Poorhara
by Michelle Rahurahu

This ‘is a story about a couple of cousins on their haerenga,’ Erin, one of the two main characters in Michelle Rahurahu’s debut novel, tells Star (Whetuu), not long before a cop threatens them with a taser. They’re on a cross-country journey to find their true home. They are both ‘starved of connection,’ Star realises. ‘He thought about his dad’s constant assertion that no one in the family knew themselves—ko wai au, ko wai au—maybe if they went back to the whenua there would be an answer to satisfy him.’

This is a desperate last measure rather than a fun road trip. Star is at his lowest point: failing out of university, struggling to pay rent and parking tickets for his dying Daihatsu Mira, dumped by his wealthy but abusive boyfriend, strung out from cocktails of ‘weed, vodka and Ritalin,’ and in increasing pain from ‘year-long toothache’. He returns from Auckland to the family home, in a ‘small village’ somewhere near Rotorua, for his koro’s birthday, but the house is chaotic. Star has ‘avoided’ his father, Joe, for three years and seethes about familial expectations: ‘his koro was the eldest boy, his father was the eldest boy, he was the eldest boy. They were supposed to move together, like the spikes of a crown, joined at the hip.’

He’s close to nineteen-year-old Erin, a ‘cringey kid who was obsessed with looking hardcore’, stuck at home in a leaky bedroom looking after everyone else’s grandchildren. ‘She had a way with kids,’ Star observes. ‘She had a way with everyone. And she was right about everything in a way even she didn’t understand.’ To Erin, Star’s move north suggested a possible escape. ‘He had it made: he was going to get a degree, get a good job, and maybe be someone she could follow out of the dark.’ The ‘best outcome’ she can imagine for herself is ‘getting a job picking fruit in a bigger city, or living in her own little shed by the beach’. Her uncle and aunts all have service jobs that require a uniform polo:

Joe wore a polo to teach tourists how to paddle; Mags wore a polo to sell souvenirs; Ann wore a polo to clean. Ann’s was the worst. She had to wear the ugly black uniform with Cleaning Kiwi stitched on the breast pocket.

Everyone ‘in a polo shirt was part of one big homogenous machine,’ Erin thinks. When she helps Ann, who is deaf, on a cleaning job at a flash lakeside house, she witnesses her aunt’s humiliation (‘please explain to your aunty that the side door is for the cleaners—not the front door’). Their own ‘family commune’, as Star calls it, has a giant yellow M painted on the roof to direct tourists to the McDonald’s a kilometre away. The rose garden planted and tended by Erin’s late mother, Tanea, has been dug up and destroyed.

Erin has her own pain: she spends ‘a lot of nights screaming into her pillow or burning lines into the soft flesh of her arms.’ Her mother, Tanea, committed suicide: she ‘ran away to the great night and never came back.’ The identity of her father is one of ‘everyone’s burdens and their secrets’ that Tanea took to the grave. Erin is an adept shoplifter, and longs for the security money offers. ‘Money bought happiness,’ she thinks. ‘Money bought Identity.’ The novel’s title is a take on pōhara, a loan word meaning poverty. At a disastrous family meal at the beginning of the novel, Star student-splains Māori ‘hardships’ to his father – ‘Poorer health outcomes, poorer education’. Joe decries the word ‘poor’ as ‘a collar … I work hard, I make the system work for me’. When he says that ‘Te Arawa are hard workers,’ Star mutters ‘More like slaves’.

On the road, their stops range from dispiriting to disastrous. They acquire, lose and chase a flea-ridden dog; they’re tormented by zealots and racists – Christians, police, community patrols, shopkeepers, librarians. They get thrown out of McDonalds; they almost get thrown off a bus. A cafe worker who Star describes as a ‘loser … droopy-eyed and unkempt’ coerces Erin into a disturbing sexual encounter. Star’s beloved car, their only place to sleep, has to be abandoned.

They visit Huia, Star’s long-absent mother, who is ‘touched with an aura of hostilty.’ Huia is living in a hostel and tells Erin that the family are ‘stuck in this poverty mindset, a victim mindset, we prove the Paakehaas right by being as lazy as they think we are.’ A visit to volatile cousin Nat, who rows with her gang-member boyfriend and knows she’s perceived as a ‘shitty mum’ to her three kids, is even worse. Nat tells them the ‘whole whaanau’s cursed’ and lives in fear of losing her kids:

Everyone goes on about child poverty and how we gotta fix it. Oh, we need warmer houses, we need to put the parents through [a] course. I’ve been to all those courses, cuz, I’ve sat in every room that they’ve told me to sit in, I’ve gone to every clinic there is to fix my life—but you know what every piece-of-shit administrator or social worker or pig really wants? They want to find a reason to take the kids away and raise them in perfect little white houses and leave me to die for the sin of bringing them into the world.

