We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 110
SPRING 2007
INTERVIEW
Ralph Crane
Writing Maori: an interview with Witi Ihimaera
Witi Ihimaera visited Tasmania in March 2007 as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar of the University of Tasmania. While in Hobart he was interviewed by Ralph Crane. The interview took place at Ralph Crane’s home in Mount Nelson on the morning of 21 March, 2007.
Witi Ihimaera was born in Gisborne, New Zealand, and now lives in Auckland where he is Professor of English at Auckland University. His first collection of stories, Pounamu Pounamu, was published in 1972 and was followed a year later by his first novel, Tangi. He is one of only two writers (the other being Maurice Gee) to have won New Zealand’s premier literary award, the Montana Book of the Year Award (formerly the Wattie Book of the Year Award), three times: in 1973 for Tangi; in 1986 for The Matriarch; and in 1994 for Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies. Witi Ihimaera’s other books include Whanau (1974), The New Net Goes Fishing (1976), The Whale Rider (1987), Dear Miss Mansfield (1989), Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995), The Dream Swimmer (1997), The Uncle’s Story (2000), Sky Dancer (2003), Whanau II (2004), and The Rope of Man (2005). He is also a prolific editor, an opera librettist, and a playwright. Whale Rider, the movie based on Witi’s novel The Whale Rider, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002 and went on to major international success. In 2004 Witi Ihimaera was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
RALPH CRANE: Perhaps I could start by asking when you decided you wanted to be a writer?
WITI IHIMAERA: When I was twenty-eight I published my first book, Pounamu Pounamu, and then the following year I published Tangi, and then the year after that I published Whanau. So I had three books out in three years before I was thirty. I then went to the University of Otago as a Burns Fellow and published another collection of short stories, The New Net Goes Fishing. But those books, I began to realise, were apprentice pieces, inadequate, a consequence of a spontaneous art and intuitive process. I think it wasn’t until I had this realisation that I decided to be a writer. I took ten years off writing and began to truly commit myself to a more conscious art and a political process as an indigenous writer, which I felt would enable me to begin to create work that had excellence, equity and justice in it. I truly became a writer with The Matriarch in 1986.
RC: I’m surprised that you look back on your early work in that way because, having recently reread Pounamu Pounamu, I think it stands the test of time. The stories don’t read like apprentice pieces at all; they have a vitality that thirty years later still resonates.
WI: I always used to call that first work my equivalent of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and so I admire them, but as you know in the year 2001 I embarked on my thirty-fifth anniversary gift to New Zealand, which was to write new versions of Pounamu Pounamu, Tangi and Whanau. Some people thought this was an extraordinary and crazy idea − why on earth should I do this to books which have become regarded as classics in New Zealand? But, as I’ve said earlier, those first four books were too one-dimensional. Over all the years since, while the novels and stories might be aesthetically pleasing, they weren’t politically pleasing to me. They didn’t comply with this equation which I developed for myself, around 1986 to 1990, that indigenous writing not only had to be aesthetically pleasing but also politically valid and interrogative of the world indigenous people live in. So for me my work then became a pathway based on politics plus aesthetics equals Maori writing.
RC: And was it about this time [1990] that you left your position with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to become a full-time writer?
WI: Well I have never been a full-time writer. This is difficult to explain because although I wanted to become a full-time writer, I actually feared committing myself on a day-to-day basis to the kind of excellence, equity and justice that I aspired to. In 2007 I’m still not a full-time writer. But there’s another issue here, and it’s that I like to take a holistic view of my life, which is, of course, bigger than just being a writer. It’s been a balance between being ... well I used to say, and this is a very sweet, sweet thing to say now, that it was more important for me to be a good father, a good husband, a good friend, than to be a writer. A writer is just a part of that whole spectrum of one’s life. But you can also see this holistic approach at work in my writing. I have written short stories, I have written novels, I have written plays and operas, I have written film scripts, and I’ve even written a ballet. Those are all of the individual kinds of achievement that one would normally associate with a writer. However, I have also been an essayist, and I have been an editor. I have now edited over twenty-five books on Maori culture and on New Zealand culture or society. They are not only on Maori subjects: they are on photography, they are on art, geography, and history. Some of these subjects I know nothing about but people have come to me and said things like ‘Can you help us put together this book?’ and so, to put it quite crudely, I use my name to ensure the books get done. I’m in a position to go to publishers and say, ‘I’ve got this idea, so if I become a front person for that idea will you give me a contract?’ And they do. And then I’ll find the right writers, young Maori or Pakeha writers, for the books or else I’ll write introductions to them because it’s very important for me to support the continuing evolution of New Zealand literature, culture and art and history. And I now also teach at the University of Auckland and am on the boards of quite a few literary and cultural organisations, and that’s another way of supporting the kaupapa (purpose) of New Zealand literature, which is always to evolve and go from one level to the next. So writing to me is a collective, collaborative kind of career, which doesn’t just involve my own work or writing per se, but also dealing with and setting up structures that support it. For instance, I am now at the helm of a project at the University of Auckland to set up The Writing School at Auckland, which, I hope, will assist writing not just in New Zealand but also the Pacific and the Pacific Rim.
