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Margaret Atwood attends Noir In Festival on December 6, 2017 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images)
Margaret Atwood attends Noir In Festival on December 6, 2017 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images)

OPINIONBooksFebruary 12, 2020

An awkward, expensive, perplexing night with Margaret Atwood and Kim Hill

Margaret Atwood attends Noir In Festival on December 6, 2017 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images)
Margaret Atwood attends Noir In Festival on December 6, 2017 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images)

Holly Walker shelled out big bucks to see The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood being interviewed by Kim Hill in Wellington on Monday. After a prickly 90 minutes of questioning, she left wondering what Atwood gets out of her seemingly endless live appearances.

We filled the lobby of the Michael Fowler Centre. We wore jumpsuits. We wore wedge heels. We wore tunic dresses with geometric prints. We lined up for plastic glasses of rosé and Kapiti ice-creams, but they ran out of rosé. We bought pinot gris instead and drank it perched on leather benches outside the Fay Richwhite VIP room while we waited for the doors to open, or our friends to arrive. Most of us were indeed rich (having forked out between $70 and $150 for a ticket) and white. Among us were poets, feminist economists, MPs, ex-cabinet ministers and RNZ presenters. One or two of us had brought men, but most of us were with our book clubs. We filed in and took our seats. The stage was lit in cool tones of blues and greens. Slightly sinister cello music pulsed in the background. The relief image of a handmaid’s headdress from the cover of The Testaments was projected onto the back curtain with the hashtag #askAtwood. It waved ever so gently. There were two large armchairs on the stage, and a small table with no less then three copies of The Testaments propped up precariously around two glasses of water. There was an air of anticipation.

The music faded out, and we fell instantly silent. After the briefest of pauses, Kim Hill sauntered – actually sauntered – onto the stage. Thank god it was Kim Hill. I did a little cheer. The last time I saw Hill on stage at the Michael Fowler Centre was at the opening night of the NZ Festival Writers Week in 2018. For once that night, she wasn’t presiding, but participating, and came on to read a wry and devastatingly funny and sad story about her mother. She was the best thing about the whole night.

Now here she was to introduce Margaret Atwood, double Booker-prize winning Canadian author of more than 40 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, most notably for our purposes The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments. Apparently, Atwood once said wanting to meet an author because you like their work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté. “So here, ladies and gentlemen,” said Hill, “is the duck you’ve been waiting for.” I’d like to say Atwood waddled on, or at the very least e-scootered, but she walked, carefully, with a black handbag strung over her arm, and took her seat. We would have 45 minutes of conversation, a 15 minute interval, and then 45 minutes of questions, which we could submit via the #askAtwood hashtag.

It was a bumpy start. “There is more than one kind of freedom,” quoted Hill, quoting Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.” The question: “Are we living in the days of anarchy now, do you think?”

“Not exactly, but we’re not exactly in a totalitarian state either,” said Atwood.

Hill tried again. “Are we a society dying of too much choice?”

Atwood: “Don’t confuse me with my characters!”

Hill: “I would never do that! But do we have too much choice?”

Atwood: “I don’t know, you’d have to ask young people.”

A pause. Hill, thinking of The Testaments’ young and old narrators: “I’m interested in that juxtaposition of young and old.”

Atwood, withering: “Why?”

It was funny, but I didn’t understand why Atwood was so determined not to let Hill find a way into the conversation: conversation, after all, being the whole point. I think Atwood must at some point have made a policy decision never to do the work for her interviewers, always to answer only the question directly put, or if she didn’t like the question, to challenge it. I had to admire her for it, this refusal to display the very female trait of conversational generosity, to let the other person do the work and feel the discomfort. It’s something I wish I was better at. It was confronting though, seeing it deployed against Hill, whom I admire for a similar kind of take-no-prisoners stance in her interviewing style. It was like seeing two members of your favourite sports team suddenly facing off against each other. Who do you root for? I found myself loyal to Hill.

