Abstract
Introduction
“Representation is important” writes Tayi Tibble in her debut poetry collection Poūkahangatus. The line is framed by the poet’s recollection of the grief and frustration she experienced after watching the Disney film Pocahontas and being told that the real-life heroine accompanied John Smith to England where she died of disease. Representation and diversity are the words of our time and they reverberate through recent discussions about the literature of Aotearoa New Zealand. Michalia Arathimos raged at the way in which non-Pākehā authors are perpetually labelled and qualified “only by their ethnicity” in a way that others and exoticises them (E-Tangata 24 June). Yet both she, and Hinemoana Baker in a review of Poūkahangatus, speak of the way in which cultural belonging and cultural heritage are part of the lived texture of experience and identity (Writehanded 29 June). Achieving a balance between identification without othering is a challenge for us, as the act of attempting to provide an overview of a year in the literary life of a nation inevitably relies on tracing recurring trends and voices. We acknowledge our own positionality as two Pākehā women who aim to comment on relevant issues of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in a way that is respectful and that values multiplicity, but who are alert to our own limitations. After a process of consultation, we have changed the name of this article to “Aotearoa New Zealand” in order to better reflect the cultural heritage of our nation.
In writing this reflection on Aotearoa New Zealand literature in 2018 we are inspired by the admonishment and dream expressed by author and teacher Tina Makereti who critiqued the way in which publishing trends and literary discourse privilege Pākehā and proposed that the nation’s literature undergo “radical renovations”. She asks the reader to imagine a house “that must welcome and absorb and connect all the literatures and writers and readers of Aotearoa” the way “a wharenui … a house that represents the body of an ancestor … contains within it the whole whakapapa [genealogy] of its people, reaching back through generations and migrations and eons until it touches the cosmology and origins of all things”. There is still much work to be done, but the range and depth of both the creative and critical work published in 2018 gives us cause for cautious hope (E-Tangata 27 May 2017).
The vibrancy of the literature of Aotearoa New Zealand is evident in the many voices that received critical attention from scholars. As usual, the work of established authors continued to be dissected. Janet Frame was the star, with several articles and the collection of essays Janet Frame in Focus: Women Analyze the Works of the New Zealand Writer exploring her novels, short fiction, and autobiographical writing. Patricia Grace, Katherine Mansfield, Witi Ihimaera, Fleur Adcock, Maurice Shadbolt and Keri Hulme are also perennial scholarly favourites and this year was no exception.
What is particularly noteworthy about scholarship published in 2018 is the number of contemporary and emerging voices that attracted attention. Poets and dramatists, authors of short and long fiction, writers for adults and children, social realists and myth makers, men and women, Māori and Pākehā, queer and straight, young and old were all explored in insightful essays and articles: Teresia Teaiwa, Carl Shuker, Vaughan Rapatahana, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Heather Avis McPherson, Michele Leggott, Jack Lasenby, Fiona Kidman, Annamarie Jagose, Anna Jackson, Miria George, Fiona Farrell, John Dickson, Lisa Cherrington, Ken Catran, Eleanor Catton.
Kidman’s latest novel, Mortal Boy, won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Kidman’s tender and meticulously researched narrative tells the story of Northern Irish immigrant Albert (Paddy) Black, the second last person publicly executed in New Zealand. The judges described the novel as “moving, memorable, authentic and urgently relevant to our times”. While the execution occurred in 1955, the themes of judgement, oppression, and lack of voice for the marginalised continue to resonate. Very different in setting and scope, Lloyd Jones’ The Cage, a fiction finalist, shares some of these preoccupations. In a chilling parable about xenophobia, two visitors to an unnamed town are locked in a cage, their suffering both existential and visceral.
The other two fiction finalists were tales of family, grief and the power of the past. In Kate Duignan’s The New Ships recently widowed Peter retreats into memory but is tormented by the thought that different choices could have resulted in changed outcomes. Vincent O’Sullivan’s moving All This by Chance is a multigenerational family saga that shifts between England and New Zealand and is haunted by the shadow of the Holocaust. The Holocaust also casts a long shadow in Kirsten Warner’s The Sound of Breaking Glass which was awarded the Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book of Fiction. Warner moves deftly between this past and a present of reality television and green activism, the challenges of overcoming trauma and finding one’s voice forming a common thread.
