Review: One Day a Taniwha, by Tīhema Baker

Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) turns a lens toward the collective unconscious and meets readers in their sleep with his latest release, One Day a Taniwha. Set in the trenches of early parenthood, the story follows Hōhepa as he transforms parental fatigue into a fearful new gift: dreamscape wandering. The line between power and peril starts to blur when Hepa’s dreams start infecting his waking life. Before long, his mind strays deeper into the infinite halls of Te Pō, turning a brief escape from exhaustion into a waking nightmare. 

Right from its title, the book promises subversion. Baker plays on the cadence of the oriori with the same name, transforming a lullaby meant for comfort into a tool that keeps us stranded on the edge of sleep. Waiting to catch us in the breath just before total unconsciousness, he whispers a haunting question: What is your taniwha?

Part guardian, part harbinger, the taniwha is defined by its placement between land and sea. In Baker’s world, they emerge in the liminal space of our dreams, giving voice to the internal monologues we usually keep buried. For Hepa, this dreamscape wrestling is a direct collision between Māori identity construction and the relentless grind of modern life.

It makes you wonder where the taniwha actually hides now. Can it be found in the numb tongue when someone greets you with a mihi? Is it sitting in the comparison between another whānau journey and your own? Or is it found in the quiet panic of reconnection, that creeping fear of what we are ultimately passing down to our uri?

Broadening our idea of the modern Māori novel, Baker remains obsessed with the tension between light and dark. Between Te Ao Mārama and Te Pō; Pākehā and Māori; the masculine and the feminine. Opposites on the surface, but forever tethered, each existing inside the other.

Writing in what Patricia Grace famously termed the ‘now-time,’ Baker grounds his narrative in a hyper-recognisable Aotearoa. Drawing from his own background in local governance, healthcare and new fatherhood, he crafts an earnest blend of autofiction and speculative horror. The world he builds feels instantly familiar, capturing the full spectrum of modern Māori life. From well-meaning Pākehā allies and corporate diversity demands to race-baiting online trolls and negotiating how you continue tikanga in a rapidly moving world. 

Yet beneath its accessible, at times heavy-handed dialogue-driven prose, lies a sharper inquiry into the modern Māori novel. If the first wave of the Māori Renaissance in the 1970s and 80s was defined by the urgent reclamation of reo and physical land, Baker belongs to its inheritors, a generation navigating a second wave - one concerned with the inter-contextual mechanisms of spirituality.

He shows us how macro-threats to Māori way of life seep into the most intimate spaces. Decimated awa that can no longer yield kai become mirror images of our own domestic strain, while whānau dynamics oscillate between refuge and trigger - especially when reo shame creeps into a relationship. When a way of life comes under attack, tensions manifest from the conscious into the subconscious. Baker reminds us that while we have the power to dream our realities to life, we’re understandably terrified of what we might confront when we do.

It’s hard to deny that the world is in a bit of a spiritual rut right now, and our men are bearing a lot of it. When the only accepted spaces for masculinity are the raw aggression of the rugby field, toxic banter in gaming lobbies, or the haurangi senselessness of the pub, you have to wonder what kind of sustenance is actually feeding a man’s internal monologue.

Baker, and Hōhepa, represent a different wave of fatherhood. It’s a shift toward a culture where men are expected to be present, gentle, and emotionally tuned in. They are tasked with breaking cycles and giving a kind of soft, grounded care that they may have never received themselves as boys, all while confronting the ghosts of their own upbringing. It’s hard, unglamourous work, but in the trenches of early fatherhood, this quiet undoing is the real legacy we pass on to our uri.