Review: This Compulsion in Us, by Tina Makereti

Reading This Compulsion In Us feels like group therapy, but where the therapist is Māori, the other people in the group are Māori, and together we are moving past the personal into the political, deeply grieving and working together to understand the roots of our collective and personal traumas. 

This collection of essays, written by Makereti between 2009 and 2024, frequently dwells on trauma, but I found the experience of reading it emancipatory, rather than traumatic. Makereti unpacks her complicated relationship with her Pākehā father in the essays, skillfully inviting the reader to identify with the feelings it evokes, if not the exact scenario. Still, I found much to relate to in the cross-cultural tensions in families and the often fraught connection to personal identity. Whether we can neatly draw parallels to our own lives or not, Makereti's prose invites us to examine our own relationships to our parents, the way trauma plays out across generations, and the complexities of a racial identity formed through migration and colonisation, and at times, violence. 

'It isn’t seemly,' Makereti writes, 'to complain about ‘success’, but in my experience, and the anecdotes of friends, the weight of expectation, work, and complex responsibilities to multiple communities, only increases when a brown woman does well.' Makereti reflects on her own breast cancer diagnosis with candour, the social determinants of health that still apply to us even when we have reached a place of relative privilege. I particularly connected with Makereti’s reflections on the trauma of being a Māori woman who is successful in her field, understanding where this drive comes from, and the constant pressure, the chronic stress that is felt and sustained in our bodies, even when we think we are okay, even when we think our class mobility and relative affluence inoculates us against it.

The exploration of whakapapa is joyful, and the tracing of Makereti’s European whakapapa alongside Māori reminds me of the fervour and enthusiasm of my mother and her sisters as they reach back into history, tracing our white Australian ancestors to Cornwall via a small town in South Australia (where, we joke, it probably doesn't pay to linger after sunset if you are brown). The essays where Makereti connects with taonga are particularly moving, and especially Māori, speaking to our taonga in local and far-off collections as the living embodiment of our tūpuna, interspersed with musing on the ethics of museum collections, the criticality and self-reflection that has (thankfully) characterised much of contemporary museology. 

This Compulsion is Us is writerly, rich in visual metaphors, the wharenui a sumptuous stand-in for the kind of literary culture we could have in Aotearoa if we genuinely embraced our bicultural heritage and the diverse culture and communities we belong to (rather than merely adding some pieces of Māori art to the colonial villa). 'Imagine it', Makereti writes, 'The swirling, spiralling, notched lines of poetry; the strong limbs and bright eyes of fiction; various nonfictions in repeating patterns overhead.' What is not a metaphor is our connections, as Māori, to our landmarks as living embodiments of ancestors, inseparable from ourselves: 'there is no separation between us and our land, waters, and mountains.' 

The equity of storytelling is a persistent theme, the urgency of which hasn't diminished in the years since Makereti wrote the essay on this topic in 2017. Whose stories are worth telling? And whose voices are we not hearing? 'In a room full of Māori/Pasifika/Immigrant students,' Makereti writes, 'few of them have ever had the opportunity to read writing from their own communities. Yet, I struggle to remember a single one that didn’t have a compelling story to tell.' Makereti also frequently muses on the purpose of writing, the things that are learned in the process rather than the outcome. The lack of criticality in New Zealand literary spaces and the dangers of literary criticism by those unable to engage with the work, expressed thoughtlessly, or in front of the wrong audience, is best expressed simply: 'ko te mea nui, ko te aroha.'

This collection exemplifies the personal essay genre at its best - critical, reflective, deeply personal, inviting us into wānanga, into dialogue, inviting us to delve deeper into ourselves and our collective histories and trauma. 

Reviewed by Jade Kake