Showing posts with label Albert Wendt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Albert Wendt. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Spirit of '92: Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow



Albert Wendt: Black Rainbow (1992)


'... I don't mind admitting I'm scared ...' I reached out and put an arm around him. 'It's times like these you need ...'
'Minties?' Fantail completed his remark.
'No, it's times like these you need a sense of humour,' Aeto said.
'And our family,' I added. My mother's handprints were still warm on my face.
- Albert Wendt, Black Rainbow (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1992): 235.

Black Rainbow is a difficult book to characterise. It moves like a thriller: first-person narration of reckless escapes and knife fights with a variety of opponents, carefully and craftily borrowed from other fictions - 'Sister Honey' from Janet Frame's Faces in the Water, 'Big Nurse' from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Maneco Uriarte from Jorge Luis Borges' Gaucho-esque story 'The Meeting' ...

There's an almost manic lack of consistency about its tone, however: no po-faced hard-boiled intensity can survive exchanges like the one quoted above, where the speakers move from portentous invocations of whakapapa to quotations from ad jingles.

So what's it all about? On the one hand, it's about the erasure of history: the losses (and gains) we achieve by simply writing off the past:
Histories can be erased, I remembered the Tribunal telling me. Erased and replaced with histories that please us. [65]
The narrator has been through just such a process of recalling his entire past in order to tape over it at the beginning of the story. He 'graduates' from this process as a free citizen, with a certificate of entitlement to all the state's resources: money, food, accommodation, and the sole remaining mission of tracking down his own family to save them from the strangely motiveless enemies listed above.

'Symbolic much?' to quote a Buffy-ism. Undoubtedly.



Ralph Hotere: Black Rainbow, Mururoa (1986)


Like the people of Maungakiekie, the Waikato tribes had been turned into grass and meat. History is madness, the Tribunal has prescribed. So I silenced the Hotere clock, pushed down on the accelerator, and sped away from history. [36-37]
It isn't entirely clear just which of the various Hotere 'Black Rainbow' etchings the novel is intended to have as its centre, but probably it's the one above. Certainly it has all the characteristics Wendt describes:
I looked at it closely. Recognised the thick black arch to be the rainbow. But the numbers, 1 to 14, on either side of the upsurging cloud? The countdown to what? [10]
There's an important scene a few pages later where the narrator's wife shows the picture to the city and the city to the picture, as she circles the Memorial to the Māori race on top of Maungakiekie - or One Tree Hill, as we persist in calling it.



'Once all this and that city was forest,' she said. She gripped the lithograph with both hands.
As she circled the memorial, she held the lithograph out in front of her, like an icon. In it the sky and the full swing of the city were caught. Every shade, shape, light, twist, change and impermanency of them. Reflected there for a time and then lost as she circled.
Was she reinvesting everything with mana? Warding off evil spirits? Or what?
... As the sun rose the lithograph's clock of doom recorded its rising. [18]


Colin McCahon: On Building Bridges (1952)


As I raced the river through the gap. I thought the hills were straight out of an early Colin McCahon painting. Strange how we see reality through art and the other cultural baggage we carry ...
I hid the Cheever [which he rented under the name 'Elmore Leonard'] in the bush by the river and crossed the hills on foot ... [65]
The allusiveness (both local and international) may require a bit of unpacking at times, but the important thing to note about it is that - as a whole - it constitutes a concerted refusal to stand on your dignity - a deliberate decision not to write in a magisterial monotone, but instead in a punning, Rabelaisian, Carnivalesque mixture of irreconcilable genres.



Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)


At times it recalls the later works of Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve, or The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). There's something of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf in there, too: the magic theatre, in particular - and the 'Treatise on the Steppenwolf.'



Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf (1927)


The treeless streets were canyons through which the wind funnelled. In summer the canyons were oppressively hot because the buildings emptied the motors of their airconditioning into them. It was said the streets, shops, malls and apartments were modelled on some of the President's favourite films: Blade Runner, Star Trek and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, some of my favourite films too. [69]
Mentioning Steppenwolf brings in the strong film element in Wendt's novel, too. I think by now that it's apparent that nobody writing about - or even just during - the age of rampant neo-liberalism in New Zealand could avoid making allusions to Blade Runner.



Robert Zemeckis, dir.: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)


The Toon-town of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is probably closer to the tone and setting of at least the central sections of Wendt's novel, with its Arabian-Nights-like stories within stories, and characters folding into other characters.

And yet, for all its postmodern, pop-culture exuberance, the central concern of Black Rainbow is never seriously in doubt. Its concern with the erasure of history is, in the final analysis, a refusal to accept the erasure of race. Even in his reincarnation as an unobtrusive bank clerk, the protagonist is never allowed to forget his own difference:
Her hair, the wave and curl of it, that trapped the light and made it look as if it was growing. Then after the dessert of nashis and cream, her remark: 'You're brown too.' And I noticed, for the first time, that she was brown. And so was I. [193]


J. W. Dunne: An Experiment with Time (1927)


According to Dunne, our wakeful attention prevents us from seeing beyond the present moment, whilst when dreaming that attention fades and we gain the ability to recall more of our timeline. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams, mixed in with fragments or memories of our past. Other consequences include the phenomenon known as deja vu and the existence of life after death.
As a teenage, I took an almost obsessive delight in reading and re-reading J. W. Dunne's book An Experiment with Time. Not so much the technical passages, where he attempts somewhat clumsily to reconcile his ideas of 'serial time' with Einstein's theory of relativity, as the central section, where he records a whole series of dreams as 'proof' that the sleeping mind can somehow step outside linear time, sample as freely from the future as from the past.

All that is needed to prove the point, he claims, is a pad and pencil kept beside your bed. The moment you awake, you must write down everything you can remember of your dreams, before they dissipate. Keeping your eyes closed till you've managed to recall those few sensory details that remain of them will have the consequence of bringing back at least a few of the events (or even just the atmosphere) of the narrative you've just been experiencing - not ever, really, in all of its depth and complexity, but in part, at any rate.

After you've done this for some months, the results should be scrutinised and analysed as bits of lived experience jumbled into the dream story - but also little nagging pieces of apparent déjà vu and anticipation of what was (then) still to come: not so much in detail as in their raw outlines.



J. B. Priestley: Three Time Plays (1937)


I doubt that any professional psychologists or dream-specialists (Oneirologists?) have ever really taken Dunne very seriously - let alone theoretical physicists. But writers certainly have. J. B. Priestley composed a series of 'time-plays' based directly on his reading of the book, and both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis cited it as an influence on their own understanding (and portrayal) of time.

I don't know if Albert Wendt has ever read the book, or is even familiar with Dunne's theories - but there's something in the jumbled, dreamlike progression of his book that recalls it to me - especially some of Dunne's more canonical dreams, the one about the volcanic eruption on a small island, for instance, or the one about the raging bull which pursues him down the hill.

'History,' says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' The characters in Black Rainbow have been forcibly detached from James Joyces's nets of 'nationality, language, religion,' (as he puts it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but in the process they have lost all sense of an individual identity.

Wendt's novel is a satire, finally - it offers no solutions to the problems it poses, but clowns valiantly on the edge of the abyss. Its message, however, is clear. We must beware of awakening from one nightmare - history - for fear of being plunged, willy-nilly, into another.








Albert Wendt

Albert Wendt
(1939- )



Select Bibliography:

    Fiction:

  1. Sons for the Return Home (1973)

  2. Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree: And Other Stories (1974)

  3. Pouliuli. Pacific Paperbacks. Auckland: Longman Paul Limited, 1977.

  4. Leaves of the Banyan Tree. Auckland: Longman Paul Limited, 1979.

  5. The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man (1986)

  6. Ola (1991)

  7. Black Rainbow. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1992.

  8. The Best of Albert Wendt's Short Stories. A Vintage Book. Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 1999.

  9. The Mango's Kiss: a Novel (2003)

  10. The Adventures of Vela (2009)

  11. Ancestry (2012)

  12. Breaking Connections (2015)

  13. Poetry:

  14. Inside Us the Dead. Poems 1961 to 1974 (1976)

  15. Shaman of Visions (1984)

  16. Photographs. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995.

  17. The Book of the Black Star. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002.

  18. From Mānoa to a Ponsonby Garden. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012.

  19. Memoir:

  20. Out of the Vaipe, The Deadwater: A Writer's Early Life (2015)



Homepages & Online Information:

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura entry

Wikipedia entry







Monday, September 16, 2019

John Cranna's Arena (1992)



John Cranna: Arena (1992)

The worst effects of malnutrition, he continued, were on the mind. 'I've known starving men who listened to their thoughts and believed they had invented a strange new language.' He tapped the point of the toothpick on his front teeth. 'They died convinced they were geniuses.'
- John Cranna, Arena (Auckland: Minerva New Zealand, 1992): 104.

Somewhere in the space between J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) and J. M. Coetzee's Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K (1983) lies the zone of John Cranna's first (and, to date, only) novel, Arena.

Like them, it's dystopian; like them, disturbingly violent. Arena also shares with both books a kind of deadpan flatness of affect - though all three authors show a taste for occasional flights of poetic fancy.



J. G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)


J. G. Ballard's first novel is set in a drowned London of the future. The characters have the usual Ballardian preoccupations with inner space: with the working out of their personal obsessions rather than any more practical, world-altering activities.

Even the bizarre ceremony which serves as the culmination of whatever narrative arc the novel has proves strangely anticlimactic: Dr. Kerans survives his ordeal, and wanders off at the end of the novel in search of "the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun."

It's hard, however, to forget the lush evocativeness of the picture Ballard paints - of a world ending not with a bang but a whimper. Who would have thought at the time that his fantasies would seem so timely and relevant so soon?



J. M. Coetzee: Life & Times of Michael K (1985)


Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K is more poignant. It is, in fact, a very difficult book to characterise even to those familiar with Coetzee's other novels. The solitary, arduous odyssey of the deformed, hare-lipped Michael K through the war-ravaged landscapes of a frighteningly real - albeit on an alternate historical time-track - South Africa, is simultaneously grotesque and inspiring.

Michael K's status as an unperson ("CM [coloured male] - 40 [his age] - NFA [no fixed address] - Unemployed") is established very clearly in context, and yet it's the actual nature of his quest that matters. The civil war ravaging the landscape is above (or below) his attention. His only approach to success in the book lies in the garden he makes in the provinces before returning to Cape Town.





Brain-damaged by the nineties, openly neglected by authorities, their school buildings falling unhindered around their ears, the kids had all the helpless savagery of young animals left out in the cold too soon.
- Rosie Scott, Feral City (Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1992): 19.

In terms of a strictly New Zealand speculative fiction, the juxtaposition works somewhat differently. Somewhere between Rosie Scott's Feral City and Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow lies Arena (all three were published in the same year: 1992).



Rosie Scott: Raubstadt [Feral City] (1992)


Rosie Scott's vision of a near-future inner-city Auckland devastated by neo-liberal monetarism may seem a long way from John Cranna's magic-realist city, where "a yellow haze obscured the horizon from the slums of the south to the Guest suburbs in the north" [27], but they do have certain tropes and assumptions in common.

The gleaming teethed "guests" who appear to be in control of the body politic in Cranna's fable are not a long way from the equally sinister authorities in Scott's - or, for that matter, the elaborate Orwellian apparatus of Albert Wendt's.



Albert Wendt: Black Rainbow (1992)


"One day the history of our nation would become clearer to her. When the time was right I would try to explain a few things." [141]

Mary Paul's recent essay "Always Something There to Remind Me: On Growing Up Amid Neoliberal Reforms" Pantograph Punch: 19/8/19) might act as a timely reminder of the spirit of that particular age, for those fortunate enough not to have lived through it.

Hers is, by its nature, a very partial view: Auckland-centric (like the three novels mentioned above), and surprisingly male-dominated. 'Didn't you want to interview any women?' was one of the comments listed under the piece when it first appeared.

That isn't entirely fair, mind you. The last interview (of five) in the article is with the couple Richard Misilei and Mate Colvin, who both work as librarians in Ōtara. All the others, though: writer and performer Dominic Hoey (aka 'Tourettes'); 'Stephen' (not his real name); performance artist Mark Harvey; and AUT Communications Senor Lecturer Thomas Owen, are indeed men, and - it would have to be admitted - offer distinctively male perspectives on the period.



Mary begins with a quote from Economist Tim Hazeldine, who describes the fallout from the 'reforms' of this era as “terrible”:
I cannot find any developed economy in modern times that has inflicted so much harm on itself. 104 major reforms pummel[ed] the body-economic. One manufacturing job in three was lost, and with those jobs basically went the blue-collar core that is crucial to the chances of less skilled workers being able to support their families in decency.
She does, however, preface this in more personal terms:
In the early 1990s I often woke at night worrying about how our children would manage in a newly competitive world. If they couldn’t strive to be the best, or at least buy into the idea of life as raw competition, how would they manage? It was not so much a feeling of pressure as one of loss. Would there be a place for them to flourish – one organised around human values and community, and not only around competition and consumerism?

The country had changed in 1984, when a newly elected Labour Government implemented free-market reforms with extreme rapidity, reforms that were extended in the early 1990s by the subsequent National Government. What was done was oddly extreme for a well-developed Western democracy and an elected Labour government, or any government. However giving precedence to business did fit with the crude empirical generalisations that were current at the time about society being founded on self-interest.
Is that what John Cranna's Arena is about, also? That sense of fear over eroding values? Certainly his (unnamed) protagonist lacks any conventional moral compass. He cuts off a man's ear-lobe and chains him to a tree in the garden as a simple act of discipline, and his somewhat tepid feelings of solidarity with the Aboriginal escapee from the livestock collected for the upcoming Arena Festival do not extend to any attempt to liberate him when recaptured for sacrifice.

His strongest identification turns out to be with the children of the next generation, but even this seems as much sensual as ideological:
The girl child's green, wide-set eyes met mine. Poised there was the question that had been put to me twice, the invitaion that had pursued me to the swamps and had haunted my dreams. And as the wind blew sand in flurries across the arena, and brought to that place the scent of end-of-summer orchards, I reached out to the small white hand of this dancer, my daughter, and told her, Yes. [174]
Bear in mind that this is the end of the same summer in which this particular child was born. A brief riffle back in the pages reveals the question - or, rather, statement - twice put to him: "We want you to be the narrator" [160].

But what exactly is it that he's meant to be narrating?


... in a sense, everything that happened that summer was predictable, and with time it seemed to me that when the sequence of events happened as it did, it did so with an inevitability that left me certain that somehow I had known what was going to happen all along. [50]

There's a certain clunkiness to that sentence, and - it has to be admitted - to John Cranna's book as a whole. It's as if he's so determined to make each action deeply significant, that he neglects to explain it - even to himself. It reads like a sleepwalker's book.

Ballard's novels sounds now like an example of cli-fi written long before that term was born or thought of. Coetzee's, too, has a clear political dimension alongside the fabular narration. Scott and Wendt, too, have their targets (and genres) clearly in their sights.

What, then, of John Cranna? More than 25 years on, any deficiencies in clarity of intention seem - to me, at any rate - outweighed by the obscure feeling of hurt underlying his story. His protagonist (like the author?) has returned to home ground round to tell us his story once more in the faint hope that this time it may end up making some tenuous kind of sense.

His hopes - as always - are disappointed, but at least he's managed, this time, to gather around him a small knot of children who may offer some kind of hope, however fragile:
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children"
Or, to put it more directly, how can there be narrative closure where we ourselves deserve none?






