Witi Ihimaera Smiler is back on the high-dive board at the municipal pool. The highest of the platforms, to which very few ever venture.
Far below is his target, but not the generously deep and wide expanse of the diving pool. Rather, he’s aiming to splash down through the neck of a beer bottle.
This, figuratively, is the task he has set himself.
Literally, he’s taking the plunge into a trilogy written entirely in te reo Māori. So, a feat that almost certainly comes with a much higher degree of difficulty.
"It’s going to be difficult because I am having to change my writing process, one I’ve relied on for 50 years," he says.
"But I’ll start the research phase and word/world building soon. Then go to the bank and get a loan to tide me over, take a deep breath, do the dive and hope to hell I’ll end up in that beer bottle far below."
They will be Ihimaera’s first novels entirely in te reo Māori, after a lifetime of writing about te ao Māori in English, "writing in plain sight", as he puts it.
It is now possible for the internationally celebrated writer because of his decision, a couple of years ago, to go back to school, aged 80. In 2024 he enrolled at Takiura’s rumaki reo course, a total immersion fulltime, full-year course with a daunting reputation.
By the end of the course, students must stand to speak, deliver whakapuaki, for an hour, in te reo Māori anake (only), without notes.
For Ihimaera, those orations involved much the same high-dive courage.
"Lucky I don’t get vertigo," he says.
"A lot of times I missed and went splat. Ah well, try again."
While we wait for the trilogy, we now have his account of the Takiura experience, detailed in a new book that mixes rich memoir as it goes.
"The book that I have written about my journey thus far, Te Kaikaukau: The Swimmer i te ao o te reo, is kind of like a signpost, half in English, half in te reo, showing my stepping out on that rori hou o pereki kōwhai (new yellow brick road)," he says.
Of course, none of this was necessary, in as much as Ihimaera’s reputation is beyond secure.
The Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (one of the honours from the brief moment when we consigned knights and dames to history. Most of those so awarded later traded them in for "Sir" or "Dame", but not Ihimaera) was the first Māori to publish a novel, Tangi (1973), has since that time written any number of New Zealand classics, The Matriarch, Bullibasha and The Whale Rider among them, several of which became movies — then there are the memoirs, the plays, the librettos, the children’s books, the investigations into pūrākau ... Add to those achievements his career as a diplomat and academic.
Nothing left to prove.
Yet, Ihimaera disputes that.
"I thought, well, yeah, I do have to prove something," he says.
"I have to prove that te reo is absolutely a gift to our country and that through it, we will be able to recreate that Waitangi partnership linguistically."
As a bicultural country we might, through the language, "create optional ways of thinking and writing ourselves into existence".
Then there was the request from his father, Tom Smiler.
"My father, Tom, appeared to me in 2023 in a way that some people might think spooky, as Dad had died in 2010 — now I know how Hamlet felt.
"Dad reminded me that time was ticking by. Since 1972 I have created a 50-year career as a published Māori writer writing entirely in English. But I still have to whakawhanake he pukapuka auaha i te reo anake, publish a novel in te reo only.
"In answering to Dad’s gentle reminder, I will of course bow to the onamata (past) and the anamata (future), the world of our ancient origins and the world of āpōpō (tomorrow)."
The kaupapa, the intention, is to nurture the children of today, he says, quoting the whakataukī at the heart of the kohanga reo movement, Morimoria a tātou tamariki, ko rātou hoki te iwi o āpōpō. Cherish our children, for they are the people of tomorrow.
For Ihimaera, going back to school, to Takiura, meant stepping away from an already busy life to make space to study.
Witi Ihimaera and daughter Olivia on graduation day at Takiura, 2024.
"You’re timing yourself out of your ordinary life to embark on an extraordinary journey. You have to have stamina, as immersion is not for sissies. But the rewards are ... extraordinary, which sounds much more physical and transformational in its Māori usage, whakaharahara."
The thing here is that, as readers of his work will know, Witi Ihimaera began his life in the small te reo Māori speaking village of Waituhi, near Gisborne — which has doubled as the setting for many of his novels. So, there’s every chance that Ihimaera’s experience was one of regaining, rather than gaining, proficiency in te reo.
"Learning te reo became not only a reclamation of language but also a reclamation of my world and confrontation with loss," he says.
At Takiura, he helped set up a forum so students could talk about the trauma of language loss.
"Some of us cried. Others were angry. Some were really pissed," he writes.
All this at the same time as the nation was debating the Act Party’s Treaty Principles Bill, widely regarded as, among other things, a direct attack on te reo Māori. The politics of the Bill were an ever present background noise to the school’s extracurricular activities, visits to marae, to honour the passing of a king in the Waikato and the coronation of a new queen.
"Therefore, language immersion was also cultural immersion. This was why Te KaiKaukau became not only a workbook of what happened at Takiura but a historical analysis or memoir of what happened to a boy from Waituhi as he traversed the colonial boundaries that all indigenous people have been challenged by."
Profoundly, Ihimaera was confronting who he was. Which is to say, a Smiler or an Ihimaera. The author on the cover of Te Kaikaukau, is Witi Ihimaera Smiler.
