Review of Witi Ihimaera, the rope man

Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies
4:1 (2006), 117-121
REVIEW
Engaging the Metaphors: A Review of Witi Ihimaera’s the rope of man, Reed:
Auckland, 2005, 325pp. ISBN 9-78079000-894-3
WITI IHIMAERA’S first novel Tangi (1973) won the Wattie Book of the Year Award in
1974. Tangi is centred around the death of Tama Mahana’s father, an event which
causes the young man to reflect on his upbringing and the home he left for a job in
the Pākehā 1 world. Thirty‐two years on, Tangi has reemerged in revised form as the
first book in the rope of man. The second book, or sequel, is titled ‘The Return 2005’
and similarly involves a traumatic event in Tama Mahana’s life. It also tells the story
of the career the narrator has forged, initially as a reporter, and later as an
internationally renowned TV anchorman. In the sequel, the relationship with Tama’s
mother Huia is central together with a secret they have shared since his childhood.
With Tama now 52 years old, it is his mother’s imminent death and the potential
destruction of the family through this secret which brings him home.
Significant insights into the novel’s vision and scope are suggested by the
book’s title and by the section titles. The metaphor of the rope of man, Te Taura
Tangata, which is elaborated on page 50, is a history with its beginnings in Māori
epistemologies. Over time, the rope has attracted diverse interpretations. Its strands
were first frayed by the advent of Pākehā; alternatively, were ‘soldered together’ by
the intermingling of Māori and Pākehā histories. With the latter position developed
through the novel, the writer is in a position to elaborate Māori strengths, but also to
support a personal philosophy in which Māori and New Zealanders jointly lead the
world in resolving ‘issues of blood, race, ancestry and identity’.
‘Tangi’, the first book in the rope of man, communicates an exclusively Māori
worldview. As the abbreviated form for tangihanga, the term encompasses the
ritualized ceremonials for the dead which are carried out on the marae. 2 Indisputably,
the tangihanga represents the most profound and moving expression of the Māori
ethos. In its common usage, to tangi is to weep. Evoking not only ‘the sorrows of the
marae’ in a literal sense, this term refers to the grieving process enacted in the novel
as memories recalling Tama’s relationship with his father.
Subscribing to the central metaphor through its layering of strands, the effect of
a narrative strategy which utilizes memories, like one of the purposes of the
tangihanga, is that the novel becomes an affirmation of life. Simultaneously it conveys
the warmth that characterizes the father himself and the positive influences he has
brought to bear on the life of his son.
The emotional texture of the earlier novel inevitably attracted critical attention.
Was it possible to distinguish between the reiterative and usual expression of grief
for Māori, which was integral to the novel, and what might be considered excessive
to a Pākehā mindset The critical need to differentiate between an emphasis on
sentiment, validated by cultural practice, and sentimentality (in the sense that the
reader’s sensibilities are manipulated at the expense of a ‘nuanced and diverse
appreciation of characters and events’) influenced minor changes in the rope of man. 3
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For instance, italicized phrases deploying the voice and apprehension of the child
Tama at an earlier family tangi have been downplayed in the later version.
‘Tangi’ can justifiably claim passages of great lyric beauty. As the casket is
lowered into the earth an analogy is made between the separation of husband and
wife and the separation of the mythic parents Ranginui and Papatūānuku. The passage
quoted here is taken from the earlier publication:
‘Earth reaches for Sky and Sky bends to Earth. One last fierce clasp in rain and wind
and wind and rain. One last embrace of rage and fury and helpless grief. One last
clinging of body to body, of Earth to Sky. One last meeting of lips to lips and tears to
tears.
And then the slow drawing away, the slow tearing away, the slow wrenching away of
Sky from Earth, of Earth from Sky, in the final, sorrowful separation . . .
Farewell, e pa. Haere ra, my father’. 4
This version allowed me to refer in a previous critique to a ‘melancholia
subsumed by a depth of grief and rage so profound it assumes cosmic proportions‘.
Through marginal changes to the revised text in the rope of man the word ‘fierce’
becomes ‘passionate’ and ‘One last fierce clasp in rain and wind and wind and rain’
is replaced by ‘One last embrace of joy and love and thankfulness’. 5 Perhaps
intended to suggest a hope for healing the sentimental underlay in this revision is
unequivocally absent in the original. In contrast a later exchange between mother
and son in ‘The Return’ is almost tongue‐in‐cheek – ‘But sometimes I can become
maudlin. Her words set me off again and, when she saw I was still sorrowing, she
got cross. “Oh, get over yourself,” she said’. 6
In the rope of man the prevailing metaphor is strengthened by another
whakataukii, or proverb: ‘Te torino haere whakamua, whakamuri. At the same time as
the spiral is going forward, it is returning’. 7 Elsewhere, Ihimaera has referred to the
double spiral which allows you ‘to go back into history and then come out again.
