White Lies

WRITING THE NOVELLAS

I was my mother Julia’s first child. I was premature, a sickly baby with chronic breathing problems. According to her, the Pakeha obstetrician who delivered me didn’t think I would live beyond my first year.

This was in the early 1940s, and on her release from Gisborne maternity hospital my mother consulted her doctor, a kindly man named Dr Bowker, and when my breathing problems continued, took me to other Pakeha doctors without telling him. There was a certain amount of desperation about this: she always used to say to me, ‘I held you in my arms’, as if that explained everything.

My breathing problems continued into my third year. My mother bore a daughter, Kararaina, and then a son, Thomas, who died of a hole in the heart. I think this spurred her to finally turn to her own Maori community of faith healers, including a well-known tohunga, a Ringatu priest known as Hori Gage.

My mother always liked to be formally dressed whenever she went to see important people in the community, so she put on a dark blue suit, stockings, gloves and a hat and drove me to Mangatu, I think it was, where Hori Gage was said to be visiting. However, when she arrived she was told that he had already left to return to his own ancestral lands near Whakatane. She sank to her knees, cradling me in her arms. He had been her final hope.

I know all this because survival narratives are always central to any family, and my mother told them to me to try to instil in me the value of life. Although I was the eldest, compared with my brothers and sisters, I was the sickly runt of the bunch; I still am. And, of course, my mother had already lost Thomas and didn’t want to lose another son. I was prone to all the ills and sicknesses of the world, and the stories of my survival were dispensed with all the cod liver oil, malt and other less mentionable concoctions and therapies with which my mother plagued me with as a boy. My siblings did not think of this as special treatment; I made them look good.

Much later, it was intimated to me by another Maori seer that I would not live beyond the age of thirty, which seemed to affirm the doom and gloom with which my early life was surrounded. Of course I am over double that age now, so every year since I have considered a bonus.

My father’s approach to my sickliness was much more practical, if wrong. He has always been robust, refusing to believe in mollycoddling and instead favouring fresh air, open windows, cold baths and the like; when I grew older and still had various ailments he liked to threaten me with a health camp. I was therefore putty in his hands when he applied his own remedies to get me well, including one that was popular among Maori in those days: dabbing benzine on a cloth and getting me to inhale it. It’s a wonder I didn’t turn into a petrolhead.

So there she was, my mother, on her knees in the mud at Mangatu when she felt a gentle tap on her shoulders. ‘You should take your son to the medicine woman,’ a voice told her.

‘My informant was referring to a lady known as Paraiti,’ my mother told me, ‘or Blightface, because she had a red birthmark over the left half of her cheek running all the way from the hairline to the neck. Like Hori Gage, she was a Ringatu and a follower of the prophet Te Kooti’s spiritual ways.’

My mother therefore took this suggestion on its merits and straight away got up, bundled me into my blankets and drove the short way from Mangatu to Whatatutu, where Paraiti was going about her work. Among the stories of babyhood, this was the one that I could imagine fully: stars wheeling above, my anxious white-faced mother speeding down dusty roads looking for a scarred witch doctor, a crying baby in swaddling clothes — you know the sort of thing.

Where was my father? I don’t know; he never figured in the narrative.

This must have been around 1946, and the work of such women (and men) was illegal and frowned upon; I understood that Paraiti had been jailed a few times and she practised in a clandestine fashion. When my mother finally found her and delivered me to her for inspection, was Paraiti welcoming? No. First she intimidated my mother with her scar, and then scolded her by saying, ‘You should have come straight to me instead of going to Pakeha doctors. Why do you think I will be successful when they haven’t been?’

Paraiti must have been in her late seventies by then. She was a girl during the Land Wars and had lived through the flu epidemic of 1918. She had seen many changes as New Zealand became colonised. Grumpy though she was, she looked at me, said she would treat me and, from what Mum told me, for the next week kept me in a makeshift tent filled with herb-infused steam. Every now and then she trickled manuka honey down my throat.

‘Some days later,’ my mother told me, ‘Paraiti began to karakia, to pray, and, as she did so, she hooked a finger into your throat and pulled out threads of phlegm.’

It is from this childhood survival story that I wrote White Lies, which was originally published as Medicine Woman in my 2007 collection, Ask the Posts of the House. In fact I had toyed with calling that collection ‘Medicine Woman’, but, at the last moment, chose the other title because it appeared to have more potency and gravitas.

