Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature entry
Ihimaera, Witi (Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler) (1944– ), novelist, short story writer, anthologist and librettist, was born in Gisborne. He has the distinction of being the first Maori writer to publish both a book of short stories and a novel. He is of Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki descent, with close affiliations to Tühoe, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Ngati Kahungunu, and Ngai Tamanuhiri, and links to Rongowhakaata, Ngati Porou, and Te Whakatohea. His family marae is the family house of the Pere family, Rongopai, in Waituhi, near Gisborne. The extraordinary paintings, rather than carvings, decorating the meeting house’s interior, have been described in rich detail in his writing.
Much of Ihimaera’s fiction is based on fact, but his work is never simply autobiographical. Waituhi, for example, the village setting for many of his narratives, is an imaginative recreation of the actual place. The fictional Waituhi’s ‘physical cohesion [providing] an "objective correlative" to the ethos that binds the tangata whenua together’.
Ihimaera spent three years at Te Karaka DHS and a year at the Mormon Church College at Tuhikaramea, Hamilton. He completed his University Entrance at Gisborne BHS and then attended Auckland University from 1963 to 1966. Having acquired six units he returned to Gisborne without completing his degree, and began working as a cadet journalist with the Gisborne Herald before becoming a postman. In 1968 he moved to the Post Office, Wellington, and, in 1969, enrolled part-time at Victoria University, completing his BA in 1971. His first book, published in 1972, was read by then Prime Minister Norman Kirk, who decided that Ihimaera would be valuable in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He began there in 1973 as a writer, producing the booklet Maori in 1975 and a film script: although the film, Maori (1981), is a promotional exercise with little resemblance to his original intentions. He remained with the ministry until 1989, apart from leave in 1975 to take up a Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago and, in 1982, the writing fellowship at Victoria University. During his time with Foreign Affairs he worked for the New Zealand High Commission in Canberra and spent four years in New York and Washington, two of them as New Zealand consul. Since 1990 he has lectured in the English department of Auckland University. In 1991 he was awarded a Scholarship in Letters and, in 1993, he travelled to France as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow.
Ihimaera was interested in writing from an early age, and recalls scrawling stories across the whole wall of his room at the family farm at Whakarau. In 1969 he began writing seriously. His first story, ‘The Liar’, was accepted by the NZ Listener in May of the following year. From the start, he saw writing as a valuable opportunity to express in print his experience of being a Maori.
Ihimaera’s publications are often the products of intensive periods of writing. In London, in 1970, the short story collection Pounamu Pounamu (1972; awarded third prize in the Wattie Book of the Year Awards) and the two novels Tangi (1973; first prize in the Wattie Award) and Whanau (1974) were completed within a six-month period. The politics in these first books is implicit, and they primarily represent his horizontal view of the culture and history of his fictional Waituhi.
A second intensive period of writing took place when Ihimaera was Burns Fellow in 1975, and he wrote the more overtly political stories of The New Net Goes Fishing (1977) and began editing the anthology Into the World of Light (1982), the precursor to the extensive, five-volume, Te Ao Marama series. In December of that year, concerned that his work might be considered the ‘definitive portrayal of the world of the Maori’ when in his opinion it was ‘tragically out of date’, he determined to stop writing for a time. His fiction’s initial purpose, ‘to establish and describe the emotional landscape of the Maori people’, suddenly seemed to him less important than describing the political and social reality.
At Victoria University, with his politics now explicit and his ten-year embargo on his own writing ended, Ihimaera plunged ‘vertically’ into Waituhi’s culture and history, with the ‘past placed firmly in front’ of him, to write The Matriarch (1986)—which again received the Wattie Book of the Year Award. He also produced the libretto for an opera by Ross Harris based on Whanau.
The Whale Rider (1987) was written in New York and Cape Cod in the space of three weeks. A magical, mythical work about a young girl whose relationship with a whale ensures the salvation of her village, it is, says Ihimaera, the work of his ‘that the Maori community accepts best’. He followed this in 1989 with Dear Miss Mansfield, a response to the Katherine Mansfield centenary celebrations which rewrites her stories from a Maori perspective. Interestingly, this collection of experimental fiction was slated by New Zealand critics (who seemed to feel he had in some way molested a literary icon) but received excellent reviews internationally.
Another novel set in Waituhi, Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies (1994), was awarded the 1995 Montana Book Award. Described by Ihimaera as an attempt to write a Maori western, this ‘exuberant novel with a New Zealand brand of magical realism’ recounts the rivalry between two great Maori families of shearers and sportsmen and women spanning the period from World War 1 to the 1990s. The conflict between the patriarch, Bulibasha—whose ‘marriage’ to grandmother Ramona conceals a terrible secret—and Himiona, the rebellious youngest male in the extended family, generates the most tension.
In 1996 Ihimaera’s writing moved in a significant new direction when he decided to foreground his sexuality and write a gay novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain. To come out so explicitly was not an easy decision, but Ihimaera describes it as keeping faith with his gay audience as, in similar fashion, he attempts to keep faith with his Maori audience. Nights is, writes Roger Robinson, ‘a good story of conflict, growth and reconciliation, with subplots heroic, political and tragic. It wears its throbbing heart on its shoulder (for in many scenes no one’s wearing much else you could put it on)’ (NZ Books, Mar. 1995).
There is a substantial body of critical, biographical and bibliographical work about Ihimaera. Among his autobiographical articles, the ones in WLWE, Vol. 14, 1975; Tihe Mauri Ora (1978); New Zealand Through the Arts: Past and Present (1982); and Through the Looking Glass (1988) are useful. Two extremely good interviews are by J.B. Beston in WLWE, Vol. 16, 1977, and Mark Williams in In the Same Room (1992). Book-length studies include Richard Corballis and Simon Garrett’s Introducing Witi Ihimaera (1984) and Umelo Ojinmah’s Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision (1993), which includes a useful bibliography.
Central to Ihimaera’s fiction is the fact that the kaupapa he writes to has as its central goal the interpretation and reinterpretation of the concerns of the iwi from the viewpoint of the past. He sees himself as a Maori in the world, and thinks of ‘the world I’m in as being Maori, not European’. Just as he grew up in a society transforming from rural to urban, so his writing developed during another period of change when, in ‘the 1970s and ’80s [Maori] began to demand sovereignty’. The legacy of this period, Ihimaera suggests, is a ‘new strength of which Alan Duff is a beneficiary’.
PM