John Cranna

John Cranna
(b.1954)


Select Bibliography:

  1. Visitors. Pacific Writers Series. Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989.

  2. Arena. Auckland: Minerva, 1992.

  3. Homepages & Online Information:

  4. The Creative Hub

  5. Wikipedia entry




Tuesday, March 21, 2017

'The Island is full of noises': i.m. Derek Walcott



Derek Walcott
(23/1/30-17/3/17)


I was scrolling around on facebook the other day when I found a post by our own great Pacific writer and poet Albert Wendt mentioning the recent deaths of two artists who had helped to shape his "heart and mind and imagination": Chuck Berry and Derek Walcott. Certainly I like Chuck Berry - who doesn't? But Derek Walcott: that really did hit home.

For quite a few years now I've been finishing the poetry section of my introductory Creative Writing course at Massey with a poem by Derek Walcott. I first encountered his work in the 1980s, when I was studying in the UK, and I still have the audio recording I made then of a dramatised reading of his long poem-sequence "The Schooner Flight" on BBC radio.

I still think that poem is his masterpiece. I enjoyed Omeros and many of his other long poems, but the voice of Shabine the sailor as he criss-crosses the Caribbean, moving in and out of islands and history with equal ease, seems to me to combine all his poetic virtues into one small compass.

Here's the part of the poem I read out to the stage one students:

from Fight with the Crew

... Had an exercise book,
this same one here, that I was using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew, bawling out, ‘Catch it,’
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems. Some case is for fist,
some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife –
this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,
but he kept reading, ‘O my children, my wife,’
and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;
it move like a flying fish, the silver knife
that catch him right in the plump of his calf,
and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white
than he thought he was. I suppose among men
you need that sort of thing. It ain’t right
but that’s how it is. There wasn’t much pain,
just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.

That last line always gets a gasp: poetry is seen as such a weak, flowery thing by so many people who aren't very familiar with it - but it's serious business to those who live by it, and Derek Walcott was definitely one of them.



Here's my own list of the books I have by him. It's not complete by any means, but I think I have most of his work, with the exception, maybe, of some of his - many - plays:

Derek Alton Walcott
(23 January 1930 - 17 March 2017)

  1. In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960. 1962. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.

  2. Another Life. Cape Poetry Paperbacks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.

  3. Another Life: Fully Annotated. 1973. Ed. Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh. 2004. London & Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2009.

  4. The Star-Apple Kingdom. Cape Poetry Paperbacks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.

  5. Poems 1965-1980: The Castaway and Other Poems; The Gulf and Other Poems; Sea-Grapes; The Star-Apple Kingdom. 1965, 1969, 1976, 1980. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.

  6. The Fortunate Traveller. London: Faber, 1982.

  7. Collected Poems 1948-1984. London: Faber, 1986.

  8. Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

  9. The Arkansas Testament. 1987. London: Faber, 1988.

  10. Omeros. 1990. London: Faber, 1991.

  11. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. London: Faber, 1993.

  12. The Bounty. London: Faber, 1997.

  13. What the Twilight Says: Essays. 1998. London: Faber, 1998.

  14. Tiepolo’s Hound. 2000. London: Faber, 2001.

  15. The Haitian Trilogy: Henri Christophe; Drums and Colours; The Haitian Earth. 1948 & 1984. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

  16. The Prodigal: A Poem. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

  17. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

  18. White Egrets: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

  19. Maxwell, Glyn, ed. The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948-2013. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.



I don't really know what else to say about him. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1992, and lots of other awards and distinctions too. Read his work for yourself. But (if you'd like to take my advice) you should start with those early books, In a Green Night and The Star-Apple Kingdom: above all, start with "The Schooner Flight."

In a sense, Walcott had already written his own epitaph in that poem. They're probably his most famous and most quoted lines:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation …

"Either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." There's a rather more full-dress version of this idea in his book of essays What the Twilight Says, which I find - if anything - even more moving. The essay itself is entitled "The Muse of History," and it inevitably calls to mind Walter Benjamin's famous lines on "The Angel of History":
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Here's Derek Walcott's version:



I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper "history," for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your fellowman and tribes­man not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race any longer (than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you, inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks. I give the strange and bitter and yet en­nobling thanks for the monumental groaning and solder­ing of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.