I gave this talk last week at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. They were having a Cultural Difference Week for the Creative Industries students, and were focusing on te reo Māori, so that they could create stop-motion animations about the importance of te reo. I've posted a few of my favourites below (made in only 7 hours). At first I was a bit worried about whether I was the right person to comment, because I write in English and don’t speak Māori fluently. But then I thought about how integral te reo is to how I write in English, how integral it is to our identities as New Zealanders, and what a cultural and creative wasteland Aotearoa would be without our indigenous language. So, I found I did have something to say...

Let me begin by way of some examples.

PĀKEHĀ

Here is a word of some contention. Many of you, as contemporary young New Zealanders, will be completely comfortable with this term, while perhaps your parents or grandparents are not. There are still those that find the term offensive, though I have long wondered why. There are various versions of stories about the origins of the word Pākehā, including that it is an onomatopoeic word for the language Cook and his men spoke when they first arrived, and that it’s meaning, when broken down, could mean those of different breath or language. One indication that Pākehā is a term still not acceptable for many New Zealanders, is that on the recent census form, ‘NZ European’ was still the only term available to white New Zealanders to describe their ethnicity. I am half Pākehā. After I wrote in my iwi, I ticked the ‘other’ box on my census form and wrote in ‘Pākehā’.

The reason for this is that I am proud to be Pākehā, just as I am proud to be Māori. New Zealand European doesn’t mean anything to me, and most Pākehā I know are not very European at all. Pākehā only exist in this place, in Aotearoa, and the Pākehā culture was forged on these shores. The name, given to the second people of these lands, says something about relationship to this place and its first people. No one else in the world gets to claim that heritage, no one else gets to have the unique relationship Pākehā have with Aotearoa and Māori. To be Pākehā is to claim ownership of a position in the most extraordinary country I know. There are responsibilities that come with that position, of course, but I don’t want to stray too far from my point. ‘NZ European’ carries none of the rich heritage and history that comes with the word Pākehā. It is part of the story of what makes us, us.

Here are some more terms. My apologies to any speakers of te reo, as I’m going to go over some basic things that are immediately evident when you learn the language, but I’m guessing that many of you haven’t. Last week I asked a class I teach at Victoria University how many knew another language. Two out of around eighteen students put their hands up. I was not even asking if they spoke Māori. It’s a shame our education system doesn’t insist on some level of bilingualism, as is the norm in many overseas countries. Only by learning another language can one gain a clear insight into how a language embodies a different world view, a whole different way of perceiving and being in the world.

Some basic interpretations:

HAPŪ

Sub-tribe / kinship group (the main form of societal organisation for Māori – villages were centred around hapū). Also, pregnant.

IWI

Tribe – larger kinship group descended from common ancestor. Also, Bone. Strength.

WHĀNAU

Family – extended family. Also, be born, to give birth.

WHENUA

Land. Placenta/afterbirth.

Looking at the various meanings of these words, we can learn a great deal about Māori culture. That your iwi is your strength, the structure that holds you upright, as deep and eternal as bones, which remain long after the rest of you has passed, just as your people will. That being hapū, creating new life, is intimately connected to the main group through which Māori society is organised – perhaps that each needs the other. That we are attached to the land in much the same way that a babe is attached to her mother’s placenta – that it feeds and sustains us.

As a writer, this means that te reo is indispensible to my writing, even in English. There are certain concepts and ideas that can only be expressed in te reo. English approximations cannot give the sense of place or meaning that Māori can.

An example: I recently sent a query to an American agent. She wanted to see the first 50 pages of my novel, which was thrilling, but I had a dilemma. In those first fifty pages were scattered many Māori words. Some could be exchanged for their English equivalent without too much loss of meaning, but most could not. Is family really the equivalent of whānau? In my first book, I very purposefully did not include a glossary (more about that later), and I did not want my American reader to constantly interrupt her reading to look up the Māori words if I did supply one. For a NZ reader, I can assume a certain amount of prior knowledge, and make context give meaning for the rest. Here I was less sure.

In the end I compromised. Unless I could be sure the context of the sentence gave the meaning of the word, I used the English translation. But this made the story somehow less than it was. For example, I discovered that I’d used the word ‘whare’ frequently. Many New Zealanders will know that a whare is a house. But in this context, the whare were being built for a summer hunting and gathering expedition. It was the 1880s, so timber houses also featured, but here the whānau were travelling to tribal lands and building makeshift whare to camp in. A New Zealander might easily imagine one – made from punga and flax, raupo or driftwood – whatever materials were available.

