A CONVERSATION WITH KERI HULME

Tu Tangata, Issue 7, 1 August 1982, Page 2

A CONVERSATION WITH KERI HULME

Don Long

Shortly after Tu Tangata Magazine interviewed Keri Hulme, it was announced that *etad»on the IQ Writers Bursary of $6,000 Completely knocked out, flabbergasted” was how Ken described her feelmgs. She says the money wdl enable all the ghosts m her head and scraps of paper to be finally put down. First up Keri says she’ll polish up a collection of short stories that have been knocking around for a while. She

also intends get to work on a book idea entitled ‘Bait’. The Writers Bu is funded join by |he UteraTy Fun / and , a Ltd and , he twenty applications received were jud d b wia Ihimaera, radio personEliza AU and Literary Fund member Dr Frank McKay, The bursary enables an author with potential to be able to work full-time on a creative writing project.

The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) is the first collection of poems by a Maori woman writer to be published in New Zealand. The Bone People may soon be published by Spiral and the Women’s Press in London with the support of Kai Tahu Trust.

I first met Keri when we were visiting New Zealand poets together at the East West Centre in Hawaii. These poems are surely among the most beautiful and profound of our generation.

In 1642 Abel Tasman made his landfall at Okarito and it somehow seems appropriate that Keri should have chosen the isolation of that wild, isolated and symbolic place as a refuge in which to write and live.

Hone Tuwhare, Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera (among others) created between them the revolution which is contemporary Maori writing. Keri Hulme is perhaps the clearest voice speaking for the consequences of that revolution. Don Long

Don Eruera interviewed Hone Tuwhare and he began by asking Hone how he became involved in poetry in the first place. As far as I can tell that is the only interview with a Maori poet to be published to date so let’s open with that same question. Keri can remember simply because I just like words ... The first time I can consciously recall making up a poem was biking to Aranui High School in Christchurch and thinking “scudding clouds”. I’m not sure to this day whether there’s such a word as ‘scudding’ when it’s used in that sense: the sky was full of scudding clouds But I’ve been scribbling down things for a very long time. That was the third form. By the time I’d left high school I’d discovered that I could write ...

High School I loathed. I didn’t like school at all. I didn’t like high school particularly because it interfered with what I really wanted to do and that was read. Fortunately I became a librarian early on. I spent an awful lot of my time in the library. For instance, the p.e. teacher discovered I existed only towards the end of my first year at high school. I just simply wasn’t around at physical education. If you are very short sighted and fairly heavy as I’ve always been (a ‘solid child’ as one may say politely ‘fat’ otherwise) you tend to be out of things like sports. I was very good at basketball. If I hit anyone going for the ball they were flattened. Anyway, by the time I left school I had discovered I could write.

Don So, did you leave school saying to yourself, “Now I’m going to be a writer?”

Keri No. I was the great white hope of the family. I was supposed to be a lawyer. Always had the gift of the gab. Won speech competitions things like that. Talking is my big thing. I’ve stopped, incidentally, being interested in speech making. I enjoyed it because I wasn’t afraid of audiences and I wasn’t afraid of playing with words. I was selected for the Anthony Eden Speaking Competition. So I got into the area finals for this and when it got to the stage of the finals I had my first attack of stage fright. I dried up completely in front of about three hundred people. My mother nearly sank through the floor with embarrassment: ‘‘Keri, say anything, ANYTHING!” I stopped making formal speeches after that. It was really traumatic. Don Has that ever happened to you since at a poetry reading: have you ever dried up? Keri No, it was just that one time. I must admit though that when I get up to read poetry in any situation I have shaking knees!

(from) Nga Kehua Motoitoi, who joined with a sailor until her bruises broke her heart; Emma who drew a plough where a horse should be; Tommy Rangakino shovelling coal until the dust throttled him with canker of the throat I carry my ghosts on my shoulders though some have never been born

Don So you left school and then what? Keri I went tobacco picking. Don Were you writing poems after a day’s work in the fields? Keri Yes. There is a long poem of Hulme’s called ‘Of Green and Golden Days’; it led to a short story of the same title. By that stage I was writing for my own amusement as much as anything. Incidentally, I had had something published. I had got annoyed reading a letter in The Women’s Weekly by some exasperating teenager who said ‘‘What can we do the world’s going to Hell and there’s nothing we can do about it.” So I wrote this letter saying ‘‘First of all you can get to work on yourself.” That was the first thing I ever got paid for, because they printed the letter as an article. (And they sent us a postal note for 15/—)-

