Adrienne

Last week I visited The Landing, in the Catlins area on the Otago coast. It’s the place Landing Press is named after – the small poetry press that three of us established two years ago. It’s also the place where my great-grandfather (the original settler) set up his home. I thought that maybe there would be no trace of The Landing any more, but there it was, commemorated in a memorial to the people who had settled there.

The Landing is several hundred metres up the Owaka River from the sea. It’s where cargo boats used to come and unload or load up. It’s beautiful. But there’s a bar across the Owaka harbour/river. Boats coming up the river had to navigate the bar, which was dangerous and the cause of shipwrecks.

So our tiny Landing Press is named after a place both beautiful and dangerous! I love that.

My great-grandfather, Captain Charles Hayward, was the harbourmaster there for 15 years. Eventually he was drowned in a shipwreck himself, and the story of his drowning is a big family story.

It’s become a cliché to say we’re a country of immigrants. I don’t feel like an immigrant. I feel deeply rooted in this country, and I get annoyed with people who says there’s no New Zealand identity. I feel as though I have a strong New Zealand identity, and it’s shaped by all the elements of this country – Māori, Pākehā, Pasifika, and our environment and history. But last week I did think a lot about my great-grandfather. He had it easier than a lot of migrants. He came here by choice, not driven by war or some other turmoil. He was able to pursue his chosen profession of sailor here – unlike many professional migrants today. He came to a part of the country that was relatively stable and settled, in a time of turbulence in the other parts of the country.

Maybe that’s why he was able to establish a strong family who went onto to contribute so much to the city of Dunedin.

So maybe there’s an immigrant lesson in this after all. If migrants enjoy security and safety, and are given the opportunity to use their existing skills, or develop their potential, they can become big contributors to this country.

Now I’ve ended up on a moralistic little lesson. I didn’t mean to go there. I’d rather just think about my great-grandfather steering his cutter Bessie up the river towards The Landing, with our tiny Landing Press sailing bravely after it!

This week I have taken part in events at the Manawatu Writers’ Festival. One was called ‘Free to write’ and in it a number of people from migrant and refugee backgrounds told their personal story. It’s always moving and inspiring – and a large reminder of the global reality – to hear these stories.

The other event I took part in was called ‘The story collector’. And it focussed my mind on something else. Behind the stories that people tell, sometimes there is simply delight at the freedom to speak. In other cases there are reasons to fear speaking aloud.

In  each book I’ve published which contains the stories of migrants or refugees, there has been one person who does not want to be identified. Ngàn Hac Tráng, in I have in my arms both ways, has no photograph and does not use her real name. In Migrant Journeys, Nena uses only her first name, and has no photo. In The Crescent Moon, Mehwish Moughal has no photo. The reasons are often complex – fear of recriminations in one’s home country, fear of recriminations here, a desire not to seem to be speaking on behalf of a small migrant community. And maybe one can become trapped in one’s own story. Borany Kanal, whose story is told in Borany’s Story published 25 years ago, still receives letters from high school students, because the book is so enduring. But she is now a mother of three teenage children and living in USA, and the story, that in some ways she has wanted to move on from, still follows her.

Her story is also a reminder that the retelling of personal stories can be very painful.

I was involved with the editing of Tears of the Moon, by Guo Sheng, which tells the story of Guo Sheng’s high-profile family living through the Cultural Revolution in China. Guo Sheng is not the author’s real name, and there is no trace of her identity in the book. She was living in New Zealand, but was deeply afraid of recriminations against her family still in China. This seriously affected the outcome for the book, because it became impossible to market it. That was a huge disappointment for her. At the time I remember we had discussions about whether she was too paranoid about this – but we New Zealanders living in our security, and often our naivety, have no right to make any kind of call about this. Earlier this year we had a Chinese man staying with us for a week – 40ish, well-educated – and I talked to him about this book. I asked him if Guo Sheng’s fears were justified, and he said, absolutely.

All of this was a reminder to me that stories don’t always come lightly. They may also come with risk, and courage. But in all the projects I’ve been involved in, there’s been a shared passion, to shift people’s heads, to create better understanding. And personal stories do this.

Over the last few months I’ve been reading chapters of a book for the author, Marilyn Garson. Among a whole host of other things she’s done, Marilyn’s worked in Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Gaza – she doesn’t choose the easy options. Now she’s back in New Zealand, and she’s writing about five years in Gaza. She’s writing about her work in economic development there, and about being a Jew living in Palestine.

Reading her work, for the first time I’ve really understood the desperate situation of people in Gaza as a result of the blockade by Israel. I didn’t know that Gaza is one of the most densely populated territories in the world – two million Palestinians crammed into 362 square kilometres (NZ has 268,000 square kilometres) – the collapse of basic services, severe shortage of goods – it all makes desperate reading.

