He reo hapa e taea te whakatika, he reo ngū e kore e taea.
You can correct broken language, but you can’t correct language that is not spoken.
– Te Korou Whangataua
Brand new to Māori+, Āku Hapa! is unlike any cooking show you’ll ever watch. Hosts James Dansey(Ngāruahine, Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) and Eda Tang (Ngāi Haina) chop, squeeze and stumble their way through a recipe, speaking only te reo Māori. The catch? Their vocabulary is limited, much like the many learners of te reo Māori across the motu.
It’s not a coincidence that the name means both ‘my dinner’ and ‘my mistakes’. Although the spoken reo won’t always be perfect, the English subtitles, which are direct translations, will show when mistakes are made. The cheeky duo who met in their reo Māori class at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa lighten the overwhelming emotions that can come with language revitalisation and acquisition.
Dansey began his reo Māori haerenga in 2017, after his daughter was born. Learning te reo Māori had been a lifelong desire but one riddled with whakamā (shame) and confusion. “We’re asked in reo classes to ‘tohaina atu rā tēnei reo ki ngā whaitua’, to ‘tūwhitia te hopo’ and to ‘nau mai ngā hapa’,” says Dansey. “Āku Hapa is our attempt to use our fledging reo to embody these with kindness and humour!”
This pilot episode featuring award-winning investigative journalist Paula Penfold (Ngāi Pākehā) as the manuhiri is just a taste of what’s to come. The guests invited to eat the kai are all learners of te reo Māori and share their experiences with whatever level of reo is within them. It’s unpredictable, delirious, and a little bit naughty, but it ultimately models the non-linear nature of learning, offering a comforting watch in a bitesized format.
“I began my haerenga reo Māori as a kind of apology to my children, Ben and Māia (Ngāti Kahungunu),” says Penfold. “We didn’t put them through kōhanga reo or kura kaupapa, and I regret that. I regret not helping them reclaim their language. So this, for me, is a way of trying to atone for that, and hoping that maybe, one day, I can kōrero Māori with my future mokopuna.”
“But it is not a linear journey: there can be times when your confidence propels you forward to speak up loudly, and other times when you feel a complete numpty failure. It was a relief to hear kaiako say all the time, ‘nau mai ngā hapa’, that the classroom is a wāhi haumaru and in order to get better at the reo you have to keep on speaking the reo, which will inevitably mean mistakes, and that is ok.”
Tang grew up speaking Cantonese at home and learning Mandarin after school. “Because I don’t have a whakapapa relationship with te reo Māori, I won’t ever know the feeling of carrying the trauma of having your language, your whakaaro, intentionally and systemically alienated from you. What I do know with my ancestral tongue, is that the fear of failure can stop me from speaking my ancestral tongue completely.”
