This review was commissioned by Stuff and published on 19 April 2020.
I realised recently that the thing I most urgently want the literature of Aotearoa to do is to explain whiteness to me. I have lived all my life in majority white countries (Aotearoa and the UK, where my whānau is from), but because whiteness is assumed to be both natural and neutral, my racial identity remains largely unexamined. I am on the alert for hints and glimpses, for signs that those who have gone before me have pointed and said: here. He Pākehātanga tēnei. This is who we are.
One such sign pointer is Fiona Kidman. To celebrate her 80th birthday she has released All the Way to Summer: Stories of Love and Longing, a collection of short stories both new and previously published. Kidman, who has been publishing since the 1970s, has a string of prestigious awards and honours to her name, and last year won our top book award for her latest novel, This Mortal Boy.
All the Way to Summer, which is also available as an ebook, is a good lockdown read: the stories are short, suitable for frazzled attention spans, and largely deal with love and human connection, often in very trying circumstances. (Be warned, however, that “Silks” features a character who becomes dangerously ill with an infectious virus.) Many of the stories take place safely in the past, which these days can feel like a pleasant escape. Most of the protagonists are white women, and as I read I could feel the tug of my own cultural whakapapa. Something important was being shown to me without being explicitly described.
In her preface, Kidman writes: “Some of these stories are written in the first person. If my readers think they recognise me in these … they are probably close. We all have our own histories of love”. One such story, “Silks”, is about a Pākehā woman who travels from Aotearoa to visit her husband in Vietnam. While there, she complains about a Vietnamese taxi driver who overcharges her; then regrets her actions as she realises they may result in his loss of livelihood, or worse. “I looked at myself in the mirror that night, Western and virtuous and deadly.” It is a rare moment of a white character consciously reflecting on their racial identity – but even so, the euphemistic ‘Western’ is used in place of the stark ‘white’. It is not a coincidence that this only happens when the Pāhekā character finds themselves in an unaccustomed racial minority.
Kidman, who is Pākehā, was for many years married to a Māori man, Ian Kidman (Ngāti Maniaopoto, Ngāti Raukawa), and I began to wonder to what extent her understanding of Pākehātanga was shaped by this relationship. After all, as Pākehā we have a cultural identity that has been named by Māori, and as writers and storytellers we live on a whenua already alive with pūrākau. Perhaps whiteness can best be understood in contrast; or perhaps, at least, this is a good place to start. All the Way to Summer is a glinting piece of the puzzle – and a thoroughly good read.