In Motueka in 1967 I started writing The Bone People. It started off as a short story. The characters have changed completely. It became the second vertebrae in the spine of the book. Don So you were a prose and poetry writer right from the word go? Keri Songs initially. I like songs. I have no voice. Can’t sing but I like songs. I still write them called ‘Wine Songs’. Left Motueka after a year and went to university. Don So you became a student by day and a writer by night? Keri No, I was, unfortunately, a writer by day and by night to the degree that I failed one of my subjects in the second year ... I became a very good fish n’ chip cook. It was necessary to go to work. Don At this point did you leave university to become a writer? Keri No. I was leaving varsity to earn money. My mother had been left a widow at age thirty-one with six small children and because of the circumstances of my father’s death, there was a massive set of death duties to pay. All my teenage years held this feeling that financial disaster was lurking just around the corner. Any moment it would slip on top of us. I didn’t really start writing for publication until I’d retired.

Don As a fish n’ chip cook? Keri No, by that stage I’d gone through many jobs. I was working as a woollen mill winder. I was getting up at between 6.30 and 6.45 and I was working an hour and a half at night because this upped your wages they were pathetic wages. They were something like $29 a week. I read this letter to the paper by someone complaining about postal services. They said posties work about three horn's a day, get paid SBO a week, and get most of the day off and I thought, ‘‘That can’t be true.” Heaven. So I rang up the central post office and they confirmed it and I became a postie overnight; at Sockburn initially and later on the Coast in Greymouth. Don other writers have also been posties. Keri James K. Baxter lan Wedde. By this stage I was starting to think of writing as a very good thing and I enjoyed it. I was seriously working

through the first draft of what was called The Rocks of Whangaroa which later became The Bone People, nei. At this stage it was starting to look like a novel and I was entranced by playing with it and it was starting to have shape so I was starting to think of myself as a writer. This would be when I was twenty-one or twenty-two. I was only a postie for two and a bit years. I decided at about that stage that I’d retire at twenty-five. I often think back with considerable amusement over that. I was absolutely serious. I was going to retire at twenty-five and become a committed writer and nothing else (except painting I was actually more interested in becoming a painter). I did retire at twentyfive. By that stage I’d bought Fox St., an old house; it was extraordinarily badly neglected but it was a house plus an acre of land for $650 (this was the grand slump on the Coast). Don What made you think you could be a writer? Not a lot of people say to themselves “I could be a writer” and then actually go and do it as you did. Keri The driving force was I enjoyed it so much. I figured, if something gives me this much enjoyment it is to be pursued. But I wasn’t, believe it or not, a writer for publication. I just wanted to write. I didn’t think of getting an income from writing. It was right up there with fishing and painting. It was something I really enjoyed.

I asked for riches you gave me scavenging rights on a far beach

(from) On the Other Coast I am polishing my grand-dad’s tohu. It is a small piece of pounamu, translucent and shaped like an elongated tear. Or a mere. His father was a traveller, a refugee from this Coast. I have brought his tohu back home, but I don’t know whether I have come home. They used to ask, in reproach of doubtful strangers, “I motu mai i whea, te rimu o te moana?’ And on what shore does the wandering fragment of seaweed finally ground?

Don you sit down in the house on Fox St. and write? Keri Literally and I retired when I said I would on the 9th of March 1972 I left my job and stayed at home and wrote mainly the third draft of the novel. That thing has changed so much it’s unreal. It’s actually a collection of short stories melted down to a

novel. By August I was starving to death. If it hand’t been for my mother ringing up periodically and saying: “Keri, how are you?” “Well, I found these malt biscuits the other day and gee they were nice.” “Right, we’ll send you over some money.” Things were getting fairly desperate. I lived on milk bottles at one stage. The people who’d lived at Fox St. before had had an even more eccentric diet. I found well over one hundred egg cartons throughout the house.

They’d made an amazing mess of Fox St. They’d chopped up part of the front porch for firewood. Also part of the kitchen floor. In one of the rooms there was the best part of an old car they were dismantling. They seem to have lived on cartons of eggs and milk. There would have been a good ten or eleven dozen milk bottles there. They were money in the bank.

About August (I’m still not sure how this happened) I discovered the existence of the N.Z. Literary Fund. They paid people to write!

Don How many Literary Fund grants have you had?

