Tina Makereti © Ebony Lamb
In Aotearoa New Zealand’s electric contemporary literary scene, Tina Makereti is a Māori novelist, essayist, scholar, and cultural worker with an unmistakable voice whose prose is embedded with ancestry, land, and the multifaceted spectrum of Māori storytelling. Her long-awaited nonfiction debut, This Compulsion In Us (out now from Te Herenga Waka University Press), is a compelling declaration to a legacy and lifelong exploration of the ties that bind place, memory, and identity. From her earlier novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (2014) to her latest The Mires (2025), these imperative themes are a steady presence throughout her oeuvre. Now, in her essay collection, Dr Makereti turns her fearless, unblinking gaze inward and outward, oscillating between memoir and scholarship, poetry and reportage, to probe the compulsions—artistic necessities, colonial histories, ancestral ties—in us.
Dr Makereti brings to light how a Māori worldview, where past and present, individual and collective, are one, is core to her craft. She deliberates on the ethical commitments of Indigenous writers across Oceania, and her vision for an Aotearoa literature that dares to transcend established literary genres and forms.
In this conversation, which spans from northern Aotearoa to the southern Philippines, Dr Makereti shows us the manifold ways in which the essay becomes a vessel of place-based writings, the systemic inequalities in contemporary New Zealand publishing, and how to witness the land itself and the stories it has to tell.
—Alton Melvar M Dapanas, October 2025
Alton Melvar M Dapanas: Congratulations on your nonfiction debut, This Compulsion In Us (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025)! It’s an ingenious work that symphonises memoir, journalistic reportage, poetry, and critical enquiry. Many of these essays first appeared in reputed venues like Adda, Sport, and Journal of New Zealand Studies, as well as anthologies including Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2023) and collections by Massey University Press, Penguin Random House, and Te Papa Press, with several receiving accolades from Landfall and the Royal Society of New Zealand. Could you tell me how this collection came to be? And how did working across decades on these creative-critical essays differ from your process with fictional novels like The Mires (2024) and Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (2014)?
Tina Makereti: I have loved reading personal essays since I was a teenager, before I really understood anything about creative nonfiction and its different forms, so when I started to write seriously, I was naturally drawn to writing essays alongside fiction. In fact, essays probably came first. When I began studying creative writing, life writing was the first course I took, followed closely by fiction. With fiction, I knew I had to learn the craft and how to write something made-up from start to finish. But I had an aptitude for creative nonfiction immediately. It was a very natural thing for me to do. This Compulsion in Us collects all of the essays that I wrote while I was writing short stories and novels. Each major fiction project has at least one essay attached to it, and these were often published in journals or books. Writing is thinking; fiction and nonfiction allow me to do that thinking in really different ways about the same topics.
And an essay collection is something I’ve always wanted to make, though I was happy to let it evolve rather than do it all at once. When I decided it was time to make my essays into a book, everything collected together felt to me like I was yelling for 200 pages, because so much of it was what I call ‘kaupapa’ essays (essays about urgent topics), so I decided the book needed more observational essays to give it texture and shape and breathing space. The new essays that were written specifically for the book turned out to be mainly memoir, and that’s when my dad turned up and made it all about him!
The book sort of grew into its title, which comes from a 2015 essay with the same title. In the context of that one essay, the title was about the strange compulsions humans have, whether it’s collecting specimens for a museum or drinking or going to museums or freak shows. Compulsion means drive, but also some element of not having complete control. Compulsion can also be being made to do something. As the book grew, the compulsion became more and more the urge to write, especially to write things that are complex, not easily defined or understood; to write because that is what one is compelled to do, and the writing is necessary, even if it is necessary only to this life. The writing became an act of witness and testimony, I’ve realised. To say it was healing or that I had to put down my truth, as some have said about their nonfiction, doesn’t feel quite right. It’s something much more complex and contradictory than that, and not heroic or brave, but I don’t mind saying it’s a witnessing. Writing in this way means you might end up hurting or alienating someone, so I don’t feel completely safe or justified in it. But it must be done, and it was important that I do it, for myself and my loved ones. And because I don’t know any other way to live this life I’ve been given.
