THE ACCIDENTAL ANTHROPOLOGIST

Also by Michael Jackson:

Non-fiction
The Kuranko

Allegories if the W ilderness

Barawa, and the f.Vtlys Birds Fly in the Sky

Paths Toward a Clearing

At Home in the World

The Blind Impress

Minima Ethnographica

The Politics of Storytelling

In Sierra Leone

Existential Anthropology

Fiction
Rainshadow

Pieces of Music

Poetry
Latitudes of Exile

Wall

Going On

Duty Free

Antipodes

Dead Reckoning
TheAccidental
Anthropologist
a memoir

Michael Jackson

[ongacre Press
 Acknowledgements:
I wish to thank the stciff at Longacre Press, in particular Barbara Lorson and Penelope
Todd ,for giving my work the kind of meticulous editorial care that every writer dreams of,
thereby helping me realise my vision of what I wanted this memoir to be.

T he author gratefully acknowledges a writing grant from Creative New Zealand,

which enabled the completion of a draft of this work.

First published with the assistance of

T his book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,
research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be
reproduced by any process without prior permission of Longacre Press and the author.

Michael Jackson asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Photographs are from the author's collection.

© Michael Jackson

ISBN 1 877361 47 X

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the National Library of New Zealand.

First published by Longacre Press, 2006

30 Moray Place, Dunedin, New Zealand.
www.longacre.co.nz

Book and cover design by Christine Buess.

Cover painting: Yellow and black landscape by Colin McCahon, 1962,
Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of the artist's class, 1962.
Reproduced courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.
Printed by Astra Print, New Zealand.
 Contents

1 Henry & Blaise & Harry & Me

Intensive Care ........ . 9

Auckland ........... . 14

Distance Lends Enchantment 27

Myself Must I Remake 36

Ordinary Madness . 53

Quarrying the Blues 69

Hotel des Etrangers . 83

Nabanda Kala 97

Pauline ....... . . 117

2 Ethnographic Picaresque

Freetown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 29

Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky . . 1 40

Mamina Yegbe's Delusion . . . 1 55

Amazing Grace . . . . . . . . . 1 69

Allegories of the Wilderness . . 1 80

In the Sandhills . . . . . . . . 1 95

In the Silence of the Night. . . 209

Harmattan . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

3 To and Fro Within the World

and Up and Down Upon it

Russian Dolls ........ . 243

Quiet Days in Darlinghurst . 253

Mihi forTe Pakaka . 268

Being in Landscape . . 281

Weary Bay ...... . 298

Touristes Tropiques . . 306

Leaving Indiana ... . 314

Full Circle ...... . 323

Journey to Yirntardamururu . . 336

Notes .............. . 344

We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter
where; it is only gradually that we compose, within
ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be
born there retrospectively and each day more definitely.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Aurelia Gallarati-Scotti
(Lettres Milanaises 1921-1926), 1 956

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born

somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him
- he may be forced to - but nothing will efface his
origins, the marks of which he carries with him every­
where. I think it is important to know this and even
find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do,
regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally,
the life of a writer depends.
-James Baldwin, Nobody Knows my Name: More Notes of

a Native Son, 1 963

 Part One

H en ry & B l aise & H a r r y & Me

 Intensive Ca re

N ight in the tropics falls fast. The stars rush out. At one stride, as
Coleridge said, comes the dark.
So I write against the gathering dark.

When the doctors told me I had almost died, I had difficulty with
the word. Pain I could understand, but death was too abstract. It
started Friday morning, a little before ten. The chest pains came
on so hard I did not dare lie down. I went into the backyard
and sat on the steps. I took off my watch, removed my pen and
notebook from my shirt pocket. I was expecting the darkness to
descend at any moment. I looked at the sunlight on the gum trees
and thought this is your last look at the world. I felt vaguely disap­
pointed that it was so nondescript. But I did not think this is the
moment of your death.

In the bed opposite mine, a bewildered Italian patriarch has been

besieged by his family. He is crying. His wife is wiping tears from
her eyes. The old man's younger brother says to him, " If I see you
crying I will not come here again.You must smile." The patriarch
tells his brother that they brought a big machine to his bedside
and a young lady asked him to smile for the camera. His brother
laughs. "There," he exclaims. "You see?"

It's hot. A ceiling fan wafts cool air through the room. A
thunderstorm rumbles in the Blue Mountains. Car tyres swish on

9
a wet road. I think of Africa. Of Pauline. I remember when she
went through this same valley of the shadow. I am beginning to
understand how it changed forever the way she looked at things.
That deep and besetting doubt that one will ever confidently go
out into the world again. The overwhelming awareness of one's
own frailty. The sense that at any moment the axe will fall, the
curtain come down. I remember how intolerant she became of
anything that upset the fragile balance she had struck between her
need for quietness and the needs of family or friends. "Don't make
demands," she told me. "Don't ask too much. I can only deal with
my own uncertainty right now."

Sunlight spills into the ward. The patriarch sits on the edge of his
bed, squinting against the light. Ray, who was wheeled back into
the ward half an hour ago, after his "procedure", is anxious to get
his Lotto card filled in, to choose the right numbers. " It's seven­
teen million now ! " he informs us. "That's a lot of money."
Mr Burns wants to know what Ray would do with so much
money.
"Buy a pub and drink it dry," Ray answers.
There's a long silence. Then Mr Burns says wistfully, "They'll be
getting ready for the meat draw at the pub right now."
"What pub is that?" Ray asks.
"Peak Hill," says Mr Burns.
Mr Burns is eighty-three, and Peak Hill is where he was born,
and where, he told me this morning, he wants to die.
"What would you do with seventeen million?" Ray asks me.
It's like asking me if there's anything I have done or lefi: undone
that I should put right before I die. Like making a will, destro�;ng
manuscripts I would not want published after my death. or \\Tiring
to friends from whom I have become estranged.

What would I write to Harry? And what would he haYe ro say

to me, Harry whom death made so anxious that he gaw the

10
impression that mortality was his personal property - that he
had patented it, and no one had the right to mention it when he
was around. How would he react if he saw me now, now that I
have pre-empted him and confronted the real thing? Would it be,
I wonder, like Henry Miller seeing his vieux copain Blaise Cendrars
near the end of his life?
When word reached Miller of Cendrars' final illness, he could
not find the courage to write. "I think of him constantly," Miller
confessed in a letter to Cendrars' daughter, "but when I try to
write to him words fail me." A couple of months later in Paris,
Miller finally brought himself to visit the man whose praises he
had sung and whose friendship he had counted on for quarter of
a century. It was a fiasco. "I had to get up and run out," he wrote
remorsefully twenty years after the event, "and I never went back.
Terrible of me, I know, but I couldn't stand to see him suffer so. I
believe he was dying of cancer, and he sat there with tears in his
eyes from the pain. He wouldn't take opiates. He said, 'I want to
see what dying is like.' "
Poor Miller, unaware of what actually affiicted his hero (a series
of strokes had rendered Cendrars hemiplegic) , yet appealing to us
for absolution. "I couldn't contain myself. I had to run away. To
see a great man reduced to that state was awful. I never got up the
nerve to go back to see him. He died a short time later.''
Perhaps my old friend Harry wouldn't have the nerve to come
and see me either, even if he knew what had befallen me. He
might imagine that my suffering would rub off on him. Harry was
never one for walking in the shadows. Though it wasn't physical
death he feared, so much as death-in-life. Decline, dissolution,
decay. He could never abide the thought that his talents might
desert him, that old age might overtake him before his promise
had been fulfilled. Most of us fear the unknown, but it was the
known that Harry was afraid of. To be no longer surprised by life,
or swept away by inspiration or love - that's what he dreaded
most. To be reduced to a bundle of blind habits.

11
"Keep your fingers crossed, and everything's right," Ray announces.
"We'll be out of here soon."
Harry would have shuddered. Or laughed.
I was awake the night Ray had his blackout. When he came
round and gazed unseeing into the faces of the night sisters, he
was afraid. "Am I dying?" he asked them. Later he told me that he
dreamt he was in a train crossing a high trestle bridge. The trestle
gave way, the canyon opened up, and he was plunging toward
rocks and muddy water.
Jovicic, whose bed is opposite mine, deals with his distress by
regaling me with stories. Stabbing his thumb toward the floor, he
boasts how he has worked undergound all his life. The prospect
of open-heart surgery and a valve replacement doesn't seem to
bother him. He was bitten by a snake once and cut open the
wound to suck out the venom. " I 've operated on myself," he brags,
"no worries. Whatever happens, I got no regrets. I enj oy myself all
my life."
Ray is as cocky as ever. Though his prognosis is not good, he
takes the same attitude one might take toward one's car after
picking it up from a garage where it has undergone extensive
repairs - eager to get behind the wheel, hit the road and go on
as before. Stunned by his close call, his two "procedures", and as
fearful as any of us have been, he has nonetheless recovered his
outrageous innocence. Tonight, as the nurse tucked him in she
asked, "Is there anything you want?" "I wouldn't mind a blonde,"
Ray said. "A what?" the nurse asked, incredulous. "A blonde," Ray
repeated, oblivious of the offence.

I shit. I shower. I shave. I brush my teeth. It is enough .

From the window I watch the sun sinking through a smoky

haze over the western suburbs. The breeze through the bathroom
window smells of the sea. I am still so shaken by my near-e::-.:tinction

12
and the aftershock of angioplasty that when I listen to the thrum
and surge of traffic in the city I cannot imagine myself in the thick
of it again.
I accept my reprieve, my luck, but am unsure what to do with
the life that has been unexpectedly handed back to me. I know I
cannot go on as if nothing has changed. Yet, unlike Harry, I never
want to accept Cavafy's description of the years as a line of candles
guttering one by one before going out, "the dark line length­
ening" .
"Everyone dies," Pauline whispered to me, during her last illness.
"It's only a matter of when. And it's not death that matters; it's how
we live, so that even dying becomes a moment of life."

13
 Auckland

I see it in retrospect through Harry's eyes. The sea cobalt blue.

Islands in the gulf on streams oflight. In the railway yards, ganglia of
rusted lines like entangled destinies. Gnarled pohutukawas bent like
gargoyles over beaches of crushed white shell. Westward, beyond
the ranges, the sky darkens, and the thump and thunder of surf
drowns your voice. Yet winter was never so cold as to extinguish
the memory of summer. "I think of the summer as a lover thinks
of his mistress," Harry once said. And I thought of a white gravel
road descending through manuka to an ironsand coast, cicadas
deafening in the heat.

Between school and university, I worked in a factory that made

poultry mash. I did not know it when I started the j ob, but the
Poultryman's Cooperative had been founded by a distant kinsman
(Fritz Jackson's grandfather and my father's grandfather were
brothers) . Fritz was in his late sixties when I worked in his factory,
and we met only once or twice. That we had the same Jackson
features we both agreed, but neither of us took the matter further.
In 1 994, however, when Fritz's daughter shared with me her
memories of her father, I was struck by the uncanny parallelism
between his story and the stories of other Jacksons, my father
and myself included - our ability, in the face of adversity, to
reinvent ourselves . Fritz had originally been a land buyer, but lost
his fortune in 1 928 -29 when he became liable, under an archaic
law, for the debts of the owners and mortgagees of all the land

14
he'd ever sold. Instead of declaring himself bankrupt, he elected to
honour the law. Pera would remember her father slaving to scratch
a living from the small farm he bought near Swanson. "My heart
used to go out to him, seeing him brought so low, his heart and
health broken. But I could do nothing." After the war, when in his
late fifties, Fritz established the Poultryman's Cooperative.
The factory was suffocatingly hot. The air was filled with dust;
beams and rafters were silted with floury mouse scats, and sweat
and dust collected on your skin like scabs. Trundling a hand-cart,
I would go down into the basement for sacks of pollard, maize,
bran, and grit. On the factory floor, I would unstitch the sacks and
manoeuvre them to the edge of a steel-lined pit, shaped like an
inverted cone. From this churning pit, the mixed mash would be
conveyed by an augur into a massive overhead hopper. There were
three such hoppers, working twelve hours a day.You had to shout
to make yourself heard above the din.
At smoko, I would lie among the grain sacks in the basement,
reading Erich Fromm, enthralled by the idea that one's first duty
was not to family or country, but to oneself. That summer I also
read my first Dostoevsky, and grafted on to the idea that one must
realise one's full potential, with the grim corollary that in pursuit
of this noble goal, any means, base or heroic, was j ustified.
Lew Stewart, who worked the number two hopper, was not
impressed. "That's an eighteen-year-old talking," he told me. "One
day you'll find out it's got fuck-all to do with creating yourself.
You go through a fuckin' war before you start preaching to me
about creation ." But Lew wasn't going to tell me about his war,
except to say that he'd gone to university before he was called up,
and returned from the war to find his wife had ditched him for
somebody else.
It's strange now to compare Lew and Fritz. The one whose life
had become an ineluctable yet deliberate descent into the abyss,
assisted by booze and self-pity; the other who had picked himself
up, paid his dues, and begun again.

15
 What would be my fate?

When I try to track down the source of the restiveness that has
been with me for as long as I can remember, I end up with an
incident in early childhood, details of which I still vividly recall.
At age two and a half I was hospitalised for a tonsilectomy - a
routine operation at the time, but one that involved, for me, a
week-long separation from home. Although the hospital was only
ten miles away, I felt as if I had been removed to another planet,
and though only seven days passed before I saw my parents again I
thought I had lost them forever. Wholly dependent on my mother
at the time, I no doubt experienced, during that week, what D. W
Winnicott calls "unthinkable anxiety" - the intolerable loss of
my basic trust in "a personal continuity of existence " . This sense
of abandonment and desolation would be compounded every
subsequent time I left home - to go to school, to spend a holiday
with my uncle in another town. I remained in mourning for a
loss I could not specify. There was an emptiness within me that
cried out to be filled. Increasingly isolated from others, I suffered
the displaced consciousness of the day-dreamer. I became infatu­
ated with women teachers. I sought father-figures. I nurtured an
intense kinship with nature. I imagined myself born into families
other than my own. Later, these fantasies of rescue and transfigur­
ation, these Platonic longings for completion and wholeness in
another, became fixated on the idea of friendship, of romantic
love, and of acceptance into a community of kindred spirits. But
many years would pass before I found within myself the element I
had exhausted myself looking for in the world.

The small New Zealand town in which I was raised was as different
from Inglewood, Los Angeles, as one could imagine, though not
unlike the Inglewood in Victoria, Australia, that I have also visited,
and the Inglewood in Cheshire, England, where Malcolm Lowry
spent his early childhood.

16
 Inglewood, Taranaki, was built on Ngati Maru land, confiscated
by the colonial government in 1 863 to punish the insurgent
Taranaki tribes as well as help defray the costs of a military campaign
against the resistance leader, Wiremu Kingi, and provide land for
migrant settlement. Through a kind of ironic coincidence, with
which history is replete, it so happened that at the very moment
that Ngati Maru lands on the upper Waitara River and its tributaries
were being alienated, ethnic Poles in northern Germany were
being subject to draconian assimilation laws. Under the Prussian
administration, it was decreed that Polish towns, streets, and family
names must be Germanized. Moreover, the Polish language was
banned in schools, and military conscription enforced. Resistance
meant dismissal from work, seizure ofland, and the loss of basic civil
rights. Rather than endure this situation, thousands of Poles elected
to emigrate, many of them to New Zealand. Thus the dispossessed
in one hemisphere unwittingly became dispossessors in another.
Initially Inglewood included as many Polish as English families.
In an 1 875 photograph of the town, manuka hurdles and fences of
split timber mark out their rough allotments, and felled trees litter
the scorched earth. The few houses•are windowless, with shingle
roofs. From chimneys made of sacking stretched over wooden
frames, thin columns of smoke seep into a desolate sky. A wall
of bush separates the clearing from the world. In Gaelic, aingeal
means fire: hence Inglewood, a fire-cleared place in a forest.
This scene came to define the symbolic ambience of my child­
hood. I was an interloper. I did not really belong. I was a refugee
from a country I could not name. At night, falling asleep, I would
hear the doleful whistle of a freight train in the hills, like the echo
of another life. Jane Eyre's reveries were also mine, looking into
the distance and longing "for a power of vision which might over­
pass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions
t:Ull of life I had heard of but never seen." And like her "I could
not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain
sometimes . . . "

17
 The reason for my lifelong preoccupation with renewal and my
Jobian patience, my ability to wait, lies in the childhood fantasy
without which I could not have endured - that another life
awaited me elsewhere, or with another, and once reborn in that
other world I would find fulfillment and happiness.
My impatient imagination raced away to reconnoitre the world,
trying to pin down the place where I should have been born, where
I properly belonged. Stories in old volumes of my father's Chums
and Boys Own Paper took me among Kanakas, wild men from
Borneo, and assorted cannibals, and while King Solomon 5 Mines
transported me to Africa, Beyond the Great Wall reincarnated me in
Manchuria where I learned to ask, "How many seeds in a water
melon?" and to sagely reply, "Many". A few years later, captivated
by the mysteries of hominid evolution, I became convinced that
in the jigsawn genealogy of my species I might discover my own
missing links.
Like most Pakeha kids growing up in the forties and fifties, I
was told nothing about New Zealand's colonial past. Maori people
were, for the most part, distantly and exotically Other. I remember
the black-dad kuia who would appear, as if out of nowhere, and
peddle whitebait from door to door. They wore moko on their
chins and smoked pipes. On autumn afternoons they sat, shawls
around their shoulders, flax kits at their feet, on benches outside
the post office or on the kerbstones. At night they vanished.
Invoking Maori myth, my grandparents helped me understand
that Maori did not live in Inglewood because they believed Mt
Egmont would one day move back to j oin its kith and kin in the
central North Island. This was a standard Pakeha way of explaining
away the fact that Maori had had their land stolen or seized, and
my first introduction to the way in which the rationalisations of
those in power derive spurious legitimacy from lambasting the
powerless as creatures of irrationality and superstition.
One of my few friends in those days was Maori. Eddie's family
lived in a ramshackle villa at the bottom of our street.The armchairs

18
were threadbare, and the linoleum on the floor scuffed and torn.
There was not a book in the house. Yet I was drawn to the home­
liness of this poverty. When, several years after Eddie's family had
moved on, and I was sixteen, my father had me inducted into his
lodge. But something in me revolted against its bizarre mix of
cabalistic ceremony and old-fashioned charity. I wrote an angry
letter of resignation, accusing the lodge of discriminating against
Maori . The lodge elders wrote back in outrage, repudiating my
accusations and saying they intended to have my letter framed.
My father could not understand what had got into me; nor did
I. But I suspect that I had made Maoriness a symbol of my own
sense of disaffection, a pretext for turning my back on the world
into which I had been thrown, in which I felt I had no place and
no future.
That same year my aunt from America came to stay and opened
a window onto another world in which I could imagine myself
belonging. When she was twenty she had gone to California on a
working holiday and stayed. Now a widow, with her sons married,
she'd decided to look up her old family and revisit the places she'd
left so long ago.
She took my breath away. Her raunchy and irrepressible laughter.
Her cocktail before dinner. Her Camel cigarettes. The way she
said sidewalk instead of footpath, tomeighta instead of tomato. The
way she shared her anecdotes of Mexico and Greece with me.
One afternoon she took over the kitchen and cooked a spaghetti
bolognaise. Looking back, I wonder if she wasn't, in some sly way,
w.king her revenge on New Zealand's provincialism, freeing herself
from something that had weighed on her mind for twenty-eight
years: demonstrating that you could take the provisions available
in a small town New Zealand grocer's shop and subversively turn
them into something exotic. Something out of this world.
At dinner we picked at the pasta our aunt spooned onto our
plates (it was macaroni - the only pasta you could buy - and the
sauce lacked garlic - also unprocurable) . My father was obviously

19
unimpressed. My younger sisters said it smelt funny, and pushed
their plates away. But I tucked in, asked for seconds, and added to
my mother's humiliation by declaring that it was the best meal I
had eaten in my entire life.
That summer, my older sister went away to university. I recall
the cyclopean eye of the K-locomotive at the far end of the mile­
long track, blazing and unfocussed, then staring us out like the
sun. Then the coal-black behemoth was thundering through the
station, brakes shrieking and rods clanking, before it came to a halt
in a furious exhalation of steam. As it panted and hissed in its iron
harness, my sister clambered up into a second-class carriage, soon
to reappear at the window, wiping away the condensation with her
sleeve, and mouthing reassurances to my mother. My father was
already at the guard's van, ensuring that the big red wooden chest
he had made for his daughter, bound with rope and addressed on
every side, was safely loaded.
Minutes later, amid tears and stifled cries, with smoke and
cinders engulfing us, the train lurched and shunted out of the
shadows of the station. And as I watched the red lanterns of the
guard's van drawn around the last bend before the bridge, I was
filled with the sudden and exhilarating sense that I would soon be
making this same j ourney.
The following summer my sister brought home a friend from
Wellington. Pale and woebegone, Jean Watson was dressed in
Gothic black. Her world-weary drawl entranced me.
My sister explained that Jean was a writer and, as though her
friend's bohemian appearance were not sufficient proof, she brought
Jean's portable typewriter to the dining table and dumped it in front
of us. It was a solid black Smith Corona. I saw it as a miniature
version of the great K-locomotives that hauled the trains through
Inglewood, whose forlorn whistles had echoed in my darkness with
the oblique promise of voyages and the possibility of rebirth .
I begged to be allowed to use it and, inspired by the feel of
metal keys and the authority of typed letters on a sheet of white

20
paper, I hammered out some surreptitious ramblings about the
evils of racism and the problem of nature versus nurture and, on
the strength of a few fragments of a conversation I had overheard
between Jean and my sister, wrote a poem.
Had I known of Cendrars back then, would my situation have
seemed as hopeless?
"Action alone liberates," he writes.
But I was a prisoner of my dreams, and Cendrars' view of life as
a gamble, of pushing oneself to the limits, of risking oneself in the
world and pursuing courses of action that ran counter to conven­
tional wisdom - this would come but slowly to me.

In my second year at university, I did courses in anthropology,

psychology, philosophy and English. But poetry was my passion,
and when a notice appeared in the cloisters, calling for contribu­
tions to Hippocampus, a new literary magazine, I submitted a sheaf
of poems. To my surprise, one was accepted for publication. Like
the poems of most nineteen-year-aids, mine were morbidly self­
absorbed. But Blind Man, written about a friend who had lost his
sight in a car crash on the West Coast, was an exception.
The previous year, our English professor announced that this
blind man, Terry Cutler, would be taking classes with us. He would
need help with his lecture notes. Could anyone assist? An erstwhile
school friend of mine volunteered to be the Good Samaritan.
But the Christian precepts which, in the eyes of the Methodist
community of Inglewood, Mervyn so brilliantly embodied, were
a cross that he would find increasingly hard to bear. When it
turned out that he would need to spend every Saturday with Terry
and his family in their cottage near the Blind Institute, Mervyn
appealed to me to bale him out. Since I had not been singled
out for moral greatness, and had no investment in the idea of
perfection, I obliged.
Reading Blind Man today, I am struck less by my compassion for
Terry Cutler than by my infatuation with Dylan Thomas. I am also

21
struck by the banal contingency of life. Had Mervyn Wellington
not felt compelled to publicly witness to his faith, I would not
have visited the land of the blind or written the poem that became
my introduction to Fletcher Knight, who edited Hippocampus with
Harry St Rain.
Though only one issue of Hippocampus ever appeared, it precipi­
tated a revolution in my life. After years of isolation, I was suddenly
admitted to a literary and intellectual circle that confirmed that I
was neither a freak nor a failure.
The central figure in that charmed circle, however, remained on
its margins. Fletcher's co-editor contributed to Hippocampus under
an assumed name, and seemed to inhabit some other zone. Perhaps
it was because Fletcher's favourite author was E Scott Fitzgerald
that I imagined Harry St Rain to be a kind of Jay Gatsby - a
figure who materialised from the shadows of trees on a summer's
night to stand and stare across a body of dark water, then suddenly
vanished, leaving a vacuum which others would fill with wild
speculation, innuendo, and rumour. Did Harry mean to have this
effect on people? Did he stage-manage his appearances and disap­
pearances to create an aura of singularity and mystery? Or was
there some oppressive, unconfided aspect to his life that made him
distant without his desiring it?
The sketchy details that Fletcher provided only deepened
the mystery. The St Rains were a wealthy but not particularly
happy family, whose Remuera mansion commanded a view of
the harbour and the North Shore. Harry had no intimate contact
with his father. One night his father came home late and found
Harry playing in his bedroom with his Hornby train. It was the
first time father and son had been alone together, and it would be
the last. The boy's father said, " One day you'll get on a train like
this. It'll take you far from here, and we'll never see you again." It
proved almost prophetic. A few years later, unhappy in the prestig­
ious private school to which he had been sent, Harry came close
to repeating fifteen-year-old Freddy Sauser's mythologized act of

22
self-liberation.* Escaping to the railway station, Harry climbed
into a wagon in the marshalling yards and fell asleep, waking hours
later as the goods train rattled into the Bay ofPlenty. Another time,
he tried to kill himself by drinking poison. It was only because
the poison racked Harry's body so violently that his death was
averted; his father happened to be home at the time, and heard
ominous noises in his son's upstairs bedroom. W hen he went to
investigate he found Harry's door locked. Realising something was
seriously amiss, he phoned a doctor and Harry was saved. As he lay
in hospital recovering from a severely damaged stomach, he read
Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, and wrote a letter to her, confessing
admiration and proposing marriage. Ms Murdoch wrote a long
hand-written letter in reply, saying that she needed stability in her
confused life, and had recently married Mr John Bayley. She did
not envisage an early divorce.
The first time Fletcher visited Harry, he found him ensconced
in a Morton Bay fig tree with his teddy bear and a book.
Since one of Harry's contributions to Hippocampus had been an
article on Evelyn Waugh, I now found myself imagining Harry, not
as Jay Gatsby, but as Sebastian Flyte. And in this piece of theatre, I
cast Fletcher in the role of Charles Ryder.
Perhaps Brideshead Revisited does shed some light on Harry's life.
Consider that famous passage, for instance, where Waugh speaks of
the languor of youth, and observes that, while all the attributes of
youth - ebullience, optimism, illusion, and despair - are also
attributes of other times in our lives, languor is something that
belongs to youth alone. At no other age does one experience this
··relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and
self-regarding . . . "

• Blaise Cendrars was born Frederic-Louis Sauser. At fifteen he ran away from
home (La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland), taking a train to Basel and thence
ro Berlin. After roaming aimlessly through Germany he met a Warsaw Jew and
_iewellery merchant called Rogovine with whom he travelled to Russia on the
e\·e of the Bolshevik revolution.

23
 Sometimes I think that Harry was in search of eternal youth.
Not in the sense of never aging, but in the sense of being able to
recapture at will the way one sees the world when one first opens
one's eyes upon it - when everything is offered in abundance
and nothing is asked in return. If Harry thought that living in
the present was, as he once put it, "a desperate experiment" it was
perhaps because he was so infatuated by his vision of a seaborne
nymph at his side whose loveliness would take his breath away
and stop the passage of time. When Harry contemplated the years
ahead, I think he was filled with an immense weariness. When I
first encountered Roquentin in Sartre's LA Nausee, I was imme­
diately reminded of Harry. What was once a world of infinite
promise, filled with the smell of fennel, the taste of couscous or
the glimpse of a Japanese girl bathing naked, has degenerated into
a tedious inventory of words. Life is never more rare and precious
than when it is simply lived. Everything is an adventure then, and
time loops back on itself, endlessly renewed. But like Roquentin,
Harry was convinced that aging erodes this spontaneity. Instead of
living, one writes about the lives one has lived. But always from
the outside, at one remove, as though through the eyes of someone
whom life has passed by, or a voyeur.
Was Harry's attempted suicide a way of avoiding the common­
place? Was death by his own hand to be his last adventure - a
gesture toward spontaneity in a life that was already losing its
capacity to surprise him? Did he see all too clearly the course
his life would run, and did not wish to live out something so
comprehensively foreseen and preordained? In his Hippocampus
article, Harry provides clues as to how these questions might be
answered.
He conjures a world of good books, of "wine, intelligent
company and gay society." The world of Oxford, possibly, between
the wars, "before science students were heard of" - a place of
country villages and dreaming spires. Such a "place in the sun" ,
such a place o f "love and friendship" , Harry argues - "always

24
sheltered, always artificial" - is somewhere most of us have been
trying to get for a long time. Such a place we hope to find in
novels. But Waugh won't pander to our dreams. He excites our
longings only to frustrate them, shattering our illusions, revealing
smoke without fire, a wasteland, a handful of dust. At this moment
of disenchantment, Waugh offers the solace of the Catholic faith.
But Harry cannot accept either the consolation of faith or the
consolation of reason. There is no distraction. Nothing, for him,
relieves the bleak prospect.
Harry was also a regular contributor of sardonic letters and
political critique to the student newspaper Craccum. He signed
his articles Q.E . D. Until Fletcher told me otherwise, I thought
these were the initials of the author's name. Harry's two targets
were scientism and romanticism. Seriousness in science and soul­
searching in art he found equally abhorrent.
Many of my new-found bohemian friends thought Harry too
clever by half. By remaining aloof and anonymous, it was all too
�asy for him, they argued, to mock the opinions of others, or
dismiss them with a bemused shrug. They said that Harry St Rain
.:ould not live up to the perfect and brilliant image he cultivated
tor himself, so turned on others, satirising their foibles, caricaturing
their beliefs, belittling their views. Many regarded his detach­
m�nt and disdain as social snobbery. They criticised the way he
hid behind a sobriquet and set himself apart from student affairs .
:\s for me, I found his aloofness both daunting and captivating. I
saw in his splendid isolation a way of making a virtue out of one's
loneliness. I read everything he published in Craccum, admiring his
mtellectual precosity and mordant style. And on the strength of
his allusions to H.L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Iris Murdoch, I
nsiduously read their works .

.\ly first glimpse - or should I say vision? - of the elusive Harry

St Rain was of a tall , tanned individual hurrying through the
.:loisters like the White Rabbit.

25
 He was always in haste. He gave the impression that he was not
so much bent on reaching his goal as anxious to leave the precincts
of the university as quickly as possible.
But if he was someone in flight, I, no doubt, in his eyes, was
someone mired or floundering.
I would work in the library for hours on end, industriously
researching essays or struggling with hypothetical proofs, and
trying not to meet the eyes of the woman with whom I had been
hopelessly in love for the last year. But Harry would breeze in
and out, his sky-blue shirt unbuttoned to the chest, confirming
my conviction that though I had never known anyone like him,
and would never hold my own in his company, he was, in some
inexplicable way, like me.
Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites. I had come of age
in a small Taranaki town, and gone to an agricultural high school
where I had failed to distinguish myself. By contrast, Harry had
been blessed with every advantage, and had already proved himself
academically. While he was articulate, well-read, and a master
of irony, I was tongue-tied and reticent, and passed my exams
only through dogged perseverance. In contrast to Harry, whom I
regarded as an Adonis, gifted with good looks, intellectual acuity
and confidence, I saw myself as Hephaestos, ugly, ill-favoured, and
inferior.Yet, in time, I would come to understand that j ust as Harry
set his sights too high, with the result that whatever he wrote fell
short of his ideal and left him in despair, I started out with such
a debased image of myself and my abilities that whatever I wrote
made me feel that I was getting somewhere, and that one day I
might amount to something after all.

26
 Distance Lend s Enchantment

After finals that second year, Fletcher and I found work digging
ditches on the site of a new housing development at Mangere.
Harry, we heard, had gone north to work as a linesman for the
Post and Telegraph Department, and we did not see him until the
beginning of the new academic year.
He was standing in a long queue, waiting to enrol. In contrast
to everyone else in sandals and summer shirts, Harry was wearing
a heavy airforce greatcoat. Fletcher later explained that he'd been
given the coat by a Maori with whom he'd been working. Harry
had admired the coat and innocently asked where he might buy
one. To his astonishment and shame, his workmate took off the
coat and insisted Harry have it. Fletcher reckoned this may have
been the first time Harry had been given something without
strings attached, by someone without an ulterior motive. In any
event, he wore the coat everywhere, despite the summer heat, in
celebration, he claimed, of a world of" custom and ceremony". But
as with his blue unbuttoned shirts and the poses he struck with
Thread Bear in his parents' landscaped garden, this new persona
was ephemeral.
Perhaps he saw me in a similar light, as someone testing for a
bit part in a second-rate tragedy. Garbed in a black duffel coat, I
spent most afternoons becoming bloated with beer in the Kiwi,
Central or Grand. I did not drink to drown my sorrows but to
conjure, for a few hours, that spurious sense of enlargement and
self-confidence that may be given by a skinful of beer. When the

27
pubs closed at six, a group of us would make our way to the
Golden Dragon in Grey's Avenue for half-orders of chop suey or
chow mein, then head back to the campus to attend a talk. I would
always take the last bus home to my parents' house in Mount
Roskill, staring bleakly into the suburban darkness, the stirrings of
a new poem in my head.

When I try now to fathom the vague sense of desolation that

dogged me then, I think it had more to do with my inability to
place myself in relation to the past, the future, or the country in
which I found myself than in any specific loss. Fletcher felt it
too. We felt incomplete in ourselves, and unhappy with what we
were. There was something missing, something that inhibited and
diminished us. At times we blamed our parentage, believing that
our fathers had failed us in some way. When Fletcher told me
how his father had clumsily pressed money into his hands on the
day he left home, unable to express his feelings in any other way,
or when Harry confessed that his father had never shown him
any physical affection, I recognised these signs of Anglo gauche­
ness in my own father. But more, I remembered the January day
I returned home from a Student Congress at Curious Cove in
the Marlborough Sounds and Dad and I went downtown to a
movie. Standing behind him in the queue at the box office, I was
suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the frailty of this man who
had had to suffer my ingratitude, my bouts of drunkenness, and my
adolescent tirades against his "bourgeois values".
There were also times when we lamented the meagreness and
marginality of our social circle, aware of how few of us there were
- intellectuals, beatniks, poets, sustaining ourselves on European
art, foreign literature, and imported jazz and blues. But some­
times we were given glimpses closer to home into what we were
looking for.
One autumn day Fletcher persuaded me to accompany him to
meet the poet R.A.K. Mason. Mason's house was on the slopes

28
of Mt Eden, a villa much like any other in the street. His wife
Dorothy made a pot of tea, and did most of the talking - mainly
about the active part she and Ron played in the New Zealand­
China society. After tea and biscuits, Ron asked if we'd like to tag
along while he wandered over Mt Eden, filling sacks with fallen
leaves. He was a landscape gardener, he reminded us, and needed
the leaves for mulch.
Unfortunately, the poet did not mention poetry at all, and since
Fletcher and I were familiar with Mason's Rimbaud-like repudia­
tion of literature in his early twenties, we were loathe to broach
the subj ect. This silence troubled me, for though I knew many of
Mason's poems by heart, and thought of him as the equal of any
of his English and American contemporaries, I found it impossible
to connect the writing with the man. I had expected Ron Mason
to manifest the genius of his poems. I had imagined Fletcher and
I coming away from our afternoon in his company transformed,
the missing sides of ourselves discovered, our lives made more
complete. But like pilgrims who have failed to witness a miracle,
we felt disappointed.
That winter, I reciprocated Fletcher's invitation by taking him
to meet James K. Baxter in Wellington. I had first met Jim Baxter
through my older sister, and we had exchanged a few letters and
poems in the ensuing years .
It was a windswept night in June - a fact I remember from the
first line of a poem Jim sent me a week or two after our Wellington
visit. Fletcher and I sat in the front room ofhis family bungalow in
Ngaio. His wife, Jacquie, and their two children remained out of
sight in the back of the house. By contrast with our visit to R.A.K.
Mason, we talked poetry non-stop - or rather Baxter did. Where
Mason had been laconic to the point of awkwardness, Jim creaked
on and on like a waterwheel, churning out phrases, inundating us
with images, and proffering world-weary words of wisdom . . .
"About Ron Mason. He is a very good bloke indeed. Whether
he can still write or not is beside the point. The poems come

29
out of a chasm of suffering: perhaps he is better off free of the
chasm for a while at least. He has no outer skin. To be near him is
to receive some kind of charge of acute sensitivity, rawness even,
combined with the sense of rough j ustice of the union man. A
New Zealand Camus."
But again we came away empty-handed. For though our search
was for mentors, path-finders or father-figures who might recog­
nise us as kinsmen and adopt us into a community of like-minded
souls, Mason, Baxter, and McCahan (whose drinking circle in the
Kiwi we sometimes j oined) were all too familiar, and too preoc­
cupied with their own struggles. I suspect that we saw them as the
kind of people we risked becoming if we remained too long in the
country that Colin McCahan described in 1 958 as "a landscape
with too few lovers" and Baxter, a couple of years later, called "the
body of our common love . . . murdered by triviality" .
That same year I saw McCahan's Gate paintings in a small
gallery off Symonds Street, and they knocked me out. Angular
and globular shapes, hinged and adrift in fields of light. Figures
against the ground with no fixed point of view. After-images
moving from the frames and out of the room into the city which
I re-entered with all my senses altered, as though I were high on
hashish . I walked in a daze. Horizons were overturned. At times I
did not know whether or not the pavement was on the same plane
as the sea. I was seeing Auckland for the first time. I saw houses
in windows and windows in the sky. I walked without knowing
where I was going, and in Freeman's Bay the gas tanks were like
tin cans floating between pylon and lattice, disobedient of gravity
and perspective.
But Auckland itself did not seem to register this event, though
there were plenty of newspaper reviews dismissing McCahan's
work as yet another example of the sort of art that a child or
chimpanzee could do. I cannot speak for Fletcher, of course, but I
hated the idea of having to fight this kind of losing battle, not for
acclaim, but simply for acceptance. It wasn't a matter of getting

30
one's work published; Charles Brasch had already printed one of
my poems, inspired by a reading of Arthur Koestler's critique of
capital punishment, in the December 1 959 issue of LAndfall, and
he was keen to see more of my work. It was a fear of being contin­
ually derided and dragged down by a petty prej udice against intel­
lectual and artistic striving that had the audacity to pass itself off as
a down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness, home-grown philosophy. I
was not really aware of it at the time, but I was already in the same
mould as Mason, Baxter, and McCahon. Though I could not, as
they did, see Christ in those that suffered, I instinctively proj ected
my own sense of marginality onto outsiders and underlings . I also
shared their mistaken assumption that the despised and rej ected
are thereby virtuous, and the privileged vicious. In aligning oneself
with the oppressed, I thought that one automatically stood on the
side of truth.
This kind of logic made me determined to change the world.
To alleviate suffering, to do good works, to live among the poor.
But this salvationist impulse had its origins, not in any direct exper­
ience of the poor, but in my own unexamined sense of victirnhood,
as I came to realise when I ventured on a career in welfare.
Our role models were all outsiders. For Harry, it was Evelyn
Waugh, HL. Mencken, and Iris Murdoch; for Fletcher it was
Scott Fitzgerald. As for me, I had already steeped myself in Dylan
Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and D. H . Lawrence, and that
year, thanks to a recent gift of books to the Auckland University
library by the Carnegie Foundation, I devoured American liter­
ature with a vengeance, and experimented with writing in the
American grain. One week my role model was Edward Arlington
Robinson, the next Wallace Stevens . . .
Yet we longed for a more immediate exemplar. Someone, as
Stevens put it, "beyond us yet ourselves".
We found him in Herman Gladwin.
Herman was in his early fifties, and almost as old as the century.
He had set foot on every continent, seemed to have had more

31
incarnations than a cat, and his experience encompassed more
history than any of us could grasp. A world where merchant ships
still stowed canvas. Cities of horse-drawn cabs. Uncharted atolls .
His vitality belied his age, leaving us to wonder what shape­
shifting secret had allowed him to move from country to country,
wife to wife and trade to trade, so effortlessly. There was nothing
of which he did not have an original opinion. As for his poems, I
had heard or read nothing like them.
Twenty-five years on, I sat with him during his dying days,
talking of old times. He was -living in a shabby suburban room
where he had roughly assembled the obj ects that had always
defined his encampments: one of his model ships, a shelf of books,
a battered folder of poems, a suitcase full of clothes, and a bar
radiator which kept him warm and on which he grilled his staple
of cheese on toast. As we talked, he upbraided me for persist­
ently getting the facts wrong about his life: I had always wanted to
mythologise him. But, I protested, had he not always represented
his past to us in mythological terms?
In some ways he resembled Ezra Pound: wiry, energetic,
cantankerous. He claimed to have been conceived in the rain on
top of a horse-drawn bus somewhere between London Bridge
and the Elephant and Castle. He was born in Barking, Essex, and
spent his boyhood exploring the Thames marshes. His father was
a glass-blower whose work included blowing penis-shaped hot­
water bottles for use in nunneries. His mother died of galloping
consumption when he was five. At eighteen he left England, and
worked all over the world as an ordinary seaman. One time, in San
Francisco Bay, he met some New Zealand seamen and got fired
up about seeing the South Pacific. A year or two later he jumped
ship in Auckland. During the thirties he worked on and otT as a
painter and sign-writer. He painted the old Parliament Buildings
in Wellington, and was active in the Communist Party.
It was Fletcher and Harry who discovered Herman, in Albert
Park. On their way to a lecture, they noticed him sitting on a bench

32
by the fountain, smoking a cigarette. An hour later, recrossing the
park, they found him still sitting in the same place, and asked
him what he was doing. "Contemplating how one can measure
both mass and velocity," Herman replied. He hastened to assure
them that it was an aesthetic, not a philosophical, question. He
was down to his last cigarette, and the quandary had presented
itself as to whether he should keep the cigarette in its original
form or send it up in smoke, which would then drift and dissipate
pleasingly into the air. Fletcher and Harry told Herman that all
through their lecture they could not stop thinking about him, and
they asked where he lived and whether he was hungry. Herman
had been living on an old scow moored at St Mary's Bay. He was
a manic-depressive, so could not be trusted to do anything, but he
had received free lodgings and pin money for occupying the scow
and, as it were, taking care of it for its owners. W ith a galley and
galley stove, and plenty of lumber in Winston's yard, he had been
well set up. Absolutely perfect for an ex-seaman . Unfortunately,
the owners had decided to hire a professional watchman, and he'd
been laid off.
Fletcher and Harry invited Herman back to their flat for a meal.
He ended up spending the best part of a year with them, dossing
on the sitting-room floor, going to student parties, and steadily
reading through the books on Harry's shelves.
Herman was a great autodidact. Blessed with the eclecticism of
the self-made man, he possessed a genius for synthesising philos­
ophy, poetry, autobiography, anecdote and myth. In the Lome Street
coffee bar where it had become our habit to gather every night,
Herman held forth on Proust, Empedocles, Montaigne, Marx and
Engels, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, and Teutonic mythology. His
mainstays at the time were Samuel Beckett's Watt and Laurens van
der Post's Lost World cif the Kalahari. The latter he blithely urged me
to embrace as a model for doing ethnography, and so transgress the
boundaries that we, as students, were being taught to defend.
Harry never j oined us. As enthralled as any of us by Herman's

33
homespun philosophy, he nonetheless kept his distance. And his
cool. He was, as Herman so memorably described him, "couth,
kempt, and deeply gruntled" .
But Fletcher and I were spellbound by Herman's impromptu
lectures on the dialectic, his latest poem, and his cabalistic draw­
ings. Our age difference mattered in only one respect. Herman
had an older person's intolerance of youth's egoism, impetuosity,
and moral gaucheness. He was always berating us for talking too
loudly, moving too clumsily, acting without forethought. Once he
harangued me for setting down my coffee cup noisily in its saucer.
"Even the most mundane action," he said, "should be carried out
mindfully." One of his favourite drawings depicted a small figure
hurrying across an open field. In its tracks lay a trampled daisy.
Above the scene, Herman wrote 1 + 1 = 3 , by which he meant
that our actions have repercussions that go far beyond the field of
our immediate awareness. That heedlessly crushed daisy would, in
the fullness of time, change the course of history. The fate of any
individual, like the future of the planet, was determined by the
accumulated effects of a trillion such trivial and thoughtless acts.
It was inevitable that one day I would trample the daisy. Indeed,
in a poem from this period, Herman made me the very quintes­
sence of heedless youth:

Loud man
that toils and sighs
remember
on your young cheek
the water from other eyes.

