Natasha Lampard reads Shilo Kino’s best-selling novel, All That We Own Know, recently published by Moa Books.

“This is where her whānau were from. This is where she was supposed to belong. Where her ancestors stood on the very same whenua and signed Te Tiriti…The field was overflowing with brown faces, and Māreikura should have felt safe around her own people, comfortable on the grounds tied to their ancestry. This was not how she imagined coming home for the first time.

[….]

She wanted to leave as soon as she could. She did not care about being here. It did not feel like home. Where did she belong if not on her own land?”

All That We Own Know is the new pukapuka by Shilo Kino (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāpuhi), award-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed Pōrangi Boy. Our protagonist is Māreikura: magnetic, fractious, both fearless and fearful, at times, wholly exasperating. She’s skilled in overthinking, filled with paradox and potent ideas, and with a yearning: a deep longing for belonging. She lives with her nan, Glennis, in Tāmaki Makaurau, having been whangai’d since a pēpi. She’s missing a māmā she’s never known, a turangawaewae to which she’s never been, a world (te ao Māori) from which she’s been kept. 

Among all the absence, there is abundance, of sorts, too. Māreikura has experienced what many desire: internet fame, having gone viral, due to her calling out racist action by a fellow school student, and, through its inaction, her school for complicity. She soon discovers that while it makes possible a number of opportunities (TV appearances, a popular podcast), it also casts a long shadow.  

Initially set for a career in law, with the scales having fallen from her eyes, Māreikura’s path alters and leads her instead to rumaki reo. As well as studying full time, she’s railing full-time: about injustice, and the audacity of caucasity; about religion, alcohol and consumers thereof. She’s disapproving of plants, of people, and particularly of Pākehā. 

While many of her grievances are, to me, wholly legitimate, at times she seems to be railing first and foremost at herself. A projection of rejection, perpetually-pissed action as distraction. Being busy being angry can be an effective method of keeping one’s bone-deep mamae at bay. 

The ensemble cast is a delight and helps to bring levity, texture, and a challenge to Māreikura’s strongly held, fast-formed, and often highly binary views. There’s Glennis of course. And in rumaki, we meet fellow tauira Jordan, whom Māreikura quickly connects with, and Chloe, who is Pākehā, whom she does not. Chloe’s presence causes much consternation to Māreikura which brings tension to the class. It’s in rumaki too we also meet Troy – another tauira whom she quickly dismisses, deeming too whakahīhī. There’s also the mature and accomplished Kat, Māreikura’s new girlfriend, and Eru, sweet Eru, Māreikura’s long-time best (and, for a long time, only) friend who is bound for Hawai’i on a Mormon mission to spread the gospel. Even before he’s left Aotearoa, his absence is keenly felt by Māreikura, as both abandonment by Eru and an affront by God. 

Deftly written, with vividly drawn and affecting characters, laden with the quotable among the quotidian, it’s eminently readable and resonant and very relevant to these here times we be living in, with themes close to the heart, and often in the headlines. It weaves together threads of disconnection, feelings of desertion, the ongoing impacts of colonisation, of history as present and future, of capitalism, tolerance – religious and otherwise, of gentrification, validation, of privilege and platform. It’s about what we inherit – both the trauma and the taonga – and it’s about reconnection, reconciliation, reclamation, and acts of resilience and resistance. 

There’s a lot going on fo’ sure but it’s far from too much: the story is sometimes fraught, but it’s not totally didactic, it’s no drag. The author has given us people and situations in whom and in which we can see parts of ourselves: complex, contradictory, messy – depictions we surely should be afforded and afford ourselves, for we are no monolith. The book is funny, and refreshing, and a courageous contribution to the wider kōrero that will open up spaces for other untold stories. 

It’s a fascinating provocation too on the ravenous animal that is social media: on the engagement with enragement, and on virality as intoxicant – how one can so easily and so often end up jonesing for another heady hit of validation. It also continues to befuddle me that we so readily adopt words with roots in the malign, to indicate “success”; in this case, a term referencing infectious disease, which is to say something fast-spreading, uncontrollable, that can do irreparable harm to a person, a community, a world.

It left me noodling on the ability – and the burden – of speaking to complex issues, and the need for grace, and for considerable and considered whakaaro rather than that which is hastily-formed, ripe for misconstrual, and may end up as oral incendiaries increasing the clicks, but not forwarding the kaupapa. 

It sparks thought too, on the particular type of clarity and vigilance with which we assess others’ foibles and failings – so effectively magnified in high-def by social media. Holding others to a standard of behaviour, many of us do not, would not, could never meet ourselves; such readiness to elevate people to the loftiest of heights, to make gods of them, and then yank them back down again. Māreikura both does this to others, and has it done to her. 

Ultimately I read this novel as an interrogation of and journey toward fluency: in our reo me ngā tikanga, in our identity as Māori or Tangata Tiriti, in our relationships and the ties that bind (and sometimes fray): friends, whānau, whenua – our papakainga; in those people and places that whangai us. Tis a reminder too that fluency is a process, not an end-point. And that, in the words of Jia Tolentino, we can “integrate righteous rage into a life that includes joy and pleasure and lightness – organizers know how to rest when they need to without ever leaving the fight.”

I came to this book seeking some sort of solace and sense-making from Māreikura’s rumaki experience in my own fraught journey, something I liken to being pulled apart and being remade, rewoven. It is, I think, difficult to have clarity on something, where you’re so deeply in it, so as I don’t yet have the luxury of hindsight, I read this hoping to find it in someone else’s. However, as happens sometimes with the most impactful of books, I got something else besides. Rumaki means immersion. It also means to drown — and I recognise that feeling of gasping, of grasping, of being unable to voice the help you need. Rumaki also means to be buried, which is to say, to be planted. To bring forth. To bloom. He kakano, a fledgling, pushing through the dark and the unknown, to send itself upward and outward, life yearning for more. Then, maybe, with more growth, more time, comes the ability to become a shelter to another, to help them push through too. 

The author does not offer us cliched quick fixes to century-old issues. (Surely, that is too much to ask of any one person?) Indeed, she leaves us with more questions than answers, and many questions to which there is no one answer. The book offers a well-crafted, neatly-cast story, with characters I already miss and would love to spend more time with. It offers opportunities too, for reflection on that which we critique but also continue to perpetuate, and our entanglements – conscious or not – with the very systems and behaviours we claim we do not abide. 

I mihi to the author, Shilo Kino, for this act of generosity in crafting and sharing this story of Māreikura’s journey. “Words are a homeland”, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Writers like Kino are navigating spaces of complexity – just as our tīpuna did – with grace, with humour, with empathy, to help us gain a fluency, and a confidence, to navigate our own way home too. 

All That We Own Know by Shilo Kino ($38, Moa Books) is available for purchase at Unity Books.