Now comes the film directed by Mexican director Dana Rotberg. It will be the third feature film to be made from my work after Whale Rider in 2002 and Nights in the Gardens of Spain in 2010. (Known as Kawa for its American release in 2011, the latter film won a prestigious National Geographic indigenous award and was released in Germany with subtitles in 2012.) In both the novella of Medicine Woman and film of White Lies the name of Paraiti has been kept for the main character.

And, of course, there is a sequence in the film in which a young boy has manuka honey trickled down his throat so that he can breathe.

I have tried to recreate Paraiti’s late nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century world in the first half of the narrative, which follows her travels with horse, mule and dog throughout the wilderness tribal lands of my childhood. Most New Zealanders will know the historical context that I refer to, involving the prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi and his followers — the Ringatu. Surely the settler country feared Te Kooti. During the early days of the Land Wars between the two races, they had wrongly imprisoned him, in 1866, on the Chatham Islands, seven days’ sail from New Zealand. He was incarcerated for two long years, but during his time there the spirit of God visited him and inspired him to create a religion, the Ringatu, and to lead the Maori people out of bondage, just as Moses had done when he defied Pharaoh and led the Israelites out of Egypt. Te Kooti and his fledgling followers escaped from the Chathams by boat, and when they landed back in Aotearoa the Pakeha militia pursued them relentlessly. In retaliation, in November 1868, Te Kooti led an attack on the military garrison at Matawhero. It was an act of war and from then on the prophet and his followers were marked; a ransom was placed on Te Kooti’s head. For ten years he evaded capture, moving swiftly from one kainga to another, always supported by his followers.

White Lies begins during these years. In it I have tried to document the world of the itinerant Maori healer, piecing it together from my own childhood experiences, local Ringatu and other informants and the scarce mentions in historic documents and other sources. My thanks to my dear mentor Maaka Jones — herself a Ringatu tohunga and versed in Maori medicine — and family and local Waituhi informants for oral stories about Paraiti and medicine women of her kind. My father, Te Haa o Ruhia, was the one who told me about traditional Maori massage and how his shoulder was set right simply by massaging the bones together; the account of Paraiti massaging her father with her loving hands at his death also comes from him. Thanks to the authors of the following books: Judith Binney’s Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (Auckland University Press, 1995); Murdoch Riley and Brian Enting’s indispensable Maori Healing and Herbal Medicines (Viking Sevenseas, 1994); and Roger Neich’s Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting (Auckland University Press, 1993). Any errors of fact are mine. I am not an expert on the Ringatu or, particularly, on traditional healing and medicine, and I apologise for any inaccuracies. Thanks also to the Manukau Institute of Technology, the Arts Foundation of New Zealand and Creative New Zealand for research and funding assistance during the period I wrote the novella printed in this edition.

However, when I was writing the novella I realised that the fictional Paraiti needed a moral dilemma, something that would challenge her purpose and her thinking: a confrontation with all that she values and believes.

In the second part of her story, therefore, I introduced a character named Rebecca Vickers, a young Pakeha society woman in her twenties, who asks Paraiti for an abortion. But Mrs Vickers and her maidservant, Maraea, in her fifties and a Maori, are not what they seem to be. In particular, Mrs Vickers has a lot at stake: if the baby is born, and if it is of dark complexion, people will realise that she is Maori.

This is where I have interpolated the story of actress Merle Oberon. It provides the heart of darkness for Medicine Woman and White Lies.

I have been fascinated by Merle Oberon ever since reading Merle: A Biography of Merle Oberon by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley (New English Library, 1983). All her life she lived a lie. She told the press that she had been born in Hobart, Tasmania. In 1965, she found herself in Sydney when she accompanied her then husband Bruno Pagliai, one of the richest men in Latin America, on an inaugural Aeronaves de Mexico flight to Australia. Invited to attend a banquet in her honour at Government House in Hobart, she first accepted, then fainted and cancelled; she was in Australia for only seventy-two hours.

