Patricia Grace

Patricia Frances Grace (born 17 August 1937) is a New Zealand author of novels, short stories and children's books. She was the first female Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, Waiariki (1975) and has since written seven novels, seven short-story collections, a non-fiction biography and an autobiography.

Quotes

 * I'd had a glossary in a previous work and then I suddenly thought that a glossary is there for foreign languages, italics are there for foreign languages. I didn't want the Māori language to be treated as a foreign language in its own country.
 * Quoted by Charlotte Graham-McLay in "Patricia Grace's literary legacy: giving Māori characters their 'natural' voice", The Guardian, 23 February 2020.
 * Grace explaining why she did not include an English glossary for te reo Māori in her novel Potiki (1986).


 * It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl... I found that being different meant that I could be blamed...
 * From the Centre: A writer's life (2021)


 * I never found myself in a book. The children I read about lived in other countries, lands of snow and robins. Sometimes they lived in large houses and had nurses and maids to look after them. They did not belong in extended families, did not speak as I spoke. There were malevolent aunts and terrible stepmothers. It was wrong to be poor. If you were poor you usually did some brave deed that made you rich by the end of the story, when you would marry a princess or a prince. Or you died in the snow while selling matches. Maidens and Jesus were fair. No one was brown or black unless there was something wrong with them or they held a lowly position in society.
 * Grace, From the Centre: A writer's life (2021), extract in "'I never found myself in a book': Patricia Grace on the importance of Māori literature", The Guardian.


 * Every society has its own stories – old stories, but very importantly, new stories too, that give identity to the self and explain that particular world. If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous.
 * Grace, From the Centre: A writer's life (2021), extract in "'I never found myself in a book': Patricia Grace on the importance of Māori literature", The Guardian.


 * I was okay about being Māori. I was okay about being brown, because this had been reinforced positively by my parents and their families. But I always had it in the back of mind, these people don't understand. They don't know. Along with that there was often the assumption that I wasn't clean, I wasn't clever, you know. These were the things that hurt me.
 * Author interview on Radio New Zealand, 11 May 2021.
 * Grace speaking about her experiences of racism as a child.


 * I had always loved writing, but I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers.
 * Author interview on Radio New Zealand, 11 May 2021.


 * The days before my wedding were full and busy ones but more so for my mother than for any of us. It was summer, with the sun skidding day after day across a flawless ice-blue sky, taking with it all moisture from creeks and pastures, draining the hills and gullies to a sleek ivory. It was the nearest we would get to a white Christmas in these parts.
 * Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps (1978), first lines


 * The city was a great loom weaving its tangles and tufts of people into haphazard multicoloured fabric.
 * Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps (1978), chapter 17


 * Autumn bends the lights of summer and spreads evening skies with reds and golds. These colours are taken up by falling leaves which jiggle at the fingertips of small-handed winds.
 * "Valley" short story collected in Waiariki (1975)

Interview (2021)

 * Though I had always liked books, any books, any written-down words or expressions, the ones I read as a child were always exotic. I never found myself in a book.


 * In many stories blackness was equated with evil: devils, witches’ clothes, unlucky cats, bad wolves. New Zealand history was told from a Eurocentric point of view, if it was told at all.


 * At the time I gave the paper (1987), New Zealand history was still being evaluated from a Eurocentric viewpoint. It generally glorified the European settler experience and by doing so negated the Māori experience and settlement of Aotearoa. A look at some of the vocabulary in use could be taken as a quick example. Take “pioneer” and “settler”. These referred to British pioneers and settlers. The ancestors of the Māori children sitting in our classrooms were referred to in many less complimentary terms. They were savage barbarians, hostile, cunning. Warlike. Yet the British with all their guns and armoury, sweeping in on many indigenous areas of the world, were never referred to as warlike. In those times, the wars between Māori and Pākehā were still being referred to as “Māori Wars”. A British fighting force was an army. A Māori fighting force was a war party (a term still in use). British fighters were soldiers or colonial forces. Māori fighters were rebels and raiders and warriors (again, still in use). A successful battle by the colonial forces was a victory, by a Māori fighting force a massacre.


 * If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous. If there are books and stories about you but they are ones belonging only to the past, it is as though you do not belong in present society. That is dangerous. If there are books about you but they are negative, demeaning, insensitive and untrue, that is dangerous. Multiply this by what appears on television, in advertising, teacher attitudes, health services, questionnaires, testing and examinations and in many areas of society, maybe we shouldn’t wonder at the low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and therefore the disengagement of many Māori children with education.

