Stories of land and language
A taonga of Aotearoa’s literary scene, Patricia Grace has a living legacy that began with short stories and progressed into novels, one of which was adapted into a film this year. Her latest work is a memoir. She speaks to
Sitting outside Porirua Library, Patricia Grace looks like any typical visitor, not one of New Zealand’s literary icons. Of Nga¯ ti Toa, Nga¯ ti Raukawa and Te A¯ ti Awa descent, the octogenarian is carrying a bag full of books. Tall and lean, wearing dark trousers, she walks slowly into the library to find a quiet table to chat. Along with her home in Hongoeka Bay, about 20 kilometres north of here in Plimmerton, the library is another place where the author of 20 published books sits down to write. At 83, she writes in the morning these days, when she has the focus and the energy. It was here that she penned her memoir, as well as in her sunny living room at home on her ancestral land.
Always, there’s paper and a 2B pencil rather than a computer. Grace describes her writing process as a slow one. She’s working on a short story collection which, if published, will be her eighth. No, there are no themes. Her 2015 novel, Chappy, her first in a decade, will be her last. ‘‘I won’t write another novel, no,’’ she says, shaking her head. ‘‘I don’t want to bury myself for another three or four years at my age. I would rather have a bit more fun.’’ Then she gives a quick chuckle.
We’re here to talk about her memoir, From the Centre: A Writer’s Life, which will be launched at the Auckland Writers Festival, where she is one of the guest speakers. Grace is one of New Zealand/ Aotearoa’s most celebrated Ma¯ ori fiction authors, who, over five decades, has won national and international awards for her work, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (considered the most prestigious literary prize after the Nobel).
She was made a distinguished companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to literature in 2007.
Grace is known for being self-effacing and it was her publisher, Harriet Allan, of Penguin Random House, who suggested she write a memoir. In an email, Allan describes the importance of Grace’s work: ‘‘While conveying a compelling story, Patricia has a powerful ability to enable the reader see the world through her character’s eyes, to open up diverse issues to make us see their human implications, to explore language and form with a poetic sensibility, and... has provided an invaluable Ma¯ ori voice and perspective to our literature, which was previously woefully absent.’’
Grace took more than two years to recollect and write down the stories. Then as she normally does, she reflected on her work, allowing it to simmer away. ‘‘I could say it’s inadequate as a biography because I just wrote about what I wanted to write,’’ she tells me.
Her land at Hongoeka Bay is like a character in her memoir. It appears at the start, when she visits regularly as a child to spend time with her father’s family – her Ma¯ ori side. She returns with seven children and her husband, Dick, when they moved there more than 40 years ago.
Grace opens the book with a historical overview of Hongoeka: the last of three remaining Nga¯ ti Toa reserves, which has suffered legal battles over the decades.
The descendants living in 37 houses see themselves as caretakers of the land and environment, along with family and tribal knowledge, traditions, values, art and language’’.
Grace’s daughter Kohai, an acclaimed weaver, is her immediate neighbour, and two of her five sons live in Hongoeka. The rest of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren live 15 minutes away. They gather at the wharenui for birthdays and cultural events.
Grace ends her memoir with an anxiety that this beautiful place she loves and has fought for could slip away through climate change, that ‘‘we who walk the Earth, treading so heavily and selfishly, could be the authors of our own demise’’.
‘‘We have to do better,’’ she writes.
Born in 1937, Grace didn’t know she was Ma¯ ori until she went to St Anne’s School in Newtown where she became known as ‘‘the Ma¯ ori girl’’. ‘‘I found that being different meant that I could be blamed – for a toy gun being stolen, for writing being chalked on a garage wall, for neighbourhood children swearing, for a grassy hillside being set alight,’’ she writes.
From the Centre is a fascinating piece of social history about life in a bicultural family in New Zealand during wartime and in the decades afterwards. Her mother was an Irish Catholic, who met Grace’s father through work. She suffered reverse racism as her sisters-in-law were critical that their brother had married a white woman. Grace’s paternal grandfather, Arthur, was considered the ‘‘black sheep’’ of the family because he had married a Ma¯ ori woman. The author explores these themes in her first novel, Mutuwhenua (1978), a story about racial prejudice in a cross-cultural marriage.
Some of the details about discrimination against Ma¯ ori are shocking. Grace’s parents grew up during the Great Depression when there was little work, especially for Ma¯ ori. Her father managed to acquire a bank loan to build her childhood home in Melrose, Wellington, even though bank loans weren’t available to Ma¯ ori at the time.
Her father also wasn’t allowed to enter a pub, as Ma¯ ori weren’t allowed into hotels until after World War II. Her mother suffered in a neighbourhood ‘‘at a time when mixed marriages were met with strong disapproval’’, Grace writes.
But there were happy times too, and the young Patricia loved exploring the hillside around Melrose with other children, reading books, and staying at Hongoeka Bay with wha¯ nau, where she fished, explored rock pools and played games. She excelled at basketball because of her height (she went through to representative level at high school and even considered a career as a basketball player). Many memories from that time inspired characters and scenes in her short stories, children’s books and novels.
Asked about her bicultural upbringing, she says: ‘‘I just embraced everything, as kids do. I always knew which leg I was standing on.’’
