Tulia Thompson talks to Maria Samuela about her new collection of short stories

Maria Samuela. Photo / Ebony Lamb

The world of Beats of the Pa'u by Maria Samuela is rich with aunties who tease, and shriek and make delicate 'ei out of cut chrysanthemums. The collection of nine stories is poignant, raw and funny. It smarts. Samuela grew up in a Cook Islands Catholic family of eight kids in Porirua, with lots of aunties and uncles, and the family dynamics in her stories are well-observed.

She says, "I wanted to write a book of stories full of characters who were like me, the people I grew up with and the experiences that we had." Samuela was inspired by Samoan writer Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home when she was 16 or 17: "It made me realise that our stories are important."

She has written for The School Journal, a junior short story collection called The Secret Game Plan and Other Stories, Cook Islands language readers and the storybook 'E tīvaevae nō Rōpati: ʻe tua Kūki ʻĀirani nō Nū Tirēni' in Cook Islands Maori, where a girl helps her grandmother make tīvaevae for a wedding.

Beats of the Pa'u has come about because in 2017 she could dedicate herself to writing her manuscript during her Master of Arts in Creative Writing at The Institute for Modern Letters. She loved having a community of writers. She had gone from writing "more intuitively" to having conversations about craft, and the writing process. In 2020, she had a residency at Michael King Writers Centre.

Samuela works as a Hansard editor at Parliament, transcribing ministers' speeches during the 30 weeks that Parliament sits, and uses the other 20 weeks to write. She tries to treat writing as a full-time job. A good day might be writing for four days or five hours, although it doesn't always go to plan. She is "constantly rewriting". There are at least 20 versions of many stories. It's a good thing - in terms of constantly improving - but it can be a bad thing as well.

"Honestly, if the publisher let me, I would still be rewriting it," she says.

The story Ugly conjures familiar, uncomfortable experiences of coming from a large family without much money. The eldest daughter lies in the grimy bathwater her siblings have already washed in. I wondered if it mirrored Samuela's experiences. She was actually the youngest of eight: "So really I am the baby." The 10-year age gap between her and her oldest siblings meant she had two different experiences; a full house of noisy, young children where they had to line up for the bathroom in the morning and also the experience of being an only child once her older siblings had left home.

In Bluey, Rosie waits for her dad outside a tinny house: "I asked Nanny what rhinestones were and she showed me her wedding ring and hard out it's the most beautiful thing." The story deals with traumatic family histories left unsaid and touches on internalised racism.

Rosie takes an instant dislike to her dad's "hori" mate Bluey: "He laughed like a girl - a fat, black, toothless baby girl." Samuela says Rosie is about 7 or 8 years old, and the story is set in the early 80s. She was trying to write a story or character true to the period, a child observing the grown-ups around them: "Obviously, you don't realise, you know. She doesn't realise what she's saying."

I'm curious about whether she is worried about how the Cook Islands community might react to some of the more challenging material - not just the teenage sex and drinking of wine at church functions, but also the jealous aunty.

Samuela has realised that worrying about what people think is obstructive to her creative process of developing the story or characters. She takes care not to write characters too close to her siblings and family members. "I want to respect the boundaries." But she also holds on to her own need for authentic representation.

She says, "The best I can do as a writer is to write the story as honestly as I can."

Then she gently adds, "Sorry," as if she is also politely excusing herself to her aunties.

Beats of the Pa'u, by Maria Samuela

My favourite story was the titular Beats of the Pa'u, about a mother and a teenage daughter who is pregnant. Samuela deftly handles their different viewpoints.

She says it took a long time to write because she was trying to show both points of view: "It is technically quite a tricky story." She wrote the last line on the last day possible. It was important to her to capture the strength of both women and the deep love as well as the conflict. "There's a lot of love in that relationship. Even if [the mother's] actions might be seen as harsh and unreasonable. I had to show that there is a lot of love from her side."

In Sisters, the family house is filled with aunties and cousins gathering to grieve and farewell the teenage protagonist's mother. The girl makes her mother's recipe for mainese, the Cook Islands potato and beetroot salad. It perfectly captures the way loss is so often paired with the preparation of food.

Samuela's mum died when she was 18, after being sick for two years. "It was devastating."

Her family home was teeming with relatives and their nightly rosaries and singing. "It's so vivid in my memory even now."

She reflects that coming from a big family helped her to get through her loss because she was surrounded by love and support. The aunties and older siblings stepped in. She didn't understand how much her mother's death still affected her until she sat down with her story collection, and realised that several stories dealt with dead mothers. "It was surprising to me. That wasn't something that I had intended to do."

Samuela still wonders what her mum was like as a young woman. She says, "Those are the kinds of questions I never got to ask her." She has begun making sense of her mother's life through her new writing project, a novel about Cook Islands women immigrants to Aotearoa during the 1950s.

In the story Plaza de Toros, the Rarotongan protagonist is a tourist who watches bullfights, infatuated with a matador. It's an impressive read - punchy and uncomfortable where the bullfight is layered with sexual tension. But I'm curious about the rich detail - "heavy cameras, underused and overpaid for, are worn like lanyards around their necks". I find myself wanting to know whether Samuela has actually witnessed a bullfight.

She was in Spain for a holiday in 2014 while visiting Europe. Locals watch it like a rugby game. She climbed up to her uncomfortable little seat. She had binoculars so she had a fairly good view. It was loud, and smelt of hay. It felt crazy to her how enthusiastic people were.

"It was horrifying," she says, "I would never do it again."

Samuela flicked through old photos on her computer and, while she didn't have graphic photos of the bull's body, the images of the matador coming into the stadium triggered the story. "I've taken something from real life and then just run with the character. I had no idea that this was gonna happen between her and the matador. It was quite a departure from the other stories," she says, "to want to show that." She seems tentative. I tell her that Samoan editor and writer Sisilia Eteuati recently said on Tangata Pasifika that Pacific literature shouldn't be pigeon-holed – it's both "myths" and "the contemporary Samoan woman who is Tinder dating".

Samuela agrees. "Maybe we are getting to the point now where people don't take Pacific stories as being a certain kind of thing, you know."

Beats of the Pa'u, by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30), is out now.

Tulia Thompson is of Fijian, Tongan and Pākehā descent. She has a PhD in Sociology and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. She writes fiction and creative non-fiction.