THE WONDER OF WORDS WINDS THROUGH ALL WORLDS

An Interview with Keri Hulme, Okarito, New Zealand

By Rima Morrell

Published In Wasafari magazine for Indigenous Literature, 1996

Keri Hulme’s brilliant and many-faceted novel, The Bone People, won the Booker Prize in 1985. Hulme is also the author of many short stories, two volumes of poetry and some unpublished fantasy. She is presently working on a long awaited follow-up novel, Bait.

Keri Hulme is still the only Maori writer ever to have won the world’s top literary honour. I interviewed her at her home in Okarito, in the South Island of New Zealand. A letter, a plane, a train, a bus and there she was at a fork in the road. We drove for miles down the hill until we reached the place of the lagoons and the sea. Hulme could hardly live further away from England, the land where the Booker was decided.

I found myself in a quiet land, a land suffused with soft light, a land where the greenstone trails wind through the mountainous backbone of the land, a land called by the Maori Te Wahi Pounamu. Pounamu stands for greenstone or jade, the sacred stone of the Maori, wahi means place. As I walked over the shingles of this beach of many currents, where the winds and the waters meet, I bent and picked up the grey stones, pressure molded and water woven. The sky was bundled with clouds, the birds flew low above the pale ocean, the trees were a dark blend of rimu and manuka and many others I don’t recognize. Hulme took me to a collection of houses that look like they are perched there temporarily. One of them is hers, a house by the shore she built herself after she won the Booker prize. Talking to Keri Hulme, in her octagonal house next to the silver sands, it felt like my worlds were coming together.

RAM: When I first met you at a New Zealand writer’s conference in London a couple of years ago, I was stunned at the way you, jerkined, sandalled and taiaha’d [taiaha is a Maori spear], seemed to bring the spirit of New Zealand with you. It hit me with almost a physical force. What effect does the place where you live have on your work?

KH: I’ve described myself as a ‘quintessential dweller on strands’. It’s what makes me me. I was conceived by a beach, grew up on beaches, I’ve lived on beaches literally all my life, I’m continually reduced to wonder at all forms of life, isopods, marine life, mammals. The beaches here are unusually rich and full of flotsam: whales, dead bodies, tools ... The world is always changing, humans are temporary, and when you live on a beach you recognize that. Especially here, in this house built over a river bank. Okarito is right next to the crack between the Austronesian crust plate and the New Zealand one. It is a world of transition and being here makes me know that. When I’m in mountains I look for the nearest escape route. Everything closes in. If you put me in the mountains, this rather substantial body [points to herself] would wither. This is where I’ve made my life, I’m at ease here and able to be productive. There’s something very physical, obvious and omnipresent about beaches, maybe it’s the sound of the sea, knowing it’s there. Besides, the fishing is good!

RAM: Where do you get your inspiration from?

KH: Tihe Mauriora! They were the first words ever spoken by the first created human being, a female. According to Ngai Tahu [Maori tribe of the South Island Hulme belongs to her through her mother} tradition she’s saluting Tane [a major god] who’s given her life. Then there are dreams, fantasies, words themselves.

RAM: How do you access it?

KH: That’s sort of like asking ‘how do you breathe’? I walk on the beach a lot, and the beach is always changing. The other day I watched a tree stump, which was covered with barnacles, thousands upon thousands of them. Then the sun came out and they put out little feather-like filaments as they were dying. Quite extraordinary. Things like that make you wonder about all sorts of things.

RAM: How about the world or worlds you create partly from your dreams?

KH: My dreams are very rich and fascinating. I have a dream dictionary and have been checking my dreams for about 35 years. I get recurrent themes and ideas. As an example, I quite frequently dream about finding caches of jewels and weaponry, which I filch, but I know I shouldn’t. I have that dream about three or four times a year.

RAM: The Bone People is very much a product of a particular place-in-space, this place, Okarito. What does Okarito mean in Maori?

KH: Two things. Okarito is the name of a former chief. Karito means somebody who’s blond, like flax. It also means the young edible shoots of the raupo plant [a kind of swamp rush]. Raupo is found underwater and within the lagoon. The place’s vibration is the gross note of water in many forms. The colours here are quite extraordinary, for instance there’s a broad range of colours all contained in the colour grey.