Back from personal into political . . . [and] out again’. 8 The spiral is a trope with a
trajectory founded on Māori ways of perceiving the world and our place in it. One of
the distinctive aspects of the spiral formation is the seamless transition it influences
between past and present, and between temporal and spatial. This sense of travelling
between two worlds is heightened by imaginative depictions of the landscape seen
through the windows of the train carrying the narrator to and from Wellington: ‘The
train curves into the dark bleakness ahead, breaking through the rain. The carriage
rocks and sways like a canoe adrift. The mountains are the ridged backbone of a
giant fish’. 9
Here, Ihimaera’s ability to integrate a mythic past into the text, in this instance
Māui’s lifting of Aotearoa 10 from the ocean, validates the notion of a narrator with a
lineage recorded in the contours of the earth – ‘My mother was the Earth. My father
was the Sky’. 11 Similar perceptions underline Tama’s wait for the flood of light to the
east of the plane when, returning from London with sleeping passengers around
him, his karakia 12 echoes his father’s salutation to the day which was ‘also a prayer:
Ko Ranginui kei runga, ko Papatuanuku kei raro, tena korua’. 13
Cultural beliefs such as these sit comfortably with the writer’s ‘mind style’ 14 or
habitual way of viewing the world. Ihimaera frequently expresses varying psychic
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states in terms of light and darkness. Whether a metaphysical drifting – ‘The stars
come out. My father and I are floating on a luminescent skein of silver dreams’ 15 – or
a perception of an actual experience – ‘the sky above Waituhi was like a funnel and
all the stars of the Milky Way would shower down upon us’ 16 – these impressions
embody the universe we intuit in ourselves. Simultaneously there is nothing
incongruous about the philosophical attitude of the narrator and the down‐to‐earth,
sometimes humorous, tone of writing describing Tama’s impoverished upbringing:
‘the makeshift stops along the way – draughty shearing huts, shepherds’ quarters
and one‐room scrubcutters’ shacks’ 17 ; hens ‘too accustomed to sleeping inside’ which
‘before you know it’ will ‘be talking in Maori’. 18
There is some irony, however, in the conjunction of diverse traditions and
political perspectives conceptualised by the strands of a rope or the interstitial
possibilities of the spiral. The implied freedom and orality of first‐person narration,
for instance, and waiata tangi which blend naturally into the text, compare
intriguingly with a somewhat cheeky decision and long encore in which a writer
rewrites his own literary history. These are Ihimaera’s stories but the stories also own
him. There are parallels between the rope of man and other texts, and it’s a burgeoning
tale full of characters given prominence in other publications. Through the writer the
reader finds commonality in a place called Waituhi and an ancestral house called Te
Rongopai.
‘Rongopai rises up before you.
The roof holds up the sky. The foundations stand firmly in the earth. All humanity is
therefore able to stand in the strand of life between, sustained by the strength of your
ancestral house’. 19
Apart from the author’s return to Waituhi, the interpretive possibilities of the
name of Rongopai and the interaction between its related meanings of ‘wellness’ and
‘healing’ and the title of the sequel are intriguing in light of the novel’s plot and
political vision. At first glance, the title, with its appended ‘2005’, simply seems to
refer to the fact of the narrator’s return because of his mother’s illness. Rongopai’s
history and name – the Gospel or good news – is the key, however, to a fuller
appreciation of the novel’s complexities and a dynamic based on notions of survival,
healing and conciliation.
Ringatū oral tradition records how Te Rongopai was one of four houses erected
to welcome Te Kooti’s return to Poverty Bay. 20 These wharenui (meeting houses) were
named for focal words in Te Kooti’s prophecy announced to four elders of the
Ringatū faith – ‘Whakahaungia te rongopai i runga i te ngāwari me te aroha’. 21 The
gospel was to be built on love and charity, the religious paradigm anticipating
conciliation between Te Kooti and government, settlers and various Māori factions.
Te Kooti never received the approval from the government so never returned to the
area: ‘I have no regrets or judgements about life and about our life. Perhaps it’s
because there was always a certain fatalism anyway about our situation as the last of
the Ringatu. As followers of Te Kooti Arikirangi, who had led us during the wars, we
would always wander as the morehu, the lost people, until fortune’s wheel returned
us to our promised land’. 22
On an emotional level, the family has to survive the death of the father. Acerbic
Battista/Review of the rope man 119

exchanges between Tama and his siblings foreground the principle of morehu or
survival, in practical terms as well; they have to survive his defection when he
chooses not to honour the obligation to return and care for them after their father’s
death. Huia and Tama have to survive not only an event, which has haunted them
for years, but its outcome:
‘I watched Eric Amundsen, repelled by him and angered at myself for bringing Mum
to see him. . . .
