Below is the unedited version of my essay published on the Spinoff in July, with some additions written after its publication. It was commissioned as a review but – inspired by Witi Ihimaera’s discursive approach in his memoir, Māori Boy - I approached it as an essay in which I could continue the kōrero begun by Tina Makereti in her excellent Auckland Writers Festival lecture about what kind of house our literature inhabits, and by Kelly Ana Morey in her plaintive essay last month on being a Māori writer who defies expectations, and how you can never really go home - or leave home.
Nobody likes a Māori writer.
First of all, nobody knows who we are. Nobody knows the names of any writers, apart from the ones with movies [see: Frame, Ihimaera, Duff, Wendt]. This is really our fault. We have written books that no one has made into a movie.
Second: we have disguised ourselves with Pākehā names. Just look at Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, James George, Robert Sullivan, Kelly Ana Morey, Nic Low, David Geary. Some Pacific Island writers do this as well (Albert Wendt, Gina Cole, Victor Rodger). Some indigenous writers from Australia do it (Anita Heiss, Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe); so do some indigenous writers from North America (Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Drew Hayden Taylor). Nobody knows that surnames tend to be a colonial construct. Witi Ihimaera’s family name is Smiler, which is a transliteration of Ihimaera, which is a translation of Ishmael, as in the Biblical figure.
My nom de Pākehā is Paula Morris. Morris is my paternal great-grandfather’s name. He was a ship’s cook who spent about a decade in Auckland around the turn of the twentieth-century. He said he was from London. He married my great-grandmother, Sarah Annie Wyatt, had two sons with her, then seems to have left the country, never to be seen again. I wrote about this in an essay called “Greys Avenue” published in Thom Conroy’s Home anthology, and more recently in Metro magazine.
On the other side of my father’s family, my great-grandfather didn’t have a last name. He was Kiri, son of Rahui Te Kiri and Tenetahi, grandson of Ngāti Wai rangatira Te Kiri. By the 1890s, Kiri had adopted a surname: Paraone, a transliteration of Brown. So my grandmother was Heni Te Kiri Paraone, known to some people as Jane Brown, though my grandfather, Alf Morris, always called her Heni.
The important name in our family is Kiri. This was my late father’s first name, and the middle name of my aunt, brother and numerous cousins. I’m Paula Jane Kiri, named for my grandmother. She was the mātāmua (oldest child), and grew up in Rahui and Tenetahi’s house – now the site of our marae – singing, playing the piano, riding horses. My father, her only son and the oldest boy of his generation, got special treatment on Christmas visits to Pākiri (where he was born), because of his name.
I’m telling you this because too many people in New Zealand still don’t understand that there’s much, much more to a writer’s name – stories, histories, alliances, whakapapa – than meets the eye. When these people read something we’ve published on the Internet (never in a book, because nobody reads these: see above), they roar with outrage.
Although they appear to have access to the Internet, they don’t know how to use a search engine. The last time I published an essay on the Spinoff, the first wave of roaring-with-outragers, I’m told, denounced me for being a Pākehā of unknown provenance and skills. If they had typed my name into a search engine, they would have seen my own web site, my bio on the University of Auckland site, my bio on the NZ Book Council site, and then my Wikipedia entry.
But nobody reads us, or reads about us. They do not waste time looking us up online. They do not buy our books unless we’ve been shortlisted for prizes overseas. Even then, they’d rather wait for the movie, or for the next flurry of self-righteous rage on social media. They would rather see us as Pākehā, because it’s easier – to read us, to misread us, to dismiss us.
*
It’s unsurprising that nobody likes us. We stake a claim in a country that prefers to believe that our history started in the nineteenth century, and that our literature began and ended with Katherine Mansfield. These days, our faces are too pale and our names are too Pākehā.
Kei Miller, the Jamaican-born poet and novelist, says that “racism’s most enduring success is widespread belief in a category called ‘race’.” This is true in New Zealand. To far too many people, being Māori isn’t about heritage and whakapapa. It’s about racial make-up: a half this, a quarter that, a percentage of ‘blood’. In the past in the US, terms were devised to express this blood mix: mulatto, quadroon, octoroon. Percentages mattered, because they defined who was white or black under the law, and therefore who could use a certain water fountain or bus seat, who could marry a person of a different race.