RAM: That’s fascinating. What does the darkness mean to you?

KH: Excellent question. It’s the beginning. It must contain everything. According to the Ngai Tahu the darkness was pierced by a song, and the song itself was of the darkness. I’ve always found that a very satisfying idea.

RAM: I notice you obviously love playing with the imagery of light in your work. I used to live in Wanaka [a town a couple of hundred miles to the South] where the light is very bright, almost crystalline in quality. I notice the light here is particularly soft, almost watery. How does that affect you?

KH: There are thousands of shades of grey. Grey is the colour of the sand, of the sky, of the sea. It’s a very soft colour, very beautiful, not sad at all. I love colours. I don’t know whether they represent anything, but they’re one of the joys of life, like food. Colour is like music, part of what makes life so enormously attractive. The other meaning of light I want to talk about is a light presence. I’ve been here when the whole sea lights up, moonlight in water, a completely non-dangerous light. This happens all over the world, but here the whole surf-line goes like that, in a big sweep [gestures].

RAM: As an outsider, another thing that seems to be special about this place is that it’s really windy. I noticed you called your volume of short stories Te Kaihau, or The Windeater. What does the wind mean to you?

KH: Te Hau. Hau is the particular kind of breath that animates humans. It’s the most lively element I know in weather terms. Winds are as various as creatures: boisterous, aggressive, gentle, comforting. On the other hand the one element that really gives me the heebies is the wind. I like the water, can deal with fire, the earth, even when it shakes [a reference to the amount of earthquakes in New Zealand]. Tawhirimatea [the whirlwind] is the enemy of humans. The wind off the sea can be enormously draining.

RAM: I believe one of the strengths of your work is that you don’t state things directly; but in many ways you imply that the answer is in the relatively unchanging. You have been described as part Maori, yet I suspect your Maoriness is your essence, running through you like a deep vein in a greenstone, although its expression may glint in the light in different ways. What would you say to that?

KH: Yes. I wish I could just answer with that word. If you separate me out, this part’s Maori, that part’s pakeha [white], it’s not right. Wherever you come from you’re still one person, you don’t war, you don’t fight, at least you don’t in my family group. Maori culture is what we do. And we do it in varying intensities. When my neighbour died, my last words to him were a karanga [Maori call]. I’ve rarely been involved with what you’re involved with, a Maori culture group, but I’ve taught the people here how to do a hangi [traditional feast of food baked in the ground]. One of the things that have sustained me is finding out the background history about the Maori side of my family. Hui [gatherings], marae [meeting houses], reading, listening, thinking about things. I speak Maori, but I’d love to become really fluent in our dialect. There’s only one Ngai Tahu speaker left.

RAM: I notice that in many of your writings you seem to associate stones with indigenous knowledge. For instance in Strands you write ‘I have a stone that once swam/ strange, warm ancient seas’. Do you really?

KH: Yes, definitely. There are some proverbs, including numerous exemplars about how Te Wahi Pounamu got its name, to do with minerals. To this day when Maori say “stone” we generally mean pounamu, almost none of us is without it. We all wear it, secretly or obviously [points to a greenstone armband under her shirt].

RAM: You have such beautiful descriptions of pounamu in your book. The other descriptions that particularly strike me are to do with the moon. Distant Simon is covered with ‘moonshimmer hair’, Kerewin’s shadow is a ‘moonshadow’, moonwater of emotion flows. According to many traditions the moon is associated with unconscious knowledge. Does the moon represent conscious or unconscious knowledge to you?

KH: The Maori don’t actually separate the two.

RAM: Good point. I have a question on a slightly different subject - how did you learn Maori?

KH: When I was seven I began writing down Maori words, and making my own ‘dictionary’. At school it was reported that I wanted to learn Maori instead of French - NOT done in those days. Now I have sixteen Maori dictionaries, so I can check as far as possible, the meanings of words.

RAM: I had the same problem at school. I wanted to learn ‘Polynesian’ (I thought it was one language), instead of French. On a different note: what advice would you give to aspiring writers?

