Kia ora koutou, haere mai ki te wiki o te reo Maori. My daily use of te reo Maori is hampered by not speaking it very well, being scared of making mistakes, and feeling awkward, guilty and shy around fluent speakers and thinking its easier to remain silent.
When I was young there were lots of things in this category of silence. It was the fashion for young married women to gather for morning tea at each other’s houses where each hostess tried to outdo the last in baking and table settings, embroidered tablecloths, flash china, silver teaspoons and cake forks. We talked about things like fashion, gardens, shopping and the price of groceries but we never talked about sex, men, religion, politics, books like Catcher in the Rye or Dr Shivago or the uselessness of competing for the best morning tea. Menstruation or the horrible pads we used was never mentioned.
These morning teas were enjoyable though because in those times they were the only occasion young married women met to spend time with their own age group and gender. The rest of their lives were bound by custom which decreed that once you were married you didn’t go out to work.
The value for me was simply being in company with other women around my age and listening to them talk which was fascinating. They were kind, hospitable, generous and I admired their social ease, the way they knew what to say and how to say it. These morning teas were a crash course in how the other half lives and I loved them for their novelty and strangeness and because they opened a door in my mind. Cake forks?
It wasn’t a surprise that I didn’t know the things they knew so I sat and listened and smiled, sipped tea and ate scones, a slice of fruit loaf and then a slice of cake. This sequence was part of the ritual. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d ignored the scone and the slices of fruit loaf, ignored the cake fork, grabbed a piece of cake in my fingers and taken a huge unladylike bite. It never even entered my head to do this anyway. I was like that old print of Jesus which some had hanging on their wall which showed a tall figure with a beard lurking in a doorway and had a few cautionary words underneath, The silent listener at every meal...which I found and still find very creepy.
Now of course one could see these morning teas as a total waste of time, the talk empty, even frivolous, the aims to outdo each other in setting, china, baking, as superficial and time–wasting, but these things were just the decorations. Underneath, although never spoken of, was what we knew about each other that we never talked about. If you live in a small place you can’t help but know if someone’s husband gets drunk, if another someone is getting a bit too friendly with the insurance agent who seems to call fairly frequently, you know that your hostess has gone into hock to buy that beautiful new table and chairs, and you know there was a big row about it. So when you visited you talked about everything else and pretended the world was kind and golden because it made that particular woman feel that everything was okay, that whatever had happened since the last gathering was simply not important because here we were enjoying the morning tea, each other’s company, creating a cosy little hour when all seemed okay in this world where we used cake forks.
So this year instead of wasting time being scared, I’m going to really get to know the tenses in te reo Maori, because as one woman said to me, you get those right and then its simply a matter of enlarging your vocab. She was being kind, there are a lot of other things to learn as well but learning the tenses is a start. So Ka…ki te…kei hea…i hea…here I come. Kei te haere au ki te korero te reo Maori (not sure of this structure but someone will tell me) and not just for this week. I’ve got an ebook on the language so I can make the type large and go for it. And homai te pakipaki there’s no cake forks involved…
Renée