A dialogue between the past and the present is also present in Tina Makereti’s dazzling The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke which explores the impact of colonisation on Māori and the mixture of displacement and wonder the eponymous hero experiences as he encounters the culture and counterculture, utopian dreams and tragic realities of 19th-century London. Leaping across time in a poignant address to the reader, the narrative yearns for a still unrealised “bright future” in which “the place of one’s birth and the colour of one’s skin has no bearing upon the way the world walks upon you, the way you walk upon the world”.
One of the most innovative novels of the year was Kirsty Gunn’s metatextual Caroline’s Bikini in which the narrator Emily pens the “novel” of her friend Evan’s passion for another. This story is told through a series of chats over gin and tonics at bars and Tracey Slaughter praises the novel’s “moving charm and sharp contemporary guile, Aristotle spiked with arch chick-lit, with an acid sliver of postmodern gesture on the side” (Landfall 237 p183). Literature is also the subject of Anne Kennedy’s The Ice Shelf, although here the subject is “the insularity and pettiness of the New Zealand literary scene” and the treatment is satiric (Thom Conroy New Zealand Review of Books 29[1] p5).
Helen Heath won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for her collection Are Friends Electric? Heath meditates on the relationship between humanity and technology, the collection moving from an opening section of predominantly found poems about everything from sex bots to the life of birds to a series of poems which explore the role of technology in remembering and grieving. Erik Kennedy’s debut collection There’s No Place like the Internet in Springtime was one of the poetry finalists. The voice of the poems moves from detached, ironic observer to engaged self-examination, but there is a consistent delight in playing with form throughout these vignettes of place, time, emotion and pressing contemporary issues. The personal is always to the fore in The Facts by Therese Lloyd, another poetry finalist. The collection is a “searing meditation on loss and art”. In a review that interweaves Lloyd’s words with her own, Toyah Webb writes that the experience of reading the poems “leaves a burn mark … Lloyd writes her own poems with the same intensity as late-afternoon sun. The Facts is raw and ‘Fierce in its interrogation of the living’ that explores the intersection between art and life” (Metro June).
The Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First book of Poetry was awarded to Tayi Tibble for Poūkahangatus. This cheeky, sometimes ironic, collection has something serious to say. It is confronting in its bluntness as it addresses questions of gender, race and power, but is full of vulnerability and heart, evident in “LBD”: I grew up on the sound of women wailing now they wail for me I carry them inside me bones vibrating like a ringtone.
The international journal Poetry Magazine featured a number of established and emerging poets in its Aotearoa/New Zealand Special Issue, including Robert Sullivan, Hera Lindsay Bird, Anahera Gildea, Kate Camp, essa may ranapiri, Tim Upperton and Courtney Sina Meredith. The three-part introduction by Stephanie Burt, Paul Millar and Chris Price highlights the ongoing importance of place, history and multiplicity of voice in New Zealand’s canon. This issue traverses time and space, speaking with confidence from both within and without Aotearoa. Tayi Tibble’s refrain in the poem “Identity Politics” seems to speak of a reflexivity shared by many of this year’s poets. They navigate using the internet, stars, gulls, and communities, all the while asking: “Am I navigating correctly?”
Seraph Press continues to produce beautifully rendered books, including tatai whetū: seven Maōri women poets in translation, edited by Vana Manasiadis and Maraea Rakuraku. This, the fourth in Seraph’s translation series, presents the poems of Anahera Gildea, Michelle Ngamoki, Tru Paraha, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Maraea Rakuraku, Dayle Takutimu, and Alice Te Punga Somerville first, in their original English form. Alongside each poem appears its Maōri thanks to the work of translators Hēmi Kelly, Te Ataahia Hurihanganui, Herewini Easton, Jamie Cowell, Vaughan Rapatahana and Dayle Takitimu. In many places, this encounter results in stunning play, as in Tru Paraha and Vaughan Rapatahana’s “Darknyss/Te pōuri”, where the limits of language give way to spells of asterisks and individual letters scattered across the page like the night sky.
Sam Duckor-Jones’ debut collection People from the Pit Stand Up also interacts with the page, both in its poetry and accompanying illustrations. Inky drawings of mountaintops and people float beside poems focused particularly on creative processes. Duckor-Jones’ experience as a sculptor shines through in this collection, and his use of white space to evoke movement and flow speaks to a close attention to form.
