This month’s Flash Frontier featured author is Ben Brown, award-winning children’s author, poet and storyteller – and, in 2021, the inaugural Te Awhi Rito NZ Reading Ambassador (more about this role here). He has been widely published and celebrated in Aotearoa New Zealand across many genre. Here, editor Vaughan Rapatahana talks with him about his family and whakapapa, his immersion in language, both English and te reo Māori, and his belief in the power of story. He also includes a small MANU story at the end!
Vaughan Rapatahana: Can you please tell us your tribal affiliation(s)?
Ben Brown: Ko Ben Brown tōku ingoa.
My name is Ben Brown.
Kua whānaunau mai tōku whaea kei Waahi Paa no te tai i te uru o te awa Waikato, i ā Huntly nā konā, Ko Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Ngāti Paoa ōku hapū.
My mother was born at Waahi Paa on the west bank of the Waikato River at Huntly, and so Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Ngati Paoa are my tribes.
Ko Taupiri te maunga, ko Waikato te awa, ko Te Wherowhero te Tangata, Waikato Taniwharau, he piko he taniowha, he piko he taniwha.
Taupiri is the Mountain. Waikato is the River. Te Wherowhero is the Man. Waikato of a hundred Taniwha, for every bend, a Taniwha.
No Ahitereiria tōku matua. Ko Ngāti Pākehā ia.
My father was from Australia. He was Pākehā.
He kaituhituhi au.
I’m a writer.
VR: Can you also please tell us something about yourself? Writing career and genre, including any recent publications/participations? Just a bit of background…of course including being Te Awhi Rito NZ Reading Ambassador.
BB: I’ve called myself a writer since 1992 when Helen Taylor and I published the first of a run of kids’ books together in a partnership that yielded over a dozen kids’ titles, a few shortlists, a couple of residencies, notable mentions here and there, a Best Picture Book Award in the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and YA in 2006 but most importantly of all a son in 1997 and a daughter in 2000.
I first met Helen sometime in 1987 at the University of Canterbury where she would go on to secure a Master’s degree in Art History and I would write two vaguely autobiographical kids’ stories (one about a cat with no tail, the other about a penguin with no idea except . . .) in lieu of completing any of the buffet of degrees that at some point must have seemed something like a good idea at the time.
Started with Law, finished with Beowulf, Snorri Sturlusson and Noam Chomsky’s bloody Transformational Generative Grammar palaver; preferring Epic Anglo Saxon poetry, Ragnarok and Valhalla over the Holy Grail search for One Great Grammatical Ring to bind them Languages all to Chomsky’s intellectual ego.
In the event, a degree in anything has yet to be attained. But I met the mother of my children and watched them all ace undergrad degrees in Computer Science and the Arts and honours and an MA with another MA on the horizon for one of them, so I count all that as a win.
As to the mahi; the simple idea of assembling words in a particular order, a specific arrangement, and they have to be the right words in every regard to generate the desired effect –well, that whole process and the possibilities it presents just fascinates me. You can enrage, delight, move to tears… with words. You can teach, corrupt, deceive, entertain, arouse, and so on and so forth, etcetera. You can even find a living in there somewhere. I think I have an accidental ‘bucket list’ of things to write before I slip this mortal coil – being at least one example of everything in terms of genre.
Starting out in kids’ books seemed natural to me – part of me never has grown up; today I’m a 61-year-old kid in a lot of ways, unapologetically. I like trying to see the world through a kid’s eyes, not all the time but when it suits.
Poetry has always captivated me. I think as a genre, poetry is the greatest example of the extraordinary utility that exists in these primitive makings and symbols we use in infinitely varying ways. My father used to quote poetry in the tobacco paddocks of the farms he and Mum built.
‘… It matters not how straight the gait, how charged with punishments the scroll…’
He understood that simply the sound of poetry can be enough to give it meaning. Of course, there’s usually something else going on as well… but there doesn’t have to be, not really. Not in poetry.
It’s my belief that, actually, it’s all about the STORY, eh. This obsession with words, which I think is what you have when you pursue writing as a life – you have an obsession, and that’s ok because words tell stories and STORY makes humans so writers are MAKERS as well. There are worse things to be in life than a MAKER. You could be a . . . well, it’s not for me to say – not here anyway.
Te Awhi Rito
A two-year appointment as inaugural Te Awhi Rito NZ Reading Ambassador from May 2021 allowed 30 years of experience as a creative writer to then be applied to the other side of the writing equation. Reading builds humans as well. It turns little humans into much more effective big humans and it keeps writers active and happy. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, reading for many becomes something of a chore. The joy and excitement and shared experience of engaging with STORY suddenly becomes a bland and colourless experience in structure and utility – and let’s face it, a machine can do THAT.
The Reading Ambassador works with the National Library to promote and inspire a love of reading in our tamariki and rangatahi. It is in my view absolutely necessary work and the National Library folks believe deeply in that mahi. They’re passionate, knowledgeable, committed people and staunch advocates of the Te Awhi Rito kaupapa. It was a privilege to work in that capacity with those people and was certainly a highlight in my career.
VR: I know that you do sometimes write in te reo Māori. How important is it for you to write in te reo Māori, please? And relatedly, how important/vital do you think it is for Kiwi writers to write in te reo Māori? Or at least attempt to?
