Scribe and family to sing redemption songs

The distant sound of a conch call is heard. As waves burble onto the shore, Lupepe or Pepe for short, with her hair in an immaculate bun, sings a moving Samoan hymn.  Proud and strong, she strums her treasured white kikala. She wants to leave a life of slavery. Dreams are packed tight into banana boxes. She will take her children to New Zealand for a better life.

******

Fa'amoana Luafutu is a small shoeless boy at a New Zealand airport. Looking about curiously at the foreign sights and smells, he feels as if he has swallowed a rainbow.

On his first day at school in Auckland he is given his new name, John, as Fa'amoana is considered too difficult to pronounce. He feels dumb and lost. He looks up and sees the phrase "deeds not words" embossed in concrete on the main school building.

Fa'amoana soon borrows a bike but is caught by the community policeman who immediately detains him under the assumption that someone like Fa'amoana cannot possibly afford such a bike.

At home, the beating, when it comes, is as ferocious as the storms he remembers from the islands. In the silent darkness, the small boy cowers in fear, powerless.

1960s Ponsonby. A new school. A Palagi boy looking for a fight with the "black golliwog". In the struggle Fa'amoana's eye is cut with a rock. He loses 70 per cent of his sight. In time he will lose sight in the eye completely.

He is made a ward of the state. The cell door swings heavily to close, framing the dirty mattress with holes in it where he will rest and the blue bucket he must use as a toilet. The young man cries himself quietly to sleep.

A life of slavery, in a work gang planting trees. The saplings grow strong but the forest is also harvesting criminals. At 15 he is charged with arson.

His world spins. He feels the rumble of an earthquake deep within his spirit. He is just 12 when he enters state care, 21 when he leaves.

"This story is for my mum," says Fa'amoana Luafutu, 64, through a waterfall of tears. Seated beside him are two of his sons, actor Matthias and Malo, aka Jeshua Ioane, the latter known to many as rapper Scribe, whose head is covered by a black hood.

Music, crime and hardship have twisted through this family's lives like an intricately woven mat.

Directed by Nina Nawalowalo and Jim Moriarty, theatre group The Conch present The White Guitar, a stage production which tells thestory of the Luafutu's lives.

Faces held to the sun, they are shining a light on their personal battles with darkness . . . the violence, drug addiction, prison stints and gang associations, to nurse the possibility of hope for their people. They seek to heal together.

"The story started when I was in jail," says Fa'amoana.

"I was talking to a psychotherapist and he was a minister too, at Rolleston prison ... He got me started on this journey and I finished it on the outside, through my book called A Boy Called Broke."

Scribe, Matthias and Fa'amoana will take to the stage to act out the family's story.

Matthias is an actor who left Christchurch after the 2011 earthquakes to work in a glass factory in Auckland. It was his connection with former tutor Moriarty that sparked the project. For Scribe and Fa'amoana The White Guitarmarks their acting debut.

Why not just use actors to tell the story?

"When you go to war," Matthias says thoughtfully. "I'd rather stand side by side with my brother and father than anyone else."

For Fa'amoana the play's meaning is two-fold. It is important to his family but it is also a message for his people that he hopes will resonate.

"I see more and more Pacific people, brown people, filling up our jails. I was looking at myself when I was younger. The reason for this play is to help our people and community to focus in on our children. Deeds not words."

After a contemplative moment, co-director Nawalowalo settles upon the word brave to describe the Luafutu family.

"I feel a great respect for the depth of trust they've shown us in telling their story," shesays.

"It's real for us," Fa'amoana adds, his voice wavering. "We want to share it with the public and we trust The Conch to help; us tell our story."

While such an act is unquestionably brave, it begs the question - why air such dark stories to the world?

"We are at peace with our truth and what we've experienced as a family and as individuals,"  saysScribe, 36. "I think we have experienced enough of life to know that every family has their darkness. By sharing our story we give people the liberty to let go of their own past and realise that things that happened in the past really have no power over the choices you can make today. We wanted to share our darkness to help people find their own light."

Examples of everyday racism litter the family's collective story.

"We grew up with racism in Christchurch from day one," Scribe says. "Any brown person will tell you that. The real thing for us is that we grew up with a lot of awesome, good-hearted white people with beautiful spirits so we never became prejudiced against the skinheads who felt the need to put swastika on their heads. What's especially ironic about that is that we are actually one quarter German."

