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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

BooksFebruary 25, 2024

An impressive debut that gets under the skin: a review of Checkerboard Hill by Jade Kake

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Natasha Lampard reviews the debut novel by Jade Kake.

In the olden days, back in the early 1990’s – before the internet got real big and the cellphones got real small – I whiled away many an hour at Upper Hutt’s Maidstone Mall with my gal-pals. There, we talked and walked and lolled and grazed and engaged in close study of boys and their doings, and of items that might now be considered antiquities such as cassette tapes and CDs at Whizz Records, and in London Bookshop: Dolly, Girlfriend and Cosmopolitan magazines. At one store – the name of which escapes me – we would stand at length, titling our heads and squinting our eyes in front of the many Magic Eye prints that adorned the walls. Apparently, so the google machine says, some folks know these as “autostereograms”. We would look hard at these prints in order to try to spot the illusive image hidden within the image. We’d step forward and step back an almost do-si-do, and we’d cross our eyes but not completely, all in the hope of catching sight, even just a glimpse, of what was not just directly in front of us, but of what lay beyond

Checkerboard Hill is the debut novel of Whangārei-based architectural designer, AUT lecturer and writer Jade Kake (Ngāpuhi – Ngāti Hau me Te Parawhau, Te Whakatōhea and Te Arawa). Born out of the author’s time in Te Papa Tupu, the coveted incubator for emerging kaituhi Māori run by the Māori Literature Trust, it is Kake’s first fiction release, but her second book to come out this past year – the first being her collaboration with Jeremy Hansen, Rewi: Ata haere, kia tere.

Kake’s other recent release, written with Jeremy Hansen, Rewi: Ata haere, kia tere. (Image: Tina Tiller)

The book begins here in Aotearoa, home to its protagonist, Ria – an Australian-born Māori artist who lives with son Ari, and husband James. From the story’s get-go, we are immersed in a continual stream of granular sensory description – of bodies of land, of water, of sky; of colour, shape, motion. We see the world with the keenness and immediacy of an artist’s eye. Vaughan Rapatahana wrote that Kake paints her novel, as much as she pens it. He’s bang on.

In their progression, these vivid descriptions affect in a bodily kind of way. The book has its own microclimate: I felt the scorch of bare feet on hot pavement; the sweat on the brow, the prickling of skin as cool night descends; I got the heat, the dust, the eddying winds, the squelch of grass wet with dew. And I felt the burn of the heated words and cold shoulders. The extremes and the extremities. 

Despite the cinematic specificity and its abundance, there is however a creeping feeling of obfuscation. Autostereogrammatic, if you will. There seems to be something beyond what we’re presented with. Of the visceral detail of the surroundings, of her own physicality – we have much. But of Ria’s emotional landscape? We have little.

When we meet Ria, she’s running. She runs a lot, up hills and down valleys, in places she shouldn’t be, ignoring the signs, running till she hurts. She runs to keep from thinking about what she has run and continues to run from, thoughts that hurt even more than that burn in the lungs and the burn in the legs. While we see so much up close, she keeps us at a distance: she’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. So while the descriptions are bodily, there is also a sense of disembodiment. And it all serves as avoidance. As distraction. Distracting her. Distracting us. We’re looking deeply at things, so as to not look deeply at her. She does not want us to see what lies beyond. 

Ka mutu, despite the intensity of her own observation, the keenness of her noticing, she is paradoxically unable to face things, to look at certain things and certain people. She “steals glances”.  Even of her doting husband, “she dares not look at him directly”. Nor does she want to be looked upon by others, “what does he see there? What dim shapes rise to the surface? He stares at her for a moment too long. She squirms and he looks away.” And thus, juxtaposing the sharp focus of her artist’s eye, she herself is out of focus. The story is centred around her yet she seems off-centre; off-kilter; a rock, an island. While set here and “across the ditch”, so much of Ria’s story takes place in a liminal space. She is an obscure presence in the home: apart, aloof, often abrupt. ”It’s unfair, their casual ease with each other”, she says of her husband and child. She seems neither fully actualised nor fully present: “The carved taiaha James received for his twenty-first birthday. A kete woven by James’s sister. A heru that belonged to James’s grandmother. A prized piece of pounamu gifted to Ari by James’s whānau. A piece of whalebone—half-carved, unfinished, unfinished, inherited from her koro—is Ria’s sole contribution, and the taonga feels lonely, out of place.” 