KH: Be bloody-minded. Believe in yourself. Unless you’re writing just for money, ignore the market. You’re the one doing the writing, doing the work. You have to have the bloody-minded determination to see it gets out in the world. I’ve been writing for myself since I was seven, and I wasn’t published until 1975 when I was twenty-eight. There are several kinds of writing. There’s writing as therapy, writing as self-entertainment (my drawer is full of a sci-fi monstrosity), writing as exploration, where you do acrobatics with language and writing as communication, which needs to reach readers. But we limit ourselves if we think readers only respond to the communication category, just because that’s what publishers respond to. You need to get out there. The Bone People was first published by a feminist collective, although after the book won the Booker, other publishing companies came up to me and offered to publish it.

RAM: What were you doing when you heard The Bone People had won The Booker Prize? How did you feel?

KH: I was sitting in a hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, I’d been having lunch with my mother when I was called to the phone. There was someone very pleasant from the BBC who said: “I’ve got the Booker result and I’d like a comment”. I was just getting ready to make the appropriate comments on Peter Carey’s Illywhacker - I thought it had won, - when the lady came back and said: “It’s you. You’ve won the Booker”. I said: “Bloody hell”. I just didn’t believe it. When I didn’t come back after half an hour Mum realized what was going on and was absolutely delighted. Utah’s a dry state and she got half a bottle of champagne and brought it back in a brown paper bag. She was so delighted, not least because I’d bet her half of the prize money that I wouldn’t win. So she got half of the $34,000 dollars. That was a really weird night.

RAM: One of the best things about winning the Booker must have been that it put Maori writing ‘on the map’ for many people all over the world. How do you feel about that?

KH: It’s good for New Zealand writing. I can imagine the ghost of Katherine Mansfield leaping up and down somewhere in France, the same with Janet Frame. The Maori writer Apirana Taylor was published two months later in America as a result. I think it showed that people in this country could really write. Not just the English-speaking countries showed an interest. The Bone People was, and is, very popular in Germany, the Scandinavian Block and Holland.

RAM: Paul Sharrad wrote that the Eurocentric propensity is ‘to look to definitive lines rather than what they enclose or how they interconnect. Do you think we need to judge novels by a Eurocentric yardstick?

KH: What a revolting thought! The novel is not a European invention. I would think a native of Japan would be mortified if their extremely long tradition of novel-making was judged by ideas that came from a European canon. Nations develop their own traditions. When I wrote The Bone People I didn’t think it would go outside the country. All you can do is judge a N.Z. novel by a N.Z. tradition.

RAM: Doesn’t that seem to contradict your winning the Booker Prize?

KH: Yes. Very good point.

RAM: Eurocentric critics say the form of the novel is very new, very radical. What do you have to say?

KH: The Bone People is a purakau or fantasy story, part of an old Maori tradition of ‘tales told in winter.’ Irehapeti Ramsden said it reminded her of being in her meeting house in Rapiti. She’d wake up and hear people chanting in the corner, then go to sleep and wake up again. There were ongoing conversations on all kinds of levels within the marae. The merging of oral traditions and written forms was likely to take place in a country like this. It’s a kind of realist writing, playful albeit. The only person I know who writes about similar traditions is the Niuean writer John Pule, author of The Shark Who Ate The Sun, a wonderful book which deserves to be better known.

RAM: How would you feel if you were, like one of the hostages in the Lebanon, confined to a cell for many years, with no possibility of writing?

KH: The dependency would be the worst thing, but I have a perfectly wonderful fantasy life. The biggest frustration is I’m quite meticulous about checking words, I have 127 dictionaries. I’m not frustrated if I can’t write things down as I have an extremely good memory. I can fix words to the pictures in my mind and remember them, like learning a chant.

RAM: Albert Wendt said in an interview that he doesn’t like set systems of thought and set systems of belief. I like to make up my own beliefs.’ Is this true for you too?

KH: In a word, yes. Irehapeti Ramsden said: Be very careful of what you believe. A set of beliefs is good as a starting point, but if you wholly absorb them you will amputate what being a human is all about. What you believe literally determines what you see.

It is night when I leave Keri Hulme’s house. I felt the rush of a bird’s flight through the spotting rain and the darkness. I thought I caught a glimpse of it.