Alongside this, colonisation is full of compulsion, and that lives inside us now, whether we choose for it to be there or not. My personal story of colonisation has been beautifully symbolised by the tragic and painful marriage between my Māori mother and my Pākehā father. Layered on that, my and my sister’s forced displacement from our Māori family when I was between the ages of two and sixteen. My life was a series of stark and traumatic fractures until well into adulthood, and I’ve been writing to give it meaning ever since. But I’m grateful for those events in that they gave me, looking back, the gift of insight. So to bring it back to the start, the compulsion to write allows me to prise apart and examine those other compulsions.
Dapanas: Speaking of writing as a necessary act of witness, one of your most compelling essays in This Compulsion In Us, ‘The Story That Matters’, meditates on the lack of diverse narratives—Māori, Pasifika, im/migrant, queer, disabled, and others—in Aoteaoroa literature, despite their existence in ‘small quantities, often in small presses.’ What specific structural barriers do marginalised writers face in gaining visibility, equity, and power within the broader publishing industry? How might a more inclusive literary wharenui, as you’ve metaphorically described it, help dismantle these?
Makereti: To be honest, I think there’s a lot of focus on publishing as the issue and, in Aotearoa at least, publishers are actually very keen to publish Māori and Pasifika writers. We’ve had this huge burgeoning of publications of Māori writers since I wrote ‘The Story that Matters’ and ‘Poutokomanawa’. Māori writers are published in every kind of publication too: mainstream, commercial, independent, Māori-owned and not-Māori-owned. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. Racism and cultural bias are deeply ingrained, often invisible traits that emerge through every process, from choosing a cover to editing. Personally, I haven’t necessarily found Māori publishing to be a safer space than more commercial presses either.
It’s funny (and not funny) when younger Māori writers come along and say, ‘Look at how few of us are published or recognised’. Even in recent memory, there are a lot more than there were even 5 or 6 years ago. There has been astonishing growth. When I started 15 or so years ago, I was most often the only Māori in the room, in almost any room. It was years into my practice that I even met any other Māori writers, apart from those in my Masters cohort. Now there’s always a group of us at any event or in any anthology. Publications of works by immigrant, diasporic, and disabled writers are increasingly flourishing, for example, but we can always do better.
Though there’s always more to do, and we can’t get complacent, as the current political climate shows. So, to actually answer your question, I have always thought the structural barriers go much deeper than the publishing industry itself. Ironically, I feel structural inequality now more than I ever have, because I have reached some sort of upper-middle-class income parity as a university lecturer, and even with that, I recognise that I am a lot poorer than my colleagues. I feel like I will never catch up, but at the same time, I feel quite astonished to even be here. What I’ve learnt, the hard way, is that intergenerational poverty comes with inherited material and physical debt that doesn’t disappear just because you finally get paid a decent amount for what you do. And my debts run deep.
I always end up talking about money because poverty is a massive issue in terms of who gets to write, but what I’m really talking about is intergenerational wealth, which is based on land ownership. Our lands were taken away several generations ago, and with it, our wealth, and we have been working-class ever since. Working-class people are too busy working to put food on the table and pay the rent. Working-class people can’t afford lengthy and expensive higher education. Add racism to that equation, which equals shorter lives and more chronic ill-health (see ‘Lumpectomy’ for more on that!), and it becomes pretty clear why there are so few Māori (and Pasifika and immigrant) people who have the luxury of writing. There are so many voices that will go unheard because they will never have time to sit down and do the long apprenticeship that writing requires, and then take a few years for each writing project.
Honestly, it’s an incredible accident that I managed to do it, and continue to do so. It takes pure bloody-mindedness sometimes. And dumb luck.
We can change that, so easily. Ireland has just established its Basic Income for Artists, after they discovered that for every $1 they spent on artists, they made a $1.39 return on their investment. Our arts economy, and our Māori economy, are worth billions. We should invest in them. But we also need to ensure that investment goes all the way through the education system. Publishing is the last stage of a lifelong process.
Dapanas: Mentioning intergenerational poverty and access as barriers leads to questions on how we think and how we create. In essays like ‘Meeting the Ancestor on the Road’ and ‘Taonga’, you write with clarity the Māori worldview of place and self as inseparable, questioning Western binaries that demarcate nature from culture, individual from collective, and past from present. How does this ontological labyrinth, so elemental to Māori epistemology, colour your creative practice?
