Book of the Week: Talia, haunted

Talia Marshall’s book Whaea Blue starts as a seemingly quite straightforward memoir but then fragments into a rich texture, a weaving of different strands, different concerns, dreams, hauntings. Her memoir is more than meets the eye: it bristles with ideas, all of them interconnected.
In a chapter that wrestles with the legacy of Ans Westra’s famous, controversial images of Māori, ripped of their vital context of names, iwi and whenua, we witness Marshall’s complicated grief over the death of her father. Marshall has a gift for sitting with discomfort: of not looking away from uncomfortable truths, but rather digging into them with all the enthusiasm of a Jack Russell at the beach. She loves Westra’s images, especially those that “caught Māori men in the act of being good”. Marshall’s own Māori father, not a particularly present one but clearly still a beloved and ‘good’ man in his way, is present here via these proxies, and via Marshall’s presence on her son’s father’s couch in Gisborne, wrapped in colourful muumuus that give her grief for her own father “a more tropical, festive feel”. (Even when recounting great sorrow, Marshall’s self-deprecating Dunedinite sense of humour is always bubbling away and cannot but break the surface.)
It’s a haunted book. The author is literally haunted, by a blue kēhua she brings back from a trip to visit her father’s whānau in the Sounds; by a kuia whose house Marshall and her mother disturb before the tapu is lifted; by an unearthly orphan with bleeding gums on the bus from Hamilton to Manukau; and by her father, whose wealth and power diminishes so that he becomes a ghost even before his too-early death, and whose unblessed taonga become another source of anxiety for the already ghost-ridden writer. The membrane between this world and the supernatural realm feels thin at the best of times for Marshall.
Marshall’s whakapapa yields some other incredible stories, not least the Italian lighthouse keeper Nicola Sciascia, Italian ancestor of so many Māori, and his horrific, untimely end. And having seen a few cetaceans lately, I feel nothing but sympathy with Marshall’s obsession with dolphin sightings (she is understandably careful to distinguish this from a love of dolphin tat), and was delighted to be educated about the fact that Pelorus Jack (one of our world-famous-in-New-Zealand friendly dolphins) was known to her iwi as the taniwha Kaikaiawaro, who could also appear as a kererū. The fact that the story has been appropriated and obscured by Pākehā narratives and writers is not lost on Marshall, and nor is the fact that the Pelorus Sound environment is under threat from salmon and forestry industry pollution. Nevertheless, she associates her beloved grandfather Jim with the dolphin, despite his being Pākehā. It’s somehow not a contradiction within the magic world Marshall conjures in her writing, where the uncomplicated love of a child for her grandparents transfigures them beyond mere mortality.
Despite its often self-satirising, at times semi-pugilistic tone, there is indeed so much love in this book: messy, complicated love for messy, complicated people, places and things. For Marshall’s parents with all their foibles – although Marshall’s feelings about her mother, like those for her maternal grandparents, bear the imprint of emotional stability, and she has a quiet, consistent presence in the book. For her son, who from reading this book seems kēhua-free, except for his worry about her. For her son’s father, despite the layers of ossified pain in their relationship. For Ans Westra and her long, hunched body concertinaed into a VW, on her way to photograph Māori. For Maurice Gee’s O trilogy and its vainglorious birdpeople. For birds. For people. It’s an at-times chaotic, at times clear-eyed, no-bullshit kind of love that Marshall seems to have for her whenua, and for its tangata. Even when truly approaching actual homelessness on her way to a tangi, Marshall listens to, shouts at and finally gives her good rum to a vile, hurt, racist woman in a Napier backpackers.
There is also laughter. Marshall is seriously funny, sometimes about the darkest things. She excels at laconic one-liners, usually at her own expense: at a superette in Ruatōria, she “buy[s] a pink toothbrush and fall[s] in love with everyone because I have a lazy person’s tendency to romanticise service workers”. Ouch: skewering herself, me, you, and everyone who thinks they are a ‘nice’ person, all with one pink toothbrush. She is devastatingly self-deprecating; I always feel like this trait gets more pronounced the further south you go in this country. Female friendship is presented as sustaining, life-saving, full of laughter, even while it is also fraught with jealousy, pettiness, and the ravages of time.
