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Waiariki
Patricia Grace's popular first collection – sensitive stories of Maori life which explore Maori spirituality and values and pursue relationships between people, family and races.
91 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Patricia Grace
63 books174 followersPatricia Grace is a major New Zealand novelist, short story writer and children’s writer, of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Ati Awa descent, and is affiliated to Ngati Porou by marriage. Grace began writing early, while teaching and raising her family of seven children, and has since won many national and international awards, including the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for fiction, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, widely considered the most prestigious literary prize after the Nobel. A deeply subtle, moving and subversive writer, in 2007 Grace received a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to literature.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 23, 2019
”And as I watched I noted again, as I had on the other carnival days of concerts and socials, the crowd reaction. I tried not to think. Tried not to let my early morning feelings leave me. Tried not to know that there was something different and strange in the people’s reaction to us. And yet I knew this was not something new and strange, but only that during my time away from here my vision and understanding had expanded. I was able now to see myself and other members of my race as others see us. And this new understanding left me as abandoned and dry as an emptied pod of flax that rattles and rattles into the wind.”
The last time I read Patricia Grace, it was her novel Mutuwhenua and I remember reading it alongside Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. It wasn’t planned but it did make for an interesting contrast - very different experiences within one country. Waiariki is Grace’s first short story collection, first published in 1975. There may be parts of rural NZ where life is still lived the way the people in her stories do, compared to how much more urbanised our modern society is today in 2019. Within these stories, there is quiet poignancy without sentimentality; a girl starts to become aware of Pākehā-Māori race relations in this country, an older man feels sadness at the loss of innocence in feeling unable to fully share carefree childhood practices with his own urbanised little ones, what might it mean for connections to one’s ancestral land, whānau, and more traditional aspects of Māoritanga as more people have to leave rural communities for better paying work opportunities.
In an interview I read recently between her and Anahera Gildea (in Sport 47), she talked about how she played around with sentence structures so it imitated te reo, but couldn’t keep doing it as it started to feel contrived. I could appreciate the stories where she experimented with this style but most of the stories she wrote in the way I recognised from the (still very few!) other works of hers that I’ve read.
The last time I read Patricia Grace, it was her novel Mutuwhenua and I remember reading it alongside Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. It wasn’t planned but it did make for an interesting contrast - very different experiences within one country. Waiariki is Grace’s first short story collection, first published in 1975. There may be parts of rural NZ where life is still lived the way the people in her stories do, compared to how much more urbanised our modern society is today in 2019. Within these stories, there is quiet poignancy without sentimentality; a girl starts to become aware of Pākehā-Māori race relations in this country, an older man feels sadness at the loss of innocence in feeling unable to fully share carefree childhood practices with his own urbanised little ones, what might it mean for connections to one’s ancestral land, whānau, and more traditional aspects of Māoritanga as more people have to leave rural communities for better paying work opportunities.
In an interview I read recently between her and Anahera Gildea (in Sport 47), she talked about how she played around with sentence structures so it imitated te reo, but couldn’t keep doing it as it started to feel contrived. I could appreciate the stories where she experimented with this style but most of the stories she wrote in the way I recognised from the (still very few!) other works of hers that I’ve read.
July 16, 2023
3.5 rounded up to 4 !
October 30, 2018
This is a fascinating first collection of short stories by the well loved New Zealand author Patricia Grace. First published in 1975, I was intrigued to see the comment on the back cover – “Waiariki is the first collection of stories by a Maori woman to be published.” This was 1975 not 1875, surely another Māori woman must have published a collection of stories before that? Now I will have to look more closely into the evidence behind that statement.
I met Patricia Grace a couple of years ago at the National Writers Forum. She was very unassuming, as if she were surprised that people would want to hear her stories or listen to her talk about her life. In her early years she would somehow fit in her writing after she had fed and put seven children to bed.
There are 12 stories in this collection and the first one is immediately challenging. We are observing family life, Rose has come home from university. Everyone is happy and they stay up late talking and laughing. Rose likes to be provocative, while the narrator, the ‘I’ in the story, and the older more sensible sister, is embarrassed by these outbursts. When Rose and her sister visit a pākehā neighbour who is going to make alterations to Rose’s dress, the neighbour makes a comment, referring to a group of Māori. Rose quietly challenges her about why she doesn’t know their names. They all know her’s. The narrator is horrified by this challenge, thinking it will harm them in some way, but Rose makes a fascinating comment, saying that the neighbour likes to say that she knows some Māori (as if it establishes her as having cultural sensitivity and awareness). “I have friends who are Maoris. They’re lovely people.” Rose also notes that the Māori do the same thing – with phrases like “the Pakeha doctor or the Pakeha at the post office.” These feel like observations decades in advance of their time, but in reality they are a debate that has been inconclusive for generations.
Other stories pick up various Māori traditions and rituals, the strong ties to the landscape and its creatures. I like the way that the narrator will switch from male to female between the stories. It keeps the read on their toes, figuring out who is who.
In the story called ‘Huria’s Rock’, the old man with a stick and a bad leg is warned about a threat to the young baby he is watching over. The ghost of his own daughter who died fishing for crayfish, her foot trapped by a rock, points to him from the place she drowned, alerting him to the danger to the young boy. It is a simple story, beautifully resonant with old fashioned language from the old man; “Too old now these bones and this leg…”.
I also noticed that there is a glossary of Māori words at the end of the book. I recall Patricia Grace saying that she had to fight hard over this when her second novel Potiki was published in 1986. To not have a glossary and not italicise the Māori words was thought of as revolutionary. Māori is one of the languages of New Zealand and should not need such special treatment, she told us. Some of the translations in this collection are very much ‘of the time’ and not so helpful when reading now.
