A pantheon of go(ur)ds
Maddie Ballard
“The Māori understanding of hue is quite intimate,” says Professor Nick Roskruge (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Tama), Professor in Ethnobotany and Horticulture at Massey University.
He explains to me that the hue is one of the original set of Māori plants, a crop that pre-dates European settlement and, as such, comes with a long and vivid history. There are many stories about the plant’s origins. Some accounts suggest hue seeds were brought from Hawaiki by early Māori. Others suggest they were carried in the entrails of whales, who ate gourds off the sides of the cliffs in Hawaiki before swimming across the ocean. Other origin stories begin in Aotearoa, where hue are said to have been a gift from the god Hinepūtēhue, daughter of the gods Tāne and Hinerauāmoa. After her parents’ separation, her siblings fought terribly; Hinepūtēhue intervened and trapped their anger inside a series of gourds. As a result, gourds have long been associated with peacemaking and gentleness.
Because hue are grown from seed, they were traditionally managed differently from plants that were grown from cuttings, such as kūmara. Particular care was shown at every stage of the process. Hue seeds were planted in spring on Turu and Rakaunui (the 16th and 17th nights of the maramataka) — nights that fell within the full moon, when the moonlight was believed to best support the seeds’ germination. The first set of leaves was given a special name related to the maramataka, marking the sacredness of the plant’s very first growth. Karakia were said throughout the growth cycle, from the opening of the ground to the pulling of the fruit from the vine — and hue were planted in mounds rather than rows, to keep their roots warm and dry, and spaced to grow in a wheel formation, which helped with pollination. All this care encouraged an early plant, so that Māori could take advantage of the whole summer.
Hue were cultivated from the earliest Māori settlements, particularly in the warmer climes of the North Island. The plant quickly developed myriad uses. Some hue were harvested young and thin-skinned, and eaten boiled or baked as a summer vegetable. For at least one iwi, says Roskruge, it may even have replaced the kūmara as a key food source. Other hue on the same vine were left to mature until their skins were thick and hard. Harvested just on the cusp of autumn, these were dried and hollowed out before being put to various uses: as bowls at a feast; for carrying water; for storing cooked birds preserved in their own fat; as floats for fishing nets; or as precursors of the pool noodle, helping children learn to swim. For centuries, hue were the overachievers of the māra.
“Dried hue were also used as a form of entertainment,” Roskruge adds. Small hue still carrying their seeds were used as babies’ rattles, while larger specimens became musical instruments. To create taonga pūoro from hue, Māori dried and emptied them, removing their tops and drilling finger holes in the sides. The instruments varied in size and timbre, and were used for different purposes — from announcing the start of the season for taking birds to healing pain and grief — but they all made soothing sounds, linking them to Hinepūtēhue, who played peacemaker in her family. I listen to a poi āwhiowhio, or whistling gourd, on the Otago Museum website. Made from a small gourd threaded onto a string, the player sounds it by swinging it quickly through the air; its timbre reminds me of a birdcall. Other hue instruments are sounded with the breath — the hue puruhau produces a resonant bass sound; the kōauau ponga ihu nose flute sounds like wind in the treetops — or, in the case of the hue puruwai, by shaking the seeds within to evoke the sound of running water.
Dried hue were delicately carved or painted, perhaps with kōwhaiwhai patterns or the moko of the chief that owned them, turning them into pieces of art. (More recently, dried hue have featured in the work of Māori-Pākehā artist Reuben Paterson, joyfully festooned with sequins — a new suit of clothes for this ancient medium.) As Europeans arrived from the late 1800s, they introduced new versions of bowls, bottles and floats. Still, Roskruge notes, Māori always understood the continued importance and value of the crop. “Hue have always been grown by those who have a purpose for them,” he says. “The seeds have been passed from generation to generation.”
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I was surprised to learn about the resonances of hue for Māori, because gourds are equally important in Chinese culture. At my Por Por’s house, on the shelves among the dustless photographs and kitsch porcelain, there is a single húlu gourd. It is slightly bigger than my hand and quite beautiful in its cello-like shape. When I ask her about it, Por Por shrugs. “Is good luck!” she says. She keeps the gourd, she tells me, because the Chinese word for gourd, 葫芦 | húlu, sounds like several other auspicious Chinese words: 护 | hù (meaning protection), 祜 | hù (meaning blessing) and 祿 | lù (meaning good fortune).
Just as hue were cultivated from the earliest Māori settlements, húlu have been grown in China for centuries and imbued with rich symbolism. Professor Manying Ip, Emeritus Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland, explains that húlu are commonly associated with supernatural power and warding off disease. Li Tieguai, one of the Eight Immortals of Taoist legend, carries a gourd containing medicine with him wherever he goes — and, echoing this image, early Chinese doctors often carried traditional herbal medicines in gourd ‘bottles’. The vegetable also surfaces in Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West, one of the Four Masterpieces of Ancient China, in which several Taoist gods use gourds to subdue demons. In short, gourds are next to godliness — to supernatural power, knowledge and mystery — a connection so entrenched, it has seeped into the language itself. “We have a popular saying in Chinese: 不知道他葫芦里卖什么药, or, you don’t know what kind of medicine is in his gourd,” explains Ip. “It means something like, you don’t know what he is keeping close to his chest.”
When I mention gourds to my friend Willa, who grew up in Meizhou and lives in Shanghai, she talks about the association between gourds and fertility — a tie related to their full shape and the fact they grow so quickly. Some villages in China display a profusion of gourds during the Mid-Autumn Festival to encourage the gods to bless the village with plentiful children. And this, in turn, reminds me that Māori also considered hue a symbol of fertility: traditionally, women who could not conceive would rock a hue in their arms while singing a special waiata.
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Each of the conversations I have highlights new resonances across the cultures. Gourds are godly; they support new life; they are used as vessels — whether to carry liquids and medicine, or to tell stories. As hue are for Māori, húlu are a key ingredient in Chinese cooking — generally stir-fried or added to soups. Húlu, like hue, have traditionally been painted in brilliant colours, carved or burned with depictions of the Zodiac or Chinese landscapes, pressed into moulds when young so they mature imprinted with a pattern, and decorated with faces. There’s also a type of free-reed flute called a húlúsī, made by attaching bamboo to the húlu. I listen to people playing húlúsī on YouTube and the sound reminds me a little of kōauau ponga ihu: breathy and birdlike and somehow yearning.
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In a way, the gourd can be seen as a cipher for migration, preservation and plenty: it is a way to transport important things and keep our stories alive.
I wonder what other twin resonances might be uncovered, if I probed a little further. What are the stories of all the plants in the māra? What else do Māori and Chinese worldviews have in common? I think about that phrase ‘in common’: the way it speaks to shared understanding and communal use. I am sad that I know so little about te ao Māori, and that my knowledge of Chinese culture, after a lifetime of internalised racism and shame, is so scattered. But I want to know so much more about both.
It turns out fruit are a surprisingly fertile place to start. In peeling back the layers of these shared histories, I find it moving that Māori and Chinese people have cultivated gourds for centuries, for specific and similar ends — because it suggests there may be more such meeting points, and a way to think about Aotearoa’s various cultures that’s multiple and connective, not reductive and siloed. In that, I feel like I’ve found a unexpected seed: an idea that, if watered and tenderly attended to, might turn up new growth.
Maddie Ballard is a Chinese-Pākehā writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau and has written for outlets including The Pantograph Punch, Starling, and Dish Magazine, where she is Deputy Editor.