The stalemate broke when Hill tried the more banal entry point of whether Atwood always intended to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and some of the tension drained away as we settled in for a discussion centred almost exclusively on Gilead in its literary and televisual guises (and the fusion between the two achieved in The Testaments). This might have been disappointing for those hoping for a wide-ranging exposition of Atwood’s considerable back catalogue, but I suspect most of the audience were satisfied with this focus.

With terrifying prescience, Atwood predicted in 1982 the kinds of attacks on women’s rights, bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom that are now firmly on the agenda of the religious right in parts of the US, as well as the dangerous slippage towards totalitarianism that can take place given the right conditions. (Though don’t try to tell her she predicted the future: “This isn’t the future. If this were the future we wouldn’t be sitting on this stage because you wouldn’t have a job and I’d be dead.”). We’re looking to Gilead now to explain and interpret Trump’s America, and maybe to tell us how to reverse current horrifying trends.

Without giving away too many spoilers, The Testaments turns on the assumption that sunlight is the best disinfectant, an idea that seems quaint in the wake of Trump’s acquittal in his impeachment trial, and every other recent example of the truth mattering not a jot. In the words of New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg: “Imagine: a world where exposing the misdeeds of a regime could unravel it!”

(Hill pressed gently on this difference in tone and optimism between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, hinting, I think, at her own view of the book, which I share – did Atwood think her readers might be disappointed at this change in tone? “I don’t know what people think,” said Atwood. “They mostly say nice things because if they don’t say nice things I put the evil eye curse on them.”)

Given this job of interpreting the present for us, Atwood presents a curious mix of hope and nihilism. Alongside her insistence that we remain hopeful “or the other side wins”, she can drop casual truth bombs like “climate change causes famine, famine causes war, and wars are shit for women”.

There was an interval, in which some of us used the men’s bathroom, there being no men to use it themselves. In the second half, Hill scrolled through the #askAtwood hashtag and Atwood parlayed questions such as “what is your favourite time in history?”, “how have your feminist themes changed over time?”, and “what would you say to New Zealand politicians ahead of the 2020 election?”.

I found myself wondering exactly why Atwood is doing this tour, especially when her spiky answers to Hill made it seem like she’d rather not be being interviewed at all. Surely by now, she has answered any possible combination of questions a million times and is bored out of her brain. Yet it’s not like we forced her: her tour is a standalone thing, not even part of a book festival to which she was invited.

She could just be taking us all for a ride. No matter how brilliant she is, $150 for an author talk is hard to swallow. (Yes, as Michele A’Court said on the On the Rag podcast, you’d pay that for Elton John, and Margaret Atwood is just as much of a legend. But Elton has a band, and quite an impressive stage show, and Atwood’s choreography was limited to swapping seats with Hill at half time.)

Surely there has never been a book publicity machine like that rolled out to promote The Testaments. Its London launch in September saw simultaneous events over several hours including a panel of Elif Shafak, Neil Gaiman, A.M. Homes, Temi Oh, and Jeanette Winterson discussing Atwood’s work, a live recording of the Guilty Feminist podcast, speed mentoring for women, ‘soapbox moments’ from renowned activists and poets, an appearance by actress Romola Garai, a cinema screening of season one of the TV series, and a crafting and placard-making cocktail zone, culminating in a midnight appearance and reading by Atwood herself. I mean, just, what? Soon after, an author talk with Atwood was held at Britain’s National Theatre, filmed, and broadcast simultaneously in cinemas around the world.

Joint 2019 Man Booker Prize winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo on October 14, 2019 in London. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)

The Testaments, of course, went on to win (jointly with Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other) last year’s Man Booker prize, so depending on how you look at it you could either say the hype was justified, or that the hype worked. That joint award proved controversial, with many decrying that the impact of the historic first win by a British woman of colour (Evaristo) was both diluted by the decision to award it jointly with Atwood, and upstaged by the ensuing controversy. Neither Atwood nor Everisto could have been satisfied with the result, though both have been gracious in their public comments.