I couldn’t use the word ‘house’ which for English speakers means a certain solid thing that takes months to construct and contains many rooms. I couldn’t say ‘tent’, because obviously that is a cloth construction. In the end I substituted ‘hut’. It was entirely unsatisfactory. Huts bring to mind buildings in other countries, and colonial descriptions of them. They might be made of mud and cow dung, be painted bright colours, or be thatched with palms. The landscape outside of huts might be desert or tropical island. Everything I wanted my reader to know about the constructions I was referring to was contained in the word ‘whare’ – the materials, the manner of construction, shape, the landscape outside. I did describe the materials, but so much of what I wanted to say was embodied in that word – a word that stands only for something that belongs irrevocably here.

And that is what te reo gives us, not only through meaning, but sound. I love to read writing by Indian and Chinese writers, which are often scattered with words I don’t know. Invariably, context gives meaning, though I know that what I imagine might not be the fullest sense of the word. But what these words also give me is the sounds of the culture and the place they come from. I value these words because they carry a cultural resonance that cannot be gained by description or explanation in English.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had one of those great experiences where things that occur in everyday life inform what I’ve been thinking about, namely, this talk. A lecture I recently attended addressed briefly the topic of glossaries and why a writer might choose not to use them. This is something I’ve already touched on and thought about a lot in relation to my own work, but the lecturer, Dougal McNeill, had a succinct and eloquent way of putting it: A glossary, he said, creates a hierarchy of the familiar and unfamiliar. It highlights an area of ‘foreignness’ that ‘normal’ people won’t understand. He was referring to the work of the late Chinua Achebe, who did not glossarise Nigerian Igbo words in his English language novel Things Fall Apart in 1958.

Thus, if we make glossaries for Māori words or italicise them, we separate them as abnormal, foreign, and not part of our literary landscape. We make them secondary to English. Patricia Grace is perhaps the writer most well known for refusing to explain or highlight her use of Māori words in English language texts this way.

But what responsibility does this present for the rest of us? One reaction is for non-Māori-speaking readers to say they feel excluded when Māori words are not translated. This is almost never the intention of the writing, but perhaps it does perform the function of prompting or discomforting the reader enough to act (or complain). If a New Zealand reader cannot understand simple words or phrases in one of the official languages of his/her country, should he or she not attempt to learn? If there are things that can only be said in Māori, should the writer be compelled to act as translator as well, even knowing the translation is likely to be inadequate?

And should we want them to? What do we lose if we constantly want things spelled out for us, if we refuse to just listen to the sounds the words make, and absorb their meaning from the story around them?

The use and acceptance of te reo Māori in English language writing has the same purpose and effect as choosing to call yourself ‘Pākehā’ rather than a ‘NZ European’. We create a new English that only belongs to this place. Chinua Achebe wrote of the same thing in Africa in 1975. He had been given this English language, he said, and he would use it to communicate to a wider audience. But in doing so the English would not go unchanged. It would be made to commune with his ancestral home and carry the weight of his contemporary African experience. When we incorporate words like ‘whare’ and ‘aroha’ into our writing, we do so recognising that ‘hut’ and ‘love’ would not encompass the wholeness of our experience. We make our most common language carry the weight of our ancestral and contemporary realities.

My offering here today is small – I can only tell you why te reo Māori is important to my practice as a writer in English. I have given you a small handful of words. But if anything I have said today has prompted you to think about the substantial richness of those few words, consider then what would be gained from achieving some fluency in te reo. If the word ‘whenua’ can show the symbolic relationship Māori have with land, consider the insights that might be gained from a thorough knowledge of all aspects of Māori communication. Imagine how your point of view, or our collective relationships with each other, might be transformed by a deeper understanding of the indigenous language of Aotearoa. Imagine then, if someone asks ‘what is this thing called aroha?’ Perhaps the answer would be, in whatever language: ‘I get you mate, I understand.’

The other animations that were made during the Cultural Difference Week at NMIT can be viewed at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Creative-Industries-NMIT/221534297899313

My thesis consists of two parts. Part One is the critical component, called ‘Grappling with Space: Going Beyond Historiographic Metafiction in Baby No-Eyes and Benang (From the Heart)’. Part Two is the creative component, which consists of a novel, Rēkohu Story.  My work in this thesis addresses questions I had about how to write a novel that both reveals a history that has not been well understood or represented in the past, and also explores the complexity of contemporary Indigenous cultural identity. Conducting a close reading of specific texts by two Indigenous writers, Baby No Eyes (1999) by Patricia Grace, and Benang (2002) by Kim Scott, using the characteristics of historiographic metafiction as a frame, provides greater insight into how these texts operate as fiction and explore wider issues around cultural/historical identities.

