Witi Ihimaera - The family serpent

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Witi Ihimaera sees himself as a snake that bites at the heart of his family, but not with venom, MICHELE HEWITSON learns.

A portrait of the artist as a mature man: swinging his bare feet, mug of herbal tea in hand, Witi Ihimaera is giggling with the abandon of a boy.

Ihimaera, our first published Maori novelist, librettist, creative writing teacher, former diplomat and now playwright is, at the age of 55, still revelling in the rediscovery of his adolescence.

The senior statesman of New Zealand fiction has, he says, rediscovered his "natural voice. I was so overwhelmed by that discovery, because for a man of my age - and at that stage I was 50 - to be able to recapture the voice he had when he was an adolescent is, in my opinion, an extraordinary accomplishment."

It might also be considered extraordinary that Ihimaera's first play, Woman Far Walking, which opens at the New Zealand Festival on March 17, spans 160 years of New Zealand history. Its central character, Tiri O Waitangi Mahana, is a woman born on the day of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

"She goes through the Land Wars, sees her sons go off to the First World War, she goes though the 50s and 60s and witnesses the urban drift, she protests against the 81 Springbok tour, in the mid-1990s she returns to the valley of her birth to save it from developers."

Now he's really giggling: "It's about all of these things in two hours. Yes, there will be an interval."

In the year 2000 Tiri is waiting for a 160th birthday telegram from the Queen. Ihimaera got the idea watching television with his mother. "An old lady near Wellington turned 100 and was shown receiving the Queen's telegram. There she was, an old, old lady with all of her family around her cooing away and being very pleased about this telegram. My mother turned to me and said, 'Well, if I ever turned 100 and if I ever got a telegram from the Queen, I'd spit on it.'"

His mother will be there on opening night. He hasn't yet got around to telling her that she was the inspiration for his play about a character who, like his mum, is a strong woman with a political bent.

"I always leave it to the last minute with mum. If I say, 'Do you remember when you said that in front of the TV?' she'll probably say, 'No'." So, I'll just have to wait for the explosion."

It is unlikely, though, that such plundering is going to surprise any of the Ihimaera whanau. His dad phoned him last week wanting a chat about a short story written for a Sunday Star Times supplement. In the story, the writer's father starts ringing him in the early hours. He thinks he's dying, he tells his son, and he's afraid.

"My father said, 'I had to go down to the corner grocery store and someone comes up me and says, "Hey, I've just read something that your son has written about you, and you're dying." Would you please tell me when it happens because then people won't go into shock when they see me walking down the street'."

As a boy, his sisters called him "Witi Boy Walton." They'd stop talking when he walked into a room. His father spent years responding, "Never heard of him," when people asked him if Ihimaera the writer was his son.

Ihimaera likens the family with a writer in their midst to "having a snake constantly biting you in the heart. I'm very fortunate to have a family that understands that even though I bite at their heart, I do it with love. And because they're the only family I have, they're the only family that I can write about with truth and clarity and as much integrity as I can muster."

His elderly parents do not, though, read much of what he's written, Ihimaera says. "I think they're probably scared." They did have his 1995 novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, read to them by one of Ihimaera's sisters.

A semi-autobiographical work about a husband and father who leaves his family to come to terms with his homosexuality, Nights represented a very public coming out.

Ihimaera's sister called to say, "'Boy, you owe me.' She'd just finished reading Nights to Mum and dad and every now and then she'd have to drop the book, flick over a few pages and say, 'Where were we?' Just to get over the sex bits and all the bits she didn't think they'd like to hear."

They may not be aware, then, to what extent the loving snake in their midst has been observing them since childhood, using them as "a kind of iconic family to represent Maori experience and Maori history."

The history of Ihimaera's writing is this: he was first published in 1972 with his collection of short stories Pounamu, Pounamu. In 1973 the publication of Tangi earned him the title as the first published Maori novelist. He published another two novels before deciding not to write again for 10 years.

It was only as recently as 1997 that he decided he could admit to himself, and his readers, that he was a writer. After his first four books, he says, "I got so frightened about the whole thing that I stopped writing." That fear came from never, unlike most writers, having had his work rejected. The learning curve, like his learning to come to terms with his sexuality, has been a particularly public one: "From the very beginning, I've had my work published. So, it's there, warts and all."

He began attending writing workshops "to try to figure out how to write."

He came back in 1986 with the The Matriarch, a wrist-busting 456- page epic which won the Wattie Book Award and the 1987 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

But he says now of The Matriarch that it "still wasn't right. But you see the thing was I had lost faith in my own natural voice. I didn't know how to write, I didn't know what writing was, I didn't know what you were supposed to do."

The real danger, in sitting down to the keyboard with fear of failure beside him, is that he may have indeed discovered that he wasn't a writer. The breakthrough came when he gave up "on trying to construct a way of writing;" gave up on trying to write like anyone else. "It was only after that whole process that I thought, 'I can accept myself as I am. I can't write beautifully constructed prose.' I just have to breathe in deep and let the words run. It's taken me 30 years to accept that the way I write is okay."

Life looks okay, too, from where Ihimaera is sitting. Despite his claims that when he's writing a novel (he's halfway through his next, The Uncle's Story) he's "hell on wheels," he presents a portrait of the artist as a contented man. From his bright, airy rooms in his house on the northern slopes of Herne Bay, overlooking Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, where he swims twice a day, the writer's life looks like one to envy.

He might write from a very nice garret, but it's plain hard work, Ihimaera says. "The worst thing about writing is that you're the only one who can do it. People say to me, 'Gosh, you're so lucky. Look at this, you've got another book out.' I say, 'I'm not lucky at all. I'm just a hard worker'."

The eldest of eight children of a farming family, who might have been expected to take over the land, he learned the work ethic early. From one end of the floral sheet he's roped me into helping him fold, he assures me that "I'm really a farmer.

"My father taught me, my mother taught me, when there's work to be done you just get the axe and you just go out there and cut the scrub. It's like that for me: cutting the scrub."

He doesn't exactly make it easy for himself. Just when he's made a clearing, he heads off in another, untravelled direction. The result is Woman Far Walking. But Ihimaera insists that he is not a real playwright. It took five drafts and intensive collaborative work with the actors, director and producer to knock the script into shape.

He might have one more play in him, Ihimaera says. He's certain that he has only four more novels to write "and that's it. After that there is nothing, I can't see anything and I don't plan to manufacture anything. At that point I want to put on an old sloppy Joe hat and sloppy Joe pants and just wander around doing absolutely nothing."

* Woman Far Walking is at the Te Papa Soundings Theatre from March 17 till 25.