Noelle McCarthy (words) and Sal Criscillo (pictures) meet Patricia Grace, whose latest book is a memoir which made the best-seller list in its first week
The 9.33 pulls in at Plimmerton. Patricia Grace is on the platform. I think I recognise her, but her back is to me. Tall and slight and standing very upright, in a purple fleece jacket and matching purple soft-soled shoes, she's talking to a handsome schoolboy with a big sports bag, one of the rangatahi from around here maybe. They have a quick chat and a laugh, and I hang back awkwardly, pretending to check my phone. Then she turns and the famous bright blue eyes are on me. Nice to meet you she says, and opens her arms for a hug, two carved oval earrings glinting against the silver of her hair.
We get in her little green car (“People are always trying to name it Lettuce and Kermit and things”) and she drives us up the street, past the suburban cafes of Plimmerton, makes a left turn and the blue water is running alongside us suddenly, the sea “from mirror to monster and everything in between” as she describes it in From The Centre: A Writer's Life, her new memoir. Today it's on its best behaviour, placid and sparkling. We drive along a softly curling ribbon of shoreline, black harakeke etched against the bright, wide sky, everything timelessly blue and white and grey and green.
Patricia Grace is of Ngāti Toa descent, with equal connections to Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa. She says in her book that she based the landscape of her classic 1986 novel Pōtiki, about the attempt to force a Māori community to sell their land, on this place. Passing the carved red and white sign for the Marae, watching the tar seal run out and the road turn to gravel up ahead, the sense of being in a story is dizzying here in Hongoeka, the last remnant of three Ngāti Toa reserves still in Ngāti Toa hands.
Her house is up a driveway. Her son lives with his family in the big house in front, hers is tall and light with beautiful big windows that look out on her garden and trees. All of this is in From the Centre, a title that describes how she writes - the shifting perspectives of character and non-linear treatment of time she started with her first novel Mutuwhenua, and perfected in the brilliant, dream-like Pōtiki, and Baby No-Eyes, a novel about racism and inter-generational trauma that starts with a whānau receiving back from doctors the body of a baby whose eyes have been removed postmortem without permission. The eyes come back in a plastic supermarket bag. This incident is based on a true story and not from 100 ago either, it only happened in the early 90s. Baby No Eyes is a tour-de-force, as formally inventive and viscerally devastating as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, another gothic engagement with the monstrousness of white supremacy that centres around a ghostly baby. And Grace has her characters tell it all in an easy, colloquial way that's very alive and often very funny. She describes her method: “I sit myself in the middle of the story, move it back and forth around me...keep characters and ideas close, reach out to get what I need.” She writes for herself first and foremost, she says. “I am the first audience”, with only one caveat: “If Māori readers did not relate to my writing, or if they rejected it, I would not do it.”
The first big surprise in her memoir is how close she came to nearly failing School Certificate. In her third year in secondary school, she was practicing tennis at a Wellington club when she started to notice a priest "looking at me surreptitiously". One day he came up to her and told her she was a bad influence. The incident only takes up a few lines in the book but the consequences of it reverberate: “I think in some ways, it was...I was going to say pivotal.” She chooses her words carefully when I ask her about it, sitting at the kitchen table with our tea. “It sort of reinforced some ideas that I had in my mind of unworthiness of myself. I mean, he was a priest. Right up there, in touch with God. And we'd always been taught, told, we were made to believe, that these were more than people. And we had to respect them no matter what. So that led to a lot of confusion, I suppose….”
She doesn’t say much more about it, the book lays out what happened next anyway. Her confidence faltered, negative thoughts shading into depression, she started to do badly at school. In Baby No Eyes, when Gran Kura takes back the mutilated baby that the doctors fetched out of a Waste Care bin, she writes, "You think that people know, think that they are high up people, then you discover that all they are is different. To you they are empty, and you see it.” I tell her I thought about those lines in relation to the priest. “Yes. With people in authority you learn not to, you’re taught not to question.”
Before that incident, she was aspiring to excellence. “That was an ambition, to be clever, you know, to be knowledgeable, to be educated, and, and so forth. I wasn't competitive with other kids. But I was very competitive with myself. And one thing I could always do best - well, I’m talking about equally as well as any other child, or even better - was writing. I don't quite know where that came from. But that was something I could always do.” She made a decision, later that year, to pass School Certificate. “I don't know what would have happened otherwise, I only passed by a few marks. But I don't know how I would have felt if I hadn't, hadn't made it.” She laughs, remembering. “Although, in the end, after I’d finished the exam, it didn't seem to matter anymore. Because I'd given it my best shot.”
