Witi Ihimaera is charming, possibly even to the people who were very snarky about his astounding plagiarism in The Trowenna Sea. That was 2009. This is 2013, a very good year for Ihimaera. White Lies, a film from his novella Medicine Woman, is about to be launched, and a revised version of the story has just been published.
Revised He’s done it before. Maori carvers return to their work, he reasons, why not writers
The movie is produced by John Barnett, who also produced the phenomenally successful Whale Rider from Ihimaera’s best-selling book. That must bode well.
Ihimaera has the writing of several new books in mind “and each book I try to make better than the last; I think I’m getting somewhere, finally”. He feels, he says, “ready for another burst”.
He has got over the year of the plagiarism, when a Listener reviewer revealed there were 16 passages in The Trowenna Sea cribbed from other writers, and then other bits were shown to be suspect. His answer was to apologise. He says – as he’s said many times before – that in his family, people apologise and move on. “I hope everyone else has got over it.”
Possibly not. The 69-year-old, who’d already had a brush with plagiarism in the past, was sitting on too elevated a pedestal. He’s both rueful and slightly defensive about the fate of The Trowenna Sea which he says “is, in my opinion, the first Commonwealth book written in New Zealand. It’s going to be republished late next year.”
And if it doesn’t come off with the publisher, he says, “I’m damn well going to publish it myself, in velvet covers.”
Meanwhile, the stacks of books he bought back after the literary debacle continue to moulder in his care.
It’s hard not to be charmed by Ihimaera, even over the phone, since he hasn’t the time, in his busy teaching and writing schedule, to visit Wellington for the preview of White Lies and talk in person. Charm is his overt weapon: “I was always charming, always wanting to charm the pants off everyone.”
He’s talking, specifically, of his days at the Mormon Church College of Tuhikaramea in Hamilton, where he was a pupil for a while, after his parents decided he might make something of himself in the world, probably in the realm of music. He was sent there from Gisborne to board.
Gisborne was where he was born, at Cook Hospital, in 1944, and where his parents were farmers and shearers. “For the first five years of our lives we trailed after them from farm to farm: Manutuke, Matawai, Te Karaka.”
At the age of 5 he went to live with his grandmother at Waituhi, northwest of Gisborne. “On my first school day she was at the gate to see me off and see me back home and the first thing she said to me was, ‘What did the Pakeha teach you today’ And I said, ‘Jack and Jill.’ And she said, ‘Why is Jack wearing a crown and why are they going up the hill’ ”
The next day it was Little Miss Muffet and his grandmother had a host of questions, including: What kind of girl would be frightened of a spider, and why didn’t she just say kia ora
“And I thought that was my first political lesson.