Makereti: I think ‘Meeting the Ancestor on the Road’ is a good example of me trying to write my way towards an answer to that question, so it might be something that needs a 4000-word answer! However, I can probably say that essay—strangely, since it is a form that might be seen as very Western and contemporary—is an extraordinary way to interrogate a question, which is more of an esoteric, maybe spiritual, maybe epistemological, certainly kaupapa Māori question. I know that all my writing comes from a Māori worldview, no matter what it is about. That’s what underlies this worldview is whakapapa, aroha, manaakitanga, whanaungatanga. Connection, empathy, wonder, welcome, the web of layers that link us all to each other and the natural world. That might sound a bit too soft or sappy to writers who come very much from the Western intellectual tradition, but what it means is that I find myself fighting a lot of fights in my writing because so much of what is happening in the world now, and what has led to this, is so antithetical to any of those principles. It also gives me a centre to write from, something immovable and so very ancient and wise. I’m not particularly wise, but I’m lucky enough to have this tangible knowing to tap into through writing (the only way to get there, though, in my experience, is through embracing not knowing and fallibility).
Dapanas: And does writing from that ‘ancient and wise’ centre naturally lead to resisting literary categorisation in the form of the genre-defying and the hybrid? Does this resistance in your prose speak for a conscious decolonising of conventional structures of storytelling, or has it evolved organically from the intrinsic demands of the kind of stories you tell?
Makereti: Yes and yes. Both! The story always dictates the form, so if you are writing from an Indigenous perspective, it’s going to resist Western categorisation and convention. I have this wonderful, predominantly Indigenous writing workshop this year. It has been interesting how collectively the class has very little interest in Western conventions of genre, even those of us whose writing looks more conventional, or looks more genre. My work doesn’t actually often get characterised as genre-defying or hybrid, so it’s a pleasure to see it described that way. I think on the outside my fiction can appear conventional in form, while there are universes of experimentation packed inside—I’ll be looking at how form can give voice to Indigenous conceptions of time, or whakapapa, or our interrelationship with te taiao—the natural world, and sometimes reviewers will just miss it, or find it puzzling, or wonder why, for example, I have chosen to not name where a character comes from or have had a character speak directly to the reader about what a book is saying. My decision-making is not based entirely on what is designated as good and proper in Western conventions around writing, and sometimes I will directly contradict those conventions. I’m not interested in following conventions just because they’re conventions, but it can be frustrating when readers come with expectations and can’t see beyond those.
My nonfiction, on the other hand, is more openly experimental in form, though I tend to just think it’s very messy and without borders. It encompasses all forms, so it can be poetic, it can peek into the territory of fiction, it can do all the things I try to do in fiction without blinking. Fiction is the more conventional genre, that’s for sure.
Dapanas: Māori orality manifests in your essay ‘Twitch’, where the takarangi spiral motif symbolises Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao Mārama’s interplay. In what ways does the takarangi influence your approach to storytelling and your understanding of Māori mythohistories? And as your work reaches global readership through the US and UK editions of your books and their Spanish, Russian, and German translations, how do you navigate the responsibility and privilege of interpreting and presenting ancestral knowledge for a diverse audience?
Makereti: I LOVE this question! I don’t often get asked questions like this at home, and I wonder why. The takarangi spiral is sky and earth, light and dark, being and non-being, Te Ao Mārama and Te Pō or Te Kore. It is dark and light, time and the eternal, life and death, whakapapa, existence. It encompasses all good stories! I learnt how to read carved motifs as an undergrad student studying Māori Visual Arts with Robert Jahnke at Massey University, and those lessons stayed with me and the way I see and understand stories. Most of my writing will at some time spiral back and forth in time, balance dark and light, the intangible and tangible—the takarangi has always, back to those undergrad days, been an image that could encompass it all for me.
In terms of ancestral knowledge, that’s embedded in what I do, but it’s not something I draw from to commodify in a separate way, if that makes sense. Usually, it is inseparable from the art form of the newly created work. For example, some of the promotion of the US edition of The Mires described it as encompassing ‘Indigenous folklore’. I asked them not to use that phrase because there isn’t really any ‘folklore’ in the book. There are certainly cultural beliefs in the book, but all the stories are made up. I quite often try to protect specific ancestral knowledge by making things up. I use cultural information only where it is already in the public domain, published or readily available elsewhere.