Keri Three (1973, 1977, and 1979). I had a mini-Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1977. When that fellowship finished I was on the bones of my arse. I applied for a Literary Fund grant and Bruce Mason sent a telegram which said:

“Two white heron will shortly perch on your doorstep.”

I gathered from that that there was a Literary Fund grant (which there was) but there was also the Maori Purposes Trust Fund prize which he’d heard about through the grapevine and I hadn’t at that stage. I got S2OOO and that was much appreciated quite a lot of sheets of galvanised iron.

Don And you got grants before you published any books?

Keri getting your work published. My theory on all my applications was unless I had free time to write in I was going to have nothing available to publish. So the gist of my applications was “help now when I need it and not later when I’ve got everything more or less organised.”

Don You’d also won the Te Awamutu Short Story Award in 1973, the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award in 1975 and been invited to the East West Centre in Hawaii in 1979 as a visiting New Zealand poet. How did you actually come to learn how to write? It seems you were teaching yourself.

Keri I was and am an omnivorous reader. It doesn’t feel right if I don’t read. You must pick up a lot of things with that contact.

I had an absolutely magnificent correspondence with Rowley Habib. He was immensely supportive and helpful. He was the one who suggested why not try writing for publication.

But I can’t remember being taught to write. My theory is that if you can do it you can do it. Either you write or you don’t. Don What is your writing routine do you spend a week writing non-stop for instance?

(from) Moeraki Conversations 4 Getting up shivering in the night, wrapping myself in the canvas-backed blanket like it’s a cloak and pakehas haven’t been invented, going outside to watch for shooting stars or the greenghost flicker of wildfire that is never where my eyes expect it, or anything E tangi moana ... coming inside in the dawnlight, I see our keyhole is plugged with cobwebs.

Keri ing to take that long to write, yes. What generally happens is that I like to get up around 12.00 or 1.00 and go to bed about 3.00 or 4.00.1 find I work better at night. I spend the day whitebaiting ... and then around 9.00 my fingers get itchy. Don Do you work straight onto the typewriter? Keri I tend to. Stories straight onto the typewriter. I have a thick volume of notes, story ideas, sentences and things like that. It’s an idea file. If I had to save one thing from the house in a fire that would be it. Absolutely irreplaceable. Given that, stuff goes straight onto the typewriter. I work in images. Don You picture something happening? Keri Yes. Don What about the dialogue? Keri Well, your characters start talking after a while. This must sound really silly. I think a writer’s occupational hazard must be schizophrenia. Obviously there is a demarkation be-

tween what goes on in your head and what goes on in real life. That must be maintained as clear cut, but it is quite strange when you have a story going how the characters start to take on independent lives and they really do. The Bone People grew over a period of about twelve years. Now, there were years when I did nothing to it. It was languishing in a heap of paper. And there were a couple of fairly intensive periods I spent about two months down at Moeraki doing a final rewrite (I thought). And then I did another final rewrite here at Okarito. I had set ideas on what the characters were and more or less what the story was ... and what would happen. The central character was going to be the woman. Everything would spin around her and the peripheral characters the man and the child were just going to be there for the woman to react upon and what happened, of course, was that the two peripheral characters started taking over the story. Joe is in ‘The Kaumatua and the Broken Man’ in Into the World of Light. He was originally a completely cardboard sort of figure I just wanted him as a sort of background ogre. He started developing his own personality in a very strong fashion until by the end of the book my main woman character had become just one of a trio of dominating characters. They started speaking their own minds.

Dialogue? Dead easy. But stopping the dialogue, scalpelling the characters down a little much harder. I cut out between 60,000-65,000 words from The Bone People eventually. It was monstrous. But that was composed from little lines straight onto the typewriter. Poems are slightly different. Poems I find come to you mostly intact. You might get a refrain from a poem. Then there’s all the rest of it lurking just beyond that refrain. That comes out holusbolus. Don Do you rewrite the poems a great deal? Keri Not once they’ve reached the stage of being complete. Don What is the significance of The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) as a title?

Keri 1 regard time spent away from Moeraki and my family there as silence. Things at Moeraki seem to be almost larger than life. Moeraki to me is heart place. Moeraki conversations are really what the book is about. The plan of the book is six conversations (they are each maybe a little series of linked conversations maybe conversations with someone in my head maybe real things that have happened with bits of dialogue around them which are approximations of the conversations that took place) and inbetween each set of Moeraki conversations there is silence, nei. The silences are aloud with their own words.

Don When were these poems written?

