Exploring Big Questions Through Fiction with Tina Makereti

On this episode of Unsettling Extremism, we explore how literature can inform our understanding of white supremacy and extremism. I spoke with Dr. Tina Makereti, an award-winning writer who teaches creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka at the International Insitute of Modern Letters.

Learn more about Tina's book The Mires, here. https://ultimopress.com.au/products/the-mires

References:

Clark, B. (2023). Fear: The must-read gripping new book about New Zealand's hostile underworld of extremists. HarperCollins New Zealand.

Ebner, J. (2021). Going dark: The secret social lives of extremists. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Lavin, T. (2020). Culture warlords: My journey into the dark web of white supremacy. Legacy Lit.

Marsh, S. T. (2024, December 9). Arts don’t just decorate knowledge, they deepen it. Newsroom https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/12/09/arts-dont-just-decorate-knowledge-they-deepen-it/

Tecun, A., Lopesi, L., & Sankar, A. (Eds.). (2022). Towards a Grammar of Race: In Aotearoa New Zealand. Bridget Williams Books.

Transcript

Unsettling Extremism Episode 8

Exploring Big Questions Through Fiction with Tina Makereti

Tina: Why do people behave this way? How does extremism or white supremacy work in the world? Why are people choosing this? Why are people inflicting damage on others? Why are people no offering manaakitanga to refugees?

Kia ora, I’m Dr Avery Smith and on this episode of Unsettling Extremism, we explore how literature can inform our understanding of white supremacy and extremism. I spoke with Dr. Tina Makereti, an award-winning writer and teaches creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka at the IIML. Her work has received praise in Aotearoa and abroad giving her a long list of accolades and awards. Her short story Black Milk won the Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017, her book the Where the Rēkohu             Bone Sings was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award, and her novel  The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke was longlisted for the 2019 Ockham NZ Book Award. 

Much of her fiction grapples with issues that unsettle how we would like to imagine society and invites us to reckon with some of the more uncomfortable bits; cultural identity, history, and coloniality. 

The same can be said for her most recent novel, The Mires, which takes on several topics including climate refugees, white supremacy, radicalisation, the impact of colonisation, and the planning of a terrorist attack. Ultimately it is a book that looks at how our identities can be used to separate us or bring us together.  We talked about Tina’s background, where she got the idea for the book, how the Christchurch Mosque attacks shaped her thinking about writing traumatic events, and the power of fiction to help us emotionally connect with difficult topics. Just a note, this interview was recorded in the days after the hīkoi mo Te Tiriti, so there will be some reference to that. And now, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Tina 

Avery Smith  01:22

Tina, why Don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

 Tina  01:29

Kia ora, thank you. I grew up all over the North Island. It's a really complicated story. So my parents broke up when I was two, and my father took us, kind of all he was. He just couldn't stop moving. So we moved every year or two. So I can't name one place as a hometown, which is quite strange and probably not that unusual, but most people can kind of say a place where they think they come from. I don't actually have that as a Māori person. It's quite a weird thing to have. So I have, I only reconnected with my whānau when I was 16. So from the ages of two to 16, I actually had no concept of my whānau existing, actually, or where they came from, or who they were so and at that point, then I then I reconnect, started reconnecting with home places. So I can say what those are, which is, I'm sure I'm Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Ātiawa,  Ngāti Rangatahi, Matakore so Ngāti Tūwharetoa from Poukura Marae on Lake Taupō, Te Ātiawa, from Waikawa in the South Island, but also From Katere ki te Moana, Parihaka and Owae in Taranaki. So those reconnections with Taranaki, I haven't gone back that far, like I have reconnected with my whānau there, in some ways, but I haven't spent a lot of time there, so that I you know, in terms of ahikā, I tend to go back to Waikawa, because that's the more recent where, where our whānau come from. So if you know, you know the history of Taranaki, we all migrated down from Taranaki during the land wars, and some went back, and some stayed down. So my whānau went all the way to Waikawa from three different whānau there and my great grandfather actually went back after the migrations, and he, he married another Taranaki, person there, and then Ngāti Rangatahi- Matakore in the Fielding area. So those are my, my, you know, my, my home places, my papa kāinga yeah. So unsurprisingly, having this kind of disconnected moving around childhood. I think I was a pretty weird kid, like I was pretty, pretty much on the outer I was just relaying recently to goodness, know, who knows who, how, I kind of had an instinct for when we would move so I would, kind of, I only realised this as an adult, I would lose all my friends. I would go places, make a bunch of friends and lose them all before we left. So I got very good at kind of anticipating that, like nothing was stable. And, yeah, yeah. So I was, yeah, I think sometimes as writers, it's quite it's not necessary, but it's quite useful to have that kind of outsider perspective, because you're always just watching the world trying to figure it out. So even as a child, I could not figure anything out. I was very much displaced within, within my own, I guess, country, but within my family as well.

