‘Cancer reminds me of what I need to change’
In her first interview in more than two years, Teremoana Rapley, the ‘first lady of New Zealand hip-hop’, speaks to André Chumko about her shock cancer diagnosis after being given months to live at 49.
Things were looking up for Teremoana Rapley two years ago. The former Upper Hutt Posse and Moana and the Moahunters member, who’s perhaps best known for her work in the media and TV industry as a presenter, producer and jack of all trades with thousands of credits to her name across TVNZ and Whakaata Māori, was in the middle of a new job with Tātaki, Auckland’s cultural and economic development agency.
She was the lead strategist for Create Auckland 2030, a roadmap for the city to become a global creative capital. Her much-anticipated debut album, Daughter Of A Housegirl, more than three decades in the making, was due to be released, as was a new exhibition called ‘ui, which was a visual commentary on the impact of colourism, racism and our health industry, as a daughter of a housegirl.
But the Covid pandemic raged on, and the exhibition was later called off. The album was never released.
What Rapley, now 51, hadn’t said was that part of the reason was two shock diagnoses – first, an aggressive autoimmune disorder in February 2022, then, later that year, inoperable brain cancer, with tumours discovered in August and October. Chemotherapy isn’t an option because the cancer is in her optical chiasm, an area of the brain that’s extremely close to the bone. She’s been given only months to live.
“If it touches bone, I’ll lose my eyesight and possibly my hearing,” she told the Sunday News in an exclusive interview.
I’m interviewing Rapley because this week she’s won the Independent Spirit Award at this year’s Taite music awards, for paving the way for Pacific artists. This is her first interview since February 2022, when she was promoting her now non-released album and the canned exhibition. While we speak by Zoom, she’s got some chicken congee cooking on the broiler.
Before her last interview, which was more than two years ago with RNZ’s Kim Hill, Rapley was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that was supposed to be lifelong.
She’s never opened up publicly about it before. “I’m saying supposed to because eventually it would put me into a wheelchair ... My bones in my spine started actually twisting with each other. So it’d render me unable to walk. And so I just got the news when I did that interview [in 2022].”
The cancer news followed not long after, and she was told she could be dead within the next six months.
“I couldn’t figure out how this could happen. And the challenge was, is that I was overworking and I’ve been overworking for a very long time.
“Part of my upbringing of being a 9-yearold kid who started looking after a 2-weekold baby is a survival mechanism and that was in my brain. I think that’s the reason why I couldn’t just give up and go oh, that’s it . ... I had to take care of another human life when I was 9 years old. So [I had] to grow up. So by the time I joined Upper Hutt Posse, I was quite a savvy 14-year-old.
“In terms of the dangers within the industry, I knew how to avoid them ... If I saw danger,
I’d go another direction. Hence why my CV is so huge, because I’ve had the survival mechanism that’s been put inside of me.
“I bought my first house at 19 ... I had my first child at 20. And so I have four boys now, that survival mechanism for myself transferred to my children. So I never stopped working. I just always thought, pay the bills. There’s a roof over your head. You’re good.
‘‘But I ended up taking on a lot of projects all at the same time, because I guess to a certain extent, I got addicted to the multitasking, the adrenaline. That’s actually what I needed to focus pulling back on. And that’s what I’ve done in the last two years, probably more so in the last six to eight months more than any other time.”
Rapley’s overworking is infamous – she’s been turned away from jobs for being overqualified. She went to university later in life because she felt like “I need to have these letters behind my name”, but wasn’t impressed with the papers.
“It was actually frustrating because one of the [journal] articles I remember I had to review, I was actually the person being interviewed [in the article]. And when I wrote back, I wrote it in the first person. They got so angry . ... I was like, ‘it’s me’. What do you want me to write?
“Even when I was doing that [Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration], I’d already run businesses . ... So I understood the fundamentals of it. I didn’t know the exact language, but you can get the language
if you read a dictionary.”
