New job!

I have now left my comms job at Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand after three happy years. I have just started a new job doing comms for the Human Rights Measurement Initiative at Motu 15 hours a week. I'm enjoying learning about whole new fields: human rights, and data analysis. Lots to get stuck into!

Talking fanfiction on RNZ

Today I went on Jesse Mulligan's RNZ programme in the book critic slot (Tuesdays after the 2 o'clock news) to talk about fanfiction. It was pretty nerve-wracking to speak live on air, but heaps of fun. I will get to meet Jesse in person when we're on the same LitCrawl panel next month, doing Short Story Book Club Live.

Book review: The Earth Cries Out

The Earth Cries Out by Bonnie Etherington (Penguin Random House NZ, 2017), 285 pp., $38
This review was commissioned by and originally published in Landfall Review Online in October 2017.

The Earth Cries Out is the story of young Kiwi girl whose family moves from Nelson to Irian Jaya (now known as West Papua). It is written by Bonnie Etherington, a young New Zealand author who, when she was a little girl, moved with her family from Nelson to Irian Jaya. Initially I feared this strong basis in autobiography was not a good sign, but Etherington manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of typical first novels.

The Earth Cries Out is narrated by Ruth Glass. In the main narrative Ruth relates her experiences as a child aged about eight. This is interspersed with scrapbook-like additions that Ruth has added later, vignettes themed around the flora of Irian Jaya: breadfruit and plane crashes in the Second World War, betel nut sold on the roadside by women in Apebura, Abok trading pandanus oil in the 1920s, ferns and witch hunts in the early twenty-first century, stories of environmental degradation and civil war. The risk of this kind of post-modern polyphonic technique is that you lose the flow of the narrative and thus the reader’s emotional engagement with the story. In this case, although it does slow things down, overall I found that it worked. It enables Etherington to give the reader a richer, broader sense of Irian Jaya’s culture and history than would be possible through the eyes of a child protagonist. And she keeps the vignettes brief enough that you’re never away from the young Ruth long enough to stop caring about her.

Most of the story takes place in the village of Yuvut in a remote area of Irian Jaya. Ruth’s father has brought his wife and daughter all the way out there to escape from the pain of their bereavement: Julia, Ruth’s younger sister, has died. Ruth’s father is trying to build a hospital. He is not a missionary, precisely, but his project is backed and funded by the Anglican Church. He gives out pamphlets about diseases:

“They were filled with black and white sketches of people who were supposed to look like the people in Yuvut, and the words were written in a language that was a cousin to their language but not the same … No one read the pamphlets about sicknesses. Susumina’s grandmother used them to start her cooking fire, and the woman who lived in the hut next door used hers to block a leak in the thatch of her roof.”

Ruth’s mother counts down the days until they can return to New Zealand and refuses to engage with local culture beyond the bare minimum. Only Ruth herself makes friends with the local children (particularly Susumina), becomes part of village life, and learns the language: ‘It was like one day the world was only one language, could be talked of only in black and white, and the next all was colour because the extra words made it so. I had been given the gift of extra senses.’

Ruth reflects on how she came to a sense of her own racial identity as a white person, and learned that her whiteness was not neutral.

“Susumina and her friends called … people from other Indonesian islands ‘straight-hairs’ because their hair was straight, while Yuvut and other Papuan people had curly hair … We are not Indonesian, said Susumina when I asked her about this. And I tugged at my own hair, in between curly and straight, and squirmed in my own lighter skin … I had to choose [which group I belonged to], but I was not from Yuvut and my parents were not from Yuvut and we did not mean to stay in this village forever either … We all had to choose.”

Etherington is obviously very conscious that she is a white person writing characters of colour and telling the stories of other cultures. It’s a hot topic in literary circles at the moment, and the point at which fiction becomes cultural appropriation is difficult to pinpoint. Etherington addresses this issue by having her protagonist explicitly consider where she fitted into life in Yuvut and who gets to tell which stories. ‘I felt like I was stealing the stories, using them to say something about myself … There would always be something missing that I did not know how to tell, could not know how to tell and should not.’ In an interview on Radio New Zealand Etherington said, ‘I know [my book] can’t speak for Papua and I don’t want to do that, but [I] just [want it] to give some suggestions of what we might see if we listen.’