When you denigrate us as “only an eighth Māori”, say, you strip away our history and family, a vast cultural inheritance unique to this country, and see us simply as diluted racial cocktails. We’re just not Māori enough to have any claim on our pasts, because you see the past as gone. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” It’s certainly not dead in traditional Māori culture, where the ancestors wait ahead of us, not just behind us.
This notion, by the way, informed the structure of my first novel, Queen of Beauty, in which the past and present speak to each other, sections out of chronological order juxtaposed to position ancestors ahead as well as behind the protagonist and the novel’s present action. No reviewer mentioned this. In New Zealand Books, David Cohen reviewed my long essay On Coming Home (BWB 2015) without once mentioning the word Māori or discussing the Māori heritage explored in the book. His only points of comparison for my work were white men, George Orwell and Martin Edmond. Although by 2015 I’d published four novels – one of which, Rangatira, won the fiction prizes at both the NZ Post Book Awards and the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards – and a collection of short stories, as well as four YA novels, Cohen had not read any of them.
Remember: nobody knows who we are.
Remember: we have disguised ourselves with Pākehā names.
Remember: they would rather see us as Pākeha, because it’s easier.
In 2008, in the same journal, Laura Kroestch – a Canadian who now directs the writers’ festival in Adelaide – reviewed Speaking for Themselves: Ex-pats Have Their Say, a book of interviews by Jan Morgan. She had this to say about Māori heritage:
“All of the writers talk about how New Zealand has changed, and one of the more interesting aspects of that change is the wish to be associated in some way with the tangata whenua, an association which represents a somehow more New Zealand way of being a New Zealander. For instance, I now know that Peter Gordon is 1/36 Maori, Paula Morris’ father was part-Maori, Rena Owen is half, and Alannah Currie had a Maori family next door. Teddy Tahu Rhodes sports a Maori tattoo because ‘Maori and Pacific Islander culture is so beautiful’, and Temuera Morrison is ‘brown white’ (part Irish/Scottish and part Maori), ‘but the Maori side gets Tem’s full attention.’
“Wanting to be Maori is great, but in the context of this book it seems yet another way to idealise a place that – unless I’ve missed a major cultural shift – is still busy trying to sort out its race relations.”
Where to begin with this? I know that 2008 is almost a decade ago, and maybe such derogatory comments wouldn’t be written – or published – now. But I remember reading it at the time and feeling horrified. By definition, tangata whenua are, indeed, the most ‘New Zealand’ of New Zealanders. Alannah Currie could learn from the Māori family next door the way I learned from the Dutch family across the road: it doesn’t mean we were aspiring to or idealising something we’re not. Teddy Tahu Rhodes can have a Māori tattoo without ‘wanting to be Māori’: maybe he just wants the design to be indigenous rather than imported.
I don’t call my father part-Māori, and I don’t call myself that either. Our heritage is Māori and English, with the persistent rumour of Portuguese in the whakapapa as well. We never talked percentages – just as the Queen, I imagine, doesn’t interrogate her own percentage of German ‘blood’ – because we don’t observe Blood Quantum policies in New Zealand or the UK.
Remember: “wanting to be Māori is great, but …”
Remember: we may not be Māori enough.
Implicit in Kroetsch’s review is the Pākehā reader. The playwright Victor Rodger has complained about this:
“I remember one of the first moments I put my hands on my hips was when I read a review of Witi Ihimaera’s book The Matriarch. The Pākehā reviewer was saying: ‘We lose so much because we don’t understand the language.’ And I was like: ‘Well, who is this we? This we does not include me. Who are you talking to?’”
Reviewers like Kroestch and Cohen would rather see us as Pākehā. The Māori stuff is a distraction. After reading my Spinoff essay, Cohen wrote this on social media: “The brief [of the review in New Zealand Books] was not to read your other work. Or indeed to focus on ethnicity as such. Everybody’s ‘ethnic,’ when you get down to it, and that wasn’t the over-riding theme of the essay of yours that I was invited to offer a few thoughts on.”