This thesis engages three possible audiences: writers; Indigenous People (engaged in the project of cultural reclamation / decolonisation); literary scholars (with an interest in Indigenous or historiographic metafictional literature). Of course these groups are not necessarily distinct and are best envisaged as overlapping spheres. To varying extents I am situated within all three groups. In addition, as a New Zealander of Māori, Pākehā and Moriori descent, I had questions about why certain histories in New Zealand had been misrepresented over long periods of time, and why, even after these representations were revealed to be erroneous, they still continued to hold precedence. For example, I contend that despite comprehensive historical writing and work by the Moriori people, Michael King, The Waitangi Tribunal and others, distorted understandings of the history of Rēkohu (Chatham Islands) persist.

Finally, the thesis asserts the potential of fiction to challenge and enrich understandings of history and self (personally, culturally and nationally). The creation of stories that investigate history from different points of view and different time periods allows for Indigenous perspectives to continue to gain new cultural and societal life and replace long held national myths.

(The following article describes myths still prevalent: http://www.stuff.co.nz/archived-stuff-sections/archived-national-sections/korero/498166/Moriori-revival as does this article that describes the necessity of producing new school journals to refute the inaccuracies expounded in older editions: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4789044/Rewriting-the-history-of-Moriori. Scott Hamilton, on his studious blog Reading the Maps, has written several long pieces on the myths that persist, including: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2009/04/myth-that-wont-go-away.html, http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2008/06/pseudo-history-in-onehunga.html)

I can't say too much about the novel yet, but it consists of three intertwined narratives: a contemporary young woman of Moriori, Māori and Pākehā descent seeks her family’s origins; a Moriori slave and his Ngāti Mutunga mistress run away together in 1882; and the spirit of a man who died during the invasion of the Chatham Islands (Rēkohu) is stuck in the realm of the living, watching his people suffer slavery and the loss of their lands and waiting for the time when his descendants will discover the truth of their origins and reclaim the powerful legacy that has been buried by multiple colonising forces.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to write this thesis. And more passionate about the subject matter now than when I began. As usual, there is an extensive list of people and organisations who made the project possible, including the International Institute of Modern Letters, Maui Solomon and Susan Thorpe, the Hokotehi Moriori Trust Board, my supervisors and workshop mates, and of course my whanau.

ME RONGO - IN PEACE

Confession #1: I don’t know what the Frankfurt Book Fair was like. People keep asking and I keep muttering inadequate semi-descriptions and feeling like I’m letting the side down. It’s only fair, since I had the opportunity to go, that I pass on some kind of insider’s perspective. All I have is an insider’s lack of perspective.

#2: That’s why I’m writing this blog – to share and make sense of the experience. Except when people ask what it was like I often can’t bring myself to tell them about this blog. It’s a self-defeating cycle. Luckily other people have produced interesting accounts of the NZ Pavilion and the NZ stand and other aspects of the book fair here and here and here and here. I was focused on a number of talks in that last week, so perhaps I can write about those, though it really only grazes the edges of the whole NZ Guest of Honour experience. Here it is then, my humble contribution:

How You Know You’re in Some Other Country: My first panel is with Bill Manhire and Eleanor Catton. There is something slightly odd, right from the beginning. Our moderator has interesting questions about the short story collection Ein anderes Land that we’re meant to discuss, but seems only to be aware of my book and no one else’s other work. I’m not sure that my impression is correct because there also seems to be a language problem (surprisingly rare occurrence throughout the trip and the fair itself). But then on stage he says to Bill, who is there as editor of the collection, ‘so you are a writer as well?’ Bill says yes, but he tends to write poetry . . .  Still, it's a really good discussion - it's always so invigorating to have these talks with other writers, even though it takes place on a stage.

Weltkulturen One: Eva Raabe (Custodian of Oceania collection), Hamish Clayton and me. A very quick rehearsal of the longer talk we’ll do on Saturday at the museum itself. We talk about expectations and outcomes from the residency (see Parts One & Two), but each read something pre-residency. Somehow Eva isolates moments from Wulf and Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa that link to our interest in, and time at, the museum.