Although The Earth Cries Out is centred around the white experience, Etherington is careful to acknowledge that Ruth and her family are largely incidental to life in Yuvut. ‘Susumina’s timeline was not my timeline and I was not a protagonist in her story or song – just a small girl fighting for space in some of her … chapters.’ Ruth considers Sonya, a villager who Ruth’s parents have hired to do domestic work: ‘I knew only a corner of Sonya’s life … She did not need me or her job to be Sonya, to exist.’

The difficulty in bringing these kinds of issues to the fore in the context of a novel is that you risk becoming stilted or po-faced, and there are times when the words Etherington puts into Ruth’s mouth come out sounding irritatingly pat. But overall the technique of having the protagonist deliberately and explicitly step back from interpreting the narratives of the indigenous characters works, perhaps because the whole novel is based on Etherington’s real-life experiences.

Another aspect of storytelling that Etherington has Ruth repeatedly bring up is this idea of narrating one’s own life, and blurring the line between what is remembered and what is invented. Because of the framing device of the novel – Ruth reflecting as an adult on the time she spent in Irian Jaya as a child – the main narrative of The Earth Cries Out comprises Ruth interrogating her own memories: ‘I forget which version is the truth.’ Throughout the novel she tries to make sense of her little sister’s death: ‘There was what was true and what I only thought was true about Julia dying, and I tried to sort out which was which. Piles of facts on one side; piles of possibilities on the other. But they overlapped and crossed, wouldn’t let themselves be neatly divided.’ Ruth craves – but is always denied – a neat ending; redemption for having outlived her little sister.

“Before I left New Zealand I was learning about plots in stories and how they might look like a mountain if you drew them out, and how stories usually finished once they got to the top of the mountain, their most exciting point, or soon after. I wondered if this … was supposed to be the Big Thing that happened during our time in Yuvut, the one that would … make us healed … [but] we were taking part in a different story.”

The Earth Cries Out is an ambitious first novel that seeks not only to tell a good story but also to consider and critique the process of storytelling itself. Etherington manages to weave in these intellectual themes without ever becoming dry or self-indulgent. Ruth is a sympathetic and engaging narrator, and the frequent breaks into other perspectives add to the story without detracting too much from the narrative tension. I am eager to see what Etherington does next.

My birthday

Aw, I got this lovely birthday card from one of my editors!

I turned 37 on 28 September 2017. 37 is a prime number and I feel certain this will bring me luck, or at least cake.

(For the record, books are ALWAYS a welcome birthday gift. Sometimes people ask me whether it's ok for them to give me books. YES. YES IT IS.)

Book review: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

This review was commissioned by and originally published on Stuff in September 2017.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has been awarded many impressive literary prizes and is on the Booker longlist; however, be warned that the entire book is just one long sentence, appearing at first glance to be a poem rather than a novel: “the bell / the bell as / hearing the bell as / hearing the bell as standing here / the bell being heard standing here / hearing it ring out through the grey light of this morning, noon or night / god knows / this grey day standing here and” so as the pages went on I began to have a terrible longing for a fullstop, or for any punctuation mark more determined than a colon, as apart from anything else it renders Solar Bones woefully lacking in capital letters, with each new paragraph, if that can still be considered the correct term, beginning, or continuing, in lower case

              as Irish author McCormack tells Marcus Conway’s life story, all in one gruelling sentence, and as I read on I felt a deep weariness and a tired familiarity, since Marcus is a middle-aged Irish man; white, one assumes, and I realised that I have spent so very much of my life reading a particular kind of novel about the internal tribulations of middle-aged white men that it makes me wish to put down the burden of worthy literature and rest, but often entire pages would go by without even an indent in sight, so there was no stopping; the typesetter had tried their best but it was exhausting – at one point Marcus’s daughter creates an artwork that is “a continuous swathe of text … in crashing typographical waves” written in her own blood, I mean good god, who may blame her

