TE MUTUNGA-RANEI TE TAKE

Tu Tangata, Issue 17, 1 April 1984, Page 20

TE MUTUNGA-RANEI TE TAKE

na D.S. Long

THE BONE PEOPLE

Keri Hulme. Spiral (1984)

The Bone People, Keri Hulme’s first novel and second book, is a story of Kati Tahu, but more especially, of hapu Ngakaukawa. It is one of the most demanding, unconventional, innovative and stunning novels yet to appear in this nation.

Last year Spiral, a feminist literary and arts collective, published J.C. Sturm’s The House of the Talking Cat; eleven stories which took us back to the birth of contemporary Maori writing, almost forty years ago, when that tide first started to lap the shores of Te Ao Hou. In The Bone People Miriama Evans, Elizabeth Ramsden and Marian Evans and their associates at Sprial have brought us up to the cutting edge of this remarkable new tradition, a tradition which is rapidly chiselling a moko on the face of New Zealand literature. We have here the novelist whose earlier collection of poems (The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) was the first time that Oxford University Press (with the Auckland University Press] published a first book of poems by anyone. A former Burns Fellow and holder of the ICI Writer’s Bursary Keri is currently the recipient of the Literary Fund Writing Bursary. She won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award in 1975 and the Maori Trust Fund Award for writing in English in 1978. She was a New Zealand writer at the East West Centre in Hawaii in 1979.

Keri’s tribe is Kati Tahu, her hapu Ngaterangiamoa and Ngaiteruahikihiki. Her whakapapa goes back nine generations to Te Ruahikihiki. The Bone People began as a short story called ‘Simon Peter’s Shell’ twelve years ago in Motueka, where Keri had gone to work in the tobacco fields. She wrote at night. Ten of its 640 odd pages appeared in 1982 in Into the World of Light An Anthology of Maori Writing. That brief extract from the tenth chapter ‘The Kaumatua And The Broken Man’ was a glint of green under the rind on what we can now see is a huge boulder of pounamu and yet how few of us realised that then. All we saw was this suggestion of jade in the riverbed of her work. And yet that glimpse excited enormous interest. Keri’s work was consistently mentioned in the reviews of that anthology. The Otago Daily

Times felt that she put “the question of alienation most succinctly and poetically.” The Greymouth Evening Star found her perceptions “sharp and compassionate.” The Wairarapa TimesAge described how she had captured “humour, pathos, love in a very simple and direct manner.” For the Auckland Star Keri made “a strange story come alive.” Graham Wiremu summed up the reactions of most critics when he wrote in the New Zealand Listener, “Keri Hulme’s haunting story ‘The Kaumatua And The Broken Man’ leaves me excited about her forthcoming novel, The Bone People." We have had to wait so long because the first three publishers Keri approached found her story “too large, too unweildy, too different" and Spiral deserves every credit for ‘taking the risk’ and ‘believing’ in this wonderful book (two cliches for once desperately true and apposite). Keri herself warns us in a brief introduction, “To those used to one standard, this book may offer a taste passing strange, like the original mouthful of kina roe. Persist. Kina can become a favourite food. “Haere mai kite kai!

The story concerns:

• the digger (of Maukiekie in a dream] the painter Kerewin Holmes • the stranger (off a smuggler’s boat) Clare/Claro/Simon/Sim/Haimona/Himi a mute child who sees shadows and violence, sings to dead animals and constructs structures of flotsam which sing of themselves the magpie child

• the broken man Joseph Ngakaukawa Gillayley/Hohepa/Joe the husk

• and the dying kaumatua Tiakinga Meto Miro a keeper watcher .... like all kina they are people who present spines to the world and to each other. How do the kina hongi?

“It’s very strange, but whereas by blood, flesh and inheritance, I am but an eight maori, by heart, spirit, and inclination, I feel all maori. Or, “she looked down into the drink,” I used to, now it feels like the best part of me has got lost in the way I live.”

Joe was very still; so softly, that it was almost on a level with his breathing.

‘‘That’s the way I feel most of the time.” More loudly, ‘‘My father’s father was English so I’m not 100% pure. But I’m maori. And that’s the way I feel too, the way you said, that the Maoritanga has got lost in the way I live.”

Kerewin and Joe to each other, and much later Tiakinga reveals to Joe:

“I was ten years old, a smart child. I’d been brought up to speak english. I even thought in english. I still can... they spoke Maori on the farm sometimes, but they were no longer maori. They were husks, aping the european manners and customs. Maori on the outside, with none of the heart left. One cannot blame them. Maori were expected to become europeans in those days. It was thought that the maori could not survive, so the faster they became europeans the better for everyone, nei? .... My grandmother was not like that. The only european thing about her was her hat....”

Is this the essence of The Bone People? At the East West Centre in Hawaii Keri presented a paper called ‘Being on both sides of the fence’. In it she described how she “came from a country where people are changing... I am both Maori and Pakeha, native and stranger in my own home.... There are many like me at home. We are the leaven in the loaf as well as the f10ur.... And when the frightened seek to erect a fence between two peoples, we are on both sides of the fence.” Where are your bones? Aue! My bones are flour ground to make an alien cried Keri in her poem ‘E nga iwi o ngai tahu’. And in ‘Mauri: An introduction to bicultural poetry in New Zealand ‘(in Only Connect, 1981) she went on to explain that “A dual heritage is both pain and advantage. It gives you insight into two worlds.... Because you are familiar with that landscape, because you are part of it and thus share such concepts as whanau, turangawaewae and aroha, you are never bitten deeply by the spiritual loneliness that seems to deaden the heart of so many Pakeha New Zealanders. But you are not wholly of that world, just as you are not wholly of the European world, and that can be a heart-rending experience.”

