Ruby Solly on reading Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People for the audiobook, released this week.

Initially, there is only one way to describe this work; an honour and a privilege. I say this every time I get to spend time with the words of our kaumātua, but those words become embodied when those kaumātua are people like me. The Bone People has a certain Mona Lisa-like quality to it where whoever reads it feels seen, feels that Keri has written their story. I’ve heard this from Kāi Tahu women, from Pākehā women, from men of all ages too. The less the reader was “like me”, the more confused I would be by this. But I would smile and nod, no matter how far from the centre of the book’s spiral the reader in front of me was. Knowing all the while that Keri would probably have hated it, their assumed ownership, the idea of the New Zealand writer over the Māori writer, or even more specifically the Kāi Tahu writer, or the Moeraki writer, which really may have been the best fit of all. 

You are building a castle in te kore
grain by grain
the sands before time
stack
themselves
in circles.
You are the iris
a turret builds itself
around you.
Sand pours through
to count the first minutes,
heats up to glass
with nothing to shatter it
                            except sound.

I first read The Bone People when I was 21 after spending years avoiding it, because, probably like Keri (and many other strong Southern women) I do not like being told what to do and in what time to do it. I know my world, I know my internal landscape, and I know when the right time for whatever is needed arrives within me. At that point, I had barely been home to te Waipounamu. Going home costs money and that is something that students, writers and musicians don’t have in abundance. But I took The Bone People with me to rehearsals, on tour, and into the studio. It became like a hand of soil in my pocket. Soil from a home that grew me, but that I was taken from before my fledgling memory kicked in.

Reading The Bone People felt like staining my hands red with maukorua, kokowai, as the northerners say. I felt like other people could see it, the deep whakapapa within that book and all the ways it touched my own. I struggled to understand how so many other people I knew saw themselves in Kerewin, when I saw myself so strongly that it was almost as if I could see no one else. Her need for isolation somehow nestled within her deep knowledge of whakapapa and its manifestation through all things. Her way of taking the beauty and depth of her internal world and externalising it through the art of creation. If there’s one thing that I connect with from being of this whakapapa, it is a deep feeling of all that has been before, living within us. It is te kore being all of what we are, condensed.

At first there was only black
but like the black of the iris;
the black of a hole ripped in the whariki of space time,
with your invisible hands writing in the chaos
of what comes after birth.
Somewhere deep in your horizon
is a ships cargo turned to stone under story,
                              turned to history under hands.

Before reading The Bone People I had never done any voice acting, and even then, I’d be very hesitant to call reading The Bone People voice acting. Keri, her whānau and I, share ties through the hāpū Kāti Huirapa, and the Loper / Waterreus whānau. There isn’t any acting here, because again, this whakapapa is infinite and all-connecting. But there is something raw about reading out loud. Something about voicing a book’s music as opposed to hearing its score inside the tower of your mind.

Keri was a writer, but she was so much more than that. Like Kerewin in the novel (who was, and is, a different entity to Keri herself) she was a musician, an artist, a philosopher … he kaitoi ia, she was an artist that soared above and across disciplines. She was an artist in the way where you see the world differently and spend your life trying to open a window inside yourself for others to see in, while still keeping your mauri intact, protecting your wairua and that of all your creations. 

There is no way to see what we look like here,
seeing has not yet been invented.
Inside it, you are writing yourself four walls.
You are writing yourself the ridge poles.
You are writing yourself a river
to wash off what no longer serves us
precious children of the South.
One hundred generations
of being more
than fully grown,
than fully formed
than fully carved
from blue glass melted
from the worlds first bank
                                  of melting sand.

The tower is such a central location to The Bone People that it becomes a character in itself. A symbol that stretches the ancient to the esoteric to the fairytale, while somehow remaining an intrinsically Māori space. The way she describes it spiralling upwards, that infinitely old connection to rauru; sacred spirals within our whakapapa and carvings. The connection of the kauae raro; our earthly knowledge, into the kauae runga, the upper jaw of the esoteric and our ancestral stars. The tower is where we journey from one to the other, and where we combine the two. But the tower is also what we build to hide ourselves, it is a space of regeneration. In tarot, it is often interpreted as a harbinger of disaster. But perhaps more accurately, it is a tohu of change.

When she shows us the tower, Keri is telling us that we are going to read about abuse. She is showing us that we are going to move through tension, before it all crumbles down around us so that we can start again. But as in so much of how Keri created, she was able to both show us that destruction was imminent, while building us a safe place to hide from it. I still visit the tower, I still sit with Kerewin and Sim and taste tītī fat and salt on my tongue. The tower exists in the all-time; it exists next to the first manuscript of The Bone People, encased in resin, as Keri contemplated doing. After reading it aloud, I understand now why she wanted to encapsulate it in that way. But I’m even more glad that she didn’t.  

Here in this whakapapa
I wear a bush shirt with my dress,
I wear my upper lip stiff,
I pack a pipe
and make a new star in the darkness.

While we were recording The Bone People, the studio became the tower. There is a ritualistic nature to reading aloud, the feeling of knowing that the only way out is through. Unless we read him home, Sim would always be waiting. Unless we were there to watch, Joe would never navigate through the treacherous milky rivers of his past. To read The Bone People is to be activated, is to be immersed. But that’s what happens when you’re a weaver like Keri, a spider who creates a web of whakapapa so vast, that every reader can find themselves inside it. A book, but not just a book. A web of whakapapa, and when read aloud, a spell. I hope the tale is made richer for the telling, and may we all have the courage and generosity to share what we create from within the towers we have built for ourselves. And more importantly, from the towers we have inherited from our whakapapa. Tihei, mauri ora. 

You wrote yourself a tower,
you wrote your darlings a river of milk to drown in.
I write myself a bottle
with a message to you
inside it.

I enter into the blackness
holding this bottle, this pounamu.
I throw it into the sea you have become.
Its glass shatters into Poutini.
The great taniwha breaching
like he has the strength
of every toki we have used
to chip away at ourselves
until this ocean of time
was carved in reverse.

I run the water through my hands,
liquid made from a million grains of sand,
made of a million black letters.
I hold my breath,
open my eyes
and join you
within.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme is now available, for the first time, on audiobook, with narration and original taonga puoro music by Ruby Solly.