Everybody is ethnic. Or, who do you Māori think you are?
In a further comment he added: “Perhaps if you weren’t so thin-skinned, you would see that the piece attempted to be fair. And perhaps if you hadn’t spent most of your adult life away from New Zealand--doing fine things, no doubt--you wouldn’t be so insistent on waving the identity flag around in order to establish your local bona fides.”
Waving the identity flag. Let that sink in for a moment.
Actually, I don’t need to ‘establish … local bona fides’. I was born and raised in Auckland. I whakapapa back to the Tainui and Moekaraka waka. I’m tangata whenua and this is my turangawaewae: I don’t need a flag of any kind.
Junot Diaz discusses attitudes like Cohen’s in a piece on his experience in an MFA workshop: “Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.” He talks about a “lack of awareness of the lens of race, the vast silence on these matters.”
Not a flag, but a lens. Not waving, seeing.
*
Some people read my Spinoff essay and were affronted. Affront is why the Internet was invented, but anyway: they countered that they loved Māori writers.
Do they?
Of course, this essay’s opening is both hyperbolic and facetious. (Trigger warning: this essay may contain irony.) But even many professed supporters of Māori writers only support certain kaupapa, certain mahi. I’ve been interviewed about my work with the not-Māori-enough books omitted from the conversation. The supporters of Māori writing are not always supportive of Māori writers themselves if they stray from approved subject matter.
An example: the review of Ngā Hau e Wha: Stories on the Four Winds for the Landfall Review Online.
Ngā Hau e Wha is a short-story anthology edited by Huia founders Robyn and Brian Bargh and published in 2016. It featured work by contemporary Māori writers associated with the publisher, including some – like me – helped along the way by Huia’s anthologies. The book also featured work by Albert Wendt, an important figure in Huia history. Reviewer Vaughan Rapatahana writes that he “initially struggled to find an overarching thread to this compilation, given that the collection is of Huia-mandated tall-tale-tellers. There is a vast array of styles and content among these 20 anecdotes authored by 18 writers.”
I don’t know about the other writers, but I didn’t write an “anecdote” or a “tall tale”. I wrote a 3500-word short story. (It’s re-printed in my new collection of stories and essays, False River.) And in an anthology that brings together the four winds – i.e. writers of different backgrounds, experiences, styles – within contemporary Māori fiction, shouldn’t readers expect a “vast array”?
One of Rapatahana’s objections was about how far those winds seem to blow. “Many tales,” he wrote, “actually have little to do with te ao Māori anyway – indeed three are European fairy tales, as in being set in Europe: Tina Makereti’s ‘Frau Amsel’s Cupboard’, Paula Morris’s ‘Three Princesses’, and the more contemporary ‘Trust’ by Mark Sweet.”
While it’s true that these three stories are set in Europe, none of us wrote European fairy tales. My story’s protagonist is a Māori man who lives in Herne Bay and is on business in Estonia. The story-within-the-story is about a Māori traveller turning up – and turning heads – in medieval Estonia. Mark Sweet’s story ‘Trust’ begins with a Māori guy getting beaten up – and derided as a “Paki queer” – by police in Glasgow.
Tina Makereti’s story explores cross-cultural resonances when a compromised and desperate German woman in wartime encounters hidden treasures purloined from New Guinea in a museum. This work of fiction was written during, and responding to, Makereti’s 2012 residency in the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt.
Nothing “to do with te ao Māori”, I guess, in the sense of tikanga and te reo, but stories by Māori writers, who may or may not understand the finer points of tikanga or be fluent in te reo. We should have stayed home, apparently; we should have stuck to the tale or the anecdote or the yarn, forms that emerge from an oral tradition.
Later in the review Rapatahana praises two other stories because:
they are Māori in ethos; that is, they inculcate a specifically Māori Weltanschauung or Worldview – which, as noted earlier, is conspicuously lacking in several other stories. This last point is not a criticism, by the way. It is just that in a collection of work predominantly by Māori, one would think there would be he atu arotahi i runga i Māori ora, nē rā? [more focus on Māori lives, eh?]
