There lies the port; the vessel puffs
her sails,
There gloom the dark, broad seas …
- Tennyson, Ulysses
For the record, let me be numbered
amongst the admirers of the New Zealand pavilion at the 2012
Frankfurt Buchmesse – an arrangement of outsized book-shapes, three
to four metres tall, within which were concealed caves hung about
with clumps of New Zealand books on wires like strands of kelp, with
wool-covered forms scattered about for visitors to sit and read or
listen to a soundtrack of bush noises, muffled recitations of poetry
and musical kiwiana; and all of this set beneath a ceiling of
twinkling stars on an “island” surrounded by a glassy
paddling-pool ocean. This was an island nation I was happy to call
home, although for me the stronger visual impression was of a
migratory waka, with books as sails, bearing passengers across
unfamiliar seas to some mysterious landfall, as the deep moaned round
with many voices.
So what if, on the first day of the
Fair, some dozen or so guests stumbled into the dimly-lit room and
straight into the water, prompting the management to instruct the
stewards to whisper a multi-lingual warning to all entering the
venue? I would have thought it was only proper that, in their
efforts to engage with the book-culture of our corner of the Pacific,
some people would end up with wet feet.
Guest of honour status at the Buchmesse
grants the nation so favoured the right to stage a writers and
readers festival alongside the world’s largest publishing trade
fair. Under the moniker “While you were sleeping”, New Zealand
fronted a creditable line-up of living treasures and enfants
terribles, foodies and crime writers, children’s writers and
digital media entrepreneurs, with cameo appearances by Ministers of
the Crown, singers, carvers, kapa haka groups, actors, broadcasters
(have I left anyone out?), all fueled by bottomless barrels of lamb
and Marlborough chardonnay.
That said, the main business of
Frankfurt takes place elsewhere, in a maze of halls connected by
travelators and a free mini-bus service, through ritual tete-a-tetes
over iPads between smartly dressed publishers and distributors and
agents. (I was told that most of these discussions are continuations
of others begun at the Leipzig and Bologna book fairs, that they will
be resumed in London and Rome and Beijing, and that 90 percent of
them will come to nothing.) Though the subject of all these
interchanges is books, and they are conducted in book-lined stalls
displaying all the latest titles, this is not really a place for the
writers of books (think of farmers in dungarees witnessing their
lovingly-produced wares being sliced and diced at the Chicago Futures
Exchange), nor indeed for their readers (the books are not for sale,
although some publishers will sell their stock on the last day of the
fair, in order to lighten their luggage on the journey home).
Life for the New Zealanders at the
Buchmesse revolved around the pavilion (affectionately known as “the
pav”), a number of other performance venues around the city, Hall
Eight (where the NZ publishers had their stands), and the “Green
Room”, the nerve-centre of the Kiwi effort, where presenters
lowered their heart-rates prior to their curtain calls, and from
which I emerged one morning to find the ground floor cafeteria packed
and the unmistakable voice of Arnold “Terminator” Schwarzenegger,
regaling the locals with, I assume, tidbits from his newly-published
memoir, Total Recall (reputedly anything but). I can report that he
has that strong German accent even when he is speaking German.
Our guest of honour status brings up
that unsettling question: what exactly is New Zealand literature? I
never heard the question posed as such in Frankfurt, but it didn’t
need to be. Many if not all of our readings and panel discussions
(including the one into which I slipped as a late ring-in) strained
in some fashion to answer it.
From within the narrowest brief of the
Green Room team the answer is clear. New Zealand literature is
intellectual property, a “weightless” export that does not evoke
angst about fossil fuel consumption, and that generates a stream of
bankable returns to individuals and entities residing in New Zealand,
at least for tax purposes if not for much more. And they have a
valid point. What writer would not, on the basis of export earnings,
want to be counted as classmates with the NZ wine export industry?
Yet, for those who don’t view the
possession of a NZ passport as proof of New Zealand-ness the question
remains. Iceland, our immediate predecessor as guest of honour, has
its own language, which most of its writers use. This can be said
too of almost all of the GoHs in the last decade – including China,
Turkey, Russia, Catalonia and Lithuania. And Brazil, to whom the
torch has passed for 2013, has 80% of the world’s Portugese
speakers, so it effectively has a language of its own too. Guests of
honour have traditionally had a kind of hermetic quality to their
culture, a quiddity brought about or accentuated by geographical or
linguistic or political isolation.
This is not to say that New Zealand’s
indigenous language didn’t feature prominently at Frankfurt, in
waiata and mihimihi, and in those imported words that increasingly
nugget the seams of contemporary NZ english. But ours is still an
offshoot of English literature (as Wikipedia defines us), into which
te ao Maori and te reo Maori are increasingly infused, giving us our
own “hybrid vigour”. We are English without being quite English.
We are clearly not American (a point everyone seemed to grasp, and
which makes the Canadians envious). Nor are we Australian (a point
that we like to labour, although surely we no longer need to do so),
so we don’t have to put up with the assumption that all of our
writing is, deep down, about a spiritual terra nullius, or the true
meaning of mate-ship or of aboriginality. We have a colonial past,
and it lives on in ways that alternately charm and embarrass us; and
yet, unlike the literature of India or the West Indies, we don’t
suffer the colonial language as a necessary evil forced upon us by
linguistic fragmentation. By and large, we are affectionate towards
the mother tongue, and have fun using it.
One thing that was obvious to the
burgers of Frankfurt about New Zealand, I believe, is that, unlike
the City of Oakland, there is a there here. Though what that there
consists of seems willfully elusive and as yet unsettled. (The best
fun I had in Frankfurt was at a performance called “Carnival of
Souls”, in which a 1960s American B-grade horror movie was
screened, with its original soundtrack supplanted by live
lip-synching actors and musicians and sound-technicians. So very
Kiwi!) Perhaps this is an attribute of our relative youth, that, in
a young country, to paraphrase TS Eliot, the past can still be
altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the
past. Perhaps this frees NZ writers to wander as rogue stars in the
constellation of English literature, to play with language and form
and culture, and yet to be “rooted” cosmopolitans when we want to
be.
Thomas Merton wrote somewhere that art
is one of the few endeavours in which we can simultaneously lose
ourselves and find ourselves. Such paradoxical ways of talking can
seem a cop-out, but there is for me something uniquely New Zealand –
seen in our poetry and our prose, our children’s stories, and
(convince me, someone) even in our writing about food – in reaching
at the end for some kind of quirky irresolution. How better to get
the world thinking about New Zealand-ness than to entice them with
sounds and scents and imagery but to deny them any real sense of
landfall?
Let us hope that the Buch-waka,
dismantled though it now will be, sails on, paddles smiting the
sounding furrows, charting a course between those dark waters and
that endless starry night.
(As a final note, apropos of modern
journalistic practice, I should point out that Thomas Merton had a
New Zealand connection; his father was Owen Merton, a notable
Cantabrian landscape artist. And he had a quirky ending too –
initial rumours were that he was electrocuted in a Bangkok hotel room
while using a hair-dryer for some purpose clearly unrelated to hair,
since, as the photographs show, he was monkishly bald. The truth,
more prosaic, was that it was a faulty electric fan that delivered
the fatal blow.)