Avery Smith  04:34

Well, yeah, with moving around all the time, that would be a very difficult to feel, you know, stable and grounded and feel like you were able to, you know, put down roots and make those firm connections. I would, I would imagine,

Tina  04:46

yeah, so I guess when I reconnected with my phone when I was 16, that was this incredible moment of, first of all, like I literally didn't know my grandmother existed. I didn't know who she was, so I was. I was kind of enveloped by this whānau who were very warm, very big people. It's like, you know, you find out who you are because you're like, oh, yeah, I make sense in this context, in a way that I make different sense in other contexts. So my dad is the Pākeha parent. My mum is the Māori parent, and so, you know, this, this whānau kind of enveloped me. My nan was this incredible. I found her incredibly powerful, even though she was very humble. So she, you know, she just worked on the marae, worked with her whānau. She was supporting a lot of people going through a lot of strife, as a lot of our grandmothers do and unfortunately, she only had four years after I met her, before she passed away in her early 60s. My grandfather had already passed away in his 40s. So that's the kind of, you know, I had this immediate picture. This is, this is what colonisation looks like from the inside. And it took education and years of learning to unpack all of that, but I could see it immediately. And like my dad's family, were working class, are working you know, were working class. It's not like they were incredibly wealthy, but you can see the difference in the circumstances. You know, they live a long time, they have well educated children in a different way than the Māori family. Have a well educated children. They just had access to different resources. Yeah. So it's a very I was a very angry young person, as I guess most young people are, when they kind of get a look at the world and go, Oh, this is, this is how it is okay, and I had to find a way to channel that.

Avery Smith  06:44

So did you always want to be a writer and academic? How did that come up?

Tina  06:48

Well, looking back, it's really clear, but at the time you're,  I wasn't aware of it. So I remember, you know, I did, I think I won a writing competition when I was about nine or something, but it was too long. The thing I wrote was too long. It was supposed to go in the newspaper, but it was too long. So I, you know, already at nine I was being a proper nerd about writing, and I did love it. And then in high school, a similar thing happened. And then, I guess, when you have that upbringing that's fractured, and, you know, there was other stuff going on with alcohol and stuff alcoholism,  I just didn't have the stability to go, oh, this is what I'm good at. This is what I want to do. And so I went away and had my own very dysfunctional young adulthood and then I only came back to it when I was in my 30s. And at that point I could look back and go, Oh, yeah, I did. I did. I was always into that. And, yeah, I was already getting kind of affirmation from people about it, but it just never clicked me, although I remember a teacher saying, oh, there's this course at Victoria, and that was the first time I heard Bill Manhire’s name, and he said, but I think it's, I think it's a postgraduate, like, I think it's, you have to have a degree first. And so I just kind of put it out of my mind, even though, at that time, I now realise it wasn't postgraduate. It hadn't, hadn't reached that part yet. But yeah, so there was that, those Inklings that something, something was there quite early, and what, what did I want to do? I think because of all that I had seen, I thought I was going to be more political, political more. I started in social sciences. I did a BA in social anthropology, what would now be called a minor in Māori studies, but we didn't have minors then, so I had that. I started a master's in Māori studies, but kind of transferred it to a post grad diploma. So, yeah, I was definitely a big nerd. Education gave me a place to be well, first of all, to be safe. I always like, I would go to school and that was where I could. Everything was stable. I knew what was expected. Yes, I could, yeah. I mean, I even like school uniforms, you know, because then I didn't have to buy clothes and look like everybody else. And, you know, everything was so unstable in my life that school was a real kind of like place where I could fit in. And I guess I had the cultural capitalist to do that as well. So, so I just kept going in that way, like I found coming back to my culture I'd missed so much, but I used education as a way to learn again about my culture as much as I could, as much as it was going home as well and seeing people at home, it was, you know, study,

Avery Smith  09:41

sure. So it was both of those, like the lived experience, but also learning about it from a more academic sense, you know, from the beginnings and the scholarship. No, no, I get that. So let's talk about your book a little bit The Mires. So would you mind giving us a little a little taste of what the book's about? Yeah.