              “stop / mother of Jesus stop / this is how the mind unravels in nonsense and rubbish / if given its head” but McCormack wouldn’t take his own advice so, constantly denied the punctuation I craved, I finished Solar Bones completely worn out and there wasn’t even a fullstop on the last page; thank god for commas and line breaks I suppose but really, bloody hell

              .

My national radio debut

I was thrilled but also terrified to be invited to speak in the book critic slot on Jesse Mulligan's programme on Radio NZ National. It was my first time speaking live on national radio and, although I was horribly nervous, once I got going I relaxed and started enjoying myself. Here I am speaking about copyright in the digital age - one of my hobby horses. Frankly they're lucky to have shut me up after only a quarter of an hour.

Book review: Hunger by Roxane Gay

HUNGER: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay (Constable & Robinson, $35)

This article was first published in the August 12, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.

A raw, honest, painful and sometimes frustrating memoir on what it’s like to be fat.

Hunger is a memoir told in bright, searing prose of what an utterly grim prospect it is to be fat in this society. You can’t fit in the seats in restaurants, or movie theatres, or planes. You can’t buy good clothes. You can’t get anything out of the doctor except ‘you need to lose weight’, even if what needs treating is a sore throat . You are subject to socially acceptable fat-shaming from strangers, on social media, and even – disguised as concern – from your nearest and dearest. You are trapped in your fat body and in your brain that, influenced by your fat-phobic environment, tells you over and over again how ugly and repulsive you are. You believe intellectually in the body positivity movement that says all bodies are good bodies, but it’s not enough. You understand as a feminist that the beauty and diet industries are purveying unattainable standards and self-hatred as a deliberate strategy to extort money from you, but that’s not enough either. You know that you would be healthier if you could love – or at least not actively hate – your own body, but that seems every bit as impossible as making your fat body smaller. And you can never, ever get away from it. As Roxane Gay said at Auckland Writers Festival: “It’s just a shitshow all day every day”.

Hunger is a raw, honest, painful memoir. Gay is a US feminist and critic whose writing career is going from strength to strength. Her intellect and talents are formidable, and in Hunger she turns them on herself.

Gay writes powerfully about how her life was derailed by a horrific childhood event that led her to overeat and make herself fat as a self-protection strategy. Those events and actions have had an ongoing and profound effect: “My body is a cage of my own making.”

Gay speaks candidly about how, even as she understands this cause and effect intellectually, still, every time she starts to lose weight through diet and exercise (which she does repeatedly), some powerful urge kicks in when she gets below a certain weight and makes her overeat again. All her insight cannot fix the chronic after-effects of her trauma or her fraught relationship with food: “What I know and what I feel are two very different things.” It makes for painful and sometimes frustrating reading.

Gay acknowledges this frustration, and our thwarted instinct to want a happy ending for her: “I wish, so very much, that I could write a book about triumphant weight loss and how I learned how to live more effectively with my demons. I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size. Instead, I have written this book, which has been the most difficult writing experience of my life … Here I am showing you the ferocity of my hunger.”

Book review: The Pacific Room

This review was commissioned by and published in the NZ Herald in August 2017.

One of the biggest bunfights in the literary world at the moment is who gets to write who. Where is the line between imaginatively entering into the world of a character different from you, and cultural appropriation?

The Pacific Room is the debut novel of Australian journalist Michael Fitzgerald. It is the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s final days in Apia, Samoa, in the late nineteenth century; and of modern-day art historian Lewis Wakefield’s journey to Samoa to research the portrait of Stevenson painted just before he died.

