Adventure Divas (27 page)

love, Hol

p.s. Sky Prancer survived! She was in the apparently fireproof bathroom. Her tutu got kinda sooty but she lives to fly again.

“Time to get on the road,” Michael says sweetly when he finds me hunting and pecking around the charred, sprinkler-drenched ashes of my room the next morning for anything salvageable. I have been up all night, and he knows it.

“Yeah, I think we’ve worn out our welcome.” Hitting the road sounds just right. Despite occasional four-alarm production hiccups, such as hotel fires, in recent months road life has made me feel alive and reminded me that I am my best self in motion. When I haven’t been suffering, I have been very happy.

We spend the day driving through a part of the North Island where the oceanic Pacific plate slides under the continental plate. The volcanic plateau that fills Old Sheila’s windows is rife with dramatic geological depressions and thermal pools. We are headed to a hotspot called Rotorua, a town where tourism and the natural world intersect.

The moment we breach the town limits we are swimming in a mix of twee colonial remnants, Maori culture, and sulfuric acid. We pull up at the Whakarewarewa tourist area to film its bubbling-hot mud pools, namely the spouting Pohutu geyser, which erupts twenty times a day, and a faux Maori “village” that features Maori arts and crafts. B-roll.

A package of German tourists are disembarking from a very large air-conditioned bus and being greeted by a young Maori who is doing
hongi,
the traditional Maori greeting in which foreheads and noses are pressed together. “Let’s get a shot of this,” Michael says to Liza. The greeter goes in for the reverent nose touch to a skinny white fellow in bermudas with binoculars around his neck. The white man gets flustered
—Why is this handsome young native entering my personal space?—
and in a dazzling display of poor, panicked judgment in the face of a confusing culture clash, he cocks his head and kisses the greeter
on the lips.

Michael, Liza, and I double over in laughter.

The kiss, and its awkward after-moment, are a reminder that while New Zealand is at first glance a quiet, controlled place, cultural tensions simmer underneath its surface. Kiwi/Pakeha writer Helen Lehndorf wrote on adventuredivas.com that while “New Zealand has a good reputation for race relations . . . the reality is that Maori make up most of our unemployed, succeed less in the education system, and have lower life expectancy. The current government is attempting to address this discrepancy with ‘closing-the-gaps’ policies. Perhaps in time we can achieve true equality and real biculturalism.”

Modern-day Maoris are the descendants of a Polynesian tribe that navigated by stars and wind and arrived in New Zealand (Aotearoa) a thousand years ago. In the 1700s, the British and the French showed up and were soon followed by an influx of whalers, traders, and missionaries. Concerned that the French would colonize first, the British rushed to offer the Treaty of Waitangi. Signed by tribal and British leaders on February 6, 1840, the controversial treaty gave the Crown rights to govern and settle, while giving the Maori citizenship and protection of their interests. But today, the treaty is being disputed and land rights debated, amid a growing Maori cultural and political revival. The movement has made major progress in land and cultural rights in the past twenty-five years.

“How much consciousness about the Maori renaissance was there when you were a kid?” I ask our Pakeha-in-residence, Simon.

“I grew up believing New Zealand was truly bicultural—but like most Pakehas, hardly knowing anything about the Maori culture or language. The seventies were a big time for the revival. Lots of sit-ins and protests. Most of it led by women, really,” he says, pulling into a caravan park near Rotorua within whiffing distance of the sulfur from the thermal areas. Kiwi soundwoman Jan slathers Vegemite on white bread for our appetizer. “Mmm. Marvelous,” she says, mooning over the fetid, brown, sticky yeast. Blech.

Hot greasy smells (now that’s an aroma I can get behind) overwhelm the eau de sulfur and soon the back of the caravan teems with vice: unlit cigarettes dangle out of the sides of our mouths; poker chips and playing cards with late-1800s soft porn on the flipside glint in our lantern’s light; and grease-splotched wads of newspaper, which held our fish-and-chips dinner, litter the floor. Between us we drink a half rack of Speight’s and, quite possibly, ingest a half gallon of Bad Fat. “Four of a kind beats a straight flush,” says Michael, incorrectly.

“No,
no
it doesn’t,” I contend.

By the time we arrive at Hawke’s Bay the next day to meet pop music icon Hinewehi Mohi, we have mostly digested the fish and chips, but we are two hours behind schedule because we ran out of gas, thanks to Old Sheila’s unreliable gauge.

“Kia ora,”
says a woman with long, dark, pulled-back hair who walks out of the house bearing the address Simon has typed on our schedule. I check the address. She is almost unrecognizable from her most recent music video, in which a sexy, almost feral Hinewehi strides in a long green dress through a dense rain forest (here referred to as “the bush”), furtively dodging vines. In person, she is all girl-next-door: orange crewneck sweater, brunette ponytail, no makeup, and a sunny, genuine smile.

“Hi, Hinewehi,” I say, leaping out of the Valiant and introducing the crew. “We’re very sorry to be so late.”

I wanted to meet Hinewehi because this rock star next door has become a spokesperson for Maori culture and her commitment to
tino rangatiratanga—
self-determination for the Maori people—is well known throughout the nation. She’s said to have lots of mana, a Polynesian term for a concentrated spiritual force. In 1999 Mohi shocked and galvanized the country by singing New Zealand’s national anthem in Maori during halftime at a World Cup rugby game. Her radical patriotism (which was more meaningful and alarming than any Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”) aggravated a stress fracture in New Zealanders’ highly regarded commitment to biculturalism.

Today is a family affair. Hinewehi’s husband, George; daughter, Hineraukatauri; and grandmother, Nanny, all pile into Old Sheila, as we were due at their local
marae
an hour and a half ago.