Tina  09:59

Totally it's actually a really hard book to summarise. I'll start with the three. So there's three families and there's a Māori family that's kitty, who's a single mum. She's got a daughter, Wairere and a son, Walty and Wairere  is a 14 year old girl who also has this kind of, I think I thought about it early on, as she has this ability to connect with senses that we all have, but that we don't all connect with. So I kind of, you know, when you're thinking about these things in the book, we use the word Mata kite at one point, which means, can mean a few different things. In this context, I was like, how does this work for me to understand who Wairere is and how it manifests is that she can feel things like she can feel what's happening in other people's bodies sometimes, or in their minds, and, you know, in their emotional body. So she, she's actually very kind of sensitive to what's happening to people, but she also has the same connection with the natural world, and one of the places that gives her real comfort is the swamp. So the swamp is also a character who is our basically our narrator as well. And so it depends which way you want to come at the narrative because the swamp kind of starts it and finishes it, but it's about these families, and then the next door to them, they've always had Janet, who's, I think at some point, she's described as a Pakeha woman with an opinion, and she's often she's prejudiced and opinionated and offensive in many ways, but she's also well meaning, and she doesn't she's kind of that. I mean, when people read Janet, invariably, they say they recognise her. We all know many Janets. She's, you know, the kind of personality that I knew very well as a child, especially in 80s and 90s New Zealand, it's that kind of prejudice that's just accepted, that's just, oh, this is just the way things are where, you know, this is normalised as a kid, nothing that Janet said would have been unusual for me to hear on a kind of daily basis. So that's when her son, Connor, arrives in the night, and Connor, he's looking for connection, and where he finds it is not a good place. So he becomes he's becoming radicalised, or he has become radicalised online, and that means that her prejudice has become this more extreme form of things. The other family, Sarah and her and Adam and Alianna, who are climate refugees, so that you know they're from the Mediterranean, I haven't named where. It's always interesting, what, where people assume, or they who they think, where they think it might be from. It's very, very interesting. But I don't know. I haven't chosen somewhere in writing that family, I felt like there were things I could identify. I've definitely been alienated in another country and being very kind of not close to the same, but I felt like I could connect with that experience of losing something, and, yeah, trying to fit in and all of that stuff. But I really, really didn't feel like I could choose a country and then kind of, first of all, condemn that country to ecological devastation, and then also embody those people. When I haven't lived their lives, there's so much you can do. And often, when these questions come up about appropriation or what you can do, that's another how you can embody another culture. I always feel like, if you live with them, you there's so much that you can like, maybe not from their point of view, but you can write about but given that I hadn't lived in any of those countries, and I could visit it to do research, but that's not the same as living there. I just didn't feel like I could give them a precise place. But in thinking about that, I think I started with because I was concerned about the refugees situation for years, where we aren't, we aren't looking after other people on this planet. We're not letting them into our countries. We're not,

Avery Smith  14:30

I think that it doesn't really matter where she's from. This family is from, right? Because, like you're saying, it could happen to any of us. I was reading yesterday how you sort of just drew on what was like actually going on, as far as the climate was it in 2022 and seeing sort of the climate devastation that was going on across Europe. So I mean, in that way, it was absolutely drawing from what was really going on

Tina  14:59

do. That was alarming. I mean, I was, I was actually in Christchurch. I was in Ōtautahi on a residency and writing this book. And, like, thinking about this, and then, you know, China was on fire. Europe was on fire. People were, you know, gathering by rivers to get away from the heat. Of course, Australia had been on fire for a few years. Canada is always on like, this is not the

Avery Smith  15:22

The States is on fire. This is now. I know this is

Tina  15:26

happening people, and I think we're still carrying on as usual as much as we can. We can't. It's very hard. I understand it's very hard to face and stuff. But in the book, there's a moment where she's like, Oh, we just, we just kept carrying on as usual until we couldn't, and then we were looking for somewhere to live. So yeah, it wasn't hard to find statistics that are just mind-blowing. And yeah, they were 2022, statistics. So where

Avery Smith  15:56

did the idea for this book come from?