Even stories like mine or Mark Sweet’s, with Māori protagonists, are not Māori enough: our Māori characters are not living ‘Māori lives’. And Tina Makereti’s subtle and moving story, in which a European woman experiences a moment of kinship with Melanesian women, gaining insight into how history and culture, the heritage of a family, sings in its household objects, is profoundly Māori in its take on whakapapa and taonga.
Not Māori enough for Pākehā, not Māori enough for Māori. This may be why writers like Kelly Ana Morey declares: “I can’t be the ‘Māori’ writer people want me to be, all I can be is myself. Mining the Māori world for material would somehow feel like an act of theft because my knowledge and connection feel so slight and arbitrary. This is why I don’t write from the Māori perspective all that often in my fiction, and if I do those characters tend to be quarter-cast who are like me a little disconnected. They operate as individuals rather than cultural representatives.”
We frighten away our own; we tell them they are “quarter-cast”, not a whole within any culture, any heritage. We accuse them of theft, as though they’re holding up a dairy. We’re at the sad point in New Zealand literature where a writer feels she has to apologise that her fictional characters “operate as individuals”.
*
Nobody likes a Māori writer with too pale a face and too culturally unrepresentative a book, but this didn’t stop Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti – defiant, insolent, gleeful? – waving a [black] identity flag, as some would see it, or maybe re-training the lens in a different direction.
Black Marks on the White Page is an “Oceanic” anthology: “the glorious, painful, sharp and funny stories of Māori and Pasifika writers from all over the world, and one guest Aboriginal writer whose presence asks us to rethink the boundaries we have set up between ourselves and our neighbours, literal and figurative”. In ‘Whakapapa of a Wallpaper’, Ihimaera’s ‘chimerical fiction’ about Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected], he laments the colonisation and division of the Pacific, and the way colonisers “variously named our dismembered parts Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Austronesia.”
This new anthology is an act of re-assembly, and of re-orientation. Here Māori writers are not token ‘exotic’ inclusions in a NZ-lit book; nor are we shuffled together in a mainly Māori pack, to be scrutinised for sufficient levels of tikanga. In Black Marks we join the other Pacific pieces, the part this-and-thats, the colonised, the diasporic, the bearers of misleading names and addresses; we join the writers who explore mythic pasts, and those who voyage into the future, imagining new worlds. The Pacific is not a rim: it’s a continent fervid with creativity, a brilliant blue planet.
Ihimaera and Makereti contend that the work in Black Marks “embodies the disruptive act that Māori, Pasifika and Aboriginal writing constitutes in the worldwide literary landscape – still the page is white, and still the marks we make upon it are radical acts of transgression, of forcing others to see us in all our complexity and wonder.”
If you doubt that the page is still white, read the text of Makereti’s Auckland Writers Festival lecture and the statistics she cites on how few books by Māori and Pasifika writers are published.
Their introduction to Black Marks is a gauntlet thrown to the “Māori in ethos” crowd. There are too many preconceptions, the editors argue, about writers from the Pacific, as there are for writers of colour and Indigenous writers: who we should be and how we should write are too prescribed.
“Even though we sometimes bemoan the scarcity of an Oceanic fiction that looks like us, smells like us, walks like us and therefore must be us, none of us should be constrained by any sense of what we’re supposed to look or sound like. Creativity doesn’t live there. There must be no compulsion to write in any particular way about any particular topics, outside of the writer’s own creative project.”
Does this need to be said – here, now, in 2017? Yes, while we still have reviewers – and readers – who are only comfortable reading in one world, and can’t make the imaginative leap into other contexts and experiences. Reviewers who see a flag rather than a lens.
Ihimaera and Makereti present the anthology as a talanoa, which is a storytelling as well as a conversation. Its original kaupapa, as a collection of short fiction, broadened and transformed as work flowed in: there are novel excerpts here, published or in-progress, from Tusiata Avia, Alexis Wright, Sia Figiel, Déwé Gorodé, and Anya Ngawhare; an extract from Albert Wendt’s novel-in-verse The Adventures of Vela; a black-out poem from Selina Tusitala Marsh; and an essay of mine – on a trip to Mississippi, the death of Robert Johnson and the murder of Emmett Till – that poses as a story. The line-break marks on Courtney Sina Meredith’s winsome, sly story ‘The Coconut King’ suggests it could be read as a prose poem.