Why the deception? Well, Merle Oberon had a lot to hide. She was, after all, one of the most beautiful women of her generation, a famous film actress with a fabulous almond-shaped face and slanting eyes set in a flawlesss white complexion. In a film career that lasted from 1930 to 1973, her electrifying beauty was highlighted in over fifty British, French, American and Mexican films, including playing Anne Boleyn to Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939), George Sand to Cornel Wilde’s Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945) and the Empress Josephine to Marlon Brando’s Napoleon in Desirée (1954). People thought she had discovered the fountain of youth because as she grew older she seemed to become more beautiful.

Merle Oberon achieved much more than a film career. In a life characterised by steely determination, sexual charisma and force of will, she moved in the international jet set, becoming one of the leading hostesses for her multi-millionaire husband, lavishly entertaining princes and presidents at their sumptuous home in Mexico. Higham and Moseley are of the view that she dominated not only Hollywood but the society of her generation.

All this, and yet she was the second daughter of a Eurasian girl, born on 19 February 1911 not in Tasmania, Australia, but in Bombay, India.

This was the description of Merle Oberon’s mother in Higham and Moseley’s book that took my attention: ‘Her name is Charlotte Constance Selby … She is a Christian girl, part Irish, part Singhalese, with Maori strains in her blood …’ The future actress was christened Estelle Merle. Her father was Arthur O’Brien Thompson, and the name Merle Oberon was fashioned out of her second Christian name and her father’s first surname.

When Merle Oberon became famous, her mother, father and her elder sister conspired to keep the truth of her Eurasian origins from the public. According to Higham and Moseley, cinematographers found ways of filming her so that her naturally dark skin and looks would be obscured. One such was the famed Gregg Toland, cameraman for Citizen Kane, who poured the whitest and most blazing arc lights directly into her face, making her look almost transparently fair and removing any hint of her Indian skin texture.

Merle Oberon’s mother, Charlotte, in fact lived with her daughter in Britain and the United States, and the biography relates this incident from the 1930s, told by actress Diana Napier (p. 28): ‘One afternoon I was having tea with Merle at her flat near Baker Street when for the first time I saw this little, plump Indian woman come into the room dressed in a sari. She stood nervous, hesitantly, as though waiting for orders. Merle was extremely embarrassed. She spoke to her mother in Hindustani. The lady hardly said anything at all. She was very, very quiet.’

Charlotte Constance Selby died with her daughter at her bedside on 28 April 1937. Very few people knew that the Indian woman, called by Merle Oberon her ayah or nanny, had been her mother. Neither woman had ever shown any sign of family affection. To have done so would have destroyed Merle Oberon’s ‘English rose’ reputation at a time when women of colour faced harrowing prejudice and racism. In the British film industry, such a woman would never have made it to the front rank of actors — and would not have survived the furore if the truth had become known.

Soon after her mother’s death, so Higham and Moseley tell us, Merle Oberon had a portrait painted of an unknown woman, with brown hair, blue eyes and white skin, dressed in a period costume of some twenty years earlier. The painting always hung in her homes from then on, and, when asked who the woman was, Merle Oberon always said she was her mother.

And so, in the second part of the novella and film, Paraiti is involved in a battle of wills with Rebecca Vickers, whose life parallels that of Merle Oberon: as a Maori passing as Pakeha, she, too, has much at stake.

The battle is over the life of an unborn child: how will Paraiti be able to save the child and not kill it? It is also, of course, over whose history will succeed, identity, race, skin colour and the choices many men and women of ethnicity faced when trying to survive within European society before it rebalanced itself.

There are now two versions of the novella Medicine Woman, which, together with the White Lies screenplay, make three versions of the same story. The following first version of the novella was first published in Ask the Posts of the House (2007), and this is the version on which Dana Rotberg based her White Lies adaptation. The second, expanded and altered version, is published for the first time at the beginning of this movie tie-in.

Those who know my work will understand why: I have a habit of rewriting; for instance, there are two versions of Pounamu, Pounamu (1972 and 2002), two versions of Tangi (1973 and the second substantially revised combined with a sequel called The Rope of Man, 2005), two versions of Whanau (Whanau 1974 and Whanau II, 2003), two versions of The Matriarch (1986 and its major revision 2009), retouching of various versions of The Whale Rider and multiple published versions of some of my short stories.

My last novel, The Parihaka Woman (2011), actually began life as Erenora, an unpublished rock opera libretto, before becoming a novella originally intended for inclusion in The Thrill of Falling, but it grew into a complete novel instead.