Weird Combinations That Work and Preconceptions That Don’t: Rosie Goldsmith gets the interesting task of connecting the work of C.K. Stead, Anna Jackson, and myself. Anna and I are slightly puzzled about how this will work (thematically the link isn’t obvious, and Anna is primarily a poet in a session about short stories). Earlier in the week I witness Rosie pull off another weird combination that includes Nalini Singh, Elizabeth Knox and Lawrence Patchett. It actually works very well, with a continuum of perspectives and styles that delve into the fantastic. There is a lot of blood spilt during the readings in that session (characters’, not writers’!) I feel we’re in good hands. Knowing more about C.K. Stead’s criticism than his creative work, I have the perhaps erroneous impression that he might not like the more fantastic/mythical elements of my own work. I decide to go with this idea rather than against it, and choose to read one of my more gritty realist stories. It’s a story I’m really fond of, and have never read publicly. All good. We touch on mythic Māori stories and the work of Katherine Mansfield. Mr Stead* then reads a fantastic (in both senses of the word) story about a man who figures out the principles of human flight.  Later, Anna manages to traverse the territory between fiction and poetry by reading a poem based on a long short story she wrote. It's very moving. I am reminded that preconceptions are rarely useful, although it's fun watching them being broken down.

Keeping It Real: Unfortunately Patricia Grace is unable to attend FBF and I have been asked to step in to one of her sessions at the Pavilion. I have the privilege of both reading some of her work and discussing the very important kaupapa of Māori Realities with Robyn Bargh of Huia Publishers. We discuss Māori fiction, publishing and diversity with the moderator, Rowan Payton. So far moderators fall into three categories according to how much pre-show communication is received from them. This ranges from none, to a little, to a great deal. Rowan has put in a lot of time and has met with me and Robyn to go over the session in detail. Māori Realities is a big and complicated topic, and we decide to isolate the issues we can reasonably cover in half an hour. So perhaps it’s a little alarming for Rowan that I can’t contain a sudden uncontrollable urge to cry when he throws me an unanticipated and quite ordinary question. It is Friday, and I am due to fly out the next day. ‘How has your time at the Weltkulturen been?’ he asks. I say something about the amazing hospitality and how special Frankfurt is. I try to stop the tears from building to full force but by then I am utterly choked up. Some ladies in the front start to applaud and others join in. It feels nice in a way – a real sense of connection to the place and people (in a marae setting the same sentiment might be expressed by someone calling out ‘kia kaha’ or ‘tautoko’). I guess I really do end up bringing a bit of Māori reality to the session (I’m sure my propensity to cry in public comes from that side).

Weltkulturen Two: To be honest, I have been thinking about crying all week. Or specifically, how to avoid it. Except I'd anticipated it would happen at the Weltkulturen Text and Culture Marathon the next day. I’d written a piece that focused on a tauihu (canoe prow) in the Face to Face exhibit, and while proofreading, it hit a couple of emotional nerves. I had also suggested that I read the piece as an address to the tauihu, so that the audience could see the taonga I was writing about and we could embody the Face to Face theme of the exhibition. Together with my tendency to tangi in front of a crowd and the fact that I am due to leave only hours after the session, I am sure to tear up. It’s all very well to have these ideas, but the piece is new, unread by anyone else and possibly a bit sentimental. I have no idea whether the whole thing will work and I’ve volunteered to test it in a very public way.

On the day I throw myself into the talk as I do in these situations – you do your best you know? A short account of the session can be found here. I am so intent on performing the piece without tripping over nerves or emotions that I make it all the way through to the end. As I finish I look up and make eye contact with one of the kiwi crew who has tears in her eyes. I am suddenly aware that my own intensity of feeling around the story I have told has transmitted to others in the room. It is only then that I tear up, though when the feeling is shared, it is not such a big deal after all.

This final day at the Weltkulturen is great - full of interesting conversations by and with other writers and Frankfurter audiences. This blog post doesn’t really begin to cover it. And then I am in a taxi just as I had been on my first night in Frankfurt, watching the river and the lights of the city go past, thinking this is it now, and feeling okay about it. The driver checks off the names of other people he needs to pick up over the next few days, all the Kiwi writers leaving town. I think next time someone asks me what it was like I’ll just say it was magic. It really was.


With many thanks to the Frankfurt Museum der Weltkulturen as well as the NZ@Frankfurt team, PANZ, CNZ, and MCH.

*I don’t feel like I can call him Karl – he turned eighty while we were there and I barely met him, and is C.K. the proper way to address him?