Music is never far from the Luafutu's story, from the first songs of grandmother Pepe on that much-loved white guitar, to seedy rock 'n' roll, church hymns and hip-hop beats.

Scribe is  the Silver Scroll-winning songwriter who penned the massive hits Stand Up and Not Many, one of the longest running Kiwi No. 1 hits on the singles chart. He's the Cantabrian who helped make Kiwi hip-hop mainstream.

But his career hit rock bottom in 2012 when he pawned his platinum and multi-platinum awards for a paltry sum. He has also confessed to having had drug, alcohol and gambling addictions.

******

Christchurch 1970.

A car slows to a crawl. Slowly the window is wound down and an elbow is leaned. "You're a long way from the jungle," the driver yells.

White power. Mr Asia. The rise of gangs.

Living at a hippy commune on Hereford St, Fa'amoana drives around Christchurch with his mate Arab in a V8 named Prudence. He plays pool, hustling for money or jugs at the Clarendon and hangs with the hippies at the Gresham Hotel. Drink, steal, get wasted, get arrested. Rinse and repeat.

But one night Fa'amoana's good eye lands on a beautiful dark-haired girl named Caroline. Something restless within him becomes calm.

In a tiny cottage in North Beach a baby cries. Julian, born with cerebral palsy.

A sawn-off shotgun is in the next room.

Cancer strikes his father. Numbed by drugs, Fa'amoana lives only for the next hit and is addicted. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

His children remember visits from hard-faced men with elaborately tattooed hands and flashy gold rings clutching wads of notes in tightly bound bundles.

When Fa'amoana is imprisoned, the rest of his young family is also caged.

Scribe is born three months after his dad is incarcerated. He is 4when Fa'amoana is released.

Put the broken needle on the record. The beating, when it comes, is ferocious. The boy cowers in fear, powerless.

******

Matthias was a little boy on a Christchurch rugby field when he was called a nigger for the first time.

On his first day in Samoa he was called a honky because he couldn't speak Samoan.

He is selected to play rugby for Manu Samoa, touring Australia. The aiga (family) swelled with pride.

Armed robbery. The cell door swings heavily to a close. The young man cries himself quietly to sleep.

A life of slavery, in a work gang splitting logs in the Tongarino Forest.

When he sees a play touring prisons it reminds him of his acting dream. Jim Moriarty gives him a break and when Matthias is released, he joins his theatre company Te Rakau. Matthias reaches back into the mist, grasping for his grandmother's white kikala.

******

Christchurch, sometime in the mid 1990s.

A youth spent growing up on the weekends. Scribe is at Hagley High, making music in a crew called Beats 'n' Pieces with contemporaries like Tiki Taane, Nilstate and Dark Tower. In his bedroom he practises every day. Music is his escape. At the back of his mind is a niggling thought that it's virtually impossible for a Samoan kid from Christchurch to make it.

He meets up with bros who use drugs. He swore he'd never use a needle but one day he finds himself shooting up morphine. From there it's a short jump to  committing crimes and undertaking cheque fraud to support his habit.

One day he's making his way across town when he meets up with a young kid from Auckland who is the next big thing in DJ-ing, a kid called P-Money.

******

February 22, 2011

At a bus stop Scribe waits with his cousin, Jeff Sanft, who is going into town to meet his two young daughters, Hazel and Olive, for lunch. The cousins make plans for the future. Scribe is on his way to a comeback. He is determined to prove wrong those throwing shade at him. For some reason – he still doesn't know why – at the last minute Scribe changes his mind and decides not to board the bus. Walking in the opposite direction, he calls goodbye to his cousin.

As a result of the earthquake that day, Jeff Sanft, 32, died in hospital after a bus he was aboard was hit by falling debris on Colombo St.

"It changed my perspective on life quite a lot," Scribe says of his cousin's death. "For me it took something like that to make me realise that my family and friends ... since that moment I've tried really hard to rebuild relationships and strengthen the trust and those bonds. As we all know, something like that can happen any time and it can all be wiped away in a minute. Post-traumatic stress ... we're still dealing with it to this day, that feeling of loss."

12.51pm. A low, menacing rumble. The sound of shattering glass in the factory fills Matthias' ears. In the glass cutting room he can hear men screaming.

"I went to work that morning and, like everyone else, I never really came home," Matthias says. "I am still dealing with the impact. The play is a way ... our story started way back with a dream our Nanahad. We want to uplift our people, especially the people of Christchurch."