I have just realised, on second glance, that the word pākehā is not included in the glossary. Not only was it given a capital letter in the text but there was no translation of ‘white man’. Was it thought too familiar or too rude? I can’t imagine it was too familiar, when they have gone to the trouble of adding haka, kina and tui into the glossary. How interesting.
Note: I have added the macron to my modern usage of words like pākehā and Māori, but left the quotes from the text in their original form.
I met Patricia Grace a couple of years ago at the National Writers Forum. She was very unassuming, as if she were surprised that people would want to hear her stories or listen to her talk about her life. In her early years she would somehow fit in her writing after she had fed and put seven children to bed.
There are 12 stories in this collection and the first one is immediately challenging. We are observing family life, Rose has come home from university. Everyone is happy and they stay up late talking and laughing. Rose likes to be provocative, while the narrator, the ‘I’ in the story, and the older more sensible sister, is embarrassed by these outbursts. When Rose and her sister visit a pākehā neighbour who is going to make alterations to Rose’s dress, the neighbour makes a comment, referring to a group of Māori. Rose quietly challenges her about why she doesn’t know their names. They all know her’s. The narrator is horrified by this challenge, thinking it will harm them in some way, but Rose makes a fascinating comment, saying that the neighbour likes to say that she knows some Māori (as if it establishes her as having cultural sensitivity and awareness). “I have friends who are Maoris. They’re lovely people.” Rose also notes that the Māori do the same thing – with phrases like “the Pakeha doctor or the Pakeha at the post office.” These feel like observations decades in advance of their time, but in reality they are a debate that has been inconclusive for generations.
Other stories pick up various Māori traditions and rituals, the strong ties to the landscape and its creatures. I like the way that the narrator will switch from male to female between the stories. It keeps the read on their toes, figuring out who is who.
In the story called ‘Huria’s Rock’, the old man with a stick and a bad leg is warned about a threat to the young baby he is watching over. The ghost of his own daughter who died fishing for crayfish, her foot trapped by a rock, points to him from the place she drowned, alerting him to the danger to the young boy. It is a simple story, beautifully resonant with old fashioned language from the old man; “Too old now these bones and this leg…”.
I also noticed that there is a glossary of Māori words at the end of the book. I recall Patricia Grace saying that she had to fight hard over this when her second novel Potiki was published in 1986. To not have a glossary and not italicise the Māori words was thought of as revolutionary. Māori is one of the languages of New Zealand and should not need such special treatment, she told us. Some of the translations in this collection are very much ‘of the time’ and not so helpful when reading now.
I have just realised, on second glance, that the word pākehā is not included in the glossary. Not only was it given a capital letter in the text but there was no translation of ‘white man’. Was it thought too familiar or too rude? I can’t imagine it was too familiar, when they have gone to the trouble of adding haka, kina and tui into the glossary. How interesting.
Note: I have added the macron to my modern usage of words like pākehā and Māori, but left the quotes from the text in their original form.
December 2, 2021
A beautifully written collection of poignant short stories touching on themes of love, loss, Whakapapa, change and displacement. Through the perspectives of Grace’s characters, traditional Māori narratives are challenged and explored through a contemporary lens as the surrounding world shifts and changes around them. A number of these stories explore the relationships between the older and younger generations, as the latter start to move further into this changing world, away from ancestral lands, and reimagines concepts of tikanga, whanaungatanga and wairoa in context to this.
October 3, 2017
“And there was a breath of sea. Somewhere—barely discernible since evening had been long forgotten and the night had been shrugged aside—somewhere the sea was casting its breath at the land. It was as though it were calling to the land, and to us as we woke and walked into the day, ‘I’m here, I’m here. Don’t forget about me.’”
breathtaking, and what a breadth of styles and voices!
breathtaking, and what a breadth of styles and voices!
December 22, 2015
Patrician Grace is a wonderful writer and I loved these stories. They are not only beautifully written but emotionally nurturing.I met her once and was amazed to find that she wrote in the evenings after she put her 6! children to bed.
September 12, 2021
Read the first story in this collection in high school, just once during a single English lesson, and it has stayed with me for many years. Grace is a legend of New Zealand and Māori literature for good reason.
August 9, 2017
A great insight in the Maori culture!
June 17, 2018
My first ever Patricia Grace read and I was honestly a little disappointed. The short story collection is about Maories and the modern experience of being Maori. I do not know a lot about the Maoris or their culture and I feel that what Grace is describing in her short story collection could apply to every indigenous people all over the world - which I get it a shared experience, I was just missing a little of the quintessential Maori experience...
Furthermore, I don't think it helped that my previous New Zealandic read was 'The Bone People' which I love because of its very complex language and narrative and therefore leans more toward showing - whereas the stories in Wairiki are narrated by telling instead.
All in all, Waiariki is a good read, a fine read but to me a very obvious read more than anything else.
Furthermore, I don't think it helped that my previous New Zealandic read was 'The Bone People' which I love because of its very complex language and narrative and therefore leans more toward showing - whereas the stories in Wairiki are narrated by telling instead.
All in all, Waiariki is a good read, a fine read but to me a very obvious read more than anything else.
February 9, 2021
I'm not a great fan of short stories but found this secondhand for $2 & couldn't pass it up being a fan of Patricia Grace. I too was surprised to read on the back cover: "Waiariki is the first collection of stories by a Maori woman to be published", given that it was published in 1975.
The stories are good but not as good as reading a full novel by Patricia, although all the usual themes in her longer books are there, and no-one that I've read does sorrow as good as Patricia Grace.
The stories are good but not as good as reading a full novel by Patricia, although all the usual themes in her longer books are there, and no-one that I've read does sorrow as good as Patricia Grace.
July 2, 2023
Nice
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews