Diary of a Shopkeeper, 2nd January

View from the old bridge, of the new bridge, Bridgend, Evie

Sad news reached Orkney on 27th December, with the announcement of the death of Keri Hulme in Waimate, in the South Island of New Zealand.

Or maybe I should say in Te Waipounamu, the southern island of Aotearoa. For it was one of Hulme’s achievements that she contributed enormously to the world’s appreciation of Māori language and culture.

Born in Christchurch of mixed Māori and Pākehā (i.e. European-descended) ancestry, Hulme showed a precocious obsession with language and writing. As a child, she composed stories and poems, and rewrote Enid Blyton novels to match her experience of the world.

After school she could have gone to university but chose instead to work as a tobacco picker. A few years later she enrolled as a law student, but walked out after some months, preferring to return to the tobacco fields and a string of the type of jobs authors boast of on their book jackets: shop assistant, fish-and-chip cook, wool winder, postwomen, proof-reader.

Eventually, after many years of writing and rewriting, and a few pieces in obscure magazines, her first novel was published in 1984. And everything changed.

That novel was the bone people (no capital letters.) It was produced by a tiny collective publisher in Christchurch called Spiral. Major houses had rejected the manuscript, not because they judged it without merit, but because they thought its freewheeling blend of story, myth, dream and poetry, and its mix of standard New Zealand English and Māori in both narration and dialogue, needed editing. Tidying up. Bringing into line.

But Keri Hulme had never been brought into line by anyone, and she was not about to start watering down the work of half a lifetime (she was 37 by this stage.)  

So the tiny publisher released a first edition, poorly produced and replete with typographical errors. And it sold surprisingly well. Reviews were generally good – some of them adulatory. Then the novel won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award, and reprints were rushed out as sales soared.

Copies were sent to the judges of the Booker Prize in London, and in 1985 the bone people was the shock winner, defeating famous names including Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.

It was the first time a New Zealand writer had won the Booker. And not just a New Zealand writer, but one who proudly identified as Māori. One who happily rejected many of the conventions of literary fiction, choosing instead to employ the leaping logic of dreams to structure her story. And to insert mythic figures and enigmatic symbols when realism seemed inadequate.

It wasn’t just her Māori ancestry she honoured. All the bloodlines and storylines that flowed into her family were important to her, and she talked about what she’d learned from English and Scandinavian ancestors too.

She spoke particularly passionately of her Orcadian ancestors, who were Matches: shopkeepers, she said, until they emigrated to New Zealand in the 1870s. I tried to track down these folk, and found them at Bridgend in Evie. Hulme’s great grandfather was William Yorston Matches who was born there in 1851 and worked as a cobbler before emigrating to Oamaru, near Christchurch.

Keri Hume never made it to Orkney. She visited Aberdeen but had no time to travel further north. After her Booker success – which sparked sales of more than a million copies, as well as international celebrity and much unwelcome scrutiny – she became reclusive, living in an octagonal tower-house in a remote South Island coastal hamlet, publishing little.

But her persistence in telling the stories that were important to her, in the language of her choosing, remains inspirational. The initial indifference of the literary establishment didn’t daunt her: she was focused on the complex, mongrel culture she came from, the bone people.

There’s a good short essay about Hulme by Kelly Ana Morey here, describing the bone people as possessing, ‘the urgency of a story, as disturbing and heartbreaking as it was, that needed to be told. Damn the grammar police and the correct constructivists. This was writing like talking, like thinking, like breathing.’ I think that is a key perception.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 5th January. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.