In Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, Tina Makereti explores a dark period in New Zealand colonial history. With care and different perspectives, she tells a story to show how history continues to impact people today.

Iraia has known Mere her entire life. But he has also known from the beginning that he is not the equal of Mere, her brothers or her father. He was not allowed to play with her as a child. He does not live in their house, but in a shed outside. Nevertheless, they have always found ways to be close. But now their dynamic is changing.

Others never stopped being uneasy in his presence. Iraia remembered the first day when Whāea Audie found them holding hands at the water’s edge. She laid into him with her cold hard hand, slapping his face so that his head swung left and right and back again. The sharp smack of her hand surprised him, but what it meant did not. He carried it with him each moment, the sense that he was not a real person but a shadow of one. The idea that it was only darkness he could inflict on someone like Mere.

Mere is becoming a woman and this is throwing her into confusion. Her future is beginning to take shape, a future she wishes she could escape from. She takes this out on Iraia. Making him feel like the time of their closeness is at an end and he must remember his place. But the truth is that she maintains great affection for him in her heart. Like her dreams of freedom, that too is forbidden.

A century later, fraternal twins Lula and Bigs are born. Children of a mixed-race couple, Lula, the daughter, appears Pākehā (a white New Zealander of European descent), while Bigs, the son, appears Māori (an indigenous New Zealander). Their mother, Tui, cherishes their birth as a miracle.

As young children, Lula and Bigs are as close as any twins. But, inevitably, they are not prepared for how others will not accept them at school. They have no answers to the questions, the taunts, the bullying from other children. Their parents have no answers either. As they grow up, Lula and Bigs grow apart and go their separate ways.

The death of their mother brings them back into each other’s orbit. Tui’s death and last wishes show them that there is much their mother kept hidden, that she did not share with them. But searching for answers brings out truths that neither sibling are entirely comfortable with.

Unknown to Iraia and Mere, Lula and Bigs, there is another witness to their journeys. On another plane of existence, a long dead ancestor is watching events unfold. Feeling what they feel, he knows what Iraia must feel as a slave. Existing beyond them, he knows what dangers lie in wait that they cannot see. He understands birth and death, love and loss.

When you slave, everything inside you squeezed in tight and tight. You breathe in too much, you taste only fear and hate, so you don’t breathe anymore in case the breath destroy you. It like being up sided in a waka – only the air left in the hull keep you alive – you kick with your legs to put your nose above and you try not to steal all the air from your future self, because there’s only so much. And you never know when it run out. That’s the slavery.

Readers who are not from New Zealand may not be aware of the history at the centre of Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings. Even though I grew up in New Zealand, I certainly cannot claim to have more than a basic understanding. To help readers, Tina Makereti provides a very brief introduction before the novel begins.

In New Zealand, in the early 19^th century, there were a number of intertribal musket wars fought by the Māori. The tribes displaced from their traditional homes by these conflicts included Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga. Some members of these tribes were taken as slaves by the tribes who displaced them. In search for a new home, Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga, invaded Rēkohu – the Chatham Islands. They in turn displaced and enslaved the Moriori – the indigenous people of Rēkohu. The Moriori were a peaceful people who had successfully eradicated war and murder from their home.

The above may be an oversimplification but will serve for a review of this novel.

Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings therefore deals with some complicated and controversial history. But more on that later.

She let herself think it then, where the boy came from. Usually, she put such things from her mind. They had kept him, fed him, given him a life. Was this not enough? But she knew, deep down, that it wasn’t. So many dead. So many from war and grief and sickness, and that other thing that made her blood run cold. She was a Christian woman. Her people had given up those ways long ago. But she was not immune to the weight of her peoples history. The boy was only a reminder of dark times.

Another aspect both New Zealand and international readers will need to be aware of when reading Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings is that Makereti makes use of Māori and Moriori words frequently in the text but provides only a basic glossary. She defends this by saying that some terms may not be easily translatable, some are in common usage in New Zealand and otherwise it may prompt the reader to research for themselves.

I have mixed feelings about the writing in this novel. On one hand Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings is very easy to read. That is an aspect that should not be easily dismissed since it is not easily achieved. On the other hand, for a short novel, it seems to contain a lot of filler. An example is where Lula and Bigs prepare and make their trip to the Chatham Islands. This passage contains a lot of trivial detail and feels like a missed opportunity to immerse the reader in an important turn in the plot and to provide a real sense of the location.

The novel’s characterisation, mood and tone, and the feel for the time and place do not rise to the level of the powerful themes and difficult history the story addresses. That being said, while much of novel seems to stay at the surface level, it does not fail to deliver emotional impact when the plot goes there. And it should also not be forgotten that to write a novel on such difficult material without being perceptively alienating, upsetting or uneven requires considerable skills as well. Deceptively simple, well-controlled but perhaps unsophisticated may be the best way I would describe the writing of Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings.

