Airana Ngarewa explains how self-imposed suffering steered him towards books, and then writing his just-launched debut novel, The Bone Tree.
I loathed English in school. There wasn’t a single year from first to 13th that I enjoyed, not a single book I read that resonated with me, not a single sentence I stumbled upon that got anything more out of me than an eyeroll.
Some of it was the runoff of my schooling experience more broadly. School was the reason my whānau had lost the reo. It had done all it could to cut our culture out of us, and of so many whānau in Taranaki. To make things worse, I didn’t get along with my teachers and my teachers didn’t get along with me. I remember one time in Primary School the teacher’s pet, Greer Goodie-Two-Shoes, asked me why I didn’t do exactly what the teacher told me to do, exactly when they told me to do it. She was a caring critter and asked as if I hadn’t yet figured out that that was how school worked. I was about ten years old and I said “Because we are in a fight right now. The teacher is trying to change me and I’m not trying to change.”
Naturally, I left school aspiring to become a professional cage fighter. I’d developed a resilient (and perhaps rebellious) spirit which lent itself well to combat sports. And so I would strap on my gloves and strip down to my shorts and do to my opponent what I’m sure my teachers wished they could’ve done to me – hand out a hiding, give the bash. What I soon came to learn was that in mixed martial arts, the cage fighting is the easy part. No small feat given the gladiator-style combat the sport involves. Shins to chins and breaking limbs and choking and being choked unconscious. But there is a fight before the fight. A hellfire you walk through before you even get to step foot in front of the crowd.
This fight is not the months of training to prepare yourself, but the weight cut. Six kilos in four days. Close to ten per cent of my body weight. That’s what I needed to lose almost every time I fought. The process is simple but excruciating: four days without food, three with practically no water and some serious sauna sessions, wrapped in several layers and a sauna suit.
During one of these bouts of self-imposed suffering, I was too thirsty to watch TV and too hungry to sleep the days away and so I went to the library and borrowed a book. I couldn’t say what inspired this. Your rational self is the first thing to shrivel during bouts of dehydration; instead, you run poor impersonations of normal human behaviour. I read the book, something about pirates, and it sucked and I returned it and I got another book out. I don’t recall the second book either which I take to mean it sucked too. That was where the idea that I could write a book started. Writing is simple, I thought: you put words on paper and they suck and then they get published.
The idea that I should write a book came a lot later. I had put the gloves away after a particularly bad headache, the aftermath of my first loss as a fighter. With all the research coming out at that time about head trauma, it was clear my fling with cage fighting had run its course. I did some Brazilian jiu jitsu after that, and I dipped my toes in long-distance running, but sport was beginning to feel more and more selfish. It began to feel pointless.
In search of something more meaningful, I started reading again. At first the works of the stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius – they spoke the same language as my inner martial artist – then authors of Aotearoa history like Michael King and Ranginui Walker, the warriors of our past, fighting not for fame and fortune, but justice. It was in these works that I discovered good writing existed, important writing, and it started to make sense to me. Books started to resonate with me, with my experience, and my understanding of the world.
Everything else flowed from there. Stories about pirates and the colonising of the American frontier and English novels written in the 1800s didn’t appeal to me. They weren’t close enough to home. My book had to be about Aotearoa. It had to be about Taranaki. It had to be about the loss of the reo and the mass migration to the city and the erosion of the trust so many whānau had – and have – in schools (and all the institutions which promise to protect the vulnerable but instead prey on them).
While writing The Bone Tree, I did not have to strip down to my shorts and go to war with another man in a cage but I did have another fight to fight. The fight to tell our stories. To represent the struggle honestly. Good, bad and complicated. To tell a tale that, if I’d stumbled upon it in school, would’ve meant something to me and would’ve got more out of me than an eye roll. If I’d had a book like this, I like to think it wouldn’t have mattered who the teacher was. The story would’ve been enough.
The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa (Moa Press, $38) can be purchased at Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.