Later, she decided to pursue a career in writing even though the New Zealand publishing industry was closed effectively, to wahine Māori, and despite being a full-time teacher and a mother to, eventually, seven children. (In her memoir, and in her short stories there’s more than one description of the teacher’s baby lying on the rug or in a cot in the school room, and nappies hanging out to dry above the wood burner.) She wrote about “living, dying, change; emotions, aspirations and human relationships” in ordinary Māori communities, in all their complexity and specificity, long before it was popular, or even viable, to do so. “Waiariki is the first collection of short stories by a Māori woman to be published” is all it says on the inside cover of her first short story collection. Waiariki came out in 1975. Not long ago at all, really.
Was it hard, being the first, being the only? “I was very naive, really,” she says. “I didn't even know that what I was doing wasn't mainstream. I didn't know that women had difficulty publishing. I’d come from rural areas. And I didn't know very much at all. So, I just went into writing quite naively, because I had done quite well in the Penwomen's Competitions.”
God bless the Auckland Penwomen’s Club. They gave her prizes and most importantly, wrote their judges comments on each story. She wrote when she could. “At first it was when the children were in bed at night, and when they were young, and perhaps on the school holidays, because they spent most of the time out of doors, you know, so I could find time to do it.” Pōtiki won major awards, critics griped there wasn’t a glossary. Why should there be translations, she had decided, for kupu Māori in a novel set in Aotearoa? The controversy was good she says, it got her to think about her own voice. She made a decision after that, not to be influenced by outside opinions. “I’ve never been overly confident in, in any type of relationships or with other people. One thing I've always been confident about is my writing. And, and knowing that I wanted my own freedom, you know, to write what I wanted to write, and not to be influenced by other people who possibly weren't writers...it's got to come from within me.”
She spent years teaching Māori children, in rural schools in Northland. The book contains a series of letters that she wrote to the Department of Education in the early 80s outlining detailed objections to stories like The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids: "I feel very strongly this story is unsuitable for placement in schools because of the very strong way it associates blackness with evil. Pictorially it is the blackness of the wolf along with his facial expression that is meant to give him a frightening and evil look. I know that the English language and English literature has many, many such associations. However these associations are oppressive to people of dark skin....I predict that in a few years’ time this booklet will be a cause of considerable embarrassment to the Department."
She says, "I’d forgotten about them until I was writing the memoir. Going through them, I thought, okay, I did my best. But it was too soon for them…I didn't just write out of the blue either, they had asked for responses. But they didn't like the responses they got sometimes.”
Included are the fob-off replies from the editors, and the Director General of Education: "While your letter was the only one...We considered it made a valid point worthy of consideration. The general feeling...your concern...though justifiable…is misplaced."
There’s a chapter about her presentation at a convention in Wellington in 1987, where she argues that children need to be able to see themselves in stories. “I was talking about the effect of always being ‘the other’ to Māori children, or New Zealand children maybe. And [about] a whole lot of the stories being about ‘poor’ and ‘rich’, you know, this poor person who does some great deed to be rich or marry a prince or king or something.”
She loved teaching, loved the children, not that she romanticises them. In the book she describes how the Native Schools Act meant children of her husband's generation did physical work at school, sweeping, cleaning, digging. “That was part of the education,” she says firmly. “They got a good education in the small schools. And he never resented any of it.” Even emptying the toilet cans. “I don’t think it was a bad thing. Children were all part of the economy, such as it was, you know. Children can do what adults can do. Maybe the slightly different level, but they can.” This makes sense. From the prophet child Tokowaru-i-te-Marama in Pōtiki, full of grief and knowing, to Tawera and the dead sister only he can see, in Baby-No-Eyes, in Patricia Grace’s novels, children regularly see things, and bear things that adults flinch from.
The book covers well-known things, like the particularly dispiriting case of life imitating art about ten years ago, when the New Zealand Transport Authority came for her ancestral land in Waikanae to build the Kapiti Expressway. “I just decided that I didn't want it used for a road, that enough Māori land had been taken through the Public Works Act and so forth. So, I was…Was I determined? Well, I just kept saying no, and not really knowing that we would win in the end, but I just kept on that track.”
She went to court to give evidence, twice, in 2015, not long after her husband died. They won, but as she points out, the legislation is still on the books and it affects Māori disproportionally. “Young academics have been doing some research into how much Maori land has been taken under the Public Works Act, as compared to General Land. And I think that they're finding that a lot more Maori land has been targeted. They don't want to go through somebody's farm, but they can go through somebody else's river resources and bush resources and, and so forth.”
She says in her book that there must be real life, as part of writing life. I say that in her ‘real’ life, there’ve been a few fights, usually when she and her whānau have come up against the brute force of structural racism. Story sovereignty, land rights, children’s rights, she’s fought for all of them.