Which was, of course, true. Conversations soon turned to the meanings of objects with or without narratives to accompany them. The custodians of the collections had many stories to share, which was brilliant, but without internal reference points for some of the objects, we were viewing something we couldn’t interpret or know intimately. As writers, we wanted the story. Perhaps that seems obvious, but visual artists and designers who had worked with the collection may have been inspired by simply viewing an object, and been able to interpret them purely aesthetically. For me, being the type of writer I am, it was not just the story of what the taonga represented, but the story of how they came to be where they are, and the stories of the relationships people had with them that mattered. One day I approached the tauihu (canoe prow) in the Face to Face exhibition and wrote about all these things, in relation to that particular taonga. I simply wrote what I saw, but realised that what I saw was probably radically different than what was seen by most other visitors to the museum, or even the staff who cared for the objects. From my studies in Māori art, I could interpret in a general way much of the meaning of the carving, but I also saw much of the history of Aotearoa played out in the journey the tauihu had taken from being part of an active waka taua in New Zealand to being stored in a museum in Europe. For me the startling realisation was that the tauihu had been witness to at least the last hundred years of Europe’s history as well (more about this in Part Three).

There were other things I saw, which became as central to the experience as the taonga themselves. I saw how the custodians of the collections really cared for them. In New Zealand they would be called curators, but the German equivalent translates more to custodian or guardian. It was not that I didn’t expect them to care about their collections, but that I hadn’t expected to witness a kind of connection and guardianship that was more akin to kaitiakitanga. I saw how one custodian drew strength and guidance from the objects in her care, how another found vitality and inspiration. I witnessed a third’s confusion and desire to understand the strange collecting habits of her twentieth century predecessors, something I myself struggled to come to terms with (a wholesale grabbing of stuff from ‘dying’ cultures – as much as they could transport home. The analogy of the naturalist destroying species in order to collect and study them was made more than once). They saw much more clearly than I had imagined.

And so the experience became just as much about relationships with the people. Typical of me to focus on this, but it seemed to be a distinctive aspect of the residency. ‘What will you take away with you?’ asked the custodian of the Oceania collection, Eva Raabe, at the Text and Culture Marathon a few hours before I was due to leave. ‘Well, there is all the writing,’ I said, ‘But it’s also the relationships that will continue. It’s the beginning of something.’ We’d just been speaking about how the taonga were alive to us. And I’d been writing about how I suspected Weltkulturen’s staff were already responding, on some level, to the living energy of the taonga in their care. So there were at least three groups connected by the residency: Weltkulturen staff, taonga and NZ residents, probably more if we include both the German and NZ visitors.

I’ve been home a week, and happy to be here. But a strange nostalgia has taken hold now. I’m still unpacking and sorting. Occasionally I see German writing – a receipt, a book or ticket. Then I’ll feel a bit of a squeeze somewhere between my heart and my stomach. The last email I received from the brilliant and striking director of the Museum, Clementine Deliss, said ‘know that you have a museum-home from home in Frankfurt.’ I have more work to do, writing to finish, research to follow-up on. Already Frankfurt has a dreamlike quality. It was immense. I have a huge amount of gratitude to many people. I can’t imagine how I got to have this completely unexpected adventure. And I’m immeasurably chuffed that I have a place to go back to, one day – an enduring link with a place and people who showed me something of themselves by showing me some of their objects / my taonga / our treasures.

As the third Kiwi resident, I arrived on a quiet weekend while Bryce was away visiting the other half of his band Wendyhouse. It was nice to be greeted by a familiar face in Hamish, but also enjoy the solitude of the beautiful apartment and city on foot. I walked and wrote and explored, and it came as a bit of a shock when other people turned up to work on Monday. Despite several lessons, my usable German consisted of various greetings, thank you and please and Ich verstehe kein Deutsche – I don’t speak German / Ich verstehe nicht – I don’t understand. One day I went to a café determined to order in German, bowled up to the counter, and muttered something about wanting cappuccino and cake. As soon as I was answered in German, I had to admit I didn’t understand a word. I’d also bypassed some sort of etiquette about sitting down and waiting to be served. In the end it was always easier to let the citizens of Frankfurt speak their excellent English when they quickly sized up my inability to express myself in their language. It was a language that I continued to admire though, sounding to my uneducated ears quite beautiful and funny. Perhaps those sounds will always remind me of the sophisticated gentlefolk of Frankfurt strolling in their taylored clothes, shopping at their delicious organic markets, eating their massive plates of meat at local pubs, with Grüne Soße und Apfelwein of course.

Es war einmal in Aotearoa, apparently!

I'm heading to the Weltkulturen Museum Residency in a couple of days, so I've been thinking a lot about Frankfurt. I'm  beginning to realise how extraordinary the German language is, and  find myself wishing I knew more of it (what little I do know is thanks to Emma at the Goethe Institut in Wellington, bitte!) This seems a good time to link to this post from the Frankfurt Bookfair 2012 - An Aotearoa Affair Blog, which includes an interview with translator, Anita Goetthans, and a German translation of my story, 'kaitiaki':

In March of this year I got to have this amazing conversation with these two blokes at the NZ International Festival of the Arts. The conversation between them was so dynamic I often got to just sit back and listen - and their words have stayed with me ever since. Here are a couple of my favourite moments from the conversation. (This has been recorded for Radio NZ so I won't quote too extensively. Hopefully the session will air at some stage).