The reason?

Well, I have always believed that a fictional piece of work exists in a continuum. It is not static. Stories rarely leave you alone, they sit like backseat drivers in the recesses of your mind, nagging to come back into the driving seat again. Indeed, my publisher Harriet Allan said to me, ‘Witi, you must have a busload of bossy characters at the back of your bus!’ There’s more: they also nag at me, ‘Pay further attention to who we really are and the landscape that you are driving us through.’ And so in most cases I have added historical context or political inflections or sub-textual resonances.

In the case of Medicine Woman there was another reason. This was that from the beginning the novella was always the first part of a two-part story: Medicine Woman and Paraiti’s Daughter. I still have to write the sequel, but its rewrite was evolving in my head at the same time Dana was writing her screenplay adaptation. I like to think that it is a more complex work, and certainly it provides a richer and more substantial — and longer — experience for the reader.

I’m not going to point out the differences between my original Medicine Woman and this current rendition — they will be apparent when you read them — except to say that two characters have a greater part to play in the expanded version: Ihaka the woodsman and the anonymous gardener; this is because they serve a larger function in the sequel. They were also demanding their own stories in the future. My editor Anna Rogers and Harriet, too, also required me with their excellent questions to audit the original and add detail that they felt was missing in it. All this was done without recourse to Dana’s screenplay.

I should also point out that there are now three variations on the ending. In the original novella in Ask the Posts of the House, it is Rebecca Vickers who throws the baby into the river. However, in Dana’s White Lies screenplay, Rebecca commits suicide, which caused me a dilemma as far as writing any sequel was concerned. This is why I was pushed to make Maraea, and not Rebecca Vickers, the one who takes the baby down to the bridge before sunrise. As it happens, this change has brought Maraea out of the shadows, makes us focus on her motivations — and prepares us for her greater participation in the sequel.

I like to think that the reader and viewer of Dana’s film now have the opportunity to choose which ending they prefer. For fledgling writers and filmmakers, the three endings show the different direction ideas can be taken by different artists, filmmakers, publishers and editors working in different media.

They show that the capacity of the artistic imagination is limitless.

Thanks to my friend and colleague John Barnett, whose production company made Whale Rider and who introduced Dana Rotberg to me. Most people won’t know that it took twelve years to bring Whale Rider, directed by Niki Caro, from novel to screen. John introduced me to Niki, too; she is one of my favourite people. The most successful New Zealand stories that appear on film and television in this country are due to his tenacity; I am humbled and grateful that South Pacific Pictures have produced White Lies — Tuakiri Huna.

Thank you also to Dana Rotberg. What an amazing biography she brings to New Zealand: an acclaimed director in Mexico, with a list of international award-winning films to her credit! After a decade-long hiatus, White Lies — Tuakiri Huna marks her return to international filmmaking. From the beginning, I was excited at the prospect of such an acclaimed filmmaker bringing her aesthetic and vision to a New Zealand landscape and narrative; we have usually been seen only through New Zealand or British or American eyes. White Lies — Tuakiri Huna is clearly the work of a major international director; Dana Rotberg’s notes, written with sincerity and radiance, show why. As well, I could not help but feel some strange rightness in the Mexican connection through Merle Oberon’s marriage to Bruno Pagliai.

In her acknowledgements, Dana thanks the many people from Tuhoe, the Ruatahuna valley and those involved in the production for the making of White Lies — Tuakiri Huna. May I add my thanks that you so fulsomely and generously opened the pathway for her, and the cast and crew.

Thanks also to my agent, Ray Richards, and to my publisher Harriet Allan and my editor Anna Rogers for their superb advice and editing; they never let me get away with anything.

Finally, I want to return to my mother and the scar-faced woman she took me to. She was a woman I never knew called Paraiti.

During the making of the film, John Barnett told the story of Paraiti at the blessing at the marae before production began. I was so proud to know that filming was to take place on the Oputao Marae and I make my mihi and pay tribute to the kuia, koroua and whanau for their generosity and aroha. I was not there, but apparently the local people were intrigued about my story. They were aware of local women who practised medicine but not one of them could identify the real Paraiti.

Does that matter? Yes, because one day I would like to visit her grave, wherever it might be, and thank her for her work.

Anointed to the task of honouring life, she saved mine.