Review: Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer, by Witi Ihimaera Smiler

Across Aotearoa, Witi Ihimaera’s name has long been synonymous with storytelling, with pūrākau, with being a pou in the field of all things Māori, literary and legendary. He is the penman behind so many of the quintessential tales we were raised with, alongside his many other works. However, as lauded as he may have always been by his audience, Ihimaera Smiler has harboured a long held sense of something being missing, an awareness of something lacking in his craft, backed by a lingering memory of his father’s early criticism. Ihimaera Smiler has known  he’s needed a different kind of introduction, a different kind of pepeha, to make to himself, his tīpuna and  his mother tongue. 

In Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer, it is this story that we‘re shown, an insight into his eightieth year spent immersed in rumaki reo. The homecoming, the reconnection, and perhaps, the most important story he’ll ever tell. 

‘Totohu, kauhoe rānei? Would I continue to sink or would I swim?’

Just as in his well-loved novels, Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer too is a book woven with many threads; characters, locations, eras and perspectives alike. While focusing on his journey of reo reclamation at Takiura, this book covers much more than language acquisition itself. It swims us between the author’s upbringing in Waituhi and his challenges in Pākehā academia, across the moana from his diplomatic work internationally and back to his roots as a creative, and drives us in his passenger seat from his home in the affluent Herne Bay to the māhau of his kura. It’s the multiplicity of these interconnected stories that gives this book its absolute depth, reminding us that this year of revitalisation isn’t a stand alone event, but the outcome of a life of accumulating dreams, of a long held underlying goal for Ihimaera Smiler to be able to speak up for himself.

‘In that year I began not only to write in my mother tongue. I stood in my stomach and began to speak it.’

By plunging into the Takiura environment, Ihimaera Smiler was saying yes to a wero he set upon himself, and signing up for a unfathomable undertaking. He uses reflections, anecdotes and pūrākau in this book to take us with him into the often jarring, highly emotive world of rūmaki reo. By connecting the many steps of his learning journey back to those earlier memories, he gives the reader  a fuller picture of what it has meant for him to get there. The reader is also  gifted us the whaikōrero and whakapuaki that he wrote and was assessed on during his year of study, and through these orations we bear witness to his growing vocabulary, his hapa, his lightbulb moments, and his expanding breadth of language as the year progresses. We see his early morning parakatihi, his moments of wavering belief, his a’s and his o’s, his passives and his actives. 

For anyone who has taken up a similar challenge, the authenticity of this book and the true mamae and reward of reclaiming reo will provide great resonance. For anyone who hasn’t, it will give a real sense of the magnitude of journey like Ihimaera’s - and a understanding of what it means to return to something that was lost.

Te Kaikaukau | The Swimmer will be, I expect, a book for the generations. Much like The Whale Rider, the sentiments within its pages speak to a very specific, yet very shared experience for many of us. The insights this memoir offers will go down in our collective history as words of wisdom, and a reminder of the magnitude of our modern fight for our ancestral tongue. It breaks barriers in its bilingualism, in its openness, and in its guts.’This is how the ngākau begins to beat,’ Ihimaera Smiler writes, at the beginning of his journey, and it is a pulse that underlines these pages until the end, and then onwards. ‘From the onamata to the ināianei and from the inīanei to the anamata,’ he writes, nearing the finishline - ‘carrying the mana in us, it’s ability to, someday, reach infinity.’