Maui and Hina

At a Glance

• Central figures: Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, the trickster demigod and youngest of five brothers; Hina, his mother in some Polynesian traditions and his wife or companion in others - here both figures appear, as Hina the mother (Taranga) and Hina the wife, called Hina-te-iwaiwa in Maori tradition.
• Setting: Pan-Polynesian tradition with emphasis on the Maori and Hawaiian cycles; Maui’s deeds take place across the ocean, from the underworld to the sky, and Hina’s story centers on the domestic world of tapa-beating and the pull of the moon.
• The turn: Hina, exhausted by work that can never be finished in the short days, asks Maui to slow the sun - and later, when the world still cannot hold her, she leaves the earth for the moon.
• The outcome: Maui beats the sun into submission and the days lengthen, but Hina departs anyway, ascending to the moon where she remains, beating her tapa cloth in the light that never fades.
• The legacy: The face visible on the moon’s surface is said to be Hina with her tapa board and mallet, still working - and the longer days Maui won remain the measure of human time.

Hina was beating tapa. She had been beating tapa since before the sun came up, and now the sun was already dropping behind the ridge, and the cloth was not half finished. The wooden mallet struck the bark, struck, struck again. Her arms ached. The light was going.

She could hear Maui somewhere down by the shore, laughing with his brothers about a fish they had caught. The sound carried easily in the cooling air. Hina set down the mallet and looked at the strip of bark she had managed to soften. Not enough for a single sleeping cloth. Not enough for anything.

She called out to Maui.

The Complaint

Maui came up the path still smelling of salt and fish gut. Hina did not waste words. The days were too short. She could not finish the tapa. She could not dry the dye. She could not lay out the cloth to bleach in the sun because by the time it was ready the sun was gone. The cooking fire had to be started in darkness. The children ate in darkness. She was tired of working in darkness.

Maui listened. He had a way of listening that made you think he was already planning something - his head tilted, one hand pulling at the flax cord he always wore around his wrist. When Hina finished, he did not comfort her or promise to help with the tapa. He said the sun was the problem. The sun was lazy, racing across the sky like a man running from a debt. He would deal with it.

Hina had lived with Maui long enough to know what that meant.

The Ropes of Flax

Maui went to his grandmother Murirangawhenua and asked for her jawbone - the enchanted one, dense as stone, harder than any club. She gave it. She had given him things before and knew there was no point in refusing.

Then he went back to Hina and asked her for rope. Not ordinary rope. He needed rope made from the strongest flax, plaited tight, and he needed a great deal of it. Hina cut the flax herself. She soaked it and stripped it and rolled it against her thigh until the cords were smooth and hard. She plaited the cords into rope thick enough to hold a canoe in a current. Maui took the ropes and called his brothers.

They did not want to go. They never wanted to go. Maui told them the sun was making their mother and their wives miserable, and that if the days were longer there would be more fish, more time to dry the catch, more time for everything. The brothers grumbled but they came.

The Pit at the Edge of the World

They traveled east, to the place where the sun climbed out of the ground each morning. There was a pit there, deep and hot, and the brothers could feel the warmth rising from it hours before dawn. Maui set them in a half-circle around the lip of the pit. Each brother held a loop of Hina’s rope. Maui stood at the center with the jawbone.

They waited.

The light came first - a red stain spreading under the rim of the world. Then the heat. Then the sun itself, hauling its body up out of the pit, enormous and fast, already leaning forward into its run across the sky.

Maui shouted. The brothers threw the ropes. The loops caught the sun’s limbs - its rays, its edges, whatever part of the sun could be caught. The sun screamed. It thrashed. Two of the brothers lost their grip and were dragged forward, their heels cutting furrows in the dirt. But the ropes held. Hina’s flax held.

Maui stepped in with the jawbone and beat the sun. He hit it across the face. He hit it across the shoulders. He hit it until it stopped thrashing and lay heaving in the ropes, its light dimmed to something the brothers could look at without going blind.

You will go slowly, Maui said. You will cross the sky at a pace that lets the women finish their work. You will give the tapa time to dry. You will give the dye time to set. Go slowly or I will come back and beat you again.

The sun agreed. It had no choice. Maui released the ropes and the sun limped into the sky, slower now, and the day stretched long and warm over the land.

Hina’s Tapa, Hina’s Departure

Maui came home and told Hina the days would be longer. And they were. The tapa dried. The dye set. The cloth bleached white in the extended afternoon. Hina’s work was easier.

But something in Hina had shifted. She had spent too long watching the light fail. She had spent too long wanting what the earth could not give her - steady, unbroken light, time without shadow. The longer days helped, but they still ended. Every evening the darkness came back and the mallet went quiet.

In some tellings she left because of Maui. He was restless and often gone, chasing the next impossible thing, and Hina grew tired of waiting for a man who was always on his way somewhere. In other tellings she simply looked up at the moon one night and understood that the moon’s light never fully dies - it thins and returns, thins and returns, but it is always there.

She climbed. In Hawaiian tradition she tried the sun first, but the heat drove her back. Then she went to the moon. She took her tapa board and her mallet and she walked the path that leads upward from the highest point of the land, and she did not come back.

The Face on the Moon

Maui did not follow her. He was not the kind of man who followed. He stood below and watched the moon and could see, if he looked carefully, the shape of a woman sitting with a board across her knees, beating bark into cloth in light that did not run out.

The brothers said nothing. The tapa Hina had already finished remained in the house, white and fine, and no one touched it for a long time.

On clear nights, when the moon is full and the light falls flat across the water, people say they can see Hina up there - her mallet raised, the bark spread before her. She has all the time she needs now. The cloth she is making will never be finished, but neither will the light fail before she is ready.