My first-ever time on the cover of The New York Times Book Review with a review of Janet Frame’s stories: Between My Father and the King (published in NZ as Gorse is Not People).
New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 26 May 2013
…then inside:
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[This was originally posted on 20 May 2013 at The Hand Mirror]
It’s trite to say that books take you places. But true nonetheless. With books, you can disappear into other times, cultures, imaginary worlds. “Foreign” fiction is better than any guide-book at introducing you to a place and its people, and sometimes even better than going there if you want to see beneath the surface.
But if you live here and read enough of the stuff (say novels from the two Anglophone powerhouses – the United States and the UK-plus-Ireland) then a different feeling starts to kick in. Like what you’re getting to know is really life inside the American novel, not life inside America. At about the same point, for me anyway, “local” fiction itself starts to feel a bit foreign. Not in the way “foreign” fiction is foreign, but in the way local fiction feels rare, like something you don’t see very often. Which, when it’s good local fiction, also makes it feel precious and exciting and new.
I felt this way reading Aorewa McLeod’s new book “Who Was That Woman, Anyway? Snapshots of a Lesbian Life.” It’s a novel, yes, but as McLeod explains in the book’s front matter, it’s inspired by real life events. “Some details happened in real life, some did not,” she writes. “The characters are fictionalised and given fictional names.” The book’s 10 chapters, ordered by date, span roughly 40 years in the life of Ngaio, McLeod’s protagonist who, like the author, is an English lecturer at a university in Auckland.
The subtitle is sweet in the way it undersells the book. These are not only snapshots of a lesbian life, but of life in New Zealand, and life in Aotearoa. Snapshots of what it can be like to grow up here, and live here.
Its starting point is the 1960s with Ngaio, a university student, heading to Nelson to spend her summer break as a nurse’s aide because “an ex-schoolmate’s father was someone high up in the mental health service and he had suggested that nurse-aiding in psychiatric hospitals was a lucrative way of earning money in the holidays”. Ngaio is put in a ward with bedridden, severely disabled children. “There were enormous hydrocephalic water heads, tiny pinheads, huge slobbering mouths, bent bodies, contorted hands waving in the air, grasping blindly, clutching as if there were something to reach for. They could grip me with such desperate strength that I had to pry their fingers off. Many were blind. I couldn’t tell how old they were.” McLeod’s writing, particularly in the first half of the novel, is like that: direct and piercing.
It’s while she’s working in Nelson that Ngaio meets Suzy, her first love. Suzy is a Māori woman from a Mormon family who works as a charge nurse at the children’s ward in town. “She only goes for white girls,” a friend tells Ngaio. “All her family’s married white. That’s what the Mormons encourage them to do, to make it in the white world.” Who cares! Ngaio is in heaven. “This was it; this was what it meant to make love. This was the transformational moment of my life.”
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The book is launched. Phew! It was a wild ride, which included an interview with a BoP Times reporter about the new early medication abortion service in Tauranga while traveling in a taxi en route TO the launch (book about the struggle meets the struggle); dropping my room key down a storm water drain in a downpour and actually managing to fish it out, all while wearing purple pyjamas and getting soaked; going into VicBooks to do the “sign some books” thing, and being
Dame Margaret Sparrow and moi at the book launch. (Copyright is Vic Uni Press.)
evacuated because of some alarm. False I guess, but I didn’t wait to find out because I had to meet the lovely Zenaida, but messed that up - we were waiting in different cafes on opposite sides of town. At the launch (thank you so much VicBooks and VUP), I met people I wish I’d found BEFORE I finished writing the book, but then again, it’s always hard to STOP researching. Scored a lovely bottle of Scotch from the WONAAC women (my request!), had an excellent ALRANZ AGM and weekend at the Women’s Studies Association Conference trying out some of the Prochoice Highway stuff. Had some orders for the Body Politics calendars and scanned some great images from Margaret Sparrow’s personal collection for said calendar. Has anyone heard of Condoman? Not sure if he’s sound as I don’t really know anything about him, but Margaret had some Condoman patches, which must be collector’s items or something. Speaking of Dame Margaret Sparrow, my all-time favourite photo of the self (and I don’t usually like them) is now the one attached to this post because I’m next to her (at the book launch). Oh, and I met the Queen of Thorns. At least, I think it was her, but can one ever really be sure? Finally, I nearly forgot (did I want to forget?) there was a Kim Hill interview on RNZ on Saturday 27th. That was pretty intense, and I haven’t plucked up the courage yet to listen back to the podcast.
Missed you Linn and Helen!
UPDATE: Thanks to Scoop.co.nz for making a video of the launch, and putting the speeches (they’re short, honest!) on YouTube. Links to those are at the ALRANZ blog.
Phew!:
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Off to Wellington today for the Women’s Studies Association conference this weekend, where I will be talking about and selling (early, because the book launch isn’t till May Day) my new book, Fighting to Choose, and introducing people to the Prochoice Highway, which is a books-cum-spread-the-word project I’m doing this year in conjunction with a few cool people including ALRANZ. Also, the ALRANZ AGM is on Tuesday 30 April, in Wellington. It’s members only, but if you need info, write to ALRANZ at safeandlegal[at]gmail.com And, yes, on May Day the book is officially being launched. Write to me if you want venue etc. details! Meanwhile, I’m on Saturday with Kim Hill tomorrow morning to talk about the book. More updates to come…
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Or, an alternative headline might be, A Definition of Impossible.
