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Patricia Grace (b. 1937, also known as Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Ati Awa) |
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New Zealand writer of novels, short-stories, and children's books, a story teller with a distinct Maori voice. With Waiariki (1975) Patricia Grace became the first Maori woman to publish a collection of stories in English. Major themes in her work are the conflict between modern and traditional values, relationships in an extended family, and the implications of cultural colonization. Often Grace's stories are set in small communities and bring together Maori folklore and mythology and Christian myths. "There is one more story to tell which I tell while the house sleeps. And yet the house does not sleep as the eyes of the green and indigo brighten the edges of the world. There is one more story to tell but it is a retelling. I tell it to the people and the house. I tell it from the wall, from where yesterday and tomorrow are as now." (Potiki by Patricia Grace, Auckland, N.Z.; New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 181) Patricia
Grace was born Patricia Gunson in
Newtown, Wellington. Grace's Maori father was of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti
Raukawa and Te Āti Awa descent. He was at the rugby when Grace's mother
was giving birth to her. It was normal practice that fathers were
not allowed in the delivery room. Grace's maternal grandmother was born
in New
Zealand of Irish parents. In her childhood Grace spent holidays with her father's whanau (family) on their ancestral land in Plimmerton, learning their customs and spiritual heritage. However, they did not speak Maori in the whanau. Grace has always identified herself as a Maori, but she writes in English, added with Maori words, phrases, and rhythms, enlarging the boundaries of standard Pakeha language (defining a person of non-Maori descent, especially someone whose family originally came from Europe). Some critics have found her language unconvincing (partly due to the fact that she didn't speak Maori); there was even an attempt to translate a passage from her short story into "proper English". As a child, Grace was a keen reader. Being the only Maori girl, Grace felt quite isolated at
primary school. Moreover, teachers had low expectations of
her intellectual abilities. After attending Roman Catholic schools, she
entered Wellington Teachers' Training College, and continued her
studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. At school she had
read some of Katherine Mansfield's (1888-1923) stories, but could not
identify herself with the world of her fiction. The first
great literary impact on her was Frank Sargeson's
(1903-1982) short stories. Initially Grace had no plans of pursuing
a career in literature, although she enjoyed writing and joined in her
mid-twenties a woman's writing group that was based in Auckland. Grace moved with her husband Kerehi Waiariki
Grace (Dick), to the North Island, where they taught in remote schools. While raising her seven children, she began
to contribute short stories to journals and magazines, including the
bilingual quarterly Te Ao Hou, published by the Maori Affairs
Department. (She wrote with a pencil, 2 B lead, and then typed up the notes. It was not until working on Potiki, when she started to use a computer.) In her early stories Grace drew mainly from her
childhood memories and her own past. Waiariki, which collected
Grace's early pieces, won the PEN/Hubert Church Award for Best First
Book of Fiction. It remains one of the landmarks of Maori literature,
in which book-form publications did not appear until the 1970s. Mutuwhenua
(1978), Grace's first a novel, dealt
with
the Maori-European relations through the experience of a young Maori
woman, Ripeka, who marries an European schoolteacher, Graeme. However,
the focus is not on the confrontation between races but on Ripeka's
sense of displacement in an urban environment. "Nowhere is the force or
even the relevance of her work so weakened by her earnest avoidance of
giving offense as in Mutuwhenua." ('The Fiction of Patricia Grace' by John B. Beston, Ariel, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1984) Like it is the case with
the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, Grace has published works that feature
youthful protagonists but which are not necessarily meant for young
readers. The Kuia and the
Spider / Te Kuia me te Pungawerewere (1981),
the winner of the
Children's Picture Book of the Year award, began Grace's collaboration
with the artist Robyn Kahukiwa, one of New Zealand's foremost women
artists. After working as a teacher for nearly twenty years,
Grace
became a full-time writer. In 1985 she obtained the Writing Fellowship
at the University of Victoria in Wellington. With The Dream Sleepers (1980), a collection of short
stories, her work took a more political
turn. This work expressed the growing rise of Maori
conciousness. In his review of the book, David Norton criticized Grace
for writing with "minimal punctuation. Particularly in some of the
earlier stories there is so little that reading is almost as difficult
as making out a troublesome handwriting". ('Patricia Grace' by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure, in A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English,
edited by Erin Fallon, R.C. Feddersen, James Kurtzleben, Maurice A. Lee
and Susan Rochette-Crawley, New York; London: Routledge, 2001, p. 191) For
Grace, writing in the colonizer's language has never been something of
a matter-of-fact. Chidi Okonkwo has noted that many Western critics
responded with hostility to