One of the reasons my mind was stuck on questions of identity and representations is because these are recurring themes in the book. Lewis’s twin was killed when they were children and he doesn’t entirely know who he is without him. Stevenson is, rather coyly, never referred to by that name, but instead goes by his Samoan cognomen Tusitala, or simply “the writer”. He is worried about the portraits made of him and how he is represented in other men’s art. Hovering underneath everything is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson’s iconic work of split identity. It made me wonder about the identity of the author.

Fitzgerald’s bio does not include his race, gender identity, or sexual orientation, which is often an indicator of what is generally regarded as the default option: male/heterosexual/cisgender/Caucasian. Some of his characters, however, are not. The Pacific Room is set largely in Samoa and features Samoan characters, including fa’afafine. In the acknowledgements Fitzgerald thanks the Samoan fa’afafine community, presumably for helping him with his research. Does this mean it’s ok? Who gets to decide? These unanswered questions troubled me throughout the book.

Fitzgerald’s prose style is poetic and rather dreamlike, which is sometimes beautiful and sometimes irritatingly languid. “The heat softens [Lewis], as if his body is but a membrane porous to the stories floating through the air.” The multiple points of view structure is distracting: I found there were too many characters for me to become fully invested.

Overall, there’s something about The Pacific Room that doesn’t quite work. I recommend instead Black Marks on the White Page, a recent anthology of Pasifika writing and art edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makareti. That’s the real deal.

Book review: Black Marks on the White Page

BLACK MARKS ON THE WHITE PAGE, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti (Penguin, $40)

This article was first published in the July 15, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.

A collection of stories tells how colonialism is being resisted.

This book is many different things at once: hardback, artwork, storytelling, anthology. It is a beautiful object and a challenge.

Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti, is a collection of art and writing from Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal Australian creators. In their introduction, the editors explain that this prose, poetry and visual art together is a talanoa, a conversation.

In The Vanua is Fo‘ohake, Jione Havea writes: “A talanoa must be shared … A talanoa can also pierce and transform, stretch and transcend … A talanoa is difficult to complete, or contain. It lives on, beyond each of its tellings.”

The nature of storytelling is a theme throughout the book. In her poem Pouliuli: A Story of Darkness in 13 Lines, Selina Tusitala Marsh takes a black marker pen to a copy of the novel Pouliuli by Maualaivao Albert Wendt, leaving just a few words uncrossed-out. Although the poem is formed by obscuring words, it is a call for more words to be written: “Wake up/Samoa and bring/a/New Zealand/storyteller/a pen.” In Famished Eels by Mary Rokonadravu, the protagonist’s illiterate father urges them to “Keep writing … As long as someone remembers, we live … My story is not mine alone. It is the story of multitudes and it will become a thread in the stories of multitudes to come.”

The creators here also comment on their use of the English language. In her extract from Freelove, Sia Figiel includes a Samoan-English vocabulary list. The protagonist, Inosia Alofafua Afatasi, says “[English] was a moody language. At times void of meaning. Empty. … It wasn’t like my geneaology could be traced through it. Or that the veins in my blood were to be found in its alphabet, the way it is found on my mother’s tattooed thighs.”

Black Marks on the White Page comprises, as the editors say, “the disruptive act that Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal writing constitutes in the worldwide literary landscape – still the page is white, and still the marks we make upon it are radical acts of transgression …”.

Many of its works are concerned explicitly with resisting colonialism. In Whale Bone City, Alexis Wright writes: “See if you can find Aboriginal Sovereignty’s killer … You like the lightness of being an individual like white people, to be in a personal space where you can no longer feel the totality of culture, or feel any of its depth of connectedness, or of being reminded how you are related to the total country …”

In his satirical short story Rush, Nic Low inverts the power dynamic by making Aboriginal Australians the owners of the mining company and older white people the protesters.

Black Marks on the White Page showcases a multiplicity of voices and genres. It is, by turns, startling, beautiful, funny, challenging, forceful and delicate – a talanoa well worth joining.

Book review: Night Burns with a White Fire

This review was originally published in the 29 July 2017 issue of the NZ Listener.