Atwood is so dry, so sharp, with such an eye for skewering the ridiculous. Why is she participating in this circus? Is she herself, being taken for a ride by publishers and production companies looking to turn our need for help to interpret our dystopian present into a fat bottom line? Or is she laughing merrily (as she did at her own jokes, several times) at the centre of all this?

Maybe I’m just being churlish. The Handmaid’s Tale is a near perfect thing. The TV adaptation is one of the best pieces of culture I think I’ve ever consumed. I gobbled up The Testaments with that satisfying feeling of wanting to tear through it, even if the neatly wrapped up conclusion felt a little hollow. And Atwood’s other works are brilliant, incisive, funny, challenging, beautiful. She’s been at this for more than 50 years, and frankly, she’s earned the right to do whatever she wants. Whether or not The Testaments deserved the Booker, she’s one of the great writers of our time, who will be read for the next 50 years and more. Maybe she sees such excessive publicity as an opportunity to get our faces and tell us “climate change causes famines, famines cause wars, and wars are shit for women. Don’t give up hope. Watch out for Extinction Rebellion.” Maybe she just wants to visit some new cities and try out an e-scooter.

Hill finished by asking Atwood, “do you still write to find out what you think?” Surely by now, she knows what she thinks about everything. But “yes, absolutely,” said Atwood. “I start with a question, and I write until I see where it goes.”

“Well I’m very grateful that you do, and that you’re here,” said Hill, placing her hand in the vicinity of her heart. Atwood made a little noise like “ohhh.” We applauded them both, the near-full auditorium, some on our feet. As they turned to leave, Atwood reached her arm around Hill’s shoulder, and squeezed, and kept it there until they had left the stage.

A kelp forest (Photo: Steven Trainoff Ph.D/Moment via Getty)
A kelp forest (Photo: Steven Trainoff Ph.D/Moment via Getty)

BooksFebruary 9, 2020

An extraordinary, tender response to Witi Ihimaera’s memoir Native Son

A kelp forest (Photo: Steven Trainoff Ph.D/Moment via Getty)
A kelp forest (Photo: Steven Trainoff Ph.D/Moment via Getty)

Poet essa may ranapiri says this review is one of the hardest things they’ve written. 

I spend two months with this book, following Witi Ihimaera’s journey, I see car tyres in country roads I see tears on lover’s faces, I feel the beating of the heart, as it strains against the western paradigm of heteronormativity. As he holds a part of himself under the water, I struggle to breathe. I want to build a time machine. I want to go back and just hold Witi and tell them that it is okay, to be. To truly be. “Smiler became Ihimaera as if that alone would create another person.” And it does build a whole new being in that kupu – I know this; holding the world in my name. Being out to the world as a decision I have made. I spent two months moving from short passage to short passage, each one swallowed with the grit of glass, melting like ice in the stomach. Made into steam. Guiding my breathing in and out.

I wanted to go to you in a dream travel back down my whakapapa to meet you in the water. To whisper bird notes in your ear. To spell out the future; light your way to who you have become. I wanted to sew up the boy who ran from the shed, I wanted to keep him safe forever. Keep him from the violence that has been forced on too many takatāpui Māori. Extract you from the cycle of pain that began when Cook arrived and has continued ever since.

I saw Witi talk at a panel last year, at Te Ha (Māori writers hui). Standing there in a grey jacket the fibres zigzagging across his body. I heard him speak of the sacrifice that elders make for their community. Of Mahuika and the fingernails she pulls from her hands, and of Muri who pulled the jawbone from her face for her mokopuna. That is the kind of sacrifice you make to allow the future generations to move onwards. He calls for us to break the calabash. Work he already started.

Native Son is the grown-up sequel to Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood, which won the General Non-Fiction category at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2016.

