and left me with a decent cut and black eye, which was probably poetic justice of some kind for not speaking up. Also, we lost to the Ma¯ oris.
Now as I look ahead to the second half of this year’s course, I can appreciate how far I’ve come. I’m much slower, less fit, greyer, somehow less coordinated than I was in the old days. But undoubtedly much stronger.
I’ve been wary of the reaction of some people out there who don’t like hearing te reo Ma¯ ori. I’ve been looking out for the paranoid ones.