Reading this compilation of Lauris Edmond’s poetry and prose can be unsettling. Edmond records her own experience so skilfully that she communicates something close to universal human truth. It’s almost like she knows you and is writing directly to you.

To put this new anthology together, editors Frances Edmond and Sue Fitchett asked various of Lauris Edmond’s family, friends and colleagues to nominate a piece of her writing that they felt was in some way quintessentially ‘Lauris’. The result is a compact collection – less than 200 pages – of poetry and excerpts from her autobiographies that feels intimate and personal.

Night Burns with a White Fire is split into thematic sections that are roughly chronological. They deal with common themes of everyday life: family, marriage, ageing, friendship. The first section is “Somewhere you are always going home”; poems and prose about childbirth, children, ancestors, and descendants. In “Square dance”, Edmond addresses her “five-foot legendary grandmother” Clara Eliza who died before Edmond was born: “I can see you, moving about / in the dim grey weather where history lodges”. Edmond then turns to her granddaughter Ruth: “You too … will likely give birth to a girl / who in turn will depart for a later, stranger time. … you will mature among women / with a larger pride in their powers.”

This theme of women coming into their own recurs throughout the book. Edmond was born in 1924 and died in 2000. She lived through most of the major events of the twentieth century, including the rise of second-wave feminism. She published her first book of poems, In Middle Air, in 1975 at the age of 51, and her writing career took off from there. 1975 was also the year Edmond moved to Oriental Bay, in Wellington, where her work is now memorialised in stone in the harbourfront Writers Walk.

In “Wellington letter XV”, Edmond writes: “In time … it will be as though / I had never lived; / but the earth will remain … and women I shall not know / will walk”. Night Burns with a White Fire is in part an attempt to stave off that time of when it shall be as though Edmond had never lived. We have her books; we have some of her words written in stone, past which ‘women I shall not know’ walk every day.

As the editors say in their introduction, “[Edmond’s] skill was to make her experience speak to ours.” Night Burns with a White Fire is a small book, but one that feels like it will last.

Book review: Gravity Well

This review was commissioned by and printed in the NZ Herald in June 2017.

I loved Gravity Well right up until the final dozen or so pages. But after reading the ending I nearly threw the book across the room. It made me wonder, how did I form such strong expectations about what kind of an ending this story seems to need?

Gravity Well is Australian author Melanie Joosten’s second novel. Set mostly in Australia, it tells the stories of two friends, Lotte and Eve. Lotte, who works as an astronomer, envies astronauts: “The responsibilities of the outside world had been removed for them. They were free to concentrate only on the task at hand: putting their lives on hold for something bigger than themselves.” Lotte has been putting her own personal life on hold, taking a job in South America for a year away from her husband, who wants to settle down, and avoiding getting tested for the same breast cancer that killed her mother.

Eve, an audio engineer, is also trying to escape. She has left her normal life and run away to a campsite in winter by the sea. There are hints she may be suffering from post-partum depression, as she punishes herself by refusing physical or emotional comfort.

Lotte and Eve, with their flaws, mistakes, and strained relationships, feel psychologically complex and entirely real. Their decisions – often selfish or based in wishful thinking – are believable, and this combined with the clever structure of Gravity Well kept me fully immersed.

Joosten sustains the suspense by splitting the narrative into two main timeframes; 2009 and 2015. Gradually we circle back to the central events that have pushed Eve and Lotte to run. Joosten handles the reveals deftly, delivering a genuine twist and a real emotional gut-punch. As the key events are recounted the prose seems to dry out, sentences getting shorter and plainer, as though words cannot contain the emotion. The characters’ lives are messy but Joosten is absolutely in control.

Or is she? “That was when it became art: not in its creation but its reception.” Gravity Well pulled me into its world so thoroughly that I became strongly invested in the kind of ending I thought it needed. Joosten’s novel has become art alright, but the Eve and Lotte in my head deserve better.