“Eric keeps seeing a huge glowing river”, Dr Stephens explained. “It’s a river that
comes out of nowhere and recedes into some darkness way beyond the room he is in,
In our sessions with him, Eric has been able to tell us about the river. It’s the most
beautiful thing he has ever seen. It’s threaded with many colours, like a glorious
rainbow. There are voices in the river and they are calling him”. . . . .
“It isn’t a river”, I said’. 23
The most powerful moment in ‘The Return, 2005’ describes the ascent onto the marae
of the group from the psychiatric facility:
‘I watched Eric Amundsen as he approached. He was making swimming movements
with his arms, his eyes were glowing with gladness. What did he see as he swam
towards the river that wasn’t a river . . . .
For two years he had been dreaming of a river and had tried to join its stream, but it
wasn’t a river. Spiralling out of nowhere was a rope stretching from the beginning to
the end of time . . . .
This time as he swam towards the river, the rope recognised him’. 24
Permitted to embrace his Māori ancestry this man may now benefit from its
distinctive knowledges and practices. There are implications here too for the future
in the idea of an adoptive Pākehā mother seeking a Māori healing for her son.
the rope of man successfully communicates the need to realise a sense of
belonging and place, one which allows us to appreciate our cultural diversity.
Occasionally pretentious, the novel supports a national identity with expatriates torn
between staying and returning who address the narrator as ‘sir’. 25 Its characters are
credible; even a narrator with a lop‐sided grin disconcertingly close to the writer’s
own. Its catalogue of major media events over the last thirty years and the level of
research it has required is especially evident in the international broadcast of the
finale. This emphasis embraces a global community and sustains the notion of our
common humanity.
The novel concludes with the words ‘We bow only to the highest mountain’. 26
This final statement in English is a commentary on the calibre of Māori and New
Zealanders. Only one point back on the curve of the spiral and the pepeha 27 is in
Māori: ‘Me te tuohu koe, me tuohu ki te maunga teitei’. 28 This tribal saying is not a
measure of defeat, it attests to the values and the mana 29 of the Māori people.
Jon BATTISTA
University of Auckland
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NOTES
1
Pākehā is the common term for a New Zealander of European descent.
2
Marae refers to either the enclosed complex where the meeting house and other buildings are
located or to the open space in front of the meeting house where formalities take place.
3
N. Simms, ‘A Maori Literature In English . . .’, Pacific Quarterly, 3, 3 (1978), p. 339.
4
Witi Ihimaera, ‘Tangi (extract from the novel)’, in Witi Ihimaera and D. S. Long, eds., Into the World
of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing, Heinemann, Auckland, 1982, p.242.
5
Witi Ihimaera, the rope man, Reed, Auckland, 2005, p.156.
6
ibid., p.315.
7
ibid., p.271.
8
Cited in Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Routes: Navigating Caribbean & Pacific Island Literatures,
University of Hawai‘i Press, Hawai’i, forthcoming, p.218.
9
Ihimaera, the rope man, p.160.
10
New Zealand.
11
Ihimaera, the rope man, p.200.
12
An incantation but more commonly in modern usage referring to ‘prayer’.
13
Ihimaera, the rope man, p.31.
14
‘mind style’ – A term used in stylistics denoting a writer’s characteristic way of perceiving and
depicting the world. See Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short. Style In Fiction: A linguistic
introduction to English fictional prose. English Language Series 13, Longman, London and New York,
pp.187‐207.
15
Ihimaera, the rope man, p.28.
16
ibid., p.85.
17
ibid., p.35.
18
ibid., p.37.
19
ibid., p.110.
20
Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki of the Rongowhakaata Iwi (tribe) of Turanganui a Kiwa (Gisborne)
achieved a national profile when he founded the Ringatu faith, a faith ‘born directly out of conflict over
land between Maori and Pakeha’ which was based on doctrines promising release from bondage and
the return of land to his people. In 1866 he was falsely accused of collaborating with the Taranaki Forces
during the Waerenga a Hika conflict and imprisoned without trial at the Wharekauri penal settlement.
After escaping in 1868 he maintained an active resistance until 1874 when he took refuge in the King
Country. He received a pardon from the Crown in 1883. Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, online,
http://aotearoa.wellington.net.nz/back/kooti.htm.
21
Roger Neich, Painted Histories:Early Maori figurative painting, Auckland University Press, Auckland,
1993, p.189.
22
Ihimaera, the rope man, p.35.
23
ibid., p.288.
24
ibid., p.313.
25
ibid., p.181.
26
ibid., p.322.
27
A tribal saying; a proverb.
28
Ihimaera, the rope man, p.322.
29
Mana is prestige, power, influence or/and authority.
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