And so it goes for much of the first half of the book: this sense of disquieting separation, of her being both wound tight, and unravelled, ungrounded. Of obscurity. She is hidden, hiding, amongst the multi-coloured, mesmerising images, much like those Magic Eyes of my youth. Somewhere beyond. 

Jade Kake (Photo: Supplied)

“She’s a person without a past, bleached clean like coral.”

“Her mind is bleached clean, clear and bright.”

In the Māori Dictionary, one translation of whakamā is to whiten, to make white. Another definition offers that the kupu whakamā, comprises “white” and “clean”, and together literally means to be whitened clean; to be bleached. I grew up with both cultural disconnect and with bleach. My mum’s signature scent was Janola. Our ties to our iwi, our hapū, our marae, were long severed. I often consider the above definitions in the context of assimilation. 

In her piece Bone Shame, Anahera Gildea wrote that the “English word for shame is about self-stigmatisation, about humiliation, but in Māori, the word whakamā is different. It is a collective shame, where you realise that you have made choices that have separated you from the collective. And you have become visible to that collective because you are outside of it. Like in a corridor of a hospital. Like on an island. This surely is what it means to be lost.

She adds that the definition of shame in te reo Pākehā that seems to resonate most with whakamā, is from psychologist Jeffrey Kauffman: “shame is a pervasive feature of the human response to death and other loss…. Shame prompts disconnection; and disconnection is, itself, experienced as shameful.”

It is beyond our shores that so much of this story takes place: in Te Ao Moemoea, The Land of the Dreaming – Australia. In the hometown Ria left as a teenager, with the family from whom she is estranged. Having received news of the death of a whānau member, it is a forced and fraught return to her birthplace. 

Among so many threads woven together, Kake deftly weaves and prompts whakaaro on indigeneity in the diaspora. Recent figures say that over 170,000 – one in five – Māori now live in Australia. It is where the author herself was born. If we, as an indigenous people, are living on the land of another, it is the case for many that there is a certain sensitivity to empire, to continued acts of colonisation as well as to the insidious nature of racism affecting any marginalised group, not just that to which we belong. Racism looms throughout the story, in the overt and the casual – in ways glaringly subtle and subtlety glaring, it is always near the surface. And like instances of racism, some readers may feel this acutely, unmistakably; others may not feel or see it much at all, the privilege of racism being that for some, it’s a purely theoretical phenomenon. 

We are all products of our environments. Of intergenerational knowledge transfer. And in some cases, of intergenerational cultural disconnect. The ways of our language; our traditions; our stories; our lands and waters and all the many creatures we share it with. Our songs and poems and our spirituality and art; our protocols and values – our tikanga. All things we uphold and hold dear – how do we learn these if we are not where that knowledge is known and taught? If bonds have been severed? If those from whom you learn did not have a chance to learn it themselves? 

In our pepeha, we speak of those from whom we descend. We recite the names of our māmā, our mātua, our maunga, our awa and iwi. Many of us may use the possessive pronoun “tōku” – ie ‘o category’ – denoting the speaker is in a subordinate position to that being spoken of: we sit in deference to our ancestors, be their bodily form, human or land. We are tangata whenua, people indelibly linked to the land, from which we take strength, our sense of self, of place, of meaning. So what does it mean for tangata whenua to be born not on the whenua of our tīpuna? What does it mean to be indigenous on the land of another indigenous people, one whose whenua was never ceded. 

“What if we think about the Māori diaspora as the kite flying?….I would think about the idea of distance and closeness and how the manu aute, despite its distance, its trajectory and its ability to move is shaped by its relationship to the ground, and who is holding on to it, and the strength of the rope.” (Alice Te Punga Somerville, RNZ )

For that manu aute to fly, the line must be strong and must be held tight; both ends must be connected. It is that connection which is the fundamental essence of home, which is the fundamental essence of who we are. 