Loud man
whose art is as short
as the season of the ant
remember
the pant of the lover
under night skies.

34
 Old man dried milk skimmed
of its red rimmed view
confused in the river
of youth
remember
the blue beams of the sea
remember the pangs of thy birth
of thy parting step on step
over fallen timbers
over old smoke;

Winter never forgets.

Perhaps it was the fear of such a sentencing that led Harry to keep
his distance. He knew that sooner or later we would all bear the
brunt of Herman's censure and ire, if only because we were young
and had the advantage of a formal education. But Harry's absence
from that corner table where we drank Cona coffee and sat
engrossed in talk over wine bottles encrusted with candlewax may
simply have been because he could not allow himself to become
too close to another human soul, having discovered too early the
love that gives with one hand only to take away with the other.
Auckland, he once said cryptically, was a principality of pain.
And so I imagined him out there on the edge of the night,
moving in some charmed circle of his own choosing, keeping the
world at arm's length, waiting, waiting for the sun to rise.

35
 M yse l f M ust I Remake

I f I stuck at my studies, it wasn't because I was a scholar. It was

because I could alternate academic life with life in the "real" world
- seagulling on the waterfront, working as a postman, a builder's
labourer or a storeman. For in those days you could absent yourself
from classes and defer essays for months on end, then make good
the deficit at the eleventh hour. Having "got terms" you seques­
tered yourself in the university library, swatted maniacally for six
weeks, and sat finals. If I were an undergraduate today, I would
not survive.
This pattern was, of course, also born of economic necessity;
my bursary was not enough to live on. But most importantly, it
was consistent with my view that academic life was too removed
from the burly-burly of the world. Though captivated by the ideas
I was encountering in philosophy, psychology and anthropology,
I feared that this intellectual life would compromise or stifle my
craving for "reality" and my desire to write.
Lew Stewart, with whom I had worked at the Poultryman's
Cooperative, often came to mind.

Once in a working weekend a man told me

That reality will wander along the all ey s
Like a cur in hunger down the garbage cans.

It is hard imagining a way of saying

When the way was living to that man.

36
Working on the wharves or on a building site was a way of
"keeping me honest," as the saying went. It forced me to explain
myself to men who thought that " going to school" at my age
suggested a reluctance to grow up. And it gave me a chance to
exchange a world of texts and abstractions for a world of face-to­
face encounters and direct experience.
But these contrary impulses unsettled me.
When I was a boy, my grandfather often chided me for never
sticking at things, for always changing horses in midstream.
Certainly there was no denying that my enthusiasms came and
went in bewilderingly quick succession. A passion for Meccano
model-building culminated, at thirteen, in my winning an inter­
national prize for a miniature mechanical kiwi, and indicated to
my parents a future as an engineer. A couple of years later, my
meticulous collections of native ferns and mosses revealed a talent
for natural science. But when at sixteen I became fascinated by
fossil hominids, and wrote my first poems, these enthusiasms went
unremarked - for no one in my family had ever heard of anthro­
pology. The idea of making a living from writing poetry was, of
course, too absurd to even consider.
In the face of my grandfather's scepticism, I invoked Ecclesi­
astes: "Whatever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might."
My grandfather was unimpressed; my grandmother even more
so. Wanderlust, she enj oined, was as bad as any other lust.
At university my desire to break through the envelope of my
upbringing and broaden my horizons had met with Herman's
approval. When my academic advisers insisted I choose between
anthropology and English on the grounds that science and art were
mutually incompatible, Herman said I should do no such thing.
Invoking the image of a stew, he said the more ingredients that went
into it, and the longer it simmered, the better it would taste.
Surprisingly, Herman did not suggest travel as an answer. Perhaps
this option was obvious, given his own itinerant life. Possibly he

37
saw travel as an escape. And I had yet to see anthropology, like the
army, as a means of seeing the world.

At the end of my third year at Auckland University, my thoughts

turned to Wellington and the south . I 'd visited the city once when
I was seventeen, and had never forgotten waking one morning
in the all-night train from Taranaki as it wound its way down
the narrow littoral of the Kapiti coast. Windows of wind-scoured
sea and blue sky were suddenly shouldered aside by the Stygian
narrows of a tunnel, before the train emerged at Korokoro in
sudden light, and the harbour drew me into its outstretched arms.
In returning to Wellington, I imagined that this adolescent vision
would be restored, and when Harry agreed to j oin me there, I felt
that my new incarnation was guaranteed.
Up until this time, Harry and I had rarely met, and although
I thought of him as a kindred spirit we had never really talked.
Almost everything I knew about him had come from Fletcher, or
was hearsay.
Our first meeting was at the Cenotaph. I had been in Wellington
for a couple of months, working on the waterfront; Harry had
j ust arrived. We were both nervous and tongue-tied, which may
explain why I have no memory of what we said.
Perhaps we both felt a little like Henry Miller, meeting Blaise
Cendrars for the first time.
It was December 1 3 , 1 934. The American writer was forty-three
and had just published his first book. Cendrars was four years older,
a co-founder with Guillaume Apollinaire of /'esprit nouveau in
modern poetry, a veteran of the First World War, a seasoned traveller,
author of twenty-seven books - including poetry, fiction, and
collections of folktales - and a friend of such luminaries as Marc
Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Leger, Sonia and Robert
Delaunay, Eric Satie, Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau.
Understandably, Miller was in awe of the older writer, despite
a magnanimous review Cendrars had recently written of Tropic

38
of Cancer for the Dadaist j ournal Orbes. In the piece entitled "Un
Ecrivain Americain N ous Est N e", Cendrars saluted Miller as
"profoundly one of us, in spirit, style, power and giftedness . . .
a universal writer, like all those who have worked out a way of
expressing in a book a personal vision of Paris."
On a wintry afternoon not long after the review appeared,
Cendrars walked into the studio at 1 8 Villa Seurat where Miller
lived with his pal Alfred Pedes. Cendrars was burly, but not tall.
With his battered features and smoker's squint he looked like an
ex-prizefighter. But the tough exterior and ebullient manner
belied his intelligence, ironic humour, and love of solitude. His
eyes were as blue as the packets of Gauloises Bleues that he chain­
smoked. Like Cervantes, he had lost an arm on the battlefield.
When he gestured, the empty sleeve of his jacket flapped from his
right shouder, and when he lit a cigarette he held the matchbox
between stump and armpit, and struck the match with his left
hand. He was famous as a raconteur. So was Miller. But not, it
seems, in the company of Cendrars.
Alfred Pedes later described the meeting:

Aft er an initial ex ch ange of cordial greetings accompanied by th e

customary accolade, Cendrars began to give h is impressions of Tropic
if Cancer. His praise gush ed forth with a warmth and fervour wh ich
moved Mill er profoundl y.Th ough h e understood Engl ish perfectl y
h e refused to speak it. He did so perh aps because h e th ough t of
Mill er in terms of a writer " de chez nous" wh o woul d h ave been
well advised to h ave been born in France.
" C 'etais pas malin d '�tre ne en Amerique! " he ex cl aimed in h is
th undering voice th at was meant to reverberate in th e wide open
spaces of th e four continents.
To cement a fr iendsh ip food and wine are indispensabl e. W ith a
negl igent gesture of h is uniq ue h and Cendrars waved away Henry 's
sh ame- faced confession th at h e was broke. He pretended th at h e
h ad just cash ed a ch eq ue for th e ex press purpose of giving / 'auteur

39
 du Tropique du Cancer a good time. "]ustement, je connais un petit

marchand de vin . . . "

I n th e street h e h ail ed a taxi and gave th e driver th e address

of his petit marchand de vin - somewh ere in Montmartre, near
th e Place des Abbesses. From th e moment we boarded th e taxi
Cendrars talked and never stop ped till we reach ed our destination.
I t seemed to me th at h e was in an ex ceptionall y ex pansive mood,
but I l ater found out th at this was his normal condition . . .

Pedes goes on to describe a wine shop with sawdust on the

floor where Cendrars is given a royal welcome. As food and wine
are brought to the table, Cendrars entertains Pedes and Miller with
astonishing stories about his adventures on the upper Amazon.
Then, "the performance over, he calmly beckoned to the patron for
more wine and returned to his rocquifort au beurre. Eating, however,
did not deter him from talking. From Amazonia he jumped
straight into the trenches of Flanders, then by a minor detour via
Italy and Russia proceeded to the heart of Africa. Although there
was no positive transition between one subject and another, they
were nevertheless mysteriously interconnected, strung like beads
of experience on the threads of life. In the three or four hours
spent at the dinner table we had the impression of having partici­
pated in some of the adventures he has made legendary."
Miller was "flabbergasted by Cendrars' wizardry," writes Pedes.
"He recognised in Cendrars a sort of cosmic brother, and his heart
went out to him." But a skeptic might point out that if Miller had
not accepted the role of happy acolyte the meeting may not have
gone so well. Cendrars could be a blagueur and a bad listener,
unwilling to brook competition. "When he told a story," his
daughter once observed, "he could not stand to be contradicted or
interrupted. If anyone called into question, or worse, agreed with
what he was saying, he would become enraged . . . He would sulk.
To speak while he was speaking was to stand between him and
his creation. He resented it as an intrusion. It was incongruous,
obscene. It broke the spell."

40
 As for Miller, the meeting with his hero was a mixed blessing.
As soon as he and Cendrars had gone their separate ways, after
nine or ten hours in each other's company, Miller sat down and
wrote a long letter to Anals Nin.
It was two in the morning.
"I have just gotten away from him," Miller confesses, "had to run
away. As a man I must have sorely disappointed him. I was almost
taciturn. A cause de toi! And yet, what a day! What a night! He's a
real man I tell you, and I feel bad that I let him down. Perhaps he is
that one man I wrote about recently, the man I expected to come
forward and hail me. And how I fucked myself! "
Five days later, his mood is just as gloomy. In another letter to
Ana·is, he confesses, " In my present state I hesitate meeting Blaise
Cendrars again. He had asked to see me again, very soon, and I
promised to invite him for dinner. But I haven't the gusto for it. I
may feel sad when he comes - and that would spoil things. I can't
even write him a letter tho ' I 've tried to several times. He must
have a strange opinion of me."

It's often occurred to me that had I gone out of my way to meet

Henry Miller - whose work I once tried to emulate, and about
whom I have written so much - I would undoubtedly have been
as intimidated as Miller in the presence of Blaise Cendrars. Our
need for heroes makes fools of us all; worse, it prevents us recog­
nising the flaws in those we extol. When I read Henry Miller's
letters to Anals Nin, or Miriam Cendrars' account of her father's
failings, I feel enormous relief. No friendship can carry the burden
of idealisation. It's all very well describing the rapport between
Miller and Cendrars as spiritual kinship, as Pedes does - an
affinity between "beings belonging to the same species, having
the same wave-length, magnitude and calibre." But the truth is
more banal, as would prove to be the case with my friendship
with Harry. When one's expectations become too great, the possi­
bility of disappointment is more than the relationship can bear.

41
Then, one has no choice but to distance oneself from it in order
to salvage the ideal, or - since I' amour se revele en se retirer - avail
oneself of distance to renew the terms of engagement.

We rented the lower storey of a house perched high above Evans

Bay. Sitting in one of those cumbersome red Wellington buses,
toiling up the switchback road to Roseneath with its clay embank­
ments studded with flax and pohutukawa, I felt exhilarated and
invincible. Years of loneliness had made me hungry for love and
friendship. In Harry I saw the possibility of what I called at the
time "a redemptive and illuminating blood pact". It was the same
with every girl I met; I created a Platonic fantasy of twinship,
a marriage of true minds, instantaneous completion. But I was
too intense, too absolute. I expected too much. My longing to
be saved from myself repelled the very people on whom I set
my heart. Harry was j ust the opposite. His reserve and studied
calm intrigued women. They were attracted, as I had been, by his
splendid inaccessibility.
Within days of moving into our flat I had persuaded New
Zealand's leading young Trotskyite, and our milkman - whom I
chanced to meet in a French Reading Knowledge class at univer­
sity - to j oin us. Harry referred to our flatmates as Leon and
Clyde. It was Leon's first venture away from home, and his notion
of cooking a meal was to boil a pound of mincemeat and serve it
unadorned. Clyde subsisted on milk. Our fridge was soon full of it,
and the path outside the back door became impassable for crates of
empties . When our landlady - a divorcee who favoured peroxide
hair and gold j ewelry - insisted we do something about it, Harry
disarmed her with his Midas smile. Her small son, Nathan, was
another matter. The boy formed an attachment to Harry and was
always imploring him to play rugby.

Memory yields these fragments, like bone fishhooks from a

midden. But was the life we lived any less fragmentary? I remember

42
gathering paua at Point Jerningham. I remember a day in March
at Balaena Bay, pine needles, seaweed and bleached sticks gummed
together at the water's edge with spume. Harry and I were sun­
bathing on the stony beach. The water was already too cold for
swimming. A white balustrading marked the zigzag path down to
Kio bay. "As if stitched to the hillside with surgical gut," Harry
remarked.
I had just finished readingjustine. Now it was Harry's turn to be
seduced by Durrell's breathtaking similes and turns of phrase.
I still have my copy of the book, its covers warped from lying in
the sun that day. But in my memory it belongs to Harry, who was
carried away by the nostalgic portraits ofJustine and Melissa, and
by Durrell's stately prose that rendered even the most tragic event
luxuriant and entrancing.
But while the Alexandria of the Quartet captivated Harry, it was
Cavafy's Alexandria that spoke to me. The city as a cage. The ines­
capable ruin that haunts its citizens wherever they travel, drawing
them back in memory for a final reckoning. In Durrell's poem,
Alexandria, you can hear these echoes of "the old man of the
city" .

To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,

W ho move to their sweet undiscovered ends,
Or whom the great conspiracy deceives,
I wish these whirling autumn leaves:
Promontori es splashed by the sal ty sea,
Groaned on in darkness by the tram
To horizons of love or good luck or more love -
As for me I now move
Through m any negatives to what I am.

With the onset of winter, we abandoned our eyrie above the

bay. Clyde needed more room for his milk crates. Leon was readying
himself for an assault on Christchurch, which he reckoned to
be ripe for revolution. And Harry said he needed more privacy.

43
Perhaps he was oppressed by my expectations of intimacy, much as
I felt burdened by his romantic image of me as someone destined
to burn out early, his promise unfulfilled.
Over the next few months I inhabited a series of flea-infested
private hotels with names like Savoy, Albemarle and Rutland.
Still attached to Henry Miller's and George Orwell's picaresque
accounts of being down and out, and of the lower depths, I felt
at home among the retired working men who haunted these
shabby buildings. I found solace in a shared beer or a flutter on
the horses, and grew used to their catarrhal choruses and urine
reek - symptoms of failing lungs and sphincters - that filled
the gloomy corridors both night and day. On Sundays they hurled
their empties into a lot across the way, the shattering of glass their
ultimate gesture of rage against the failing of the light.
Harry also stayed at the Rutland for a while. He wanted to see
my decrepit world for himself. We invented nicknames for the old
codgers who sat hunched over their cornflakes and brain patties in
the breakfast room, gulled out of melancholy by Faith and Hope,
the two Maori waitresses who worked there. Twice Paid, the hotel
proprietor, and his wife, Grimalkin, were forever reminding us that
our rent was overdue. And Bertrand Russell - the spitting image
of the great iconoclast - embarked optimistically each morning
on an expedition to the TAB, but spent his evenings in the dining
room, groaning softly to himself, bemoaning his losses.
We were both in revolt against respectability. We had no
intention of joining any political party, no matter how ideologi­
cally correct its agenda. We valued independence of mind. Our
unspoken motto : epater le bourgeoisie!
My few months working as a clerk in the Treasury were dedi­
cated to this kind of vainglory. When told that I had to wear a
suit, I went out and bought an expensive two-piece tweed outfit
that answered the description but outraged my superiors. When
instructed to make a scrapbook of clippings from the Financial
Times on GATT, I was careful to paste in plenty of ads for Lucas

44
batteries - a subversive allusion to my supervisor's surname.
When asked to measure the clock face in the Board Room, I
performed the task during the course of a high-level meeting of
senior heads of the Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Ministry of
Finance. And when entrusted with taking proofs of the Budget and
Economic Survey to the Government Printing Office, I ensured that
the statistics were subtly revised in conformity with what Harry
had told me about the true state of the New Zealand economy.
For my exasperated superiors, this was the last straw, and I was
sacked. As a final gesture of defiance I pushed Lucas's collection
of potted cacti off the windowsill during the lunch break. They
plummeted seven floors to form a symmetrical crater of earth and
terracotta shards in the dark blue roof of a Navy Department car.
Harry delighted in my escapades, and even went along with
me in my madness. The day after I left the Treasury, we went up
to the roof of the Rutland and dropped clothes pegs on the heads
of public servants descending the steps to Lambton Quay. Later,
we strolled downtown wearing policeman masks cut from the
backs of cornflakes packets. Inevitably, we were accosted by two
real constables who did not take kindly to our idea of fun. Harry
was not fazed. Signalling to me to act dumb, he began some spiel
about how I was a victim of a broken home, and had lost my
marbles, and should not be judged too harshly. I thought he was
in complete control of the situation until the cops said he would
have to accompany them to the police station.
With a pitying look, they told me I was free to go.
If Harry was to be believed, he was often rumbled by the
police, usually late at night when he was walking along Oriental
Parade alone. There was something about Harry which people in
authority did not like. He was too enigmatic. Too glib. He gave
them the impression that they were the butt of some private j oke.
Often as not he would get roughed up. How else could one protect
oneself in the face of his mercurial and condescending manner?

45
In Clarissa Young, Harry met his match. He was introduced to her
by Brij en Gupta who had recently taken up an appointment in
Asian Studies at the university. Like a Cheshire cat, Gupta presided
over a select group of students - at once guru, matchmaker and
hermeneut. Clarissa was stunningly beautiful, her face vaguely
oriental, her smile an entreaty and a trap. Harry and I both fell
under her spell, though it was to Harry, of course, that she turned,
and Gupta who gave the liaison his blessing.
Soon after meeting Clarissa, Harry told me she was cold. "One
part woman, three parts a child," he said. He could not understand
why he was so deeply drawn to her.
That the attraction was mutual was obvious. They would sit
together in the Ghuznee Street coffee bar where we hung out in
the evenings, looking for all the world like lovers. Yet everyone
knew they were not.
Looking back, I wonder if Harry did not see himself in her.
Someone unable to yield to love, who could not trust the other.
They would gaze into each other's eyes as one might gaze at one's
own image in the still surface of a dark pond. And Clarissa would
break into laughter as if a spring, wound to breaking point, had
just snapped. Though it was all display, I envied them. They made
me wonder whether the semblance of love wasn't more to be
desired than actual passion.
One night, at a party in Gupta's house, I watched as Harry
lay supine on a couch with Clarissa leaning over him, pecking at
his flesh with the languor of a tropical bird. Though their love­
making was like some tableau vivant, I felt disconcerted and hurt.
I got drunk. I went out into the night and wandered for hours
under the stone pines and cedars in the Botanical Gardens,j ealous
and bereft.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the affair ended. Rumour had
it that Clarissa had called it off. Gupta let it be known that Clarissa
had baulked at the idea of "settling down" . While it amused me
to think of Harry in any domestic role, I did not risk asking him

46
if what I had heard was true. In the coffee bar where I repaired
every evening, Gupta judged Clarissa to be cold and naive. Others
called her ruthless and cruel. One mutual friend opined that Clar­
issa was bisexual. Neither she nor Harry showed up to advise us
otherwise.
A few days later I was taken aback by a call from Clarissa. Would
meet her? She needed someone to talk to. Could we meet at
Suzie's coffee bar at five?
Over coffee, I hardly heard a word she was saying. I was aware
of little else than the fact that I was alone with her, and that she
was taking me into her confidence.
When I told Harry of our meeting, he was enraged. He stood
at the foot of Plimmer's Steps, demanding that I not see her again,
asking me to see things from his point of view. It was the first time
I had glimpsed his vulnerability.
But I saw her again, and imagined I was in love with her. We
walked along the waterfront, we talked of what we wanted to do
with our lives. If we mentioned Harry it was only to distance
ourselves from him, and create a space where we could come into
our own. In the weekends we climbed Mt Kaukau, emerging from
the soughing, creaking pine plantation onto a windblown ridge
that overlooked valleys of indelible greenness and, beyond, the sea.
I sensed that there could be nothing physical between us. Perhaps
I was respecting Harry's wishes. Or was overwhelmed by my own
inadequacy in comparison with him.
One thing was sure, none of us would remember the events of
this time in quite the same way. Gupta would describe how a devas­
tated Clarissa sought refuge with him. How he drove with her to
the top of Mt Victoria one stormy night and tried to console her.
Clarissa, mindful of her self-image as a feminist, would commit
her story to print thirty years later, recounting an agonising choice
between marriage and domesticity on the one hand, and an inde­
pendent academic career on the other. According to her version
of events, she one day took the cable car from Lambton Quay to

47
the university, and between buying her ticket at the bottom and
getting off at the top decided to ditch Harry and pursue a career.
W hat resolution! As for my own recollections, I recall Clarissa
saying that Wellington was a carousel. And so the carousel turned:
Clarissa and I drifted apart, and Harry met Annette.

I find it difficult to describe Annette without typecasting her,

without making her out to be simply an example of a class, a
member of a set. Perhaps this is how she wanted to be seen. Perhaps
this is how I wanted to see her. W hile Harry and I were desperate
to stand out, and cast ourselves in heroic roles, Annette, I believed,
was desperate to belong - but to the right circle.
Like me, she was a child of small-town New Zealand. Both
of us, I like to think, were driven to remake ourselves in some
more cosmopolitan image. W hereas I took a literary and intellec­
tual route, she sought to refashion herself in the image of a social
elite, possibly because she readily accepted the view, typical of our
parents' generation, that England was synonymous with home,
security and respectability. So she emulated an English upper­
middle class ideal. She improved her speech, polished her manners,
looked to her grooming, and wore a cashmere sweater, court shoes,
camel-hair coat, and carried a pigskin handbag. She had none of
the dark mystery or intellectual panache of Clarissa Young, but
what she lacked in style she made up for in self-assurance. Her
goals were limited, and therefore attainable. Her self-image was
consistent and clear, and thereby she gave the impression that she
could be relied upon. In Harry she found an exemplar of the class
she aspired to belong to. And Harry saw in her an admirer and
guarantor, someone who might redeem the upbringing he had
struggled to repudiate, and forgive him his trespasses.
A cynic might say - as Gupta indeed did - that Harry had
"settled for" Annette. But if she was a low-risk lover. Harry was a
complete gamble.
His affair with Clarissa seemed to have precipitated some

48
terrible unhappiness in him. It kept him from responding deeply
to Annette's love, and hung about him like a dark cloud.
At this time I was working a night shift in a Newtown bake­
house, running an automatic bread slicing and wrapping machine.
Clyde had left me his ten-speed racing bike when our Hitaitai
flat disbanded, and I used it to ride to work. One night, as I was
setting off, I came upon Harry leaning against the door jamb of
his hotel room, his eyes half closed - like Finn at the beginning
of Iris Murdoch's Under the Net. I couldn't help thinking there
was something theatrical and rehearsed about the way he stood
there, but I was used to his mannerisms by now, and set no store
by them. However, when I spoke to him I saw that he was afraid.
I asked if he was all right, and of course he said he was. But ten
minutes later, as I was cycling between the tramlines in Courtenay
Place, which glistened in the street lights after rain, I suddenly felt
compelled to go back. I braked hard. My bike skidded on the wet
tramlines. Convinced that Harry was going to kill himself, I stood
in the dark and deserted road near the corner ofTaranaki Street,
not knowing which way to turn or what to do.
What does one do with premonitions? They fly in the face of
reason . They are seldom confirmed by the course of subsequent
events. One risks looking foolish if one acts on them. In any event,
by the time the premonition has come fully into one's conscious­
ness it is usually too late to act.
All these thoughts passed through my mind as I stood in the
street before climbing back on my bike and cycling slowly toward
Newtown.
Harry survived the night.
We never spoke of the incident. A few days later he left
Wellington.

Not long after Harry's departure, Annette sought me out. She was
in deep distress. Apparently Harry had been unable to commit
himself to her. There were things he needed to resolve in himself.

49
And only in Auckland could he do this.
I was touched. In Annette's bewildered face I saw my own
misery. But it was worse for her. She was in love with Harry.
Because of Harry, she had come to realise that the young solicitor
to whom she had been engaged was someone she could never
love. She had called off the engagement. There was no going back.
But what was she to do now?
I could neither help nor comfort her.
Then she surprised me by confessing that she did not really
know who Harry was. He had confided little to her about his life.
Her questions had all been answered by evasive hints, mysterious
allusions, unfinished sentences.
"I don't think anyone knows him, or that he knows himself," I
said. "Not in the sense you mean. Not in the sense that one knows
where one is going, what one is going to do with one's life. I
think this is the knowledge that he does not want to have, that he
shrinks from, that he fears."
"What about his family?"
"I 've never met them."
"But you knew him in Auckland. You were friends, weren't
you? What was he like there?"
"Much the same as he is here."
Disappointed, Annette almost ended our conversation. But then
she rallied, and asked: "Why did he promise so much? W hy did he
let me believe he loved me as much as I loved him?"
It was to be the only intimate exchange we would ever have.
W hen she found that I did not have the key that might unlock
Harry's soul, she turned away. And at that moment, I think, she
began to see in me the side of Harry's personality she could
neither understand nor accept. She split him in two. And while
he now became her knight in shining armour, albeit an inconstant
one, I became the uncouth berserker, whose howls of pain on the
tundra at night would no longer be construed as the cries of a lost
soul within the gates.

50
At the end of the year I found work as a steward on the Maori,
which sailed nightly between Wellington and Lyttelton. I shared
a six-berth cabin with five gay men, whose badinage was unre­
lenting. Scotch Annie would ask me, "What's the difference
between a straight New Zealander and a queer New Zealander?"
then tell me, "Five beers" . Or catching me reading Moby Dick,
which he immediately translated as "Maybe Dick" , he would try
to caj ole me down from my bunk to j oin the party. I would try to
sleep through the drinking and carousing, but there were nights
when it was all too much and I went on deck and stood at the
taffrail, watching the churning wake in the windswept darkness as
if it were an image of my own confusion. In Lyttelton, I would
take refuge among the lichen-covered stones and tawny grass of
the Port Hills or visit Terry Cutler in Christchurch, trying to piece
together the story of who I was. W hy was I so susceptible to their
gibes and repartee? I had never felt sexually attracted to men.
Yet I recoiled from the thought that men might covet me, and it
weighed on my mind that my friendship with Murray Groves (one
of my anthropology teachers at Auckland) had been misconstrued
as a homosexual dalliance. After unsuccessfully trying to transfer to
the Hinemoa, where the stewards were said to be as straight as the
Maori stewards were bent, I signed off the articles and made my
way back to Auckland to lick my wounds.
Harry was working as a postman. Fletcher was unhappily married
and teaching at the university. We would meet occasionally in a
pub to get plastered and complain about our lots. I had a sense that
we were all in a dark wood, a place of forking paths, emotionally
lost. We had come of age in the fifties - when men did not know
how to treat to women as equals rather than as sex obj ects, when
our ignorance of our own feelings made us panic at the thought
of baring our souls to, or physically embracing, another man, and
when alcohol was our panacea if not our salvation. One evening,
after several hours of hard drinking with Fletcher and Harry in the

51
Albert Hotel, I perversely told them that I had "changed my sex" .
With hindsight, I think I was possibly pre-empting a conclusion
that I felt they were about to reach. In my outrageous disclosure
I hoped to salvage some sense of determining my own destiny
at a time when my whole world seemed to be collapsing around
me. But behind my tormented desire to spit on the world into
which I had been born, to degrade myself in drunkenness and
flout every convention, lay the unshakeable belief that this was all
a necessary prelude to my rebirth in some other place, some other
guise. And years later, when I began to find my feet, it would be
this curious connection between degradation and regeneration,
this perverse but universal impulse to contravene that which is in
order to realise one's own capacity to be, that would become the
leitmotif in all my anthropological writing.

52
 O rd ina r y Mad ness

T he phrase is Charles Bukowski's. It's what I suffered from back

then, toing and froing between the magnetic poles of Auckland
and Wellington, torn between my desire to write and my yearning
for a different life.
Harry and Annette were now living in a sun-filled flat at
Oriental Bay. They listened to the music of Bartok, Vivaldi and
Respighi. They drank Campari sodas in the late afternoon. The
kitchen smelled of freshly ground coffee. There was fruit on the
table in a wooden bowl, and flag irises in glass vases. Art books and
House and Garden magazines were scattered about. It was a place
of elegance and happiness so far removed from my own under­
ground life that when I visited them I felt like a cockroach.
Their parties were like pieces of meticulous theatre. Glamorous
women reclined on the Sanderson-print settee like butterflies
catching the light. Men in pressed trousers and ironed shirts
absented themselves from conversation in clouds of Sobranie
smoke. Annette was in her element, laughing easily, fixing drinks.
Harry drifted among the crowd like a tropical fish, trapped in the
sunlight he had always sought. Everything about him belied the
rumours I had heard: that he had talked to Annette of the hollow­
ness of his life and threatened suicide. And yet, among the golden
lads and girls that would not, like chimney sweepers, come to dust,
I felt a deep and subversive kinship with Harry, and half expected
him at any moment to rej oin me in the shadows. What I failed to
understand was that the very world whose shallowness appalled

53
him, rescued him from drowning in the depths.

Th ere's a c ool web of langu ag e winds us in,

Retreat from t oo much joy or too much fear:
We g row s ea-g reen at last and c oldly die
In brininess and volubility.

He liked to quote this poem of Robert Graves's about the way

language spells away the overhanging night. He saw literature less
as something one laboured at than as a supernatural gift. A form
of magic. He referred to himself as a writer long before I saw any
evidence - apart from the portable Olivetti he kept on the desk
near the window and his pieces in Craccum - that he indeed wrote.
Where writing was my lifeline, it was, for him, a saving illusion.
I worked for a while as a proofreader on Truth. Wellington,
which a year before had been for me a place of infinite promise,
had now become a place of defeat. I wrote poems in which I
described myself as a dirty sheet of newsprint blown down an
alleyway, crumpled against a iron fire-escape, lying sodden in the
gutter. My weekly pittance as a proofreader was blown on grog.
Some days I went without food. I huddled under the thin blankets
in my hotel room trying to keep warm, or sat at my table in a
duffel coat, bashing away at my typewriter in a desperate attempt
to transcend my surroundings. At night I would scratch myself
until my skin was raw and bleeding, and try to annihilate the
hundreds of fleas that bred in the scrim-covered walls. Weekends
were worst. With nothing to do and no money in my pocket, I
would prowl wind-swept streets, inhabited only by drifters and the
Salvation Army band. Sometimes I would beg the price of a meal
from a passer-by, and use the money to sit in the Roxy cinema
for five hours (Action in the Roxy manner - you said it) . watching
B-grade horror films or westerns.

Little boy lost,

he t akes hims elf so s erious ly,

54
 h e brags of h is mi sery,
h e likes to live dangerously.

So Bob Dylan sang in his "Visions ofJohanna" . But my visions

were all of the fortunate life that I believed Harry and Annette
were living in their flat near St Gerard's, overlooking the harbour,
sheltered from the storm.
Whenever I appeared on their doorstep, Annette made me feel
like an intruder - a vestige of the life Harry had now put behind
him. She disguised her dislike in raillery. She saw me as a comic
figure, though I, of course, failed to see the j oke. She called me
Estragon, sharing Harry's view that Samuel Beckett, whose work
I admired, was anarchic and morbid. She teased me about my
"pension-cheque" clothes, my unwashed socks, my job on Truth.
The accusations were justified, if cruel.

I returned to Auckland, and to the waterfront. I kept away from

the university. My goal now was to save enough money to go
abroad.
But then I met Candace Urquhart.
At Auckland University, I used to see her almost every day,
but had never been able to bring myself to speak to her. Like
me, she spent long hours in the university library. But to steal a
glance in her direction left me disoriented for hours. She was a
music student. A flautist. Strawberry blond hair, unblemished skin,
imperfect teeth. Not conventionally beautiful. It was her aloofuess
that drew me to her, a self-containedness born, I imagined, of
some unfathomable sadness. I attended all her recitals, fantasised
meeting her, yet dreaded the prospect. What would the daughter
of a wealthy and well-known Auckland surgeon ever see in me
- a callow, tongue-tied youth from a backwater Taranaki town?
A party in Remuera brought us together. She said she knew of
me. She'd read some of my poems in student magazines. I recited
her a few lines from an elegy I 'd written for my psychology

55
teacher, Harry Scott, who had been killed in a climbing accident
in the Southern Alps.

One death passes toward my own

before l igh t falls upon th is l and;
grass is forsaken by th e vall ey wind;
seeds are taken to death unsown,
before l igh t fall s upon th is l and.

My words were drowned by the din, and I felt foolish to be

saying them. She said she was sorry about my teacher's death; she
had heard that he was a good man, and the poem did him j ustice.
I felt grateful, but was under no illusions. I sensed that she saw
nothing in me, and not wanting to impose, I accepted that we
would probably never meet again.

One Friday night I was browsing in Progressive Books in Darby

Street. Posters from China hung overhead: watercolour horses,
bamboo groves, workers of the world united and smiling beneath
billowing red flags. Shelf after shelf was stacked with works by
Marx and Engels, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung from the Moscow
Publishing House.
W hen I glanced up, she was standing at the counter.
My face burned. I was suddenly conscious of my dirty overalls
and hobnailed boots. I did not know whether to run or hide. But
she spotted me in the gloom and worked her way around the
book tables until she was near enough to speak.
"What are you doing here?''
"What are you doing here?"
She explained that she'd dropped by to see the man who owned
the bookshop. His daughter was a friend of hers, and had recently
gone to England. Candace had come to get Helen's address.
"Are you going to England?"
"I might. I 've applied for a scholarship to the Royal Conserva­
tory. What are you doing?"

56
 "Seagulling."
"Which is? "
"Working on the wharves."
"Aren't you going to go on with your anthropology?"
"I 'm not sure. I want to get away from academe for a while. I
want to do something useful in the world."
The absurd phrase seemed to strike some chord with her. She
said she felt the same. Becoming a flautist had been her father's
idea. He was a frustrated musician, and she had grown up doing
his bidding, trying to please or at least appease him. But increas­
ingly she'd felt as though she were a mere instrument of his will;
she wanted to do something other than music. How could music
make any difference? How could one make music when the world
was crying out to be fed and clothed and housed?
We both forgot why we had come into the bookshop. Talking
fervently about the woes of the world and the need to commit
one's energies to changing things for the better, we left the little
red books and communist manifestos behind us and walked up
from the basement into the blinding light of the afternoon.
We met almost every day. Whenever I wasn't working, I would
ring her parents' house and ask if she was there. Her mother would
usually answer the phone. Distant and disdainful, she made me feel
like an annelid worm. I quailed at the thought of ever making her
acquaintance.
As it turned out, Candace had no intention of having her
parents meet me. I was never invited to the house, and we would
rendezvous outside a cinema or coffee bar. In the weekends we
would go sailing in her father's yacht, The Magic Flute . . . though it
is not strictly true to say we sailed, since Candace always switched
on the engine and steered the craft out into the Hauraki Gulf as if
she were behind the wheel of her father's Jaguar.
At Waiheke Island, Candace anchored the yacht in an isolated
cove and we swam ashore. We spent most of the afternoon on
the beach together, talking or gathering shells, and at dusk swam

57
back to the yacht. I towelled myself dry and got dressed on deck,
while Candace went below. Then she called me down. I remember
thinking that I had come into some fabulous fortune that would
crumble to dust if I were not vigilant. She said, "I cannot promise
you anything, but I want to give you what is wholly mine to give."
I thought it was the most astonishing thing anybody had ever said
to me, and as she undressed and we fell onto the narrow bunk
with the sea knocking against the sides of the craft and darkness
descending, I told her I loved her.
She was like quicksilver. An embodiment of the tinsel and
cinematic world I had dreamed of entering when I was a boy. I
wrote poems about the Gulf, and believed her when she said they
touched her. I floated through the days, sustained by my infatua­
tion, intoxicated by the thought of seeing her again.
But then she let me go, and I plunged into such deep despair
that there were days when I thought of nothing else but how
I could drown myself in that same gulf we had sailed upon in
such splendour. She told me she had decided to go to England. It
was what Daddy wanted, and Mummy too. "Aren't you going to
congratulate me?" she said.
I stammered something, and asked her to promise she would
write.
"No," she said, "let's not write. I hate letters."
"Then I will come to England with you," I said.
She laughed then, a brief hysterical laugh that was like ice cubes
dropped into a glass, and I could see she thought for a moment
that I was serious.
"When will you leave?"
"At the end of the summer. I don't really know."