Tina  15:58

Yeah, it was pre 2019 I was just I was finishing The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke so I already had the idea about a year before that was finished, and I was, yeah, I think at that time, we were talking about leading more refugees into Aotearoa. I can't remember what was happening overseas, but I was looking at what was happening overseas, and I just thought it's only a matter of time. And this is, this is kind of an awful realisation that I don't think is unique to me. I thought it's only a matter of time before it happens here. Horrifically, it did happen here. The kind of terrorism attacks, attacks on people, Muslim people in particular, and as those people have said, is a lot more well informed people than I have said. We knew this was coming. We tried to tell you, you know, I guess if you're paying attention to certain things, you will kind of see the writing on the wall, and then it actually happened. So I had thought, Okay, I want to write a story of I've had friendships. I've had neighbors who are refugee I've had friendships with people who are refugees. And like, I just want to give manaakitanga to these people that need to come from wherever they come from. It's like, that's so enriching to have relationships with people who come from these other countries. I find it's always any of your assumptions or preconceptions are often broken, and that's a wonderful process. I enjoy that like that. You know, oh, the world is different than I knew. That's great. So I also felt like this responsibility that, how would we feel? Many of us have encountered that, so I was always a bit confused as to why it's so hard for people to accept or welcome or like bring in more refugees. Of course, there's an endless need for it, but it's kind of this fear based thing. And it's not that I was coming at the book from a kind of, okay, here's a theory of what we should do, but just thinking, you know, what does it mean to have relationships with people that have come from places like that. I wanted, I also wanted to write about just a single mum. Because I was a single mum for a long time. These two things came together, and then the terrorist attacks on the mosques happened. And I was like, because in my mind, this book was always going to move towards something like that, and actually, at that point, I had to reassess what I was going to do, because when you see it in real life, it's not something you necessarily want to put on the page. And my daughter, who's a really good writer, Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, said to me, you can't, you can't write that now. And I was like, but we have a responsibility to, you know, write about that, to talk about that from our side, like, in terms of, when I say outside, people who weren't the victims of it, in terms of what is our responsibility in the face of that, what, what role did we play? And she was like, Yeah, but it's not your trauma. And it took me a while as a old person, like as a middle aged person, to go because, you know, the way the next generations think is faster, more precise and like I'm constantly learning from them. So it's not that I didn't thought that that was wrong. It was that my desire to do something was like, I need to write about this. But as I thought about it, I eventually got to, yeah, no, that's right. That's not, it's not my place, first of all. And then anyway, when I went to write, I could never have written that, that those, those people or that don't belong to me, but because writing teaches us as well. But yeah, I got to thinking about how to write it, and I thought, I still want to write about the threat of that, but yeah, to reenact something that horrific on the page is not something I want to do. So it really changed the way I wrote the book. And it really changed, I think it deepened it, it made it quieter and poor. Possibly more powerful to do it that way than to actually go for the hard stuff and the way that I originally thought I was going to Yeah,

Avery Smith  20:08

yeah. No, no. That was interesting, because there was all this lead up in the book, and you kind of saw what was going to happen, right? You were following along with Connor's journey and his radicalisation, and you're like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen? Yeah, I think, I think you handled that really well without giving anything away. But

Tina  20:27

it's amazing what the world teaches you while you're writing a book like you think you're going in one direction. And I'm just so grateful that I didn't write that first idea before things really happened, because that just, yeah, as I say in the book, there's certain things that don't need to be in the world on the page. It's not around us. Yeah,

Avery Smith  20:46

don't need to repeat that or have anyone relive that, right, go through that again. So how did you do research for the book?

Tina  20:54

So speaking of extremist extremism, I was very grateful that people had written about the subject so that I didn't have to go looking online. So I was like, am I going to go on some forums? Do I need to do that? So in terms of writing about being a single mother, a single Māori mother, didn't need to do any research on that. Now. Yeah, Janet really didn't need to do any research on that either, because, you know, like, I say like, I the main thing with Janet was I didn't want it's easy to hate a character like that, and there's no point again. And having a character like you can have a character you dislike, but she needs to be compelling. And I thought, I don't want people to get to this character and go, I don't want to spend a book the length of a book with a person like this. So I knew about those kinds of people as well, because I'd grown up with enough of them and on the other side. So I had the Maori side. I had the Bucha side. The things that I needed to look at were extremism and also the refugee experience. So yeah, I was lucky to find books that really do a good job of writing about extremism. And I don't think any of this would be a surprise to you, but I know you had Byron Clark on the podcast,

Avery Smith  22:14

so yeah, we just put out his episode yesterday. So yeah, his

Tina  22:18

book wasn't out yet in the early parts of my research, but I was looking at all of his material. And Julia Edna's going dark for secret social lives of extremists, and she's written another book since then. It's just so useful that her Antalya Lavin culture warlords, my journey into the dark web of white supremacy. It's so useful that, you know, they kind of sacrifice their own well being, to some extent, to find out about these things, to go online and to get involved in these communities and actually see how they work. And the really useful thing about that, I think, was through reading their work, it was really clear that, okay, I still couldn't really understand the extremism, but I could understand how people get into it, because they both demonstrate how people are looking for the sense of belonging. It probably, that's probably simplifying it too much, but you know, they're feeling alienated to now, that's no surprise. We all feel alienated by this culture that we live this, you know, the mainstream, settler, colonial, sure, capitalist situation. But what do we blame for that? So, you know, and if we blame immigrants for that, or if we blame, you know, black people for that, or whatever, whoever we're blaming that might be where we go to look, you know, we might connect with, with other people and communities that also think that's the problem. So there's a certain, yeah, there's a certain amount of, I guess this isn't really research, but then that's great. We have a theory. We can see what people how people like this behave, but then how do I make that real on the page? So for me, it was kind of going to Connor and kind of just understanding because then again, it's a specific character. So we've been talking a lot about the big stuff in the book, but a book only really works on the basis of character. So what makes Connor tick? Why? Why are you like this? Connor Janet is a product of her culture and a product of being comfortable enough not to have asked certain questions of herself before. And what happens to Connor with his radicalisation kind of blows that up a bit for her. So she's not in the book, but you know, at a certain point she's gonna need to start asking questions. And for Connor, you know, he didn't have and this, again, comes from my own Pacha side of my upbringing, where there is a kind of hole where culture and connection should be not for everyone. I know lots of Pakeha people that have really. Really connected and really rich cultural lives, but from the family I come from, or my specific family within that, not the whānau that was missing and so I feel like that's a really common experience. Yeah,