RC: The multi-volume anthology Te Ao Marama is probably the prime example of the type of editorial work you’ve just highlighted. How did you get involved in that project?
WI: Reed Publishers came to me and asked me if I would do a follow-on to Into the World of Light, which I edited with Don Long in 1984, and was the very first collection of Maori fiction and poetry ever published in New Zealand, apart from Margaret Orbell’s Contemporary Maori Writing back in 1972. I said yes, but that one book would not be sufficient. Reed said they would be prepared to do it in two volumes. I said no, six would be the most opportune size. People think it was hard because it was bigger, but in fact it was easier because I did not have to make so many choices about cutting stories out. So I was able to adopt and demonstrate an inclusive methodology not only in the comprehensiveness of the writers involved, but also in the range of subjects on display: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, children’s stories, waiata, haka, essays, and so on. What I am really proud about is that I’ve looked everywhere in the world and I’m yet to find another example of such an inclusive anthology which offers such a comprehensive ten-year window into how a people thought about and articulated their pride, their rangatiratanga, through the range of their literature. So you don’t get the vision of one person but of many. Not one voice, but a multiplicity of voices. Incidentally, the sixth volume, which was supposed to be a compact disc of oral Maori literature, was never released.
RC: Another significant anthology, which further extends the scope of the Te Ao Marama series, is Where’s Waari: A History of the Maori through the Short Story which includes a story by the Australian writer Henry Lawson alongside work by both Maori and Pakeha. Do you see a link between that anthology and Te Ao Marama?
WI: The Te Ao Marama series was a horizontal survey across ten years. But there was always this proposition that I would cluster other books around Te Ao Marama, that would go vertically into New Zealand’s history. With Where’s Waari, which was a really exciting book to do, I wanted to try to recover some of the older stories written in English about Maori. Of course, these originating stories to Maori textuality were all written by Pakeha or non-New Zealand outsiders like Lawson. Most demonised Maori, some framed Maori characters within a more enlightened perspective as a people who should be saved, or as innocent child or noble savage. It wasn’t until the 1950s that Maori themselves began to write stories in English, and what’s fascinating to me is that some of the work maintained the same perspectives of themselves. So we were in those days still far away from being able to escape the frames or subvert the original frameworks. In Where’s Waari I wanted to track the story of the Maori through the short story to show where we’d come from, where we were now, and that there’s still an awful long way to go in decolonising Maori literature.
RC: That change from Pakeha representations of Maori to Maori representations of Maori really began in a significant way in the 1970s, which saw the publication of a whole number of ‘firsts’ for Maori writing. Your own collection of stories, Pounamu Pounamu, the first collection of stories by a Maori writer, was published in 1972, and your novel Tangi, the first novel by a Maori writer, followed in 1973. Then Patricia Grace’s Waiariki, the first collection of stories by a Maori woman writer, appeared in 1975, and her novel Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps, the first novel by a Maori woman writer, was published in 1978. So you found yourself − along with Patricia Grace and other Maori writers like Arapera Blank, JC Sturm, and Hone Tuwhare − one of the writers at the centre of the ‘Maori Renaissance’, that rich blossoming of Maori arts that marked the 1970s in New Zealand. What made that possible when only a few years earlier JC Sturm had been unable to find a publisher for her collection of short stories, The House of the Talking Cat, which, of course, wasn’t published until 1982?
WI: Well, it is only in hindsight that we see it as a rich blossoming, but it was a blossoming, and it was a blossoming that was hard-earned. It wasn’t as if there were people saying, ‘Oh this is great’ − the first reviews that Patricia got and that I got were not positive. People wanted to know why our work wasn’t like Albert Wendt’s work, or black American work, which was more political than ours. Then our own people − and Patricia will tell you the same thing − were all disturbed about this whole idea of Maori writers writing Maori lives into English. The case of Jackie Sturm is different. I don’t think she wasn’t being published because she was Maori or writing Maori work; you’ll have to ask her. But some of those stories of hers about Maori are historically very, very interesting. They came from a time when Maori were being assimilated and show Maori negotiating a very conflicted world, succeeding as Pakeha but not as Maori. With Pat and myself, we weren’t in the first instance writing the same kind of New Zealand text as, say, Frank Sargeson or Janet Frame or Maurice Gee − with which Jackie’s work shares similarities. Pat’s and my work was, dare I say it, centrally Maori-oriented, having a lyrical and emotional charge which marked it out as a new arrival in New Zealand and, possibly, the beginning of a bicultural literary tradition. There was a kind of freshness in Maori literature that I think made it distinctive in a way that Pakeha literature wasn’t. But in my case, I had to grit my teeth because my work wasn’t welcomed in the same way as that of Albert Wendt or Vincent Eri. It lacked that political subtext that I spoke about earlier; it wasn’t informed as Albert’s work was by his reading of French theorists. But that was then. I think my work operates between a wide range of polarities. Sometimes it’s lyrical, other times it’s theoretical, it’s frankly all over the place now − which brings its own critical dilemmas. I spiral in and out, backward and forward, I like working the centre and the boundaries, like the spiral.
