Portrait (part 2): Noelle McCarthy interviews Talia Marshall

Memoir is slippery. Not so much in the sense that the subtext is “look at me” (although it is) but it’s also “no, look at my experiences.” And that’s when a reader can tell quite quickly what kind of a person you really are, even as you’re busy trying to characterise yourself. It’s a high-wire act and inevitably, if you’re honest and genuine, at some point some people aren’t going to like you. That’s fine. The way I see it, if you’re taking up space in someone’s brain, a far worse sin is not being good company. In this respect, Talia Marshall has her priorities right. 
As follows is part two of my interview with the author of Whaea Blue. Part one was published in ReadingRoom yesterday.
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I got the sense from Whaea Blue of a difficulty, a tension for you in negotiating space and time. And place. How hard it is for you to be all there in today, 2024, and not be simultaneously experiencing things with your tīpuna 200 years ago. Layers and lines of time and lineage.
I wanted a pop-up map in the middle. And you know, to show the connections between Blenheim, and the Sounds or Te Tau Ihu  and Foxton, and over to Pōrongahau. And then  to show the tīpuna line that comes through Tūtepourangi. It’s interesting, we were so decimated our birth rate went nuts, that’s why there’s so many young people. It takes me a while matrilineally on my Dad’s side to get to a Kuia. I tend to identify more with the Rangitane side, and to get to [her ancestor] Polly. Initially I started with my ancestor on the Sciascia side, Nicola. But going backwards through these widows on my line, I figured out, was the way to go.
Backwards through the widows. I love it. The last image from the book are those faces on and in the water. These whaea in the blue ocean.
They are always with me. I think they probably take breaks sometimes
Maybe they are doing it in shifts, Talia. Did you name the book for them, so?
Yeah.  I had gone with Year of the Taniwha, War of the Rāta, and Boy Crazy.
Oooh I like that.
And Man-eater. And none of those titles were getting past publishers. Fire in the Greenstone Room was another one.
Very Jennifer Egan.
And then my son walked into the room and said “What colour is love, Mum?” And I said “Red.” And he said “No, it’s blue.” And I was like “Aaah. Whaea Blue.”
Can we talk about Mormonism? Your grandparents Jim and Gwen were mormons. I know so little about it, besides being traumatised by watching the murdering fundamentalists in Under the Banner of Heaven. This idea, of everyone being like, physically reunited in paradise, and having life kick off there in earnest, that’s quite compelling. Puts a whole new complexion on existence.
And my Nana believed that so much, and yet would not let my Granddad go. And they believe in bodily resurrection, but there was so little of my Grandad left, he’d lost so much weight. He was so powerless for about four or five of his last six years. And you get buried in a white tuxedo. And when Jesus comes back, all the Mormons sit up in their coffins.
Wow.
Mum and my brothers grew up in the Mormon Church and there were so many Māori. Like there’d often be Māori, or Tongan, Rarotongan, Pacific Island Mormons staying in their house.
And then Mum got  sent off to church college when she was 13, with her older brother and they were pretty much the only white kids there. And they used to have these midnight raids on the dorms, they used to have all this fun.
But she got sent home for writing love letters to another girl. And then her brother got sent home, because he had found rugby, but he also managed to find drinking, somewhere around Hamilton in the Mormon Church, and was a party animal. So they both got sent home in disgrace. But they were a family that shared, in the same way that Māori shared you know, they’d give you anything. You would always be able to walk into the house, open the fridge, whatever you wanted.
And Grandad, when he died, Brent said, “We’re taking him home, aren’t we mother?” And she couldn’t argue with him. And so they took him home, like you know, your [Irish] people do, but you know, they had him behind the kitchen counter and I came in and was like, “Come on, with the food?” So we went and put him off in this little room. I couldn’t sleep on that bed after.
Did you do what you wanted to do with this book? Separate from how it’s received, did you achieve what you wanted to in writing it?