Impossible being trying to clean up zillions of these (pix taken 23 April at the Mount):
Plastic beads from the Rena wreck.
From this:
Crews at work picking up beads on the Mount beach.
According to info from the Rena Recovery Project’s site the storm over the weekend caused the release of “a quantity of plastic beads” from a container in the stern of the wreck. Hmmm, “a quantity”. That’s specific.
The project also says that the beads pose no threat to humans or wildlife. I suppose I find the latter a little hard to believe. Back in 2012, there was a whole lot of reporting about the threat the beads might pose to wildlife when a container holding 17 tonnes of them washed ashore on Matakana Island, which stretches between Mt Maunganui and Waihi Beach. But this time around, there hasn’t been any useful digging that I can see (excuse the inappropriate verb) into just what the impact of these beads is. And the authorities almost always reflexively say that X, Y and Z will have little or no impact on A, B and C. Will see what I can find out…
UPDATE 23 April 2013: The BOP Times, via the Herald, has a piece about why this latest pollution means the wreck should be removed.
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The BOP Times has an article today on its site about the Port of Tauranga opening an expanded container terminal.
The Port of Tauranga has a media release today on its site about the Port of Tauranga opening an expanded container terminal.
Even the headlines match. Someone should give someone some credit, at least. Business “journalism” at work. (Would a political advocacy group, or iwi who have been fighting the port expansion, or a group of greenies, or feminists, or etc. etc. get their PR material published verbatim?)
Oh, there it is over at Scoop, which clearly marks PR material as PR material, so you know what you’re getting.
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I first saw Joe Harawira speaking last year at the CTU-Iwi leaders hui in Tauranga. He seemed such a quiet, unassuming man, but the story of his struggle, along with fellow former Whakatane timber mill industry workers (SWAP, or Sawmill Workers Against Poisons), was quite mind blowing. It took them decades to win recognition for their claim that their exposure to PCP (pentachlorophenol) in the timber mills was causing some pretty severe health problems. In addition, that the poison-laced waste used as landfill (often around marae) was an environmental problem.
I kept meaning to contact Joe — since I live not too far from Whakatane, in the Bay of Plenty — and catch up on where he and the former mill workers were at, how the clean-up was going and were their health issues being resolved, something I finally did this March. He came to my place, managing to drive himself here despite having an arm that doesn’t work too well — one of the many health problems he himself has developed. (He’s 67 now.)
And, yes, he is a quiet, unassuming man. (I asked him about that: he said, well, if he’d seen me ”30 years ago, probably 20 years of those 30 years, I would probably cut your neck off out there. We were shocking, but after thinking about it now, we needed to go down that track.”) We talked for an hour and a half or so, and I wrote up a wee piece for Werewolf.co.nz, Toxins in the Timber Mills. The full story of Joe and SWAP has been told elsewhere, including in a documentary called The Green Chain that was shown on Māori TV in 2011. (There’s a link to that in the Werewolf piece.)
In the wake of the Pike River mining disaster, and the calls that followed for more oversight and better regulation, it struck me while listening to Joe that his story had a lot in common with other community-level struggles I’ve heard about over the past year or so — like the Waihi residents battling plans to mine under their town; and the iwi challenging the Port of Tauranga’s expansion plans, to mention just two. They share that sense of being powerless in the face of business interests, who usually also win over public sentiment by talking about how many jobs their project will create. (Sometimes that’s true; sometimes it’s not. But the ‘economic growth’ at any cost has been widely seen as contributing to what happened at Pike River.) It’s nigh on impossible, for example, to conclusively prove links between things like chemical exposure and health problems (think agent orange or dioxin in Taranaki), and when you’re a group of blue-collar workers — well, good luck with that. Similarly, in all the RMA hearings over mining, the local groups are up against well-resourced companies with experts on tap and reports that a lay person can barely make head nor tail of. True, the residents are supposed to have moderately well-resourced local government looking out for their interests, but ask the Waihi residents what they think about that. Whoa! A lot of them actually see the council as the biggest problem, not the mining company.
Among other things, the RMA is supposed to even the playing field a little bit. But most everyone has bought into that “there’s too much red tape” and “decisions take too long” narrative, hence the current legislation that’s designed to speed up some of the decision making. Sounds innocent enough, but unless a lot more effort is put into actually listening to and acting on the concerns of the people on the ground, there are surely more costly clean-ups in our future (be they health or environmental).
I had a much more in-depth piece in the Werewolf before (27 February 2013) about Policing Pregnancy, (I’m convinced the official and unofficial surveillance of pregnancy is a human rights issue that should be on more people’s radars) and some more book reviews up at The New York Times in February. Also, at The Hand Mirror, UN ‘Family’ Resolution Raises Concern, (20 March 2013) looks at a proposed UN Human Rights Council Resolution on “Protection of the Family”, and the potential impact it could have not just on reproductive health and rights, but on those of LGBTI people; while in ‘Careless Driving Causing Death’, (4 March 2013) I report on a case before the courts in Wellington in which a husband has been charged with careless driving causing death after a relatively minor accident that apparently led to the death of his wife’s 31-week fetus. A heart-breaking case in every possible way!
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