Having said that, I don’t have full control. I can’t read the German, Russian or Spanish editions of my work, much as I would love to. At a certain point, you do have to let go and trust the people you work with. Sometimes people get things wrong. I tend to have faith in the story to translate its essential elements across cultures, though. I have a belief in Story as something greater and wiser than I am, that can reach across those borders between places and people.
Dapanas: This faith in ‘Story’ that transcends borders seems to be a guiding principle. How then did that expansive view shape the editorial vision behind Black Marks on the White Page (Vintage, 2017), an anthology which you co-edited with the trailblazing Witi Ihimaera? What was the imperative behind intentionally widening the circle of Pacific literature to include voices from Aboriginal Australia and First Nations? And how did these perspectives call into question and enrich at the same time the commonplace understanding of Oceania?
Makereti: I think it would surprise almost everyone beyond Australasia’s shores how separate Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia are in terms of almost everything, but particularly our literatures. There is almost no relationship at times. Is Australia part of the Pacific? Are New Zealand or Hawaiʻi? Of course, but in our own ways, we separate ourselves out. When we started the book, I wanted to acknowledge our wider whakapapa into the Pacific, instead of focusing only on Māori writers. Māori and Pasifika literary scholars have long talked about the ocean as a superhighway between the most vibrant and diverse collective of cultures and languages in the world. Us larger island nations who have a big enough population to have a strong literary tradition often become insular. Whakapapa, which is usually translated as genealogy, but which encompasses a whole way of seeing the world built on relationships, is the basis of Māori culture and the basis of all my critical and creative work. To edit an anthology in a whakapapa-based way, of course, we would move out beyond our shores to reconnect with a whakapapa that is much more ancient than colonisation. But it was Witi who then insisted that we therefore include First Nations Australians, expanding my notions of what the Pacific includes. Witi would have packed so much more into that book! But we had to be realistic page-wise, so we only had room to touch, briefly, on those other nations we don’t always include. We also had work from French Polynesia, Hawaiʻi, and even a Māori writer in Canada, another Pacific nation.
The thing about whakapapa is that it’s expansive and inclusive. It will always expand to include everyone (including animals, trees, sky and earth) if you keep going far enough. Western science understands this too: we’re all made of the same stuff, right? This is the general approach or principle that I find most resonant and instructive for writers: it’s all, always, about connection, humility, relationship. Where we are disconnected, which we are, mostly, as contemporary humans, how do we find our way back to wholeness?
Dapanas: Carrying that thought forward of the whakapapa as inherently expansive and inclusive, it feels like an extension to consider how your own stories travel on their own. For instance, your novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and your story ‘Black Milk’ won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. How do you feel about your work being received by international audiences, in particular, those unfamiliar with the specific cultural and historical nuances of Aotearoa?
Makereti: I think it’s long past time for Aotearoa literature to have more international reach. What I’ve discovered with The Mires is that things even I thought were local and specific are in fact universal.
People aren’t always going to get every layer of a work, and that’s okay. I love Jamaican, Sri Lankan, Indian, Chinese, and other Indigenous writing in English and even though I don’t always understand all the nuances of those cultures or their words or their worlds. But I connect. It’s incredibly exciting to me when people from around the world connect with a piece of writing I’ve made. I can only hope that the intent of the work is there in the tone and the images and the characters, even if readers don’t have an encyclopedic understanding of where I come from. In fact, I have very limited tolerance for everyone needing to know everything all the time. It’s completely okay to read a book and not know aspects of it. It will be an expansive experience anyway, perhaps even more so. Enjoy the mystery of that other culture. Laugh at your own ignorance when you don’t get something. Reading can be a joyful experience that way. And writing.
Dapanas: I love that idea of finding connection without needing to fully grasp everything. It’s such an exploratory and generous way of reading. Does that same philosophy find its way into your work in cultivating new voices? As a professor at the Creative Writing programme at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington and founding convenor of the Maori and Pasifika Writers Workshop, what is the foundational lesson you hope every student takes with them, particularly students who aspire to become writers?
Makereti: Do you know, I think it’s to treat the writing like work. Writing can be very sexy and romantic. Like, I’m joking, but I’m not. We LOVE writing, and when we’re into it, damn! It’s also spiritual. I have a lot of, no other words for it, spiritual experiences when I’m writing. That might sound a bit out there to certain people, but what I mean by that is that it’s expansive – it takes us beyond our own personal borders, beyond our small worlds and our small minds. We touch something bigger than us when we’re writing. We tap into something.