“Yes,” she says, happily. “But that’s all good”.
Her house is very comfortable, with the blue sky coming in through the high window, and the fire going. I recognise the photos on the walls, her father in his army uniform, her beautiful mother with her sisters.
I ask about her husband, Dick. Kerehi Waiariki Grace is up on the wall too, in the lounge just along from us, handsome and smiling. In the book, she writes, “He asked me to go to the movies with him...He has been the man in my life ever since.” A lifetime of love in a couple of sentences. There are photographs of them together, at Teachers College field trips, after kapa haka, and smiling and shy on their wedding day at St Mary’s of the Angels (“A long walk down a long aisle carrying a shaking bouquet"). I say how much I enjoyed reading their love story, even though, or maybe because, it's so understated. “I hope that came through,'' she says. “I am an understater, but I also like to show rather than tell.” When Dick died in 2013, they’d been married for 55 years.
What was it like, winning the big international literary prize in 2008 for Baby No Eyes and the body of work that came before it? Neither of us are precisely sure how to pronounce Neustadt. “The Oklahoma Nobel” the New York Times called it. She didn’t even know she’d been nominated. “I always appreciate the work being appreciated,” is all she can manage. She’s hopeless at horn-tooting. But she’s happy to praise Cousins, the film of her book, another story about the abuse of children by racist adults and institutions, about the power of love and whānau. “They got the essence of the book, the essence of the characters. And, you know, only an hour and a half to do it. And I think they did a wonderful job.” Her daughter in law, Briar Grace-Smith co-directed the film and acts in it, she wrote the script from the novel. Grace-Smith wrote an essay about how, with three small kids, she once told her mother- in- law she didn’t have time for writing. “You might just have to make the time,” she told her.
“You’re important”, I say, “to the generation of Māori women writers coming through now.” I could have quoted Tayi Tibble talking about her on Te Karere, or Emma Espiner, writing about Baby No-Eyes in new bilingual journal Te Whē: “Aunty Pat saw Indigenous data sovereignty as an urgent political issue before we even had a word for it.”
“They tell me that, yes,” is all she says, smiling.
“What’s that like?”
“Oh, if it means something to them, if it helps them at all, I think that’s a good thing, and if I can help them and support them in any way, I always will.” Te Whē editors Anahera Gildea and Nadine Anne Hura acknowledged Grace, and fellow writer Renee, as kaumatua of their game-changing writers rōpū in a session called “I’ve been called Lippy” at Featherston Booktown recently. The brilliant new generation of voices in Te Whē are up against a lot of the same old prejudice that Grace details in From the Centre. On the panel in Featherston, Nadine Hura described texting around her fellow writers when an editor asked if the an absent Māori dad in one of her stories had prison as his backstory.
I brought a copy of Wahine Toa, Grace’s collaboration with artist Robin Kahukiwa. She wrote the text for a book full of Goddesses: Te Pō, Hinetītama, Mahuika and others. “What I wanted was to have a new angle, and then I decided that angle should be the writing in the first person.” It’s nearly 40 years old now, recently reissued in a bilingual edition, with a new subtitle: Omniscient Māori Women. “All-knowing, all-seeing, all-perceiving,” Ani Mikaere calls them in the foreword. I think, but don’t say, this sounds like a good description of Patricia Grace also.
After we're finished talking, we eat our morning tea. I brought slices at the cafe by the train station, she has a cheese scone nearly as big as her head for me. We talked earlier about the difficulties her French translator had with some of the cakes in her novels. They figured out Lamingtons, she says, but fly cemeteries might have been beyond them.
We’re driving back to get the 11.50 when I ask if the wharenui around here and she pops a neat u-ey. We drive back down a private road, the same one the developers have probably had their eyes on. At the end of it, sitting against the hills in tranquil perfection is Hongoeka’s carved and painted meeting house Te Heke-mai-raro, named in honour of the epic journey made by Ngāti Toa from Kāwhia to Te Moana o Raukawa. It was opened in 1997, built and planned by this community, who learnt how to carve and weave in order to fulfil the dream of earlier generations. Grace describes it all in From The Centre. The flag is up. “We won’t disturb them,” she says. In Pōtiki, the wharenui is burnt in a terrible act of desecration. We leave Te Heke-mai-raro tucked serene against the green hills, the blue sea lapping one side of it. The little green car rounds the sparkling bay, and I hear the refrain from Pōtiki: “All we need is here.” I've missed the 11.50 but the sun is shining and there’ll be another train along in a minute.
From the Centre by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House, $40) is available in bookstores nationwide.
