Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“KATARAINA” by Becky Manawatu (published by Makaro Press, $NZ37)

 

 

            When I reviewed on this blog Becky Manawatu’s break-out novel Aue, I noted that, great as that novel is, I was sometimes confused about which characters were related to whom. I am therefore grateful that Becky Manawatu’s second novel Kataraina begins with a whakapapa, making clear who the main characters are and how they are related. I also noted that sometimes Kataraina has been referred to as a sequel to Aue , but I would prefer to see Kataraina as an extension of Aue. Some of the new novel elaborates events that have been touched on in the earlier novel. In Aue, Kataraina was called Kat most of the time and was a minor character, although we did hear of her failed marriage, the bullying of her Pakeha husband Stuart Johnson (Stu), and her eventual flight from him. But in Kataraina, she is the centre of the novel - an account of how she had become the woman she is and how she eventually embraces her traditional culture.

 The style of Kataraina is similar to the earlier novel. Once again Becky Manawatu does not tell her tale in sequential order. Chapters deal with the present or the near past or the distant past, not necessarily in order – we are thrown back and forth in time. Chapter headings refer to the momentous event when Stuart Johnson was shot dead by the young girl Beth – thus headings say “Twenty-two years before the girl shot the man”, “A hundred and twenty-eight years before the girl shot the man”, “The moment before the girl shoots the man” etc. etc. Is this the drum-beat of Kataraina’s guilt or is it the ghost of whatever trauma has haunted her? Or is it simply reminding us that Stu’s death was a turning point in Kataraina’s life? Then there is the voice that the author often uses. “We”, the first person plural voice, narrates much of the novel, suggesting the voice of a whole community of wise kuia.

 

It's important to note that Manawatu does not present Kataraina as a paragon. She has very many faults and her behaviour is sometimes self-destructive… but then she has a major identity problem. When she’s a little girl, she prefers to live with her grandparents Jack Te Au and Liz Wixon rather than with her parents Henare Te Au and Colleen Davis, even though she knows her grandparents are often very quarrelsome. The family appears to be a tightly-knit one. There is much talk of food and many family gatherings, though the grandparents quarrelling becomes more violent. As a teenager, Kataraina has many of the adolescent problems. She has a sense of being awkward and is self-conscious. She gets drunk. Sex begins to interest her. Later she knocks around with her brother Toko and meets up with a friend called Pare, who isn’t necessarily a helpful role model. She is disoriented – perhaps through drugs. Aged 16, she has unwanted sex forced on her by an older man, Jared in his 40s. She is assertive enough to walk out of a job at a restaurant when her boss has pushed her too hard. And then she gets together with Stuart Johnson. At first their life is perfect – he’s a young healthy Pakeha farmer, she’s attracted to him and they marry. But gradually their marriage goes sour, Stu becomes more bullying, more violent, throwing things around, more suspicious of his wife… and Kataraina does have an affair with the nearby Tom Aiken, whom we saw in Aue as a very sympathetic character.

Then there is this unresolved matter of Kataraina’s major identity problem. It comes in the form of a piece of land. On Stuart Johnson’s land there is what is colloquially called Johnson’s Swamp. It is regarded by the Maori community as tapu – partly because of a death that happened there in the nineteenth century, but also because it is connected to ancient lore which says the swamp should connect with the sea and that water should always flow through it. A researcher, Eric Green, is interested in the health of wetland geology. He – a Pakeha -has one view of the swamp, seeing it as interesting for scientific research. Cairo, who is Maori, is another researcher specialising in braided rivers. She has a radically different attitude to the swamp after having been told about the history of the swamp by her kuia [grandmother] Moira Sterling, seeing the swamp as sacred and understanding it teems with living things. When he first married Kataraina, Stu had no interest in the swamp and was happy to let it lie. But as his farm loses money, he begins to obsess about the swamp and tries to expand his grazing fields by draining the swamp. Kataraina’s mother Colleen Davis sides with Stu on this issue, but when he tries again and again, he merely ends up with some sedge-e fields and the swamp renews itself. And Stu’s anger grows worse, partly taken out in violence on Kataraina. She sees him as a man “with no interest in poetry or the way a lyric in a song could declare love without using the actual word, and no interest in land too wet to fatten cows…” (p.111)

