NZ-Aotearoa

Climate change, migration, activism, terrorism: for people living in a small country at the bottom of the world, what does hope for the future look like in the teeth of that gale?

‘Non-driving, my passenger assures me, is a far higher calling than being in the driver’s seat.’

It is like an inverted and far more complicated version of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle (in which two men bond over their rivalry for a female’s affection). What I keep seeing is variations on this: two young women, both of them queer or queer-adjacent, intensely connected and wavering between the platonic and the erotic; and then the added complication of an older straight man, with whom one of the women sleeps.

Māori culture is the taonga, the treasure vault from which I source my inspiration. How could I not pay tribute to the people and stories of the iwi? Without them I wouldn’t exist. The genealogy of my work can be traced back to Waituhi, my father’s kin place. The pito (umbilical) is there, where the stories were all being spoken, sung and acted around me. It’s the turangawaewae, the place where my work began to stand. My Māori self has its history there, and it’s where all its reo (tongue or language), ihi (energy), mana (strength) and wehi (dread) comes from; there, I am my own king. All I’ve ever done is move that literary whakapapa, that living world and its orality, its aurality too, into a written world in a different language, English.

What amazed me was not just that Beck had written back to me. It was that he had written the words ‘New Zealand’. He’d said the secret code word that granted us access to the rest of the world. And he was interested to know what it was like here. It didn’t seem an idle interest, but a genuine one. He was so interested that he’d said ‘Wow’.

‘It was the day that Seamus Heaney died: August 30, 2013. I hadn’t seen John Clarke since the late 1970s.’

Personally I can’t imagine anyone writing about New Zealand literature without mentioning that New Zealand is defined by its biculturalism.

The danger that ANZAC will seem like just another commemorative album relates, I think, to a tendency that is legible across Aberhart’s considerable oeuvre, one that is not in itself problematic. This is a pull almost in the direction of nostalgia – a preference for folk cultures, throwbacks and remnants; a preference for obsolete things and for places that seem like outliers from the busier and slicker centres of late modernity.

The Luminaries… is not only set in the nineteenth century; it appears to be of the nineteenth century, or as close to it as possible. It has the scope and length of a nineteenth century novel, and its central mysteries are established and explored in a nineteenth century style.

In the Memorial Room is both literally and figuratively posthumous. It centres around themes of creativity, being a writer, and a writer’s posthumous memorialisation. Frame wrote the novel in 1973, but did not allow its publication during her lifetime.