Kapa haka

The last days have had the consistency of fudge—dense and sweet and with more calories per square centimeter than any other substance. Who knew how much could be packed into these small spaces?

There is the entire world of getting the house ready to go on the market. This is boring and tedious, and is now finished. Our house goes to auction in mid-November (auctions being one stressful but apparently lucrative way to sell a house). I’m grateful to all of you who have wished us luck. The real luck comes on November 15, auction day.

And, alongside the selling of one house is the readying of the other. That story will unfold on these screens, but the good news is that the demolition has begun. The bad news is that the other house is now a construction zone in the biggest way. We walk from the spotless house we’re selling to the nasty pit we’re moving into and think, What’s wrong with this picture?

Into this chaos came a new friend, JL a Chicagoan (this word passed my spell check) whom Michael met at a conference in Australia a couple of weeks ago and to whom he issued the general, “If you’re ever in New Zealand…” offer. And JL (unlike nearly all of the rest of you blog readers) actually CAME. So we had a new friend in our pristine house and on Saturday night when MG and her daughter came for dinner, there were seven Americans at the table, maybe a record at our house (and much fun and laughter, too).

But the pinnacle of the weekend was the kapa haka competition, a Māori performance of singing and dancing (for more on that, click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapa_haka ). A work colleague/friend whose children were performing invited me to come, so, once JL arrived, we piled into the minivan with MG and her daughter, our kids and Naomi’s friend JA, who was ours for the day.

The competition was a couple of towns up the coast, and there were school busses and teenagers and school children wandering around in school uniforms or jeans and t-shirts. We paid for our tickets and walked into a gymnasium, filled to bursting with hundreds of people. We stood out strongly in the crowd of brown-skinned people, my family doubling the number of blondes in the room (I counted).

I’m not sure I have any words to describe the intensity of the performance. The ones we saw were groups of children—perhaps ranging in age from 6 until 12 years old. They were dressed in traditional costumes, the girls in silk dresses, the boys in grass skirts and bare chests. The Māori are famous for their tattoos, and these children were painted to resemble the traditional tattooing. The girls had blue lips and scroll-work down their chins, and the boys had full face paints—scrolls and swirls all over their faces. They were so beautiful and so utterly different from me. I was captivated.

And the performance itself was amazing. The children danced and sang and chanted in te reo Māori, each group performing for 20 minutes or more. They were at times graceful, at times peaceful, and at other times violent and fierce. We stood (all the folding chairs were full) and watched, captivated, as the children changed the mood from song to song, each iteration with a different set of motions and meanings, none of which we had access to at all. There were sweet songs led by the girls with melodic harmonies. There were fierce hakas led by the boys with wild chanting and jumping and beating of chests and arms. And there were songs in between, call and response inside the group, the boys leading parts and the girls leading other parts and warrior energy zinging off the walls.

The first group finished, and the crowd—wildly intergenerational—burst into applause. And then, in the midst of the clapping, another current rose up. From somewhere in the audience, another chant—a haka. Four teenagers in jeans and sweatshirts screaming in perfect rhythm. The audience stopped clapping to watch. Then, as the four boys finished, a school group, in demure plaid uniforms, took up the charge and began to yell out their haka. And suddenly, the group of teenagers standing around us began to call out too—their eyes bulging in traditional style, their hands fluttering by their side or at their faces in synchronized movement, their faces fierce and focused as they chanted.

It as awe-inspiring. These kids were so intensely charged, so present in the moment. I found out later what I guessed then—that these calls—so aggressive and loud—were not meant to threaten or challenge the other group, but rather as an appreciation, a gift in return for the gift the group had just given. After each performance, the audience would respond this way—mostly with groups chanting a haka, but sometimes with individuals singing a keening song. It was like nothing I have ever seen before, an audience so fully engaged in the process that they joined in, but each joining contributing to the largeness of the whole rather than being a look-at-me attention grabbing that distracted from the performers. The community was creating and naming itself right before our eyes.

And it was the community that was perhaps the most rich presence there. Kids in rumpled jeans slouched into the room, laughing with their friends and texting during the down times, ear buds dangling from their waists. They could have been any kids anywhere. But at some point, they would shed all these trappings and slip into face paint and costume and sing and chant. And before that time, they would watch the children in front of them and call out their support. I have never felt a sense of place so strongly, never felt what it means to follow in your mother’s footsteps and her mother’s and hers. This was not a performance put on to gratify tourists; this was a community sustaining itself and keeping its traditions alive, and not even alive but thriving, breathing, living, growing.

And even through all that, through the clear Māori-ness of it all, even though we were so out of place in a room filled with the distinctly beautiful brown fullness of the Māori and Pacific bodies, there was no hostility directed at us at all. These people could have been angry about these interlopers who reminded them of colonial domination—and the songs were so full of aggression that you could imagine that an angry crowd mentality might mount. But there was none of that as far as I could tell. The forceful singing and chanting wasn’t filled with hate, it was filled with dominance, power, majesty. The strongest emotion was pride—not with arrogance, but with strength and community. There was no need for violence because the songs themselves were so powerful that they held the emotions for us all.

There will be more for me to write about this experience, because it circles around me and through me. I am more of New Zealand for having seen it, and more aware that I will always be foreign here, that I will never be as rooted in this place as these people. I was jealous of what they shared together, but more than that, I was joyful that such places remain in the world, that this is possible, that children can sing and dance and be painted like their grandfathers, that grandmothers can hold babies and croon ancient songs, that there are generations gone and generations coming and the haka still sends shivers down everyone’s spine. Tomorrow I will tell Aidan’s story, but tonight it is enough to know that here in New Zealand, there are possibilities you have probably never considered, and some of them could be found in the Memorial Hall on a windy spring Saturday.