I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I am. I was trying to stop being an essayist because that was never voluntary on my part. And with this – when I wrote about Isaac, that scene where he’s in the car with the couple [p167, he’s getting a ride to Culverden], I could feel myself imagining it properly. I could feel the fiction stuff starting to happen. And you know, I was getting to like 500 words in before an “I” pops up. I was so proud. Like, then there’s an “I” and it’s all over.
So the “I” kind of keeps you self-conscious, is it?
I don’t know. It’s more like I realised I was onto something when I changed my ex’s name to Ben. I wrote something like “Ben was short for benign.” That was entering a sort of fictional territory, even though everything in that chapter is 100% true. It was just that one sentence. I knew I was obscuring him, and that made me happy.
You say apart from Hilary Mantel, you don’t really like historical novels. Which is funny, because you kind of spent years working on one about the Musket Wars.
My thing about the Musket Wars was rather than being a tale of savagery, it’s actually a tale of how sophisticated we were as fighters. In Western Civilisations, they measure your society by how good you are at war. Because you know, the Romans were, they went forth and conquered. Those strategies are thought of as sophisticated when white people do it. When brown people do it, it’s savagery. It’s interesting how trained Māori would have had to be, in hand-to-hand combat, and they had a philosophy  behind the way they lived their life. We were more like ancient Greeks and Romans.
The line I put a love-heart next to is on page 148: “And while it is correct that Māori were accomplished gardeners, like many sophisticated peoples we also tumbled like wolves.”
“Tumbled like wolves” is brilliant.
And we didn’t need the wheel, because we had the waka. If you look at the bush, well it would have been pretty hard to drive through any of it. And the other thing I realised I was trying to do, in writing about the Musket Wars, is contextualise our mobility compared to peasants in Britain and Europe. It’s like when I look back through my whakapapa chart, you’re looking  at the movement of people all across the country. There’s that ability – look at someone having six or seven iwi. That’s all strategy. That’s all connection. And we did that just with waka.
I think the other thing I was trying to do with the Musket Wars, I was trying to describe a society that was largely untouched by Pākehā. What went on in that war was our own business. The fact that we were the centre of our own universe for at least 600 to 700 years means we’re so culturally distinct. And even though we’ve lost the reo – and it is coming back –  there’s just this really distinct character. There’s just something that’s so recognisably Māori and I think that has to do with how long we’ve had the place to ourselves.
You write about an ex who you call Isaac. He turns up at your ranchslider with a cricket bat. But on another level, it’s a story of a time you felt you had a curse on you, and you write: “I feel I still haven’t conveyed how Māori the whole thing between us felt.”  I don’t know, are you talking about love there? Or the sex, or the connection, or what?
No, no. The fear. Fear and sex got merged for me, and that was not easy to figure out. I can’t even talk about that. Sorry.
One last thing. When I was reading I thought about a  certain kind of Irish woman, an older woman usually. You introduce yourself, and she says “Where are you from?” and you go through a few cousins, or your grandmother or something, and then finally she says, “Oh, I have you now.” Which means: I know who you are in relation to everyone else I’ve fitted you in your rightful place. The connections in your book, not only whakapapa, but all the other connections too, are so painstakingly and lovingly made.
Yeah, the girls at the start. Those friendships I introduce, in Dunedin. That was done after the first draft. And I introduce them because you’re going to meet them, you’re going to meet all these girls, and realise that they’re still in my life, and that we’re connected. And that really helped me to anchor it.
But the thing that really mucked me up was my friend’s suicide. I wish I did not have to write that chapter. Because it happened. And I wish it had never happened.
What are you going to do next Talia?
There’s a freighter that goes through to the Marquesas and around Gauguin’s grave. And it’s ecologically sound, because it’s a cruise, but it’s a freighter as well –  those islands need supplies. The bones I write about, on the Wairau Bar, the jewellery they were wearing didn’t come from here, it came from the Marquesas, and around the Society Islands. I guess it’s like our Hawaiki. I want to go on the cruise.
That’ll be an interesting CNZ application.
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Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the book. Monday: an excerpt from Whaea Blue, about bad love, a bad drug trip, and seven years living on the main road of “a deadly village by the sea”. Tuesday: part one of the Noelle McCarthy interview. Tomorrow: a review by Louisa Kasza.