Interview (2016)

 * in the early days I didn’t know what real creative writing was. I thought it was just imitating what had been read. I don’t know – trying to write a new Conan Doyle-type mystery, cobblestone streets, or something like that. That was until I came across writing by New Zealand writers, which was very late – after I’d left secondary school. I started to hear the New Zealand voice in literature and to understand that real writing is writing that comes from your self – your dreams, imaginings, emotions, dreads, desires, perceptions – what you know. Part of what you know comes from the research that you do. Those early influences were people like Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield. I started to experience the New Zealand settings, hear the New Zealand voice in what I was reading for the first time, and then when I came across the writing of Amelia Batistich, a New Zealander of Dalmatian origins, I thought well, this is a different New Zealand voice. It started to click with me that I might have my own voice too. The penny dropped rather late for me. As well as Batistich there were all the Maurices [Gee, Shadbolt, Duggan], as well as writers like Dan Davin, Robin Hyde, Ruth Park, Ian Cross, Marilyn Duckworth, Janet Frame. All added to my enlightenment and to the realisation that I would have a voice of my own. I knew also that there were people who I could write about, or characters I could invent, based on people I knew, who hadn’t really been written about before. There were stories about them, but not written ones.


 * I think the time was just right for myself and for people like Witi Ihimaera and Hone Tuwhare. The real pioneers were JC Sturm, Rowley Habib, Arapera Blank, Rose Denness and Mason Durie and those writers I had started to see published in the journal of the Māori Affairs Department, Te Ao Hou.


 * I have a confidence now that I didn’t have in the early days, when I’d sometimes think ‘This is too terrible. I’m never going to be able to do this.’ I never feel like that now. I know there’s always going to be a way, or that you can just chuck something out if it’s too annoying. That’s a solution as well.


 * I wasn’t a very talkative child and I’m not a greatly talkative adult even, but I do enjoy listening to people, and language and how it’s used. It becomes part of my own store.


 * That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters.


 * what was the best part of writing. The main thing for me is characters. I don’t really worry about anything else. I don’t think about the storyline too much actually – just the characters and what might happen to them because of who they are and where they are and who they interact with. The settings, the stories, the themes and the voices and everything else, the inter- relationships – all belong to the characters. So if you keep true to those characters and how they might develop because of who they are and who they have around them and, to a degree, what happens to them, then the story will unfold. I’ve learned to have faith that something will come out.


 * People need to inhabit the work. I’ve always been interested in writing about those interrelationships – especially the intergenerational ones. It’s a matter of finding ways of doing that which enable different characters to have clear identity. Storytelling is one way I’ve found very useful – having different characters telling about the same things, each one bringing a new aspect and further enlightenment to the accounting.


 * I don’t have a sense, when I begin a new work, of standing at the beginning of a long road and looking along it to an end. Instead I have a sense of sitting in the middle of something – like sitting in the centre of a set of circles or a spiral – and reaching out to these outer circles, in any direction, and bringing stuff in. That’s what makes it all closer to me, being in the centre and having all I need within reach around me and piecing it together. So there I am, at the core, with my core idea – the few sentences about the Japanese man – thinking about what I need to bring this character to life and to shift him from A to B.


 * When Potiki first came out there was quite a bit of criticism of it. One of the reasons was because of the use of Māori terms and passages in the book; the other was that some people thought I was trying to stir up racial unrest. The book was described as political. I suppose it was but I didn’t realise it. The land issues and language issues were what Māori people lived with every day and still do. It was just everyday life to us, and the ordinary lives of ordinary people was what I wanted to write about, so I didn’t expect the angry reaction from some quarters. But there was one deliberate political act, and that was not to have a glossary for Maori text or to use italics. A glossary and italics were what were used for foreign languages, and I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language in its own country.


 * Learning about each other is not as one-sided as it used to be.


 * I’ve always loved the short story form. Short stories are like little gems that you can keep polishing and polishing in your aim for perfection.

Interview (1999)

 * The more I look into these matters the more I think that what happened to the baby happened for the same reason that land is taken, or cultural items, or indigenous knowledge. It's a new area of colonisation.


 * Why is it that one set of stories is called "mythology", and another set of stories is called "the truth"?


 * When I get really stuck I want to get back to nothing, to nothing at all, so that I can allow 'something' to come. It's a clearing.... For me te kore is part of the process of writing, of searching, of starting out with nothing and making something of it.


 * ("have you ever thought of yourself as a member of a corpus of post-colonial writers?") I try to keep away from that sort of vocabulary and theorising. I'm aware of my work being classified, but don't want to be influenced in any way by those classifications — or by reviews or analyses. I need to keep myself as free as I can from commentary. I have to judge my own work for myself, do things my own way, make my own choices and decisions. I must own what I do. Once a work has been published it's been given. It's gone.


 * I'm not against research of any sort. I fully understand the importance of research. But I'm against theft. I'm against appropriation — where those who are powerful use their power to take from those who have less power, and then rationalise this by saying that what they are doing is for the greater good; or that those less powerful people will benefit. They never do. It's about sovereignty. There is nothing wrong with one group giving to another because they have absolute understanding of all aspects of what is going on and want it equally as much for the same reasons. It needs to be a giving, not a taking. And research needs to be done primarily to benefit those about whom research is being done — who need to have the say, the power, the knowledge, the 'sovereignty' regarding the project.


 * my books are a giving — the first act in communication. Once the book is out there I've done my bit. It's gone. Anything that happens to the book after that is out of my hands, and I've consented to that. Whatever way the book is taken up afterwards is all to do with the next stage of the communication. Reading, reviewing, study, dissection, and commentary are all the business and work of other people — they're all part of discussion. It may all be part of promotion and distribution as well. In other words, if the book is well received then that is encouraging to me. I benefit. I put the book out there to be read and discussed — but if I put it out there and it heads for oblivion, so be it.