To Erin’s horror, Nat is turned away, screaming and crying, from a mental health facility for ‘harassing staff.’ Star begins to fear that Erin is ‘merely a younger version of him, falling for the same traps’, one of a ‘long line of terrified children who clung to anything that floated.’ She sees herself as ‘untethered from the world’, believing that ‘nothing was permanent—not triumph nor sorrow.’

The literary references in Poorhara are pointed. Erin writes a line by Maya Angelou on her arm with a Sharpie (‘There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you’) and mentions the celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston: ‘She’d read some Hurston online and it made her cry because she would never be that good’. In Erin’s style of texting (‘ur d@d prob thort u w3re busi / dnt b ah s00k / + eye hvnt s33n u n agez’) the author may be echoing Hurston’s use of the vernacular. But it’s not clear if Erin has actually read the work of Hurston or just read the quote she cites later in the novel: ‘If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’

This is a popular reference for writers of colour – Carmen Maria Machado, for example, uses it as the epigraph for her 2019 memoir In the Dream House – though it’s a meme rather than an actual quote. Neither of Hurston’s biographers mention it; it is not from any of Hurston’s novels or essays or her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. It’s probably a misquote of something Alice Walker wrote in Possessing the Secret of Joy: ‘If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.’ (In 1973 Walker paid for a headstone for Hurston’s unmarked grave in Florida and helped instigate the rediscovery of her work.)

Hurston’s most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), explores the effects on Black women of sexism and male violence, within a context of ongoing societal oppression. This might suggest the relevance of Hurston to Poorhara. But my characterisation of Their Eyes Were Watching God is a revisionist feminist interpretation, shaped fifty years after the book was published, and Hurston herself would have seen it as reductionist. Still, Hurston’s exploration of female experience mystified some of her peers and the novel was criticised by both Richard Wright and Alain Locke for refusing to engage with, or protest, the overwhelming issues of social injustice Black Americans faced. Locke longed for a ‘sharp analysis of the social background’. Wright, still three years away from publishing Native Son, decried it as a novel with ‘no theme, no message, no thought.’

Hurston was unrepentant. In her 1938 essay ‘Art and Such’ she lamented:

Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back … [His] background thrusts itself between his lips and the star and he mutters, ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and I shall be considered forgetful of our past and present. If I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject [for a Black writer] … is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again to the detriment of art.

Is Poorhara an example of ‘the same old theme’? Like The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa, another recent debut novel, Poorhara can feel relentlessly bleak and too obvious in its political points, often leaning towards melodrama. Too much of the writing is clunky, reliant on adverbs, with cliches like ‘furrowed brow’ used more than a dozen times. ‘The streets were semi-crowded with a mix of people,’ Erin observes, though in other scenes the book can be more visceral and particular in its details. The cousins toast ‘gritty realism’ and that’s what the novel offers, with its abandoned journey and return to the family home Star sought to escape.

In her 1928 essay ‘How It feels to Be Colored Me’, Zora Neale Hurston insisted there was ‘no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, not lurking behind my eyes’. She did, however, admit to feeling an outsider as the only Black student at Barnard College (Columbia University):

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Star’s university experience is quite different: he is eroded by his life in Auckland, corrupted. He can’t remain himself because he isn’t confident about any aspect of his identity: queer, Māori, student, son, ariki, adult. There is indeed a ‘great sorrow dammed up’ inside him and in the novel’s final act it pours out, engulfing him. Aunty Ann signs a message to Erin that Star is ‘special’:

We need them to get better. We’re waiting for them to come home. I believe this is happening to bring them home … The outside world is very harsh. If we’re all together, we can focus on looking after each other and create a place for the people like Star to come back to. Do you understand?

Erin wonders if she and Star ‘did it wrong’: they should have made the journey to the whenua ‘as a whaanau. As a hapuu.’ Early in the novel Star compares their journey with the Odyssey, where a returning soldier ‘spends ten hours trying to get home because he keeps getting lost. Or like, thwarted.’ When Erin says that has ‘a Maaui vibe,’ Star agrees: ‘It’s basically the same story.’ But the mythic stories offer no simple solutions, as Erin comes to realise. ‘A lot of the stories she learned as a kid had a problem being solved by someone offering a piece of themselves—literally. Usually that person was a waa.’

Star feels a profound disconnect with the past and the ancestors who were ‘capable, strong, masculine young men … on the prow of a boat’ or ‘locked in an epic fight.’ There’s a difference between ‘knowledge stored in a box and knowledge held in your bones, and he wasn’t sure if it was something that could ever be restored.’ Their return to the flawed and familiar makes their road trip seem less Odyssey than Oz: in Poorhara, there is no place like home.