Now, as I leaf through my notebooks from that long-ago time, I

am struck by a paradox. The most terrible things that befall us, the
things that threaten to destroy us utterly, appear, in our descrip­
tions, tedious and banal. Day after day, page after page, I rendered

58
a compulsive account of my misery. At times, I was overwhelmed
with anger that she had used me to cultivate some illusion of
solidarity with the working class. At other times, self-pity gave
way to obsessive questioning: What is she doing? Who is she with?
Will she write? Then there are glimpses, in this repetitive register
of despair, of how I tried to bargain with Fate and forestall the
inevitable. I bought an old truck in the belief that she might be
persuaded to spend the summer travelling around the country with
me. I wrote a sonnet to her every day with a view to dedicating a
book to her. Another piece of my desperate magic was to pilfer
a set of Wedgwood china from the hold of an English freighter,
convinced that this gift would gain her favour.
She said it would be better if we did not see each other. I phoned
her every few days anyway. My pathetic appeals must have made it
easier for her to put me from her mind.
One night, drunk, I phoned her house and her father answered.
I said who I was, and asked if I could speak to Caddy.
"Candace can't come to the phone right now."
"When can I call back?"
"I don't think it would be a good idea for you to call again."
"Tell her I'll call tomorrow?"
"She's going to England tomorrow."
It was the final betrayal. I put down the phone, devastated.
Exhausted by unhappiness, I could not sleep. My stomach was
in knots. If i lay down or sat still, the pain broke over me in waves.
I thought of the times we had lain together in the narrow bunk of
her father's yacht, when she must have been thinking ahead to the
time she would abandon me. I stubbed out cigarettes in the palm
of my hand. I walked the streets of a city I could not bear to live in
any more. For as long as I was on the move the pain was lessened
and I could think straight. I racked my brains for some feat I might
perform to impress her, to bind her to me forever.
Toward dawn I came to her house and shinnied up the big
magnolia at the entrance to her driveway. I sat in a fork of the

59
tree, nursing a bottle of rum, and kept watch. I knew she would
be leaving early. I knew the name of the boat she was sailing on.
I knew the quay where it was berthed, and the time it was due
to sail.
I heard voices, and the slamming of car doors. Then the crunch
of tyres on the crushed-stone driveway. I climbed down from my
perch and stood in the path of the Jaguar. When it stopped, I went
to the back window and gestured for her to wind it down.
"I wanted to say goodbye," I said.
"Goodbye," she said.
"I wanted to wish you luck."
"Thank you."
Her father turned impatiently in his seat. "We're running late.
You'll have to let us go."
"I had no intention of stopping you . I only wanted to say
goodbye."
"You've said it."
"Candace," I said.

From her reluctant mother I got Caddy's address in London, and

wrote several times. She replied only once. "You wouldn't like it
here," she wrote. "It's the kind of place I couldn't imagine you in
at all." Then, at the foot of the page, scribbled like an afterthought,
words which to this day pain me to repeat: "England represents
order; you represent anarchy."
I tried to drown my sorrows in drink, and became an habitue of
the hole-in-the-wall bar at the Queen's Ferry. An odd assortment
of low-lifers hung out there: newspaper men, con-men, barflies,
and the seedy entourage of an ex-porn Queen from King's Cross,
Sydney, who'd come home to lick her wounds and regale us with
stories of life on the wild side.
Somewhere around that time, befuddled and adrift, I met Bob
Lowry.
Lowry was one of the great rogue elephants of New Zealand's

60
literary and left-wing scene. In 1 93 1 , while still a student at Auck­
land University, he produced Phoenix - the literary j ournal
with which, according to Denis Glover, "New Zealand litera­
ture begins." He counted among his contemporaries and friends
Rex Fairburn, Jim Bertram, R.A.K. Mason, Denis Glover, Colin
McCahon, Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow, and Charles Brasch.
His bacchanalian parties were legendary, and James K. Baxter's
well-known lines are not too wide of the mark:

Anno Domini 1 956

Here Lowry lived, a stone volcanic god

Fed with honey and red gourds,
Open ing his heart like a great door
To poets, lovers, and the houseless poor.

For many years Bob had been New Zealand's most innovative
typographer, and he'd had a hand in the founding of the country's
finest literary presses - Unicorn, Griffin, Philips, Pelorus, Pilgrim,
Wakefield. Indeed, wrote Denis Glover in 1 946, "If typography is a
word that some of us now understand, the credit is Bob Lowry's."
By 1 962, however, Bob had fallen on hard times and faced bank­
ruptcy. As a last-ditch effort to keep his business afloat, he installed
two outmoded and dilapidated presses - a Thompson platen and
a Heidelberg flat-bed - in a rented basement in Airedale Street.
His bread-and-butter work was printing Craccum and labels for
a health food company. His genius as a typographer meant little
to clients whose chief consideration was getting their work done
on time, and many old allies wrote him off him as a beer-sodden
has-been. It's true he aspired to Robert Burton's ideal of taking
tobacco and drinking "day long in a Taverne or Ale-house, to
discourse, sing, all j est, roare, talk of a Cock and a Bull over a
pot . . . " After all, he was an artist and bon vivant, not a businessman,
and if there were scholarships in letters to support writers, why
not some hand-out for a struggling typographer? But while he
liked to quote Joseph Spence's observation about Dr Swift lying

61
abed until eleven o'clock in the morning, thinking of wit for the
day, there were times when he saw himself as a martyr, and he
envisaged writing an account of his rej ection and estrangement,
to be entitled Severed Relations. He recommended I read a book
by Winwood Reade - The Martyrdom of Man. Many years later,
I did so, but only because ofWinwood Reade's connection with
Sierra Leone. He went there in 1 868 in search of the source of the
Niger and instant fame. Failing in this ambition, Reade returned
to England only to be upbraided at the Royal Geographical
Society for the carelessness of his observations and measurements.
Feeling unjustly maligned, Reade wrote Martyrdom as an indict­
ment of those who conspire to destroy great minds and crucify
true heroes.
W hen I was twenty-two, I may have had something of the
martyr in me. I worked for Bob without a wage, running the
letterpress machines while he comped and locked lead slugs and
ink-stained furniture into a chase, deploying the fonts for which
he was renowned: Garamond, Bodoni, Caslon Old Face, Gill Sans,
Baskerville, Blado italic, Goudy, Albertus. We worked long hours,
slaving to keep the antiquated machines going, bludging money
to pay the linotypists or wheedle paper and printing ink from
the suppliers. W hen we met a deadline we were so exhausted by
the effort that we'd invariably blow our earnings on pub crawls
and parties rather than settle our mounting debts. We were like
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Nighttown.
Even as Bob faced ruin, my life was reinvigorated by his boon
companionship. And the Heidelberg was my domain. Compressed
air hissed as sheets of paper were sucked up and fed through its
black labyrinth. The chase slammed to and fro, and the whole
thing clanked like a locomotive, shunting Candace down some
dark branch-line of my mind where she could no longer touch
me. I watched the printed pages accumulating on the stacker like
days upon days, rebuffing the past. She who had found her true
love in England counted for nothing beside Bob, this obstinate

62
individual whose livelihood was on the line. In my struggle with
abstraction, reality had finally won out.
However, Bob insisted that I not j eopardise my future. He
urged me to keep on at university and enrol for my M.A. I could
continue working for him in my spare time. I should know that
sooner or later the press would fold, and we'd have nothing. Unless,
of course, we won the Golden Kiwi.
So I attended classes, dressed in a boilersuit, wearing a scowl,
but spent most of the day and half the night with Bob, at the press
or in the pub. Often we drove north in Bob's beat-up Morris van,
and sought refuge in his family's bach on the Wade estuary. Euca­
lypts, pines and mangroves cast ominous shadows over the turbid
stream. I would wake each morning to the sound of Bob stoking
the pot-bellied stove in the living room. A dark demonic wind was
tearing his life apart, and the chug chug of the boats towing barges
of quicklime downstream seemed to be counting down the days.
Midmorning we would drag the dinghy across the mud to the
river, and row to the store, then dig for pipis and cockles on the
tideflats and return, sluggish against the ebbing tide, to steam our
shellfish open, douse them in vinegar, and eat them with bread and
beer. At night, the wind assailed the pines and manuka around the
bach, and rain gusted noisily over the tin roof, and I would hear
Bob walking about in the kitchen, unable to sleep. His calvary was
corning, and I could not save him.

F rom Wakefiel d Street to Sil verdal e,

t he fourteen St ations of t he Cross:

Carpenter's Arms, Gl obe, Cl arendon,

Market, K iwi, Cit y, Cent ral, Grand,
Q uee n's Ferry, Glee son's, Capt ain Cook,
Albert, Great Northern, Mon Desir . . .

In those days of early closing, you blundered out of a pub at six

o'clock but before heading off to buy fish and chips or a cheap

63
Chinese meal ensured you had the address of a party where the
drinking could go on all night. Often as not the venue would be
decided at the last minute by someone too drunk or desperate to
reckon the consequences.
One night that someone was me.
I had a key to the anthropology department, and on the spur of
the moment announced that there was going be a party there.
A piss-up in the hallowed precincts of the university was an
opportunity no one was going to ignore. Until that night I had
never suspected how many of the crowd I moved with bore deep
grievances against academe. It was as if each individual felt he had
been singled out and shamed by some ivory tower conspiracy.
Now, old scores could be settled.
My office was crammed. You had to shout to hear yourself speak.
There was a fug of cigarette smoke. Wood splintered as bottle­
tops were ripped off against table edges and chair arms. Windows
were flung open. Women caterwauled into the street. Someone
spent the best part of an hour gluing water-filled condoms to the
ceiling. Someone else drew a series of skulls on my blackboard,
depicting the fall of man - from ape to academic. As for me,
slumped in a sofa, swigging beer, I quickly ceased to give a damn
about anything that was going on around me. The only thing that
goaded me into action was a wastepaper basket going up in flames .
With my thumb stoppering a beer bottle, I shook the contents
vigorously, releasing a high pressure spray which worked effec­
tively as a fire extinguisher.
Not long after that, I passed out.
I woke as the last revellers and vandals were disappearing into
the night.
Only then did the full realisation of what had happened dawn
on me.
The room had been trashed. Strips of wallpaper dangled like
flaps of flesh. A ghostly smudge of smuts marked the site of the
wastepaper basket fire. Empty and broken bottles littered the floor.

64
The carpet was a mess of butts and spilled beer. And overhead,
the distended latex stalectites defied my feeble attempts to pluck
them down.
It was all too much for me. I walked out of the building, went
home, and sought asylum in sleep. A couple of hours later, I j erked
awake with a splitting headache. I thought of catching a bus into
the city and making an effort to restore the room to order before
the cleaners discovered it. But I was overwhelmed by fatigue and
indifference, and sank back into sleep.
At Bob's press that afternoon, I tried to put the night out of my
mind, hoping the clamour and clatter of the machines would dull
my memory as readily as it had annulled my imaginary marriage
to Candace Urquhart.
But then I looked up, and the Head of Anthropology was
standing at the doorway, his fisted hand extended as though he
had been knocking, or was about to knock.
I climbed down from the Heidelberg and, telling Bob I 'd be
back, went to face my nemesis.
I was surprised by Professor Biggs' awkwardness. It gave me a
curious sense of having the upper hand, and I suggested we cross
the road to the Globe Hotel where we could talk.
In the front bar, I ordered two beers and told the Professor that
I knew what he had come to see me about.
H e looked relieved, then wary. "There's been a lot of concern
about you," he said.
" If it's my room . . . "
" It's not just the room."
"No," I said, deferring to him now.
It was one of those times in your life when you are confronted
by a story other people have been telling about you that bears
little or no resemblance to the story you have been telling your­
self. First, it seemed I was a firebug. It wasn't just the incendiary
evidence in my office. A lecturer in the psychology department
had let it be known that only days before I had been quizzing him

65
about the psychopathology of arson.
I tried to explain that I was writing a story about a barn-burner.
But I was not yet at liberty to speak in my defence . . .
Second, it was obvious to everyone that I was not serious about
anthropology.
And then there was the crowd I was hanging out with.
And the fact that I was drinking heavily.
And to cap it all, there was the question of my "friendship "
with Murray Groves, the unspoken quote marks functioning, I
supposed, as a euphemism for "homosexual relationship" .
" I could go on," the Professor said, "but I won't."
His tone of voice became colder now, and more authorita­
tive. He had been in touch with a friend of his who was Medical
Director at Kingseat Hospital. An appointment had been made for
me to see him at Middlemore Hospital in two days' time. Would
I agree to go?
It was my first experience of that subtle metamorphosis whereby
ordinary human unhappiness is transmuted into a clinical condi­
tion. Gradually and imperceptibly, you cease to have any say in the
matter of who you are or what you want. You are reduced to an
obj ect whose morbid condition is something you had no hand in
creating and can have no say in treating.You are explained away.
In due course the distinguished psychiatrist got to ask me what
was troubling me. I told him I did not know, but that a lot of
people thought they knew. I admitted I was confused about my
future in academe. I wanted to write. I wanted to do some good
in the world. I did not know how to reconcile all the competing
imperatives. I added that some of my teachers clearly thought I
had a sexual identity problem, that I was a repressed arsonist, and
possibly an alcoholic.
On the strength of this confession I was invited to admit myself
as a voluntary inpatient for observation at Kingseat Hospital.
I panicked. I saw myself classified, obliged to wear pyjamas,
consort with loonies, suffer a lobotomy, lose my reason. I thought

66
of the crazy and implacable logic of the Cheshire Cat in Alice and
Wonderland.

" I n that dire ction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, " live s a
Hatte r: and in that dire ction," waving the othe r paw, " live s a March
Hare. V isit e ithe r if you like : t he y 're both mad."
"But I don't want to go am ong mad pe ople," Alice re marke d.
"Oh, you can't he lp that," said the Cat: " we 're all mad here. I 'm
n1ad.You're mad."
"How do you know I 'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, " or you wouldn't have come
he re ."

told the psychiatrist I would give his "invitation" senous

thought. But my mind was already made up. I had to get away. I
didn't know where, but some kind of decision had been reached
without me deciding anything, and I knew it was now or never. I
wrote a letter, quitting the M.A. programme in the Department of
Anthropology, and then, with Bob 's amused complicity, carefully
charred the edges of the envelope with a lighted match before
sending it off. "The irony will be lost on them," Bob warned. "You
could set the Thames on fire and they wouldn't turn a hair."

This happened a long time ago. The ransacking of the anthro­

pology department, first construed as pathology, became mythology,
though years passed before I had any inkling of this . It was only
when I applied for a position at Auckland University many years
after my fabled auto-daje that the full force of these invisible
fictions was brought home to me. My application was rej ected on
account of my having once tried to burn down the very depart­
ment in which I now proposed to teach! Some years after this,
in Australia, the story resurfaced. An anthropologist accosted me
at a party and demanded that I tell him the story about how I
burned down Auckland University. The myth was non-negotiable.
I disappointed people when I tried to tell them the truth . They

67
gave me reproving looks, as if I were keeping something back or
trying to put one over on them. The story had more legitimacy
than I had, and, like a parent who can neither fathom nor control
an unruly adolescent child, I had to face the fact that the story I
had fathered was no longer my own. As for Bob, who had himself
entered mythology as a stone volcanic god, he failed to survive the
tragedy of falling short of the legendary role that had been foist
upon him. Almost a year after he was declared bankrupt, the same
crowd that had trashed the anthropology department laid waste to
Bob's house on One Tree Hill during the course of another wild
party.
The tragic news reached me in Australia, in a letter from
Fletcher Knight.

LastTuesday week I heard from a fell ow I dri nk wi th in the pub

that Bob Lowry was dead. Si nce thi s man sai d that he'd got the
news from John Yelash, I was suspi ci ous, so I rang 32 Gladwi n
Road i n Auckland, and after some trouble struck a ti me when
someone was there.Tina, Barry Crump's ex-wife, answered: it was,
as she sai d, "all too true" . W hen I first rang there'd been no one
home because everyone had been at the funeral. I heard later that
Irene had left hi m ( after so long, and so much happened to them
both!) some two weeks before. It must have been the last straw for
Bob: so he took an overdose of sleeping tablets. N ow thi s man we
knew and loved so much and thought to be so i ndomi table i s ash
at Wai kumete. Just li ke th at. It shook me. More than I would have
thought; and somehow, for some reason or another, I felt gui lty . . .

68
 Q ua r r ying the B lues

B efore I saw it with my own eyes, I imagined Australia as the

continent where all the blues in the world are quarried - smalt
and saxe-blue smudged on a desert horizon, opals in a rockfall,
oceans of ultramarine, and the night's deep indigo. But it was
remorse, pure and simple, that made me think this way. The
suffocating sense that I had failed my friends, disappointed my
parents, and generally made a mess of my life. Yet as I sought a
wilderness in which I could do my penance, I craved release from
the necessity of apologising for myself.
Everything had come to a head one night at Wiri.
After Bob Lowry had been declared bankrupt I went to work
for Herman Gladwin who had given up looking after old scows
and gone into business, manufacturing a floor polish called Lady
Gwen. Herman took me on as a salesman, and from his home in
Wiri I would drive down into the Waikato and across to Coro­
mandel, sleeping in Tomlinson, his panel van, on the roadside at
night and spending my days on my hands and knees, cleaning and
polishing a square of scuffed linoleum in some small-town shop
in the vain hope of proving the virtue of Lady Gwen to a cynical
proprietor. I was still to learn that the secret of selling floor polish
was not gleaming parquet but patter and confidence, and I sold
next to nothing.
It was not my shortcomings as a salesman that brought this
period of my life to an end, but the accumulated emotional debt I
had been running from and now felt obliged to pay.

69
 In Wiri one weekend, as the wind wuthered among the scoria
outcrops and scraped the macrocarpa boughs against the walls and
windows of his house, Herman accused me of lusting after his
young wife. Certainly, it was the sort of thing of which I was
perfectly capable, but in this instance I was innocent. After a
slanging match that continued long into the night, I walked out of
the house, got into my car, and headed back toward the city. The
car belonged to my parents, an old Vauxhall they had bought in
their retirement, the first car they'd ever owned. I was half drunk.
Halfway home, in sudden torrential rain, the windscreen wipers
failed. Blinded by the downpour, and too pissed to know what I
was doing, I slammed into a concrete stanchion on a traffic round­
about. For a split second I saw stars wheeling in a clear sky, then
was aware of rain pattering on the roof of the car, and a milkman
asking me if I was okay.
I crawled out of the car and inspected the damage. The front of
the car was mangled, but I was able to reverse off the roundabout
and limp down Pau Road to One Tree Hill where I took refuge
with Bob and Irene.
In the morning, I borrowed some money from a friend, and
booked an airplane ticket to Sydney.
My last glimpse of the city was in the dusk - the volcanic
cones of Mt Eden and Three Kings resembling whales aground in
the city's incandescent shallows, and the distant ithyphallic monu­
ment on One Tree Hill like a pillar of salt.

Over the Tasman, overwhelmed by the icy silence of the clouds, I

could momentarily forget myself. For the space of a few hours I
was out of time.
In a blue notebook, I scribbled my reflections on the difference
between knowledge and experience. "You know that millions of
people have flown before, but you have never experienced flight
until now. In effect, you are savouring something akin to the
experience of the first aviators. Yet you are aware that you will

70
never have this experience again. You will fly a thousand times
in your life, but this particular experience will never be repeated.
From now on it will only exist as knowledge."
From my temporary high, I was rudely returned to earth.
In Sydney, I found a rooming house in Ashfield. It was infernally
hot. I lay on my back on a broken wirewove bed, sweat pooling on
my closed eyelids. The immensity of the city had left me numbed.
I did not know a soul, and with barely enough money to survive
a week, I did not know what to do.
Late in the afternoon of my second day, weary and dispirited, I
checked out of my hotel and bought a train ticket to Melbourne.
Harry and Annette were living there. In my desperation I did not
give a moment's thought to their situation; whether I would be
welcome; whether they would be able to put me up. But it was
somewhere to go.
When Annette saw me on her doorstep, she did not disguise
her dismay. But she quickly recovered, and asked me in.
We sat at the kitchen table, hands clasping our coffee cups, and
compared notes . Harry had a j ob writing advertising copy, and
Annette was working in a panic, stress and phobia clinic in St
Kilda. Though happy to be out of New Zealand, they felt little
affinity for the city where they had come to start over. Harry
quoted a Maltese migrant he'd met on a tram: "Australia, good
for money, but no good for the life." Annette's complaint was that
she was constantly being accosted and bothered by Mediterranean
men, and Harry propositioned by queers. It wasn't safe to go out
on the streets alone at night. She had a particular dread of the old
pensioner in the next-door flat. "One night I 'm going to find him
lying dead under the stairs ." She was determined to find some­
where "more suitable" to live.
I asked Harry if he was writing. He said he was working on a
story, but it was slow going. No more than five hundred words a
week.
" It's because he's studying at night," Annette explained.

71
 "What are you studying?"
"Typography. Book design," Harry said with his customary
casualness.
"We want to go to England later in the year," Annette said. "We
want to make sure Harry will get work."

The great Danish folklorist, Axel Olrik, observed that whenever

three people come together in any sort of intimate space, only two
of them can interact at the same time. The odd person out must wait
in the wings, biding his or her time, until one of the actors at centre
stage steps aside. Olrik called this "the law of two to a scene" .
Harry and Annette, who were about t o get married, had no
room for me in their lives. My manifest loneliness cast a shadow,
and I hated my dependency upon them. When I had exhausted
my fund of stories, I had nothing more to offer. Perhaps this was
why, as soon as I found work - the nightshift in a printing press
near the Victoria markets - and rented a room in Elsternwick,
I felt compelled to shower them with gifts. To treat them to a
meal in a city bistro bound us together for an evening. A bottle
of expensive wine or several stems of an exotic flower bought my
way back into their lives.
One day I invited them to the movies . There was a Truffaut
film I had seen a few days before, but wanted to see with them.
The film was Jules and Jim. Too naive to acknowledge its obvious
connection with my relationship with Harry and Annette, I inno­
cently asked Annette, as we left the cinema, what she had thought
of it.
"I think any menage a trois is an abomination," she said. "And
Jules was obviously queer."
"You're j oking."
" No, I ' m not. It was perfectly obvious that he was trying to
sabotage that marriage."
Harry said nothing.
But I was stunned. For the first time, I realised why the Van Gogh

72
print I had bought them had never been hung, why the flowers I 'd
given Annette had never been placed in a vase, why the bottles of
wine were always left uncorked, and why I had not been invited
to their wedding.
Not long after this, I left Melbourne for Gippsland and a j ob
in Aboriginal welfare. In mill towns like Nowa Nowa, Cabbage
Tree and Cann River, my sense of isolation found expression in
a perverse identification with Aboriginal people. I hung out with
them, not to improve their lot or understand their lives, but to
degrade and efface myself. Though I rationalised this identifica­
tion as a protest against the government's assimilationist policies,
and as a penance for European crimes against Aboriginal people,
the truth was that I was driven by a need to erase the difference
between myself and them, and thereby escape the obligations of
my j ob and the claims of my conscience.
Whenever I went back to Melbourne to file a report, I phoned
Harry and Annette. We would meet in a wine bar or restaurant,
swap stories and laugh about old times, but I had a sense now that
we were moving in such completely different directions and social
circles that there was little we really shared.
Once, Harry asked what I was reading. I said Camus.
" I cannot read that sort of thing any more," he said. And it was
like another door closing in my face. But then Harry was turning
his back on a lot of things.
One evening, in a rare allusion to his parents, Harry confided
that he had nothing in common with them. He did not even take
the trouble to write home. He was "reconciled to silence " .
The phrase weighed on my mind for weeks, a s I travelled dirt
roads from one remote Gippsland town to another, registering
stories of despair and anger, sleeping at night in the back of my
station wagon at the edge of the sea and, unlike Harry, writing
regular letters home to my parents in which I exhaustively chroni­
cled every detail of the j ourney on which I had embarked.

73
From the sea, the forests went forever, blue upon blue. Along the
coast, the bluegums were cages made from bone. The boom and
thump of surf and smudging spume suggested another world.
Nowa Nowa was a small settlement not far from Lake Tyers.
In some lost Aboriginal language, Nowa Nowa meant "the rising
sun " . It was a mill town. Winter and summer, the odour of euca­
lypts mingled with the smoke from sawdust kilns. The bush was
filled with the piping of bellbirds, though nearer the mill you
heard only the diesel generator and the droning chinngg of the
breaking-down saw.
Many of the people at Nowa Nowa had grown up on the
Aboriginal station at Lake Tyers. Their parents and grandparents
had been forcibly settled there at a time when it was believed
that Aboriginals were doomed to extinction and official govern­
ment policy was "to smoothe the pillow for the dying head" .
They lived in three-room weatherboard dwellings permeated by
smells of decaying sackcloth and woodsmoke. Each was furnished
with a table and chairs, a dilapidated sofa, and wirewove beds.
The floorboards were covered with cracked linoleum. There was
neither electricity nor sewerage. People did their cooking under
lean-tos and drew water from rusty corrugated-iron tanks among
the trees.
"We know we disgust you," Dulcie said to me. "You Welfare
Board people, we know what you think of us, of our houses,
always trying to straighten us out, make gubbas out of us. It's
always been whitefellas telling us Koories who we are, what we
have to do. We're sick and tired of being told we're black boongs,
that we're shit, that we're not Aboriginals because we don't know
any Aboriginal language, because we're half-caste. We're not half
anything! We're people, we're black people! What we call ourselves
is our business. You call yourself what you want, but don't tell us
who we are, how we're supposed to live ! "
Dulcie always looked angry, even after she 'd given m e "a piece
of her mind" , as she put it, and apologised because she didn't mean

74
me personally. She was forever berating her neighbours, too, for
shambling along the street with their heads bowed, as if they had
no right to use the local shops or go into the pub.
Her maternal grandparents hailed from Lake Tyers, her paternal
grandparents from Eden. She lived with a whitefella whose name
happened to be the same as mine. They had two kids.
About my namesake I knew next to nothing, except how he
came to walk with a limp. His foot had been crushed in a logging
accident. Unwilling to see a doctor, he'd tried to set the broken
ankle himself. For his pains he ended up with a deformed foot, lost
his job and drifted to Nowa Nowa, where he met Dulcie. "The
white bloke with the gin wife," the white mill hands called him.
He wore a grimy boilersuit and seldom washed. He spent much
of the day drinking cheap sherry in the bush with his Koorie
mates . In fact, since the publican at Lakes Entrance refused to sell
liquor to Aboriginals, Mike was their main source of supply.
Dulcie had sort of adopted me, possibly because my name was
the same as her de facto's, possibly because I looked as lost as he
did, and I often drove to Nowa Nowa in the evenings to play a
few games of Hundred-up or Jackpot with them. Mike always sat
out of the lamplight, morose and taciturn, indifferent to whether
he won or lost. The booze seemed to send him deep into himself,
or to some other wilderness like Nowa Nowa where he could
hide and not be hurt. If Dulcie left the room because one of the
children was coughing or crying in its sleep, and I tried to make
small talk about the weather or my day's work, Mike would wince
as if I was rubbing salt into a wound, and he'd breathe an audible
sigh of relief when Dulcie came back to the table and picked up
her cards.
It was usually late when I left Nowa Nowa and drove my station
wagon down to the lake. I 'd write up my daily report for the
Welfare Board, cook some beans and bacon over a driftwood fire,
and go to sleep in the back of the Holden, listening to the wind in
the ti trees and the thud of distant surf.

75
 Each day I drove along bush tracks, logging roads and highways,
visiting Aboriginal families, helping people file social security
claims, taking sick children to hospital in Bairnsdale, keeping my
diary of ineluctable misery.

Floodwater has gone through the bean pickers' huts at Wirtgwirri.

I go down to see if there's anything I can do. A woman sloshes
through the mud, hugging her cardigan across her breasts. She
brings tears to her bloodshot eyes as she talks to me, dragging on
the cigarette I 've given her, waving a limp hand at the drowned
bean fields.
''I'm not used to this, Mr Jackson. I 'm decent. I 've lived at Lake
Tyers all my life, but now we have to come here. Look ! " She
gestures at the waterlogged mattress, the suitcase covered with silt,
the clothes hung out to dry on the trees. "Look at that and ask
yourself, do you think I can get used to that? I 'm a self-respecting
person like yourself, Mr Jackson. You understand, don't you? You
know what this does to you - in here ! " And she pummels her
breast with her fist. "We went to Eden for a few days, and when
we got back the floods had gone through. Up to the windowsill
it was! Look - you can see the mark. We lost everything. When
I went into town to get my endowment I had to wear an old pair
of sandshoes. Honest, Mr Jackson, just having to go up there like
that, it does something awful to you . I have to drink. You have to,
to keep yourself together." She gazes out over the desolate fields.
" I want to get a live-in job. I 'm going to help myself. I mean, it's
no use cadging off the Board all the time, is it? You've got to help
yourself - and believe me, Mr Jackson, I want to, I want to help
myself. I mean . . . " She takes a last pull on the cigarette and throws
it away. "Like I told you, Mr Jackson - look, you don't mind if I
bum another cigarette off you, do you? - if I have to, if I have to
live here much longer . . . " Her voice trails off and she is choking
back tears. " I 'll drown myself in the creek. I'm not going to live
here and get drunk and Stan go off and leave me all the time. I'm

76
not going to do that anymore. I 've got my self-respect, like anyone
else . . . "
I give her my pack of Lucky Strikes and a ten-shilling note, and
tell her I'll be back tomorrow with some clothing and bedding.

Abel Morgan would regularly get drunk on port and meths, stag­
gering home at night along the railway line. It was only a matter
of time before a freight train rode right over him.
This morning, a Bairnsdale cop delighted in giving me a grue­
some description of how Abel had been dragged fifty yards along
the track, his arms severed, his face scraped off on the ballast. "This
time he really got smashed! " I turned and walked out of the police
station. I had to find Doll Morgan and take her to identifY her
husband's body.
I touched her elbow lightly, and guided her into the hospital.
People were staring at the grief-stricken Aboriginal woman.
"Shall I go in with you?" I said.
"No," she said, ''I'll be all right."
Later, in the car, she said, "It wasn't him, it wasn't really him. It
was his clothes . But he was so mangled. I couldn't look at him. I
couldn't bear to look."
I asked her if she wanted to go home.
" No, take me to Sale," she said. She had relatives there. She
didn't want to go back to Nowa Nowa.

That afternoon I attended the Magistrate's Court to plead on

behalf of an Aboriginal boy charged with car conversion. It was
my first time in court. I was nervous. I sat near the back of the
courtroom, waiting to be called. The young defendant stood in the
dock, eyes downcast. I 'd never met him, and the clerk of the court
hadn't informed him that a welfare officer was going to assist in
his defence.
The minutes dragged by while the police prosecutor read the
charge and a second-hand car dealer was called to the witness

77
stand. I could not stop thinking of Doll Morgan's distressed face as
she stood at the kerbside in Sale, wringing her hands and looking
desperately up and down the street, unable to make up her mind
which way to go. Then I began imagining what Abel must have
looked like in the morgue, shrouded in his blood-stained clothes,
with his arms missing and his face erased. I took out my cigarettes
and lit up.
The magistrate pounded his gavel and bawled, "What is that
man doing smoking in this courtroom! "
I was flabbergasted. I wasn't aware that smoking was prohibited
in a courtroom. It wasn't a church.
"Remove that man from this court! "
Before I could say anything, a co p was manhandling m e from
the room.
" I didn't know you couldn't smoke," I protested. ''I'm a welfare
officer. I'm here to speak for that Aboriginal boy."
"Oh yeah! " And the cop bundled me through the main doors
and out onto the stone steps, threatening to charge me with being
in contempt of the court.
"Then charge me! Because I hold your bloody court in deep
contempt! "
"Beat it, mate."
I drifted away down the street, muttering under my breath, and
ditched the dossier in a litter bin that read,YOUR HERITAGE .
KEEP AUSTRALIA CLEAN.

The gossip about Olga Mainwaring was that her house was always
full of blow-ins, that her kids went hungry and never had shoes or
warm clothing, and that she screwed around and spent her benefit
on grog.
I drove to Genoa and found Olga's house. In the yard was a
rusty truck chassis and a Hill's hoist. I followed a muddy track to
the back door.
Olga's hair was tousled, her eyes heavy from sleep. She carried

78
a child on her hip whose nostrils were gummed up with mucus.
When I said I was from the Aboriginal Welfare Board, she frowned
and mumbled something to herself. Then she went ahead of me
into the dining room and cleared a space on the sofa among piles
of crumpled clothes so I could sit down.
"You can't get anything dry in this weather," she said.
I took out my notebook and went to work.
How many people did she have living in the house? Where
were the other kids? Were they attending school regularly? Did she
know that her ex-husband was claiming custody of the children
on the grounds that she was incapable of looking after them?
I scribbled down her desperate answers.
A big mob of relatives had blown in last week. They'd got drunk
and smashed things up. She couldn't do anything to stop them.
The cops had to come and throw them out. "The kids have all
been sick, that's why they've been off school. Ernie doesn't really
give a bugger about the kids . He's never given me no think. He just
wants them so he can get back at me, that's all."
A couple of days later I was in Melbourne. Olga's ex-husband
worked as a porter at Flinders Street Station. He spoke of his
Aboriginality as if it was some kind of criminal record. Now
he was a reformed man . " I don't drink," he said. " I got me own
place. I keep me nose clean . Olga couldn 't look after the kids
if she tried. She can't even look after herself. She's always got
blow-ins there, white blokes from the mill, parties every night.
You seen it, the place is a pigsty. You got to cut yourself off. It's
the only way. Those black bastards'll rip you off for everything
you've got.You want to keep a j ob, you got to stay clear of them.
That's what I do - stay well away."
I filed my report. A few weeks later, the court ordered that the
Mainwaring children be placed in the custody of their father.
I returned to Gippsland. The rain had not let up for days. The
coast was invisible for spume, and the smoke from the sawdust
kilns had draped the forests in torn sheets. I had already forgotten

79
about Olga and her children.
At Nowa Nowa I waited on the narrow verandah, watching the
rainwater cut channels in the black earth. I knew Mike and Dulcie
were home. Why didn't they answer my knocking?
Then Mike opened the door wide enough to tell me to fuck
off. "You're an arsehole, mate," he said, "and Dulcie doesn't want
to see you."
I would have jammed my foot in the door and demanded to
know what was going on had Dulcie not appeared and shoved
Mike aside.
"You better come in," she said grimly.
The three of us sat around the wooden table. I offered them
both cigarettes, but they shook their heads. Their faces were full of
anger and grief. What had happened? What had I done?
Olga was Dulcie's niece. I had taken away her children. Olga
had been drunk for days, wandering down the logging roads and
along the beach. Now nobody knew where she was.
"You 're young," Dulcie said. "You don't know us. You're only
young.You don't understand."
She said it like a lament for the dead.
Rainwater was dripping from the ceiling into an enamel bowl
on the floor. Mike got up from the table and went and leaned
against the door jamb. He stared into space. I knew he was waiting
for me to go.
"We're not once upon a time people," Dulcie said. "You can't
take a mother's children from her just cos she's having a hard time
of it, j ust cos her house is a bit messy. All the years we've had our
kids taken away, ripped from our bosoms, stuck in white homes .We
thought you knew better, we thought you knew us, we thought
you cared about us. We thought you was different."
''I 'll get the children back," I said.
"How will you do that? There's a court order. How can you
undo what you 've done? Poor Olga, we don't even know where
she is. Poor doll, wandering around like that in the rain . . . "

80
 She fell silent as the rain gusted across the iron roof like a flung
handful of stones.
"I dunno why you bother to talk to the bastard," Mike said.
"He's young," Dulcie said. She wasn't saying it to Mike or to
me. "He doesn't know us. He's only young. He doesn't under­
stand."
We sat for a long time, the rain pelting down, the lantern splut­
tering, Mike standing over us with his arms folded.
"There's always two stories," Dulcie said, "two sides to every­
thing. Always two stories, the outside one and the inside one.
You only heard the outside one. You didn't even know there was
another story inside that one."

I went back to Melbourne. I did what I could, but the court order
was not revoked. I sought out pubs frequented by Aboriginals
- sleazy back bars with cement floors, tin tables and chairs, the
beer passed through a hole in the wall so that drinkers in the
public bar would never have to see an Aboriginal face. Sometimes
I thought of Mike's stories. I thought of driving north and losing
myself in the inland, where the place names were all metaphors for
abandonment - Broken Hill, Oodnadatta, Abminga, Bundooma,
Coward Springs.
At closing time we staggered out on to the street. Match flames
flared between cupped hands. Shocks ofblack hair. Swaying figures.
Men kicking the hub caps of parked cars. Women with matchstick
legs and socks down around their ankles, spitting abuse at passers
by. "Whattaya want? Ya cunt! Ya dead cunt! Fuck offi "
Then the cops pounced.
" I 'm a welfare officer," I bleated as they pitched me into the
Black Maria.
"And I'm the fucking Queen Mother! "
At Fitzroy police station I lined up with the Aboriginals. The
only white. It made no difference. I relinquished my belt and shoe­
laces like everyone else, and emptied my pockets . I was slung into a

81
cell with three Aboriginal men, none of whom I knew.
All night we huddled under thin blankets on the floor. The cell
reeked of urine and booze. We could not sleep for the cold and
the cops corning in every hour or so and kicking us on the soles of
our feet, goading us to fight. Along the corridor a woman wailed
wearily, " Ope the door, ope the door, ope the door."
In the morning we were taken into the court. I found myself
standing next to Carl. I asked him what would happen.
"Plead guilty," he said. "If you plead not guilty, you have to wait
a month for a court. Maybe wait in jail."
The charge was "Drunk and Disorderly" .
" Guilty," I pleaded when my turn came.
"You will address the court in the proper manner! "
" Guilty,Your Honour."
"Convicted and discharged. Next ! "
After reclaiming my belt, shoelaces, and car keys I walked out
into the daylight, blinking with disbelief. The Aboriginals were
waiting for me in the park across the road. I j oined them and we
pooled what money we had. Carl, Ned, Jock and Danny wanted
to buy some takeaways and grog. I was content to sit and watch a
group of Chinese women doing t'ai chi.
"When ya going back to Gippsland?" Ned demanded. " I wanna
lift."
" I ' m not sure I'm going back."
"You're a proper welfare officer now," Carl laughed, "you got a
conviction."
I laughed too. "Sure," I said.
Then they drifted off, saying they'd see me around.

82
 H otel d es E t rang e rs

A couple of weeks after resigning from the Aboriginal Welfare

Board, I sailed from Melbourne on the MV Sydney, bound for
Genoa, Italy. From Genoa I took the overnight rapide to Paris,
arriving at dawn a day after the deaths of Edith Piaf and Jean
Cocteau. After buying a plan de Paris at a tabac near the Gare du
Lyon, I walked west along the Seine, past the zoo, toward the Latin
Quarter. Though almost penniless, I was feverish with excitement.
I was finally where I thought I belonged. That Henry Miller had
left Paris in 1 940 and Cendrars had died in 1 96 1 - the same year
as Celine and Hemingway - were facts I chose to ignore. When
you're twenty-three, truth is poetic. Who gives a damn about the
difference between imaginary gardens and the real thing? For
better or worse, I figured, artists, like lunatics and criminals, obey
the dictates of inner worlds. Obj ectivity is either irrelevant or
chimerical.

It was Tony Hammond, a fellow student at Auckland Univer­

sity, who first put Tropic if Cancer into my hands. Tony had been
friendly with Robert Goodman, who ran a bookshop in Queen's
Arcade and somehow managed to smuggle into the country such
banned books as LAdy Chatterley 's Lover, The Naked Lunch, Ulysses,
and LAst Exit to Brooklyn. The dog-eared, scarlet-covered, Obelisk
Press paperback of Miller's masterpiece duly did the rounds and
finally reached me. I was stunned. This was the way I wanted to
write, addressing my own expenence directly and passionately.

83
But Miller had struggled for years not only to purge his writing
of literary mannerisms, but to give up entirely the idea of himself
as a literary man:

It is now the fall of my se cond ye ar in Paris. I was se nt he re for a

re ason I have not ye t bee n able to fathom.
I have no money, no re source s, no hope s. I am the happie st man
alive. A ye ar ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no
longe r think about it, I am. Eve rything that was lite rature has falle n
from me .There are no m ore books to be written, thank God.
T his then? This is not a book.This is libe l, slander, defamation of
characte r.This is not a book, in the ordinary se nse of the word. No,
this is a prolonge d insult, a gob of sp it in the face of Art . . .