This is the first thing, and then the other thing is politics. Mario Vargas Llosa said politics and sex are the two most difficult subjects for a writer. Perhaps the reason is that if you’re writing about politics you run the risk of your language becoming political. When your diction becomes political diction, the novel is lost, because political diction and political language and novelistic language are as opposed as you can get. Political language almost always is incapable of illumination, it’s incapable of saying something new. When politicians speak, they want to tell you something you already know, or they want to simplify things. Whereas a novelist wants to make things complicated, wants to tell you things are not as easy as you think. So there’s a tension.

You can have good political novels. Some of my favourite novels could be thought of as political novels, but it is because they assume another diction, another language. They don’t carry messages obviously. They don’t break the essential contract between the reader and the writer, which is – I shall not try to convince you of anything. The writer should say: this novel is not a way of talking you into anything. Whereas obviously with politics, that’s the only thing that matters.
 
Kim Scott: Perhaps one of the strengths of literature and fiction is – Vladimir Nabokov talks about the importance of enchantment in literature, in the reading and writing relationship, and I think that’s the precious part. One is inevitably political if you’re dealing in the sort of stuff we deal with I think. And people are very keen to put you in one camp or another and to tell you off if you haven’t met their political ends, or if you haven’t been accurate in your social history.

My concern is the possibilities of intimacy and enchantment and emotional engagement, without being soft and sloppy and self-indulgent… So again that enchantment thing - in many ways that’s what I want to get. That’s what I think is special, that’s what I value when I’m reading, and the complexity of that special relationship, as you were saying. It can’t be reduced to a political or power game. Also through doing that you can provoke people to decide their own position politically, or to go and find out more about the history of a certain situation.

Often I find in my writing, you find the juice in a political situation. So in Benang – when I came across an historical tract that talked about the need to uplift and elevate a despised people, and to breed out all signs of Aboriginality, and to create the first white man born in the family line -  when I used the phrase I may well be the first successfully white man born in the family line – the political energy that came from using that phrase...  I thought, oh I don’t want to say that, I don’t want to use that. But just to use that energy touched all sorts of historical and political buttons. To unpack and sort that kind of energy, and that motivation, not knowing where you’ll end up, or who you might or might not appease, that’s what interests me.

If you haven't read Scott or Vasquez, go now and find some! (not that I'm trying to convince you of anything...)

There are few things better than when life throws something at you that you couldn’t have predicted, just lobs you a fastball without even bothering to yell catch! and watches your face contort as you try to figure out if you can catch this one, or if it’s going to flash right by you, or even smack you in the eye.

Perhaps I should rewind to last year, when there was this list made of 100 NZ books that would be part of a 2011 catalogue in advance of NZ’s 2012 role as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I don’t know anything about how such things were done, but Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa was given a spot in the catalogue and some publicity followed on from that. It was a boost for which I was grateful, though I did wonder what it all meant. Time went on. There may have been a German publisher nibble. Occasionally people would say, I hear you’re going to Frankfurt, and I’d say, Oh no, not me, just the book! And then I found out that no, not even the book would be promoted at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair, since no German Publisher had picked it up.

Then, earlier this year, I received a message about a residency in Frankfurt leading up to the book fair, for which I had somehow mysteriously made my way onto a shortlist. Cue fastball. I thought of all the reasons I couldn’t go first: family, fear, family, fear. Okay, so there were only two reasons, but they were compelling. Except, as I heard more about the residency, other thoughts gained precedence: what I could write; what museums mean; what ethnography is and does; what it would mean to be a Māori in a Museum in Frankfurt. Half-formed story and essay ideas kept insinuating themselves into my thoughts like showgirls looking for an audition: I’d be perfect for this! You could take me with you! I’d travel well!

And so there was a meeting, and a little while later there was an invitation. I was going to Frankfurt. I am going. Haven’t been yet. Here’s a little bit about what I’ll be up to:

Weltkulturen is an ethnographic museum with an intriguing approach to a constant issue for all museums: how to approach, interpret and make relevant their collections. In Germany the approach has traditionally been more, er, traditional that it has been in New Zealand for decades now. I can’t comment on attitudes or methods in German Museums, but it’s probably safe to assert that they would not have the kinds of cultural roles and tikanga/protocols in place that have become commonplace in New Zealand museums. As a friend said recently, museums in Europe usually don’t have local indigenous populations to work with, and therefore haven’t developed the kinds of relationships that museums in places like NZ, Australia or Canada are working towards.

