All in the same canoe

A “koe” is a cry or a shriek. It can be, for example, the cry of a kiwi from the bush. Māori names for birds are often homonyms for the sounds they make. So “kiwi” is not unlike that bird’s “koe”. In a long poem included in Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology, the great nineteenth-century warrior chief Te Kooti has the bush wren, the “matuhituhi”, pronouncing itself to call for “hui” – a meeting of the people, a gathering. In the English translation it is a call to “unite, bond together”. This is a frequent call to a tribal society, not always answered or welcome, but one recently repeated and urged on Māori during the “tangihanga” (funeral rites) of the Māori king, Tuheitia, and the coronation of his daughter.

“Koe” can also mean “you”. This collection of eco-poetry is a call to you or to us – from the bush, the hills, the waterways – that means to alert us to the harm that has been done and is happening now. New Zealand’s (conservative coalition) government has chosen to reverse the previous (Labour) government’s ban on mining and oil exploration, which makes the implications of the book under review more topical than its makers can have anticipated. Poets in New Zealand in the nineteenth century often lamented the destruction of beautiful native bush to make way for farmland, as in the final stanza of “The Passing of the Forest” by William Pember Reeves:

The axe bites deep. The rushing fire streams bright;
Swift, beautiful and fierce it speeds for Man,
Nature’s rough-handed foeman keen to smite
And mar the loveliness of ages. Scan
The blackened forest ruined in a night,
The silver Parthenon that God will plan
But builds not twice. Ah, bitter price to pay
For Man’s dominion – beauty swept away.

More recently this has been viewed globally, in terms of climate change and the huge amount science is teaching us about the effect we have on our world.

Eco-poetry concerns itself with nature, the environment, its protection and preservation, and its relation to human psychology and health. In New Zealand, English-language poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was often influenced by the spirit of Wordsworth. The flora and fauna and the landforms were different, of course, and there were no Tintern Abbeys. But as Romantic attachment to landscape has been at times an instrument of English nationalism, so it was of New Zealand nationalism. Twentieth-century poets such as Allen Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, Denis Glover and James K. Baxter wanted severance from British colonial identity. Of that strong quartet, who wrote some of the finest poems in the country’s short literary history, only Baxter considered the Māori population an important part of the national equation and included that consciousness in his poems.

Because pre-European Māori had no written language, and because of the depredations of colonialism, including the fact that the use of Māori spoken language was discouraged and even suppressed by both Māori and Pākehā leaders (in the interest of advancing English), there is a middle period in New Zealand’s history when Māori seem less vividly present. Many of their most notable writers (Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, the Māori editor of this volume, Robert Sullivan, and even the just-deceased king, Tuheitia) grew up with English as their first language and without Māori. All that has changed in the past four or five decades, owing to what has been called “the Māori renaissance” and to the reassertion of their language, so that even people like myself, who were familiar with it only as place names, names of birds, fish and trees, and a few useful words and phrases – Pākehā (European New Zealander), “kia ora”, “tēnā koe” (greetings) “ka pai” (very good), “waka” (canoe), “kai moana” (seafood), “aroha” (love), “mana” (prestige, pride) and so on – find it creeping more and more into our daily vocabulary. This has been encouraged, even enforced, by government departments renaming themselves in “Māori” words invented or misapplied for the purpose – the transport department has become Waka Kotahi, which, literally translated, would mean roughly that we are all in the same canoe. For the moment, however, New Zealand’s significant literary writing, and most of our daily conversations, are in English.

The overview of this anthology, which offers samples of New Zealand eco-poetry over several centuries, is that Māori poetry (songs, chants and stories preserved in the memory of an oral culture) differs from its English-language counterpart because it is based on “whakapapa” – the memorized line of forebears, which, taken far enough, must always go back to a particular place, a feature of landscape, a forest, a mountain, a river, a stretch of coastline. This is your “whenua”, your spiritual home; so the human and natural worlds are interrelated. Neither one rules the other: as a Māori proverb has it, “I am my river and my river is me”.

Māori are represented as “kaitiaki” – protectors of local flora and fauna. This is true in the sense that each tribe guarded its own fishing grounds, shellfish beds and rivers; but none of the commentary notes that, before European colonization, Māori collectively had burned off vast tracts of forests and hunted the moa, a large (ostrich-sized) flightless bird, to extinction.

Māori ideas of the natural world have affected New Zealand law. A mountain range (Urewera), a river (the Whanganui) and a mountain (Taranaki) have been accorded personhood and human rights by act of parliament. The intention is to make eco- protection of those land features enforceable by law. It seems a strikingly original piece of legislation, and possibly unique in the world.

Koe, regrettably I think, includes too many poets in its 300 pages, and consequently allows itself only one poem by each. It is therefore uneven, but offers many gems and much valuable commentary, especially from Janet Newman on New Zealand’s cultural and ecological history. As much as it is a record of the harm we do to ourselves by harming our environment, it also records how we slowly learn, and how we might correct some of our errors.

C. K. Stead’s most recent collection of poems is In the Last Light of a Dying Day, 2024. Table Talk, a new collection of prose pieces, critical and fiction, is due at the end of October

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