Review of Witi Ihimaera, the rope man

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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