It ends well, you know. There is, at a certain point, an altering. A change in tempo; a whakatau: the pace both picks up and settles; there’s a thawing and warming of what was frozen. Out of the truth comes tenderness, transformation. What’s that James Baldwin quote? “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And she does: face it, I mean. Ria wills herself to not look away at the most difficult of times, and in her ability to do so, “…her own face looks back at her” – she sees herself, whole, actualised, for the first time. The pervading unease has dissipated, and those ties that connect and bind us, once fragile and frayed, are rewoven strong. 

Checkerboard Hill is an impressive debut that gets under the skin, and only gets better and better in the re-read. I love the untranslated reo and its increase as Ria becomes more defined, more whole. I appreciate the trust the author puts in the reader: that if we don’t know the kupu, we’re capable of finding out. 

This is a story like an onion – many-layered, and able to make you cry – by an author of great talent and vast breadth. I can not wait to read more of Kake’s work. Her voice is wise, her perspective astute and rooted in a deep and profound understanding – much needed in this world right now – of home, of whānau, of the collective, of forgiveness, and of our ability to transform and transcend, beyond shame, beyond trauma, beyond, beyond, so we too, like the manu aute, can be both grounded, and able to soar. 

Checkerboard Hill by Jade Kake (Huia Publishers, $35) is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland. Jade Kake is speaking about her novel at the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts’ writers programme on Saturday 24 Feb. Kake is also speaking about Rewi on 24 Feb at the same festival.

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

BooksFebruary 25, 2024

How to read a poem: For a Five-Year-Old by Fleur Adcock

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

The latest in a semi-regular series that breaks down a poem to analyse what it’s really trying to tell us.

Updated on 11 October 2024

Fleur Adcock CNZM OBE died on 11 October 2024 after a brief illness. Adcock was one of New Zealand’s greatest ever poets, with 20 collections and anthologies published and a swath of prestigious awards the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 2006, and the OBE awarded in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. Adcock was older sister to novelist Marilyn Duckworth and lived on and off in England, where she was living when she died. In 2023 Adcock was involved in a BBC programme exploring the craft of writing the kiss, you can listen to it here. The below is a close reading of one of Adcock’s most beloved poems, For A Five Year Old.

How to read a poem: For a Five Year Old

Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems is as big as a bible. It arrived, plumply, in my letterbox last week with a promise of a poem a day for a very long time. Adcock was born in 1934 in Papakura and lived, from childhood, between Aotearoa and the UK (where she lives currently). Her first collection of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane, was published in 1964, and from there followed 19 further collections over 60 years, and a clutch of awards such as the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for Poems 1960–2000, an Honorary Doctor of Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature, and an Honorary Doctor of Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Adcock’s poetry pins down the fleeting twists that exist in every day life. Her poems seem simple at first, but they hardly ever leave you with a simple feeling. Somewhere in her lines, in the way the images are framed and hung together, there’s a turn, or an “off camera” voice that unrests you as the reader. Like the poem ‘House-talk’: at first it’s about a parent listening to their teenagers sneak back into the house after a night out, trying to be quiet. But by the end you realise you’re in intimate company with the narrator who is tucked up in bed in a house that’s been lived in for 90 years. It’s a haunted and haunting poem: both a relief (the teenagers are safely returned) and unsettling (what has that house overheard in all that time?).

Working through Adcock’s Collected Poems is to follow a poet’s life through the poet’s own eyes: the places she’s lived, the various states of parenthood, clusters of focus and observation. Adcock’s poems often feels assertive and factual, but they don’t resonate in straight lines. Adcock’s poetry gets under your skin because she strips the ordinary back and exposes the truth underneath which is often funny, and often stark. I find them surprisingly emotional: they sneak into you.

I first read For a Five-Year-Old when I was still in primary school. The central image of the poem a snail being carried to safety by a child sank into me so thoroughly that the voice of Adcock’s poem comes to me every single time I see a snail meandering hopelessly into harm’s way. Reading it again some 30 years later, now a mother of a five-year-old myself, I am floored by this poem of two halves. It is darker, funnier, more harshly truthful than I ever realised.