Weltkulturen has tens of thousands of objects that were collected from indigenous populations around the world mainly in the last century. Extraordinary objects, cared for by dedicated staff. But some of these objects lack significant information or understanding of their function or meaning or origins. And rather than tackle this problem only in a conventional and direct manner, which may have limited success, the Museum has developed an innovative and elegant idea: invite contemporary artists (in the wider sense) to respond to the collection.

So that is what we will be doing for a few weeks later this year. There will be two of us, Hamish Clayton and I, and we will literally be living in apartments in the museum. There is much to say and think and write on the matter. There are many questions raised simply by the idea of living in a Museum, engaging with a collection in this way. I have at least two gut responses to Museum environments, forged by the two main cultures from which I descend. And I have been impressed and inspired by the work of previous artists at Weltkulturen – astute, illuminating work that incites conversations about museums and ethnography and the people and cultures at the centre of them. I hope to contribute to that conversation.

With many thanks to the NZ @ Frankfurt team and Clementine Deliss, Director of the Museum der Weltkulturen.

For more information:
http://www.weltkulturenmuseum.de/en/labor

This kete was given to me in 1997 (I believe) by Pare Richardson and the whānau of Māori Studies before I left my job here to go and do other things.  I chose to bring it tonight because a decade later, when I began writing this book, among other things it was the stuff I had learnt in my first years at Massey that came back and made themselves essential parts of my stories. Perhaps I thought I was going to write like other writers that I enjoyed reading -  like the Americans, or British immigrant writers, or contemporary Pākehā New Zealand writers. With the exception of Keri Hulme, I’d hardly read any fiction by Māori authors. So I was surprised that when I began writing, even though I experimented a lot, it was the stories that took Māori mythologies as their inspiration that carried the most juice.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. As an undergraduate, I found culture and mythology the most fascinating areas of study. I came here knowing nothing. The first year pōwhiri I attended at the little building next door was the first pōwhiri I had ever been to. Pare Richardson was my first te reo teacher. When the papers I took didn’t cover my interests, I used Massey’s Library to continue my own research. I joined Maori student groups like Manawatahi and learnt some kapa haka.

In Bob Jahnke’s Māori Visual Arts classes I learnt more about the Māori universe, and how it was embodied not only by carving, but by buildings themselves. Being a visual person, this conceptualisation of the universe has stayed with me ever since. I haven’t found a better system for understanding most things.

I also remember a handful of us meeting in Mason Durie’s office each week for 150.401 or 701. We had the privilege of having immediate updates on the new Treaty settlements and new Māori MPs in Parliament, as well as a myriad of other incredibly important and momentous, it seemed, events in Māori political spheres. It was in this class, or perhaps 301 before it, that Mason drew a line on his whiteboard, and told us that there is no one Māori reality, that there is a continuum of Māori identities, that Māori are a diverse people, and government should not expect only one response from us about things like Treaty settlements. Though I have used it again and again in my work, it has taken me a long time to really grasp the simple wisdom of that statement in terms of my own identity.

These were some of the influences that came out when I opened myself up to writing fiction. The writing taught me what is fundamental to my identity. Diversity. Culture. History. A belief that our traditions and myths still offer us a way of understanding our contemporary challenges. That some of my characters are obviously Māori and some obviously indefinable is important. And there are things that are not pretty to look at, but hopefully when we do look at them we can do so with humour and an ear for the wisdom that is still available to us. 

Universities are sometimes maligned, I think, as inferior places for learning tīkanga and reo. There may be some truth to that, but for people like me, they are a door that opens toward an understanding of Te Ao Māori. In addition, my first steps into creative writing were made here. So this is why, in more ways than one, this is like being given an award by family – of the multifaceted influences that went into the creation of Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, this whānau certainly has a significant place.

My thanks also to those directly involved in creating and maintaining these awards. For me the important thing about these awards is that they encourage diversity in writing. This both shows vision and implicitly critiques the current national literature awards, which reward excellence, but can be limited. The Nga Kupu Ora Awards are a great model for how we can have more diverse ways of recognising writing, and it’d be great to see more events like this, not just for Māori. While awards might be seen as simply kinaki or embellishment to the achievement of getting work published, awards and nominations can have a surprising effect in terms of promoting and encouraging new writing. So thank you for encouraging me.