There was another thing about the opening pages of Tropic of

Cancer that affected me profoundly. It was the way Miller made
life appear so simple and straightforward - a matter neither of
intellectual contemplation nor of political action, but of fidelity to
immediate experience. Intrigued by such a Zen-like attitude in an
age that cried out for political commitment, George Orwell had
compared Miller to Jonah "inside the whale" . But it was precisely
Miller's Rabelaisian gusto, his happy knack of immersing himself
in the stream of everyday life without the slightest urge to create
an orthodox narrative, or impose a point of view, that captivated
me. Experience is always aged in being interpreted. Encrusted with
ideas, life becomes calcified, sclerotic. "The truth is," as Cendrars
put it, "few people know how to live, and those who accept life as
it is are even rarer."
The exhilaration I felt when reading Tropic if Cancer for the
first time, and then discovering, through Miller, Blaise Cendrars, is
now inextricably mixed with my first memories of Paris. It was a
windless late-autumn morning in October. The sun was shining,
the air already cold. The leaves on the plane trees were brittle and
rusty. There was a mulch of foliage on the damp pavements, and
there were footprints of petanque players on the chalky paths. On

84
the boulevards, waiters in long black aprons were setting up tables
and wicker chairs, and the air was filled with the smell of flowers,
Gauloises and fresh coffee.
I strolled along the quais, browsed in Shakespeare & Co, tasted
my first espresso, ate my first croissant, and sought out neighbour­
hoods made familiar by my reading.
Armed with a copy of Cendrars' Trop, C'est Trop that I bought
in a bookshop near the Sorbonne, my first port of call was 2 1 6 rue
Saint-Jacques. Here Cendrars had lodged when he was my age,
and the Hotel des E trangers, which stood on the site in 1 9 1 0, was
the place he would thereafter declare to be his true birthplace.
This initiatory birth demanded a complete break with the
past:

Raze my childhood to the ground,

My family and my customs;
Build a railway station there instead,
Or leave some waste ground
To erase my origins . . .

The quarter where Cendrars came into his own had older
associations too. Sharing a room with his future wife, Fela, and
translating letters and documents for a pittance, Cendrars revelled
in the coincidence that Jean de Meung had composed his thir­
teenth-century masterpiece, The Romance of the Rose, in the same
hotel. Moreover, Fraw;:ois Villon and Restif de la Bretonne, the
two writers with whom he identified at this time, had both lodged
there.
But just as Cendrars and Fela were soon forced by penury to
leave their historic niche, so too was I .
I n the nearby rue d e la Harpe (then cobbled, now asphalted) , I
rented an attic room in the sort of rundown pension that may have
once accommodated Max, the hapless refugee of whom Miller
writes in one of his most compelling tales .
When you are on your own and new to a city like Paris, it is

85
impossible to be still. The streets are obsessional. You walk them
from daylight until long after dark. You collapse onto a sagging
bed in a cramped room, but cannot sleep. It is not the noise of the
street four storeys below but your remoteness from all those other
enviable lives that fills you with despondency. In a cheap notebook
you scribble your misgivings and memories. You are determined
to spend the next day looking for work, yet know it will be no
different from today. And all the while you are intoxicated by this
sense that you have finally found a place where you belong - the
students filling the sidewalk cafes along the Boul' Mich, bread­
crumbs spilled on a paper tablecloth, the smell of Moroccan
couscous and the Balkan charcoal-grills, coal barges chugging
upriver, the autumn sun on your face as you forage among the
bookstalls along the quais . . .
Living on baguettes and cheese, chilled by the wind, I lived
like a pilgrim. One day I walked to Clichy in search of the
Avenue Anatole-France where Henry Miller completed writing
Tropic of Cancer and began Black Spring, moving as in a dream,
my spirits flagging, yet sustained by the belief that if Miller had
overcome poverty and starvation and made it as a writer here, so
too would I .
But Miller's Paris had been reinvented many times since he
lived there. Now it was Miles Davis's turn, and Juliette Greco's.
Now coffee bars, bebop and existentialism defined the moment in
an ambience of angst, mauvais foi, ennui, and chic . . . words I picked
up in passing and filed away for future use.
One day, having drifted south of Montparnasse, I suddenly
recognised a couple of street names . . . rue d' Alesia, rue de la
Tombe-Issoire . . . and stumbled upon the Villa Seurat where Miller
was living at the time of the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1 934.
It was here, at number 1 8 , that Miller and Cendrars first met.
For me, at least for the moment, it was the end of the road, and
that night I took the boat train to England.

86
Crossing the Channel via Dieppe-Newhaven, I took some conso­
lation from the knowledge that Henry Miller had once travelled
this same route. But as the lights ofDieppe vanished into the dark­
ness, and salt-spray and rain lashed my face, the full force of my
destitution overwhelmed me.
In Paris I had walked the streets in a dream. In London the
streets exuded a dankness that seeped into my bones, weighed me
down, and brought me to the edge of despair.
It was my third day in the city. I was ravenous, but did not want
to spend what little money I still had on a meal, preferring hunger
to sleeping rough in the Embankment Gardens. Slouching along
Fleet Street, head down, in a funk, I heard someone call my name.
I told myself I had been mistaken, and scarcely raised my head.
But then the voice was closer, and a hand grasped my arm. "Mike!
Mike Jackson ! "
A line o f T. S. Eliot's came into my head: "You who were with
me in the ships at Mylae! " and then I was looking up, face to face
with Graeme Hetherington, who was grinning at me and saying
what an extraordinary coincidence it was.
I had met Hetherington on the Sydney. He had graduated from
the University of Hobart in Tasmania, and was off to Birmingham
to do a Ph.D. in Hittite Studies. I had liked him well enough, but
he was an uncomfortable reminder of the persona I had turned
my back on in Auckland, so had kept my distance. Now, unbe­
lievably, he was putting in a second appearance in my life - as a
savwur.
When I confessed that I hadn't eaten that day, he bundled me
back along the street to a Wimpy bar. When I told him I was
broke, he opened his wallet and pressed a five pound note into my
hand. And when I confided that I did not know a soul in London,
he scoffed and said he'd walk with me to New Zealand House
in Haymarket. I could go through the names and addresses there.
··You can't tell me that from a country as small as New Zealand
there's not someone here in London that you know."

87
 It was then that I remembered Fleur. We'd been close friends
in Wellington. She'd left New Zealand a year before I did, and far
more decisively. England was where she wanted to live. England
and nowhere else. And poetry was what she wanted to live for.
Fleur took me in until I found a job and somewhere of my
own to live.

Given my recent experiences of living rough, it was probably only

natural that I should end up working with dossers.
The London County Council Welfare Office for the Home­
less was an army hut, half hidden under the Hungerford Bridge.
Defeated men and women shuffied in and out all day. My j ob was
to interview them, record a few details about their situation, then
issue meal vouchers and tickets for a night's accommodation at
a Salvation Army or Church Army Hostel . When the tickets ran
out, the homeless were dispatched to the Camberwell Reception
Centre, a Dickensian institution whose routines I submitted to
one night in order to understand why so many dossers preferred
sleeping under the arches to the ordeal of the "spike".
You were admitted in the evening. On entering, you were
directed into a changing room where you were told to strip
naked. Your clothes were then taken away for fumigation. Next,
you received a blanket and a mug of milky tea, and were directed
into the dormitory. It was like a factory floor from which the
machinery had been removed. There were rows upon rows of
narrow cots. You sat there, wrapped in a blanket, cold, without
privacy, unnerved by the bronchial coughing of broken men and
the occasional foul-mouthed protest of someone who'd gone
berserk and had to be dragged away. You slept fitfully if at all. At
dawn, after getting back your clothes and receiving another mug
of tea with some chunks of bread and margarine, you were turned
out into the street again.
I thought I'd had it tough, but every day now I looked into the
face of irreversible suffering, of real defeat. Like Burnsides, with his

88
epilepsy, psoriasis, and naive optimism. "When I land a j ob I 'll buy
some decent clothes and get back to being a chef again." Or blind
Lillian Goodgame and her deaf companion whose name I have
forgotten. She spoke for him and cared for him as though he were
her child, and he in turn steered her through the crowded streets .
She wore a coarse woollen coat with a cheap brooch pinned to
the lapel. Her thick-lensed spectacles magnified her lifeless eyes.
If I learned anything about human misery during my long
winter under the Hungerford Bridge, it was how little there is to
tell. I guess I discovered this when Candace broke off our relation­
ship. Despite the intensity of my feelings, there was no story to
recount, nothing much to say, except that I went through hell. So
it was with the stories I now heard from the men and women that
drifted in and out of the welfare office.
I remember Mary Overland, encrusted with dirt and unmiti­
gated sorrow. She used to be a nurse. One evening she came home
early, after her night shift was cancelled, and found her husband
in the toilet being fucked by a transvestite. In a state of shock,
she walked out of the house and kept on walking. She never
went back. She had not seen her children for seven years . She was
obsessed by her own degradation and shame - as though she had
wronged him .
" It's too late now," she told me. " I ' m too embarrassed t o get in
touch."
The remorse of these drifters intrigued me. Their all-encom­
passing abjection and guilt. A few of them celebrated their freedom,
telling me that they owned nothing, were beholden to no one.
But I wasn't fooled.You could see it was all a disguise, a desperate
attempt to feel free by doing unto themselves what had been done
to them.
Most tragic were the veterans. These were the shell-shocked
survivors of the war, who came home, like Lew Stewart, to
find that a wife or girlfriend had not waited, had buggered off
with someone else. Men whose nerves were shot, who would

89
be devastated by the phone ringing, who had recurrent night­
mares of bloated corpses, and would wake in a cold sweat to find
a putrescent head staring at them from the darkness, mouthing
their name. Men who would never recover their lives, but walk in
circles forever, as in a prison yard.
One of my j obs was to interview men who might qualify for
a place in a British Legion home. Many of these old soldiers had
been waiting half their lives for such a chance. Some had been
gassed during battles on the Western Front in the First World War,
and could hardly find breath enough to answer my questions. All
unburdened their stories as if I were the first person to ever listen
to them.
I was reminded of the way Cendrars speaks of the war in the
opening pages of L'Homme Foudroye - a book written during the
Second World War about the first, after a long silence. "And the
eclipse that I observed on that occasion was an eclipse of my very
being, and I still wonder how I survived that terror about which I
have, until now, spoken to no one . . . "
I wrote letters home. Occasionally I saw Fleur and other friends.
But mostly I chose isolation.
One of my haunts at this time was the National Gallery. I went
there almost every day, since it was only a short stroll from where
I worked, yet another world.
Two paintings obsessed me.
The first was Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Crowned with Thorns.
Christ's face is that of both a saint and simpleton. He looks at
us with an expression as foolishly and beseechingly innocent as
his tormenters' faces are ignorant and cruel. It was an expression
that brought home to me the sense of victimhood I still suffered
from. My "muggins complex" as my friend Alex Guyan called it.
Always feeling hard done by, always feeling that the world owed
me something. It was the same "complex" I had seen so clearly in
Bob Lowry, whom I still mourned.
The second painting was Piero di Cosima's The Death cif Procris.

90
 A young woman lies dead in a field of wildflowers, accidentally
slain by her husband, Cephalus, while he was hunting. A satyr
kneels beside her head. His left hand gently touches her shoulder.
With his right hand he smoothes her hair from her forehead. His
face is filled with pity and tenderness. At her feet, Procris' faithful
hound Laelaps keeps vigil. Beyond these figures is a lake, its near
shore crowded with oblivious birds and beasts, the far shore lost in
early morning mist.
I would sit on the bench in the middle of the room, contem­
plating the painting. Once, I was distracted by a young woman
entering the room. She sat and gazed at the same mythological
scene that entranced me. I longed to speak to her. But I felt my
shabbiness and penury so acutely that I could not bring myself
to even glance in her direction, though this did not prevent my
famished eyes following her when she turned her back to me,
- the line of her legs, her bony hips, the exposed nape of her
neck, her black hair plaited and tied - until a group of tourists
was ushered into the room and the spell broken.

Since leaving Melbourne I had lost touch with Harry and Annette,
though I knew of their plans to come to England. It was therefore
a coincidence quite as remarkable as running into Graeme Heth­
erington on Fleet Street when I ran into Annette one afternoon
as I was emerging from the Underground at St John's Wood. Even
more uncanny, perhaps, was the fact that she and Harry were living
only a couple of streets away from where I had rented a room.
"I thought you were going to France?" Annette said, as though
I had broken a promise to her by ending up in England. That I was
working among down-and-outs did not surprise her in the least.
If only to show that I had no intention of encroaching on
their privacy, I left it to Harry and Annette to initiate contact, and
retreated to my books and my experiments with gouache.
Moved by a Soutine and Modigliani retrospective at the Tate,
I had decided that since I was getting nowhere with my writing,

91
I might succeed with paint. Undoubtedly, too, I was influenced
by my mother's letters, in which she recounted her struggle to
paint abstract landscapes, and her forays with my father into wild
New Zealand in search of inspiration.* My own life as an artist
was, however, continually frustrated by my landlady. An elderly
French spinster with a passion for Esperanto, she wore a velveteen
gown and bedroom slippers, kept her thinning hair permanently
in curlers, and seemed to have known only dashed hopes and
disappointment.
Arriving home at night, I would find notes on my bedside table,
chiding and cautioning me.

Dear Mr Jackson,
1. Please clean your paint spots off the wooden par tition.
2. The drawer s are only for clean underwear. Not even semi- clean
clothes must be put there. I have given you ex tra coathangers and
put ever y thing in order.
3. Please do not leave your small s ly ing around.

At other times, I was verbally enj oined to make my bed every

day, to put some padding under my typewriter (the racket of my
writing was disturbing others in the house) , and to desist from
using foreign coins in the gas meter.
I was about to find somewhere else to live when President John
F. Kennedy was assassinated. I saw the first grim notices scrawled
in black crayon on newspaper stands near the Bond Street tube
station. Everyone was in a panic, desperate for details. The old
newspaper vendor was consulted as if he were a seer. I went down
Bond Street and found a pub, where people had clustered around
a radio, listening for updates. When I got home it was late, but my
landlady had been waiting for me. She was beside herself with

• My mother, Emily Jackson j oined the Auckland Society of Arts when she was
fifty, and had her first solo exhibition thirteen years later (in 1 972). She continued
to exhibit regularly over the next twenty years, becoming one of New Zealand's
most respected artists.

92
grief. In her eyes, Kennedy had been the hope of the free world.
Kennedy and Esperanto, that is.
She asked if I wouldn't mind making her a coffee and sitting
with her awhile.
She talked for hours among her volumes of Pushkin, Esperanto
texts and issues of the Peking Monthly. She talked about Brittany,
where she grew up. About why she had studied English rather
than Russian (her Russian teacher made a pass at her) . About the
reason she had come to live in England (her English fiance was
killed in the first year of the war) . And finally, and tirelessly, about
Esperanto. If everyone in the world spoke the same language there
would be no grounds for human misunderstanding, assassinations
or wars.
Next morning she knocked at my door and said she wanted to
take me to Canning Town market. She had noticed how shabby
my clothes were; it was high time I dressed in something decent.
When I saw Harry and Annette a couple of days later, I was
wearing an expensive Swedish suede jacket, Oxford trousers and
new shoes.
"Very chic for a social worker," Harry observed.
'' I'm moving out," I announced, "before this goes any further."

Iris Murdoch begins the second chapter of Under the Net by

declaring: "There are some parts of London which are necessary
and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court
is contingent, except for a few places along the river."
As if conforming to this existential cartography, I found a room
in Hammersmith.
The distance between Hammersmith and St John's Wood was,
of course, not only measured in the cost of tube fares and travel
time; it was social. And as I descended further into the world of the
homeless that Jack London called "the abyss" , I became increas­
ingly indifferent to the orderly, non-contingent world that Harry
and Annette inhabited.

93
 If I saw Harry now, it was usually for a pub lunch in the Strand,
halfway between the publishing house where he worked and the
welfare office under the Hungerford Bridge where I eked out my
living.
Our conversations were stilted. I was inevitably broke, having
distributed my meagre earnings among the tramps in a self­
defeating effort to mitigate my distress at their suffering. So I would
feel ashamed at asking Harry to buy the lunch. I also lacked the
confidence and aplomb I felt were needed to move among the
smooth-talking professional crowd he was in with. We would have
had little to talk about were it not for Harry's fervent interest in
my experiences of life inside the spikes and doss-houses, and on
the streets.
I now wonder if it bothered him, being so far from the edge.
One night, Harry, Annette and I went to see Antonioni's La
Notte at a Hampstead cinema.
In the opening sequence of the film, the dying Tommaso says,
"What should I do? What can I do?" then answers to the effect
that his life has been more shadow than substance, that he has
lacked the courage to probe things deeply and fully. As we left the
cinema, Harry recalled this moment, and asked me what I thought
of it. I cannot remember how I responded, but the earnestness of
Harry's question is something I have never forgotten.

Though I too had yet to discover the life I wanted to live, I believed
I had glimpsed it in a dream.
I had no doubt as to the source of the dream. It belonged to the
day the Sydney docked in Bombay, the day I first set eyes upon the
East. The experience had affected me as deeply as it had Marlowe
in Conrad's Youth, coming from the sea to a place of "danger and
promise," where "a stealthy Nemesis" lay in wait. India was the
opposite of everything I had known . Crowded, unflagging, noisy,
smelly, anonymous and fecund, it held me in thrall.
I spent most of the afternoon drifting around the city, before

94
losing my way in the red light district around Falkland Road,
locally known as the Kamathipura. Street after street was lined
with cages in which frail girls, like birds, sold into slavery for the
price of a cassette-player or tin roof, whispered and fluttered.
Pimps pursued me wherever I turned. "You want j iggajig, Sah?
Sahib, sahib, sahib, you like leetle girl? Sah? Yes, Sahib, I can do,
Sahib?" To escape the wheedling and pestering, I walked into a
cinema and bought a ticket. I was ushered into an upstairs seat,
and found myself watching a film of the great Persian epic, Sohrab
and Rustum. I had never before seen an Indian film. Although I
couldn't understand Hindi or read the Urdu or Malayalam sub­
titles, I was captivated by the music, one song in particular. Sohrab
and his sweetheart are by a river. Sunlight sparkles on the water.
They are singing to each other before Sohrab goes off to do battle
with his father.
One night in London, months later, I dreamed I was back in
Bombay. As I woke from the dream, the song was running through
my head. I didn't want to lose it. I didn't want to break the spell.
I was convinced that as long as I held the music in my mind,
I would be connected to the exotic world I had glimpsed for
a moment, then lost. I walked out into the London streets and
walked all night, singing the song softly to myself so that I would
remember it. I kept it alive in my head all day as the mist lifted
from the river, as trains crashed and racketed above the roof of
the welfare office, and tramps came and went with their hardluck
stories and stricken faces.

As that winter grudgingly gave ground to spring, I succeeded in

getting a volunteer position with the UN operation in the Congo
(ONUC) .
For about a week before I left London, I stayed with Annette
and Harry, enj oying their hospitality and company as if for the last
time. Mindful of the violence that had followed Independence,
Harry saw my going to the Congo as willful self-immolation. I

95
laughed this off, saying anything was better than another English
winter.
In the hours before taking the tube to Heathrow, I wandered
with Harry around Soho, finally winding up in a record shop in
Tottenham Court Road. I asked the salesman if he had anything
ofWoody Guthrie's, only to be asked if I had heard anything by
this new singer, who sounded like Woody. I thought he meant
Jack Eliott, but no, this was a young guy called Bob Dylan. So
Harry and I listened for the first time to "The Times They Are
A-Changin' " .
When i t came time for u s to go our separate ways, I wanted to
embrace Harry, or at least clasp his hand. But Harry, I knew, shrank
from such intimacy, and I was too unsure of myself to initiate it. In
the end, we simply turned and walked off in different directions .
But as I descended into the Underground I glanced back and saw
him for a moment, as couth and kempt as ever, but no longer, I
felt, as deeply gruntled.

96
 N a band a l<ala

T he storms come up from the south. By mid afternoon, anvil­

topped thunderheads tower over the city. The air is charged with
electricity. You hear thunder far off. Then it cracks overhead,
making you cringe. Forked lightning splits the sky. With the first
spattering of rain you smell asphalt and earth. As it pelts down,
people dash for cover under the mango trees along the Avenue
Valcke, and cars slow to a crawl along the flooded Boulevard du
Trente Juin.
I buy a copy of Le Progres outside the Cafe Leopold I I . The boy
at the news stand has lost most of his fingers to leprosy. A burnt­
out case. Luckily for him, the soaring inflation rate has made
..:oins superfluous. He holds out a grubby wad of ten-franc notes
berween the stumps of his fingers and palm, and with the knuckles
of his other hand feeds me my change.
The cafe smells of sweat and rain. I take a seat by the door,
order a Primus beer, and spread the newspaper open on the table
<o I can scan the headlines . Rebels Northeast of Leopoldville . . .
Bolobo and Mushie Isolated . . . Ranger VII Takes Photographs of
:he Moon. Events that all seem equally remote.
The waiter sets down a bottle of beer, capped with an upturned
:umbler. He looks perplexed, like le Premier Ministre, M. Moise
Tshombe.
"' C'est vrai ce qu 'on dit - qu 'ilfaut que les blancs partent?"
·' Only the families of UN personnel," I say. "Only women and
:hildren."

97
 "You are not afraid to stay, monsieur?"
"With the National Congolese Army to protect us, how could
one possibly be afraid?"
It's the kind of cynical bravado everyone cultivates here. Though
I still surprise myself that I go along with it.
I saw Marthe this morning at Le Royal - the apartment
building that is the UN headquarters in Leopoldville. Marthe
has developed several marketing cooperatives up and down the
country. How many have survived Pierre Mulde's incursions in
Moyen Congo, Gaston Soumialot's invasion of North Katanga
and General Olenga's rebellion in Kivu is anyone's guess. For more
than a month now it has been dangerous to travel outside the
provincial cities. Stacks of paper proj ects collect dust in the Depar­
tement des Affaires Sociales. Haitian stenographers file their nails
and stifle yawns as UN heads confer in closed meetings. At midday
the PX is packed with UN personnel spending their p er diems on
packets of Camel cigarettes, six-packs of Budweiser and bottles of
Glenfiddich . By six in the evening, when the curfew begins, all
have retreated into the hill suburbs, white Peugeots parked behind
padlocked gates.
When I see Marthe gesturing angrily at the end of the corridor,
my first thought is that she has once again been refused permis­
sion to travel to Kivu and check on her community development
proj ects there. But when I get close enough to hear what she
is saying to the UNRRA office staff, I learn that she has been
ordered to prepare for evacuation.
" I am nobody's wife. I am not a child. I am not a dependent,"
she rails . " I have been here since sixty-two. I do not need une p etite
vacance ! It's an outrage. It's discrimination ! " Catching sight of me,
she demands, "What do you think?"
If anyone should be flown back to Europe, it should be me. I
haven't created a single community development scheme - even
on paper. Nor am I likely to do so, even if the National Congo­
lese Army, inspired by the optimistic pronouncements of its high

98
command, succeeds in crushing the rebellion. I spend most of
my time in my hotel by the river, reading and translating Blaise
Cendrars .
"What can one do?" I say. " C'est le Congo. "
Marthe is incensed. " Ce n 'est pas le Congo. C'est New York ! "

I n colonial times, Parcembise was Leopoldville's elite neighbour­

hood. The streets are shaded by jacarandas. Villas are enclosed by
high walls, topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Behind
wrought-iron gates, guard dogs bare their fangs, salivate, and bark
at Congolese passing up and down the street. The air is scented
with frangipani and bougainvillea .
On the street door to Marthe's apartment block is a sign -

A ttention au Chien Mechant ! As I unlock the door, I half expect an

Alsatian to leap at my throat. But the lobby is deserted.
It is only two days since Marthe left, yet already her apart­
ment smells mouldy. I drop my duffel bag on the parquet and look
around. There are two paintings propped against the bookcase.
Tourist-shop art. Wiry African figures strolling through a forest
clearing. A fisherman in a pirogue on the river. Maybe she intended
to take the paintings back to Europe as gifts for her family. Then I
remember, she doesn't have any family.
On the dining table is a bunch of keys, a note telling me to make
myself at home, and a ledger in which I am to keep a record of
payments to Albert. She has also left me a photocopied file of docu­
ments that date back to colonial times - official wage-rates for
domestic servants . It amuses me that despite her hurried departure
\1arthe found time to answer my misgivings about paying her
houseboy the equivalent of twenty dollars a month.
Waiting for Albert to turn up, I fix myself a gin and tonic and
go out onto the balcony. In the square, there is a boulangerie called
Le Coq Hardy. All the other shops are boarded up. I am having
second thoughts about moving out of my hotel. I am going to
miss the river and its floating islands of hyacinth; the OTRACO

99
river boats such as Conrad may have captained, that lie beached
and derelict beside the ferry landing; and the distant roar of the
Livingstone rapids in the night. I regret having let Marthe talk me
into living in her apartment and taking care of it while she is away.
And the prospect of dealing with Albert unnerves me.

Marthe's "boy" is old enough to be my father. In fact, one of the

first things he tells me when I ask him about his family and where
he lives is that he has two sons about my age in the army. He is
worried about them. They are stationed in Kamina, defending the
town and airstrip against Soumialot's guerillas .
" C'est loin, Kamina, " he says, making Karnina sound like a
synonym for sadness.
As he moves toward the kitchen, I follow, and stand in the
doorway as he rummages in a cupboard for his bucket, mop and
detergent.
"Look, Albert," I say, "I'm not sure I really need a servant. I
mean, I can't have you doing all my menial tasks for me. I thought
it might suit us both if maybe you came here once or twice a
week, just to put in an appearance . . . "
"But Madame Haedens said I should come every day."
"But why? There's nothing for you to do. If you come every
day, we'll get in each other's way and feel uncomfortable."
"What about monsieur's meals?"
"And another thing, if l'm going to call you by your first name,
you must call me by mine. I can't have you calling me monsieur.
My name is Michael."
"Oui, Monsieur Michel."
"And there's the question of your wage, Albert. I 've already told
Madame Haedens that I cannot agree to pay you only a thousand
francs a month ."
Albert stands with his arms by his sides, rigid and startled as if
posing for a photograph. I try to hide my irritation. "I want to
pay you three thousand francs a month . But I want us to keep the

1 00
arrangement to ourselves. I'll pay you on the twenty-fifth of each
month, like Madame Haedens, but I'll enter only a thousand francs
in the ledger so that everything will be en regie. Is that okay?"
Albert picks up the bucket and tilts it under the tap.
" Oui, Monsieur Michel," he says, and starts running water into
the bucket.

Driving back to the apartment for lunch, I am flagged down by

the Belgian driver of a refrigerated meat van. He's had a puncture
and asks if I can keep an eye on his vehicle while he walks to the
Total service station for help.
"No problem," I say, and park my j eep about twenty metres
behind him.
No sooner has he disappeared up the road than people converge
on the meat van from all directions. They saunter around it, kick at
the flat tyre, inspect the padlocks on the back doors.
It's as though I am invisible. One guy breaks open the padlocks
with a j emmy. Another positions a jack under the rear axle. Have
they been lying in wait all morning, equipped with these tools,
expecting such a windfall? Or has all this been carefully planned
- six-inch nails strewn on the road, a team of helpers?
The metal doors are flung open. Men, women and children
clamber up and start handing down carcasses. People hack up the
meat with p angas. Everyone is laughing.
Before long, people with headloads of meat are filing away over
the open fields, vanishing as quickly as they came. As for the truck,
its axles are chocked up on hunks of wood and a group of men are
bowling the tyres away down a muddy track.
I switch on the j eep 's ignition, j olt back on to the road, and
accelerate past the stranded truck.

"Albert," I announce, "today I'm going to make you lunch. Give

me your apron." Nonplussed, he unties his apron and hands it to
me, then stands aside as I peel and slice potatoes forjdtes, and crush

101
garlic and black pepper for the entrecote steaks.
He says, "You are doing everything. It isn't right, Monsieur
Michel."
I push past him to get the lettuce and tomatoes out of the
fridge.
He says, "What is there for me to do?"
"Put a record on."
"Which one, Monsieur Michel?"
"You choose."
Albert puts on a rumba called "Nabanda Kala".
I set two places at the table and open two bottles of beer.
" Bon apphit ! " I say, ignoring Albert's disgruntled expression.
" Bon apphit, " Albert mumbles, and sits down.
I ask him if he has always worked as a houseboy.
"Always," he says.
"Always for whites?"
He looks at me guardedly.
"You don't regard such work as beneath a man's dignity, as
women's work?" I ask.
"Some people say that."
"Do you like the work? Is it hard to find work like this?"
" One is lucky to have work. Times are hard, Monsieur Michel.
Everything costs. Everyone suffers. It is not a question of what one
wants to do. It is a question of survival."
"Have things changed much since Independence?"
"What things, Monsieur Michel?"
"The way people treat their servants, for example."
"Sometimes people are kind, sometimes they make life very
hard for you ."
"And Madame Haedens, is she kind?"
"Madame Haedens, yes, she is very kind."
"In what way?"
"She gives me clothes for my wife. She always gives us food.
Sometimes she gives me a box of cigars."

1 02
 Albert sips his beer.
"You're not eating," I say.
" I am sorry, Monsieur Michel, but I am not hungry."
"Does it bother you that I serve you lunch?"
"Yes, monsieur, it bothers me."
"Why?"
"It is not right."
"But you can't always be a servant, Albert. Isn't that what Inde­
pendence means - becoming your own master? "
" It is true what you say, but porcupine can't teach pangolin to
climb trees ."
" I didn't know porcupines could climb trees."
Albert begins to clear the table - his uneaten entrecote and
french fries, his salad and glass of beer . . .
"So am I the pangolin or the porcupine?" I ask.
"You confuse me, Monsieur Michel," Albert says, and pads out
to the kitchen in his bare feet.

A carte p ostale from Geneva:

The ne ws pape r he adlines here would make you think the e ntire
Congo is a bloodbath. I'm s till try ing to pe rs uade those imbe ciles
in Ne wYork that it is pe rfectly s afe for me to re turn. I hope you are
e njoy ing your petit sejour in my apartme nt and that all is we ll.
Say bonjour to Albe rt for me .
Cordialement,

Marthe .

I have bought an alarm clock so I can wake at six and do all

the housework before Albert turns up at seven-thirty. When he
arrives, I follow him into the kitchen and wait while he disentan­
gles himself from his string bags and unfolds the scrap of paper on
which he's written the cost of the greengroceries.
He gives me my change, then puts the vegetables in the fridge.
He appears more subdued than usual.

1 03
 "Have you heard from your sons?"
"They say the army is regrouping."
Both of us know this really means the army is retreating.
"I received a postcard yesterday from Madame Haedens. She
says to greet you."
"Is she well?"
"Yes, she is well."
"I hope she comes back soon."
Albert unstraps his sandals and pushes them out of the way. He
takes his mauve apron from behind the door and ties it around his
waist. I follow him as he pads around the apartment.
I have waxed the parquet so well that I have to tread carefully.
Albert's bare feet give him a firm grip. He checks the bathroom. It
is spotless. He looks into my bedroom. The window is open, the
bed made without a crease.
"Everything is very clean and tidy," Albert observes.
I seize my chance. "You see, Albert, how pointless it is you
making this long j ourney here every day. Wouldn't you prefer
being at home with your wife?"
"My work is here, Monsieur Michel. I do not want to be at
home with my wife. I will do your laundry this morning."
" I 've already done it."
"Then I will dust the books. Madame Haedens likes me to dust
her books from time to time."
I give up. Yesterday he polished the silver. The day before he
cleaned windows. Today he will dust the books, even though it is
the rainy season and there is no dust.

A night of torrential rain. I sit at the dining table, working on my

translation of Blaise Cendrars' Moravagine:

I don't believe there are any literary s ubjects , or rather that there is
only one: man.
But which man? The man who wr ites , of cours e. There is no
other s ubject poss ible.

1 04
 W ho is he? In any even t it's not me, it is the Other. "[ am the

Other," Gerard de Ner val wr ites under one of the ver y rare photo­
graphs of himself.
But who is thisOther?
Doesn 't much matter. You meet someone by chance and n ever
see him again. On e fine day this guy resurfaces in your conscious­
n ess an d screws you aroun d for ten years. It's not always someone
memorable; he can be colourless and without character.
T his is what happened to me with Mister X - M oravagine.
I wanted to star t wr itin g. He had taken my place. He was there,
install ed deep down in me, as in an ar mchair. I shook him, str ug­
gled with him, he didn't want to trade places.
He seemed to say, "I'm here an d here I stay! " It was terr ible. I
began to notice that this Other was appropr iating ever y thing that
had happen ed in my life, assumin g character traits I thought of as
my own . My thoughts, my favour ite studies, my tastes, ever y thin g
con verged on him, belonged to him, n our ished him. At great cost
to myself, I fed and nurtured a parasite. In the end I no lon ger knew
which of us was copying the other. He took tr ips in my place. He
made love instead of me. But he never possessed any real iden tity,
for each of us was himself, me an d theOther. Tragic te te- a- te te.
W hich is why on e can wr ite but one book, or the same book
again an d again. It's why all good books are alike.
They are all au tobiographical. It's why there is onl y one literar y
subject: man .
It's why there is onl y one literature: that of this man, this Other,
the on e who wr ites.

The p ortejenetre is open. The night smells of decaying foliage and

rain. Above the noise of the rain I hear snatches of a Fran<;oise
Hardy song. Plaintive. Remote. Someone in a nearby apartment
has been playing it all evening.
I shove my books and papers aside. Who is playing this record?
Why the same song over and over again?

1 05
The song keeps running through my head as I drive through the
rainswept darkness. The headlights of my Jeep pick out Africans
walking beside the road, or grouped under makeshift canopies of
hammered tin, grilling manioc and shish kebabs over braziers.
At the crossroads I cannot decide whether to drive up to the
Stanley Memorial or head downtown . The windscreen wipers flick
back and forth . I sit mesmerised. Water drips on to my shoulder
from where the canvas hood is fastened to the frame.

The Carousel Club is not far from my old hotel. A malfunctioning

neon sign buzzes and clicks in the rain. C A R 0 U S E . . .
It's early. The only people at the bar are half a dozen Congolese
girls. Lacquered hairpieces and cheap perfume. Lips are purple,
faces blurred in the lurid light. I buy two bottles of Primus beer.
Joe the piano player is from Southern Rhodesia, only he calls it
Zimbabwe. He is one of Joshua Nkomo's men. They are waiting
to return home and begin the armed struggle for Independence.
"So how's the United Nations?" Joe drawls.
"As ununited as ever," I say, and set a bottle of beer down on
the piano for him.
He stops playing and quaffs some beer.
"What else is new? " he asks.
I glance over at the bar, at the Congolese girls.
"Who's the girl in the blue dress?" I ask Joe.
"Why don't you ask her?" Joe says, and starts playing again.

Most of the night I lie awake, smoking cigarettes, listening to the

rain. The girl beside me smells of palm oil and ash . . .
The dawn light infiltrates the room. Sophie's glossy hairpiece
is on the bedside table, her blue dress flung over the back of a
chair.
When I hear the front door open and close, I think it is a door
in an apartment downstairs. I have been asleep, and have dreamed

1 06
of a village with thatched roofs like hair, and fire-blackened rafters
like human skin .
I hear Albert moving around in the kitchen, and seize Sophie
by the shoulder.
"Wake up! You have to go."
As I scramble out of bed and pull on my trousers, Sophie sits up,
folds her arms across her breasts, and yawns.
" Quick!" I say.
When I hear Albert padding down the corridor, I stumble
toward the door.
"Monsieur Michel ? " he queries.
As he peers into the bedroom, Sophie snatches up a sheet to
cover herself and utters a queer squeal of annoyance. Albert begins
to say something in Lingala, but I steer him back through the
doorway, holding my trousers awkwardly with one hand to keep
them up.
When Albert has disappeared into the kitchen and shut the
door, I go back to the bedroom. Sophie is sullenly tugging her
hairpiece over her own braided hair.
She looks even more of a child than she did last night. Ne fait
pas �a monsieur, je t'en p rie . . .
I take a wad of notes from my pocket and peel off three hundred
francs.
She crushes the notes in her fist.
" �a va ?" I ask.
" Oui, fa va. "
She snatches up her red high-heeled shoes and pads barefoot
down the corridor to the front door.
" I 'll drive you," I say.
" I will walk."
"No," I say angrily, ''I 'll drive you."
Not once between Parcembise and the city do we speak. When
I have dropped her off, I go to a p atisserie for coffee. The very
thought of the apartment sickens me. I am in half a mind to check

1 07
back into my hotel by the river and forget that any of this has ever
happened . . .
It is midday when I get back to the apartment. Albert's sandals
aren't in the kitchen, and his apron is hanging behind the door.
In my bedroom the bed has been made with freshly laundered
sheets. On the couvre-lit a pair of my trousers is laid out, and an
ironed shirt.

The cite indigene is a labyrinth. Shanties made of mud, beaten

sheets of tin, palm fronds and packing cases. The pulse and jangle
of hi-life. Young men in dark glasses staring. When I ask, " Is this
Nyanza?" they smile. A woman sidles up to me and urges me to go
back, it's dangerous for me here. I press on, followed by children
who beg for coins.
Sweat is trickling down my ribcage. I curse the heat, the potholes
into which I stumble, the children pursuing me.
" Fiche-moi le camp ! "
M y voice i s cracked and feeble. The crowd o f children i s not
following me now; it is moving ahead of me like a wave.
When I finally locate Albert's house, he is waiting outside, as
though word of my coming had already reached him. His face is
contorted with anger.
Then I realise he is looking beyond me, at the children. Brusquely,
he raises his arm and shouts something at them in Lingala. They
shamble a few yards back and stop.
"White men never come here," Albert says .
"Is this your house?" I ask.
He pushes aside the plastic strips in the doorway and gestures
for me to go inside. "It is a poor man's house," he says, "but you
are welcome."
The darkness blinds me.
"You have come a long way, Monsieur Michel," Albert says.
"I wanted to come and see where you lived."
I stand nervously in the middle of the room, trying to get

1 08
accustomed to the gloom.
Albert indicates that I should sit down on the battered sofa
against the wall. Then he goes out into the backyard and says
something to a woman sitting there. The woman immediately
picks up a scrap of tin and starts fanning the embers between the
hearth stones.
When Albert returns, he sits opposite me on a folding metal
chair but keeps glancing toward the back door. I direct my gaze
to the photographs on the wall and the glass-fronted cabinet
containing candles, bunches of native tobacco, plates and cutlery.
"My wife will bring tea," Albert explains.
She enters the room with her eyes lowered and hands me a
thermos of tea. She has pulled her lap a over her breasts before
entering the room. I put a sugar cube and some evaporated milk
in the cup she gives me. She holds the box of sugar cubes in front
of me, as if l should take more. I shake my head, and she leaves the
room without having spoken a word.
"Where is your cup?" I ask Albert.
" It is all right, Monsieur Michel."
He watches as I fill my cup from the thermos.
"Albert," I begin, "I wanted to talk to you . . . "
"Ah bon," he says, as though he has no idea why I have come.
"I missed you yesterday. I wondered why you didn't come back
to the apartment after siesta."
"There was something monsieur wanted me to do?"
"No, no . . . "
"You have told me ever since you moved into Madame Haedens'
apartment that I was not to come every day . . . "
His eyes meet mine, but betray nothing.
I dig into my pocket and pull out the plastic pouch of aromatic
Dutch tobacco I bought in the PX.
"Here, this is for you ."
"That's very kind of you, Monsieur Michel."
He opens the pouch, sniffs the tobacco and begins to fill his

1 09
pipe. I light a cigarette, then stand up and take the box of matches
over to him.
"Are these your sons?" I ask, looking at the photos of the sombre
men in battledress.
"Oui, Monsieur Michel."
There is a photo of a young girl too, not unlike Sophie.
"Have you lived here long? " I ask.
"Since two years. I used to live in Kinshasa, but my wife felt that
it was unsafe, so we moved here."
" It's safer here?"
"Pah ! " He throws up his hands. " I am getting old. In a year or
two I'll go back to my village. I'll quit work. I 'll let my sons take
care of me."
"Where is your village?"
"It is far."
"How far?"
Albert puffs at his pipe as if he has not heard my question. I
sit down on the sofa again . "Now that you have more days off,
perhaps you'll be able to spend more time there."
"Perhaps ."
" I 'd like to go with you some time. I 'd like to see your village.
I 'd like to see where you live."