Another example of Makereti’s control of her novel is how she used the voice of the third story – the ancestor or ghost watching from an afterlife. This is not necessarily a magic-realism novel but in either case it is important not to mess with reader’s expectations. Whichever path is used it is important to know where to draw lines. I sensed a danger at one point in Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings where inexplicable forces and unseen powers were going to have a role but I think Makereti knew when to pull back.

Character dynamics are an important aspect to Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings. The attraction between Mere, the young girl of a respectable family who live in an isolated location, and Iraia, the young man who lives with them, though clearly set apart due to his low birth, will obviously remind readers of Heathcliff and Catherine of Wuthering Heights. Mere and Iraia’s story is different, more optimistic but no less perilous. Instead of Wuthering Heights, their story reminded me more of the Ron Howard film Far and Away.

The dynamic between siblings Lula and Bigs is more conflicted. Lula is a somewhat lost individual, unsure where to find meaning and purpose in her life. Her instinct, though, is to seek truth. She places great value on what she can say is real with confidence. It gives her the sense of grounding she needs. However, she is as yet ill equipped to know how to accept the unsettling truths she may uncover.

In contrast, for her brother, purpose, identity and love have come fairly easily. Bigs’ path seems laid out before him. The only threat to his happiness seems to be his sister’s insistence on digging to the bedrock first. If what she unearths challenges what he has built his identity over, he does not want to hear it. For Bigs, a subjective truth has equal if not greater validity while for Lula the question of whether it is best to leave a happy person in ignorance is a difficult one to answer.

They had ancestors on all sides. The newcomers from across the sea, who had brought The Book and guns, imposed settlements and pressure that pushed the ones who followed the War God to fight and never stop fighting. The warriors who refused to recognise kinship and an offer of peace when it was made. And the ones who chose sacrifice, who gave everything, who almost slipped altogether into myth. Those were all her people.

She woke with anguish twisting in her gut. Bigs wasn’t interested. When she tried to tell him, it always came out wrong, like she was having a go at their Taranaki ancestors. A slavery was full on, she said to him once, not like anything else that had been seen in New Zealand.

‘They’d been enslaved too.’

‘Yeah, but do two wrongs make a right?’

‘No, but that was their tikanga, their rule of law.’

‘Was it? To prevent marriage? To work them to death? It wasn’t tikanga to wipe them out, was it?’

‘Look. Things must have got twisted. Their whole world had been turned on its head. That’s colonisation. It’s like an infection. I don’t know what went down exactly I don’t know how much I trust those books. I know who my ancestors were and they were a beautiful people.’

‘Well, this stuff happened, Bigs. It’s unpleasant, but it’s there.’

‘So, what am I supposed to do about that?’

On its own this is an interesting dynamic between the characters. But there is one other element that created difficulty for me. Of the two, Bigs is the more academically successful and has set himself to be a schoolteacher. Therefore, his decision to remain willfully ignorant in his personal life is somewhat at odds with his calling to impart knowledge to others. As mentioned, he seems to favour interpreting history on subjective, personal, emotive and instinctual grounds. For an aspiring schoolteacher, Bigs has a cynical attitude towards learning from books. There is a point to be made that for some history – and the history covered in this novel especially – the ‘official’ history and school curricula has left a lot to be desired. But I think Bigs’ position can’t be defended as simply healthy scepticism. The disharmony between Bigs’ attitude and his vocation is left unreconciled.

Which brings us to that history. It is a controversial history that Makereti deftly handles and any reviewer of this novel needs to be agile too.

Makereti jabs the reader with various aspects of this history in the novel. Such as the absence of its mention from popular, academic and school history; its legacy in the form of a caste system and discrimination against the descendants of slaves; and, when it is mentioned, it is to make what-aboutism arguments by those who would use history to score political points.

‘When we were kids, it wasn’t something you talked about. It definitely wasn’t something you were proud of. People said Moriori were a lower caste than Māori, a lesser race or something. There was some ugly stuff out there about our people. Then there was all that raruraru that went on. Some Pākehās still like to bring it up when they want to have a go at Māori: Look what the Māoris did to the Morioris- still see it in the newspapers from time to time, even now. As if that cleans their own slate.

Not to skirt these difficult issues, which deserve a thorough, reason and evidence-based unravelling, but I would like to share a different perspective. We live in a time where much Western popular culture is dominated by the United States. Unfortunately, this means that much of the discourse on this history of slavery is dominated by America’s experience of slavery, America’s fight to end it and the legacy and ongoing discrimination from slavery for Americans.

Makereti’s novel is a reminder that slavery, the ongoing fight to end it and its continuing impact on lives today has a global history. Its legacy affects almost all cultures since almost all peoples practiced it at one time or another. To produce an objective history of it may seem an unlikely achievement. But the pursuit is still worthwhile if it can place arguments about where to place blame, who were its perpetrators, its victims and its heroes, into some semblance of reasonable perspective. To what extent do people alive today need to be acknowledged or reimbursed are also difficult questions.

This factor alone makes Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings worth reading and a valuable addition to a history that needs to be told from more perspectives.