 * To me, 'sovereignty ' means having authority over one's own life and culture. It is a right and something that should not have to be fought for. Terms such as 'self-determination' are not high enough, not good enough terms for this


 * 'Decolonisation' is what needs to happen in the minds and understandings of everyone, including Maori, so that issues can be properly addressed and equity brought about. There can't be equality, no matter how many catch-up policies are instigated, until the issues of racism and decolonisation are addressed.

Potiki (1986)
page numbers to 1995 University of Hawai'i Press edition


 * There was once a carver who spent a lifetime with wood, seeking out and exposing the figures that were hidden there. These eccentric or brave, dour, whimsical, crafty, beguiling, tormenting, tormented or loving figures developed first in the forests, in the tree wombs, but depended on the master with his karakia and his tools, his mind and his heart, his breath and his strangeness to bring them to other birth. The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree - a tree that may have spent further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier. Or further time could have been spent floating on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun. It is as though a child brings about the birth of a parent because that which comes from under the master's hand is older than he is, is already ancient. (beginning of Prologue)


 * The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)


 * Only [he] could secure me, he being as rooted to the earth as a tree is. Only he could free me from raging forever between earth and sky - which is a predicament of great loneliness and loss. (Roimata, chapter 3 p23)


 * I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering, from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But before life and death and remembering' is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being. It was a new realisation that the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named 'past' and 'future' only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. So the 'now' is a giving and a receiving between the inner and the outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories. (Roimata, chapter 5 p39)


 * although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined. (Roimata, chapter 5 p41)


 * 'Nothing wrong with money as long as we remember it's food not God. You eat it, not worship it...' (chapter 13 p94)


 * We could not afford books so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in book It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives. But our main book was the wharenui which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a conga. And we are part of that book along with family past and family yet to come. The land and the sea and the shores are a book too, and we found ourselves there. They were our science and our sustenance. And they are our own universe about which there are stories of great deeds and relationships and mage and imaginings, love and terror, heroes heroines, villas and fools. Enough for a lifetime of selling. (Roimata, ch23 p104)


 * The stories had changed. It was as [he] had said, the stories had changed. And our lives had changed. We were living under the machines, and under a changing landscape, which can change you, shift the insides of you. (Roimata, ch23 p151)


 * She did not agree with our acceptance of a situation, which was not a deep-down acceptance, but only a waiting one. She saw the strength of a bending branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike. (Roimata, chapter 23 p152)


 * The hills did not belong to us any more. At the same time we could not help but remember that land does not belong to people, but that people belong to the land. We could not forget that it was land who, in the beginning, held the secret, who contained our very beginnings within herself. It was land that held the seed and who kept the root hidden for a time when it would be needed. We turned our eyes away from what was happening to the hills and looked to the soil and to the sea. (Roimata, chapter 16 p110)


 * Everything we need is here, but for some years we had had little contact with other people as we struggled for our lives and our land. It was good now to know new people and to feel their strength. It was good to have new skills and new ideas, and to listen to all the new stories told by all the people who came. It was good to have others to tell our own stories to, and to have them there sharing our land and our lives. Good had followed what was not good, on the circle of our days. (Toko, chapter 21 p145)


 * ...gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still. (Roimata, chapter 25 p159)


 * ...the scars will heal as growth returns, because the forest is there always, coiled in the body of the land. (Roimata, chapter 26 p169)


 * She told of gifts that she'd been given, and how gifts once given cannot be taken away and do not change. Gifts did not change even though there could be a shifting in the self caused by pain. (The Stories, chapter 28 p174)


 * "People are strength too. Care for people and you are cared for, give strength to people and you are strong. It's land and people that are a person's self, and to give to the land and to give to the people is the best taonga of all. Giving is strength. We've always known it..." (The Stories, chapter 28 p176)


 * The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathways. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky. And the pathways and the songs went into a time beyond the thumbing down of the eyelids. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)


 * ...the telling was not complete. As the people slept there was one more story to be told, a story not of a beginning or an end, but marking only a position on the spiral. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)

Quotes about Grace

 * Patricia Grace's writing is as delicate as Japanese brushwork, yet as poignant and throat-aching as the loss of a loved one.
 * Arapera Blank, included as blurb to Politiki


 * Grace's stories make a shining and enduring place formed of the brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling and contained within the shape of contemporary Western forms. We are welcomed in, and when we get up to leave, we have been well fed, we have made friends and family, and we are bound to understanding and knowledge of one another.
 * Joy Harjo, who nominated Grace for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2008; "In Honor of Patricia Grace", World Literature Today, (May/June 2009).


 * When I began to write in the 1970s there were three women I considered my elders: Katerina Mataira, Arapera Blank and Jacquie Sturm. They were like spinners working on a loom and their great triumph, together with that of Hone Tuwhare and Patricia Grace, was to begin spinning the tradition from which all contemporary Maori writers come.
 * Witi Ihimaera "Spinner of Maori tradition" (11 Aug, 2002)