IHIMAERA, Witi (Tame)

Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Gisborne, 7 February 1944. Education: Te Karaka District High School, 1957-59; Church College of New Zealand, 1960-61; Gisborne Boys High School, 1962; University of Auckland, 1963-66; Victoria University, Wellington, 1968-72, B.A. 1972. Family: Married Jane Cleghorn in 1970. Career: Cadet reporter, Gisborne Herald, 1967; journalist, Post Office Headquarters, Wellington, 1968-72; information officer, 1973-74, Third Secretary, Wellington, 1975-78, Second Secretary, Canberra, 1978, and First Secretary, Wellington, 1979-85, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; New Zealand Consul, New York, 1986-88; Counsellor on Public Affairs, New Zealand Embassy, Washington, D.C., 1989; lecturer in New Zealand studies, University of Auckland, 1990-92. Since 1993 associate professor of English, University of Aukland. Lives in Aukland. Awards: Freda Buckland Literary award, 1973; Wattie/Montana award, 1974, 1986, and 1996; University of Otago Robert Burns fellowship, 1974; Katherine Mansfield fellowship, 1994.

Publications

Short Stories

Pounamu, Pounamu. 1972.

The New Net Goes Fishing. 1977.

Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. 1989.

Kingfisher Come Home. 1997.

Novels

Tangi. 1973.

Whanau. 1974.

The Matriarch. 1986.

The Whale Rider. 1987.

Bulibasha. 1995.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain. 1996.

The Dream Swimmer. 1998.

Other

Maori. 1975.

New Zealand Through the Arts: Past and Present, with Sir TosswillWoollaston and Allen Curnow. 1982.

On Top Down Under, with Sally Tagg (photographer). 1998.

Editor, with D. S. Long, Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing. 1982.

Editor, Te Ao Marama: Contemporary Maori Writing Since 1980(five volumes) . 1992-96.

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Critical Studies:

"Participating" by Ray Grover, in Islands, Winter 1973; "Tangi" by H. Winston Rhodes, in Landfall, December 1973; "Maori Writers," in Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays by Bill Pearson, 1974; The Maoris of New Zealand by Joan Metge, 1977; Introducing Ihimaera by Richard Corballis and Simon Garrett, 1984; Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision by Umelo Ojinmah, 1993.

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Witi Ihimaera's early fiction followed a rigid plan. His first book, Pounamu, Pounamu, was a collection of stories about the rural Maori. This was followed by two novels on the same subject: Tangi, an expansion of one of the stories in the earlier volume, and Whanau. Having, as he said, "completed writing about the rural Maori to my satisfaction," he turned his attention to "the Maori in urban areas." He again started with a volume of short stories, The New Net Goes Fishing, and planned two follow-up novels that were never completed.

Pounamu, Pounamu and The New Net Goes Fishing thus complement each other in subject matter and in other respects. The central symbol of the earlier volume is greenstone (pounamu), the species of New Zealand jade that gives the book its title. In The New Net Goes Fishing the central symbol is another green stone, the harder, gaudier emerald, which better evokes a sophisticated city milieu. The two volumes also employ complementary modes of narration. Almost all of the stories in Pounamu, Pounamu are first-person narratives told by children or adolescents. In The New Net Goes Fishing most of the stories are in the third person, and the main characters are generally a little older. The difference between the two volumes, then, is more than just a difference between town and country. There is also a distinction between softness and harshness, between subjectivity and objectivity, between childhood and adulthood, and between innocence and experience.

Pounamu, Pounamu is not, however, entirely dewy-eyed in its celebration of the traditional Maori communal lifestyle. Ihimaera constantly reminds the reader that this way of life is under threat. The first three stories all are about games and the way in which the Maori bend the orthodox rules, whether in cards ("A Game of Cards"), hockey ("Beginning of the Tournament"), or romance ("The Makutu on Mrs. Jones"). They are the happiest stories in the volume, but all have a somber undertone. The climax of "A Game of Cards" is the death of Nanny Miro, who epitomizes the traditional way of life. In "Beginning of the Tournament" hockey spectacularly brings the community together, but in a telling aside the narrator observes that "hockey's been dying in our area for some time." And while "The Makutu on Mrs. Jones" ends in a marriage, there must be some doubt about the future well-being of the feisty Irish postmistress who eventually succumbs to Mr. Hohepa, the tyrannical old tohunga. Of the subsequent stories in the volume, the most memorable focus on destruction ("Fire and Greenstone") and death ("The Child," "The Whale," and "Tangi"). The obvious implication is that the traditional way of life on the land is doomed, with a drift to town inevitable. Or, as an old Maori proverb puts it, "The old net is cast aside, the new net goes fishing."

The New Net Goes Fishing is framed by two stories ("Yellow Brick Road" and "Return from Oz") that draw on L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Emerald City where Baum's wizard lives proves to be much less fabulous than it seems at first, and when Dorothy and her companions doff their tinted spectacles, they find it to be an ordinary place presided over by an ordinary man. The superficial attractions of Ihimaera's Wellington are likewise delusive, and life is shown to be hard for the Maori who try to make a living there.

The 16 stories that lie inside this frame examine a wide range of interactions either between Maori and Pakeha or between rural and urban Maori. Some of the stories ("Clenched Fist," "Gathering of the Whakapapa," "The Greenstone Patu," and "Catching Up") are stark demonstrations of a clear-cut point about one or another of these interactions. Stories in a second group—including "The Escalator," "Masques and Roses," and "The Seahorse and the Reef"—make their points more subtly through a delicate use of symbolism. Subtlety is achieved in a different way in a third group that includes "The House with Sugarbag Windows," "I, Ozymandias," and "Big Brother, Little Sister." These are the most interesting stories in the volume. In them a narrative set in the present is interspersed with episodes from the past, with the latter strand providing motivation, explanations, and human depth for the former. This technique of interweaving strands of plot constitutes Ihimaera's most distinctive contribution to the short story genre.

Ihimaera and Patricia Grace are New Zealand's best-known Maori writers of short fiction. The best-known Pakeha is undoubtedly Katherine Mansfield, and in Dear Miss Mansfield Ihimaera pays tribute to this illustrious precursor. All of the stories in this volume reflect on Mansfield's work, but they do so in different ways. The volume begins with a novella (Maata) on the subject of the Maori princess (Maata Mahupuku) with whom Mansfield was intimate in her younger days and about whom she evidently planned a novel. The short stories that follow Maata are variations of one sort or another on stories by Mansfield. Four of the 13—"Summons to Alexandria," "His First Ball," "The Cicada," and "The Halcyon Summer," which is presumably meant to be seen as a free imitation of Mansfield's "At the Bay"—are reworkings of stories published separately early in Ihimaera's career under the respective titles "Queen Bee" and "My First Ball" (both 1970), "Cicada" (1973), and "Halcyon" (1971). The remaining were written in 1987-88 specifically for Dear Miss Mansfield, whose publication coincided with the centenary of Mansfield's birth.

With further revisions several of the Dear Miss Mansfield stories reappeared alongside six previously unpublished pieces in Ihimaera's later collection Kingfisher Come Home. Ihimaera wrote that he "had always intended to publish Kingfisher Come Home in 1980 and make a trilogy out of this and the two earlier collections, but life and career intervened." The entire trilogy is incorporated in the omnibus volume Kingfisher Come Home: The Complete Maori Stories, the subtitle suggesting that Ihimaera has chosen to eschew short fiction in order to consolidate his fast growing reputation as a novelist.

—Richard Corballis