But she writes about the discrimination she suffered because of her skin colour. As a teen, she was physically attacked and still has the scar.
Then she was told by a priest that she was ‘‘a bad influence’’ and became aware of racial harassment directed at her.
‘‘What was it about me that was noticeable to certain people who recognised some inherent wrong in me? These thoughts, eating away at me, became part of what I recognise now as depression.’’
She got through it, and, determined to earn her own living, went off to teachers college, where she met her future husband. While there, the prolific reader discovered contemporary New Zealand writers such as Robin Hyde and Frank Sargeson. ‘‘It had never occurred to me that one could aspire to be a writer… I began to understand what real writing was.’’
Newly married, the couple’s teaching careers took them to country schools in Northland, where Grace started writing short stories and winning writing competitions. Her literary career seemed to happen naturally. Approached by a publisher to write a collection of Ma¯ ori short stories, her first, Waiariki, was published in 1975, making her the first published Ma¯ ori wahine writer. ‘‘By now I had made up my mind that writing was something I would always do,’’ she writes.
Afterwards, the publisher told her: ‘‘Now we want a novel from you.’’
Looking back, Grace says now: ‘‘I think the time was probably right for me. There might have been some negative criticism of my work but not that much.’’ The only barrier she really faced was time, she explains. She didn’t want to compromise the children’s welfare or her job, so she wrote in the evenings.
As a working mother in the 1960s, she makes the juggle sound relatively easy.
‘‘It was easier being in the country school and the school being next to the house. The kids really enjoyed their school and their friends… My husband and I worked together on everything that needed to be done. It wasn’t as though I had to do the housework and look after the children, because we shared all this. We certainly shared the childcare,’’ she says.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Grace stopped teaching and became a full-time writer. She took up a writer’s fellowship at Victoria University, where she penned her best-known and best-selling novel, Potiki. Today, it has been translated into seven languages and has gone into multiple editions. The characters are fictional although the storyline – about a Ma¯ ori community fighting to save its ancestral land from developers – was inspired by events at Hongoeka Bay: since the 1950s, there had been proposals to privatise it with housing developments, a marina and a through-road to Pukerua Bay. When it hit bookshops in 1986, Potiki was described as ‘‘a political novel…’’ written to ‘‘incite racial tension and create social disharmony’’.
But Potiki was also a turning point. Grace muses that she wanted to write about
‘‘the ordinary lives of ordinary people… Land and language issues are part of everyday life for Ma¯ ori.’’ She left out a te reo glossary in the book. ‘‘I didn’t want the Ma¯ ori language to be treated as a foreign language in its own country,’’ she reasoned.
‘‘It made me really think about my own voice – who I was, where I came from, what my task was and what I knew.’’
She decided then not to be influenced by others’ opinions when she wrote.
Speaking softly, she says that she was surprised by the reaction to Potiki.
‘‘I just thought I was writing about normal things which might have been of concern to me and Ma¯ ori people.’’
Her 1992 novel, Cousins, has been turned into a film which has been widely acclaimed. Directed by her son’s former wife, Briar Grace-Smith, the novelist saw it recently and was impressed by the interpretation.
‘‘I think they made a wonderful job and they got to the essence of the story and the characters.’’
Grace writes about how much she loved teaching, but that the reader books children were given in classrooms didn’t reflect the lives of New Zealand children, especially Ma¯ ori, and were often discriminatory. She set out to write stories Ma¯ ori children could relate to. Her book, The Kuia and the Spider, was published in both languages.
‘‘Yes it was definitely a milestone,’’ she says. ‘‘There hadn’t been anything done in that way, but it was about the time when ko¯ hanga reo was starting up and there weren’t many Ma¯ ori language resources. I wrote it in English and I decided I wanted a Ma¯ ori language version. The publishers were reluctant. They didn’t think it would be viable. They didn’t have the infrastructure or the editors.
‘‘They were wondering who would buy them and read them. Which was true. There weren’t many little children who could read them.’’ But the Ma¯ ori version sold out and a bilingual version of the book will be reissued later this year.
Throughout her career, Grace has always done more than pen books, realising that writing was too solitary for someone so sociable. ‘‘I realised it when I became a full-time writer that it wasn’t very stimulating sitting there writing day after day – which I thought would be a luxury, but it wasn’t. I needed to get out and be with people.’’
So she did that with her activism and voluntary work in her community: fighting for land rights, working on the marae, and managing iwi work schemes for the unemployed. In 2014, she won a legal battle against the government, which tried to purchase some of her ancestral land to build an expressway.
Today, Grace is still a respected literary judge who currently has a pile of manuscripts to read for the prestigious short story-focused Sargeson Prize. Grace says she’s ‘‘looking for gold’’. Since she started, there has been an explosion of Ma¯ ori literature. Publishers are looking for new, contemporary Ma¯ ori writers, which Grace is heartened by.
Yes, the literary pioneer hopes others will read her memoir and learn from it.
‘‘I’ve always looked for diversity. I’ve always thought that the literature of our country is not going to show who we are unless the writers are coming from all of who we are. Otherwise it’s not going to paint a true picture.’’