For a Five-Year-Old by Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

Reading notes: The language is plain, so deliberate. The voice is measured; and by the fourth line we know that the narrator is addressing a child: “you call me into see, and I explain”. I love that line because it rings so true of a child’s demands: wanting a grown up to help them witness what is, to them with their fresh eyes, strange and wondrous, like an insect appearing somewhere where it shouldn’t be, like on a window.

If we linger on that idea of small wonder it starts to expand. The marvel of the way a snail can travel vertically up the side of a house and appear at a window, where, you could say, it is seeking to come in. The snail’s adventurousness becomes fascinating if we see it through the eyes of the child who is eager for their parent to bear witness to it, and ‘explain’ it. How much of the natural world is explicable? How many of us are equipped to go as far as nature requires when it comes to sharing these minute, every day wonders to our kids? What is that snail doing? Why is the windowsill its destination?

By the end of this verse there’s a clear sense of rhyme and rhythm. There are internal rhymes: Rain / explain; there / care; understand / hand; and then we end with “daffodil” which rhymes with “window-sill” in a sound that cradles this entire scene. These sounds are made subtle by way of line breaks and punctuation. If you read the poem according to its sentences the rhyme is there but you don’t land heavily on them. This is not a waltz or a ballad, it’s an intimate gesture. I think of it as a muted nursery rhyme: a creation ‘for a five-year-old’ but only to be read when that five-year-old is much, much older. Because here is where the poem splits: a sudden bolt of understanding divides the poem, and the narrator, directly in half.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails;
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

Here we have a turn; an abrupt change in tone. The narrator is witnessing, in real time, the effect of her power as a parent. On instruction, the five-year-old carries the snail to safety (“to eat a daffodil” which I always assume is the child’s idea of what the snail might love. They are so yellow and delicious looking after all), and the entire poem changes because of this small act of obedience and mercy.

The narrator is suddenly struck by the hypocrisy of the situation. That a parent can preach kindness while also being a person that’s done opposite: in this case “trapped mice and shot wild birds”. It’s a gunshot! The image cracks its way into what was a pretty zen scene. The poet has created a violent contrast with the gentle hands of the child and the slow, soft-bodied insect.

A mouse trap, though, even a gun, is not unfamiliar. Adults reading this poem won’t be so shocked. It’s what follows that takes us into the noir for a few lines this simple poem turns into gothic drama: “from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed / your closest relatives, and who purveyed the harshest kind of truth to many another.” These lines slash right to the blunt heart of a parent: as people we’ve done brutal things but as parents we embody a second self, one that might say “do as I say, not as I act”.

There is a wonder in this verse, too. The poem is a bit of a confession. There’s an ongoing shock of being in charge of a small person’s developing values while you’re still working on your own. The wonder of a child’s innocent faith; their logic and sweetness in what we know is a harder, more violent world, even within the world of the mind and bodies of their closest protectors, their parents.

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The final two lines pull us out of the spiralling raw with a return to instruction and resolve: “But that is how things are: I am your mother, / and we are kind to snails.” It’s not an apology, it’s just the truth. We are all hypocritical beings. The line “I am your mother” echoes the argument that might come later for this pair when the child loses that faith and starts to question it: “but why?” “because I am your mother and I say so” (as if that is every a satisfying answer). Only, in this poem, it is also poignant and moving. It is a statement of responsibility: an acknowledgement that despite the violences we’ve done, we teach our kids the ideal way forward, so they’re better.

The final line, “We are kind to snails” brings the narrator and the child back together again. It repeats the “kindness” of the first verse but in its more definite form: we are kind.

It’s short, but it’s a rollercoaster. It’s a sharp shock and one that I think parents will recognise. Hopefully you’ll hear this voice next time you sidestep to avoid stepping on a snail (or the next time you deliberately squash one like my garden-loving mother does).

Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems (Expanded Edition) (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50) is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.