Avery Smith  25:20

so this is just like the last two sentences of the book is where you say there is work to do, to belong here, there are stories to hear. It's a good thing they're coming now, and it's a good thing that they're ready. So when you were talking about that, when you're just talking about Janet, it's that feeling, that feeling of belonging, you know, and I feel like, especially for Pakeha, there's this feeling of, oh, you know, I'm here, but I do, I belong here. What's my play? You know? Like, there's all of this sort of anxiety right around it. And sort of, when you, when you, when you ended the book, when you're saying that there is work to do to belong here, I felt like that was just really compelling. I just really, I appreciate the way that you put that. Oh,

Tina  26:04

thank you so much. I sometimes worry about that ending because, yeah, oh, we shouldn't talk about the ending too much spoilers. But no,

Avery Smith  26:13

no, I'm trying to stay very far away from the things that happened. That's

Tina  26:17

okay. If anybody's wanting to pick up the book, by the time you get to the ending, you would have forgotten all of this. But what can I say? I think I worried about there is a rhetoric in the world. Let's I'll go out a bit further. So we're not talking specifically in the book. There is a rhetoric in the world that is a bit unforgiving of Pākeha. And I get that 100% but at the same time, I think there is, if we're going to go anywhere, if we're going to get anything done, we're not going to do it without Pakeha on board. So there is an element of and now tupuna know that our old people know that that that March showed that the hikoi showed that like we, we're gonna we've got to do it together. There's certainly a rhetoric that's a very Justified Anger and kind of blame, which needs, you know, we need to work through that, that I'm not saying that that's wrong in any way. And sometimes I get a bit worried that this position of it's kind of like, come on, Janet, think about this. Get on board. You know, that's kind of what the book's doing. Like, she's the only character in the book that I was really interested in seeing, learning to do that. Yeah, she's, she's the main change character in the in the book, Kerry and Sarah don't need to change, but they do, yeah, but they do. Like, there is a story for them too. There's a narrative change,

Avery Smith  27:41

there's a connection between them. Yeah, a bond, for sure that, yeah,

Tina  27:45

and that's really I loved writing, that that's, that's, there's a comfort. Well, I hope that was my intention, that not that you really, if you're I think if you're writing, you have intentions. But the book, the book knows better. Quite often when you're writing, the writing knows better. So you kind of have to go with where the book's taking you. But these were intentions of mine to kind of say, hey, Janet, are you coming? Are you coming or not? Yeah, and that's the question, well,

Avery Smith  28:14

here's here's what I really enjoyed about your book, and it's something that I try to do in my work as well. So when you are dealing with a topic like this, you know, terrorism, extremism, white white supremacy, it's so hard to fall into the trap of doing this big, huge, us versus them, right, and dehumanising the white supremacists in a way that is quite, quite frankly, you know, not useful. Like, I understand it, like there's anger and there's range rage and there's hurt behind it. You know, it's like we end up doing to them the same thing that they're doing to us. Yeah, again. Here we go, us and them again. But do you understand what I'm saying? It's this, you leave their humanity intact the way that you, that you handle the characters in the book. And again, like I didn't, I did not at all agree with what Connor was thinking, but I saw the journey that he took, right? And I saw sort of how, how one thing led to another, led to another, led to another. And the same thing for Janet, right? I saw how she had this sort of, you know, superiority complex, to where she thought the things that she did were just the right way. And then, you know, she kind of started to question, especially in relation to what she was seeing happening with her son. She's like, to what part did I play? Can you talk a little bit about how you're able to do that with with characters that you know maybe we don't like, maybe you would hate them, you know what I mean. How do you maintain that? How do you maintain their mana? How do you maintain that humanity? You. Even with these characters, like this extreme, this white, white supremacist extremist, that you know, we wouldn't like. 