Albert guides me out of the labyrinth of Nyanza to where I left

my j eep. It's not there. Albert insists on searching up and down the
Avenue Mahamba, but I tell him it is pointless.
I catch a bus into the city and walk to the Nigerian Police
headquarters . The sergeant in the sky-blue beret tells me I will
have to make a written statement. He shows me into an air-condi­
tioned room and gives me a form on which I am to describe the
circumstances of the theft. When I have done this, I return the
form to him.
He casts his eyes over it and frowns. "You have written your
statement in English ! "

1 10
 "What else?"
"Your carte d'identite says 'Nationalite: Neo Zelandais '."
"So?"
"So you have to write your statement in French."
"But I'm a New Zealander. English is my first language."
"You must write your statement in French. Those are the rules."
It takes me half an hour to complete my translation. The
sergeant is satisfied. "We all have to follow the proper procedures,"
he explains as he passes my statement to the Nigerian Police trans­
lator.
An hour later, the statement - now rendered into unreadable
English - is returned to me for my signature.

At the Department des Affaires Sociales the news is that Marthe

is coming back.
I move out of the apartment at once and back to my hotel. It's
several days before I put in an appearance at Le Royal, to collect
my mail.
There's a note from Marthe. She wants me to contact her
urgently.
The following afternoon she runs me to earth at the Cafe
Leopold I I .
"Michael! " she cries, and with the back o f her hand bats aside
the newspaper I 'm reading. "What have you done to Albert?"
I open my mouth to say something.
"You've spoiled him completely! He won't do a thing I tell
him. He turns up late in the morning. He demands more money.
He looks as if I disgust him. What did you do to him while I was
away?"
" I didn't do anything to him, Marthe. I paid him a little more
than you do. I told you I 'd probably do that. And I told him he
didn't have to come to work every day. There was nothing for him
to do."
"Nothing? The place is a shambles ! I knew I couldn't trust you.

111
I knew this would happen if I went away."
"Marthe, why don't you sit down?"
"No, I will not sit down! "
" I paid Albert more because h e needs the money. I went and
saw where he lives. He and his wife don't even have a floor in their
house. It's j ust linoleum over bare earth . . . "
"Oh! He's actually seen how the natives live, has he?" She
glances around as though she wants her sarcasm to reach every
corner of the cafe. "What self-righteousness! Do you think we
can be laws unto ourselves? Is that your idea of a civilised world
- everyone doing what he pleases?"
"This isn't a colonised country any more, Marthe. You can't
exploit peo- "
"Exploit! Don't be so na'ive! What do you think you've been
doing? Did you ever think of what Albert wanted? No! You
presumed to know what he wanted, and you forced him to play
along with your selfish little game. Do you really think you know
Albert? Do you know how he thinks, what he feels? Bullying
him, blackmailing him, undermining his position. You call that
equality! "
" If things have gone wrong between you and Albert . . . "
"Wrong! It's you and Albert who have gone wrong, not me."
" I 'm sorry if that's how you feel."
"You haven't the faintest idea how I feel."
She turns and walks away, and the whole cafe stares at me as if
I owe them an apology too.

On the C-1 30, flying to Kasai , I am the only passenger. Far below,
the shadow of the aircraft is tugged across gulches and grassland. I
make out red dirt paths, villages like the one to which Albert will
return . . .
Our cargo is made up of bales of chicken wire and a Volkswagen
Beetle, eye-bolted to the floor. As the plane drops into airpockets,
the VW is jerked violently upward. I flick through Marthe's notes

1 12
on the community-development proj ects she wants me to check
out.
Sunlight streams through the window. I begin to fall asleep,
remembering Marthe's accusations.
Then we are descending through rain cloud.
The airstrip is in shadow. Tufts of grass sprout from cracks in the
tarmac. There are no signs of life.
We unload the VW. The Swedish pilot fills it with petrol from a
forty-gallon drum. I get in the car, switch on the ignition, and the
engine splutters reluctantly into life. As I drive off, the pilot gives
me a perfunctory wave, then ducks under the wing of his aircraft
and disappears.
In the city, the silence is unearthly. I find the Imokasai building
and park the VW.
I cross the foyer. There is a deck of playing cards strewn over
the terrazzo. A radio crackles with static. From time to time a voice
breaks through with news from Leo or E'ville.
The UN radio operator sits in front of his receiver, headphones
hanging around his neck. He squints through cigarette smoke. "I t
doesn't sound to o good," he says. "The rebels are moving back
into Lusambo."
He tells me he's ready to destroy the radio equipment and move
out at a moment's notice.
In the next room, the UN Chief ofArea Operations is drinking
percolated coffee from a plastic cup.
" It's crazy," he drawls, "fuckin' crazy. You ask for fuckin' supplies
and they send you fuckin' chicken wire! What the fuckin' hell am
I supposed to do with chicken wire?"
He screws up the consignment notice and tosses it away m

disgust.
" Is there any chance of my getting a j eep?" I ask.
"What do you want a j eep for, pal?"
" I want to go to Muchona and check out a project there. A
school."

1 13
 "You crazy? Because the area's under ANC control doesn't mean
a goddam thing. They're all as jumpy as jackasses. Anyway, what
the hell are you going to do with a school up there? Teach?"
I look around. The boxes of vehicle spares, the copy of Playboy.
In the next room the radio spits and crackles.
"So is there a spare j eep I can have?"
"Pal, you can have my job and kiss my arse if you want. Sure
you can have a jeep. There's a four-by-four in the yard. Ask Hank
for the keys. And tell him where you're going and how long you
expect to be gone . . . "
Hank, still squinting through smoke, points to a bunch of keys
on a hook on the wall.
"Don't get raped! " he sings out as I leave the room.

At the edge of town, the road degenerates into a rain-eroded track

- red laterite between brakes of elephant grass and the forest wall.
At the first ANC roadblock, the officer in charge bangs the
muzzle of his automatic rifle down on the metal ledge of my seat.
I hand him my laissez-passer and carte d'identite. He flicks through
them without a word, and signals for the barrier to be raised.
The j eep churns through quagmires and grinds uphill. It is hot
and clammy. People move into the grass as I pass, steadying their
headloads, alarmed . . .
I stop at a village to ask for directions.
A small boy tugs at my trousers. "Des pierres, monsieur, des pierres."
He opens his fist and shows me a handful of uncut diamonds. He
wants to exchange them for a cigarette.
I drive on, reaching Muchona at dusk.
The school has been destroyed by termites and rain.
I sit on the porch of the town chief's house, trying to swallow
the chikuanga his wives have brought me to eat - "lumps of some
stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender colour . . . wrapped
in leaves" as Conrad described it in Heart if Darkness.
A man approaches. His clothes are filthy and ragged. His bare

1 14
feet are like charred wood, the toes unsightly stumps.
He dumps a bamboo creel and two traps on the porch at my
feet." Monsieur?" he says.
He pulls a strip of Iiana from the neck of the creel, and drags
out a dead porcupine. He turns the porcupine over. One paw is
mangled and bloody. Its two sharp rat-like teeth jut upward.
I reach down and touch the inert body. It is cold, like the rain.
"Monsieur?" he says again.

For days I drove down deserted roads, through brakes of elephant

grass, the bush swathed in mist. As I saw it, the UN's development
programme was little more than a new mask for what Conrad had
called the "civilizing mission". Like Kurtz's vainglorious enterprise,
it simply disguised and euphemised Europe's longstanding desire
to control Africa's wealth, and I found it hard to rid my mind of
King Leopold's savage dominion - the amputations and castra­
tions as punishment, the millions enslaved or shot in the course
of Belgium's quest for rubber, gum-opal and ivory. As a volunteer
worker, I should not, perhaps, have felt so deeply implicated in this
dubious history, yet without this disquiet I may not have found
my own path .
In Elizabethville, I checked into the Hotel Leopold I I , with its
anachronistic balconies, dingy dining-room, and thin Corinthian
columns that recalled a regime that had gone for good.
Over the city, heavy blue thunderheads were massing. People
drifted past me on their way to the market. A group of women
moved slowly down the centre of the road, keening for the dead
child they carried on a wooden litter.
As the first heavy drops of rain pattered down through the
pendulous flowers of the jacaranda trees, the stormlight became
tinged with lilac. I felt strangely free. As if the Congo 's bloody
struggle for Independence had been, obliquely, my own.
But as with any revolution, the new is never ushered in without
the old being ruthlessly attacked, cut out, and destroyed. For an

1 15
individual, rebirth is both an ordeal to be endured and a death.
Old ties are cast away, one turns one's back on one's parentage,
one's childhood. Bridges are burned. There is no turning back.
This is no less true for a country attempting to radically rein­
vent itself. The old must be erased if the new order is to arise. So
declared Chrisopher Gbenye when he ordered the execution of
everyone who was literate or had worked for the Belgians: "We
must destroy what existed before, we must start again at zero with
an ignorant mass ." Like Pol Pot in Cambodia a generation later.
The trouble with revenge is that it binds one ever more firmly
to the past one is so determined to surpass. Vengeance is not revo­
lution. Revolution is going beyond the past.
Not long before leaving Kasai, I was invited to spend a few days
with a group of Franciscans at a former Belgian coffee planta­
tion they had brought back into production with the assistance
of twenty or thirty young Baluba men. Each day we worked. At
night we filled the large, barely-furnished living room of the old
Belgian homestead and watched movies (I remember Jean Marais
in Le Bossu) or talked. I experienced a cameraderie I had seldom
known before.
One night, I went down to the Lulua river with some of the
young Congolese to watch the hippos come ashore. As darkness
fell, the black grassland was suddenly filled with the shimmer of
fireflies, as if the stars had disintegrated and fallen to earth . Then
we heard the hippos clambering up the muddy slipways along the
river bank. Dark holes in the glimmering, fallen sky, they moved
about as if blind to our presence.
Another night, rummaging around for something to read, I
found a dog-eared copy of Claude Levi-Strauss's Les Structures
Elementaires de Ia Parente, and read with growing fascination about
the rules of reciprocity that underlie all human interaction.
I had glimpsed the Africa I now wanted to know. Not a place I
might have a hand in changing, but a place in which I would be
the one that was changed.

1 16
 Pauline

C endrars' first wife, Fela Poznanska, once said that when she first
met Blaise - in Bern in 1 909 - she felt that he could have been
born in any country in the world. "He doesn't much resemble
his compatriots. He's got Gorki's head of hair, Baudelaire's leather
pilot-coat and big cravat, and in his gestures has the grace of an
Italian. He could also be Polish." Cendrars was twenty-two. Inter­
viewed forty-three years later, he would appear almost indifferent
to the image he had once so avidly cultivated: of the risk-taker,
the dare-devil, the adventurer who had tried his hand at every
trade, learned English by working his way through the Encyclo­
paedia Britannica, enlisted in two world wars, made and squandered
millions. Observed the interviewer, "You have dedicated yourself
to being a man of the world, that is to say to break ties, to cut
loose . . . "
World-wearily, Cendrars replied, " If you like. But I give it no
credence."
Determined to keep the legend alive, the interviewer tried
again. "You've also got a great appetite for risk."
" I know nothing of that," Cendrars replied. "Do you think it's
really possible for me to understand the circumstances of my life?"

.1\t twenty-five, I was also at a loss to understand the circumstances

of my life. Back in Auckland, old friends kept telling me that I had
come full circle, and my parents were "glad to have me home " . But
I was still restive, and living abroad had, if anything, only increased

1 17
my sense of having no fixed identity, no specific anchorage.
Just before Easter 1 965 I went south for a j ob interview at
the Department of Maori Affairs. As the train crossed the low­
lying flax fields near Foxton, I looked for an augury among the
black seedheads of flax and the seahorse clouds but none was
forthcoming. In Wellington, the man who sat behind his polished
desk, fingering a jade letter-knife, was clearly less impressed by
my resume than his colleague had been - who had responded
warmly to the letter I sent from Athens, where I taught English to
college students for a few months after I left the Congo.
"Maoris aren't Africans, you know," he said.
Was I to feel insulted by the insinuation that Africans were
somehow inferior to Maori, or by the suggestion that I might not
be aware of their obvious differences?
I bit my tongue, but it availed me nothing. The interview on
which I 'd pinned my hopes ended with that door-in-the-face
phrase: "We'll be in touch."
Insurance towers were going up all over the city, and before the
day was done I got myself hired as a builder's labourer on the GM
Assurance site in Waring Taylor Street. But I was back to square
one, dependent on my sister and brother-in-law for a roof over my
head, in debt to my parents for my airfare home from Greece, and
with no clear vision of my own path .
In the Duke of Edinburgh one evening, I bumped into an old
friend who, to my astonishment, was still struggling to finish his
B.A. at Victoria University. Mike knew of a party that night on
Kelburn Parade. He'd met a couple of girls . We were invited.
I didn't feel like going to a student party, having been nowhere
near a university for several years, but when the pub closed at six
I found myself shouldering a crate of beer and beginning, with
Mike, the slow climb up narrow flights of concrete steps to the
Terrace, and thence to Salamanca Road.
It was at that point, as we trudged past Victoria University's
Student Union, that Mike suddenly remembered that he was the

1 18
secretary of the Literary Society and that there was a meeting at
seven that night that he had to chair.
I was determined to go on my way, but Mike begged me not to.
The meeting wouldn't take long.
So I took a chair at the back of the room while Mike ponder­
ously called his meeting to order.
She was sitting in the front row. At first I could not see her face.
Her hair was dark. She was wearing a dark-blue polo-neck jersey
and hessian skirt. There was something about her that attracted
then compelled my attention. She turned her head slightly. She
was very beautiful. I wanted to hear her speak.
When the business of the meeting was concluded, a dishevelled
poet climbed to his feet, pulled a sheaf of papers from his duffel­
coat pocket, and proceeded to explain that since no one seemed
to have fully understood the allusions in his last published poem, it
might be helpful if he read us a commentary he'd written for it.
He had been speaking for no more than five minutes when she
raised her hand. The poet was flustered, and tried to ignore her.
But she was sitting right in front of him, and finally he asked her
irritably what she wanted.
Her accent was polished, her intellectual acuity immediately
obvious. I can no longer recall her question, but it told me that she
was brilliantly irreverent, incredibly well-read and did not suffer
fools gladly. I didn't want to let her out of my sight.
As the meeting broke up, my face was burning and my hands
were trembling. Though panicked by the thought that I would lose
her unless I acted at once, I could not bring myself to approach
her. Fortunately, however, Mike was talking to her friend while
she stood by, and so I sidled up to them and, without meeting her
eyes, asked if "they" would like to j oin Mike and me for a coffee.
Mike tried to protest, but we repaired to a gloomy and near­
empty coffee bar where we engaged in desultory conversation for
an hour. She was very reserved. Almost disdainful, I thought. But
I was smitten .

1 19
 After coffee, Mike and I walked them to Rosina Terrace where
they flatted with two other students .
I have never believed in miracles. The very idea irritates me.
It belongs to the vocabulary of those irksome individuals who
answer your phone calls by confiding in awed tones that they'd
been thinking of you at the very same moment you rang. People
who believe that every coincidence is evidence of some hidden
hand benignly steering them through life. People who pepper
their stories with words like karma and fate and synchronicity.
Despite this, I was no more immune to superstition than any other
human being, and in this case I felt that a miracle had happened.
We had met. I had her address. I knew her name. And her friend
Carol had invited me to call on them any time.
I took up her invitation the following evening, still in my work
clothes. She was wearing a white woollen dress, and a suede coat
with a fur collar. She was waiting for her boyfriend to come by.
They were off to a National Orchestra concert.
I hid my disappointment, and fell into conversation with
Carol.
Later that night, when Pauline came home from the concert,
she asked Carol how her evening with me had gone. "He did the
dishes," Carol said, "plied me with questions about you, then left."
Next time I called in, Carol invited me to stay for dinner.
We sat at a round table in the kitchen. They were all curious
about me. Why was I working as a builder's labourer? What was
it like in the Congo and in Greece? At one point I said that I
was thinking of going to Vietnam as a correspondent; I wanted to
bring home the truth of the war to those in New Zealand who
supported it. The truth was, however, that I was wanting to bring
home to Pauline that I approved the slogan she and her flatmates
had painted in large black letters on the side of their house facing
the cable car: U. S. OUT OF VIETNAM NOW!
After dinner, as though at a prearranged signal, Pauline's flat­
mates all left the house, ostensibly to see a movie, and Pauline

1 20
suggested I light the fire in the front room - her room - while
she fixed some coffee.
She said that when she first saw me, she supposed I was a seaman.
Mindful of Cendrars' meeting with Fela, I considered this a very
flattering remark and proceeded to tell her how I had hitchhiked
from the Congo through Northern Rhodesia shortly before it
became independent and how I had a vision of returning to New
Zealand and falling in love and marrying. I still kept a white stone
that I picked up from the roadside near Chirundu , and a battered
edition of Ryder Haggard's She that I bought in a Bancroft dairy
before recrossing the border. All auguries, I said. And then I asked
her about herself, where she hailed from, and what she was stud­
ying at university.
She'd spent most of her childhood in North Canterbury, she
said. Like me, she had been impatient for as long as she could
remember to leave home and make her own way in the world.
She spent her sixth form years at Christchurch Girls' High, then
enrolled in the Otago University Medical School, only to quit
after a year, exasperated by the intellectual sterility of the lectures,
the absurd amount of rote-learning, and the morbidity of the
dissection room. After returning to Christchurch, she spent the
summer working at Sunnyside mental hospital, then began an arts
degree, majoring in English.
"I was rapt in Hopkins . . . "
'"Away in the loveable west,"' I began, " ' On a pastoral forehead
ofWales"' . . . and then she picked up the line . . . " ' I was under a
roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales."'
She laughed with delight, and asked if I would like more
coffee.
I said no, but got up and crouched in front of the fire, and care­
fully placed some more pine cones on it.
"Stay there," she said. "There is something I 'd like to show you."
It was a book. She'd had her books in storage in a Christchurch
basement for a year and they had been spoiled by damp and

121
mildew. Broken-backed and water-stained, her most cherished
volume was The Renaissance.
She opened it on the floor, and we pored over it, our bodies
accidentally touching from time to time. Cimabue's Crucifixion . . .
Gozzoli 's Journey cf the Magi, Cosima's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci
. . . which she compared to Botticelli's Venus and La Primavera.
I asked her if she knew Cosima 's The Death of Procris.
" No," she said.
Then, as she made to turn the page, I reached out my hand and
covered hers with mine . . .

All night we lay in each other's arms in her narrow bed, listening
to the rain gusting over the iron roof, sharing the stories of our
tribulations, and our dreams.
Once she got up and moved naked through the darkened room,
touched by the flickering firelight, and switched on the record
player. There was a song she wanted me to hear, sung by the Soviet
Army Ensemble. A song that then mixed with the sound of the
wind and rain. "Your eyes are as dark as night, as clear as day; I
think of their beauty and cannot sleep . . . "
When she came back to bed, I kissed her, and with the palm of
my hand gently moved the strands of her black hair back from her
forehead. Her blue eyes were dark in the half-light of the fire. In
the shadows, her broad cheek bones and lips were Egyptian.
She told me of her break-up with her fiance in Christchurch at
the end of the summer. David had been crushed, but she simply
could not share his middle-class aspirations - the house in Fend­
alton, the Afghani rugs, the Jaguar.
I should have been reassured, but felt humbled and incredulous
that someone so beautiful and urbane should be attracted to a
bum like me - my hobnailed boots and torn denims thrown on
the floor, a scribbled poem on the back of an envelope . . .
It would be all too easy to give the impression that we found
instant completeness in each other. That we were assailed by no

1 22
doubts, experienced no difficulties, and lived happily ever after.
But like any form of rebirth, love is replete with pain and confu-
S!On.
So intense were our feelings for each other that we felt stifled
and panicked. I saw my travel plans going up in smoke. She feared
the loss of her hard-won independence. One night, at a party, I
became arrogant and conquistadorial. I flirted with the other girls
in the flat. And danced with an old flame, throwing our friendship
in Pauline's face.
She left the house, and took refuge with friends.
Contrite and pathetic, I phoned her next day, and asked if I
could see her.
"What am I to think?" she asked. "That I can trust you, after the
callous way you behaved?"
The following day she left for Waiau to spend some time with
her parents .

When one falls in love, one takes on the life of the beloved as if it
were one's second body, one's very soul. I could not turn my mind
or hand to anything for thinking of her. When I breathed, it was
as if my breathing were as vital to her as hers was to me. I could
not imagine living without her. At night I would fall asleep only
to wake in a cold sweat, desperate that she might decide against
seeing me again. And yet, as I despaired at this possibility, I was
seized by a contradictory impulse - to retrieve my sanity and
independence before it was too late, to put her out of my mind
forever.
Cendrars was right when he wrote in Moravagine that love is
masochistic.
We wrote each other every day, tentatively but lovingly, and
when she returned to Wellington I had no doubt as to my path,
my camino.
We walked in the Botanical Gardens, under the great stone
pines that reminded me of the Bay of Naples . The city lay below

1 23
us. It was one of those gifted, windless, late autumn days when
the harbour is like a looking-glass, the distant Orongorongos blue
upon blue.
I told her that I had decided to remain in New Zealand. I
would go back to university and resume my studies of anthro­
pology. In the meantime, to pay my debts, I had taken a position
relief-teaching at a high school in the southern Wairarapa. It was
only an hour from Wellington . . .

Together with a couple of other teachers, I boarded in a rambling

villa on the outskirts of Greytown. Every day after school, I
worked in my room, revising the poems I 'd written in the Congo,
and translating Cendrars, though without any thought of publi­
cation. Friday afternoons, I hit the road and hitchhiked down to
Wellington. I had never been happier in my life.
Pauline would be waiting for me at Rosina Terrace, her week's
work done. We would go downtown for dinner, and then to a
movie. Or, if the other girls were out, we would light the fire
and spend the night talking and making love. Like me, Pauline
was fascinated by the links between one's intellectual interests and
one's life. She once said that she thought of a text as a refracting
mirror, like the sea, in which one glimpsed fragments of the
author's world as well as one's own. Discussing her ideas about
Conrad's Youth she recounted how, at fifteen, she felt she had the
whole world at her feet - like Marlowe, feeling he could last
forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men. But that summer
she contracted glandular fever, and was rushed by ambulance to
Christchurch Hospital. Tests were done, though several days passed
before a diagnosis was reached. During that time she was in a ward
of senile and dying women. She felt condemned and frightened.
When her mother visited her, she begged to be allowed to go
home. Back in Waiau, however, she had no energy for anything.
Though a champion swimmer, she did not go near the baths. And
though she had learned to drive earlier that year, and her mother

1 24
encouraged her to drive her over to Hanmer for golf, she could
not bring herself to get in the car.
Many years later, she would write a novel, remembering this
loss of strength, this terrifYing failure of confidence, and in a letter
she wrote to me in England, when I had gone ahead of her to
begin my Ph.D. at Cambridge, she would confide:

All my life I have wanted to be strong. But I have alway s believed

that strength cannot be drawn from others or from things; it can
only be found in oneself. I' ve alway s felt absolutely alone in the
world. I' ve alway s felt that my life is in my own hands. All I' ve ever
asked of other people is the freedom to be my self. The world is a
wilderness. I want to go forth into it and be tried and not found
wanting. I don't want to step back from the brink. I want to find
the inner, not the outer, sanctity of this life. I want to find the heart
of darkness, the nothingness that is som ething, and emerge from it
humbled but not broken. I want to find the ex tent of my strength.
I want to know m y self, and be at one with what I am. To accept
adversity instead of shutting it out with the spiritual defenses I
have at my disposal. I don't want to have any buttresses - house,
marriage, family, friends, sex - unless my whole being is engaged
in them. If I succumbed to these things, I'd lose every thing I' ve
ever struggled for, and life would not be worth living.

As the school year drew to a close I told some of the other teachers
that I was about to get married - a stratagem to rent a school
house in Featherston for the summer. Though my deception
proved embarrassing (colleagues showered us with wedding gifts,
and my pupils brought me flowers) it was the beginning of an
idyll. Long summer evenings walking the country roads together
or swimming at the Tauherenikau Gorge - the soft russet of
bracken, the cobalt blue of agapanthus and Michaelmas daisies,
flax with its fireblackened beaks, the crab claw boughs of macro­
carpas, sheepmobs of cloud pouring over the gorse slopes of the
Rimutakas.

1 25
 It was one of those blessed periods when one is wholly content
to accept things exactly as they are.
And yet, for all its vividness, and despite the strong sense I have,
as I write these lines, of re-entering that time, I am aware that the
past eludes us just as inevitably as we move beyond it.
Twenty-nine years after the summer that Pauline and I spent
in the Wairarapa, and twelve years after her death, I was briefly
in Wellington, visiting old friends, Mary and Les Cleveland, and
beginning my research for The Blind Impress.
One evening, Les dug out a reel of film he'd shot during the
summer that he and Mary, and Vince O'Sullivan and his wife Tui
stayed with Pauline and me in Featherston. Les had never devel­
oped the film, but decided to do so now.
The photos he brought out of his darkroom were grainy, grey
and scratched. This only increased their power. It was like opening
up a grave and finding no evidence of decay. And the impact of
seeing these photos, these images I had unwittingly reworked in
memory, was overwhelming.
There we are, sitting outside the Lake Ferry pub in the sun,
except for Mary, who must have taken the photo. In another photo
we are in the bar, holding glasses of beer and peering at Mary
behind the camera. Other photos capture us sitting together in the
long grass somewhere near the Pinnacles, eating lunch. There is
this vivacious young woman laughing at the camera, and a callow
young man, myself, beside her, draining a bottle of DB Brown.
Though this other self is someone I scarcely remember, and
my image of Pauline is now dependent on the photos I have of
her, I think Harry St Rain was right when I saw him in London
a couple of years later and introduced him to Pauline. "Pauline
seems to have straightened you out," Harry said. And I agreed.
I had been adrift, but with her I now had a keel, a rudder and a
sheet-anchor. I was finally able to set my course and, like Odys­
seus, come home.

1 26
 Part Two

Ethno g r a phic Pica resq u e

 F reeto wn

N ot long before Pauline and I went to Sierra Leone, a story broke

in the English Sunday Times about the fate of an English yachtsman
called Donald Crowhurst. His trimaran ketch, Teignmouth Electron,
had been found adrift in mid Atlantic. The life-raft was lashed in
place, the helm swung freely, and the sails lay folded on the deck,
ready to be raised. But Crowhurst had vanished.
Three blue-bound logbooks on the chart table revealed what
had befallen him.
On 3 1 October 1 968, Crowhurst had set sail from Teignmouth,
Devon, in a bid to win the Golden Globe single-handed round­
the-world race. His trimaran had been built and equipped in a
hurry. There had been no time for intensive sea trials, and Crow­
hurst had sailed late with his course unplanned. To make matters
worse, hatches leaked, steering gear malfunctioned and the electrics
failed. The reasonable course would have been to abandon the
voyage. But loathe to admit defeat, Crowhurst began to work out
an elaborate deception in which he would calculate and radio false
positions, giving the impression that he had rounded the Horn in
record time and was making excellent progress across the Pacific.
In fact, he was sailing in circles in the South Atlantic, well away
from shipping lanes, awaiting an opportune moment to announce
that he had reached the Cape of Good Hope and was again in the
Atlantic on the final leg of a circumnavigation of the globe.
What brought Crowhurst to the realisation that he would never
be able to pull off the deception? Inconsistencies in his carefully

1 29
forged logbooks? Guilt over having deceived those who loved him
and had supported his enterprise? Doubt in his ability to remember
every detail of his concocted story and remain consistent in every­
thing he said on his return to a hero's welcome in England?
In the ineluctable silence and solitude of the sea, the yachtsman
began to lose touch with reality. Entangled in the web of lies he
had spun, he saw that his voyage was doomed. By the time he
sailed into the Sargasso Sea, he had retreated into a wholly private
world. Becalmed, and having lost all track of time, he began to
imagine that he could leave his body at will and make himself
divine. Surrounded by a debris of dirty dishes and dismantled
radios, he penned one of the last entries in his log:

It is t he end of my
game t he trut h
has been revealed.

A few minutes later, he climbed the companion ladder to the

deck, then stepped off the Teignmouth Electron into the sea.

As Pauline and I stepped from the aircraft, the hot soup-sweet

African night enveloped us.
My body felt swollen. My shirt stuck to my skin. Inside the
airport terminal, African bodies pressed around us, pungent and
cloying. It took two hours to get our passports stamped, to reclaim
our baggage, to clear customs.We moved in a state of torpor, saying
nothing, as if we were strangers to each other.
It was after midnight by the time we got away from the airport.
Lightning flashed along the Bullom shore, and the humid air was
heavy with the stench of decomposing vegetation and the sea.
In the taxi, the breeze through the open windows revived me.
But I was beginning to rue the promise I 'd made to my friend Alex
Guyan in London. Alex had insisted that when we arrived in Free­
town we stay at the City Hotel. Graham Greene had killed a lot of
time there during the war, and Alex was an avid fan of Greene's.

1 30
It amused him to think of me sitting on the same balcony where
Wilson sat at the beginning of The Heart of the Matter, "his bald
pink knees thrust against the ironwork . . . his face turned to the
sea".
I asked the taxi driver if he knew the City Hotel. Sure, he knew
it. He could take us there for only thirty leones . It sounded like a
lot of money, but I didn't know the exchange rate and, besides, it
was a bit late now to negotiate our fare.
Too tired to take anything in, we crossed the Sierra Leone River
on a listing ferry and were driven through labyrinthine streets, lit
by braziers and flickering oil lamps. By the time our taxi set us
down outside the City Hotel, our minds were in a fug and we had
lost track of time.
In the darkness, the wind thrashed at the palms in the hotel
forecourt. Thunder rolled and caromed in the peninsular hills.
We found the main entrance to the hotel barred by a metal
grille, and the shuttered windows showed no signs of life. Already
we were wishing we had taken the airport bus with the other
whites and gone to the Paramount Hotel, even though the cost of
a room there would have been prohibitive, even though we had
vowed to steer clear of tourists, to plunge straight into Africa and
keep our promise to Alex.
I shouted up at the dark and decaying concrete fa<;:ade. "Anybody
there?"
A first-storey window was wrenched open, and a woman called
down to us in Krio. At the same moment the rain came bucketing
out of the sky.
Pauline and I must have looked ridiculous, soaked to the skin,
with our shoes awash in the floodwater sluicing down the street.
The woman at the window was j oined by others. They laughed
and shouted down at us.
"We don't speak Krio," Pauline shouted back.
"Wait," the first woman said, " I dae kam."
They all traipsed down, dressed in miniskirts, shrieking with

131
laughter. They held beach umbrellas above their heads to protect
their jet-black wigs from the downpour.
They wanted a dash.
I dug in my pockets and came up with some English coins. The
women took them gleefully and ran around to the front of the
hotel, beckoning us to follow.
The lobby was feebly lit. Off to the left was a deserted saloon
bar. Ahead was a flight of wooden stairs . The prostitutes clattered
up the stairs in their high heels and fish-net stockings, gales of
laughter going into the darkness, the smell of cheap perfume
lingering in the clammy air.
When the hotel porter emerged from the shadows, bleary-eyed
from his interrupted sleep, I explained that we had come in on the
London flight and wanted a room.
" Kam we go," he ordered. Dragging a bunch of ancient keys
from his pocket, he started to climb the stairs, using the bannister
to pull himself up. Pauline and I lugged our suitcases after him.
Our room was at the end of a dingy corridor on the first floor.
It was furnished with a double bed under a torn mosquito net,
two chairs and a chest of drawers . The room stank of mildew and
excrement.
I went into the bathroom. The toilet hadn't been flushed, nor
would it flush. When I pulled the chain, there was a noisy gurgling
in the pipes and a mess of paper pulp and shit disgorged into the
stained bowl.
We were too tired to care. I bolted the door and we stripped
off our wet clothes, towelled ourselves dry, and crawled under the
mosquito net onto the bed where we lay jarred and spent from our
journey. I thought:We have done what Alex wanted us to do. I can
write him tomorrow and say we have experienced Greeneland in
all its seediness. Then we can find somewhere else to live.

We woke at first light to the jangle and blare of hi-life music.

I went to the louvre window and looked down into the street.

1 32
Several Toyota and Datsun taxis were parked at an angle to the
kerb, and the drivers were washing their cars with buckets of sudsy
water. I was reminded of the way young men in the Congo used
to wash their bodies, soaping themselves until they were all but
invisible for lather.
Beyond the intersection, over laterite stonework and rusty
roofs, I glimpsed the sea. Far out, a sunken freighter showed only
its funnel and mastheads above the surface of the ocean. It must
have gone down during the war, when Atlantic convoys used to
assemble in the harbour. I made a mental note to mention this in
my letter to Alex.
"What are you looking at?" Pauline asked.
I told her about the taxi drivers and the sunken freighter on the
sand bar. Then I asked if she felt like getting up and going down­
stairs, to try to find something to eat.
"Don't even talk about food," Pauline said. She was suffering
from morning sickness. She felt as if she were going to throw up.
"We'll move out of here," I said.
"At least let's get a room with a toilet that flushes. I'm going to
try to get some more sleep," Pauline said. " If you go out, try not to
make too much noise when you come back."
I lifted the mosquito net and kissed her on the mouth. " I 'll see
you in a while," I said.
I went out of the room thinking we should not have come to
Africa. I felt sick in the stomach at the thought of Pauline preg­
nant and having our baby in such a place. I should have called
it off, this year in Sierra Leone doing field work for my Ph.D. I
should have come alone or not at all.
In the downstairs dining room, some retired Krio clerks were
eating breakfast. No one looked up as I walked in.
When the waiter asked if I wanted an English breakfast, I made
the mistake of saying yes, and was served braised spam, glutinous
eggs, and chips fried in rancid dripping. The cook had been with
the hotel since colonial times. Like the ex-clerks in their English

1 33
serge and bowlers, his menu parodied the world that Sierra
Leoneans had once been encouraged to emulate.
I had no appetite for the food in front of me and was beginning
to think that my dream of returning to Africa, which had sustained
me for five years, had been as ethereal and anachronistic as the idea
of Empire. When I tried to imagine myself in a remote village,
speaking an African language, asking people to tell me about their
lives, a terrible sense of despair came over me, such as Malcolm
Lowry described in his story "Through the Panama" : the "inenar­
rable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where
you are."
In the days that followed, I filled my notebooks with such
misgivings, panicking whenever I thought of the j ourney I had
embarked upon. And each night I was tormented by the same
dream, in which I wandered disoriented in an immense building,
looking for a room where I was supposed to enrol.
Pauline grew impatient with me, and recollected the series of
events that had brought us to Freetown together - the month
we had spent in Copenhagen where she did an intensive course
in Danish, the modern language most akin to Old Icelandic, the
weeks in Paris waiting for a sailing from Le Havre to West Africa,
and finally the flight back to London when she fell ill , and where,
in the course of an operation to remove an ovarian cyst, she was
found to be six weeks pregnant. "I want to be here," she assured
me. "I want to have our baby here, in this climate, with you! "

Vultures wheeled high above the city. I n the street markets,

pedlars cried, "Biscuit dae ! " " Five five cents." We tried out our
Krio, " Omus for da wan dae ?" " Omus for dis," buying pineapples,
bunches of bananas and scoops of groundnuts wrapped in funnels
of brown paper. We went to Immigration to get our visas. In the
piss-soaked alley outside the Immigration Department, a sign had
been posted: URINATING PROHIBITED IN THIS AREA. We
found a pharmacy with the improbable name of Vulga Thera.

1 34
 Beggars crowded around us. Some leaned on staves, their legs
like burnt matchsticks. Paraplegics sat in little carts and shoved
themselves along on their knuckles .
Pauline pressed coins into the fingerless hands of a burnt-out
leper. In the street, a Toyota Coaster moved slowly through the
traffic, a logo above the cab saying SWEET ARE THE USES OF
ADVERSITY
Now reconciled to remaining in our hotel, we sat on the hotel
balcony in the cool of the evening, drinking tonic water and
writing postcards home. The sad-eyed Swiss proprietor, who had
run the hotel in Graham Greene's time, limped to and fro behind
the bar.
Our waiter was a thickset man with a coarse-featured, morose
face. He derived unending pleasure from prising caps off bottles of
Star beer with a grand and sweeping gesture, then watching as kids
scrambled around his feet, fighting for possession of the bottletops.
If there was a blue star printed under the cork inlay, you won a
lottery prize.
" Fortunes are precarious here," I wrote to Alex. "We met a deaf­
mute boy on the street today who thrust a scrap of paper under
our noses and urged us to read what was written on it: 'Good
morning I am no hable to spick and I can not find chob Please
will you help me Tankyou God pless . . . '"

I was going to add something about the inescapability of

poverty when I became aware that a boy was standing close to me,
watching me write.
"Kushe," I said, and hoped he would go away.
He said his name was James. He had been attending school but
could not continue because his family did not have the money to
pay his fees. He begged us to help him out.
" Wusai you dae?" I said.
James said he lived in the East End. His expression wavered
between shiftiness and shame.
"Can you come and see us in the morning?" Pauline said. " If

1 35
you bring your school books, I can get some idea what you've
been doing."
James said he would come early. Then he announced that he
was going, and disappeared into the street.
"Do you think he's on the level?" I asked.
" I 've no idea. Does it really matter?" Pauline said.

A couple of days later, I was lying on the bed in our hotel room
reading Melville's Typee. Pauline was sitting at a desk near the
window, turning the pages of a cheap cahier, correcting James's
exercises. James stood stock-stili beside her, chewing his fingernails.
"Do you prefer reading books or listening to stories?" Pauline
asked. "I like to read books," James replied.
"Why?"
"Because they're true."
"Do your mother and father tell you stories?"
"Yes."
"Do they tell you stories about Conny Rabbit? "
" I know those stories."
"Aren't those stories j ust as interesting as the ones you read in
books? "
"No, people always tell them in different ways and change them,
and you never know which one is true."
"Aren't they more exciting and interesting like that - when
they're different every time?''
James shook his head.
"Why not?"
"Because you never know which one is true."
"Are all books true?"
"Yes."

My ears were ringing. I was bathed in perspiration. I pushed

through the crowded streets, determined to finalise the business of
getting our Land Rover released from customs. But no sooner was

1 36
one obstacle overcome than another arose. Day after day, I trudged
from one Port Authority office to another, collecting customs
clearance certificates, import-duty exemption authorisations, set
surcharge forms, insurance schedules, shipping notes, delivery and
condition reports, certificates of importation and release. Then
there were letters of affiliation to the university, residence permits,
vehicle registration and insurance, a driver's licence . . . more visits
to dismal offices where clerks sat slumped over their desks and
some taciturn minion would want his palm greased with a dash.
I began to think seriously of abandoning my plans to do field
work. I imagined myself holed up in the City Hotel, drawing on
my scholarship money to write an ethnography of an entirely
fictitious society. The task did not seem too daunting. The Fourah
Bay College library was well stocked with monographs from
which I could glean the formulaic patterns of structural-function­
alist ethnography. To invent a society, one had only to decide the
nature of the economy, the mode of descent and inheritance, and
the principles of legal and political life, and everything else could
be deduced. Since conventional ethnographies were generally so
devoid of in-depth descriptions of actual individuals, I need not
concern myself unduly with details of real lives. Stereotypes would
suffice. And sweeping generalisations would gloss over the subtle­
ties oflived experience and give my account an aura of obj ectivity.
Even the language of my make-believe world could be constructed
as a dialect of some actual West African language. Hadn't Jorge
Luis Borges done something akin to this in his account of the
world of Tlon?
The more I pondered my idea, the more it engrossed me. But
when I confided my scheme to Pauline, she said I should not let
myself be disheartened by the weeks we had been stuck in Free­
town. It was hard not knowing where we were going or what
we were going to do, but shouldn't we give ourselves time to get
acclimatised and find our feet?

1 37
What brought me back to reality was a map. The map was stapled
to the wall of the corridor in the Institute of African Studies at
Fourah Bay College. It showed Sierra Leone divided into tribal
areas . The research I had proposed at Cambridge for my Ph .D.
would have meant living among the Mende in the south-east,
studying the impact of literacy on village life. I had never been
entirely happy with this plan - a continuation of research I had
done for my M.A. on the impact of literacy in early nineteenth­
century Maori New Zealand - but had not been able to come
up with anything else . . .
The map showed a region in the north, defined by a dotted line.
Across this blank space was written KURANKO.
I do not know why I responded as I did to this map. All I knew
was that this remote region was where I wanted to go. I told the
director of the Institute of my plans. He said that very little was
known about the Kuranko. This was all I needed to make me
absolutely sure of my path . A few days later, Pauline and I loaded
our supplies into the Land Rover and headed north .
A warm wind flowed through the cab of the vehicle. Grasslands
stretched away under an immensity of sky. The road behind us was
lost in billows of red dust.
We were going to a town called Kabala. We were enamoured of
the name. It invoked the Hebrew qabbalah and its esoteric tradi­
tions of cosmic union. But we couldn't be sure where we would
end up at the end of the day. Few roads were signposted, and
north of Makeni the road degenerated into a tortuous and eroded
track.
We passed through towns where people were celebrating the
end of Ramadan. Women danced in tight circles, resplendent in
voluminous gowns and high silken headkerchiefs. Men lounged in
hammocks slung under the eaves of verandahs.
We crossed turbid streams where butterflies danced in shafts of
sunlight. In the lop hira plains, the air was filled with the odour of
burned elephant grass.