This is also a memoir by a writer about how enmeshed the writing life is with everything else. Excerpts from many of his stories are included here from Bulibasha to The Matriarch; with characters’ names changed to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. What does it mean to use real names? What do we do with the fictional names? How do we honour our family and keep them safe in our work? What does putting the whakapapa of a word into a fictional world mean? These are some of the questions that these excerpts provoke by their inclusion and were also the questions that Witi was asking all those years ago when he started writing. The spiral structure of the book moves us back and forth along his journey to become a writer. From first book published to submitting early short stories to Landfall. The question that sits me still is one of responsibility, being a Māori writer being a queer writer; how do we traverse the damage done? How do we hold onto ourselves without making everyone else look bad? What kind of example are we setting? These questions follow me, putting words into the world is no small thing.

“You think this is easy? Fuck you.”

I didn’t understand like really fucking understand where you were coming from until that moment where you turn to the reader and essentially say if you’re staying you’re staying but if you’re not with me in this if you’re not willing to understand, if you’re not here to help then you can fuck all the way off.

I am with you.

When you go on your first date with the woman who shoots opossums with the intention of making a fur coat, with you in that fictional or not so fictional hockey game where a team of gays are victorious, with you when you play an old tune on a broken piano, when you’re driven around by your grandfather who is writing and researching the family’s whakapapa, I laugh when you compare atua to beings from the film Prometheus. I’m with you when it gets harder. When you drive out alone to make a solitary visit to the doctors. When you leave in fear. When you lie out on the beach the darkness of the night sky merging with the waves. When you touch a man and feel the joy of it. When you carve lines into your arms. The scars that reveal what the pākehā world has done to us. The scars along the wrists that show the pain, that reveal the loss. We pull it up from deep in our bodies. I am with you when you place the tube over the car exhaust as you sit in the car in the garage on the street where you live alone where you are so alone where you are such a disappointment to everyone you love, where the Mormon god looks at your lust with disgust where the water starts to fill your world, and there is no relief when you start to vomit and piss and shit up all of this. A ‘you’ that I can’t just step out of.

You take us to these places and challenge us to leave but I’m not going anywhere. This book opens you. This book opens you up. The heartbeat shifting.

The pages move my wairua sways with the sigh of the pages. I am with you at Te Ha when I tell you I am writing a review of your book Native Son. And you shrug uncomfortably and tell me not ungraciously “you don’t have to do that”. This is not a review, this is a mess. This is my spiral swinging out from yours. This is me finding something in myself to hold onto something in your kupu that stings and brings new life, new energy to the world. I am with you we are all with you when you draw on pūrakau on the old stories. When you touch Hinenuitepō and laugh along with the trickster Maui when you climb up to Rehua with Tawhāki when you fall to earth with Karihi his younger brother; there is no matauranga Māori in the clouds of pākehā academia and I’m with you when you move past that world. I’m with you when you’re reading through Te Ao Hou and when you talk about how you’re not the first Māori writer, list names of a thriving community; Arapera Blank, Kāterina Mataira, June Mitchell, Pat Heretaunga Baker, Rora Paki, Ani Bosch, Atihana Johns, Renee, and Bub Bridger, “Most of them were writing while I – Rowley Habib used to like saying – was still shitting in my nappies”. We are a community of writers we go back to the great poetess Puhiwahine and further to the songs of birds. You are aware we are all threaded from Te Kōre to Te Marama.

I close the book and the spiral swings outwards from where I’m sitting. It pools in the air it pulls me through decades I had never known, to people I would never meet, to an Aotearoa I would never get to see, except for in this book. In the centre of that spiral is trauma. Is what takes its place inside our bones wrestling with our ancestors – I feel as if a hot poker has penetrated my wairua, a pou into the pain. But the plant grows, the ferns curl, the spiral spreads outwards onwards and backwards and swinging around in circles some great some small some barely perceptible to sight.

I feel a connection.

This book taught me a lot about myself made me think about my mental health in a way nothing else has. Made me look at my own spiritual wellbeing. This is a book that guides and hurts and heals and makes whole from things that have no business being whole at all, from slippery worlds of dream and fright, to the ongoing search for a Māori place in a colonised world, where all our selves are held up to the light where they glow. I thank you for it.

Native Son: The Writer’s Memoir by Witi Ihimaera (RHNZ Vintage, $40) is available from Unity Books.