When the earth moved that day, Fa'amoana felt like a child again in Samoa, trying to stand in the fast incoming tide, thousands of grains of sand shifting rapidly under his feet.

"Being an old Christchurch muso, in October, after the September quake, Wally (Te Taki) Tairakena was having has 60th birthday. His Japanese students got up at the party and did a folk dance for him as a present. They all died in the CTV Building in the big quake," Fa'amoana says quietly. "I still feel sadness about that ... my old friend. I'm crying now talking about it."

************

Where do you take a Cantabrian hip-hop star on a Friday night? In 2007, when Scribe released his album Rhyme Book, I took him to feed ducks on the Avon River in Victoria Square.

We stood on the bridge with a statue of Queen Victoria moodily observing us.

It's the same bridge that Scribe rapped on in his youth, when skater kids owned the circular area by the sundial.

As he hurled bread into the darkened recesses of the city's iconic river he visibly relaxed, and when an eel appeared at the water's edge to sample our wares, he shouted excitedly like a little boy.

"I've never seen an eel in the Avon before," he said, smiling broadly, walking a little closer to offer a few more morsels.

From across the street men offered complicated hand gestures and shouted "yo Scribe" to  catch his attention.

"People think they know me," Scribe said at the time. "Through my music they do know me. There are lots of times when I don't want to talk to people ... but that's just something that goes with the territory. I've learnt to deal with it. When it first blew up with The Crusader it was actually quite scary."

On that bridge in 2007 we talked about his children, a son who at that time was 7, and a daughter then 16 months. A song on Rhyme Book included the lyrics: "Next thing I know I'm leaving to go and record my CD/I tell my son things will be different the next time you see me".

Fa'amoana sang on one song, A.W.O.L., which is about the way Scribe sometimes wants to ghost through life. He was also joined by his cousins Ladi6 and Tyra Hammond.

"My dad is the reason music is in my life. Since I was very little he's put music in my life. He's a great musician and I get pretty much all my musical talent from him."

We shared a peanut slab and walked through Victoria Square. Scribe talked about the seedy underworld of Christchurch he saw as a youth.

"I've seen a lot of the dark side that this city has to offer.

"It motivated me to make something of myself. There's a very thin line between making it and not making it."

The Luafutu family are not ashamed to tell their truth. To create the script for The White Guitar, Fa'amoana and his two sons each wrote their individual story in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington respectively.

"It was amazing how many similar themes there were," Scribe says. "It's how the truth works. There wasn't anything we wanted to leave out, we put it all out there, what our individual experience was. It's not edited in any way."

During rehearsals there have been moments where the trio have had to pause to breathe and collect themselves.

"It's been healing to feel the magnitude of the other person's experience," Scribe says. "We are still delving deep into those memories and it is still very real but at the same time it's liberating to be confronting the truth this way."

Fa'amoana agrees that rehearsing the play has been cathartic, but he says it has also been emotional.

"To have my sons here ... we are not ashamed of what we've been through and to share our truth," he says. "We are not saying feel sorry for us, the play is a message about positivity. It happens in all families, when things come down you have each other's back."

"Our family's life has always been like a series of earthquakes," Matthias adds. "Creativity keeps us in the light during times of darkness. We're trying to pick up the pieces. Each time it happens we pick up the pieces. It hasn't broken us."

There's a pause before Fa'amoana adds: "That's what we're saying to Christchurch, come on, keep picking up the pieces."

************

Nana Pepe was like a queen, Scribe says, a royal. She didn't speak much English but the rest of the family knew exactly what the matriarch expected of them.

"She was an amazing upright woman who dedicated her life to the church," Scribe says. "She didn't get to see the darkness that we lived with, we shielded her from it."

Fa'amoana remembers trips in the canoe to Apia with his mother.

But when she died four years ago he stopped playing guitar.

"I felt like I failed her," he says with a lump in his throat. "I never did what she wanted us to do when we came over here for, a better life, I got caught up in the darkness. When she died I thought that was the day the music died."

It was Pepe who first taught Fa'amoana how to play the guitar.

"I'm back playing again now because of this play."

************

Pepe steps out of the darkness. She gazes at her beautiful white kikala before swaddling it like an infant in a lava lava for safe keeping. She moves towards the pure light of the setting sun. Behind her, sharing the same path, her son and grandsons now walk proudly in the reflected light of her precious white guitar.

 - Stuff