1 38
 I reached for Pauline's hand, and we glanced at each other and
smiled. " It's hard to believe I seriously thought of staying on in
Freetown and writing a fake ethnography," I said.
"The trouble with lying," Pauline said, "is that you always have
to make a mental note of everything you say, so you won't be
caught out in the future. If you tell the truth, you don't have to
remember anything.You are free to live."
"Do you have any regrets?" I said. "About Sierra Leone, I
mean."
" I couldn't be happier."
It was then that I remembered the story of Donald Crowhurst
and became aware that for as long as we had been in Freetown,
this story had been at the back of my mind, casting its shadow over
everything I thought and did.

1 39
 B a rawa and the Ways B i rd s
F ly in the S ky

T he day after arriving in Kabala, I introduced myself to the Koin­

adugu District Officer and explained my proj ect to him. The D. 0.
listened patiently before saying that there was a young Kuranko
man teaching at the District Council School who might help me.
His name was Noah Marah.
A couple of hours later I was deep in conversation with the
man without whom none of my research in Sierra Leone would
have been possible. After repeating what I had told the D. O. -
how I was studying for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Cambridge,
and wanted to write a book about the Kuranko - I asked if
Noah would be willing to help me make a start with learning the
language. His enthusiasm was immediate and overwhelming. He
had often thought of writing something about his own society,
and would be only too happy to assist me. So before the day was
out, Noah and I found ourselves sitting on the porch of his house,
going over the Kuranko phrases of greeting and the elements of
Kuranko kinship. I could not believe my good fortune.
So engrossed did Noah become in my research that it wasn't
long before he agreed to take a year's leave from his teaching j ob
and work for me full-time as a paid field assistant. He also helped
us find a place to live - a newly-built, three roomed, mud-brick,
pan-roofed bungalow on the edge of town. We also met Noah's
wives,Yebu Bah and Yebu Bangura, and Noah's mother, Aisetta, a
redoubtable woman who had borne eight children, all of whom

1 40
were still alive. Aisetta immediately took Pauline under her wing,
and in Yebu Bah Pauline found a staunch friend. Soon we had
worked out a modus operandi for my fieldwork. While Noah and
I made forays to outlying villages, Pauline would remain in Kabala
to be near the clinic in case of a medical emergency and where she
could use her time to finish translating the Icelandic family sagas
she had brought with her to Sierra Leone - the basis of her own
Ph.D. research at Cambridge. Noah's mother and Noah's wives
would keep her company and see to her needs.
That Christmas I made my first trip to Firawa, though Christmas
was the last thing on my mind. Firawa was Noah's natal village,
and his family - the Marah - had ruled there for more than
three hundred and fifty years. "A person's clan might be older than
the Marah," went the Kuranko adage, "but it is under a cotton
tree planted by the Marah that he was raised." According to the
genealogists, a warrior called Yamisa had first settled the country,
descending from the forested foothills of the Lorna range where
his elder brother Borsingbi had already made his home. Legend
has it that Yamisa declared, "M'bara wa," (I am going to my own
place) and thenceforth this tract of country became known as
Barawa.
The first stage of our journey was by Land Rover - twenty­
five miles along a pot-holed, laterite track to Koinadugu , and on
to the Seli river. From there we began the ten-mile walk to Firawa,
skirting swamps and crossing plateaux where the fired elephant
grass had covered the path with filigrees of ash . Before us stood
th e great inselberg Senekonke - " gold mountain" - where the
Marah rulers once offered sacrifices for the protection of the land.
Sometimes, Noah said, the death of a ruler would be presaged by
the creaking of granite doors in the inselberg, and the music of
xylophones carried on the wind.
Though we entered Firawa in the heat of the day when most
people were resting, praise-singers were soon hurrying out to
meet us with xylophones and flattery.

141
 "Nomor (almighty), nomor," they cried. And then, as Noah
distributed coins, they cried with even greater enthusiasm, " Nom or,
Marah, nomor! "
As we crossed the compound named for Noah's branch of the
ruling lineage, two of his elder brother's wives approached, and,
bowing low, clasped his hands. "In sene, in sene, you are welcome,
you are welcome," they cried, and they clapped their hands as we
pressed on into the heart of the village.
In the chief's compound, a collapsible tin chair was brought
out for me, and I was bidden to sit down. Then, summoned by
the chief's drum, elders began to appear, and Noah moved among
them, shaking hands.
I felt conspicuous and awkward under the quizzical and some­
times suspicious scrutiny of the old men , and when chief Tala
Sewa emerged from his house, his anxious face only increased
my unease. Noah, however, had prepared his introduction care­
fully. As he explained that I was a pen pal who had come to visit
him and see the place where he had spent his childhood, nods
of approval were directed my way, and even Tala Sewa seemed to
relax a little.
Finally, through the praise-singer who relayed the chief's words
to his audience, Tala Sewa let it be known that I was welcome, and
that I would come to no harm while I remained among them.
This said, he indicated that gifts should be brought out for me.
First was a winnowing tray piled high with unhusked rice. Then
a young man pushed through the crowd and squatted in front of
me with two russet hens compressed between his knees. Noah
explained that such gifts were always offered to strangers - at
once a tangible expression of goodwill, since food sustained life,
and a subtle way of disarming a potential enemy.
I thanked the assembly, using the Kuranko phrases Noah had
taught me. Several of the elders smiled, either in appreciation of
my attempt to speak their language, or in amusement at my inepti­
tude. I was then led to the house next to Tala Sewa's.

1 42
 Anomalous among the circular, thatch-roofed, wattle-and-daub
houses that enclosed the compound, the house in which I was to
lodge was built of concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated
iron. It had been built by a police sergeant from Firawa who had
made a small fortune in the diamond districts of Kono, where he
still lived. Inside I was surprised to find a spacious parlour, with
prayer mats on the floor, a low table, and several framed photos of
members of the sergeant's family on the walls. My bedroom was
furnished with an iron-framed bed, wooden chairs, a table, and a
kerosene lamp.
As it turned out, this generous show of hospitality was not
entirely gratuitous, for among the freight I had reluctantly trucked
from Kabala to the Seli river-crossing during the previous weeks
was the cement the sergeant needed to complete the steps of his
house. "We have a saying," Noah explained, '" Nyendan bin to kile,
a wa ta an segi ' " - when you walk along a path through the
nyendan grass (used for thatching) it bends before you; but when
you return along the path, the grass bends back the other way. In
the same way, greetings, goodwill, assistance and gifts move to and
fro within a community, keeping the paths open, keeping relation­
ships alive.
After showing me my room, Noah returned to his elder brother
Abdul's house.
I was glad to be alone for a while, and began unpacking my
rucksack. But my privacy was short-lived.
"Honk, honk ! " It was Noah's nephew, Sewa, and though Sewa
had never seen a motor vehicle he knew exactly how to imitate
a horn .
In the parlour, two ofAbdul's j unior wives had left enamel dishes
of parboiled rice, with a palm oil sauce of chicken and cassava leaf.
Sewa made gestures and grinned, encouraging me to eat.
I took the food out onto the front porch, only to be ambushed
by a crowd of children. The older ones, having quickly overcome
their trepidation, propelled their terror-stricken younger siblings

1 43
toward the tubabu (whiteman) .
But I was glad of their company. I could try out my Kuranko
with them without embarrassment.
That night I fell asleep not long after nightfall, hearing the shuf­
fling of bare feet on a cement floor, and the ping and ticking of the
roofing iron as it cooled.

During the next few days, I found myself so captivated by the

things I heard and saw around me that it was all too easy to believe
I intuitively understood them.
But understanding is never born of enchantment, any more
than initiation is consummated in newness alone. Understanding
comes of separation and pain. To understand is to suffer the eclipse
of everything you know, all that you have, and all that you are. It is,
as the Kuranko say, like the gown you put on when you are initi­
ated. To don this gown you must first be divested of your old garb,
stripped clean, and reduced to nothingness.
I would begin my days at Abdul's house. The porch was of mud
and dung, its floor as burnished as a riverstone. Sitting with my
back against the wall, I could observe the comings and goings in
the compound and ply Noah and Abdul with questions. Abdul
was ensconced at a treadle sewing-machine at the other end of the
porch, putting the finishing touches to the white country-doth
gown his niece would wear for her initiation. He was a taciturn
man at the best of times, and I suspected that the row of pins he
held tightly between his lips was a pretext for ignoring my ques­
tions . So it was Noah who bore the brunt of my incessant curi­
osity, as groups of strangely attired women performed before the
house before receiving a dash and moving on, or groups of pubes­
cent girls, their hair braided, beaded and decorated with snail shell
toggles, their waists encircled with strings of beads, danced out
the last days of their childhood. But behind the drumming that
lasted long into the night, and the air of festivity, there were deep
shadows. I was told of the neophytes' vulnerability to witches, and

1 44
of the dangers attending cliterodectomy. I heard of fearful encoun­
ters with bush spirits and arduous hazings. And I wondered how
these young girls would feel, returning after weeks of sequestra­
tion in the bush, not to the security of their parental homes but to
the uncertainties of life as newly-weds in the houses of strangers.
If I empathised with the neophytes, it was, I suppose, because
I was also like a child, and because the shock of too many new
experiences - a language I could not grasp, food I often found
unpalatable, customs I could not understand, afflictions I could
not cure - was beginning to erode my own self-confidence and
make me vaguely paranoid. As the days passed, I began to miss
Pauline, and worry about her.
One evening I went out to the latrine that stood in the grass­
land behind the sergeant's house. For a while, the silence around
me was broken only by the repetitive piping of a sulukuku bird.
Then suddenly I was startled by the presence of several Senegalese
fire finches flitting above me. Aware that for Kuranko these small,
crimson birds embodied the souls of children who have died in
infancy, I became convinced that something was amiss in Kabala
- that Pauline had had a miscarriage, that her life was in peril.
That night I slept badly, and in the morning confided my anxi­
eties to Noah. He too was missing his children, and wondering
about his wives back in Kabala. Perhaps it was time for us to
return.
But I was determined to stay, at least until the initiates entered
thefafei - the bush house where they would live for several weeks
after their operations, receiving instructions from older women.
Already I was aware that initiation was at once the symbolic begin­
ning of adult life and the celebration of communal solidarity after
the long months of the rains when families lived on farm hamlets,
scattered and isolated in the bush .

It was around this time that I consulted my first Kuranko diviner.

His name was Doron Mamburu Sise. Noah had sought his advice,

1 45
and allowed me to sit in on the consultation, and so, a couple of
days later, without thinking too much about it, I asked if I might
follow suit.
" The tubabu wants to know if you can look at the stones for
him?" Noah asked.
Doron Mamburu gestured that we should go inside his house.
Stooping, I followed Noah through the low doorway into a
house that smelled of stale woodsmoke.
Doron Mamburu dragged shut a rickety cane door whose
daubing of mud had all but flaked off. He then sat and waited, his
eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, before spreading out a
mat on the earthen floor and ordering me to sit down opposite
him.
"Why have you come?" he asked.
Noah spoke for me. "He wants to find out about his wife," he
said. "She is expecting a child. He is worried about her. He wants
to know if all is well, if all will be well."
The diviner emptied some stones from a small monkey-skin
bag and with the palm of his hand spread them across the mat.
Most were river pebbles: semi-lucent, the colour of rust,jasper, and
yellow ochre. Among them were some cowrie shells, old coins,
and pieces of metal. When I handed Doron Mamburu his fifty
cents consultation fee, he mingled this with the other obj ects.
"What is your wife's name?"
"Pauline," I answered, pleased to have understood the question.
Doron Mamburu found difficulty with the name but did not
ask for it to be repeated. In a soft voice he addressed the stones,
informing them of the reason I had come. Then he gathered up
a handful and began to chant. At the same time, with half-closed
eyes, he rhythmically knocked the back of his cupped hand against
the mat.
With great deliberation he then laid out the stones, some in
pairs, some singly, others in threes and fours.
"All is well," Doron Mamburu said quietly, his attention fixed

1 46
on the stones. "Your wife is well. She will have a baby girl."
Without a pause he proceeded to lay out a second pattern.
"There is nothing untoward. The paths are clear. The birth will
be easy."
In order to see what sacrifice I should make, Doron Mamburu
laid out the stones a third time.
"Your wife must sacrifice some clothes and give them to a
woman she respects. You must sacrifice two yards of white satin
and give it to a man you respect. When your child is born, you
must sacrifice a sheep."
The diviner looked warily at me, as if wondering whether I
would do as the stones suggested.
"To whom must I address the sacrifice?" I asked in English.
Noah translated.
"To your ancestors," Doron Mamburu said flatly. Then, seeing
that I was still nonplussed, he added: "You must give those things
away, do you see?"
Doron Mamburu began to gather up his stones. He had been
working on his farm since first light, and was famished. The dull
clang of a cooking pot in the yard had already distracted him, and
I caught a whiff of chicken and red pepper sauce.
Reassured by the diviner's insights, I nonetheless remained
sceptical.
"How can the stones tell you what you told me?" I asked, again
relying on Noah to translate.
"They speak, just as we are speaking now. But only I can hear
what they are saying. It is a gift that I was born with ."
"Could I acquire that gift?"
"A person cannot tell if a bird has an egg in its nest simply by
watching it in flight."
I told Noah that I did not understand.
Do ron Mamburu fetched the loose sleeve of his gown up onto
his shoulder and frowned. "You cannot go looking for it. Not at
all. It comes to you."

1 47
 There was a silence.
"Eat with me," Doran Mamburu said, climbing to his feet. He
stowed his bag of stones between a rafter and the thatch, then
wrenched the door open. The sunlight blinded me.
When we were seated in the yard, Doran Mamburu 's wife
brought us rice and sauce in a chipped calabash. But I had more
questions.
"How did you get the stones?" I asked. "And the words you say
to them - surely someone taught them to you?"
Doran Mamburu finished his mouthful of rice. Then, as if
amused by my curiosity, he said cryptically: "If you find fruit on
the ground, look to the tree."
I must have looked very perplexed. Do ron Mamburu continued.
"In my case, I began divining a long time ago, in the days of Chief
Pore Bolo. I was favoured by a djinn. I saw a djinn, and the djinn
told me it was going to give me some stones so that I would be
able to help people."
"Where did you see the djinn?"
"In a dream. They came in a dream. There were two of them.
A man and a woman. They had changed themselves into human
beings and were divining with river stones. They called to me an d
told me their names. They said, 'We are going to favour you with
a different destiny.' They showed me a certain leaf and told me I
should make it into a powder and mix it with water in a calabash .
Then I was to get some stones from the river and wash them in
that liquid. When I woke up next morning I went at once to the
Bagbe river and found that leaf and those stones . I did everything
the djinn told me to do."
"Would I be able to find that leaf?"
"Eh! I cannot tell you about that."
"The djinn then, did you see them again?"
"Yes, I see them often. Every Thursday and Friday night they
appear to me in a dream. Sometimes they say to me, 'Are you still
here?"'

1 48
 "Do the djinn speak to you through the stones?"
"Yes," said the diviner emphatically, as if pleased that I had finally
understood something of what he was telling me.
"When you address the stones, you are not speaking to the
djinn?"
"No! I am speaking to the stones." Again a frown creased Doron
Mamburu's forehead. Hitching up his sleeve he scooped a ball of
rice from the calabash and slipped it deftly into his mouth.
I had finished eating, but not my interrogation. "Do you ever
give anything to the djinn?"
Doron Mamburu swallowed the rice and washed it down with
some water. " From time to time I offer them a sacrifice - of
white kola nuts ."
I could see Doron Mamburu was tired, and that Noah was
exasperated by my questions and the difficulty of translating them.
I got up to go. "I have eaten well," I said.
"You are going?"
"Yes, I'm going to my house."

In those first weeks of fieldwork in Firawa, the seeds of almost all

the ideas that would shape my thinking over the next thirty years
were planted. I was now convinced that the j ustification of anthro­
pology lay not in its potential to explain social phenomena on
the basis of antecedent causes or underlying laws - evolutionary,
structural, or psychological - but in its capacity to explore, in
a variety of contexts, the ways in which people struggle, with
whatever inner or worldly resources they possess, to manage the
immediate imperatives of existence. Though worldviews differ radi­
cally from society to society and epoch to epoch, our everyday
priorities, as well as our notions of what makes us quintessentially
human, are remarkably similar wherever one goes. To participate
in the lives of others, in another society, is to discover the crossing­
points where one's own experience connects with theirs - the
points at which sameness subsumes difference. It may be that this

1 49
savoir-faire, more than abstract ideas, promises the best basis for
practical coexistence in a plural world.
A year hence, in Cambridge, I would scour the university
library in search of exemplars of this view. Though Levi-Strauss
had been my first inspiration, I was averse to the idea of life as
logos and to the notion that meaning lies deep in the structures
of the unconscious mind. I wanted to locate meaning within the
mundane world of lived experience. To glimpse the universal in
particular events. And I wanted a form of writing that showed as
well as said - something I would later find in Walter Benjamin's
use of apen;:us, images, epiphanies, and koan, in Theodor Ador­
no's paratactic style and notion of "exact fantasy", and in Ludwig
Wittgenstein's idea of "perspicacious presentation" .
As for the existential and pragmatist elements in my thinking,
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and James and Dewey, would become
my mainstays . But for the moment, all I possessed was a vague
dissatisfaction with the idea that a people's practical life was a
product of their ethical or religious beliifs. B eliefs shadow practice,
rather than produce it. Beliefs give us a way of making sense of our
lives, but they are not scripts one faithfully follows. Accordingly, it is
a mistake to try to understand people solely from the standpoint of
the beliefs they espouse; we must explore and enter into the situa­
tions that they actually live. In abandoning the heights from which
European science observes the world it deigns to understand, and
placing myself in the stream of everyday Kuranko life, I found that
many apparent differences between European and African worlds
began to disappear. I saw Kuranko society neither as exotic nor as
radically other; rather, it comprised a particular set of strategies for
managing the kinds of quandaries that human beings encounter
everywhere: how to keep body and soul together in the face of
adversity; how to create communitas despite divisions, differences
and dissent; how to reconcile the need for attachment with the
inevitability of loss; how to balance self-interest and the common
weal; how to be both open and guarded, and how to preserve one's

1 50
humanity when little that one says or does seems to make much
difference to the way things are . . . In my na'ive and stilted inter­
rogation of Doron Mamburu I see myself beginning to grasp that
meaning inheres less in what one has to say about the world, than
in what one does in order to endure. And in my fascination with
the initiations that I would follow throughout that dry season, I
see the beginning of my concern with what it means to act upon
the world, reimagining, reworking, and recreating it, rather than
suffering it in passivity and silence.
Although, for Kuranko, the social order is ancestrally-given
and non-negotiable, it is not self-perpetuating, and requires for its
continuance the vigorous, mindful, concerted action of everyone
living in the here and now. This creation and recreation of the
world - symbolically re-enacted in the initiatory rebirth of a
child as an adult - is never left to chance. In every generation
anew, everyone must make the ancestral order his or her own. This
does not imply a blind or slavish recapitulation of the past, for
one must actively live what one inherits according to one's own
particular abilities and understandings.
There is a Kuranko adage - dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a
dununia - which, translated literally, means "the name of the world
is not world; its name is load." The adage exploits oxymoron and
pun (dunia, "world" , and dununia, "load", are near homophones) to
suggest that the world is a head-load, the weight of which depends
on the way one chooses to carry it. It bears a family resemblance
to Dostoyevsky's notion that "the meaning of a man's life consists
in proving to himself every minute that he's a man and not a piano
key," and to Sartre's view that "we are not lumps of clay, and what
is important is not what others make of us but what we ourselves
make of what they have made us."
These ideas were confirmed almost every day, as I sat on the
porch at Abdul's house and, with Noah's help, eavesdropped on
the interminable talk that went on there. Late one afternoon, a
group of men my age were debating the origin of an obscure

151
word for orange. I found it odd that such a trivial matter should
inspire such vehement talk - though any university committee
meeting might provide a telling parallel. It helped me understand
that in the seemingly perverse ways in which men and women
made palaver, or elders wrangled over some minor point of law,
what was important was not settling the issue per se, but using
the occasion to voice one's view, to make one's mark, and - to
borrow Marx's vivid image - force the frozen circumstances to
dance by singing to them their own tune.
But what of modernity - this field of forces which, while
far from ancestral, was j ust as omnipresent and equally powerful?
How did people come to terms with it?
A few months before I left England, NASA succeeded in putting
two men on the moon. I sat up all night at my Cambridge college
watching the television coverage, and by the time the two silvery­
grey, bulky figures of Armstrong and Aldrin finally ascended the
ladder to the LEM and "achieved re-ingress" , dawn was breaking.
Walking back to my flat, wearied by the cliches of the night, I
warmed to the sight of the sun coming out of the mist and the
noise of birds.
When Pauline and I arrived in Sierra Leone, the country was in
the grip of a conj unctivitis epidemic. Locals called the eye disease
Apollo, though when a second wave of the epidemic swept the
country a distinction was made between Apollo 1 1 and Apollo 1 2 .
"What was the connection?" I asked people. The American moon
landings had disturbed the dust on the surface of the moon, I was
told. Just as the sand-laden harmattan blows south from the Sahara
in the dry season, filling the air and irritating one's eyes, so this
cosmic dust had brought its own discomforts and disease.
Given my curiosity, people were eager to have me clarifY some
of the anomalies in the accounts they had heard of the Apollo
missions. Some suspected that these accounts were untrue; no one
could travel to the moon. Others (ignorant as to how far away
the moon was, and believing it to be j ust overhead - no bigger

1 52
than it appeared in the night sky) asked me to explain how a
rocket large enough to hold three men could come to a standstill
alongside the moon and allow the men to get out and walk about
on its surface. Still others demanded to know why the Americans
wanted to go to the moon in the first place; what sinister designs
and global repercussions did this presage? I had already noted this
same suspicion of America in local peoples' refusal to allow Peace
Corps volunteers to photograph them. Anxieties clustered around
the rumour that photos showing village women with bare breasts
would be used by whites in the US as racist propaganda, a way of
arguing for the oppression of African-Americans on the grounds
that their origins and essence were incorrigibly primitive. In many
ways these anxieties anticipated the fears of a later generation: that
just as Americans had once sought to steal people's vital essence by
capturing their likenesses in photographs, so foreigners were now
out to steal and traffic in human body parts and vital organs.
But getting back to Apollo, the questions people in Firawa and
Kabala put to me should not be read too literally. People were
less interested in grasping intellectually the truth of the Apollo
programme than in how to resolve an old existential dilemma that
it had brought to mind. This was the dilemma of how to control
traffic across the borders of their own local world, such that it
would be perennially revitalised by imports from the outside world
- and these included magical medicines, women, and commodi­
ties like salt, cloth, kerosene, and seeds - without its integrity
being endangered or undermined by foreign influences they were
powerless to control. It was not that Kuranko had hitherto lived in
isolation; rather that the post-Independence period had brought
increasing hardship in negotiating relations with the outside world
that were to their advantage. While villagers were building roads
to get access to markets, young men going south in increasing
numbers to work in the diamond districts, and Muslim converts
making the pilgrimage to Mecca, Kuranko were coming to see
that the outside world was much larger, much more complex, and

1 53
probably much less manageable than it had been for their fore­
fathers. The Apollo stories encapsulated this pervasive suspicion
that the might of a foreign power of which they knew very little
could cause things to happen in their own backyard without their
consent, without their comprehension, and without their control.
In his work on myth, Claude Levi-Strauss invokes the principle
of dialectical negation: any term has meaning only in relation to
its opposite. This logic carries over into existence itself, for one
comes into one's own only through experiencing and confronting
that which one is not. In West Africa this process of becoming
involves an opening up of the "town" to the "bush", the first term
being associated with sociality, order, necessity, duty and stasis, the
second with individuality, creative disorder, freedom, desire and
vitality. Among the Kuranko, this interplay between town and
bush defines a scenario for the initiatory passage from childhood
to adulthood, provides a backdrop for almost every story told, and
informs every act of the imagination - from dreaming, through
masquerade, to children's play.
In Firawa, I often watched children in the dusty lanes, or on
the outskirts of the village, drawing on the ground with sticks. In
broken Kuranko I asked them what they were outlining. "Djinn,"
they said.
They were playing with images of the spirits that some had
glimpsed or heard in the bush - spirits that both tantalised and
terrified . . .
Night after night, at Abdul's house, I would listen to stories
about the djinn, and the shadowlands they inhabited between
human and extrahuman worlds. And again and again I was struck
by the same theme - that only by braving the wilderness, by
venturing into the world of the not-self, can one capture the vital
spirit that will make one fully human.

1 54
 Mamina Yeg be's Delusion

D uring my first few months i n the field, I undoubtedly cut a

ridiculous figure. Linguistically inept, socially disoriented, anoma­
lous in appearance, and preoccupied by questions the point of
which no one could grasp, it was inevitable that I would end up
in the company of misfits. But even misfits have stories to tell -
stories that shed light on both the forces that shape a human life
and the ways those forces are suffered, resisted, and reimagined.
He was at least seventy - small, spry, and always, it seemed to
me, slightly bemused. Though Noah pointed out that Mamina
Yegbe had lost his marbles, and tried to dissuade me from setting
too much store by what he told me, I felt at ease in the old man's
company and often sought him out at the town chief's house near
the Kabala market, buying him packets of tobacco in gratitude for
his tolerance of my stilted Kuranko.
"The world began in Mande," Mamina Yegbe said, alluding to
the great thirteenth-century empire that had dominated the West
Sudan. "But yesterday and today are not the same. Whatever sun
shines, that is the sun in which you have to dry yourself. We are
now in the period of the whiteman's rule."
He remembered when this period began before the Cameroon
War (World War One) , and recalled the names of Palmer and
Captain Leigh, who built the barracks at Gbankuma before the
British moved to Falaba. He also described the first barracks at
Kabala, built on the site of today's town market, and told me when
the frontier was fixed, and when the Court Messenger Force and

1 55
the Chiefdom Police were inaugurated. And he recounted how
taxes were paid to District Commissioner Warren - or Warensi,
as he was known . Initially the annual hut tax was two shillings and
sixpence, but later rose to five then to nine shillings, and finally to
one pound five shillings, and one pound ten shillings per head.
"In those days, people were happy," Mamina Yegbe said. "We
were happy with our government. All the chiefs had their favourite
music, and whenever the chiefs assembled, the j elibas would play.
Chiefs Belikoro, Konkofa, Sinkerifa - I knew them all."
At the District Officer's office one morning, I was working
through a stack of intelligence diaries and daybooks from the
colonial period, hoping to corroborate Mamina Yegbe's recol­
lections oflocal history. Around me the clerks were busy with their
own bureaucratic chores, filing memoranda, moving dog-eared
files from the " out" tray of one desk to the "in" tray of another,
sharpening pencils, or fetching ice-cold Coca-Colas for the
D. O.
Before being allowed to inspect the records, I had been obliged
to submit five copies of an application, all typed, signed, sealed in
official envelopes, stamped, and countersigned. It was not long,
however, before I was ruing the effort, and my eyes wandered - to
the whitewashed wall where two wasps were adding yet another
accretion of moist red clay to their nest, and beyond the barred
windows of the office where the leaves of an enormous mango
tree hung limply in the heat. I closed the daybook and made to
go, already anticipating a few relaxed hours at home talking with
Pauline over a simple lunch of bread and jam.
At that instant, two clerks deserted their desks and asked for a
lift to the market.
As I switched on the ignition I caught sight of Mamina Yegbe
sitting on a rock under the mango tree, smoking his Bavarian pipe
with the hinged metal lid.
"Do you want a lift?" I called, and gestured in the direction of
the market.

1 56
 Mamina Yegbe clambered up into the front seat of the Land
Rover, beside the clerks. As usual he was wearing an embroidered
tunic and a blue silk cap with a tassel, and looked like a Mandarin.
He sat bolt upright with an almost smug expression on his face,
holding against his chest a large manilla envelope marked in
capital letters O N SIERRA LEONE GOVERNMENT SERVICE.

The envelope was embellished with ornate signatures and sealed

in several places with red wax. It resembled a Saul Steinberg
drawing.
The clerks were clearly amused by the envelope.
"What's the j oke?" I asked.
The first clerk winked at me, then nodded toward Mamina
Yegbe who was gazing straight ahead. The other clerk dodged the
question by suddenly recognizing two friends sauntering along
the road.
"Mosquito ! " he yelled. "Heh! Peacecorps! " And he hung his
arm out the window of the Land Rover.
A thin, gangly youth who answered to the first description, and
his companion, wearing faded j eans with frayed cuffs, lifted their
arms to wave, but the dust in the wake of the vehicle enveloped
them.
After dropping the clerks at the market, I sought to satisfY my
curiosity about the envelope.
"What is it?" I asked.
The old man continued to gaze straight ahead, but raised a finger
to his lips. He then got down from the Land Rover and without a
word disappeared into a crowd around the kola-nut traders.
That night I drove back into Kabala from our house at 'One­
Mile' to buy some cold Fanta at Lansana Kamara's bar. The bar was
a shabby and poky corner room that opened onto a verandah and
the market place. It was furnished with several warped and dusty
shelves, a battered deep freeze, and five armchairs with polystyrene
foam bulging out through rents in the red vinyl upholstery. The
jangling strains of a hi-life hit issued from a dilapidated record

1 57
player at one end of the bar. " I really love you, Fati Fatiii . . . "
Lansana Kamara did not particularly like hi-life tunes, and
whenever business was slack he would get out his records from
Guinea and, with tears welling up in his eyes, listen to the stirring
refrains of praise-songs from old Mali .
On the walls of L.K.'s bar were several fly-specked calendars
showing beaming Africans in open-necked shirts holding aloft
bottles of Vimto, Fanta or Star beer. L.K. disdained such drinks.
With a lugubrious air he poured himself another large Martell
brandy and a Guiness chaser.
I bought what I wanted and was about to go when I noticed
Mamina Yegbe in the corner, surrounded by a dozen boisterous
youths, among them the two clerks from the D. O.'s office. One of
them made a remark that I could not catch, but it drew a burst of
taunting laughter from the others, and the old man shrank back as
if from a blow. I saw that Mamina Yegbe was still holding the big
envelope, only now it had been ripped open, and bits of sealing
wax littered the floor among the beer-bottle caps.
When the old man saw me he seemed to regain his composure,
but before either of us could speak one of the clerks confronted
me with bloodshot eyes and beery breath.
"He says it's from Seku Toure and Siaka Stevens! " the clerk
roared. "That envelope! He says they've given him a big country
in Guinea and a million pounds cash! He says he's corning to the
D. O. tomorrow to collect it! "
Everyone broke into laughter. Then they looked at me, waiting
for my reaction.
The clerk became angry. "He says he's going to be appointed to
a high position, in the government! " he shouted, as I had failed to
understand the situation. " It's all in the letter! "
I glanced at Marnina Yegbe, who raised a finger to his lips and
smiled ingenuously. I appealed to L.K. for a clue as to what was
going on, but L.K. simply smoothed his knitted singlet over his
enormous belly, lowered his eyes, and took another sip of brandy.

1 58
 The clerk, exasperated by my stupidity, lurched over to the old
man, wrenched the envelope from his grasp, and shook out its
contents onto the bar. L.K. dolefully moved his glass to one side as
his customers pawed at the sheaf of papers, spreading them out so
that I could see what they were.
I recognised several old G.C.E. examination papers, some offi­
cial memoranda and letters, and a page from my own field notes . I
could not think how it had come into the old man's possession.
Stabbing at the papers, the clerk drew my attention to a bundle
of leaflets, all advertisements for Surf washing powder.
"This is the letter from the prime minister! " the clerk hooted.
"Can't you see what it is?' "
I recalled a Volkswagen Kombi that had turned u p outside the
market a few days before. A large display packet of soap-powder
had been fitted to the roof-rack, and a loudspeaker blared out
hi-life tunes. Four or five men in sunglasses and pale blue shirts
had gone about distributing leaflets and occasionally giving away
sample packets of Surf. In the afternoon the vehicle, still crackling
with canned music, disappeared in a cloud of dust up the road
toward Falaba.
"Yes, I can see what it is."
I knelt down and started picking up the papers that had fallen
on the floor. They were already smudged with red dirt from the
clerks' shoes.
The jokers appeared embarrassed by this crazy show of sympathy
for the old man. They backed out onto the porch, making half­
hearted gibes and clutching their bottles of beer. L.K. stared
morosely at his glass of Guiness.
"Do you want a lift home?'' I asked Mamina Yegbe.
"Awa."
I looked down the unlit street, thinking, the generator's gone
again, and wanting to say this to Mamina Yegbe. I also wanted to
ask the old man, now sitting in silence in the Land Rover beside
me, if he still intended to present his letter to the D. 0. and claim

1 59
his fortune, but it might have seemed like another taunt. What
simple faith we all place in the power of printed words, these
fetishized markings on a page - the clerks, this benignly deluded
old man, myself!
The headlights picked out the mosque and the grove of palms
beyond it.
''I'm going back to Barawa on Friday," I said.
Mamina Yegbe made no response.
" I 'll come and see you before I go."
In the darkness the town gave forth the sounds of its invisible
life : a dog yelping, shouts, a radio badly tuned, an inconsolable
child crying, a motor scooter spluttering down a potholed lane,
the drubbing of an initiation drum.
I drew up outside the house with the broken verandah where
Mamina Yegbe lived.
"Ma sogoma yo," I said, as the old man got down.
Mamina Yegbe stood on the roadside in the glare of the head­
lights.
"In the old days people were happy," he said. Then he turned
and drifted into the darkness.

Almost all his life, Mamina Yegbe lived under a colonial regime.
He had imagined it to be like chieftaincy - a source of order and
benevolent power. If the great Belikoro could conjure thunder­
storms at will and slay his enemies with lightning bolts, then surely
the British Crown or the Presidents of Sierra Leone and Guinea
could pay him his due, and make good what he was owed. The
clerks in the D. O.'s office, who so mercilessly ridiculed him, were
no less in thrall to wishful thinking. Indeed it was the maddeningly
elusive nature of fortune in the post-colonial world that compelled
them to perform their derision of Mamina Yegbe so publicly.
In the villages, the older generation still looked to the ancestors
to centre their lives, as young women looked to their children,
though everyone kept a weather eye open for auguries of misfor-

1 60
tune. But young men, looking beyond the village, faced a void
- a nation in name only, summarily carved out of the conti­
nent by colonial powers, a place whose centre had never held and
whose infrastructure was as fragmented as it was surreal: a modern
highway that ran eighty miles through the middle of nowhere; a
fleet of unused ambulances rusting away in a city yard; a school
without teachers; a clinic without pharmaceuticals; a petrol station
with no petrol. The young drifted into opportunism and fantasy
as orphans sometimes do, hoping for some fantastic change of
fortune, a second chance in a another country, or a powerful
benefactor or political leader who would guide them out of the
wilderness.
There was no one word for what these young people craved.
Perhaps power comes closest, if we allow that the word covers
a vast array of imperatives, any one of which an individual may
consider vital to his or her very existence: wealth, worth, work,
status, strength, renown, knowledge, recognition.
But what of the village? Was this too a source of power?
In the villages, life was a matter of reciprocity: the expectation
that what you gave in the course of your life would somehow be
given back, and that whatever you received would be shared. You
respected your elders, parents, and rulers; in return they protect
you and saw to your welfare. To the lineage from which you took
a wife, you gave bridewealth in return. And you offered guests
food and lodging on the understanding that they would do you
no harm.
Lapses in these everyday protocols of give and take were the
concern of Kuranko stories, where, like stories everywhere, all
problems were happily resolved in the end. An exploitative chief
was overthrown, a j ealous co-wife punished, a duplicitous guest
unmasked, a liar hoist by his own petard, a recalcitrant bride
reconciled with her lot. Everyone got his due, or his just desserts.
But many young people felt there was no natural justice. For them,
the time-honoured roles of gender and of age, together with

161
hereditary chieftaincy, cult associations, and labour collectives,
were no longer binding or viable. The dreams of the village were
no longer their dreams.
As for the new sources of power that preoccupied them -
diamonds, commerce, education, Islam, and the military - these
often seemed to belong to a world apart, where j ustice was subject
to no known laws.
Power is always paradoxical - for the powers that lie within
one's reach are seldom as alluring as the powers that elude one's
grasp. Rene Girard calls this mimetic desire. Though home is
where you start from - and may finally return - life is perpetu­
ally beyond. It is there that you will find the woman you will
marry. From there comes the rain that will replenish your own arid
land. There is the space you need to enlarge your life, the wealth
you crave. Sometimes I thought of the New Zealand diaspora,
second only to Ireland's, with so many of us living abroad because
home offered us such limited possibilities. Sometimes I thought
of my friend Harry, with his reveries of sun-drenched landscapes,
summer beaches, and women whose skin was like honey - an
El Dorado of the mind, with gold its sacred symbol. But the most
compelling image for Kuanko was of a fabulous town rumoured
to lie somewhere in the hazy savannah regions to the northeast,
and known as Musudugu - town of women - where there were
no men, where women were in possession of the most powerful
Kuranko medicines and means of sorcery, and where great wealth
could be attained. Does vitality always have to be associated with
the place most distant from where we are?
Every journey in search of these mythical centres of wealth and
power was fraught with danger. One heard of men who travelled
to Musudugu and did not return . When Noah's father enlisted in
the West African Frontier Force in 1 9 1 4 and went to war against
the Germans in the Cameroons, people in Firawa declared that
he had thrown his life to the winds and become a child of the
whitemen. When, in the late sixties, a Kuranko dancer in the

1 62
Sierra Leone national dance troupe enlisted the help of a djinn
to make him a great dancer, people shook their heads. To receive
help from a djinn meant that one day you would have to repay the
debt - with the life of a close kinsman. And when word reached
Firawa that some young village men had been killed in a car crash
in Freetown, the old men again shook their heads: the calamity
would not have happened had the young men remained at home.
Yet against these cautionary and conservative voices, the impulse
to risk one's life, to stake all on a j ourney into the unknown is as
perennial as youth itself.
I did some research in the Kabala High School during the rainy
season of 1 970. Everyone aspired to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an
engineer, and no one would countenance the idea that schooling
would not guarantee him an exalted position, with all the wealth
and prestige that came with it. The schoolboys wore white gloves
and let their fingernails grow long. They spent hours each day laun­
dering their uniforms, lacquering their fingernails, and doing their
homework, comfortable in the belief that they would never have
to farm or struggle for a livelihood as their parents had done.
Even if you landed a j ob - as Noah did - you were often
paid sporadically or not at all, and then, like everyone else, had to
fend for yourself, or be driven into desperate schemes. Noah spent
a lot of time playing draughts . Sometimes I thought of that board
of painted squares, with bottle top counters, as an image of his
world. The tried and tested moves, the gambles one might take. A
person could have, as we say, more than his share of good luck, j ust
as another could suffer unfair setbacks - as though singled out by
some cosmic power for Jobian punishment. Haven't we endured
enough, people would say. Don't we deserve a break?
In the villages I would meet young men who had returned
from the diamond districts of Kono. Having heard so many stories
of sudden riches, they were baffied as to why luck should desert
them while smiling on others. Mohammed Fofona - "the man
who could turn into an elephant" • - had j oined the army as a

1 63
young man . He saw it as a kind of initiation. "The army gave you
discipline, made you a man, made you feel a real force. In those
days," he told me, "a soldier was like a whiteman in the villages;
he commanded great respect." Mter a few years in the military,
Mohammed drifted south into the diamond districts. But things
didn't pan out, and as he became more and more dissatisfied with
his lot, he lambasted the bribery, bias, exploitation and croneyism
he saw in the government, and began to dream of radical political
change.
Others imagined that Islam might provide the answer to their
prayers. In the dry season of 1 979 one of my nearest neighbours
was a young man called Abdulai Sisay. After many fruitless months
digging and panning for diamonds in the alluvial fields of Kono,
he returned home bewildered and disappointed. "My hands
are empty," he told me. Some years before, he had consulted a
Koranic diviner who had given him good advice. He had then
gone to Kono and made enough money to fund his elder brother's
pilgrimage to Mecca. Now the same diviner told him that his run
of bad luck was about to end, and advised that he should sacrifice
a sheep to Allah and share the meat among his neighbours . But
even after dutifully taking the diviner's advice, Abdulai was nagged
by doubts, and desperate for further insights into the cause of his
fluctuating fortunes.
When I told Abdulai I was interested in Kuranko dreams, he
immediately confessed a keen interest in how white people inter­
pret dreams. And so, within a few days we were comparing our
dreams and dream interpretations.
One morning, when I told Abdulai of a dream in which I had
been in a high place, he explained that the dream presaged esteem
and prosperity. Then he told me what he had dreamed.
"I was up in the sky, near the moon . I went up like an airplane,

• I write at length about Mohammed's shape-shifting in Paths Toward a Clearing

(1 989) .

