Feature
Lost in Translation
by Paula Morris
The Harvard Review editor’s book about her “unlikely love story” with a Maori seems sure to rile New Zealanders.
It’s the 1980s: Christina Thompson, an American grad student en route to Australia, takes a short holiday in Northland and falls in love with a local man known as Seven. Despite class and cultural differences, and comically diverse physical appearances – she is short, pale and blonde; he is tall, Maori and strapping – they marry, live happily in Australia, then Hawaii and finally her hometown, Boston, and have three sons. Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is Thompson’s memoir of this “unlikely love story” – as the subtitle describes it – interspersed with lucid accounts of European encounters with Maori, from Abel Tasman to Charles Darwin, and a brief sortie into her own family history in North America.
This is Thompson’s first New Zealand interview, and she is nervous. “It’s always weird to see how someone from another country sees your book,” she says, talking to me from her office; she’s now the editor of a literary journal, the Harvard Review. She’s already feeling a little burned by the American reviews of the book – “two were tough, and two were positive. I like kinder ones better!” – and doesn’t understand why the New York Times gave the book to a New Zealand-based reviewer. “It’s written for an American audience,” she says several times. Initially, Thompson envisaged writing for an Australian and New Zealand audience – a group she apparently regards as homogeneous – but after she and her family moved back to the United States 10 years ago, the focus changed.
Which explains, for example, the use of the word “Maoris” throughout the book, something grating for a New Zealand reader. My niece and nephew, coming across my copy on the kitchen table, were outraged and amazed: didn’t she know that was incorrect? But the book may grate on readers for numerous other reasons, I suggest to her, not least the “unlikely love story” of the subtitle. The “I married a Maori” subject matter may have novelty value in New England, but obviously it’s old news here: my mother married a Maori, as did my grandfather, and my husband, and thousands of other people over the past 200 years or so. The idea of describing a marriage in the 1980s between an American and a Maori as a “contact encounter” feels not only dated but absurd.
“I see it as my experience, my encounter,” Thompson explains. “It’s about the novelty of being there, and the incomprehensibility factor for me. I didn’t know what was going on a lot of the time, and it must have been like that for the first Europeans. It’s a posture of humility – I’m trying to say that this is what happened to me.”
Some of the things Thompson found disorienting and incomprehensible: sucking the brain out of a boiled fish head at dinner, prising sea urchins off rocks, and seeing, for the first time, a washing machine with a wringer. These things, I suggest, would have been just as perplexing to young urban Maori in the 1980s. Too often in the memoir, events are presented as typical of Maori, or typical of New Zealand, when in fact they are aspects of a disappearing rural life unfamiliar to many of us; Seven’s family seem to be presented as Ur-Maori, the representatives of an entire mysterious, simple, socially disadvantaged race.
“These are the people I knew,” protests Thompson. “I didn’t know anybody outside that community. Later in the book, I talk about dysfunctional urban Maori communities, but I didn’t know about them then.”
But rural deprivation and urban dysfunction aren’t the whole story, either. What about middle-class Maori with educations and professions? When she discusses contemporary Maori, it’s solely in terms of high unemployment, low life expectancy, health issues and incarceration statistics; she cites no 21st-century sources in this chapter, and the only Maori book she discusses at length is, unsurprisingly, Once Were Warriors. Maori as a once-noble but now depressed and dying race; an American reader of this book will have much the same impression as a visitor to the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, gazing at the Goldie paintings and their pompous, memorialising titles.
“That is probably, maybe, a flaw in the book,” Thompson concedes. “But I didn’t set out to communicate a picture of Maori New Zealand today. It’s changed in the past 20 years, and I haven’t been there in 10. I’m not pretending to be an authority. It’s funny – the sense that I have a responsibility to depict the whole truth, when I’m just trying to tell two people’s story. My exposure to Maori New Zealand is very limited.”
It’s unfortunate, then, that this is the book that will introduce many overseas readers to Maori, especially given the limited enthusiasm among publishers in London and New York for books by and about New Zealanders. “If I’d just written a history, I wouldn’t have been able to get it published,” Thompson says, suggesting “people who are interested” will seek out the books cited in her bibliography. “A lot of people told me that it was my personal take on it that made it interesting.”
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