I've Been Thinking About You, Sister by Ihimaera Witi

Author:Ihimaera, Witi [Witi Ihimaera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775534167
Publisher: Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

3.

I took another break from the story. Once upon a time, I would not have questioned the directness or ingenuousness of my writing. But I know more postcolonial theory now, and not only do I write literature, I also teach postcolonial identity. Is any of this reflected in the story? No.

My problem was that I was, well, still indigenous. Unlike Derek Walcott, a poet of African, Dutch and West Indian descent, born in St Lucia and commuting between Boston and Trinidad, I was not a ‘divided child who entered the house of literature as a houseboy’ and who had become a paradigm of the polycultural order, making of English a polyglot literature. Nor, like Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize winner for his tumultuous, multiheaded myth of modern India, Midnight’s Children, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, Timothy Mo, Rohinton Mistry or Pico Iyer, was I a transcultural writer, the product not so much of colonial division as of the international culture that has grown up since the war, and addressing an audience as mixed up and eclectic and uprooted as themselves. Situated at a crossroads, they reflected on their hyphenated status in the new-world global village with a different kind of sophistication than mine as an indigenous writer.

And where was my sense of irony? To this day, my closest friends bemoan the fact that I don’t have an ironic bone in my body. If I had, I might have been able to undercut the otherwise positive, sacralised and hopeful nature of my mythmaking. I would, instead, have highlighted the nihilistic despair of the victimised and oppressed and the need to continue to propose political and revolutionary solutions. Hybrid writers have often commented, as Edward Saïd did, that: ‘The centre is full of tired scepticism, a kind of knowing irony. There’s something very stale about it.’ As for American literature, it had been sapped by such trends as minimalism. Bharati Mukherjee has written, ‘The real energy of American fiction is coming from people who have lived 400 years within a generation. They’ve been through wars, orbited the world, had traumatic histories prior to coming, and they’ve got big, extraordinary stories to tell. In place of the generic account of divorce in Hampstead or Connecticut, the international writers offer magically new kinds of subject matter and electric ways of expressing it.’

Perhaps there is another way out. My postcolonial colleagues might honour me not for the more political novelising that has been the central poutokomanawa of my artistry — but, rather, for the activism that has been associated with it.

For instance, First Nations friends still talk about the time, over twenty-five years ago, when they came to see me at the Harborfront Festival, Toronto, where I was to read my work. They told me that no First Nations writer had ever been invited to read in Canada’s most prestigious literary festival, and they asked me to represent them. I was so angry that when I came to read I instead let rip to the primarily white

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