1 64
and came down to earth again. While I was in the sky I was not
afraid, but as I came back to earth I became very frightened, and
called out, 'I am falling, I am falling' .
"In my next dream I was praying. It was the middle of the night.
I was praying and counting my beads ."
" I think you want to go to Mecca," I said, "just as your elder
brother did, but you are afraid that you will not be able to make
the j ourney."
"A ko sebe! " Abdulai exclaimed. "That's true. That is what is in
my mind."
I did not confide everything that Abdulai's dream suggested to
me. His first dream gave me the impression that Abdulai felt less
and less in control over his own destiny. The dream seemed to be
charged with the same anxieties of powerlessness and marginalisa­
tion that I discerned around me every day - villagers working
through an entire dry season to build a road through the bush,
or a bridge across a river, in the expectation that their collec­
tive fortunes would improve, only to find that nothing changed;
young men, like Abdulai, back from the diamond fields, with little
to show for their efforts; others back from the cities where they
had hoped for a windfall, but found none; students unable to find
the money to finish their schooling, or thrown out of college
for protesting against the government; men frustrated in their
attempts to ally themselves with a powerful mentor and patron.
At the same time, Abdulai's dream reminded me of the kinds of
fantastic avenues to self-esteem and empowerment that had begun
to fill this existential vacuum, particularly among young men.
An alliance forged with a powerful bush spirit. The acquisition
of powerful medicines, or the ability to transform oneself at will
into a powerful animal. Or the hope that Islam and the spiritual
authority of the alhadjis - those who had made the pilgrimage to
Mecca - would usher in a new age. A generation later, as corrupt
governments and coups destroyed the civil state in Sierra Leone,
and the patrimonial economy collapsed, these thwarted dreams

1 65
would assume increasingly violent and vengeful shape, mixing
indigenous fantasies of magical power with images from kung fu
movies, fixations on invincible trickster heroes like Rambo, and
the possession of lethal weaponry.
A few days after his dream of falling from the sky, Abdulai
recounted another dream. "I was lying in bed, drawing my wife
toward me, when a pale-complexioned woman came up to her
and began pulling her away from me."
Assuming that musu gbe - pale-complexioned - might, in this
context, mean "white woman", I wondered whether Abdulai's
dream betrayed a desire to sleep with a European woman, but when
I suggested this, Abdulai abruptly clapped his hands together.
"Eh! Not at all. That is not what I had in mind."
"But who," I asked, "is the woman?" For I was thinking of what
so many Kuranko had drummed into me - that one never dreams
of non-existent things . To dream that one is a witch confirms that
one is a witch. To dream of someone who has died is a confirma­
tion that this person still exists, only in some other zone. As is the
case among many preliterate peoples, dreams were not considered
to be random figments of the imagination, but glimpses into other
parallel realities, ordinarily invisible and intangible - like things
glimpsed in the penumbra of a fire.
"It is not as you say," Abdulai said. "You see, I have two wives.
One is pale-complexioned and one is dark. You know that pale­
ness signifies good luck. Well, I had intended taking my dark wife
when I went back to the mines. Now I will take the other one,
because in the dream she was pulling the dark one away. This means
that she will draw the bad luck away and bring me good luck."
"What if things do not go well for you, despite all the good
omens?" I asked.
"It all depends on Allah," Abdulai said. "A person's destiny is
in the hands of Alla h. The Qur'an is Allah's word, and the Qur'an
shows us how to understand our dreams."
Few human beings can live as if their lot were fixed, or ill-

1 66
fortune irreversible. Though Kuranko often say that "no sacrifice
can cut one's fate" they generally do so after a calamity has befallen
them, as if bemoaning and at the same time struggling to accept
the apparent lack of any divine or natural j ustice in this world. But
this does not mean that people live fatalistically. Indeed, Kuranko
seek to avert misfortune and improve their chances in life as much
as anyone, though their means may, to European eyes, sometimes
seem pathetic or illusory. But none of us exists without imaginary
bolt-holes, and in bad times we all have recourse to blind faith, to
hope, and to desperate fantasies - some of which may entail useful
effects. This is why it is presumptuous to dismiss another person's
reality as illusory, or complacently regard one's own coping strate­
gies as reasonable - as the clerks did with Mamina Yegbe, and as
Europeans have been doing for a long time with what many still
persist in calling African "superstitions".

By compelling you to inhabit the world of others, anthropology

changes the way you think about yourself. It also makes you reflect
on the arbitrariness of fate. Often in Sierra Leone I found myself
wondering what course I would have taken, which life I would
have chosen, had I been born into this society where circum­
stance had made me a mere soj ourner. At times, I have imagined
myself as Saran Salia Sana - the old medicine master of whom
I have written in Barawa ( 1 986) - who renounced sorcery in
order to practise the healing and prophylactic arts, and who at no
time did not have several children under his roof, protecting them
from witchcraft and sorcery. At other times, I have identified with
Keti Ferenke Koroma, whose life story I have also recounted, who
created his brilliant fables in an effort to sustain a vision of a world
where promises are kept, bargains are honoured, and friendship
and intelligence valued above power and wealth . Though these
are the men whose paths I might have followed, whose lives I
might have shared had my fate been different, it is not because
I attach any sentimental value to so-called "traditional" societies.

1 67
Rather it is because life has taught me the importance of striking
a balance between acceptance and protest. Kuranko protest inj us­
tices, to be sure. But the whole thrust of initiation is to teach one
to withstand hardship, and accept adversity as an inevitable part of
life. Pain, illness and unhappiness are not seen as aberrations from
which one might be saved. The insane and sick are never seques­
tered. Death is not denied. Nor do people react to suffering with
the outrage and impatience so familiar in our own society - the
tormented sense that one has been hard done by, that one deserves
better, that permanent health, unalloyed happiness, even immor­
tality, might be one day guaranteed as a civil right. I admired the
modus vivendi these two men had worked out, accepting what
they could not change and struggling to change that which they
felt they could.
There is something else I found to admire in these men.
Though both had suffered at the hands of others, they had not
allowed themselves to be consumed by despair or revenge. Each
had lost his father at an early age, experienced broken marriages,
and neither had been born to privilege or power. Yet each had
salvaged his humanity again and again, choosing reconciliation
over vengeance, the common weal over merely personal gain. It
would have been easy for them to vent their frustrations on others,
to blame and vilify, but in the face ofloss each man stoically recen­
tred himself and pushed on.
This is not to suggest that one is free to make one's life exactly
what one wills; rather, it is to say, with Merleau-Ponty that "to
be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the
world" - the world being at once already constituted by others
before us and open to us as a field of infinite possibilities. If one
uses the word freedom, it is simply to recognise, as Sartre puts it,
"the small movement which makes a totally conditioned social
being someone who does not render back completely what his
conditioning has given him."

1 68
 Amazing G race

O n our first day back in Freetown, Pauline and I drove down the
peninsula to Black Johnson's Beach.
The air was filled with the noise of cicadas. The sand burnt our
bare feet. Ahead of us, witch-crabs scuttled away into their sandy
burrows. The tideline was a dark tracery of twigs, coconut husks,
and dead stonefish . The only other marks in the white sand were
our own footprints.
We found a place at the end of the beach shaded by casuarinas,
and lay there for a long time listening to the susurrus of the sea.
Kabala seemed far more than two hundred miles away, and my
experiences in the north felt as though they belonged to someone
else. Even if it hadn't been necessary for Pauline to come to Free­
town to have the baby, we would have left Kabala for a while. I
needed a break from fieldwork. To take stock, to get my bearings.
On our way back from the beach, we stopped in to see Sewa
and Rose. Sewa was Noah's older brother. He'd been in and out
of politics since Independence, but was now the agent for Alitalia
in Freetown .
Their house overlooked a tidal inlet called Thompson's Bay, but
the track to it was badly potholed, and even in the Land Rover I
had to take it slowly. As we drove up to the house, the kids ran out
to meet us. They wanted to tell us about an explosion on the inlet
that afternoon. A canoe fisherman had been using gelignite and a
stick had exploded in his hand. Other fishermen had rowed out to
him, but by the time they got him ashore he had bled to death.

1 69
 Rose came out of the house and shushed the kids, saying we
would not want to hear such gruesome stories. She took Pauline
by the arm and led her inside.
We sat on the balcony overlooking the inlet, sipping the iced
Pepsis Rose had brought us. Rose was combing her daughter
Isata's hair. Isata's brother Abu was wheeling his toy fire engine
along the top of the concrete balustrade and imitating a fire siren.
Rose asked where we'd been and what we'd been doing all
day.
I let Pauline describe Black Johnson's Beach while I looked up
at the high cirrus that was now beginning to change from grey to
gold as the sun set.
Then I was aware of Rose's voice again . She was talking about
the Cottage Hospital, asking Pauline if she had managed to buy
everything she'd need when she was admitted. "You will have to
take everything," Rose stressed, "your own disinfectant, your own
bedding, your own food and drink . . . "
I didn't want Pauline feeling anxious, so I told Rose about the
Kuranko diviner I had consulted, how he said the confinement
would go well and that Pauline would give birth to a baby girl.
Rose tugged the comb free from Isata's hair. "You can't believe
everything those people tell you," she said.
"Well," I said, "when in Rome . . . "
"It helped allay our anxieties," Pauline said. "That's all Michael
means." And then she told Rose we had made a list of all the
things we needed and would go downtown in the morning to
buy them.
Rose went back to braiding Isata's hair.
We all fell silent then, and I looked out over the mangroves in
the fast-fading light.
Suddenly Rose asked, "Did you know that the real name of this
bay isn't Thompson's but Thousands?"
" No," I said, " I didn't know that."
"Yes," she said, "they used to ship slaves from this inlet."

1 70
 I remembered the old university building in Cline Town,
built from the timbers of captured slave ships, iron ring-bolts still
embedded in the walls.
Then Rose said, "Thousands of them were herded into caves
and barracoons down there before they were taken out to the
ships offshore."

The barracoons were slave pens built on the beaches. Coffies or

trains of slaves were brought to the coast from up-country, roped
together at the neck with leather thongs. All were forced to carry
headloads of ivory or food. All bore weals and scars from lashes
and chains . The sick and exhausted were shot.
On the coast, men, women and children were stripped naked,
and further selections made by the slave master and his "surgeon"
to ensure that sick individuals would not contaminate the healthy
on the voyage out. Two days before shipment, the heads of the
slaves were shaved. Sometimes they were branded on the arm with
the initials of the merchant to whom they belonged.
In Sierra Leone, the slave ships anchored offshore and the slaves
were brought out to them in longboats. Two hundred and fifty
people would be "tight-packed" on three tiers or shelves in a hold
with a six-foot ceiling. No individual had a space more than six
feet by sixteen inches in which to move. It was impossible to sit
upright, and people were handcuffed and leg-ironed in pairs, "the
right hand and foot of one to the left of the other, but across" , so
that no one could move without disturbing the person to whom
he or she was shackled. Sometimes it was worse. Up to seven
hundred and fifty men might be "stowed in each other's laps"
in a three-foot space between-decks, "without an inch to move
right or left" and, in a partition of the bulkhead measuring sixteen
by eighteen feet, two hundred and fifty women, some pregnant,
would be confined.
In each section of the hold were three or four latrine buckets .
In most cases, a slave 's shackles prevented him or her from

171
getting access to the buckets .
On the voyage, the slaves were brought on deck at eight in the
morning and a long chain was run through their shackles and
fastened to a ring-bolt in the deck. They were then given tubs of
pulped horse-beans, boiled yams and rice, and buckets of sea water
to slake their thirst. During the day, they would be forced to exer­
cise on the deck by dancing and singing. People were flogged if
they moved sluggishly or sang laments. Women were often forced
to dress in European clothes, decked with beads, and raped.
At four in the afternoon, the second mate and boatswain
descended into the hold and supervised the stowing of slaves for
the night, cramming tall individuals amidships and shorter ones
near the bows to maximise the scarce space.
In bad weather, these routines would be suspended. Portholes
and gratings were sealed against the high seas and rain . In the hot,
fetid holds, dysentery and typhus broke out. People lay in their
vomit and faeces, and European crew would faint from the stench,
dumping the tubs of food in the hold or not taking them below
at all.
Lying in their own blood and mucus in a ship yawing and
pitching in heavy seas, many slaves had their skin worn away until
their shoulder bones, elbows and hips were exposed. Crying out in
fever for release from their agony, they would be brought on deck,
swabbed down and bandaged. Most of the sick died and were
thrown overboard. In fact, of the sixty thousand slaves carried each
year in English ships, nearly twenty thousand died at sea during
the Middle Passage across the Atlantic.
Many attempted suicide. Some refused to eat and were flogged
or tortured. Hot coals were held against their lips, or their mouths
were forced open with a kind of calliper called the speculum oris.
Some managed to j ump overboard and drown. Others, like the
"Muslims" in the Nazi death-camps, simply withdrew into them­
selves and lost the will to live.

1 72
I looked at Rose and Isata in the half-light and shuddered at the
thought of what had happened. I felt uneasy too, as though I had
been somehow complicit in it. What would I have done if I had
been here two hundred years ago?
Then Sewa was shouting from the foyer that he was home, and
Abu rushed away to see him. Rose stopped braiding Isata's hair
and tied the loose strands with a red ribbon.
Sewa came out on to the verandah, holding his son's hand.
" Kushe, kushe," Sewa said, greeting us in Krio.
He leaned back against the balustrade, his face in darkness.
Behind him, lights from the tourist hotels on Cape Sierra smeared
the ink-black water of the inlet.
Rose stood up. "Kam, we eat," she said, and went into the
parlour.
"Well," Sewa said to Pauline, " how di bodi ?"
"Fine," Pauline said. " Di bodi fine." She related how we'd spent
the day at Black Johnson's Beach.
Sewa appeared puzzled or disapproving, but Rose was calling,
"Dae eat dae na table ! " and so we moved indoors and took our
places around the table.
Rose lifted the lids off the enamel bowls and urged us to help
ourselves to the fish and okra stew, and rice.
Pauline took a couple of spoonfuls, and I served myself little
more. I half expected Sewa to launch into his diatribe about how
thin I was, and to tell Pauline how she must keep her strength up
because she had to eat for two people.
"Did you go downtown and do your shopping?" Sewa asked.
"Dem go tumara," Rose said.

The rains were coming. When I drove back up to Fourah Bay

College after buying vegetables and lentils downtown, the hills were
dark under heavy cloud and thunder rumbled away in the north .
After a quick trip to the library, I went home. The heat was
oppressive. Pauline was out.

1 73
 Lying down on the sofa, I read for a while before falling into a
deep sleep.
I woke not knowing where I was. And my mind was crowded
with images from the book I 'd been reading.
According to Walter Rodney, the Sierra Leone slave trade had
been "prodigious" . He cited a slave captain called John Newton
who had made three voyages to Sierra Leone between 1 750 and
1 754 and filled the holds of several ships. Another book, written
in the 1 830s by a ship's doctor involved in the suppression of the
slave trade, mentioned Kuranko people among those who had
been lucky enough to be repatriated and find their way home.
That evening, Pauline wanted to know why I was reading books
about slavery. I told her it had been weighing on my mind for days.
I was distressed by the knowledge that Kuranko had been among
those shipped from the white-shell beaches where we'd walked
and swum.
She flicked through one of the library books, and discovered a
reference to John Newton.
"You know who Newton was?" she asked.
" The captain of a slave ship," I replied.
"Yes, but apart from that. He wrote 'Amazing Grace'," she said,
and then began singing softly to remind me of the hymn :

Amaz ing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me,
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see. . .

Newton was employed in the slave trade for ten years, first as
an ordinary seaman, then as ship's mate, finally as master of two
slave ships.
Like most of his contemporaries, he saw nothing wrong with
the slave trade. "I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness,"
he wrote in his memoirs. " I was upon the whole satisfied with it,
as the appointment Providence had marked out for me . . . It is,

1 74
indeed, accounted a genteel employment . . . "
His concern for his human cargoes was no less mercenary than
that of other slave captains. Quite simply, a dead slave turned no
profit. This is why slaves who tried to starve themselves to death
were forcibly fed, and those who j umped overboard were rescued
from drowning. This is why slaves were washed, shaved, and some­
times rubbed with beeswax and oil, and why their wounds were
bandaged. If their nails were trimmed, it was to prevent injury
when they fought. If they were forced to dance, it was to keep
them fit. If their mouths were rinsed with vinegar, it was to treat
scurvy. If the holds were ventilated or fumigated with brimstone,
if the decks were swabbed with disinfectant and holystoned, it
was to stop the spread of deadly disease. And if lunar caustic was
rubbed on yaws and a man with dysentery had his anus stoppered
with oakum, this was to promote a quick sale in the scrambles of
Kingston and Port Maria. Nothing was done for the slave simply
because he was a human being.
Naturally, the slavers had God on their side. On one voyage,
Newton inscribed the first page of his ship 's log with a passage
from Psalm 1 07 : "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do
business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his
wonders in the deep." Surviving terrible squalls off the coast of
Sierra Leone, Newton praised the interposition of the Almighty
in bringing his ship safely to port. When a slave uprising was
put down on board The African in 1 752, Newton perceived "the
favour of Divine Providence", then neck-yolked the offenders and
forced a confession from them with thumbscrews . Like other slave
captains, he held religious services on Sundays, though not for the
slaves . Indeed, Newton felt that captaining a slave ship was more
favourable than any other calling "for promoting the Life of God
in the Soul" . In the evenings, when the watch was set and the
slaves safely below "packed in their shelves" , he would pace the
deck murmuring his wife's name, recommending her to the care
and protection of God, and composing such lines as these for the

175
letter he would write her: "My heart goes often pit-a-pat, lest I
should hear that you have been ill or uneasy."
He was, as another slave captain gibed, "a slave to one woman" .
In 1 755, Newton left the sea and the slave trade, and settled
down to married life ashore. He was thirty. He wanted to begin
anew. He made resolutions to get at least seven hours sleep a night,
devote an hour a day to Bible study, avoid speaking ill of others,
and forswear his past life as an "infidel and libertine " . He began
a diary with the words, "I dedicate unto Thee this clean unsully'd
book and at the same renew my tender for a foul blotted corrupt
heart."
But was it the slave trade he wanted to repudiate, or rather what
he cryptically called "those brutish lusts by which I was once so
long and deeply enslav'd"? Thirty-three years would pass before
Newton lent his voice to the cause of Abolition, denouncing
slavery as an iniquitous, cruel and oppressive commerce "at which
my heart now shudders" . But was it God's "amazing grace" that
brought about this change of heart or simply that he was sick of
the company of rabble and unable to bear long periods separated
from his young wife?

We woke to violent gusts of wind, the curtains flung back from

the open windows, billowing and flailing. I got up and fumbled for
the window catches, my movements hampered by the curtains. I
pulled the metal frames closed. The sky was being ripped apart at
the seams. Thunder crackled. Lightning laddered the clouds.
" I think it's starting," Pauline said.
She could not get comfortable. She had stomach cramps and
complained of an ache in her lower back. I helped her change her
position, then massaged her back. We worked on the breathing
exercises we'd been practising for months.
Then the rain came. It came as suddenly as the wind, pelting
down under immense pressure, pouring out of the sky. It was so
loud, the deluge, and so furious that the whole house shook under

176
its impact. The drumming on the roof was deafening. Water spilled
from the guttering, splashing in the yard.
"I must be well acclimatised," Pauline said. "My waters will
break with the rains! "
The rain ceased. I could hear a frog croaking. Thunder rumbled
distantly in the hills.
We timed the intervals between contractions. It was five in the
morning, more than an hour before first light.
"How long since the last one?" Pauline asked.
"Quarter of an hour."
"I'm going to get dressed," Pauline said. "I think we should get
to the hospital. It's better if we have time to spare. Can you pack
the things?"

"We're going to put you on a drip, Mrs Jackson," the doctor said.
"Your waters have burst a little earlier than normal and we want
to minimise the risk of infection. It's j ust a precaution."
I watched as the nurse set up the bottle, untangling the plastic
tubing.
Pauline winced, taking her weight on her elbow. " I 'd rather
you didn't, Doctor," she said. "I want to be unencumbered for the
birth ."
"It's for your own good, Mrs Jackson," the doctor said.
"But it's better for me without the drip ! " she protested.
She turned her face to me. "Michael?" she said. I grasped her
hand. "The spasms in my back are getting worse," she said.
"The contractions should become quite intense soon," the
doctor said.
"If you should need pethidine or an epidural . . . "
"I don't want anything, Doctor, thank you," Pauline said. " I just
want to try to handle things my way for as long as possible."

It was hot. Pauline was on all fours. When the contraction came,
she screamed, pushing my hand to where she wanted me to

1 77
massage her back. " Fuck! Shit! Oh God oh God oh God oh God
oh God oh God . . . "
As the contraction subsided, Pauline buried her face in the
pillow. I could hear the traffic in the street outside, a world away.
She was breathing hard, panting, giving herself orders: "Relax
relax relax relax relax relax, it'll pass it'll pass it'll pass it'll pass . . . "
"Now push, dear, push ! " the nurse urged.
"But the contraction hasn't begun," Pauline said.
I took the facecloth and wiped her forehead.
" I 've got pins and needles," she said. Then she gasped, " Now!
One's starting now ! " Her face was tense as she drew in the next
breath.
I glanced at the wall clock. Three-fifteen. Six hours since we
arrived in the hospital.
She gripped my arm. " I think I 'm going to be sick ! "
I grabbed a kidney dish from the table.
" No, not that," said the nurse.
"Perhaps you'd better leave now, Mr Jackson," the doctor said.
" No, no, let him stay ! " Pauline said. "I want my husband to be
with me."
She was gasping for breath.
"Push ! " said the nurse.
"I can't! "
"Go and get Doctor Jalloh," the midwife said to the nurse. " I
think we're going t o have t o d o a n episiotomy."

It was half past five in the afternoon. I knelt beside the bed, gazing
into my daughter's unfocused sea-blue eyes. She seemed to return
my smile. "Isn't she perfect?" Pauline said. Then she took the baby
to her breast, and the infant's tiny head butted for the nipple.
Pauline looked at me. "I'm glad it's over. I 've never been through
such an ordeal in my life. I can't believe she's here, after all the
months of waiting."
When the baby had finished feeding, I held her against my

1 78
shoulder and gently rubbed her back. Then I held her in front of
me, cradling her head in my hand. Her feet hardly reached the
crook of my arm. I could not stop gazing into her face, watching
her wrinkled hands clutch at the air.
I lay the infant down beside Pauline on the bed. She placed her
arm around her.
"You must be exhausted," I said.
"Exhausted and elated," she replied.
"Motherhood becomes you."
" I can't get over how beautiful she is," Pauline said.
And as I looked at my daughter, the first lines of a poem came
to me . . .

For her, words are but bruisings of the air

And the windfall sound of them is everywhere . . .

1 79
 A l leg o ries o f the Wild e rness

When my thoughts return to Sierra Leone, they often return to

the stories I heard there. One story, told by a young man called
Sulimani Koroma in the dry season of 1 972, has haunted me for
years.
It was late at night, and we were crowded into a shuttered room
in which I had been barely able to find a niche for my micro­
phone. Children were clambering over one another, trying to get
nearer the storyteller. Babies slept, oblivious, on their mothers'
backs. Old men, chewing kola, unmoved by the commotion, sat in
the shadows thrown by hurricane lamps.
The story was about a small hand-drum called the yimbe, which
is played during initiations.
At the time the story begins, this yimbe drum is in the hands
of the hyenas in the bush. But hearing it night after night, the
villagers become entranced by its sound and present an ultimatum
to their chief: "If you do not bring the drum to us in the village,
we will go into the bush ." Concerned to keep the community
together and maintain his authority, the chief promises a "hundred
of everything" to anyone brave enough to bring the yimbe from
the bush to the village.
A young man decides to try his luck. After saying goodbye to
his mother - who fears she will not see her son again - he sets
off on his quest. Deep in the bush, he encounters a man-eating
djinn. But the djinn, impressed by the young man's audacity and
courage, decides not only to spare his life but to help him by

1 80
giving him a fetish, with instructions on how to address it in time
of need, as well as an egg, a live coal, and a piece of bamboo.
That night the young man reaches the village of the hyenas .
Though suspicious and wary, the hyenas offer him food and lodg­
ings, and accede to his request to be allowed to sleep in the court­
house - where the yimbe drums are kept. In the middle of the
night he steals the sweetest-sounding yimbe and flees. Hyena Sira,
the canniest of the hyenas, who has not slept for fear of what the
young man might do, rouses the other hyenas and leads them in
pursuit of the thief. However, each time the hyenas threaten to
overtake him, the young man summons the fetish . The first time it
tells him to throw down the bamboo, which becomes an impen­
etrable forest that hyena Sira has to gnaw her way through. The
second time it tells him to use the live coal to set fire to the grass,
though hyena Sira quickly douses the flames by pissing on them.
The third time it tells him to throw down the egg; it turns into a
great lake which enables the young man to reach the safety of the
village with the yimbe drum in his possession.
Now the djinn gave .the young man the fetish on condition
that he kill a red bull and offer it as a sacrifice to the djinn when
his quest was ended. But the young man forgets his promise, and
when hyena Sira, disguised as a seductive young woman, comes to
the village and entices him to accompany her home, he sets off
with no thought for his safety.
Once they've crossed the lake, hyena Sira leads the young man
into an ambush. As the hyenas close in for the kill, he shinnies up
a tree and summons the fetish for help. The fetish says nothing.
Desperately he summons it again. Again no response. It is then that
he remembers his broken promise, and declares that he will sacri­
fice two bulls to the djinn if it saves him. As the hyenas are about
to tear him limb from limb the fetish breaks its silence. It tells him
to take a branch from the tree. It turns into a gun. The fetish then
tells him to take some leaves. These turn into bullets . He fires on
the hyenas and they flee for their lives.

181
 The young man returns home, and makes the promised sacrifice
to the djinn.

I have always liked to compare this story with Defoe's Robinson

Crusoe. Both are allegories of the wilderness in which the protag­
onists, separated from their ordinary lives, struggle not only to
survive but to triumph. But while the hero of the Kuranko story
succeeds in keeping his community together, the world Crusoe
creates is entirely his own. Beholden to no one, he is the self-made
man, the possessive individualist, a law unto himself, captain and
saviour of his own soul.
With whom might I identify? Is the anthropologist to be
likened to Crusoe or to the young man who belatedly makes
good his promise to the djinn?
There was a time when people in Firawa said that I was Noah's
djinn. They expected him to gain great fortune through knowing
me. The truth was, however, that he was my dj inn. As with the
dj inn in the story of the yimbe drum, the conclusion of my quest
depended entirely on his help. And like the young man in the
Kuranko tale who, his mission accomplished, forgets the bargain he
struck with his supernatural helper, I would come to be haunted
by a sense of having failed to reciprocate the help I had received.
For what did Noah gain from his association with me that came
remotely close to equalling what I had gained through him?
And yet I ask myself, am I my brother's keeper? Am I bound to
take upon myself the obligation to make good what Noah felt he
lacked in his life? And how is one to determine what one owes
others and what one owes oneself?

Noah was born in Firawa in 1 942, his mother's last child. His
father worked as a court messenger and was transferred often to
various parts of Sierra Leone. "I was my father's favourite," Noah
told me. "I started school late because my father wanted me to be
with him. I was all the time with my father, slept with my father,

1 82
moved with my father, until his death in 1 954. Only then did I
really get to know the woman who bore me."
In 1 953, under circumstances Noah would never completely
understand, his elder brother Sewa took him out of school and
pledged him to a Mandingo trader who was travelling south. Noah
thus embarked upon a seemingly endless j ourney down boulder­
strewn roads between brakes of elephant grass, driving a herd of
cows . His taciturn companion, whose name was Kemo, gave him
corn and curdled milk. He watched women in the fields, hoeing
up mounds of lumpy black earth. He saw children his own age
splashing and laughing in river pools below the girder bridges
they crossed. The air was fragrant with the perfumes of flowers
after rain, but in the towns the streets were quagmires that stank
of cow piss and dung.
In the south, at a town called Bambatuk, Kemo took leave
of Noah, telling him that he was to remain there and work for
Mammy Kasan.
Noah saw money change hands. And then an enormous woman,
whose brow was creased with an expression of intense disapproval
or worry, gathered her flowing blue robe about her and led him to
the outhouse where he would sleep.
The main house seemed like a mansion to Noah. The walls of
its central room were covered with framed photographs of men
in army uniforms and women in vast white gowns and towering
headkerchiefs. Padlocked doors led to rooms he was not allowed
to enter. All the windows in the house were barred against thieves,
and it was Noah's j ob to see that the shutters were securely bolted
every night. Along the front porch of the house ran an ornate
concrete balustrade, painted bright yellow. At one end of the porch
was Mammy Kasan's shop. Its ceiling was hung with lengths ofbaft,
hanks of rope, metal buckets, and kerosene lanterns. Its shelves were
fill e d with packets of Tate and Lyle sugar, Bryant and May matches,
bars of soap, bottles of pills, and enamelware. On the worn counter
were piles of onions and arrays of okra and red peppers.

1 83
 Mammy Kasan sat behind the counter frowning at the street.
Hardly an hour passed without her summoning Noah, whose
name had become Kekura, to do some chore for her.
"Ke-kura, Ke-kura, Ke-kura," she would call monotonously.
Then more stridently, "Kekura ! "
Noah would come running from the back o f the house, his
hands dripping with soapsuds.
"Kekura, do the ironing now," she commanded.
He would leave off doing the laundry and heat the heavy
smoothing iron by filling it with coals from the fire. Then he
would struggle with one of Mammy Kasan's voluminous gowns
on a rickety table that creaked ominously as the huge iron was
pushed along a fold of the cloth. No sooner had he begun to make
some headway when he would hear again, slowly and regularly at
first, "Ke-kura, Ke-kura, Ke-kura." So he would scoot round the
side of the house, dodging the rain puddles under the eaves, and
hear the voice raised into an angry summons, "Kekura, come now,
Kekura ! " Arriving breathless, at the bottom of the steps, he would
be told that he still smelled of Kemo Sise's cows.
Noah quickly learned that Mammy Kasan made such remarks
to give herself time to remember what it was she had wanted him
to do. When the chore came back to mind she would indolently
lift and extend her right arm and with her left hand hitch the
billowing sleeve of her gown up onto her shoulder. "Kekura, fetch
firewood," she would say or, simply, "Bring water." Noah would
lower the bucket into the well, and as it hit the water he would
see his silhouette j olt and shatter, and a blue half-circle of sky turn
to mud.
He found solace in the company of Denka, Mammy Kasan's
husband. Denka had been blinded by a spitting cobra not long
after enlisting in the army in 1 939. Gossip circulated that Denka's
mind was a bit touched as well.
The blind man, feeling his way along the scarred plaster wall of
the house to the back steps, would come into the yard when Noah

1 84
was working there and, for no apparent reason, throw himself into
a display of parade-ground drill. Noah would have to push basins
aside and kick firewood out of the way lest the blind veteran trip
over them.
Denka marched up and down, shouting orders to himself: "Lep
rite, lep rite, lep rite, lep. Riiiii wheel. Lep rite, lep rite, lep. Squaaad
halt ! "
He would spring t o attention facing the mango tree, his hand
quivering at his forehead in salute.
Noah would say, "I am over here", and Denka, nonplussed,
would wheel toward the voice and repeat his salute.
The boy flinched as his blind companion stumbled over
outcrops of pitted rock or waded into a puddle, scattering the
ducks. But Denka was tireless. "Give me the pestle," he would
order, and taking it from Noah he would shoulder and present
arms while the boy dodged the flailing pole.
At first Noah was unsettled by Denka's ghosted-over eyes. They
reminded him of the spectral gaze of the people in the parlour
photo gallery and of the locked rooms he suspected were occupied
by the spirits of the framed figures . But familiarity soon allayed
his fears, and lying awake at night on his mat in the outhouse he
would be lulled by the sound ofDenka's flute warbling and trilling
above the rain - until Mammy Kasan's voice broke the spell,
calling, "Ke-kura, Ke-kura, Kekura! Come now."
From time to time Mammy kasan went on what she called an
"errand" to another town. Denka said she went to collect debts.
Noah went as Denka's guide. Each held an end of a long pole, the
boy steering his blind companion down the narrow bush paths
while Mammy Kasan bustled ahead, her gown catching the breeze
and billowing like a sail.
One morning at Sirabo, Mammy Kasan sent Noah off to buy
some bananas.
As he sauntered along a row of stalls in the market he was
startled to hear snatches of Kuranko. Looking around, he spotted

1 85
three men, one of whom wore an indigo gown like his father's . He
sidled up to the men and greeted them cautiously.
"Eh, m 'bonnu! " one of the men exclaimed to the others, "the
boy speaks Kuranko."
"What is your name?" asked another.
"They call me Kekura."
"Kekura ! " said the first man, surprised. "And where do you hail
from, 'new fellow'?"
" From Kabala."
"Kabala! Eh, m 'bo, you are a long way from home."
"We are also from Kabala," said the second man.
Noah fumbled in his pocket for the knife his father had given
him.
"My father gave me this when he sent me away to school,"
Noah said.
The first man took the knife and turned it over in his hand. "He
sent you to school here? In Sirabo?"
" No, in Kabala."
" Hun ! "
" It's a fine knife," said the second man.
The first man made to go. "Awa," he said, "mi nala - we will
see you later."
Noah felt a lump in his throat as he watched the Kuranko
men disappear into the crowded market. He hung around until
late afternoon in the hope that they would return but, dreading
Mammy Kasan's ire, finally gave up his vigil.

Noah's eldest sister Ai was married to Alhadji Momodu Salloh

who lived at Bonthe in the southern province. On a trip to Bantai
chiefdom to buy rice she chanced to meet the Kuranko men with
whom Noah had talked at Sirabo.
Noah's father, Tina Kome, had written to Ai about Noah's
disappearance, and when the travellers mentioned the small
Kuranko boy with an army knife Ai was certain it must be her

1 86
little brother. Although puzzled by the child's nondescript name,
she immediately took a truck to Sirabo where the market people
told her about Mammy Kasan and her houseboy. Ai came on foot
to Bambatuk the next day.
The town was on an island in a tidal river lined with mangrove
swamps and muddy shell banks. The only way across to the island
was by ferry - a wooden raft, given buoyancy by empty oil drums,
which the ferryman winched across the river by means of a cable
attached to trees on either bank. After asking directions from the
ferryman, Ai proceeded to Mammy Kasan's house.
Mammy Kasan was ensconced behind the counter of her shop.
Ai greeted her and asked casually if she was the trader who had a
small Kuranko boy called Kekura working for her.
Mammy Kasan's frown deepened. "Kekura is there," she said,
tugging at the sleeve of her gown.
"I am sure that Kekura is my brother," said Ai. "The last we
heard of him, he was in the care of a certain Kemo Sise, a cattle
trader."
Mammy Kasan said nothing.
"May I see the boy?" Ai asked.
Mammy Kasan simply repeated, "He is there."
Ai walked into the house, calling, "Noah, Noah, are you
there?"
Denka, sitting in a gloomy corner of the parlor, muttered as if
to himself, "There is nobody here called Noah."
Ai asked if he knew of a boy called Kekura.
Denka at once sprang to his feet. "Att-en-shun," he barked.
Then, tilting his head as if to listen for some reply, he called,
"Kekura, Kekura, come here."
At first Noah hardly recognised his sister in the dim light, but
Ai led him to the back door to get out of Denka's hearing. Noah,
seeing her face clearly, could not suppress his j oy.
"Calm, calm, keep calm," Ai whispered. "You must pretend you
do not know me. Just wait. I'll come back this evening."

1 87
 Ai returned to Mammy Kasan and asked ifNoah could go back
to Bonthe with her. "Perhaps only for a little while," she added,
noticing Mammy Kasan's deepening frown.
The trader's blunt refusal convinced Ai that further pleading
would be a waste of breath .
"Even if you were the boy's mother, which you are not,"
Mammy Kasan pontificated, " I would not let him go with you .
He is pledged to me, and Kemo Sise has gone to Liberia."
"Then may I spend the night here?" Ai asked. " I 'll go on my
way in the morning."
Mammy Kasan gave her gruff assent. "Kekura !" she shouted,
"bring food! "
That night Ai stole down to the outhouse and explained to Noah
that he was to run away in the morning. She carefully outlined her
plan, making him repeat what he was to do and impressing upon
him the need for calm until they had made their escape. It was
well after midnight when she returned to her own room.
The day dawned, bringing high cirrus clouds like rubbed
tobacco, and a sea breeze. Ai thanked Mammy Kasan for ht>r
hospitality, said a curt goodbye to Noah, and walked away quickly
down the path to the ferry landing.
Noah waited for Mammy Kasan to go into her shop.
He approached her with his heart thudding.
"I am going to cut firewood," he said weakly.
He was wearing two pairs of trousers and two shirts, and was
fearful that Mammy Kasan would notice. But she was preoccu­
pied, counting out pills from a brown bottle into the palm of her
hand.
Noah raced through the coconut grove and on through the
scrub and grass, taking a roundabout route to the ferry landing. Ai
had dashed the ferryman a pound note and told him to wait for
Noah. He grinned as he watched the boy squelch clumsily across
the mudflats then stumble breathlessly down the landing stage.
"My sister . . . " Noah began.

1 88
 "Come, Kekura," the ferryman laughed, "let's go."
As the ferry slid slowly out into the stream, Noah looked back
anxiously at the path to Bambatuk. He half expected Mammy
Kasan to appear, with her gown billowing about her, to order
them back.
"You were lucky," the ferryman said, straining at the rusty
winch. "If your sister had chosen to cross in the evening, the river
would have been down and you would have been stranded."
Noah watched the blurred shadow of the raft in the olive water.
Mangrove pods drifted with the current, and yellow butterflies
caught by the river wind flapped and flurried near the surface.
As the ferry bumped against the landing, Ai seized Noah by the
arm and hastened him away from the river.
They skirted the first village they came to, using a grove of
mango trees to keep themselves out of sight of the houses. But
they were close enough to hear the murmur of voices and the
thud of pestles, and feared that some kind of alarm would be
shouted at any moment.
Clear of the village, they regained the path and walked on
through the heat of the day. The air was heavy with humidity and
Noah's ears throbbed. He complained that his legs were numb and
his throat dry, but Ai insisted they press on. All night they walked,
picking their way down the moonless path through a wilderness
of mangrove forest. Occasionally they disturbed a nightjar resting
in the warm dust of the path, and it would fly up clumsily and
break the cloying silence with its churring cry.
At noon the following day they reached a town where Ai had
friends.
That night Noah woke from a dream in which Denka was
fumbling in the darkness for his flute. It was the first time he had
thought of the blind man since the morning he had left Bambatuk.
I must whittle him another flute if he cannot find that one, he thought.
Then weariness enclosed him and he fell back to sleep.
Two days later they reached Bonthe where everyone fussed

1 89
over Noah and urged him to recount his adventures. Ai had
scarcely seen her brother in the eight years since Tina Kome, their
father, had left Moyamba, and as Noah spoke of his vicissitudes she
responded with reproachful signs and exclamations of incredulity.
"Han! " she cried, as Noah listed the chores he had had to
perform for Mammy Kasan. "Han, that woman made you work
so ?. "
Though Ai knew that Noah was pining to rej oin his father,
she was unsure how to arrange for him to go home. Days passed,
until one day a friend of the family who worked in the colonial
administration, dropped by to announce that he had been trans­
ferred to Port Loko. On hearing of Ai's predicament, Mr Banya
said he would be only too pleased to take Noah north as far as he
was gomg.
With great trepidation, Noah passed into the charge of another
stranger. Yet by the time Mr Banya put him on a truck at Makeni
bound for Kabala, the boy's anxieties had vanished.
It was past midnight when the truck pulled up outside the
Kabala post office and Noah clambered down and hurried into
the shadows, bent on avoiding his relatives in Kabala and getting
home.
He arrived in Firawa several days later, footsore and alone. His
father clasped him in his arms and fought back tears. His mother
Aisetta's j oyful crying brought neighbours running. Yeli Fore, the
praise-singer, put all his heart into his xylophone, and the thrilling,
melodic phrases took such a hold of Tina Kome that he shouted
to the whole town to come and celebrate his son's return.
That afternoon, when the excitement had died down, Tina
Kome sacrificed a cow in gratitude to Allah, and vowed that his
son would never again leave his side.