Marshall travels the country like a troubadour, with Fleetwood Mac as the soundtrack. Through whakapapa and through her own life’s journey, she knows the places and their people and sings them out with a familiarity that puts most urbanites to shame. I learned a lot about Aotearoa through Marshall’s personal geography: I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t even aware of the concept of Te Tau Ihu, the prow of the waka, the northern tip of the South Island, not to mention its many iwi, even after recently spending time there. That’s why we read, though: to combat our ignorance in the safety and privacy of our homes.
So what does it feel like to read the thing? Sometimes like a road-trip with a mad but beloved friend, taking blind corners of some remote coastal road. And occasionally like watching a car crash in slow motion. But what struck me most was an artist’s life, peripatetic, sometimes chaotic, and often told from the margins of poverty as the author’s fortunes change and change again over time. Marshall is engaging and endearing, from her uniform of leopard-print leggings and series of scary-sounding men and cars to her fierce loyalty to her friends.
She describes herself as being “brown but not brown enough for some and too brown for others” with her crew of classmates in Dunedin. She writes of her love for two elderly Pākehā Mormons – her grandparents, Jim and Gwen. She cautiously walks the line of full acceptance into her semi-estranged father’s whānau, observing with understandable envy those who grew up fully ensconced. Meeting her father but never truly knowing him all that well, she is able to observe his fumbles, his get-rich schemes and collection of covetable chairs, with love but also with a certain objectiveness that comes with distance.
Melancholy feels like one of the central emotions of this book. “I wonder whether, if my mother was the one who was Māori, rather than Paul, they would have kept me,” Marshall writes. “But to wonder such things is to enter a parallel dimension where I don’t need to write.” The selfish thought occurs to me that I want Marshall to need to write. But then, so does she, I think.
Her prose feels like poetry, especially in those moments where the tone shifts from the rush of perceptions that characterise everyday modern life to the still, sublime moments that Marshall expertly lassoes in from the cosmos. Even while admitting to the very human feeling of ineptness in the face of new parenthood, Marshall breathes otherworldly poetry: “But as my milk comes in, I look out the window of the maternity ward and the three red leaves left clinging to the tree are too piercing to be true. Autumn is a poignant season, but this was beyond melancholy; here was a tenderness.”
There’s a rawness to Marshall’s work which sometimes feels unwieldly. I considered not mentioning this because I have worked in publishing for years and know the stresses and strains, both financial and time-related, that publishers work under, but I was saddened to see fairly basic editiorial slip-ups throughout the book. Every book has these, and it’s never one person’s fault, but the lack of care taken over tense in particular was occasionally frustrating, particularly in a book where transitions forward and backward through time are frequent, important and, for the most part, managed masterfully.
Some parts are hard to read, both emotionally and literally: I’m thinking of a painful chapter where Marshall describes a long-term relationship with someone very damaging. The sentences literally become more difficult to read because they are long, full of doubts, re-thinkings, workings-out, and psychological terminology that is tried but ultimately rejected. It’s a heartbreakingly accurate representation of a state of mind that, while unique to the author and the relationship, are also universal. Heartbreaking in a different way is the story of Isaac, a beautiful, damaged, meth head. Marshall feels sorry for him even as he stalks and harasses her. His humanity is beautifully honoured, even when he approaches the ranch slider with a cricket bat.
Marshall has a special way of looking at the world – and of not looking away. She observes the cracks in the foundations of this country’s monuments to its own glory: the uncomfortable legacy of inter-iwi relations from the musket wars; Māori people displaced and homeless on their own whenua while Pākehā prosper and buy Trelise Cooper. Her voice feels unfiltered, unconcerned with others’ perceptions of her, not parroting what others have said before, not taking the easy route of agreeing with already-established-as-correct opinions. Yes, she feels the fear, but she says it anyway. There’s something powerful in that, something that feels like it’s missing in so many of our conversations. We’re so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we don’t say anything.
Talia Marshall is one of the best and freshest voices we have. She is constantly turning over stones and revealing the tiny, abject details of what we decline to see. And her refusal to look away feels like an act of love.
Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom has devoted all week to this dazzling memoir.  Monday: an excerpt from Whaea Blue, about bad love, a bad drug trip, and seven years living on the main road of “a deadly village by the sea”. Tuesday: part one of an epic interview witjh Noelle McCarthy interview. Wednesday: part two of that long conversation.