“What’s the deeper meaning of the
marae
s, Hinewehi? I mean, I know they act as community centers—but they’re more than that, aren’t they?” I ask.

“First, call me Hine,” she says, the initial gesture in a long day that would become increasingly informal. “About the
marae,
well, we come together at the
marae
to celebrate life, as a mark of respect for the end of life, but also to bring us all together and acknowledge who we are and where we’ve come from, and the ancestors that have brought us here,” Hinewehi explains as we unload our gear in a parking lot adjacent to the
marae,
a compound of sturdy reddish wood buildings and grassy lawns.

We cannot enter the grounds until we have been ceremonially invited. All of a sudden a woman’s voice bellows out in Maori from the distance. “The women are always the first to call the visitors on,” Hine says quietly, then lets float the most beautiful notes from her mouth. And so begins an ethereal call and response. We guests go through a small “receiving line,” in which we
hongi
(touch noses) as a way of cleansing all the spirits, or anything bad that has gone before us. We settle into a line of folding chairs to be welcomed in Maori by the men of the
marae,
as tradition dictates. We are expected to stand and express our sentiments about being welcomed to the
marae.
Only men can perform this honor, and as a Kiwi somewhat familiar with the process, Simon stands and speaks on our behalf. “We are honored to be your guests . . .” Simon begins.

That women are forbidden by longstanding tradition to speak in certain contexts on the
marae
is a divisive issue. There is a shared pride in and commitment to rejuvenating the Maori traditions and cultures, but as was true in the civil rights movement in the United States, many women are not pleased about fighting the Man only to have to get her own man the coffee. As women and progressive men increase their
mana-
power in contemporary Maori culture, this is likely to change.

Hine tours me around the
marae.
She takes me into the main meeting-house, where every structural line and post of the building, or
wharenui,
is ornately carved with representations of ancestors, tribal history, and symbols of ancient legends. It is believed that the Guardian of Peace, Rongomatane, reigns inside the meetinghouse. Framed, crinkly black-and-white photographs of tattooed elders adorn the walls.

We feast for two hours on fried bread and
kaimoana
(seafood, in this case mussels) before driving back to Nanny’s house to eat more. “I’ve made pavlova. You
must
have some,” declares Nanny, more forcefully than one might expect from a seventy-eight-year-old in blue stretch pants and a floral top talking about a white fluffy dessert.

Nanny shows us through her own house, pausing at one of many picture walls sagging with photos, pointing with a yardstick.

“So this is the family?” I ask.

“Yes, this is the family,
whakapapa.
”

“
Whakapapa?
That’s . . . ?”

“That’s your ancestry. It is very important to the Maori people. It’s very important to know where you come from and who you are. Very important indeed. But I see Granny is crooked there. I’ll have to straighten her up,” Nanny says, whacking the side of a picture of her own grandmother with her yardstick.

“Granny’s got the
moko,
” I say, noting the dramatic, spiraling facial tattoo in the picture.

“Granny’s got the
moko.
All the old ladies in the old days had their own
moko,
and it was just like a coat of arms to that particular family.”

The black facial tattoos were traditionally carved into the skin with a bone rake and the ink, made from the body of a special caterpillar, was tapped into the grooves. Maori women usually only had chin or lip
mokos;
they were also sometimes tattooed in the pubic area. Maoris ended the tradition in the early 1900s to protect themselves from white colonists who liked to take tattooed warriors’ heads back to Europe as souvenirs. But lately, the
moko
is coming back into fashion as Maoris reclaim the power of their ancestral traditions. I am fascinated by how its mesmerizing spirals eclipse any natural lines on these old, creased faces. In India, I admired women committed to the (temporary)
bindi
as a visible symbol of their spiritual agency. But to feel so secure in your identity that you’re willing to permanently chisel it onto your face, that’s real commitment.

Chin moko

“All my pictures,” Nanny says, swooping her yardstick from the wall and around the living room. “There’s nothing by Rembrandt or somebody fancy like that. It’s all my in-laws, out-laws, my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, and my great-great-grandchild,” she says with pride, and with a curious, mischievous smile. “Did you want to know that I started very early in life? I won’t tell any more secrets.”

“They’re all on the wall,” I say.

Hine and I sit down at the kitchen table for tea while Nanny is fiddling with the pavlova.

“What’s your interpretation of mana?” I ask, setting down my mug decisively, trying to get to the essence of this Polynesian notion of concentrated soul power. It reminds me of the force said to be contained in those heads I saw in Borneo.

“
Mana
is a word that really . . . basically gives you a lot of prestige and a lot of strength of character,” Hine answers.

“From inside? Or is it something you get from . . .” I gesture broadly to no cosmos in particular.

“There’s lots of different ways of describing mana in Maori, like different elements of your innermost strength as well as your physical strength,” she says.

“It’s a special word that’s pretty hard to say in English exactly what it means,” adds Nanny.

“But is it tied to the spiritual?” I ask.

“Yes, spiritual strength and it comes out in what you do, what you say, or how you hold yourself or how you—”

“An aura,” says Nanny.

“An aura, yes,” says Hine, “an ‘innermost ethos’ is what they call it. For many it’s a wonderful way of saying, ‘I get my strength from way back, from my ancestors and from those that have gone before me who have set me up, and who continue to guide and look over me.’ ”

Mana, she tells me, implies prestige, power, and influence. Elders have more mana than the young. Supposedly you can see mana in great souls, people whom you respect for their inner strength and fearless inner calm.

Hearing this, it occurs to be that mana might just be the active ingredient in divadom worldwide. What is it, after all, that the Kiwi women I’m meeting share with those we spoke to in India, Cuba, and elsewhere? “Inner strength and fearless inner calm,” is a good way to put it. Maybe diva = woman with mana
.