So you can see how all that might be a bit distracting or overwhelming or exciting. If you stay in that place all the time, you can get a bit lost. You might find yourself saying things like, ‘I can only write when I’m inspired’ or ‘I can’t show anyone my work because it’s too special/spiritual/cultural’ or ‘I don’t like to read other writers in case they influence my voice’. Uh-uh. One of the most massively useful things we can do as writers is get over ourselves. Sit down at the desk or lie down on the couch (I don’t care where you do it) and write. You are going to need to do that for a long time. Then you’re going to need to do rewrites and edits for a long time. Getting others to read your work helps. People you trust who get you. Reading other writers is professional development. Humility also helps.
And then there’s publishing, which is decidedly non-spiritual and non-sexy. And that’s a whole different type of work. None of us feels comfortable doing marketing, for example, but it’s part of the job. For the Indigenous writer, the only advice I can give is work with people who get what you’re about, work with people you feel comfortable with. If anyone, non-Indigenous or Indigenous, makes you feel uncomfortable, pay attention to that. There are no guarantees, even with your ‘own’. I have found that disregarding my gut feeling because someone is Indigenous and we should therefore be on the same side can have disastrous consequences. Colonisation has screwed us over in so many ways, and lateral violence can be more painful than regular old-fashioned prejudice. So, for me, the bottom line is: ‘Do I enjoy working with this person? Do they want the same things for my work that I want? Do they get it?’ And if they don’t get it all, are they at least aware of their own ignorance in certain areas? That’s so important.
Dapanas: In your writings and activism, you vividly envision a brighter future for Aotearoa literature. As we look ahead, what is your greatest hope for the literature of Aotearoa, and what responsibilities do you believe writers, readers, and the whole literary ecosystem (from editors to translators, from agents to publishers) communally hold in bringing that vision to reality?
Makereti: My greatest hope for the literature of Aotearoa is that we all have the liberation to write freely, to create without limits, to imagine beyond what has been imagined before, and that in doing so, we bring to bear our unique position in the world, and the beauty of our Indigeneity, on our literature. And, that this literature is read widely internationally and recognised for its extraordinary gifts.
In terms of our responsibilities, Indigenous writing is incredibly innovative, and one of my concerns is that we keep up with that and make room for that in our national literature. Genre? Indigenous writers often have a more expansive view, writing beyond what traditional Eurocentric literary models allow. But that doesn’t sit easily within bookstore or awards categories, for example, so we don’t yet have space to recognise the conversations that are happening within Indigenous literatures.
So I guess I’m saying that our responsibility is to keep up, and make space, as it has always been. That goes for the Pākehā literary world but also for us as Māori, Pasifika and Indigenous writers and professionals in the literary world. I think the mainstream often feel their duty is done if they bring in a Māori person to be on this or that judging panel or funding panel, or staff. But all of us need to interrogate what we think we’re looking for and allowing for in Māori literature. Many of us don’t have the capacity to read beyond the mainstream because we haven’t had that expansive education (our education system hasn’t allowed for it). So I think that sometimes, even if you have a Māori person on your team, you may still be reinforcing the way things have always been.
To be less abstract, I wonder if we need to have a conversation about aesthetics: I find our national aesthetics to still be modelled very closely on Western ideals. We are taught a very Eurocentric way of reading and writing, and where Māori succeed it is often in ways that are acceptable to the categories that model allows: mythological stories or stories of poverty and violence, for example. Aesthetically, when we are trying to move the conversation beyond that, and beyond conventional forms, I’m not sure it is recognised by the literary powers that be. It’s a complex problem, but if we are to progress, I think we have to allow Indigenous writing to bust apart what we think writing should do and be. Aren’t we tired of the same old forms and narratives? Don’t we yearn to be taken beyond that? I know I do.
This Compulsion In Us
(Wellington, Aotearoa: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 8 May 2025)
UK edition of The Mires
England, UK: Footnote Press
25 September 2025
US edition of The Mires
New York, USA: HarperVia
23 September 2025
Black Marks on the White Page, eds. Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti
(Auckland, Aotearoa: Vintage New Zealand, 2017)
Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings
(Auckland, Aotearoa: Vintage New Zealand, 2014)