(from) Pa mai to reo aroha At night, the penguins bray under the cribs, Sometimes the old ghosts from Kihipuku steal in, for warmth and company. The dog will prick his ears and growl, the cat snarl a little, then both sigh and stretch and settle again. We eat and talk and read until the lamps flicker. Then we go to sleep in the narrow cupboard bunks, and the sea has all our dreams.

Keri in 1980. Don Grace said that one of the reasons why she began writing was because of her concern about the way in which many Maori words came to be debased in Pakeha literature. She cites the case of ‘wahine’. You are writing in English but there is a constant occurrence of Maori words in your work so have you been consciously thinking something like this, too?

Keri I have been annoyed whenever I’ve encountered them you get annoyed about weird things like “Maoris” it’s ‘Maori’ if you are going to use a Maori word use it with a correct plural. I tend to use Maori words when there are no English equivalents ... and also, it’s a very beautiful language. I’d like to see a whole lot more of it become common currency. You can’t adequately (for instance) translate ‘kuia’ as “old woman”. There’s an affection and respect implicit in the word ‘kuia’ that isn’t really implied by “old woman” ... or “old lady” even. It’s just not there. What is the equivalent English to ‘kaumatua’? “Elder”, “respected elder”, yes, all those things but there’s both reverence for the aged which must be, and acknowledgement that this is sort of the final adult stage you don’t become fully adult until you’ve reached the dignity of your years until you’ve had that wonderful experience. All of that is in the word ‘kaumatua’.

Don Witi Ihimaera once wrote “the main problem is that the writer who is Maori has both a dual role as a writer and a Maori and a dual responsibility to his craft and his people. Even if he does not see himself this way, you can bet your life that other people do.”

Keri Your Maoriness, like everything else, is intimately part of you and it will normally show through your writing as well. It’s a bit like what Samuel Johnson said of a woman preaching: “It’s like a dog walking on its hind legs.” It’s not how well he does it but that he does it at all that is a cause for amazement; i.e. Maori writers ... oh, fantastic, they are writing in English and Maori, how nice! “An oral people turned literate at last.” Pat, pat. With no insight into the excellence or otherwise of their work. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been any of that in the reception to Into the World of Light.

There is this nasty feeling that my work, such as it is, is being looked at through a different pair of spectacles: “This is a Maori woman writing, ah ha, we’ll give it a little more time than we’d give if it was just a Pakeha woman. “I mean when I say just simply that there are a whole lot more Pakeha women writers than there are Maori women writers at the moment. It’s population, nei. In the year 2000 that will be very different.

It is an advantage because you stick out because of your rarity value but I fear that because I want to be acknowledged one way or another as a writer ... and not for it to be the performing dog. (Which is why I’ve launched a pen name which I keep very quiet about. I shall not give you any details of it except to say there doesn’t seem to be anything Maori about it and it’s definitely a male pen name. I have one very curious thing to tell you. The first story that’s been accepted from this character came with an invitation saying “can we have more stories we’d be interested in publishing a collection.” Now this is one story? It took me, I don’t know, my God, I don’t know how long when I started writing!) Don Why have you chosen the isolation of Okarito? . T , , T Ken - I m a oner, aue. lam a so itary person by nature. I think short sightedness plus a sense of having a very large personal perimeter contributed to this need for solitude. While 1 m i Ffu ° .u- large ( , fa ™ f rou f and would be nothing; without my farm y (I m just a husk) I don t like living with lots of people having lots of people around. An area like this fits my two ideals: close to the sea and relatively people free. That’s the reason.

Don What are the essential things which you’ve taken from the oral tradition of Maori literature into your work? Keri Everything which I think belongs to my taha Maori: from the excithig nature of words themselves, the power inherent in words themselves, to things as basic as the kinds of images or the way things are alluded to when speaking whether it is formal oratory or speaking at family hui or reading or listening to waiata. What have I taken? The heart, the bones, the brains, the spirit, everything I can lay my hands on, eh. Don On the marae people use the waiata do you think that poems by Hone, Rowley, you and all the others are they going to be used on the marae in that way? Keri Only if they are written in Maori. One of the things that makes the marae important is that it’s one of the remaini bastions of Te Reo Maori, You don fee , right speaking in English in a formal situation. Until I start writing to Maori _ no , In non formal situations - yes. But not in the {ormal are n 0( f With Witi Ihimaera, Don Long edited Into the World of Light —An Anthology of

Maori Writing.