The International Literary Festival

The legacy of imperialism is a burden and a bonus for Canadian and New Zealand writers.

I live at the edge of the universe, like everybody else. - Bill Manhire

On the 30th anniversary of IFOA, I’ve been asked to contemplate the connections between New Zealand and Canadian literature, which I feel somewhat conflicted about – mainly because I’ve been grappling with what I think about the notion of a “national literature.”

So, there are the usual landmarks: our colonial past; the impact of imperialism; the uneasy relationship ongoing between settlers and the indigenous people, new immigrants and settlers; the grappling with the stigma of being a Commonwealth country (borne out in the battle over copyright issues); the physical and emotional demands and strength drawn from our landscape; the nervousness about telling our own stories; the need for affirmation from everywhere outside the country in order to be recognized at home; a dark sense of humour (perhaps this is only possible because of a general sense of wellbeing?); the sense of being the “country mouse” to our nearest neighbour’s more sophisticated “city mouse” – at least New Zealand is separated by vast tracts of sea water from Australia (although this doesn’t feel like a plus now that most books are warehoused in Australia); the impact of “globalization” on our fiction; the constant questions about where our respective literatures fit into the rest of the world; the great body of “immigrant” stories and celebrations of hybridization. All of these aspects, from an outsider’s point of view, seem to permeate Canadian fiction (and the industry generally) as they do in New Zealand.

The physical distance between Toronto and Auckland, where I program the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, is 8,626 miles (13,882 km). Auckland is a city of around 1.5 million people, and that’s as big as it gets in New Zealand. Toronto, if my jet lag hasn’t completely screwed up my maths, is around four times that. Remarkably, in this day and age of air travel, it still takes just under a day to get from one city to the other.

I don’t imagine Canadians feel quite so out of the way – although perhaps their writers do. I get the sense that some Canadian writers are mildly surprised to be recognized or acknowledged. It reminds me of the way a New Zealander might apologize to someone who mistakenly but confidently labels them Australian, aware that the mistake is entirely their own fault for coming from such a non-part of the world. On the other hand, perhaps this sense of anonymity is a bonus when you’re trying to write.

Terry Sturm’s biography, An Unsettled Spirit: the Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttleton, challenged my imagination as to what it must have been like to write – and travel – in Edith’s time a century ago (she was published as G.B. Lancaster). She left New Zealand in 1909, and, preferring places other than England and Europe, became a writer chameleon who lived and wrote in Australia, Norway, and Canada … “where she became known primarily as an author of Canadian novels … her writing ha[d] a single abiding theme: the formation of colonial identity, and the legacy of imperialism in the lives of settlers and their descendants in these countries.” I can understand why she took on the cloak of each of her adopted countries – a reviewer dismissed one of her early books as “A coarsely told story – locality, New Zealand” (i.e. the kiss of death). She wrote to a Canadian friend in 1923:

N.Z. was death on native writers. We would never publish a thing, even without pay; had no copyright laws, took no interest, gave no encouragement. … Besides my mother always thought my writing at all such a disgrace that I had to keep it a dead secret. No one really knew who I was until I had finally left N.Z. – that end of the world.

I think of Alice Munro’s comments during the very special event with Diana Athill here in Toronto last Wednesday night, when she said that in her early career as a writer she felt that “you couldn’t write about Canada because nobody would be interested. There was a shyness.” I think perhaps that shyness has metamorphosed into a pressure on both Canadian and New Zealand writers today to write “global” novels, if they are to have any chance of being sold elsewhere, and subsequently noticed where it counts (i.e. not at home).

Munro also talked about the sense that her family, particularly her mother, were embarrassed about her writing: “I got things right, but I didn’t always please the people I got it right about.” I’d like to think this has changed, but I’ve seen enough writers with family members in the audience to know they still find it excruciating to have their writer persona exposed in public with their mother’s eyes on them.

In the '80s, Margaret Atwood made a number of trips to New Zealand. She was, in a sense, my introduction to Canadian literature, and I felt grateful to her for opening that door for me. Canadian writers are far better known in New Zealand than vice versa, I’m sure, although I did stand in line with someone the other day who talked about Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip in glowing tones (once upon a time, it would have been the Booker winner Keri Hulme who would have sprung to mind).

A trickle of New Zealand and Canadian writers swap hemispheres for literary festivals today. It should be more, but, for reasons nobody likes to admit out loud (or perhaps we’ve never really analyzed it properly), it’s never more than a few. We were lucky enough to host Heather O’Neill at our festival in 2007. There was an honesty and a fairness in her writing that appealed to me, and to numerous other local readers. Asked by a New Zealander if she considered herself a Canadian writer:

I really spent most of my life in Montréal, so I do consider myself Canadian. But my writing, I mean people ask me "how do you see yourself fitting into the Canadian canon?" But I don’t really see literature like that ... you know, all the stuff I read is from all over world, I don’t see it as being from one country or another. I guess I never thought about it too much because I always had dual citizenship and so I always just saw myself as being North American. But I support the Canadiens! I think you can tell (people’s nationality) by what sports teams they support, and I support the Canadiens!

I think Heather speaks for a great many readers all around the world. I’ve listened to New Zealand writers bemoan the state of the publishing and bookselling industry, the lack of interest in local work, the fact that they are ghettoized in bookshops and festivals as “New Zealanders,” and on the other hand, I have heard numerous readers talk with great affection and passion about an author without caring two hoots where that particular writer hails from – it’s of secondary interest. They just want good writing. They want to be affected emotionally, they want to see things through someone else’s eyes, whether that be through a character from a totally different part of the world, or through the voice of the author, or through the words of a non-fiction writer, translating their experience into information which makes the uninformed feel...well, informed.

My husband reminded me that I had, many years ago, done a Canadian literature course at the University of Auckland. If I was at home, I would have unearthed some of my course notes, but I Googled the course out of curiosity, which it seems no longer exists. Instead, Canadian literature has been subsumed into “comparative cultures,” where Margaret Atwood’s “novel of Canadian settler anxiety, Surfacing, is followed by [New Zealand writer] Geoff Cush’s playful novel, Son of France, where N.Z. gets rewritten as a French colony in order to better reflect on the contested space of the present.” I don’t know what I think about this exactly (and I’m sure there are many reason for the course’s demise), but what occurs to me is the way in which New Zealand, Canada, and Australia are increasingly lumped together, in a kind of negative, anti-Commonwealth way. There may well be connections, but they are still different places and perhaps we should be more focused on the differences. Do we ignore each other because we’re told we’re alike? And does this serve only to keep us looking “up” to the literary cultures and communities we ache to be taken seriously by? This isn't helping me sleep.