White man speaks with brown tongue

As far as I know I haven’t met ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias, so I’m not sure why he has asked me to pour petrol over my head and then handed me a Zippo. I have written a crime novel, The Call. And he asks, “How do I write my Māori characters?” It’s the question every old white writer is begging to be asked.

Fortunately, when I was working on my novel, I asked the most Māori dude I know for advice. David Seymour told me not to sweat it. He said all New Zealanders were the same, we all came from the same starting point so why did I have to focus on Māori characters at all… Toitū te tiriti, David.

Okay, so the simple answer is that I write Māori characters the way I write any characters — by stealing bright shiny bits from the lives of the people around me and, if necessary, doing a little research. Over the years I’ve been involved in many projects with Māori writers, and I’ve repaid them by borrowing stuff the way all writers borrow from the world around them. I won’t pretend it’s not a dilemma though, or that the question didn’t turn my bowels to water.

A few years after I made Aotearoa home, I was asked to write a telemovie about the signing of the Treaty. I said yes because I was young and naïve and keen on being paid for my work, but I really had no idea of what I was getting myself into. Early in my research, I saw a diagram of the seating arrangements for the signing at Waitangi. The positions of all the Europeans were marked – Hobson, Pompallier, Colenso, Williams and so on. And around them – ‘Māori Chiefs.’ I wondered who those Māori chiefs were and why they were there. To write anything that wasn’t Eurocentric, I had to put myself in their position and imagine what it was like. Today, that sounds like astounding arrogance.

Waitangi – What Really Happened remains one of my proudest achievements. Back then, I was shepherded by Merimeri Penfold and Witi Ihimaera, historian Paul Moon, and director Peter Meteherangi Burger onto a sharp learning curve. But times have changed, and I’ve come to understand that some stories are not mine to tell. These days, at most I’d work on a project like What Really Happened as script or story advisor to a Māori writer.

Some of my novel The Call is set in a fictitious North Island rural town. It would be astoundingly racist not to populate Waitutū with diverse Māori characters, but it wasn’t an intellectual decision. It just felt right. When my protagonist DS Honey Chalmers comes home to take care of her mother, she pulls into a garage to fill up. I realised that her mother’s character would never have asked for help, so I needed a local to have called her. That local became Wiremu. I didn’t want him to be a saint and I needed him to provide useful exposition, so I made him a sanctimonious gossip. And so on.

In the same way, when Honey takes her mother to dinner at the local golf club and a bloke puts his elbows on the bar, I had no idea, until that moment, that she was about to meet her oldest friend and potential love interest, Marshall. Why did I make Marshall, Māori? Because I wanted a person Honey knew intimately to have been away and have come home, but under very different circumstances. I remembered talking to a remarkable Māori woman in Iceland. She told me that she had to leave New Zealand and get away from whānau, so she could work out who she really was. I took that little snippet and used it to start to build Marshall’s backstory.

If a story takes me to places where I feel uncomfortable or ignorant, I will ask someone to look at my work and give advice. The one place where I felt that was necessary in The Call was a scene set at a tangihanga. The point of view is Pākehā, but I wanted to be sure I was following protocol, so I asked a tangata whenua friend to give me some feedback. She suggested a few word changes (for instance replacing kaumatua with koroua) to make the language a little less formal and paid me the compliment of saying it was just like tangi she had attended.

Unavoidably, I will always be a Pākehā writer (and even worse, an ex-Australian) so all I can do is be respectful of others, ask for help when I need it, and try in my own small way to contribute to the decolonisation of our stories. Ngā mihi nui.

The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide. From a review of Strawhan’s crime novel about an Auckland detective caught up with very bad people in organised crime: “Strawhan excels in the slow approach, and wrangles all his bits and pieces together as the book climaxes with gun shots and the swipe of an axe….In essence, The Call is a tabloid novel. Sex scene: ‘She was about to die or come.’ Rich character: ‘We had a big old house in Remmers.’ Māori character: ‘Wicked…Crack-up…Staunch as…Bet he doesn’t give you the bash eh’, etc.”