decolonization writers' linguistic experiments. "Compelled by history
to write in the colonizer's language, they seek to transform it from a
hegemonic instrument into an agency of self-empowerment and identity
reintegration." (Decolonization Agonistics in Postcolonial Fiction by Chidi Okonkwo, London: Macmillan, 1999, p. 88) Grace has said
that "[t]here are characters who haven't been written about, there's
language that hasn't been used in writing, customs that haven't been
exposed. . . . We have our own particular culture to draw from, but we
have our own "world culture" as well. We can take what we want from the
colonizing culture too, because we're part of it." ('An Interview with Patricia Grace' by Vilsoni Hereniko, in The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 1998)
That what she has in common with decolonization writers is to challenge
the boundaries of language in
order to convey her own special cultural experience and emotion. "It is
your job, this. To show others [Pákehá] who we are," says Grandpa
Hohepa to his granddaughter in the short story 'Parade'. (Waiariki and Other Stories by Patricia Grace, Auckland, N.Z.: Penguin Books, 1975) Potiki (1986), Grace's second novel, won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the 1994 Literaturpreis in Frankfurt, Germany. Written from various viewpoints, it told about a small community defending maoritanga against entrepreneurs. The novel contained a high amount of untranslated Maori expressions, "of people fighting to hold onto a language that was in danger of being lost". (Ibid., p. 60) Some parents tried to get the book banned from the school that their children were attenting. By the late 1990s, Grace's works had been translated into Russian, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Dutch, and Finnish. Grace's style is lyrical but often sparse; there is a
sense of timelessness in her work. The utterances of her narrators
resemble the structures of whaikorero (communal
speechmaking). Many of her stories engage with social
injustice; she has dealt with feminist issues, the historical
aspects of the change in Maori culture, and contemporary problems as in Cousins (1992), which focuses on the experience of three cousins, Mata, Makareta and Missy. "I also feel very comfortable when I am writing about women," Grace has
said, "especially when I am writing about strong Maori
women characters. I come from a culture where women are strong."('An Interview with Patricia Grace' by Paloma Fresno Calleja and Patricia Grace, Atlantis, Vol. 25, No. 1, June 2003) Differing from her earlies collections of short stories, Electric City and Other Stories (1987) do not mix poetry and prose, and Maori words are used more limitedly. Waiariki, Mutuwhenua, and The Dream Sleepers included even glossaries. Tu
(2004), its title referring to the Maori god of war, partly
drew on the experiences of Grace's father who fought in the Maori
Batallion during World War II. In addition to novels, short stories, and film
scripts, Grace has published picture books, Maori language readers
for children, and her autobiography, From the Centre: A Writer's Life (2021). Maraea and the Albatross (2008), a children's
book, was illustrated by her brother, Brian Gunson. A film adaptation of her novel Cousins, directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, her daughter-in-law, premiered in March 2001. Patricia Grace's numerous awards include the Queen's Service Order in 1988, the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for Fiction, the 2006 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement in fiction, the Distinguished Companion of The New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2008. In 1989 she was made an Honorary Doctor of Literature by Victoria University of Wellington and in 2016 World Indigenous Nations University (WINU) awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. She also has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. Patricia Grace has lived for decades in Hongoeka Bay, the ancestral land of her extended family; everyone living there is either related to Grace or is married to a relative of her. Kerehi Waiariki Grace, whobecame a children's author, died in 2013. For further reading: 'Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace' by B. Pearson, in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story, ed. Cherry Hankin (1982); 'The Fiction of Patricia Grace' by John B. Beston, Ariel, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1984); Turning the Eye: Patricia Grace and the Short Story by Judith Dell Panny (1997); Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction by Otto Heim (1998); 'The Wider Family: Patricia Grace interviewed' by Paola Della Valle, in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 42, No. 1, 131-141 (2007); 'My Mother was the Earth, My Father Was the Sky': Myth and Memory in Maori Novels in English by Nadia Majid (2010); From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature by Paola Della Valle (2010); The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction by Doreen D'Cruz and John C. Ross (2011); The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte (2017); 'Patricia Grace,' in The Writing Life: Twelve New Zealand Authors by Deborah Shepard; photographs by John McDermott (2018); Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka (2019); 'Patricia Grace,' in Te Kai a te Rangatira: Leadership from the Māori World, editors Rawiri J. Tapiata, Renee Smith & Marcus Akuhata-Brown (2020); A Kind of Shelter = Whakaruru-taha, edited by Witi Ihimaera & Michelle Levy (2023) Selected works:
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