But what about Kataraina’s major identity problem? The whole narrative of the swamp, and different attitudes towards it, appears to symbolise the difference between pragmatic Pakeha views and Maori deeply-held beliefs. The Pakeha wants to make a buck and ignores the sacred. The Maori want to preserve what is sacred…. and they have an awareness that Pakeha settlers have taken much land that is sacred, such as the swanp. Kataraina is placed between two different cultures – her mixed Maori-and-Pakeha forebears and the Pakeha farmer she has married. What is her culture? Only shortly before Stu is killed does she  understand what culture is really hers. “She knew that she was tearing up, and it wasn’t Johnson’s place, that way, or Aiken’s place, that way. [i.e. she is not trying to chose one of two men] It was a new ancient world inside her, trying to escape her ribcage and fold over the whenua with her, spread out from her, and remember its way up towards the sun.” (p.277) She has embraced the land and its ancient beliefs. And years after Stu’s death, Kataraina laughs and “A crevice open, widens, and her laughter is like cool water, and her cool-water laughter finds this new channel and rushes through it, like a dam has suddenly collapsed, and the cool-water laughter rushes through the channel, right back through time, rinsing us clean.” (p.279) Symbolically, Kataraina is identified with the swamp opening up and cleansing the flowing water. She is now firmly aware of her Maori identity.

And the land is regenerated. After Stu is dead, we are told that there is a flourishing of nature when young Beth and Arama [important in the earlier novel, but minor characters in this one] return to the deceased Stu’s farm and they see “the entire landscape of farmland appeared to have reverted, wild with life: manuka, rimu, kowhai, nikau, ponga. Some grew overnight. Bold. Hungry. Obscenely generous, the air was fresh and rich.” (p.19 – note that this is said early in the novel, but then the novel is not presented in sequential order ].

It would be very amiss of me if I did not note that there are moments in this novel where Becky Manawatu writes in a style that is very lyrical, especially when Cairo is dreaming of, or thinking about, nature and its bounty. And then in complete contrast she presents extreme psychological stress when Kataraina “loses it” . Take the sad moment (pp.132-133) when, months after Stu’s death,  Kataraina virtually takes on a new persona, and considers thus: “ For some tasks she’d been letting loose the ghost of her. Ghost-Kat escaped the towering bowls to do the basic things that proved she was a person. Ghost-Kat faked flesh and substance. Trained itself to hold things )and associated skills such as not falling into the earth, through floors etc.); to toast sandwiches (and associated skills like making Bolognese, cooking whole roasts, peeling and chopping vegetables but not wrists); to hold a glass to drink water (and associated skills like drinking beer, wine and top shelf, even putting the salt on the side of her palm, locking it, dropping the tequila, pressing the lemon to her mouth, but not ramming it down her throat); tidying up, sometimes cleaning even (but not drinking bleach or window cleaner); had even mastered yahooing, bouts of laughter and some facial expressions to reply in the group chat (and associated skills such as making/cancelling dinner plans sending funny GIFs and memes and pressing the happy, sad, angry, hundy-per-cent emoji buttons to react to people’s online lives but avoiding writing I WISH I WAS FUCKEN DEAD….” This is despair before her life is regenerated.

It's up to the reader to wonder where Kataraina goes after she has accepted who she is. Will she have a happy life or a fruitful one? Does embracing a culture necessarily make for happiness? How long will Kataraina’s epiphany last? In Aue, Becky Manawatu depicted much that was negative in both Pakeha life and modern Maori life (gangs, drugs etc). In Kataraina she basically focuses on the positives of Maori life.

I conclude with one personal view. By focusing on one major character, I think Kataraina is a more pared back and focused novel than the earlier Aue, and all the better for it.