Māori poet Tayi Tibble’s ‘Rangikura’ explores modern womanhood in New Zealand

Māori poet Tayi Tibble’s Rangikura, or Red Sky, explores what it means to be a young woman coming of age in New Zealand (or Aotearoa, “land of the long white cloud.”) 

The works read as both contemporaneous and traditional. The modern voice is of an indigenous woman who is making her way in the world buoyed by her culture and ancestral spirits. The poet writes of a wildness that she cannot fully control even as she engages the world with appetite. On the other hand, she is also positioning herself to please the men around her, who are willing to advantage-take. Interwoven in the poems are various Māori folklore and legends. 

Tibble makes a claim of direct descendance of the tohunga, a practitioner of sacred rites or a priest.

A tohunga is a person in Māori culture who is an expert in a particular field, or a priest or performer of sacred rites. The term can also refer to a sage or medicine man. In “Tohunga,” she shares fighting words about the remembrance of history:   

“…/but just like my ancestors knew/ to you I was a savage / wild jasmine / a$$ out / blacked out / with dollar signs / feline like a Bengal tiger and it’s true / that anyone on their hands and knees / is essentially a praying animal”

While living in the contemporaneous moment, the poet can look back through time to understand human nature. 

“… A warrior / like my ancestors I survived / annihilation. And the awa / that run beneath my skin / have not been lapped dry / just yet / and you can see it all / the unpanned gold / the wild pounamu / the thrashing tuna / family jewels / you can never have / taonga / you can never taste / forbidden fruits / reserved for me / are you afraid again?  / like you were of Eve?  / The world / is getting unbearably hot / but so am I / and so is she.” 

The work acknowledges each other’s positionality as a product of their respective cultures and a history of strife.  The flirtation (seduction?) is forthright and aggressive and based in the real. 

“Mahuika” refers to a Māori fire deity or fire goddess.  “Hine-nui-te-pō” is “the great woman of the night,” who is associated with the underworld and death.  Tibble uses both characters from Māori myth to describe a young firebrand’s night life: 

“Queen of the club scene grinding

with the gay devils and holding court

with the drag queens.  I’m

Hine-nui-te-pō. 

The kind of girl who knows

that the real vandalism

happens in the ripeness

of daylight, tagged in

White man’s law

And wāhine blood”

This work highlights something of personality, something of talking smack.  She can play with fire while still knowing what’s what. 

Tayi Tibble wields language with power.  Her works are meant to be read aloud.  “Can I Still Come Crash at Yours?” evokes an innocence often missing from other works.  She describes being an iti iti iti (“little little little”) girl already scoping out the boys. 

“You know da ones.  Air Force 1s, slacker jeans, jaw of the whale, bandanna bunny tails. We wanted them to pick us too.  Spent afternoons in our classrooms praying for them to come thru and satirize themselves.  Press their noses against the glass.  Make the teacher racist and the eggs laugh.  Yeah.” 

The reader is left wondering:  Who is going to get used in this transaction?  In a later part, Tibble writes: 

“…on the first beds we ever made for men just like our mothers, shoulder to shoulder beneath their second-hand Star Wars covers, palms over their hei matau, they shone almost like the real thing and we were astrologers, drawing dot to dots and making connections where there weren’t any. Casting our ships full of wish into the sky.” 

By the end of the poem, the poet realizes that the girls have been engaged in their own self-deceptions, too:  “…we would tell each other we loved them only faintly aware it wasn’t true…” 

“Lil Mermaidz” refers to the poet and her friends as Tangaroa’s daughters, offspring of the Māori god of the sea.   She writes: 

“And I remember the year

we were the two strongest ‘girl swimmers’

in our syndicate.  This meant

we were forever forced to race

the boys for Western feminism

and you would always win”

The celebration of female strength, athleticism, and confidence is welcome. 

“Takakino” describes the pursuit of skux (cool) boys and being skux girls.  This work describes living on the edge through youthful transgressions and poor decision-making: 

“When we got stopped by the cops

well that was so hot.

I loved everything about it

The uncertain way she made everything

feel fictional and lowkey

that’s still my favourite way to feel.”

A similar theme of self-destructiveness weaves in “Homewrecker.”

“As a teenager

a man whose opinion I truly trusted

said I was a dangerous girl

and this made me so afraid of myself. 

I avoided being alone with her.