David Geary’s #WATCHLIST reflects his background as a dramatist: much of the piece would work as a play, with its other elements as visual counterpoint; Serie Barford’s ‘After the Tsunami’ also works as a short dramatic monologue. Readers seeking yarns, anecdotes or tall tales may be perplexed by formal experimentation like Geary’s, or Cassandra Barnett’s ‘Pitter, patter, Papatūānuku’.
Admirers of realism will swoon at the understated, elegant story telling of Patricia Grace (‘Matariki All-Stars) and Kelly Ana Morey (‘Poor Man’s Orange’); they may read Mary Rokonadravu’s ‘Famished Eels’ and ‘Sepia’ and wonder why her work is only available in journals and anthologies rather than her own collection – though ‘Famished Eels’, like Tina Makereti’s ‘Black Milk’, also included here, were both finalists in the Commonwealth Writers story prize. Some names – Grace, Ihimaera, Wendt – are well-known to New Zealand readers, but the selection here isn’t predictable, and includes new voices like Gina Cole, and newish ones like Nic Low.
Remember: nobody knows who we are.
Black Marks is handsome in hardback, dressed in the splendour of James Ormsby’s bold cover illustration (the symbolism explained on the inner sleeve), and features four-colour art by Pati Solomona Tyrell, Shane Hansen, Rosanna Raymond, Robert Jahnke, Cerisse Palalagi, Lisa Reihana and Yuki Kihara.
Despite the book’s flash production: it’s no glib marketing exercise. It’s an intelligent and lively anthology that explores the formal possibilities of story, its slippery nature, its nerve. “I am five the year my father tells me how to tell a story,” says the narrator of ‘Famished Eels’. “Always make room for uncertainty, he says. Don’t say someone said this or said that. Don’t ever be sure. Just walking from this kitchen to the backyard you will lose what I have just told you. Make room for that.”
Black Marks on a White Page is a roomy and discursive book, diverse in style and subject matter, big on ambition and scope. Maybe it’s the most subversive coffee table book of the year. Maybe it’s the beginning of a new way of framing and reading Māori writers, in a larger context that allows us to escape the confines of other people’s preconceptions and percentages.
“When the soul of a man is born in this country,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” He vowed “to try to fly by those nets”. We should try as well.
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I’ll finish with a plea – no, a challenge. I sit in lots of meetings where people – writers, students, lit-biz professionals, institutional reps, policy makers, hui organisers – lament the fact that so few Māori writers are published and that sales figures for Māori writers, like many New Zealand authors, are small.
My question: how many books by Māori writers have you bought this year? Did you buy Apirana Taylor’s novel? Did you buy Black Marks on the White Page? Did you buy Ngā Hau e Wha: Stories on the Four Winds? Did you buy Sleeps Standing/Moētu by Witi Ihimaera with a superb side-by-side te reo translation by Hemi Kelly? Did you buy the new issue of the Māori literary journal Ora Nui? Did you buy the Te Kaihanga Māpere picture book by Sacha Cotter, translated by Kawata Teepa and illustrated by Josh Morgan, winner of Te Kura Pounamu Award at this year’s CYA Book Awards?
If you can’t afford to buy books, did you take one of these titles out of the library, or ask for it to be ordered? Would you ask someone to buy you a copy for Christmas? Would you ask someone to buy a copy and donate it to a school library?
If you’re a writer whose work was featured in one of the anthologies, did you attend one of the launches? Did you bring along friends and whanau to help celebrate the sheer force of will that goes into producing these books? Did you promote the book on social media or to your networks? Did you tell your local school about it so the book might be bought as a resource for students?
If you think of yourself as someone who likes Māori writers, will you buy one of these books at your local book shop and give it to someone else, to help develop new audiences?
Spread the word, spread the love, spread the like. As Tina Makereti said in her lecture, we get the House of Literature we deserve, the one we care enough to build.