Family ties focus on Cousins
Patricia Grace started a script for her novel, Cousins, with Merata Mita in the 1990s. Glenn McConnell reports it’s finally ready for the cinemas.
It’s been a long journey to get to this point, and it all started at a marae in Takapu¯ wa¯ hia, on Nga¯ ti Toa land north of Wellington.
Patricia Grace, the renowned author from Nga¯ ti Toa, Te A¯ tiawa and Nga¯ ti Raukawa, had just finished her third published novel.
It’s called Cousins ,a staggeringly familiar story for many who have read it.
The story encompasses a lot. It’s about whakapapa, and the familial ties and connections to place and people which comes with that. It’s also about wha¯ nau, and the unbreakable bonds of family. It includes a narrative which stretches decades of New Zealand’s modern history, reminding us of the troubling fact that the country has a long and ongoing history of removing tamariki Ma¯ ori from their wha¯ nau. It shows the long-lasting trauma of that practice as the protagonists, three cousins, grow old.
But the plot synopsis of Cousins is more likely to say that this is the story of three cousins, whose persistence and love for each other keeps them together even when everything around them tries to pull them apart.
There are many ways to read Cousins, it has depth – which is perhaps why directors have tried, ever since its release in 1993, to get it to the big screen.
At the marae in Takapu¯ wa¯ hia in 1993, Grace had arrived with her new novel to share her latest work with wha¯ nau and friends.
‘‘The people of Takapu¯ wa¯ hia and Hongoeka, my family were there. I remember Ha¯ rata Solomon, she was the one who really did the launch. She thought a good way to launch the book was with karakia. We were in the wharenui and she thought a lovely way to launch the book was for it to be passed hand-tohand around,’’ Grace recalls.
The book was passed to every one in the wharenui at Takapu¯ wa¯ hia marae, returning eventually to Grace as karakia and waiata blessed its imminent release to the public.
Grace says she’s followed this tikanga at every launch of her novels, having karakia bless the book before it goes out into the world.
Grace was one of Aotearoa’s first wa¯ hine Ma¯ ori writers to publish commercially. Her work includes Potiki, The Sky People and Waiariki, the first book of short stories from a Ma¯ ori woman.
Also at the marae that day was her daughter-in-law, Briar GraceSmith. She remembers it slightly differently.
In her memories, her
newborn baby somehow ended up being passed around as well, with all the aunts and uncles jostling for a cuddle after the novel made its way around. And while Grace-Smith says the novel eventually made it back into the author’s hands, her baby boy didn’t make it full circle.
‘‘He was out in the kitchen with the cooks, I found him a few hours later, they were all snuggling him up,’’ she recalls. At the time, GraceSmith, a playwright, actor and filmmaker, was a young creative working for a Ma¯ ori theatre company, He Ara Hou, in
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Wellington. She married Grace’s son, Himiona Grace, but they have since separated.
It would be 19 years before Grace-Smith would make her directorial debut with a short film called 9 of Hearts. Just six years after that release, she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to theatre and screen.
By then, Grace-Smith had become a well known filmmaker – especially through the production Waru, a film led by nine Ma¯ ori women, labelled by critics in 2017 as ‘‘one of the most important and innovative Kiwi films in years’’.
While she was busy with that, Grace-Smith and one of her Waru co-directors Ainsley Gardiner were busy with another idea. They wanted to finally get Cousins on the big screen.
‘‘It’s been our child. You really breathe these things, you go to bed thinking of them and wake up thinking of them. You dream of them as well, and this is a responsibility,’’ she says.
‘‘I feel like with this film, people have expectations of it because of its history and it being a novel. And for many New Zealanders, they know this novel and so there’s a responsibility of doing a good job and hoping you’re not going to let it down.’’
There’s the pressure which comes from translating a wellknown story onto film, but also a pressure that comes from working with family – or maybe not.
Grace-Smith says working with her mother-in-law’s book hasn’t led to any family disputes.
‘‘I don’t really feel pressure because everyone’s just rapt it’s being made. I’m so pleased, she, Patricia, gets to see it. She’s been waiting such a long time. It’s been a huge journey for her, 25 years, waiting for this film to be made.’’
It had been a long wait. A few years after the book’s release, Grace says she bumped into Merata Mita – remembered as one of New Zealand’s greatest documentarians and an industry trailblazer for Ma¯ ori and women. Mita wanted to make Cousins into a film.
Grace says she was thrilled, and Mita got to work. For years, Grace says Mita and her were working on the script.
‘‘It’s been in the pipeline a long time, it’s been through several iterations up until now.’’
By that time, Grace-Smith’s boy was turning into a toddler. She remembers being home while they were ironing out what this story would look like in film.
‘‘They used to talk about it while I was making cups of tea and changing baby’s nappies. I always knew this film was being made, but never once did I think I would be involved,’’ she says.
The roadblocks which prevented Mita’s iteration making it to the screen were largely down to prejudice and a lack of belief in women directors, Grace-Smith says. The powers of that time, producers and the NZ Film Commission, favoured safer bets – and, she says, the same sort of producers. This is a Ma¯ ori story, led from the very start by wa¯ hine Ma¯ ori.
‘‘It’s changing. I look around at the projects being made now: there is this one, but there will be many more,’’ she says.
Grace hasn’t yet seen the film. She’s set to see it for the first time at a premiere screening in Pauatahanui tomorrow night. But she says she’s grateful, even relieved, for this project to have finally come to an end – 28 years after it started.
It’s a story obviously close to her heart. The characters, she says, are made up of aspects from her own life, from those of her friends and cousins. But it’s also being made into a film by a close friend, who says the story of Cousins has always been her favourite of Grace’s books.
‘‘It’s been our child. You really breathe these things, you go to bed thinking of them and wake up thinking of them. You dream of them as well, and this is a responsibility.’’ Briar Grace-Smith