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Mātini: The story of Cyclone Martin in the Cook Islands
As the region grieves with Vanuatu after Cyclone Pam, and as scientists talk about climate change making tropical storms worse, disaster preparedness in the Pacific Islands takes on a new urgency.
Against this backdrop, a group in the Cook Islands is preparing to launch a book about the most tragic cyclone in the country's recorded history, a book that has important lessons to teach about coping with natural disaster in remote, isolated island communities.
Mātini, due out June 30, tells the story of Cyclone Martin through the eyes of people who were there on November 1, 1997, who watched waves as tall as coconut trees crash over Manihiki, their sea-level atoll – a five-kilometre strip of land separated from the country's capital by more than 1100 kilometres of open ocean.
“The story has to be told… so people in other countries or other Pacific nations… especially the new generations can prepare,” says Apii Piho, a Manihiki pearl farmer who once represented Manihiki in the Cook Islands Parliament. “We must drum it and install it in them to be aware and be prepared for nature when it hits.”
In early 2014, a group of Cyclone Martin survivors formed the Cyclone Martin Charitable Trust with the aim of commissioning a book about the cyclone and how deeply it impacted their island and people. They approached Cook Islands News, entering into a partnership agreement with publisher John Woods that would carry Mātini from concept to completion. Subsequently, journalist Rachel Reeves, formerly of Cook Islands News, interviewed nearly 150 people – survivors, weather experts, and responders who remember Cyclone Martin as the most tragic event of their careers.
Survivors, many of whom had never opened up about the traumatic cyclone, told their stories for posterity’s sake. They shared in order to warn future generations about the power of weather, and also because book royalties will go not to the author but to Manihiki via the Cyclone Martin Charitable Trust.
“That’s good to get everybody’s story,” said Papapia Taraeka, the oldest resident of Tauhunu village. “ I was wishing that one day somebody will come up and tell this story of Martin.”
Mātini is raw, emotional, and real. It weaves together gripping tales of survival – incredible tales of people clinging to coconut trees, being washed out to sea for days, using the sea and the sky to find their way back to land. Mātini also chronicles a bungled bureaucratic response, one that involved communication breakdowns, inexplicable delays in search and rescue, and an autocratic approach to reconstructing an entire island. The book highlights the methods people used to survive – methods passed down from their forebears, methods that succeed where modern forms of disaster management may fail.
Mātini is a book that will break your heart, but will also restore your hope and faith in the human spirit and inspire in you a deep respect for the island people.
“It is a beautifully written book,” says Niki Rattle, Speaker of the Cook Islands Parliament, who went home to Manihiki after Cyclone Martin to nurse her people. “You will not be able to resist it as the human side of disasters is so well told from the affected people and to not read it would be to deny yourself an incredible experience.”