"To clarify, I took up the name Witi Ihimaera at 15 when I sat school certificate, as an act of whakamana and rangatiratanga, as my political identity," he explains.
"The ‘Smiler’ part of it, given by missionaries to my grandfather, I have discarded for some 65 years — though of course iwi and whānau know me by that surname.
"But that part was the colonised part of my life and didn’t really belong in the ‘authorised’ narrative or version of it. When I finished writing the book, however, I realised that I needed to acknowledge that boy’s survival. Te Kaikaukau is his story."
It involved a huge psychic release, Ihimaera writes in the book, when Witi Ihimaera bent his forehead and nose to Witi Smiler.
"The draining away of years of doubt about myself, even self-hatred.
"The constructed self, making mihi to the real self."
Ihimaera’s year at Takiura involved further revelations about how to be whole and be well as Māori in Aotearoa — that language, te reo, was central, fundamental.
"Ko te reo Māori te kākahu o te whakaaro." (Māori language empowers the pathway to a hopeful world.)
It was, the fifth oranga (cornerstone of wellbeing).
"There have been four oranga since Mason Durie proposed them in 1984: oranga hinengaro, oranga wairua, oranga ngākau and oranga tinana," Ihimaera explains.
"They embody the four realms of health that we should aspire to to make us healthy and safe within the body personal and politic.
"The idea of the fifth oranga came to me around the end of the first term at Takiura. Fifty years after Mason concocted them, I saw my classmates blossoming as they learnt te reo, uaua (difficult) though it was, at all its moments of exhilaration and acceleration. I felt that it should be added as the necessary activation oranga for the first four to operate by. The original title of Te Kaikaukau, in its first draft about the experience of language immersion, was The Fifth Oranga."
So, Witi Ihimaera Smiler safely navigated the Takiura experience, sometimes fearing "immersion" might involve drowning, but ultimately keeping his head above water, right up to and including that final whakapuaki, standing to speak in te reo Māori for an hour — he both spoke and sang — so that all that remains is for him to write his novel in te reo rangatira.
He gave himself two years, post the course, to fix the language in place, before beginning.
But it’s no simple thing. Ihimaera is determined it will not be the writer doing the same thing he has always done but in another tongue, writing in te reo but within a horopaki (context) Pākehā.
He’s moving on from the rules of the coloniser.
"I guess the puzzle has always been how to represent the iwi Māori in fiction in ways that are clear and based on kaupapa, tikanga, whakapapa and rangatiratanga," he says.
"I could only go so far in English and according to its structure and narrative, let alone linguistic traditions, by warping myself — or them — to fit."
The new writing will emerge from te ao Māori informed by its pūrākau (legends), karakia (prayers), waiata (songs) and whakataukī (proverbs).
They will appear intertextually, much as a writer in English might work Shakespeare into their own text, he says.
"I’m really excited by the opportunity to create subtext through karakia and try to also involve the singing nature within sentences.
"That, I think, is one of the gifts that comes from my understanding and my better engagement during the year."
The multidimensional nature of kupu Māori (words) opens new possibilities too, the elasticity of te reo.
"It has so many wormholes, or, if you like, rabbit holes, that no sooner do we think that we’ve got it pinned down, then all of a sudden, you know, because it can have these many faces and have these many meanings, what it will do to you is that it will lead you on another kind of chase."
Rerenga (sentences) Māori, with their different structure — verb first, then subject and object — will empower new formulations.
"The redevelopment of sentences from a Māori point of view, I think it’s going to surprise myself out of my current competencies in English."
Then there’s the voice favoured by the best speakers of te reo Māori — and the bane of many learners’ experience — the hāngū, the passive voice.
"I love the hāngū!," Ihimaera says.
"I’m trying myself out at Māori hui and am getting puzzled looks from people who wonder what the heck I am saying, so I’m probably doing it wrongly right now," he says.
However, it’s shaping as an important element of the novel.
"What it will do is that it will place emphasis on the subject of the novel and in that way subvert the usual English unfolding of the novel through character.
"I’m just exploring these notions, but it seems to me that if I use hāngū, then it will displace the English assumptions that I’ve made whenever I’ve created my work in English, you know, that this is how an English sentence unfolds or evolves. And I think it might bring a different kind of worldview, a different kind of psychological view and return the viewpoint not on the individual, but on the whānau. So, I think what I’ll end up with is a more tribally oriented text and not an individually oriented text."
The hour is approaching when all this learning will be put into practice, on paper.
"The good news is that although 2025 was very busy — catching up on what I had set aside of my life while at Takiura, chairing a new Māori writer organisation, rehearsing my play Tiri Te Araroa, completing the three books that will come out this year, travelling to Rūrutu and France, let alone Waituhi, being a granddad and all that — I was able to trial three options," Ihimaera says.
That feat of high-board athleticism might have landed in various places, but in the end splashed down on a trilogy set in te ao tāwhito, in history.
"The first book will be called Waenga, Between," he says.
"I will be writing for a Māori audience but also for Pākehā, that won’t change," he says.
"Except they’ll have to know te reo to do it."