Tina  30:07

Well, thank you. First of all, I mean, it's a mixture of things. One is, is it interesting? Yeah, how do you make it how do you keep the reader reading? Yeah, so, yeah. So if we hate the characters, there are characters that we hate that we still like reading, that does happen, but for me, it's much more interesting to read, to come from a place of empathy or like to get to that of course, I have no personal, real understanding of someone like Connor, and no love, real love, or joy for someone like Connor. But in order to write him, I had to find some kind of connection. And so I did that through understanding where he comes from and how he has never had anything to hold on to and how he's become very entitled, or like he thinks the world should be his. And it's not sure, yeah, if I meet these, if I see these people online, if I meet them in real life, there's nothing in me that wants to be close to them. But in literature, and isn't that amazing? That's what literature can do. It's like, oh yeah, I can have, I can go into this person's world. So it's not that I'm great in any of those ways in real life, but in literature, it's, that's what I mean about the book teaches us. Like the literature kind of says, Okay, what's there's a George Saunders video where he the writer George Saunders, where he talks about this, your higher self comes in and says, okay, so Connor's an asshole. But how interesting is that? Like? Why is he an asshole? What? What's making that happen and how can we connect with him? He is a human being, and it's reprehensible. But what does that mean that he's still a human being, and yet he chooses to live this. This is what he wants to do because they're everywhere. So we can't pretend that they're not part of us, like we have created this, not like I haven't actively gone out and created it, obviously. But as a society, you

Avery Smith  32:15

mind if I stop you for one second, yeah? Because I think what you said right there is actually, like, really huge, because what you said is that Connor, or, you know, the people that he represents, they are one of us. They're part of us. And this is what we have done to sort of create these kinds of outcomes. What I really appreciate that is it goes against very much, the, I don't know the kind of knee jerk reaction of being like, oh, that's them, and they're so different. And, you know that dehumanisation that we do, and what it does is it's about connection. It's about, yeah, I don't like what he does. I think he's an asshole, but he's part of, he's part of this, you know, society, he's part of this community with me. And so how do we engage and how do we how do we relate to each other like that? So anyways, thank you for saying that. I think that's actually really quite helpful.

Tina  33:12

You're You're welcome. I mean, honestly I I think books are, it sounds a bit woowoo, but they come out of me. But then I just kind of go, Well, how did that happen? Because the book is like, I say wiser than I am. Like, it's not like, I'm like this every time I'm still like, Oh, those people, oh, I can't stand it. Our better selves come out in our books. One more thing, I feel like you

Avery Smith  33:39

have to like, channel you channel something else,

Tina  33:43

definitely. And yeah, it's like you're trying to, you are trying to, yeah, through that effort of trying to connect with someone that you don't understand, you become bigger yourself. But yeah, the one thing I wanted to say about Janet was, and this was kind of one of the underlying things I was thinking about, was she's not this reprehensible character, she's this everyday character. She is our neighbour and when so this is how the actual terrorist attacks in Ōtautahi , he actually, at the mosques, actually did inform, inform what I was doing again was up until that stage again, my own ignorance. Having been brought up with what we call casual racism, or just like everyday racism, I hadn't connected that with extremist forms of it, and I'd been brought up in a very casually. I don't know if casual racism is even a good phrase, but, you know, in that kind of and everything was kind of implicitly prejudice in the house that I would grow up in, but Nazis and white supremacists and skinheads were all this extreme. You know, we were not racist, so we would be. Was a line. There's a line between those really extreme forms of racism and just knowing that, you know, everyday white supremacy, let's call it, that the white systems run the world, development of humanity like we're more developed now, so we know better. So we have Parliament, and we have these systems that we've created that actually are white systems when that happened, and the discussions that were happening afterwards, I really had to question myself about that. Again, binary thinking of, you know, overall this far, far end of things is racism, and that is why we as Pakeha now? Now evoking my Pākeha side, we're not racist because we don't call them the N word. We don't say bad words out loud. And then I was like, it's so clear to me now I can't even believe I wasn't really thinking that way. But So Janet, that's where Janet becomes important, because she is that person. She comes from that background, and it's only through Connor's extremism that she can really kind of go, Wait, where did that come from? You weren't brought up this way. Well, wasn't it actually, really

