The curated memories of a beloved wa¯ hine Ma¯ ori
From the Centre: A writer’s life by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $40)
Reviewed by Emma Espiner I’ve always viewed Patricia Grace as a kind of oracle.
Long before it was fashionable to be anti-racist, she was calling out questionable children’s books for depicting harmful stereotypes.
She demanded story sovereignty from the beginning, refusing to put a glossary of kupu Ma¯ ori in her books because she didn’t want to suggest that we were foreign in our own land.
From the Centre relays a lifetime of doing things her own way. It is the curated memories of a beloved wa¯ hine Ma¯ ori who readers will enjoy getting close to.
She is a master of understatement when talking about loved ones: ‘‘I saw Dick coming towards me, also in a hurry, also alone. We stopped and talked. He asked me to go to the movies with him, and I agreed. He has been the man in my life ever since.’’
Almost every woman’s memoir will have a section about men being inappropriately intimidating and using power to dominate women.
In her case it was a priest, a leering parishioner, strangers harassing her in the streets, on crowded trams and buses. Grace relays the terrible confusion of these experiences when they occur within the sanctuary of her faith, and the depression they induced.
The memoir is also an insight into the creative process of a celebrated writer.
She says that she writes for herself, and for anyone who will read her, with one caveat: ‘‘If Ma¯ ori readers did not relate to my writing, or if they rejected it, I would not do it.’’
Writing Ma¯ ori characters in Ma¯ ori contexts has been her driving ambition, nurtured throughout a teaching career where she saw firsthand the missed opportunities to show children images of themselves in writing.
She is bold, unafraid to do what is right for her and her stories.
For me, it was a history lesson dressed in memory. There is so much about our recent history which has been obscured and the testimony of someone who was there strips the forgetting away.
The callous and casual racism directed at Grace and her wha¯ nau is relayed in a steely monotone.
I winced, thinking of my struggles with wetereo when she says, ‘‘When my children began at secondary school which had Ma¯ ori language on the timetable, they learned that some of their friends had been advised by their primary teachers not to take it because it had ‘no grammar’!’’
As Grace describes working through initial drafts for the film adaptation of Cousins with visionary documentary maker Merata Mita, the collective power of Ma¯ ori creative forces becomes apparent.
It is a political act to remember that these are people who made a difference.
It has been difficult to convince some about the truth of our history in this country. In this memoir you witness the slow, bittersweet reclamation of te reo Ma¯ ori me o¯ na tikanga from a time when our culture was in desperate peril through the eyes of someone who has lived it. With Grace there is no distance between us, no shallow interpretation and we recognise that, in learning history, it matters who is telling the story.
This review was originally published on Kete and is reproduced with kind permission.