RC: Ken Arvidson, in an essay entitled ‘Aspects of Contemporary Maori Writing in English,’ very persuasively argues that the fundamental difference between Maori and Pakeha writing is the purposive nature of Maori writing. He argues that Maori writing has two distinctive purposes: an educative purpose and a political purpose. The Matriarch obviously marked a major shift in your writing, from the educative to the explicitly political, and I think it is still your most radical work. Do you continue to see it in that way?
WI: Apart from satirical stories I’ve done − like ‘A History of New Zealand Literature Through Selected Texts’, which I wrote in response to your conference paper on Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, or a short story called ‘Meeting Elizabeth Costello’ − yes, the political phase of my work starts with − well you can see it coming in The New Net Goes Fishing − but its major statement is with The Matriarch. Two other major political books of mine are actually the gay novels, Nights in the Gardens of Spain and The Uncle’s Story. Whanau II is also extremely political and one of the headlines for that − I think it appeared in the Otago Daily Times newspaper − was ‘Witi’s Newest Novel Is Hate Mail to the Nation’.
RC: Well some of your fiction can be very confronting for Pakeha readers. In The Matriarch there is a definite shift away from Maori culture to the clash between Maori and Pakeha cultures.
WI: All of my work is informed and impelled by what is happening around me. Ironically, I began to think about The Matriarch when I was in Australia. I got involved in Aboriginal activism around Canberra while I was a diplomat with the New Zealand High Commission. Then when I got back home we had the Springbok tour and that really unleashed a huge fury among Maori and other New Zealanders. I got into activism and gave a number of speeches, about the similarities between New Zealand and South Africa and also the dissimilarities, and was banned from parliament grounds. A lot of that put itself into The Matriarch. It was a book that reflected the years of Maori protest; twenty years later there’s been enormous political, economic and cultural transformations and a process of returning land and assets to Maori − which is the theme at the very centre of The Matriarch. We seem to be getting over that hump, and, now, are in an era of reconciliation between the Treaty [of Waitangi] partners.
RC: Yes, one of the of the really positive things that sets New Zealand apart from so many countries − something I was very conscious of when I lived there − is the genuine attempt it has made, and continues to make, to achieve a reconciliation between Maori and Pakeha, and to create a climate where the indigenous and settler cultures can coexist and benefit from each other.
WI: Even so, I like to keep the pressure on. I like to still maintain the edge in a lot of my work. Although most of it is now moving towards accommodation of a reconciliation ethos and acknowledging that equity and justice are being achieved, there’s still work like Whanau II where I still like to sock it to the Pakeha. In other words, I like to keep the parameters still as wide as possible, because if I keep them wide then the middle ground will be struck with more of a pro-Maori bias. If I cave in and say, ‘Well okay, now I am going to write lovely stories about reconciliation,’ then reconciliation will happen but it will be based on a centre that has no political strengths to it.
RC: Well, I’d have thought that it’s less to do with writing ‘lovely stories about reconciliation’ and more to do with writing Maori New Zealand into existence, with making Pakeha readers aware of Maori culture, and with challenging Pakeha versions of New Zealand history. So I think you and other Maori writers − well, all Maori artists, really − are performing an important role in that reconciliation. Do you see this as some sort of mantle you accepted when you decided to become a writer? Are you consciously attempting to effect change through your fiction?
WI: I don’t think I’m consciously trying to effect change. I’m simply doing what my father would term as being my job − and that is to help keep the Maori end up in the Treaty partnership. I do it through literature, education and political work. The reconciliation has come about because the Pakeha majority has now seen the political, economic and cultural benefits coming from a culture they never used to think had merit. So the shift has not been from Maori to European, it has been from European to an understanding of the value of having a Maori identity within New Zealand. I think that is the better way of saying it, that there is middle ground now being found.