Avery Smith  36:13

you were, yeah, no. It's so interesting because, you know, as you say, sort of like that every day that casual racism, you know, it's, it's so interesting to me, the like you say, the divide between, well, you know, I'm not racist because I've got a Māori best friend. No, the way that that you're racist is to really be like an extremist, right? You have to be like, like Connor if you're ever going to be called racist. But Janet is also a racist in this book. And so what you're doing is you're kind of shining a light on, well, there's sort of this continuum that leads to the outcomes that we're seeing. And so that was that was really significant. So I think we're kind of getting to this anyways. And so what I would like to ask you now is, what is it that fiction can do for us, that non fiction can't? So the way that you're talking about this, obviously, you had to do a lot of research, and you you know, there's a lot of factual evidence that you're using to inform this book. So what is it that fiction is able to do for us, that maybe just reading, maybe an academic article can't

Tina  37:20

Important question. But my theory has always been and it is backed up by research that you know narrative, if you want someone to remember something, we know this is teachers at a university, you give them a narrative. You don't give them a set of bullet points, you give them a story to remember about the thing. And so it is a way for those, when you give someone a book like this, they hopefully fall in love with the characters and want you know if these characters are real enough to them. That is a way of them feeling what is happening to these characters. As a Maori person, if you give me a set of facts of what has happened to my ancestors, I'm going to feel that. But if you give those same set of facts to other people, yeah, they might feel it, but they might it's like, oh, yeah, but that was history. Because, you know, I've written a lot of books that were set in the past as well,

Avery Smith  38:16

for the same reason, that was history. They don't have the same connection to it, right? Yeah, that's got nothing to do…

Tina  38:19

We didn't do that. I mean, that was sad, but we didn't do it. But with this, you know, with fiction, you can get them to feel it. Hopefully, I get a huge amount out of writing it myself, personally, and I learn about the world through writing it like the the key thing about writing creatively that I think those who don't outside of the field don't often realise, as it's not about me coming to you and saying, Here's my theory. It's me saying, here is my big question about the world. That's where I start. Like, how why do people behave this way? How does extremism or white supremacy work in the world, like, why are people choosing this? Why are people inflicting damage on others? Why are people not offering manaakitanga to refugees?

Avery Smith  39:08

And what's so powerful about your book is it's you know specifically about Aotearoa, right? Because so much of what we read about, or we think about, is happening in other parts of the world, right? Yeah, yeah. But what your what your book does is it brings it, you know, absolutely here, like, very local and in a very familiar and accessible way to, just to show, like, how this is actually possible, yeah, Kia ora, yeah, yeah. I think also, you know what you were saying about evoking the emotion and the feeling. You know that's the power of storytelling, right? Yeah, like you said, you can see a bunch of facts and figures up on a PowerPoint slide, and you're like, Oh no, that doesn't look good, right? That's not but you don't have the same connection to. It, you don't have that same emotional investment as if you were to really, you know, connect with the stories that go along behind those numbers. I think what you do is, you, you can highlight the stories behind, like some of the numbers or the, you know, the facts are right. So I think that's really important

Tina  40:22

in a way. This book, for me, has two different things. I mean, all books work on several layers, but this book was never going to work until I just made it about these families. That's the thing. Like, you've got all this stuff going on. It's a book full of all these things. And sometimes when people describe it, they're like, oh yes, it's about ecological disaster and what it represents, and it is about those things, but really it's just about these three families and how they how do they get on with each other and with the world? Like, what is? Yeah, that's it can only ever be at that level. So you write at that level, and then the other layers are kind of embedded in that.

Avery Smith  40:58

It's a good book. Y'all should read it so this is my last question for you. In The Mires, one of the main characters is the Māori teenage girl named Wairere, after an especially poignant scene in the conclusion, she thinks back to her to her Nan, who always told her that the right teachers are already here, and the swamp is a place of gathering for them all, who might be some of the right teachers when it comes to navigating this. What we're seeing this white supremacy and this extremism in Aotearoa and where might be a good place that would bring these teachers together.

Tina  41:36

Sorry, I just got quite emotional. Well, you know, as you were speaking, I just couldn't stop thinking about Hana-Rawhiti, actually, yeah, I was just thinking, as I say, you know, the young people are on another level, on another level, and everybody's seen the haka, everybody in the entire world, everybody's seen the haka. So that's but, but then I've seen a couple of interviews since, and I was so, so pleased to hear a couple of things she said, which was, one of them was, you know, it's the hikoi is not about telling them. It's about us. The other thing she said was, you know, there's this talk about whether the Hakka is appropriate or not appropriate. And she's just like, we have our own ways of doing things. We're not there to follow their way of doing things. And I'm just like, yes, like, we are following our system of this is how we conduct ourselves. And her. See how Māori is behind her. And I know she can feel, I know they can feel that. But also, like, also the world, apparently, is behind her as well this, you know, this is the way we do things. So if you're gonna, if you're gonna not pay heed or not respect something that was laid down by our tupuna, which is not yours to tutu with, it's not your place to even be having this conversation, to be honest, then we are going to reply to that in the way that it's appropriate to us. So

Avery Smith  43:01

and because, I mean, New Zealand supposed to be bicultural, right? That's what everybody that's the big Yeah, but, but, but, so let's live up to that exactly. Yeah. So parliament is obviously, then also supposed to be bicultural. So why can't the Hawker happen in Parliament? Yeah,

Tina  43:15

and it's quite funny, because naming her and sending her away from it for a day is, I mean, who cares? But anyway, yeah, yeah. But so that's the first

Avery Smith  43:26

thing, how she showed up with 100,000 of her.