I’m particularly pleased that Fiction by Maori is now firmly back on the agenda, when it was so conspicuously absent in the first two years of these awards. In 2010 there was a handful of fiction books by Māori, and this year a handful more. I hope that continues & grows. As a Māori, it was tempting to think that my voice would be more effective in social sciences or other forms of research. But I found that those disciplines alone could not address the full complexity of my reality. Fiction gave me permission to explore issues in a way that was non-didactic. That is, fiction does not come up with theories or definitions, it simply allows you to explore what is – to go deep into the paradox that is all of us – to suggest that a being can be more than one thing, that an idea or action can be both bad and good. My current research and writing suggests that fiction can give us a more direct and visceral relationship with historical and contemporary challenges, and thus deepen our understanding of issues that affect us. Further, it offers others a version of our stories that speak directly to the heart and imagination, thus creating a bridge between cultures. I sometimes think it is difficult for many Māori to prioritise creative writing, when there is such urgency in our other work. I would like to suggest fiction is an important tool for the reclamation of histories and identities, and for the imagining of alternative possibilities. It is my hope that this inaugural award will be the first of many fiction awards to Maori writers.

I always intended to post a link on my website to the interview I did with Craig Cliff for his blog when my book first came out. Looking back, it still strikes me as an interesting conversation to have had, and I love the way the title Craig gave it has different resonances now.

CC: ‘Skin and Bones’ is a fantastic story — I can't imagine the collection starting any other way. Was it always your first choice to open the collection? And what led you to write this story in the first place?
TM: Thanks so much!  The only reason it's first is because I couldn't imagine it being anywhere else either.  Somehow I ended up with creation at the beginning and death at the end (well, death as well as birth), but that symmetry wasn't apparent until quite late in the development of things.  To tell the truth, I think I would have hidden ‘Skin and Bones’ in the middle somewhere because of the 'adult' themes, but it didn't make sense anywhere else.

An MA classmate, Charis Boos, was looking at mythology in her poetry, and for a workshop she asked us to think about mythological traditions we were familiar with.  This triggered a bit of a chain reaction for me - an old obsession with mythologies combined with some sort of idea that it would be an interesting exercise to make mythological characters more human.  There's not always an explanation given for the actions of godly beings.  In the versions I read, it would always say: Tane went in search of the female element or something similar (they were Maori stories in translation).  There was never anything about Hine ahu one, the woman he eventually created - it was like she was a blank slate.  So I thought about what kind of woman she would have been, and of course, his motivations in creating her.  The funny thing was in some of the stories, Tane didn't know how to procreate with Hine once she was made, so his fumbling and experimenting is part of the story. That's a pretty human characteristic - I guess I used it as my starting point.   

CC: ‘Blink’ is an interesting story.  I enjoyed the way it veers into almost pulp sci-fi territory, but manages to walk that fine line and keep its credibility. It is, in the end I think, a great character study which uses some sci-fi tropes, rather than a sci-fi story which uses characters.
TM: Yes, I think it started with thoughts around relationships and paranoia.  Rosie is a pretty neurotic character, and I started playing with her sense of reality.  I was also having a go at deliberate humour, which I found a massive challenge, but the feedback I got was to amp up the strange and humorous aspects.  So I decided to take it as far as I could.  It is probably the most re-written story in the collection, whereas ‘Skin and Bones’ has changed very little from the first draft.

CC: I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see science (both pure science and sci-fi) pop up since you won the Non-Fiction category in last year's Manhire Science Writing Prize for ‘Twitch’, which looks at the similarities between Maori and scientific views of creation. Which came first: ‘Blink’ or ‘Twitch’? Were you conscious of any link between sci-fi and Maori mythology when you were working on ‘Blink’?
TM: Like most of the stories in the collection, 'Blink' was a bit of an exploration of where I could go with a story, and in the beginning it wasn't very conscious!  I tried not to categorise what I was doing, so I didn't think 'this is sci-fi'.  A few of the stories were structured around particular myths, but for the most part I was just figuring out what I could do with fiction.  I was pretty unsure with ‘Blink’, because I didn't think sci-fi or humour were things I would be able to pull off. 

'Twitch' came much later, in response to the RSNZ call for entries for the Manhire prize, but the thoughts behind it began at the same time as I first encountered all the mythology as a teenager.  I remember the first time I read the Maori version of the creation of the Universe (in English translation), I thought it could be a description of the Big Bang as I understood it.  I decided to check out if there was any scientific basis to my thoughts, and it turned out there was more than I had hoped for.  Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything was a great source for the scientific side of things.  I found it to be almost spiritual, because although it is completely about science, it continuously bumps into the mystery of things - the idea that it is completely miraculous we even exist.  Read more...