The Mires
by Tina Makereti

Tina Makereti’s first two novels had historical settings, but The Mires is set in a just-distant future, where refugees are arriving in a post-plague New Zealand to escape the ‘Great Heat’ in the northern hemisphere. The main characters are three mothers who live in a small block of home units on the Kāpiti Coast. Sera, a recent arrival from an unnamed European country, is welcomed by Keri, a Māori single mother of two, and offended by Janet, ‘one opinionated old lady’ who hypocritically believes people should ‘stay where their culture belongs’. Keri longs to ‘make a community out of this neighbourhood, like they did back in the day. Why not actually get to know the people they lived beside?’

The mires of the title include the actual local swamp on which ‘this tidy suburbia’ has been built and the metaphorical ones, ‘the filth, the hate, the sludge, the evil, the mires of the world.’ Janet’s son Conor, a thirtysomething wastrel, has descended into one: he moves home to operate a one-man cell of online hatred from the spare room. He’s in thrall to a charismatic leader signing up similar grievance-fuelled loners, all working for the vague cause of ‘a homeland and freedom for white people.’ This is less about political conviction and more about personal inadequacy:

There was very little Conor had done in his life that had marked him out as useful to anyone. He certainly hadn’t developed skills that were remarkable in any way. He had been a mediocre sportsman, an uninterested and unskilled student. He wasn’t particularly good-looking and he had few charms for the opposite sex: he worried his hair was thinning, that he didn’t have the best musculature, that he might not be endowed well enough in other areas. There must be a reason the girls he met never stuck around.

The novel’s plot tumbles towards a planned day of terrorist action all over the country, including Conor and his homemade chemical weapons. The only one who understands the depth of his darkness is Keri’s sensitive, stubborn teenage daughter Wairere who – as her name suggests – is more comfortable with the world of water than the social pressures of school. Wai has the dangerous gift of being able to move into other psychic spaces.

Sometimes it’s animals, sometimes it’s less animated things, like trees or mud. The worst is people. You don’t ever want to feel what’s going on inside another person, not if you can help it. It’s so confusing, so dense with thought and word and feeling, all scrambled together. And she is beginning to see the pattern to it, the necessary conditions that make it occur. A certain friction in the air, sometimes emotional, sometimes atmospheric—family arguments, or threatening weather.

In its social milieu, The Mires explores a vastly different world from that of Lioness by Emily Perkins, this year’s fiction winner at the Ockham NZ Book Awards, though Keri is a lioness of another kind, responsible for feeding and defending her family. She has to make ‘sure her visitors come after a payday so there will be a decent kai … She’s even baked scones and cookies—though it was cheaper to buy cookies than to bake them, with the price of eggs and butter.’ At the novel’s version of WINZ, Keri’s anxious, dehumanising experience feels particularly resonant in 2024, even if The Mires is set a few steps into the future:

Everything is so finely balanced on the head of a pin. A few dollars out of place could send her scrambling, but having a 50 per cent cut, even for a week? It’d all fall down … The benefit comes on Tuesday, so that’s when the bills come out. Rent takes almost two-thirds, then power, internet, school fees and associated costs, anything medical, clothes, food, transport. Payday is shopping day and by the end of it she usually doesn’t have anything left. They get their clothes from the Sallies, have no insurances, one cheap prepaid phone each for safety, no money for haircuts or days out or dental care. Wai is supposed to have a computer for school, but since Keri got her the cheapest one, it’s kind of useless and slow. Keri got a second-hand thing for her own study, job applications and the like. She gets them the cheapest internet connection so they have to be careful with how much they use, but it’s a life necessity these days: to not have a connection costs them so much more in time, transport, childcare. Even banking in person can cost more. And they both need to study. She tells herself that whenever she has to sacrifice fruit or new underwear to the internet connection.

In its evocation of setting, the novel is specific and textured: Makereti is strong on both domestic spaces and the natural world. It’s frustrating, then, that almost everything about the background and culture of Sera, husband Adam and daughter Aliana – their ‘home country’, as Sera implausibly thinks of it – is vague. Sera, a point-of-view character, is descended from ‘people’ who ‘come from dry mountain territory’ and then moved to ‘the cities below.’ The country they’ve fled is ‘in Europe’ though they had to travel north, not south, to reach the sea; they lived in a city that ‘stretched more than an hour’s travel in every direction.’

When Janet mentions Ali Baba, Sera thinks ‘Wrong culture, entirely’, and it seems as though they may be Jewish. Sera and Aliana have Hebrew names. Adam, the swamp tells us, is ‘named for the Christian and Jewish and Muslim first man’ and his ‘people have been wandering a long time.’ Sera tells Janet ‘the name her country is given in the English-speaking world’ but the reader never learns it. Their rituals and beliefs are kept largely off-stage, like most memories that pre-date their ordeals as refugees. Sometimes Sera ‘is back in the past, trying to conjure the taste and smell of that world’, but those tastes and smells are not revealed. At the birthday party for Aliana, Keri advises Sera on ‘balloons and streamers, chippies, drinks and musical chairs’ and on ‘what party foods should be on an authentic Kiwi child’s birthday list, modified by cultural preferences, of course.’ But what might Sera and Adam’s ‘cultural preferences’ include?

When Janet arrives bearing local biscuits, she makes the rounds of her non-white neighbours to ‘define what New Zealand is to her: Country Calendar—that was one—sheepdog trials and sheepshearing, A&P shows and gumboots and jandals, pavlovas and Footrot Flats.’  She has no interest in ‘their cultures, but she hears about them anyway because it’s all they ever talk about.’ But what cultures? What stories? What languages?

From all the point-of-view characters apart from Sera we learn much more, about fathers who beat and bullied, of a daughter who has married into a Christian cult, of tūpuna, of Sydney, of Ireland. We learn names. To strip most of that specificity from Sera’s point of view means she and Adam – blameless, beleaguered – feel like representatives of the displaced rather than as complex individuals.

The voice of the actual mire (‘Swamp Mother’) is the book’s linking narrative device. The unit block denizens are like ‘everyone who belongs to my swampy waters, no matter how far they and their ancestors have travelled.’ Māori, Pākehā, tauiwi: all are now of this place. Some iwi and hāpu were once refugees, and Keri has spent twelve years in Australia, ‘another life in another country that wasn’t her home.’ Sera, Keri feels, ‘is the one person she can think of who has come out of exile, like her, and who has known shame and hunger’.

Staying in the place you belong isn’t an option for people who’ve been ‘at the centre of a flood, a fire storm, a terrorist attack.’ In The Mires, a novel of messages, this is perhaps the most pointed and controversial: that outsiders can belong here, and that all of us – just like that – can become outsiders, whatever our whakapapa. ‘I have no borders,’ says the swamp. Even a bigoted Pākehā like Janet ‘is my daughter as much as anyone.’

The Mires sounds the warning: humanity may try to pollute and control and build over nature, but while nature may be damaged, it remains mighty. ‘Swamp runs beneath everything … even though you have drained and paved and dammed us,’ as the swamp says. ‘Just watch how we rise after an earthquake, reclaiming the land with our wet.’ The world existed before people, the novel reminds us: the swamp was ‘primordial twitching ooze’ and ‘prehistoric reptilian bird lands’ before it became an ‘ancient food storehouse.’ Nature is better off without us, but without nature – and without community – we can’t survive.