Witi Ihimaera
Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler is a New Zealand author. Raised in the small town of Waituhi, he decided to become a writer as a teenager after being convinced that Māori people were ignored or mischaracterised in literature. He was the first Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, with Pounamu, Pounamu, and the first to publish a novel, with Tangi. After his early works, he took a ten-year break from writing, during which he focused on editing an anthology of Māori writing in English.
From the late 1980s onwards, Ihimaera wrote prolifically. In his novels, plays, short stories and opera librettos, he examines contemporary Māori culture, legends and history, and the impacts of colonisation in New Zealand. He has said that "Māori culture is the taonga, the treasure vault from which I source my inspiration". His 1987 novel The Whale Rider is his best-known work, read widely by children and adults both in New Zealand and overseas. It was adapted into the critically acclaimed 2002 film Whale Rider directed by Niki Caro. His semi-autobiographical novel Nights in the Gardens of Spain was about a married man coming to terms with his homosexuality. In later works he has dealt with historical events such as the campaign of non-violent resistance at Parihaka in the late nineteenth century.
Ihimaera is an influential figure in New Zealand literature, and over his long career has won numerous awards and fellowships, including multiple awards for both fiction and non-fiction at the New Zealand Book Awards spanning the period 1973 to 2016, the Robert Burns Fellowship, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. Until 2010 he was the Professor of English and Distinguished Creative Fellow in Māori Literature at the University of Auckland. He has since published two volumes of his memoirs: Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood and Native Son: The Writer's Memoir.
Early life and education
Ihimaera was born in Gisborne, a city in the east of New Zealand's North Island and is of Māori descent. His iwi is Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki. He has affiliations to Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou, and Whakatōhea. He also has Scottish ancestry through both parents. His family marae is Te Rongopai Marae in Waituhi, and he grew up in Waituhi—many of his stories are set in a fictional recreation of the town. He began writing at a young age, and in later life recounted writing stories on the wall of his childhood bedroom.He attended Te Karaka District High School for three years and the Church College of New Zealand in Temple View, Hamilton, for one year, after which he completed his final year of schooling at Gisborne Boys' High School. He has said that he became interested in becoming a writer when he was fifteen and realised that Māori did not feature in the books he read. His schoolteacher then instructed his class to read the short story "The Whare" by Pākehā writer Douglas Stewart, about a young man who encounters a Māori settlement. He found the story "so poisonous" that he threw the book out of the window and was caned for doing so. Writing about the incident in his 2014 memoir Māori Boy, he said:
After high school, Ihimaera attended the University of Auckland for three years, from 1963 to 1966, but did not complete his degree, and returned to Gisborne where he became a cadet journalist for the Gisborne Herald. He subsequently became a postman, moved to Wellington and started studying part-time at Victoria University of Wellington, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1971. He met librarian and student Jane Cleghorn at university, and they married in 1970.
Career
Early career: 1960s and 1970s
Ihimaera began writing seriously in 1969, around the age of 25, and had his first short story "The Liar" accepted for publication by the New Zealand Listener magazine in May 1970. Six of his stories were read by George Henare on Radio New Zealand in 1969. Ihimaera's first book, Pounamu Pounamu, was a collection of short stories, which was awarded third prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards in 1973. Ihimaera has said it was rejected by three publishers before being accepted by the fourth. His first two novels were published in quick succession: Tangi, which won first prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards in 1974, and Whanau, which told the story of a day in the life of a Māori village. He was the first Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories and the first to publish a novel.Norman Kirk, then the prime minister of New Zealand, read Pounamu Pounamu and arranged for Ihimaera to be employed as a writer at the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1973. During his career he wrote a non-fiction booklet called Māori, later adapted into a short film of the same name in 1981, although he felt the final film was a propaganda exercise that bore little resemblance to his written work. He subsequently worked as a diplomat with posts in Canberra, New York City, and Washington, D.C. In 1975 he was the recipient of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, and in 1982 he received a Victoria University of Wellington writing fellowship.