Tina  43:31

I mean, that's the first thing. Well, it's not, it's not that all of the answers aren't in Parliament, but that was a moment that certainly kind of makes you think we all have our home places. I've found the political world as it's gotten more binary and fractured and like extreme, it's become that way within our own culture as well within Te Ao Māori. So there are moments where I feel really uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric within Te Ao Māori, and the only way I've been able to deal with that is to go home, which has always been a really scary thing for me, but I've really reconnected with home in the last I guess, since COVID, times I was connected before, but I've really gotten involved. And one time I went home and I was doing a karanga workshop, very scary things for me, like being like, just not feeling like I belong for so long. And then finally, like in middle age, kind of actually spending more time there. And you know, karanga, if you've ever tried to do it, is such a scary thing. I wrote a little story about this, actually, and the auntie there said, you know, we're talking about, how do we do it? And their reply is, oh, you just, we just got pushed into it, basically. And so we're all scared. We're all frightened. And she goes, Well, you're home now. You can't you can't go wrong. You can't be wrong when you're at home. And I was just like, yeah, you hear a message. So many times I've been told that. In different ways before, but there was something about that moment where I was just like, yeah. Like the world was feeling so it was feeling unsafe, and it was feeling like I didn't know who to trust and stuff like that, even within my own communities. And then I went home, I mean, wider communities. I went home and I heard that, and I was just like, yeah, just go home. So I just, yeah, that's, that's, you know, if, if you've got someone telling you that, if there's a place where someone's telling you that, where you can safely be yourself, and hey, the arts, that's a place where, truly, we can reconnect with being human, even if we're disconnected in our communities, we can reconnect with that. Yeah,

Avery Smith  45:47

and I think that's what your book, I mean, just kind of highlights that for me too, is when we're talking about, you know, countering violent extremism, which is our task here at He Whenua Taurikura, but what you're saying is that there are other ways, through like the arts, to tap into other pieces. This book right here, which I think was really profound, in a way you were able to show, show the humanity in all of these characters, in a way that you would never get, you would just never get it from a research article, right? So again, thank you for that. I think that's, it's a gift. And, you know, I want to, I want to keep pushing that we have these different voices and different ways of looking at it and perceiving these issues, because I think that's only going to strengthen our perspective and how we're able to deal with these really big, thorny issues. But

Tina  46:41

we do, yeah, Kia ora, but we do need that research too, just to like, yeah, of course, you guys, do we need, you know, I think it's amazing, it's so important. But yeah, we need the arts equally. So, yeah, yeah, Kia ora,

Avery Smith  46:58

it's not a binary. It's not a

Tina  47:00

binary. No binaries allowed.

Avery Smith  47:02

No binaries allowed. Get out of here with those binaries. Oh. Kia, ora, Tina, that was so lovely. Thanks. Thanks for coming on and yeah, having just a great conversation.

Avery
Thanks for listening to Unsettling Extremism. Tina’s book, The Mires, published by Ultimo Press is an emotionally honest and uncomfortable speculative examination of our society. Although the topics are heavy, the book is ultimately hopeful, reminding us of the wisdom of rangatahi,the power of manaakitanga, and how all of our survival is linked to our connection to our world and each other.  One thing that Tina said that I’m taking away with me is how she is able to write as her better self, in a way that maintains the humanity of people that she may not agree with. That mindset is critical to the work of writers of fiction and non-fiction alike, and indeed to anyone who wants to work through our divisions. Finally, I want to reflect on the power of the arts to deepen our understanding of research. Tina’s used research on white supremist extremism to inform her writing in this book. She took that research, and through her use of fiction, made it into a story that encouraged us to look at ourselves. It resonates with something Selina Tulisitala Marsh, former poet laureate of New Zealand, said this week in response to cuts in humanities and social science funding, ‘arts don’t just decorate knowledge, they deepen it. They don’t just entertain, they explain. They don’t just complement science, they complete it.” As we said earlier, no binaries allowed! Like and Follow unsettling extremism on your favourite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. Ma te wa! See you next time!