BB: A Māori Writer or A Writer who is Māori
My Tainui Waikato Kingitanga mother was born on the marae and learned English as a second language. Her formal education ended when she was aged around 12 or 13 years old with her last year at Rakaumanga Native School. Mum missed out on secondary school. TB intervened and she spent over 2 years in hospital. The advent of streptomycin saved her life and probably millions of others around the world because, prior to 1949, a diagnosis of TB – especially to an adolescent young Māori girl living in a Pā on the Waikato River – was virtually a death sentence. But she was saved and I grew up hearing English and Māori all the time – sometimes jumbled together in this really vibrant sparkly real cheeky Māoringlish vernacular.
I’m not a fluent speaker. That journey is ongoing for me, but I love the way te reo Māori is able to define in the purest of ways –for me anyway – both the wairua o nga tāngata and this land beneath its long white shiny cloud we all call home, Māori and Pākehā alike. To me, te reo Māori sounds like Aotearoa. Wai sounds like water, Hau sounds like wind, Hā sounds like the breath, Wā, like time or space or even spacetime, Mr Einstein. . .
I write mostly in English, the Bastard of all languages, the mongrel with at least 3 fathers and an undisclosed number of matriarchs, foster mums, wet nurses and fairy god mothers. That’s why it’s majestic in all its forms. English is my father’s language. Which makes it mine as well. I cherish te reo Māori and wish everyone in New Zealand could wake up tomorrow fluent speakers – it would solve a lot of imaginary problems in a moment . . . Te reo Māori is as immutable as te maunga. Anyway, that’s what I reckon – mauri ora, manawa mai pūmau tonu atu. . .
VR: It would be great if you could also provide a sample of your flash (short) fiction, please. If it has as its kaupapa, ngā manu, even better, eh. If it is ‘creative non-fiction’ kāore he raruraru.
BB: Below; a story about he manu . . .
Whakautu
A story by Ben Brown, November 2023
A sun shower yields the rainbow, to lay it as a korowai on the mountain.
‘See that, sonny, Uenuku attends,’ my mother notes in a serious tone.
Her hand tightens upon my shoulder. I feel her tense, pull me closer. I feel, as well, a kind of force, an energy that emanates from her. It’s palpable.
One day I would recognise this energy as ihi.
‘He always does,’ she continues, growling now. But softly so.
‘He’s lost his hold on me though, Sonny. Do you hear me? My place was taken up… Me tangi koe taku tamaiti, tōku whaea e noho rā me taihoa ana māku… You should lament, my son – my mother, your nanna, she died for my little girl’s sins…’
Ah, I understand.
Mum is grieving now.
‘My first born, your brother – te taumata, te tihi – te teitei ō mua, he too was taken from me. You have a credit now, taku tama. I’m the guarantor. If you find the courage when the time comes, you might have your way with that rainbow of a Taniwha.’
She turns me to her, glares unblinking into my eyes.
‘Cut him down to his tears…,’ she hisses. ‘To his tongue, to his ure koro tawhito,
whakamoe, whakamate, whakapūmau tonu atu. Do this for me.’
Soon the rainbow dissipates. Uenuku takes his leave. A black pīwaiwaka comes a-flitting past my mother’s ear chattering away happily, close enough for a wing to
brush the mako shark’s tooth hanging from her lobe.
My mother would tell me as I grew older, ’Omens are omens, sonny, that is all. There are always signs and portents that something will happen, because something always does. Pīwaiwaka searches for flies and Māui dies of vanity. Good job too! Imagine presenting yourself to a lady of such stature dressed up as a bloody grub! Jeez, what did he expect, eh? Too bloody smart for his own good that one.’
I wonder to this day what my mother really meant with all that ‘Cut him down’ and such. Or rather, is it that I am trying very hard not to know at all? I understood then and there 50 years ago; as my mother raged quietly in her grief beneath our mountain, she saw and knew of things beyond te matatā – the outermost fringe. And she was unafraid to defy such consequences laid for her through the inevitable circumstance of whakapapa. In fact, this was her natural inclination in life. To defy.
Sometimes, out of the blue, without invitation, birds of all kinds would suddenly appear and spend the day flitting about her vicinity, making a fuss, just to spend time in her life. She’d tell them ‘Bugger off’ if she was working. But, on rare occasions, Mum liked nothing better than to sing a cheeky love song with them. And they would all linger in each other’s company. . .
Me he manurere ahau ē
( if I were a bird in flight )
And all the time, she was.
Ben Brown (Ngati Mahuta, Ngati Koroki, Ngati Paoa) is an acclaimed writer, poet, performer and publisher who lives in Lyttelton, New Zealand. He is the author of an evocative memoir, A Fish in the Swim of the World (PRH, 2022), a number of children’s books, non-fiction works, and short stories for children and adults, many of which have strong New Zealand nature themes. In 2020 Brown delivered a lecture titled If Nobody Listens Then No One Will Know for the annual Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Pānui and edited How the F* Did I Get Here, an anthology of poetry written by young people at an Oranga Tamariki Youth Justice Residence facility, who had taken part in his writing workshop. In 2021 he was appointed as the inaugural Te Awhi Rito New Zealand Reading Ambassador for children and young people, a role which advocates for and champions the importance of reading in the lives of young New Zealanders, their whānau, and communities.