Beginning in 1975, Ihimaera stopped his own creative writing for a ten-year period, due to his belief that it was "tragically out of date" and a wish not to have it seen as the "definitive portrayal of the world of the Maori". He instead began working on the anthology Into the World of Light, together with co-editor Don Long. The anthology collected the work of 39 Māori writers. In Ihimaera and Long's introduction, they said that Māori oral tradition formed the context for Māori literature, and observed that the apparent lack of Māori writing in the mid-20th century was due to publishers' reluctance to publish books by Māori writers because of a belief that Māori "don't read books". The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature described the collected works as being "of a uniformly high standard", and Graham Wiremu writing in the New Zealand Listener called the anthology "prodigious and powerful".
Return to writing: 1980s and 1990s
When Ihimaera began writing again, he wrote The Matriarch which examined the impacts of European colonisation on Māori, and which again received first prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards. Not long after publication, it came to light that Ihimaera had used passages from the entry on Māori land in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, written by Keith Sorrenson, without acknowledgement. Ihimaera apologised to Sorrenson at the time. Mark Williams later noted that the consequences for Ihimaera were minor, and he became a professor in the year of the book's publication. He also wrote a libretto for an opera by Ross Harris, based on his second novel Whanau, and Dear Miss Mansfield, a rewriting of Katherine Mansfield's short stories from a Māori perspective, in response to celebrations of 100 years since her birth. The collection was well-received overseas but criticised by New Zealand reviewers for a perceived lack of respect for Mansfield.In a three-week period Ihimaera wrote his best-known work The Whale Rider, the story of a young girl becoming a leader of her people. It has been reprinted many times, read by both adults and children and was adapted into the critically acclaimed film of the same name in 2002. It won the Nielsen BookData New Zealand Booksellers' Choice Award in 2003. It was published and read internationally; Kirkus Reviews described it as a "luminous joining of myth and contemporary culture".
In 1989, he left his job as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the following year he became a lecturer in the English department at the University of Auckland. He later became Professor of English and Distinguished Creative Fellow in Māori Literature, until 2010. He was awarded a Scholarship in Letters in 1991. In 1993 he received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship which allowed him to work in Menton, France, for a period, where he wrote his next two novels: Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies and Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies was awarded the prize for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 1995. It was described in The Dominion Post as "a rollicking good yarn about Maori rural life in the 1950s", and Ihimaera himself has said he was intending to write a Māori Western. The novel was adapted into the 2016 film Mahana by Lee Tamahori.
In 1996, he published Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a semi-autobiographical novel about a man coming out. Like Ihimaera, the main character was married with two daughters, but unlike Ihimaera the main character was Pākehā. Ihimaera had accepted his sexuality in 1984 and began the work, but out of sensitivity to his daughters, did not finish or publish it then. The novel was described by scholar Roger Robinson as featuring "conflict, growth and reconciliation, with subplots heroic, political and tragic". Robinson said it was "no small achievement to take this material off the grubby walls of public toilets, free it from sleaze, write it with vivid passion and through it affirm and celebrate a way of life of which most of us know almost nothing". In a review for The Dominion Post, Gavin McLean described it as Ihimaera's best book to date, and noted that much of the book's impact came from the intensity of the main character's relationship with his parents and his "desperate need to do better by his children"; "Unlike characters in many similar novels, coming out does not mean discarding all one's past." In 2010, it was adapted into the film Kawa by director Katie Wolfe. The central character was changed from Pākehā to Māori businessman Kawa, played by Calvin Tuteao. In an article in The Sunday Star Times, Ihimaera was quoted as saying the change "was quite a shock to me because I had always tried to hide, to say 'this is a book that could be about "everyman", this is not a specific story'. So is now actually nearer to the truth than I would like to admit." After the publication of the novel, Ihimaera and his wife remained married, but no longer lived together.
A decade after his anthology Into the World of Light, Ihimaera edited the five-volume bilingual anthology of Māori writing, Te Ao Marama, published between 1992 and 1996. It represented the most comprehensive collection of writing by Māori writers that had been published at that time. In 1997 he published The Dream Swimmer, a sequel to his 1986 novel The Matriarch. That same year, Mataora, The Living Face: Contemporary Māori Artists, which he co-edited with Sandy Adsett and Cliff Whiting, received the Montana Award for Illustrative Arts at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. His poem "O numi tutelar" was recited at the dawn opening of the British Museum's long-awaited 'Maori' Exhibition in 1998.