In 2008, director Gaylene Preston sent me into a tent at the Parihaka International Peace Festival, to see a poetry performance. I sat down on a beanbag near the front as a tall Maori man approached the microphone, cleared his throat, and began to weave his magic.
READING his poem Kapiti, Apirana Taylor (Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui and Te Ati Awa), addressed the spirit of great Maori war leader Te Rauparaha.
We watched mesmerised as he spoke, voice booming, of thundering haka, the lightning crack of the musket gun, and above it all the call of Te Rauparaha.
“Aaa ha haaa”, he screamed, and we all jumped in fright, never quite relaxing. At the poem’s close, with Te Rauparaha’s schemes and dreams lost in a rain of blood, the room was allowed a moment’s respite before Api continued on, exploring the entire spectrum of emotion.  We were moved to tears, as well as to sidesplitting laughter. His screams and crazed eyes instilled fear, and his passion was awesome.
As well as an internationally published poet, Api is an actor, storyteller, and writer of novels, plays and short stories. He performs with his guitar, named Aroha, a collection of taonga puoro, or traditional Maori instrumentation, and is sometimes joined by friends with other instruments. Every year since that first, I have returned to see Api perform, and each time the tent that houses him has grown. At the last festival hundreds lined the pews, aisles and ground, from grey-haired kaumatua to giggling children, all keen to catch a glimpse of the magic that is Apirana Taylor – a true people’s poet.
Api grew up between Khandallah, the East Coast north of Gisborne, and Bangkok – where his father was a diplomat with the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Writing is in his blood; Api’s father was a journalist, his sister Riwia Brown is most well known for writing the screenplay for Once Were Warriors, his brother is storyteller and actor Rangimoana Taylor, his cousin William Taylor is an award-winning writer for the young and his little sister Haina, who was killed last year in a car accident, wrote a couple of plays.
“I’ve got a few uncles and aunties on my pakeha side who had novels stuck under their beds too,” he says.
Api had a reverence for words from a very young age.
“In primary school the teacher would say, ‘Get out your crayons and we’ll do some art’ and all the kids would go, ‘Yaaaaay’. Then they’d say, “Now we’re gonna write a story’ and they’d all be going, ‘nooo’ while I was going, ‘yaaaaay’. I loved so much the beauty of language. I would play with lines in my head and think, ‘If you say that line that way people will remember it better’… and that was before I could read and write. I always dreamed of being a writer.”
Api lost his dream temporarily.
“I decided I wanted to be an All Black and didn’t start writing again until university… Except that I used to write all the boy’s love letters to their girlfriends in boarding school. There was some filthy stuff, and I’d mix it in with what I imagined Shakespeare would say, and charge a cigarette for every letter.”
Encouraged by others to make the most of his talents, Api enrolled at Massey University.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there,” he says.
One day Api switched on the television to see Alistair Campbell reading his poetry.
“I saw a brown face like me, and I cottoned on to some of his lines, and I thought, ‘that’s it - if he can do it, I can.’ So I sat down for two weeks to write the world’s greatest poem… I literally carpeted my floor with bits of screwed up paper – I hardly ate, I didn’t shave, I’d spend a day on one line, then cross it all out. After a week I had a poem that was 11 lines long. I packed up and left university the next day,” he says.
When people seek his credentials, Api says he’s from the Apirana Taylor School of Art, where he’s been a student for thirty years.
“I don’t want to diminish universities, there are things there that people want and that they feel will help them, and that’s a good thing. But I needed to look with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears.”
Api’s since made international trips on invitation, had his work translated into German, Italian and Russian, is present in most New Zealand anthologies, been awarded writers’ residencies at Massey and Canterbury University, Rangi Ruru School, St Andrews College and Hagley Community College, and was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residence in Creative Writing in 2002. He’s just returned from the Taranaki Arts Festival where a successful collaboration with musician friends has led to the formation of a new band, Mauri Ora. Before he hit the road, Api finished the first draft of a novel that his sister is already talking about turning into a film. This week he will talk at Te Papa, as part of an artists’ response to the Oceania exhibition.
“My grandmother used to tell us a parable about God and three servants. God gave them all some money, one went and buried it and God said, ‘you’re hopeless’, and another saved it and got told off, but the third one invested it and made it bigger, and God said, ‘well done’. I think everyone’s got a gift, and that people think too much of failure when for a start just being born is a tremendous success. We’ve all had pots of gold given to us, and it’s our responsibility to make them bigger.”
See Apirana Taylor speak at Art After Dark: Oceania, Oceania, August 18, The Marae, Te Papa.
Melody Thomas