The Beautiful Disaster Of My Chin

I have been daydreaming of the moko kauae I will receive after I publish my book. Because I descend from Kupe I want his kererū Rupe diving down my chin. That courting ritual which is so divine to watch in the hotter parts of the year. But this isn’t up to me. Is it? I made a joke to a former friend about wanting an art nouveau moko, because of my Pākehā roots. These failed attempts at jokes are why I can’t be left in charge of any design choices. The patterns are much older than me and it is prudent to show them respect. They come from Niwareka, the spirit wife, who fled to the underworld after Mataora beat her, and would only resurface with him once he had apologised, his remorse carved into koru flaring from his nostrils and over his cheeks.

Our faces can tell this tale and it is true that I have been beaten. But I don’t like to tell that story. It makes it happen over and over again. The pointy stubborn chin I got from my father wants to stick out, but not like that. My moko kauae will be a way of keeping that beautiful disaster a secret. A way of revealing too little rather than far too much. The atua are a more reliable equivocator about when I should open my mouth and when I should keep my trap shut.

How do we see further than the image and into the grooves? This is something I have been wrestling with in my manuscript using Ans Westra as my little clog wearing tauiwi doll. Because I knew she was living with dementia I intuited or rather guestimated that she would probably die before my book was finished, and that I would have to write about her in the past tense. I have rewritten sections and discard others altogether, and really she is just a prop for describing my own photo album but using words instead. I am not a good photographer, my hands shake, and the results veer to the left.

I thought I would have to read Susan Sontag but I have not. I thought I would have to compare Ans to her common Dutch superior Marti Friedlander, whose photos are crisper, more composed and less sentimental. But it is Allan Baldwin I have been thinking of, a contemporary of Ans who never got the attention he deserved. A Pākehā man humbler than the proverbial kumara. And it was his patience and gentle nudging persistence which eventually won over the kuia and kaumatua in private small places like Taneatua, and which allowed him access to their moko, once the shy, protective hand came away from the kuia’s chin. Allan persisted when Māori called him Pākehā instead of his name and told him to bugger off after questioning his motives. Master Carver Pine Taiapa did exactly this when he turned up in Tikitiki but Allan hung around and took the wero on his unmarked face. So Pine allowed him to take photos of his whakairo, and they are mysterious, deep images but Allan says he was unable to find any kuia on that trip willing to let him in. I have had similar issues writing about the Coast with a capital C.

It was different over in King Country. In an article that Chris Barton wrote for the Herald a decade ago Allan describes the strange pull and compulsion he felt towards these rural areas, as he hitched up his caravan after work on Fridays. A pull to places where Māori lived mostly unbothered by Pākehā, but where the new roads were disturbing an old way of life. Wairua is a curious and wayward force. Maybe Allan was chosen?

Most contemporary art discourse about Pākehā and tauiwi artists tends to focus on the ways Māori have been exploited, but this gaze is retrospective and ignores all the moments when Māori consented to share their knowledge, or have their photo taken. It is a discourse which can deny our agency in ways that I find troubling, but I try and stay out of it because I’m not very bright. And like Ans and Allan I tend towards sentimentality.

Michael King and Anne Salmond built entire careers based on this willingness to share. Baldwin met King on the tangi circuit in the early seventies, and they planned to collaborate on the book that eventually became King’s Moko with Friedlander starring as the photographer. Baldwin abandoned the project because he thought that King was in too much of a hurry. In Barton’s profile of Baldwin his view was that they needed to go to the archives, and do proper research into the designs, but King was dismissive. To me, Baldwin had more in common with the kuia, like the wāhine in the Waikato who never sped up even as the world around them started to zoom by.

 I showed a friend the Baldwin documentary and she left me a voice message saying that he seemed like a coloniser and her first visceral response was anger. I was puzzled by this, but could see that one valid criticism of Baldwin was that he was exoticising these wāhine, and treating them like zoo exhibits. And there is some truth in this, but also in the shadow of this criticism, which is during the late sixties the art of moko kauae was genuinely endangered. Which is the current reason for keeping animals in zoos. Now I see moko kauae proudly shown on Instagram, perhaps the least sacred space of all, but also seeing these wah take back what is theirs fills me with hope.

Even though Ans would regularly return to places she had taken photos of before, and formed lasting relationships with some Māori, I don’t believe it was her habit to give whānau a copy of her images. Baldwin made sure that he did, and some of these portraits were deemed so precious they were buried in coffins with their wearer, which seems a shame, but Māori had a lot to bury from Pākehā then. And even though Baldwin was a fan of Goldie, and his chocolate box version of Māori, which you can see in his portrait of Ngaa, yet her whānau insist that Allan got the closet to the essence of their Nan and her constant pipe, not Friedlander.

I’m on antidepressants at the moment so I find it hard to emote, but the ending of this documentary made me ugly cry. Baldwin, now in his nineties, is reunited with the young woman Hokimoana Te Rika Hekerangi he made a portrait of in the sixties, carrying her pēpi old skool on her back, and who took on her mother’s moko kauae so that the pattern would not be lost. They cry and clutch each other, and despite the annoying piano track which dominates the documentary I was struck by how real and human this moment was between two equals and old friends He gives her a silver wrapped present, tied with a silver ribbon curled by his wife’s scissors. Unwrapped, it is an album of all her images, and in doing so he gives her back.

I already have a cousin in mind to do my moko kauae, he comes from Rupe too. I still want a kererū falling like arrows from the invisible bolts of the sun, but it is up to the artist and the atua what will reveal itself. How it will feel and living with it rests with me. And the endless tweezing of whiskers that Allan insisted were beautiful to the old wah before the camera went click.