I’ve just read a review of an earlier, smaller book by Marilyn, Reading Maimonides in Gaza, in the Green Party publication te awa. I want to quote from it:

“This is a story from inside, written by a woman who went to help, as she had been doing in other countries, and found that ’the violent waste of its potential overturned what I knew about conflict and aid, and challenged the content of my Judaism’.”

Working with Marilyn on her book overturned what I knew about Gaza, and Palestine, and Israel. I like to think that I’m reasonably well-informed, but I just hadn’t grasped the enormity of that situation. As the reviewer says, ‘the sheer waste of human potential, the intelligence and creativity stunted by the actions of a hostile neighbor.’ I think about that, because in New Zealand one of the most important things we can do for new migrants is to give them the opportunity to use their potential. Whether we do so is another conversation.

Marilyn’s book is available from the publisher, Mondoweiss, https://store.mondoweiss.net/.  I’m not planning to use this blog for advertisements, but I’m really happy to wave the flag for this book.

There’s been a series on TV1, I AM, and one of the series, I AM FREE, is about the Moughal sisters in Auckland, who escaped an abusive and violent father. Several years ago I interviewed the eldest sister, Mehwish, for The Crescent Moon project. The Crescent Moon was a book and a photographic exhibition (Ans Westra was the photographer) about Muslims of Asian descent in New Zealand. It was a project of the Asia NZ Foundation, and I spent many months going around the country interviewing a big range of Muslims, from 4th generation New Zealanders, to newly arrived migrants, and mixed in every way. It was a great project, and resulted in a book and exhibition of small stories about nearly 40 people – a kind of snapshot of each of them in their everyday lives.

I met Mehwish in Auckland. It was never easy arranging to meet – I had the impression then that her life was very complicated – and in the book she is the only person with no photograph. That in itself says a lot about that time in her life. But I was so impressed with her – with the story of the family, with her broad vision, her wisdom. The TV documentary reminded me of all of that again – and of the price the family has paid for their brave decision.

In The Crescent Moon book, we highlighted a quote from Mehwish to take the place of her photograph. The book itself is beautiful, and her quote, printed on a gold page, is striking. I want to include it here.

“I’m a Muslim and I respect and explore all religions. There are things I like and things I don’t like in the Muslim religion. I’ve got lots of questions. It’s about finding people who have a strong belief in their religion, but know there are some parts to it which are not okay. It’s the same with Christian religion. Every religion has its wrong thing to discuss.”

I’ve just been asked to talk at a writers’ festival. The session is called ‘The Story Collector’ and I love that title. I’ve never thought of myself as a story collector, but I have been one for most of my life, and most of the stories I’ve collected have been migrant stories. Actually I haven’t so much ‘collected them’ as have been the writer for the person with the story to tell.

Where did this come from, this interest in migrant stories? When I was a child, my very hospitable parents invited a big mix of people to our house, including many Colombo Plan students (the Colombo Plan was a programme to bring mainly Asian students to New Zealand to study). That was the life I grew up in – it was full of all sorts of people. Then when I studied in Canada, I had the chance to take courses in Multicultural Education. I wrote all sorts of rubbish essays about what was happening in New Zealand – I didn’t have a clue, but my lecturers didn’t either. But that all sparked something strong in me. So when I came back to New Zealand I started teaching in a programme in Christchurch for newly arrived refugees. And it all carried on from there.

This year I’m publishing a new novel, A Change of Key, which is a sequel to my earlier novel The Score. Like The Score, it’s set in an inner-city block of council flats, where a very diverse group of people live. When I published The Score, readers in a whole raft of countries – Australia, England, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Serbia, Canada – said, ‘You could be writing about my city!’ I loved it – that inner cities had so much in common, and that maybe the story rang true in many of them. I hope it’s true of A Change of Key too.

Carina Gallegos and I are also publishing a new collection of poetry, All of us. Carina and I first met when we were both working at Te Papa. She’s originally from Costa Rica, and has spent several years working with mainly Colombian refugees in Wellington. I began working on a series of poems around the theme of migration last year, then asked her to join me. The whole collection is on the themes of migration and refugees, and alongside that we’re publishing a collection of poems by people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. There’s a lot going on. Plenty to write about! That’s why I’m writing this occasional blog.

My name is not refugee is the title of an event we’ve just had at the Porirua Public Library. Organised by extraordinary children’s librarian Bee Trudgeon, it was a real celebration of diversity. And on the programme were 10 of the ESOL students from the school workshops I’ve been running. They all introduced themselves in their first language, then read their poems in English. It’s hard enough standing up to read a poem in your first language, let alone in a language you’ve only been learning for a few months. But they all did it. Their supporting cast was Moira Wairama as MC, storyteller Tony Hopkins, drummer Sam Manzana and the Kaka family from Syria telling their own story. As Bee said, it was a ‘truly moving evening of spoken word performances with World roots.’