Cover Story
The incredible likeness of being
by Guy Somerset
The Listener uncovered some surprising similarities to other works in Witi Ihimaera’s The Trowenna Sea. We confronted him with the evidence.
Witi Ihimaera is in the middle of marking exams and essays when he first responds to the Listener about the 16 examples this magazine put to his publisher of striking resemblances between parts of his new historical novel, The Trowenna Sea, and previously published work by other writers.
As well as being one of New Zealand’s leading authors, Ihimaera is a professor and Distinguished Creative Fellow in Maori Literature at the University of Auckland, where he is founder and course convenor of the Masters in Creative Writing programme.
His response comes swiftly. He is apologetic to all parties. During an ensuing interview with him and Geoff Walker, publishing director of Penguin New Zealand, under whose Raupo imprint The Trowenna Sea was released, Ihimaera says he is “horrified” about his “errors”.
The “usual meticulous practices that I have, they failed me”; “there are just these nuggets of things, I guess you could call them knots, really, that I should have realised about and I’m just pissed off, really”.
The university has strict guidelines about intellectual property and Ihimaera has since volunteered to submit himself to arbitration, after acknowledging what he calls unintended “correspondences” – “this is not plagiarism”, he says – discovered by book critic Jolisa Gracewood in the course of reviewing The Trowenna Sea for the Listener.
Phone calls have been made to apologise, including to Peter Godwin, author of one of the books involved, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1996).
“I tried to get in touch with him on the phone – you can’t say that I am not doing my best to make sure that they understand I am personally apologising because this was not intended at all. And I still have to discuss with Geoff how those apologies can be done. I’m imagining a page in Trowenna, or at least half a page, absolutely indicating those aspects where it appears to be word for word copying or lifting from original text, and making sure that readers are aware of that so they do know the priority with which I am approaching this. And integrity. I can’t do otherwise.”
However, there are no plans to withdraw the novel, says Walker.
In his initial email, Ihimaera stresses: “The queries relate to 16 sentence or paragraph instances, totalling two pages of a 528-page novel, where correspondences have been found between my novel and texts unattributed in the Author’s Note. Without wishing to delimit the seriousness of the queries, I would still want to put them into this overall perspective.”
Actually, two of the texts are attributed in the extensive list of works in the seven-page Author’s Note – but only as having been “consulted”. They were Mukiwa and SW Jackman’s Tasmania: The Island Series (1974).
“Consulted” would hardly seem to suffice in this instance, though – Ihimaera might have done well to have noted the phrasing for the last novel by Richard Flanagan, the Australian writer he credits in the Author’s Note for introducing him to the real-life story behind The Trowenna Sea.
“In writing this novel,” Flanagan wrote of the Charles Dickens-related Wanting, “I have on occasion made free use of sentences and phrases from Dickens’ own work.”
“Oh bugger! Why didn’t he tell me?” says Ihimaera, laughing. “That would have solved a lot of problems. But that’s not what I was about, though. My principle is not to use work raw from another person’s work, it is not to do that at all.”
Others texts evident in The Trowenna Sea include American cultural anthropologist Karen Sinclair’s Prophetic Histories: The People of Maramatanga (2002) and contemporary accounts of Victorian England. At one point, Ihimaera puts the words of William Colenso into the mouth of his fictionalised real-life figure Hohepa Te Umuroa.
The examples range from phrases to sentences to, in two instances, virtually paragraphs.
They were discovered by Gracewood, who has a doctorate in comparative literature from Cornell University in the US and lives in New Haven, Connecticut, while she was looking for more information on Te Umuroa.
“I went first to Google, which I think threw up a page from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and also a reference to Karen Sinclair’s book. With Sinclair’s book, some of the text is on Google Books, but not all of it, and I noticed a couple of familiar phrases, so I went back and matched those and then managed to get the book out of the Yale library as well so I could look at other pages, and I found a whole bunch of quotes that just lined up.”
Gracewood thought: “Okay, is there anything else in this novel that might have been insufficiently digested?” She remembered one of the passages that proved to be a match for “The Manufacturing Poor” by Robert Lamb. “That had struck me when I first read it, because I remember stopping to think, ‘What is an equipage?’” she says.
“I went straight back to that passage and again Google Books helped me with that one by throwing it straight back up. After that, it was mainly a case of flipping through and finding passages that seemed extraordinarily detailed or particularly ‘period’ in their language and just randomly Googling.”
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