I never left her unattended.”

Within some constraints, the girl Tibble describes is testing out the limits of her own power.  She does not understand (or accept?) her part when “the world wrecked itself around me.” She experiments with risk-taking from observations and Jenga.

“That House” evokes a family’s evolutions through quicksilver changes and sharp images.  There is the poet in a pink lavalava.  The mother is…

“Pretty for as long as she could

Hold herself together…

Couldn’t tell if she would harden

like a diamond or collapse like sand”

The man of the house uses his machete to cut back various plant life. The house itself has no heat.  There is the sound of Bible pages turning. The remembrance of the house is rife with memories and a particular phase of life for the family.

“Mars in Scorpio” is setup as a conversation between two women who have shared a man.  The poet describes seducing him with poetry sent over text “like nudes, like ekphrasis/In reverse…” She writes: 

“He was new for me.

You wouldn’t have recognized him. 

I was the animal

baiting the animal out of him.” 

Several of the works deal with female desire for men. “Hot Hine Summer” describes fashion-forward women competing for male attention. They are informed by the likes of models Gigi and Bella Hadid and the fashionable Kardashians. 

“Little” captures just how transient affections are. In affairs, the woman is counting what she is getting vs. what she is giving.  She reads the signals of her date and emulates him as a form of flattery. 

“He took her out for cocktails five nights in a row. He gave her $1000 in an orange envelope so she could go shopping.  With the money she bought three sets of lingerie, three pairs of earrings, a pink tweed skirt, a fake plat, a box of macaroons and two bottles of Chilean wine.” 

She waits on his call. 

“Hōmiromiro” taps into a recurring theme of the poet modeling herself after Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.  Buchanan is the object of desire, drama, and destruction.  In “Hine nuit e pō,” she writes:   “I grew up tacky and hungry and dazzling” and  aspiring to be it-girls at parties. 

The poet is coming off her own sense of wildness in “Kehua / I used to want to be the bait that caught Te Ika.” The demands of her imagination drive her to take particular chances, to create particular contexts. 

“And yes, I used to want to be the bait that fished up Te Ika. But Nana kissed my face over and over after her funeral and said shh bubba shh. And these days I don’t have to summon anything so brutally anymore.  The sun rises and sets and I try to take notice of it when I can. The urge to be a passenger in a vehicle going so fast that the soul leaves the body and the mind is wiped clean — I rarely feel it anymore but if I did I would only have to think about phrenologists, supernatural science, and all the nerves and notifications in my body that have kept the animal in me alive this far, and feel glad that I don’t have to kill a rabbit to know it has a heart.” 

“Te Araroa” captures a sense of the poet’s inner strength and internal brutality. 

“I come from a line of wyling women. 

Born like Aphrodite in the blood spill

East Coast sea. They teach me

to live life violently. 

I’ve always been the kind of girl

too tough to be touched softly.”

“My Ancestors Send Me Screenshots” shares an unflinching sense of how the whites have treated her people for generations, based on her whakapapa (genealogy).  She writes accusingly: 

“If you lie starfished at the bottom of this rock, look up and let your eyes go swimming until you realise that you are also in the clouds.  Just like my women, and my ancestors send me screenshots.  And I already know what you think of me.  I’ve known now for centuries.” 

“Yum Yum Noodles (Beef Flavour)” depicts a world based on hungers and ends on a note of communality: 

“don’t you worry about me

because I’m good sis I’m full &

I don’t want no beef but

if you bring it to my table

everybody gonna eat”

“4 the Dead Homies” engages ways to mourn the dead. “My Mother Meets My Father in an Alternate Koru” imagines a banal moment turned into commitment.  (“Then I think it would be good/for my children to have a father / like you cooking an egg on the rocks.”)

One of the most memorable poems of this collection is “My Ancestors Ride wit Me.”  Here, the poet lives in a world with spiritual allies, who help her face down racists with hexes and witchcraft.   

It helps to read Rangikura first for the pleasure of the ideas and the descriptions and the emotions. There is pleasure in the punchy style and braggadocio. Then, it helps to explore  again with some light research to understand the Māori terms, which are not footnoted or defined further in the poems. 

Tayi Tibble’s first book of poetry is titled Poūkahangatus.  She grew up in Porirua, outside of Wellington, the nation’s capital.  Her city has a large Pacific Islander and Māori population.