RC: Yes, and one way you have found it is by merging the oral traditions of the Maori with the literary traditions of the Pakeha, most notably, of course, in The Matriarch. Is that something you have done deliberately in your fiction? WI: I have certainly done it consciously. Very consciously. RC: Outside New Zealand you are probably best known as the author of The Whale Rider, following the enormous success of the film. Now, I believe, three more of your novels are set to be filmed. Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies, which you have described as an attempt to write a Maori western, is about to go into production. Am I right to think the screenplay is by Hone Kouka? He’s a wonderful playwright.
WI: He is, yes. I actually upbraided him, I said, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re a playwright, a very fine playwright − any old hack can write a film script, if you want to write a film script you should be writing an original film script, not writing a film script from my work.’ So I wasn’t very happy when I found out he was the one who was going to write it, but that’s water under the bridge now, it’s done, and I hope he’s getting back to writing his own work. The film after that is The Uncle’s Story, and that one has been written by Victor Roger; Victor is a well-known young playwright in New Zealand, but again he should be concentrating on his own writing. The third film is the script of The Matriarch and I’m writing that one when I go to the Binger Institute, Amsterdam, from September of this year.
RC: We should probably talk about a couple of your other novels before we finish. In your novel Sky Dancer − a quest narrative that mixes Maori myth with science fiction (time travel) − you take a leap in yet another different direction − into hyperspace I suppose.
WI: I have had the myth which is the basis for Sky Dancer on my brain since I was about eleven years of age. The whole story of the battle of the birds captured my imagination when I was a boy and, when I was looking for a Maori myth to write a quest narrative on, that myth wouldn’t let me pass on it.
RC: It’s an exuberant novel − I read it in a single sitting − and very different in style from The Matriarch, but probably still part of the ‘political phase’ of your writing.
WI: At the level of story Sky Dancer is a romp − and it is lots of fun to read − but at a subtextual level the land birds are Maori and the sea birds are Pakeha, so yes, it is a very political text. Maori get it; I’m not sure if Pakeha do.
RC: I certainly read it that way ...
WI: It’s just as critical as The Matriarch is of Pakeha New Zealand, but it is framed in a way that seduces you to read it as story and often a lot of the stuff I do is hidden, embedded, and it’s fun to write like that.
RC: Your latest novel, The Rope of Man, is really two books, isn’t it? The first part is a revised version of your novel Tangi, while the second part is really a sequel to that earlier novel. What made you decide to take that detour back to Tangi?
WI: Well, as I say, in 2001 I decided to rewrite three books: Pounamu Pounamu, Tangi and Whanau. At the end of Tangi the boy is in Wellington and you are never too sure what his decision is: will he stay in Wellington or will he go back, as he has promised his mother he would, to take over as head of the family? There was supposed to be a sequel to Tangi which I might have written had I not placed that ten-year embargo on myself from 1976, and then, after The Matriarch, other books kept getting in the way of it. The same thing happened with The Dream Swimmer.I was supposed to write that immediately after The Matriarch but I then got a diplomatic appointment to America and I had no time to do it. So often these things are delayed. What intrigues me is what would The Dream Swimmer have been like if I’d written it in 1988 rather than 1997? The 1997 version is an altogether differently designed novel.
RC: Finally, I want to ask you what’s next? While you’ve been in Tasmania we’ve talked about the five Whanganui Maori who were imprisoned on Maria Island in the 1840s and you’ve said that you’d like to write a novel that tells their story. Do you think you’ll do that?
WI: Oh, I definitely will. I am an opportunist, and this story is too important in New Zealand’s history − it is really important for Maori to know, in my opinion, and therefore I will write it. I want it also to reflect on New Zealand’s own history of non-intervention because throughout all the documents I have seen there was this noticeable quiet in the New Zealand press. The imprisonment was commented on by the Australian press at the time, so why was it that in New Zealand nobody was standing up saying, ‘George Grey, you are wrong’? This story reveals a lack of vigilance in the New Zealand justice system; it’s uncanny how it resonates with Guantanamo Bay and therefore is very contemporary in terms of its politics. My sense of the injustice of the transportation is the passion that will drive the story. It’s not just the urge to tell the story. I want to confront New Zealand and say, ‘We have to do better.’ I want to add it to the country’s conscience and the nation’s inventory.
RC: What will you call it?
WI: I came across a phrase in one of the documents about Maria Island which referred to the ocean in winter as sounding like ‘The Phantom Moaning of the Sea’. I’ll either call the book by that title or else ‘Maria’s Eylandt’ spelt in the way the Dutch used to spell it: Maria was Van Diemen’s daughter.
RALPH CRANE is Professor of English and Head of the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. His latest book, an edition of AEW Mason’s The Broken Road, will be published by Oxford University Press (India) in 2007.
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