Bob Orr’s ninth collection One Hundred Poems and a Year showcases the poet’s distinctive lyric style, combining close attention to the lived-in world with a commitment to the demotic. In its delineation of a single year, it illuminates the seasons of a life lived in communion with the many faces of New Zealand. Chris Tse’s second collection He’s So MASC demonstrates the strength of the poet’s vivid and surreal imagery, which earnt him much acclaim for his 2014 verse biography How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes. However, Tse writes back to this collection reflexively: “This is my blood oath with myself: the only dead Chinese person I’ll write about from now on is me”. He’s So MASC shifts the focus to the poet’s own life, while explicitly challenging the givens of autobiographical poetry. Adopting a number of persona, and creating rich imaginary lives, Tse challenges his reader: “Let’s unpick what you think you know about me”. With every poem, Tse both enriches and destabilises any coherent idea of himself as a character, and as a poet.
Southern Stage brings together the plays of five South Island playwrights — Gary Henderson, John Broughton, Carl Nixon, Oscar Kightley and Erolia Ifopo — with work ranging from the aftermath of the Vietnam War, to the dynamics of family, to finding oneself, to the re-imagining of Shakespeare in a Pasifika context. The Intricate Art of Actually Caring, and Other New Zealand Plays, edited by Sharon Mazer, is an important collection of recent works by Eli Kent, Gary Henderson, Abert Belz, Victor Rodger, Geoff Chapple, and Miria George. The plays all engage with social issues and both individually and collectively present a vivid picture of life in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 21st century as people grapple with the lingering effects of colonialism and the intensification of globalization.
A range of contemporary issues are likewise explored by the award winners of the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, with overall winner Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor circling out from the sight of dead bees on windowsill to contemplate global concerns, Janna Tay reflecting on the complexities of Malyasian Chinese identity and Rata Quark writing revealingly about autism spectrum disorder. Susan Wendell, the second-place winner of the Landfall Essay Competition, was also inspired by both the personal and the collective, in her case the cultural, religious, and artistic meanings of a shaven women’s skull. Remembering was the theme of the other two Landfall awards. Alice Miller won first place for “The Great Ending”, a multi-layered meditation on 1918, while third place Sam Keenan reflected on Westport in the 1980s.
The importance of memory is likewise central to Maurice Gee’s Memory Pieces. As the title suggests, this consists of three separate memoirs. The first, “Double Unit”, tells the story of Gee’s parents and combines the words of his mother Lyndahl with his own. “Blind Road” explores Gee’s formative years and “Running on the Stairs” recounts the early life of his wife Margareta Garden. Insights into the journeys of 12 New Zealand authors are also to be found in The Writing Life which shares Deborah Shepard’s interviews with Joy Cowley, Marilyn Duckworth, Tessa Duder, Chris Else, Patricia Grace, David Hill, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Philip Temple and Albert Wendt. The Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement acknowledged the contributions of three other long-serving luminaries of the New Zealand literary community: dramatist and fiction writer Renée, critic, curator, and poet Wystan Curnow and poet, publisher, and librettist Michael Harlow.
Circling out beyond literature to related fields of creative endeavour, three biographies celebrated the talents and acknowledged the fraught journeys of men who refused to be trapped by sexual binaries: celebrity chefs Hudson and Halls, painter and expatriate Douglas MacDiarmid and performance artist Mika. Questions of representation and the limitations of labels again come to the fore in relation to these men. Reviews of these biographies repeat recurring phrases: “homosexual” in relation to Hudson and Halls; “bisexual” to describe MacDiarmid; “queer” to identify Mika. At times these are imposed and at others chosen. In order to achieve multiplicity of representation such identifiers are sometimes necessary, but the biographies also look at the lives of these men in all their complexity, struggle, and talent.
One place where the many voices of Aotearoa New Zealand’s kaupapa whare are honoured is the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, which turned 100 in 2018. It was established in 1918 when bibliophile and collector Alexander Turnbull bequeathed his library of over 50,000 books to the nation along with thousands of original art prints, manuscripts and maps. The Library continues to be a vital repository of the nation’s memories and ongoing search for identity and a sanctuary to readers and researchers.