Dislocations in a True Landscape

I am used to dislocations. I have more than one running right through me. Dislocation is in some ways an image of the country I grew up in, even if we agree to call it diversity. If dislocation wasn't the source of my sense of things not matching up, of them rushing together and immediately beginning to fall apart, it is to some extent the mirror of them.

New Zealand, the country which is in every meaningful way my home, is a country in the Pacific Ocean but my family were European not Polynesian, and consciously and unconsciously regarded European, and more specifically British, culture as the highest form of civilisation in the world. The result was a big imaginative displacement, for, though there were a few children's books written in and about New Zealand when I was a child, the majority of stories, including those that inexorably fixed me, came largely from Britain with a few, a very few, from the USA.

Coming in from swimming on Christmas Day I would sit with my page 11 sunhat on, reading stories of snow and robins and holly, and though I have never once spent a Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere, those things are now part of my Christmas nostalgia. The imaginative truth and the factual truth may be at odds with each other but personally I still need those opposites to make Christmas come alive for me ... the sunny sea in front of me and the simultaneous awareness of short days, long cold nights and snow of dark bare branches.

But containing and synthesising such contradictions is easy for an imagination nourished on stories in which so much becomes possible. I did indeed grow up with a fault line running through me, but that is a very New Zealand feature when you consider that it is a country of earthquakes and volcanoes. A fault line ran right through the town I was born in so perhaps my disjunction is part of what makes an essential New Zealander of me after all—perhaps the country has imposed its own unstable geography on my power to perceive. I don't mind. I regret it only in the sense that one always regrets not being able to be everything all at once. Dislocations can expose the secret nature of the land. They can make for an intensely interesting landscape, provided one does not come to feel that a landscape full of fault lines is the only legitimate kind. Dislocations made me a world reader rather than a local one: they made me contingent rather than categorical.

New Zealand at the present is celebrating in a small way the development of a more indigenous children's fiction than at any time previously. Having at last got a foothold in the imagination of its writers, New Zealand is now an. innate part of most of its indigenous children's books, which are increasingly free of unnaturally deliberate reference, of the self-consciousness that marked the first attempts to have I am a New Zealander writing about New Zealand as a sort of subtext. There is a certain relieved mood of congratulation within the writing community, and a lot of talk, some of it meretricious I think, about 'relevance'.

I think it is most important that a local literature should exist, so that the imaginations of children are colonised in the first instance by images from their immediate world. I am not in favour of dislocation for the sake of dislocation. But I am curious too about why I should have become such an enthusiastic reader myself when so little of what was immediately relevant was offered to me, and why, later on the rare occasions when I did encounter books presenting my own street and my own idiom, I tended to pass them over in favour of exotic alternatives. Why was it that what seemed truest to page 12 me had nothing to do with the facts and images of my everyday life, which, mistakenly enough, I came to regard as inadequate stuff for a story?