In The Bone People all this comes together in the tauranga atua. “I was taught,” says the kaumatua, ‘‘that it was the old people’s belief that this country, and our people, are different and special. That something very great had allied itself with some of us, had given itself to us. But we changed. We ceased to nurture the land. We fought among ourselves. We were overcome by those white people in their hordes. We were broken and diminished. We forgot what we could have been, that

Aotearoa was the shining land. Maybe it will be again... be that as it will, that thing which allied itself to us, is still here. I take care of it, because it sleeps now. It retired into itself when the world changed, when the people changed... but I am afraid for the mauri! Aue! How can I make you understand? How? How? How?”

“Most New Zealanders remain unaware that they have a dual cultural heritage and not a single one,” wrote Witi Ihimaera in Tihe Marui Ora: Aspects of Maoritanga (1978). The Bone People is (with much else) a novel of that realised.

Witi has sketched in a view of what Maori writers have been doing (New Zealand Listener, March 17, 1984) which finds writing fixed in “the Maori pastoral tradition” from the 1940 s through to the 1970 s when the new literature of “the tide’s turning” began to be heard. All those seminal works of the 70s, so different from the naturalistic regional work before, seem now to have liberated the novelist and poet of the 80s. They create a freedom for the writer to create his or her own factive reality by implying that all ideas about the real world are themselves fictions. I think The Bone People points us to a fiction of lo real maravilloso: Alejo Carpentier’s phrase which translates as ‘the marvellous in the real’. The wondrous and inexplicable becoming essential parts of ordinary perception. We should be reading The Bone People beside Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lawrence Durrell or Salman Rushdie. I haven’t been so continously surprised by a novel since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Alexandria Quartet or Midnight’s Children. Like them, it is an immensely rich piece of writing. Here is surely one of those rare books which will change people’s lives (and how we must write of ourselves as a consequence). Listen, for instance, to Kerewin returning to Moeraki:

“The wind has dropped. It is growing very dark. The shag line has gone back to Maukiekie, bird after bird beating forward in the wavering skien. The waves suck at the rocks and leave them reluctantly. We will come back ssssoooo... they hiss from the dark. Maukiekie lies there in the evening, that rock of an island, not much more than an acre and bare

except for a mean scrub of bushes and brown guano-eaten grass, where the shag colony spreads its wings in the sunlight and haggles over footspace at night; Maukiekie at nightfall, all black rock crusted with salt and birdlime and sleeping life, and nearest to land the stone hawk, blind sentinel watching the cliffs. Aiieee, pain and longing and relief... too long I’ve been away from here.” (If The Bone People was conceived at Motueka and carried full term at Okarito, where Keri lives, surely the afterbirth lies buried at Moeraki.) On Thursday New Zealand was rocked about noon by a major earthquake which had it occurred closer to the surface of the land must have taken many lives. As it happened I was reading page 76:

“Smudge. Then a razorfine line, so keenly black it ached. Illusion of looking into a knife-thin ominous chasm.”

That earthquake took exactly as long as it takes the eyes to scan those lines. The dried corpses of moths rained down out of the skylight above me. Their dust still smudges the page.

In Broadsheet (June 1983) Keri sought to answer the question, “What do you draw and write about?” “People, and their relationships with one another; with earth and sea; with other species; with the dead.” Can I add, she writes about herself.

In another essay in Only Connect Colin Partridge set out to explore the stages ‘The Literatures of New Cultures’ go through. Maori literature is

not that of a ‘new culture’ but New Zealand literature is. “The final stage in establishing a new culture, which often coincides with the shaping of homemade legends, is acceptance of and pride in the resources of local language. “Pakeha writers have given us a New Zealand colloquial English which we recognise as our own selfexpression ... but it has remained a Pakeha self-articulation ... and thus incomplete as a voice for this place. No New Zealand novelist has yet given us a text like that of The Bone People’s: “The sea rolls on. A sheep coughs asthmatically behind the hill. A bettle burrs past. She stands on the old marae site. The halldoor hangs crookely open. “Tene koe ... whakautua mai tenei patai aku. He aha koe i karanga ai ki a au?” It is very still. Kerewin waits, hands on her hips, head cocked to one side, listening. What do I expect? I come and say hello, I’ve come back, did you call me, and wait for... lightening? Burning bushes? It is very dark behind the door. “He aha te mahi e mea nei koe kia mahia?’’

Sea distant on the beach; birds in the night; her breath coming and going. Nothing else.”

Here, at long last, we find Maori and English together in a writer’s hands. If for no other reason than this, the book is a remarkable tour de force. Approaching New Zealand literature solely through English has become increasingly untenable. For those who require help with this fusion of our father and mother tongues, there is an excellent glossary at the back.

“Many times, I have cursed bitterly, because I am doomed to live alone and lonely, and to what end? To keep guard over something that modern people deem superstitious nonsense, something modern people decry as an illusion, “laments the elder in this novel, but I believe Keri feels this equally. I have no doubt that many will read The Bone People and see not illusions but our collective future.

Elizabeth, Marian and Miriama kia ora koutou Keri arohanui, your book ka maharatia tenei e ahau e ora ana. (A note: I have purposely avoided giving too much of the story away I fear, in fact, that I’ve already divulged too many secrets. One of the great joys of this novel lies in watching its story unfold listening to the characters discover each other beneath the spines. Too often I read reviews which spoil the dish. I hope instead I have but helped to set the table. Please forgive me, Keri, if I tasted some of the kai also when no one was looking.)