Unhappy with being told that even if she pursued radiation, she would likely live for only months, and having at one point 10 different specialists, Rapley has since early last year been travelling from her home in Auckland to Melbourne to stay with her eldest son and pursue alternative treatment.
She was 115 kilograms at one point and naturopaths in Australia suggested it could be because she has an intolerance to foods like oranges that she was eating every day, which were causing inflammation in her body. Rapley says she couldn’t type because the joint pain in her hands was so bad.
“Within that two-year period, I had to learn to use different tools in order for me to do my work because I still worked throughout that whole period ... There were days where I couldn’t bend my limbs like my knees. And so I would walk ... like a robot.
“I pretty much put up two middle fingers and said ... I’m not dying in two years’ time. I was like, no, I’ve got things I’ve got to do. And grandchildren I want to hang out with and eventually great-grandchildren.”
Among all of this Rapley has, since 2022, been leading a project with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage to get artist-led system transformation within the New Zealand music industry, to make it safer for artists.
The report is scheduled for release this year. She says kids navigating the industry these days “don’t even need us”, adding she’s like the “old lady in the corner” now. “None of these children know who I am.”
She’s impressed how many of them are self-starters on social media and know how to promote themselves and get audiences.
“What they needed was support around being able to record their stuff, around how they distribute their stuff, how they communicate that stuff. Because these kids can go out and shoot a music video off their phones and actually release it like that.
“Those business models that had been built up from the current infrastructure of the music industry are gonna break down, but there are people within the industry that are trying to uphold those business models because they need a job ... That stuff can make you lose yourself [as an artist].”
Too often, she says, musicians aren’t sitting at the table when it comes to designing policy to make their industry better. For indigenous artists, Rapley says capitalist, superficial value systems often directly oppose their own. She says many of the problems could be fixed by making sure young people entering the industry have a deep knowledge of self, so they can back themselves to make the right decisions.
“It needs to come back to this inner conversation again. Whatever it ends up looking like André, will be one that I am happy for my granddaughters – I got two granddaughters who love to sing, who love music – to be able to participate in if they want to.”
While Rapley’s been told that there’s no evidence of her autoimmune disease any more, which she credits to radically transforming her health (she has lost a significant amount of weight), her cancer is still present, which she’s finding a way to live with.
“I had to walk around my house going ‘BRAIN TUMOUR’ just randomly, just to shock my brain into thinking, I’ve actually got a brain tumour. Then it was two brain tumours and I was like, what? I had to shift my mindset. I had to get myself into a mindset of I have children, I have grandchildren. I might not be here in the next six months.
“So I got myself in order to do things that I thought needed to be done if I wasn’t here. And then it wasn’t so much of a giving up but it was more of a OK, what are the other things that I can do in my life that I have access to that can help support me, push me towards a way where I’m healing.
“There were lots of things within that space that I needed to do. With the tumours, even though they’re still there, the key is to get rid of them naturally, even though the oncologist would not say that there’s a way that that can actually happen. But he says, ‘we’ve seen results like that, but we don’t know how it happens’.
“My goal is to keep focusing on living, on focusing on a healing light within my body. Maintaining my stress levels, because I know stress would have been part of it . ... It was a very deep self inner reflection and so I still have a focus of getting rid of these tumours.”
Rapley says she’s tired and forgetful. She says the cancer is not hers to own. “I look at it more as a blissing. People say blessing, I say blissing. It’s a bliss to actually have this cancer inside of my body to remind myself that there are things that I’ve been doing within my life that I needed to change, and those changes are happening and that’s consistent, and it’s forever.”
She’s trying to focus on providing for her four children and four grandchildren.
Rapley’s polishing three albums: the unreleased Daughter of a Housegirl, and two others, Cleaning House and Daily Incantations. The music videos will together be a sort of film, telling the story of her life. She also wants to write a book.
“My thing is to be a good human being and have something that I can offer to the world, and not expect anything back from it.”