By Afternoons, RNZ
Airana Ngarewa Photo: Airana Ngarewa
Get used to seeing Airana Ngarewa's face, he's just released his third book, 'The Last Living Cannibal,' and over the next few weeks he'll be up and down the country appearing at book shops and writers' festivals.
His other books covered contemporary life but Ngarewa told Afternoons Jesse Mulligan, this one looks back and reimagines life in Taranaki in the 1940s.
"One of my secrets Jesse is the fact that almost every book I've written is written about my family, but when you write about 1940 at least when they ask you 'hey is this about me?' I can lie."
Ngarewa said the title is deliberately provocative. The book is inspired by the Ngāruahine leader Tītokowaru, who in 1868 led a campaign against the colonial government.
At the outbreak of war he had 60 warriors to his name, so he needed to adopt a guerrilla campaign to have any chance of victory, part of that strategy was to provoke the colonial commander Thomas McDonnell into attacking him on home territory, he said.
"One of the ways he did that is by killing one of the colonial troops, leaving half the body behind taking the other half of the body back to his pā where he was ritually consumed. What's really interesting about that history is how he had deliberately exaggerated his own participation in the act."
But the book is set in 1940 - a time when Māori in Taranaki and Waikato broadly refused to join the Māori Battalion - and born out of wānanga held at Ngarewa's marae Pariroa just outside of Pātea.
During the wānanga several different whānau came back to the marae, families who had been away for a long period of time, but returned to share stories of their own upbringing, he said.
Ngarewa said he has been very, very lucky to spend time on my marae with the people who were born there raised there.
The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngarewa. Photo: LLC Press
Through his Father's whakapapa Ngarewa and his whānau connect to Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāruahine and Ngā Rauru, going all the way back to the waka Aotea.
Since the arrival of Turi, captain of Aotea, in Pātea, Ngarewa said his family have remained settled there, with the exception of three years when the men and children were arrested for their participation in Tītokowaru's war and sent to Dunedin.
When they returned to Taranaki in 1872, three churches were built often on the sites of some of the most famous battle sites and it symbolised the turning of the people of Taranaki towards Christianity as a pathway to reconciliation with the colonial government and to move past the fighting, he said.
"So these stories were lost for a significant period of time and only until my own father's time did these stories begin to kind of bubble up."
But despite the deep subject matter, Ngarewa said Māori also infuse their stories with humour and lightness incredibly well.
If you've ever been to a pōwhiri before you will hear bouts of laughter interfaced with serious mihi and ritualised encounters, he said.
"It's something that I've worked really hard to embed within the book, and it even goes down to some of their names, there's a boy whose name is Dairy as his father is Irish, so half-Māori, half-Irish, half-black, half-white - a dairy cow."
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