Noah would subsequently make these events an allegory of his life.

He would recall the idyllic period before his separation from his
father (who died within a year of Noah's reunion with him) , and

1 90
compare it to life before colonial rule. And he would complain of
hardship and betrayal in the same breath with which he expressed
his perennial hope of rescue.
"Since my father's death I have been paddling my own canoe,"
he once told me, and went on to recount what it had been like
in the years after Tina Kome died, when he went to live with his
married sisters in Kabala and attend school.
"It was not an easy time I had then. I remember one time my
sister Mantene remarked that my father had petted me; now that
my father was dead I would have to fend for myself. So I was
there, struggling - going to find food, laundering, doing every­
thing in the morning before going to school. I had to take care
of myself."
But if he felt hard done by, there was always rescue at hand.
"I remember one Lebanese, Mr Hassan Mansour, who took pity
on me at one time and told me I could always go to him when I
needed help. As a small boy I often went to Hassan Mansour."
In 1 959 Noah passed his selective entrance exam and went to
high school in Magburaka. But in 1 962, in the run-up to the first
general elections after Independence, Noah was obliged to travel
the length and breadth of Ferensola [i .e. Kuranko-land] , canvassing
votes for his elder brother. When he returned to school, the prin­
cipal warned him that further absenteeism would not be tolerated.
So, when his elder brother summoned him in 1 964 to help with
another political campaign, Noah's school career came to an end.
"I couldn't go on because of hardship. I had to leave school
and return to Kabala," Noah said, leaving me to wonder to what
extent he blamed Sewa or circumstance for his woes.
"I was there in Kabala for some time, struggling. One day I
went to Lansana Kamara's shop to buy kerosene, and met Wing
Commander Macdonald, the District Officer. We talked for a
while and he asked me whether I would like to work. I told him
I would, but there were no j obs. He asked me to find him in his
office the next morning. I went to the office and found him. He

191
offered me work as a native administration court clerk. But I had
nothing of my own. He had to give me twenty leones to buy some
soap and clothes .
"After I had been there for some time, he posted me to Musaia
in the Fula Saba Dembelia chiefdom. I was there doing the work.
Then I decided to leave the native administration work because
I felt I was deteriorating educationally. I then decided to pick
up teaching. I was given an appointment in the District Council
School, the same school I had earlier attended as a pupil. So I was
there, fighting hard. At this time, while my contemporaries were
still at school, I was struggling hard to earn my living."
It was there, a few years later, that I met Noah and persuaded
him to come and work for me.

Whenever I move to a new country or embark on some new

venture I am besieged by dreams of Sierra Leone. The dreams are
always the same. Noah is asking me when I am coming back. Why
I have not returned?
For years I have tried to fathom my unease - this persistent
sense of promises unfulfilled or broken. There were times when
I pretended it was the war that kept me from going back, or the
pain of returning to places I still associated with Pauline. But what
was it, really, that cried out for resolution?
Whenever I broached these matters with Kuranko friends, they
assured me that I owed them nothing. My first published ethnog­
raphy - known as "the Ferensola book" because of the iconic
value it had at a time when Kuranko were struggling for political
recognition - is still sought after by Kuranko exiles in Freetown
and abroad. And in academic circles, my ethnographic work has
won international awards and been widely praised. Why couldn't I
accept that what is given goes far afield of the giver, and does not
necessarily have to return to its source? Is it that we find it difficult
to escape the sense, so famously captured in the Maori notion of
exchange, that gifts are imbued with the hau of the giver, and that

1 92
Second-year undergraduate, A uckland, 1 959.
With Fleur A dcock, WellinJ;ton, 1 9 62 .

ii
 Pauline, Tui O 'Sullivan, Vincent O 'Sullivan, Les Cleveland, myself,
at the Lake Ferry Hotel, southern Wairarapa, December 1 9 65.

Outside the City Hotel, Freetown, Not long after returning to New Zealand,
Sierra Leone, October 1 9 69. early 1 9 65.

lll
 With Heidi and Pauline in A uckland, Christmas 1 9 78.

With renowned storyteller, Keti Fermke Koroma, Kabala, northern Sierra Leone, April 1 9 79.

lV
Saran Salia Sanoh, Firawa, 1 9 79. In Canberra, A ustralia, 1 985.

Noah Marah, Firawa, 1 9 79 .

v
 -·�

Rose Marah and Sewa ("S. B. ) Marah, Freetown, 1 9 79 .

"

With Zack ]akamarra and Pincher Jampijinpa, at Paraluyu, Central A ustralia, 1 990.

VI
With joshua, Francine, Mandy Thomas, joel, and Allan (Lanny) Snyder,
Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, 1991.

With Joshua and Sam Hunt, Paremata, Wellington, 1991.

Vll
 With Heidi in my ciffice, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2004.

My parents, Emily Jackson and D'arcy Jackson, on their 55th wedding anniversary, Auckland, 1991.

Vlll
this "wind of life" forever longs for the place where it originated?
Does this sense of circularity, of a desire for closure, compel us to
return what we receive to the place and person from which we
first received it? And does this explain why I have been troubled
for so many years by a sense of owing Noah something I cannot
pay?
Yet perhaps it is the very notion of debt that is the problem, not
my failure to repay. For to speak of credit and debt is to construe
a human relationship in purely contractual terms.
This is not the jargon that my Kuranko friends use.When I hear
from them, the only claim they make is that I return, that I not
allow the "path to die". So if there is any failure on my part it is
not a failure to discharge a debt, nor what might seem indifference
to the ever-widening gulf that exists between the privileged world
I inhabit and the world of hardship they presently endure; rather,
it is a failure to give more fully of myself - a failure to recognise
the kinship that exists between us.

Not long after writing these lines in 200 1 , I received a phone call
from Sierra Leone. It was Noah's brother Sewa, telling me that
their brother Ali had died. Sewa said he wanted me to be the first
to know. And to convey to Heidi, my daughter, the sad news. We
talked for twenty minutes or so - of Ali's descent into insanity, of
the tragic death of his son and the devastation of the war. I remem­
bered Ali with heartbreaking vividness, his immediate smile, his
unfailing generosity, and the day Pauline and I left Freetown on
our way back to England, when Ali ran up the gangway minutes
before we sailed, with oranges for Heidi.
In January 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end
of its brutal decade-long civil war, I went back to the country
I had first visited thirty-three years before. Miraculously, Noah
and Sewa were still alive, though neither had escaped the war
unscathed. Over the next eighteen months my friendship with
Noah was reborn and I ghost-wrote Sewa's biography. When they

1 93
died within a year of each other in 2003 , I felt that I had lost not
only two of my oldest and dearest friends, but my link to the
country that had become my second home. But then Noah's first­
born son Kaima, who was only a year older than Heidi and whom
I had known since he was a small child, begged me to help him
with his education, which had been disrupted by the war. With
Kaima and others of his generation, I suddenly found my relation­
ship with Sierra Leone renewed, and realised that the path went
on, just as Noah had told me so long ago when we first went to
Firawa.

1 94
 I n t h e Sa n d h i lls

I grew u p i n a land-locked town, and became infatuated with the

sea. But like everything else on which I set my heart, the sea was
inconstant and ambiguous. During rare visits to the coast, the sea
occupied, in my psyche, the place of the unconscious. At night I
would fall asleep listening to it throw itself into its heavy-hearted
Sisyphian task, its voice by turns irascible and calm. By day I would
taunt it, hurling stones at its slathering tongue, or build dikes and
moats that it could reach but not erode. It would avenge itself in
my dreams, dragging me helpless and voiceless across the ironsand
into its dark maw.
When I walked to the beach from my uncle's house in New
Plymouth, the seagrass underfoot would feel simultaneously spiky
and spongy, then scuffed and dry where the sandy path debouched
onto the railway line. Sometimes I would place pennies or pebbles
on the tracks, and wait for the port train to flatten them. Mostly
though, I would press on, stepping from sleeper to sleeper over the
rust-coloured ballast until I came to where the path re-entered the
dunes, now thick with broom, marram, pampas, and lupin.
The broom pods explode in the noonday heat. I breathe in the
honey-heavy odour of lupin. Bumblebees hover. Flies buzz. But
there is no sound, no sight, no smell of the sea. Moving quickly
now, because the ironsand has made me a firewalker, I follow the
narrowing, broom-festooned track into the heart of the dunes.
There I enter a silence so complete and comforting that I still
sometimes seek its sanctuary. I hesitate. If I take one step forward

1 95
I will hear the sea. The uproar of the world. One step back and
it will again be silenced. I push on, and the sea is instantly in my
ears, its sound indistinguishable from the coursing of the blood
inside my head. I inhale a mingling of brine and kelp that is like
the sweat one licks from the skin of one's beloved. And the ocean
is rolling ashore, shredded on the black volcanic reefs, and a single
sweep of ironsand and rock leads my eye from The Sugarloaves
in the south to the White Cliffs in the north, and it is like the
promise of life.

When I finished my Ph.D. at Cambridge I worked for the Board

of Extramural Studies for a while, did some tutoring in anthro­
pology, made a return trip to Sierra Leone, and applied for j obs.
Toward the end of 1 972 I received a letter from Hugh Kawharu,
who had supervised my M.A. studies in Auckland; he had just
been appointed head of the new Department of Anthropology
and Maori Studies at Massey; would I like to j oin him as a senior
lecturer? It took only a few hours for Pauline and me to reach our
decision; she had completed her research and residence require­
ments for her Ph.D. on the Icelandic family sagas and was now
free to leave Cambridge; as for me, I was happy that Heidi would
grow up in New Zealand and, besides, if I was going to write, I
would need that silence in the middle of the dunes.
One day Herman paid us a visit, and pulled no punches in
voicing his opinion of my retreat. Like an avatar of Tiresius he
pronounced that I had cut myself off from the real world. I should
give up anthropology and return to "the university of life". My old
friend Harry visited a few weeks later. I still retain a vivid picture of
him standing in winter sunshine in the front room of our bungalow
in Palmerston North, bathed in that undying glow of cosmopolitan
promise that once made me feel such a clod in his presence. Now I
saw the fragility of Harry's fa<;:ades. The dilettante. The dreamer. As
he talked, I thought of his postcards from California where he had
lived for a while, working on screenplays. Such a far cry from the

1 96
sodden landscapes I inhabited, and Pauline's struggle with cancer. . .

The other day I sat on the beach, watching through palm fronds
as the sun went beneath the Pacific rim, waiting for the green
flash, which never came - or if it did, I missed it. But the colours !
A flamingo pink, becoming melon, then red again, a hard brick­
red - and all the while, the sea getting darker, ink-blue, until it
blackened, and the palms were black against the light. And then I
had a sharp memory of a time when the world was charged with
significance, with possibility, with a resonance beyond what I saw
and heard. I have lost that. All I can do now is recall that once I
had it, and that it was what I wanted to convey in words. Without
it I wonder if the words are worthwhile. Perhaps, because I can
remember that it was once there, I can find it again. Perhaps I need
somewhere like the desert to go in search of it ...

We talked about writing. But it was clear we were headed in

very different directions. While Harry was entranced by Marquez
and magical realism, I distrusted fantasy. Dealing with Pauline's
illness and working doggedly on my African material, I was guided
by Cendrars' dictum that one must write as one eats or breathes.
Writing must be a part of life, not a thing apart. "I do not write as
a profession . . . To live is not a profession . . . I do not dip my pen
in the inkwell, but in life. To write is not to live. It is perhaps to
survive. But nothing is in the least guaranteed . . . "

Harry also took a dim view of anthropology. He saw it as a

romanticisation of the archaic. By focusing on tradition, anthro­
pologists denied third world peoples the rich possibilities of
modernity. Surely one had a duty, he argued, as a child of privilege,
to change the third world for the better and not merely document
its obsolete and irrational forms? I agreed that one should not
exoticise tribal peoples, but felt strongly that one had no right to
impose changes on people of whom one was personally ignorant.
To stand aloof or set oneself apart from the third world, as I felt
Harry did, was to risk seeing that world solely as an obj ect, and to

1 97
easily fall prey to the habit of proj ecting one's own prejudices or
fantasies upon it - seeing it only as something upon which one
could work one's own will. But to live in it, to engage with it, to
risk oneself in it, was to challenge such standpoints. The question
of changing the world then became a question of changing one's
relationship with it.
That my affection for Herman and Harry was not diminished
by our disagreements was an oblique proof of the mystery of love,
which confounds our predictions and cannot be entirely explained
in terms of common interests or shared worldviews.
It was the same with Sam Hunt, with whom Pauline and I
had formed a close friendship during the two years we lived in
Wellington before heading off to Cambridge. Though this bond
had a lot to do with our passion for poetry, it went deeper than
words and survived Sam's arrant dislike of intellectualism and his
suspicion of marriage, both of which, in his view, spelled the end
of spontaneity. Did Sam never see the refutation of this opinion in
my relationship with Pauline? But then, prejudice, by definition, is
never something one subj ects to empirical test but a psychological
defence with which the ego protects itself from things it finds too
challenging.
My other boon companion during those years was Bill
Maughan.
After several years as an economist with the Treasury, Bill
had resigned his job and moved to the Manawatii with his wife
Lesley and his small son Karl, determined to write. After learning
that they had rented a farmhouse in the hills behind Colyton,
Pauline, Heidi and I dropped in on them one Saturday in the early
autumn, and before long we were visiting them every weekend.
We would ramble over the hills together, discussing everything
from the geology of the Pohangina Dome to Bill's latest rej ection
letter from the editor of Islands, and return to the house to warm
ourselves in front of a fire of pine cones and macrocarpa logs,
enjoy a hearty meal and listen to Bill's old gramophone records

1 98
of Kid Ory and Bix Beiderbecke. Bill had already written a satire
on the civil service called Good and Faithful Servants, as well as a
picaresque novel whose leitmotif was the Leonard Cohen song,
"Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have
tried in my way to be free". I read the typescripts and envied Bill's
Dadaist knack of writing tongue in cheek, his irreverent genius.
Now he was working on The British Empire for Two and Sixpence,
and everything was grist to his mill: his childhood in England, his
education in the classics, my adventures in Africa.
But even as I threw myself into my own creative re-irnaginings
of Sierra Leone, writing the poems that became the core of
Latitudes of Exile, I was working hard on an ethnography in
which fidelity to the facts precluded any imaginative licence. I
was thus continually switching between two kinds of truth, the
first embracing whatever enhances one's sense of life, the second
respecting academic conventions that constantly sap one's text of
vitality. Though Herman had once urged me to transgress bound­
aries and be eclectic, I was beginning to wonder how long I could
juggle the imperatives of science and art.
This question of truth arose not only in my writing, but in
my life, for Pauline was growing impatient with the medical
advice and treatment she was receiving. What good saving one's
life physically if this meant losing it spiritually? She was asked to
undergo a splenectomy that would prevent the dissemination of
her lymphatic cancer to stage three. Though this might provide
a useful medical statistic, it had no therapeutic value whatsoever
- something confirmed by Milan Brych, whom we consulted
in Auckland, and in whom Pauline immediately placed her trust.
In undergoing chemotherapy under the supervision of someone
whose medical qualifications were already being called into
question by the New Zealand Medical Association, yet whose
compassion helped restore her will to live, Pauline took the view
that science alone could neither explain life nor cure our ills.
These questions and quandaries found expression in the books

1 99
of poetry and ethnography I wrote during my Manawatu years.
But perhaps none of this writing better captures the curious inter­
penetrations of the poetic and the academic, of fact and fiction,
than the story that evolved around me, concerning the final days
of the French aviator and author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

At Massey, I generally avoided the staff club. I preferred to buy a

sandwich in the student cafeteria, find a quiet spot on the campus
and eat alone. It was a pattern I 'd slipped into during my school
days, though now it wasn't shyness that made me keep my own
company but the exigencies of writing. I wrote at home every
morning, then drove up to the university. I needed an hour to
myself in the middle of the day in order to unwind, take my mind
off Africa, readj ust to academe. But there was always a time lag
when I walked about in a daze. Occasionally, I would jot down
thoughts and images that related to what I had written that
morning or planned to write next day. Often I would be startled to
realise that I was staring vacantly into space, with only the haziest
notion of where I was. I would snap out of my trance to see
students walking along the gravel paths, descending the stone steps
in the shadow of the great cedars, griping about boring lecturers
and onerous assignments, or exchanging gossip about girlfriends
and binges. I realised I was living a shadow life, absorbed in Africa,
trying to recapture in words the sound and smell and sight of
things I might not see again for many years.
Sometimes it was my colleagues who brought me to my senses.
Like the day I was running late for my two o'clock class on the
Comparative Study of Myth, and parked my Citroen in a loading
zone outside the main building. A week later I received a letter
from a "Parking Committee", made up of faculty members, repri­
manding me for persistently parking my car in restricted zones. I
was asked what gave me the right to act as though I were a law
unto myself.
After that I went to the staff club a few times, to put in an

200
appearance, to try to meet people outside my own department.
Mostly people talked about television programmes, or the best
wines you could buy locally, or the intrigues of various commit­
tees they were on. I felt out of place. When my mind began to
wander and I began scribbling some surreptitious memo to myself
on the back of my chequebook, I knew it was impossible for me
to even feign sociability. I was too close to the laterite roads of
northern Sierra Leone, or too preoccupied by the lecture I had
to give on myth. Besides, I didn't watch television, have much
interest in local wines, or sit on committees.
One day, however, when I was in the staff club with members
of the English department, the talk got round to Antoine de
Saint-Exupery. I can't remember how we got on to the subject of
writers. Maybe someone had seen a documentary on television or
broached the subj ect of French wines. In any event, this balding
person in a rumpled herringbone jacket said that apart from Le
Petit Prince, Saint-Exupery had written nothing that compelled
real interest. I was struck by that phrase, " compelled real interest",
because Melvin Kirkwood looked as if nothing had compelled
him for a long time.
I said I didn't think Saint-Exupery should be dismissed lightly,
and that Saint-Exupery had once been my favourite writer. In
my late teens I had read everything by him and about him. I still
remembered the revelatory impact of Saint-Exupery's view that
the visible rests in the invisible, and that an author's task is to reveal
unseen connections beneath the surfaces of our familiar world.
Then, for some reason I still cannot fathom, I launched into an
account of Saint-Exupery's last years.
When war was declared in 1 939, Saint-Exupery received orders
to report for duty as a flying instructor at Toulouse-Montaudran.
Demanding that he be assigned to active duty, he was allowed
to fly several reconnaissance missions over Germany, winning the
Croix de Guerre for his flight to Arras in Belgium in 1 940.
After the fall of France, Saint-Exupery was demobbed. Knowing

201
he could never live in France while it remained occupied, he
made his way to America where he endured two and a half years
of isolation and inactivity. In early 1 943 he joined a group of Free
French sailing with the Americans to North Africa. At Ouj da, the
French were attached to the American Third Photo Group of the
Seventh Army. The squadron was equipped with new P-38 Light­
nings - fast, long-range aircraft adapted for strategic photographic
reconnaissance. According to regulations, pilots had to be no more
than thirty years of age, but an old friend of Saint-Exupery's in
the French Command had persuaded the Americans to allow the
forty-three-year-old Saint-Exupery to fly.
After one successful reconnaissance mission over France he was
grounded - the result of a crash-landing. He was to spend almost
a year in Algiers before he was permitted to fly again. Some of
his friends put pressure on him to accept desk jobs or diplomatic
assignments. Others were persuaded by his arguments that he
should be permitted to rej oin his group.
"The only thing that remained were the war missions," he wrote,
"- a few hours spent flying over France - something of the
dignity of an icy scaffold. It suited me fine. But being unemployed
I have nothing to look forward to that means anything to me.
Sickening discussions, polemics, slander - I'm bored by the morass
I'm entering . . . Everything is mediocre, I can't stand it. At 35,000
feet I was beyond mediocrity. Now I no longer have that outlet."
Finally, the Americans approved five more reconnaissance
missions in Lightnings from a base at Alghero in Sardinia. Saint­
Exupery felt rejuvenated. He flew his five missions, surviving
engine failure, fire on board, fainting due to lack of oxygen, and
pursuit by German fighters.
In July 1 944, the group was moved to Corsica in preparation
for the final thrust to liberate France. Saint-Exupery asked to
be assigned further flying missions. His close friends were now
desperately concerned for his safety and conspired to have him
grounded.

202
 He was permitted one final flight.
It was his tenth reconnaissance mission. Sortie No: XX 335
1 76. Date: 3 1 July 1 944. Time out: 0845.
At one p.m. he had not returned. At two-thirty p.m., after
numerous phone calls, radar and radio searches, his comrades and
commanding officer knew there was no longer any hope of his still
being airborne. At three-thirty an American liaison officer signed
the interrogation report: "Pilot did not return and is presumed
lost."
For over fifty years, no trace of Saint-Exupery or his aircraft
would be found. What came to light, however, was that the Messer­
schmitt pilot who shot Saint-Exupery down over the Mediter­
ranean unwittingly killed his hero and role model. The young
German not only owned all the French author's works in transla­
tion; he knew everything that was to be known about him, and
had enlisted in the Luftwaffe on the strength of his admiration
of Saint-Exupery's pioneering flights across the Andes and the
Sahara.

I cannot remember how my colleagues responded to these details,

but I do remember vividly running into Melvin Kirkwood in the
library a few days later and being taken to task for the unsubstanti­
ated story I had told. "Where did you get all that stuff about Saint­
Exupery being shot down by someone who read all his books?"
Melvin asked. " I 've been through all the critical biographies in
this library and I'm damned if I can find any reference to any
German airman who shot Saint-Exupery down.You sure you got
your facts right?"
I told Melvin I had read the story in an introduction to one
of Saint-Exupery's books. It had been an English translation. I
couldn't remember the title. I said I 'd try to remember more details
and get back to him.
Melvin phoned me at home. He'd been doing some more
checking and had come up with nothing. Was I sure of my source?

203
 "Now you've got me mystified," I said. I told him I would go
through all the Saint-Exupery books in the university library and
see if I could find the one I had in mind. " It's going back a few
years, though," I said.
I could tell that Melvin was beginning to suspect that I was
putting him on.
Over the next few days, I checked through every English trans­
lation of Saint-Exupery's works that I could lay my hands on. I also
skim-read several critical biographies. I was certain I had read the
story some six years before when I was living in Wellington. This
would therefore discount biographies and translations published
since that time. To satisfy myself that I had checked everything, I
lodged inter-library loan applications for those of Saint-Exupery's
books that were not held in our own library.
In the staff club, Melvin asked me how I was faring in my
scholarly search for the facts about Saint-Exupery's death.
The question brought smiles to the faces of his colleagues.
I was angry, but I also felt fraudulent, as if my reputation as
a poet really did debar me from credibility as a scholar. I asked
myself if I had been so convinced of the veracity of my account of
Saint-Exupery's death - an account it now seemed I had largely
imagined - then what store could be set by the ethnographic data
I had collected in West Africa and was now preparing to publish?
Perhaps it was true what people said about me - I should decide
whether I was a poet or an anthropologist, and stop trying to be
both.
That night I went home, determined to ransack my study, to go
through every folder of notes I 'd ever accumulated until I found
the piece of paper on which I now remembered scribbling, in
Wellington some time during 1 968, when ill in bed with flu, the
details of the story I had recounted at the staff club.
I finally found it.
There were four leaves of bank paper held together with a rusty
paperclip. Dated 20 March 1 968, the first page was filled with

204
notes about my feelings at the time . . .

Lying in bed, Pauline downstairs translating sagas, her unflagging,

cool meticulous routine, each day getting her quota done. Myself
cut off and isolated, unable to write, like a businessman who is
getting no returns . . .

The second page recorded my thoughts after reading Anal s Nin's

journals:

I am astounded at the reception accorded them. It doesn't figure.

She pretends to have written a faithful chronicle of her life for
her own edification, and yet the journals are so self-consciously
addressed to the world that one has to conclude that they are in
part works of fiction.

The third page consisted of two quotations from Spengler that I 'd
copied from Camus' Carnets:

It was the Germans who invented mechanical clocks, these terri­

fYing symbols of the flow of time . . .

The man who gives definitions has no knowledge of destiny.

The fourth page contained the following passage from Stuart

Gilbert's introduction to his translation of Saint-Exupery's Cita­
delle:

He took off at 8:30 on July 3 1 , 1 944; the weather reports were good,
the engines running smoothly, and the plane soared lightly into the
shimmering morning air, northwards towards France. At one-thirty
Saint-Exupery had not returned and his friends were growing
more and more anxious, as by now only an hour's fuel remained
in his tanks. And at two-thirty he still had not returned . . . That
evening a young German pilot attached to Luftflottenkomrnando
2, entering up the day's report in his logbook, wrote: "Tribun (i.e.

Avignon) has reported one enemy reconnaissance plane brought

down in flames over the sea. " Everything points to this plane's being

205
 Saint-Exupery's Lightning. By a curious irony of fate this German
airman who, after four crashes, had been assigned to an observation
post on Lake Garda, was a cultured young man and amongst the
most treasured books of his library, now buried under the ruins of
his hometown, were those of - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Under this I had transcribed an extract from one ofSaint-Exupery's

last letters:

I do not mind being killed in the war. What will remain of all I

loved? I am thinking as much of customs, certain intonations that

can never be replaced, a certain spiritual light. Of luncheons at a
Provew;:al farm under the olive-trees; but of Handel, too. As for the
material things, I don't care a damn if they survive or not. What
I value is a certain arrangement of these things. Civilisation is an
invisible boon; it concerns not the things we see but the unseen
bonds linking these together in one special way and not other-
WlSe . . .

I t was then clear to me that the story I had told a t the staff club
was in part a fabrication. I had conflated the young German
telephonist, whose name was Hermann Korth, with the pilot who
shot down Saint-Exupery over the sea.
Another thing struck me, rereading these lost pages. All the
quotations I had recorded were, in a sense, oblique commentaries
upon the impossibility of drawing a hard and fast line between
fact and fiction.
But I knew that Melvin Kirkwood would not be satisfied with
such a conceit.
Was I going to tell him that I 'd got my wires crossed? Would
argue that my story of Saint-Exupery's death was true to the
spirit of things if not completely faithful to the facts? Would I dare
suggest that we all improvise with what we remember of the past,
that no one, not even the most conscientious scholar, lives his or
her life faithfully recapitulating what has already been said and

206
done? Would I add that Stuart Gilbert had got his facts wrong,
confusing Sardinia for Corsica, misquoting the time of Saint­
Exupery's final sortie, mistranslating Korth's log report?
In the end I let the matter drop. I wrote Melvin a note, saying
that my search had been fruitless. I had failed to find the book, the
reference or any details that corroborated my story.

Since the end of the war, various accounts have purported to

explain how Saint-Exupery met his death.
First, there was Hermann Korth's, written in 1 949 when he was
a theology student in Germany.
Then, in 1 972, another ex-Luftwaffe pilot, Robert Heichele,
published an account in a German magazine of a mission he flew
over the south of France on 31 July 1 944. Heichele and his co­
pilot took off from Orange in Provence, and were patrolling the
Mediterranean littoral between Marseilles and Menton when they
encountered a P-38 Lightning flying about a thousand metres
above them. Inexplicably, the Lightning descended, and Heichele
manoeuvred into position behind it. When the Lightning was
within range he opened fire. He took another turn and again fired
on the Lightning. After a third attack, the Lightning began to lose
altitude. It crossed the coast, trailing white smoke. Then the star­
board engine burst into flame, the right wing dipped, and the
Lightning ploughed and somersaulted into the sea.
Heichele's account was corroborated by Claude-Alain Jaeger,
who had been a seventeen-year-old student in Biot in 1 944.Jaeger
was a spotter, and kept notes on any military activity he observed
in the area. On 3 1 July he observed a P-38 Lightning with Amer­
ican and French insignia flying at rooftop height and great speed
toward the open sea.
On the same day, a German defence company commander,
Leopold Bohm, was on duty at a place called Tete de Chien, high
above Monaco. He too observed a low-flying plane, pursued by
two others, crash into the sea.

207
 Since all these reports suggest that Saint-Exupery's plane went
down well to the west of Marseilles, it is difficult to reconcile them
with a fisherman's discovery in 1 998, off the coast of Marseilles,
of a bracelet engraved with the name of Saint-Exupery's wife,
together with a fragment of a flying suit, or with a diver's discovery
two years later of the remains of Saint-Exupery's P-38 Lightning
in the same area. Without any evidence that he was shot down, are
we to conclude that Saint-Exupery suicidally crashed his aircraft
into the sea?

208
 I n t h e S i l e n c e of t h e N i g h t

If the past is like an amputated arm, memory is its phantom pain.

When he was nineteen and living in St Petersburg, Blaise Cendrars

fell in love with a young Russian woman called Helene Lenotchka.
When Cendrars returned to Switzerland less than a year later, the
lovers exchanged ardent and j oyful letters. "You have succeeded,"
wrote Cendrars, "in restoring my soul, in warming a heart I had
deliberately hardened, with the kind of affection I have suppressed
in myself for a long time." In the summer of 1 907, Cendrars
received news that Helene had died in a house fire. Distraught
and despairing, he railed against reason and romanticism, cursing
the way they fool one into thinking that life is less arbitrary, less
indifferent, than in truth it is.

I spit on the beauty that spells unhappiness

I spit on reason when it seeks to be too fine
I spit on destiny when it refuses to admit nothingness
I spit on the words that deceive the animal
I spit on life that does not listen to life!

There are certain events and experiences of which we choose

not to speak. Not because they hold us in thrall, stilling the tongue.
Nor because we fear they might reveal our flaws or frailty. Still
less because we feel our words can never do them justice. Silence
is sometimes the only way we can honour the ineffability and
privacy of certain experiences. And so, in silence, we dwell upon,

209
rather than seek to override or alter the way things are. This, said
Miriam Cendrars, was why her father could never write his book
on the life of Mary Magdalene.
In L'Homme Foudroye, Cendrars refers to this work as his "secret
book" on which he had been working for a year. Entitled LA Caris­
sirna, it was a fictional life of Mary Magdalene, "the lover of Jesus
Christ, the only woman who made our saviour weep" . Though
the book was never written, Cendrars described it as "the most
beautiful love story and the greatest love that have ever been lived
on earth."
The same experiences that compelled Cendrars to write this
book also demanded silence. " His silence was its truth," writes
Miriam Cendrars. " Had he written it, it would have been, for him,
a negation of this truth. I ts truth is preserved in his silence." One
thinks ofWittgenstein, who fought in the same war as Cendrars,
though on the other side. "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one
must be silent . . . "

Cendrars lost his right arm in the First World War. Enlisting in the
Foreign Legion four days before Germany declared war on France,
he miraculously survived the Artois and Somme campaigns when
tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed for a few yards of no­
man's land. But his luck ran out during the Champagne offensive
at the Navarin Farm on 28 September 1 9 1 5 , when a machine-gun
bullet tore apart his right arm and it had to be amputated above
the elbow. Invalided back to Paris, Cendrars would tell his friends
that he lost his right arm on the same day that his literary hero,
Remy de Gourmont, died. But as for the war, it does not figure
directly in his writing for many years.
Speech, say the Bambara, is the bastard son of silence. The ances­
tors are the measure of all things . They keep their own counsel.
But we who follow them into this world speak without fore­
thought, and lose our hold on wisdom and peace. Speech disperses
the world; silence restores its wholeness. Speech burns the mouth;

210
silence heals it. Speech builds the village; silence regenerates the
world.
It is not that we will say nothing of the things that oppress us;
rather that in silence things run their own course, and our words
are allowed to rise from a source beyond our willing. When this
happens, it is almost inevitable that what is most immediate to our
thought will find expression in images that are distant from it. As
in Cendrars' poem, " Orion", for instance:

It is my star.
It is shaped like a hand.
It is my hand ascended into the sky.
For as long as the war lasted I saw Orion through a rifle-slit.
When the zeppelins came to bomb Paris they came always from
Orion.
Today I have it overhead.
The main mast pierces the palm of this hand, which has to suffer
As my severed hand makes me suffer, pierced as it is by an
unbroken spar.

After the fall of France in 1 940, Cendrars retreated to Aix-en­

Provence and three "agonising years of silence". He lived alone. In
the kitchen ofhis small apartment, a portable Remington collected
dust. His books remained unopened, though he immersed himself
in the life of Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators
- probably because his two sons, Odilon and Remy, were fliers.
In his garden he grew some greens and medicinal herbs. Though
editors and journalists begged him to write, he wrote nothing.
Then, on 2 1 August 1 943, Edouard Peisson, a friend and fellow
writer, dropped in on a regular visit. The men chatted about
mundane things, then fell to reminiscing about the war. It was the
spark that touched off a fire, for that same day Cendrars dusted off
his Remington and began the first of his three autobiographical
novels, L'Homme Foudroye.

21 1
On another visit, a little more than two years later, on 26
November 1 945, Peisson noticed, on a small table to the left of
the entranceway to Cendrars' apartment, a bouquet of flame-red
carnations. " Flowers, this morning! " Peisson exclaimed, and asked
Cendrars if he was all right. The previous evening Cendrars had
received a telegram from Meknes in Morocco informing him that
his son Remy had been killed in a plane crash. He nevertheless
seemed calm, filled with a " kind of quiet pride", and showed his
friend a photo of Remy. A few days later he confided to Peisson:
"They want to bring Remy's body back to France. I am against
it. He is buried in the cemetery of a Moroccan village with his
comrades. Don't you think it's better to let these young airmen
rest in peace, in the sand, wrapped in their parachute shrouds like
the larvae of cicadas in their chrysalids, awaiting the day of the
resurrection?"

After surv1vmg lymphatic cancer in the early 1 970s, Pauline

harboured her resources. Though she returned to part-time
teaching at Freyberg High School and remained active in the
campaign against apartheid, her focus was the children's novel on
which she was working (instalments of which she read to Heidi at
bedtime over three years) and the study ofZen . A return to Firawa
during my sabbatical year in 1 979 proved to be psychologically
and physically very tough on her, and during 1 982-83, when we
lived in Canberra (I had a fellowship at the Humanities Research
Centre) and then in Menton, Pauline was often unwell. In the
spring of 1 983, she took a turn for the worse, and we went to
England. The medical diagnosis was cervical cancer. This time, she
refused to subj ect herself to orthodox therapy, and in August we
travelled back to New Zealand where she died five weeks later.
I found it difficult to go on living in the place where we had
shared our lives for so many years. At the same time, Heidi, who
was starting high school in Palmers ton North after a year in a

212
French lycee, was also finding it hard to adjust. For several months
I devoted myself to preparing Pauline's novel for publication, and
to home-schooling Heidi . But that summer, despite having found
shelter and love with new friends - Keith Ridler and Judith
Loveridge - we decided to go back to Canberra and start over.
The arid landscapes around Canberra, the ranges perennially
blue, received the ghost of my old self generously. Every afternoon
I would run up onto Mt Taylor and lie among lichen-covered
boulders and long grass, watching the winter sun melt into the
distant Brindabellas, alive to Pauline's presence in every change
of the light, every movement in the grass, every metamorphosis
of the clouds. But it troubled me deeply that I could not conj ure
her image in my mind's eye, could no longer hear her voice, or
recall the touch of her hand, nor the smell and contours of her
body. At times I struggled against the silence and emptiness; at
times I submitted to it, not wanting to fill it with my desperate
imaginings, or the noise of my own grieving. And so I dreamt.
Strange dreams in which she would appear to me contorted and
monstrous. But then, that winter;"night after night I woke from
dreams that were adrift with words. Words I scribbled half asleep
on scraps of paper by my bedside, and typed up in the mornings
after Heidi had left for school. These intense dreams lasted no
more than ten nights. Then I worked on what I had been given,
crafting a long poem whose central figure was Mary Magdalene,
and whose leitmotif was a black rose. I had no idea what lay at
the source of these images. But when I had finished writing I
was aware that my poem bore, both in its length and imagery, an
uncanny resemblance to Cendrars"'Paques a New York" , a poem
that was also scribbled feverishly on the threshold between sleep
and waking, during a period of hunger, penury and solitude in
New York City at Easter 1 9 1 2.

213
A dark island among wheat
the blond moonlight and someone dying 200

the dark islands of ourselves

waiting for miracles

kneeling on stone flags

gazing at your face

Madonna of the rock 205

that was not taken,

survivor of the nighdong pillaging

guardian of the street

saviour of this penitent

Magdalene of the black rose. 210

222
I lie under the cordylines again
at Maungahania 175

hearing the wind

in which I was quieted.

XII
Alive to you again
I remember circling frigate birds

at a feast of death and resurrection, 1 80

heads of a blue harbour

bruised by rain.
Now to the day

seaward and landward

you return 1 85

who lay all winter with me

in rock and pine

always you, mistress of my silences,

telling me what to say.

XI I I
Over a besieged city 1 90
you threw the folds of your blue gown.

When soldiers stole your ikon

their sledges would not move

in the heavy snow.

They slashed your face; 195

your scars weep when we suffer now.

So the suffering in our lives repeats

events 300 years ago . . .

221
One mountain thrown
against its opposite - 1 50

Your life and mine,

the daylight going, needful

of the dark,
and the broadcast stars -

Orion, Betelgeuse - 1 55
salt-rimed names a sailor gave

to the mountains here:

Stargazer, Moonraker, Tantalus,

until we are no more

than what appears of us 1 60

in wind-combed grasses
under a glacier.

XI
That which moved like the wind
and was sown like stars

no more a property of moving 1 65

than was foliage or cloud

than these words are . . .

It is some other uses me,

giving and taking despite my wish

determining the furrow 1 70

of the turning plough.

My mind is clouded. Images

sift through me like earth.

220
And then in the dry season
you in the shape of birds

answered as I sang. You drew the ash 1 25

from crocodile and fish

sieved it from sand,

refashioning her who had become for me

the river,
her voice the cataract, 1 30

and my arms branched again

and were green foliage

and the rains came

and my body was a bridge

on which you walked 1 35

into a hinterland
of promises

Lady,
and I gave you all I had to give.

X
The river relinquishes 1 40

hills wholly still as their cuneiform

shadows r ise
out of the valley.

I open my heart to them

that have destroyed 1 45

everything I know I am.

Night lifts itself

from the valley floor -

219
Lady, do I embrace

the myriad images, go down

through an olive grove 1 00

toward the sea, come

at evening to a village

whose ikon is a snake, meet

that dancer

braceleted with bone 1 05

whose voice is pitched

on the rising wind?

The thought of her body

keeps me from sleep,

I yearn 1 10
for the music of flutes

I heard in Firawa
above the rain.

IX
When my lover died
they dismembered and burned her 1 15

strewing the river

with her ash,

and for a year

I traced its source to the mountains,

descended it to the sea 1 20

singing her name

seeking the understanding she had lived.

218
Lady, should I note these colours
seeing you in them,

be led over stones,

my feet unsandalled, 75
and in you drown?

Do I trespass in your zone -

this heap of skulls
this rusted nail in wood
from which a cape of barkcloth hangs? 80

Are these your images

that stream in the sky

claw at the cliff,

that twist like willows at the pool?

Do I visit this form on you - 85

breasts daubed with mud,

blue whispers
accompanying me on the hill?

Can I trust myself in your arms,

my oppressor 90

my comforter,
feeling your breath ...

Lady, are you indeed myself,

are you the sickness-unto-death?

VIII
Red ochres and yellow pigments 95
smudge my face. I am

in a darkening colonnade.

217
 v

Memories of a theatre, tar­

paper pinholed with stars

a train thudding through, so

a man at the level-crossing gate

waiting in his car . . .

I enter the blue

flickering screen, the dark

green hills, 55
having imagined for almost 30 years

I would find you

and recognise who you are.

VI
Full moon silvers
the river 60

I give myself over

to the thought we may be one

Lady of the dolorous

briar and tower

here is your lover 65

saying you have abandoned him

here is the adzed cross

of your son.

VII
Yesterday the sea was indigo
today the same 70
as the cobalt sky.

216
 III
Lady, I pray t o you 25
whose sepulchre is this blue sky
its steps this hill
whose frescos are of eucalypt

I thirst for water

from your cupped hand 30
I am the rosehip and persimmon
I ask to be gathered
from the gravid tree
I want to be harvested.

IV
Ever I knew you in 35
grass afire in Firawa

hearth-stones
and the hunters' shrine,

saw you in cloud

at Waipatiki 40

(all error I persuaded myself then)

. . . and that white bird

of unblemished stone

a lapidary crane
hatched from the sea 45

that became a rumour

of perfect womanhood . . .

215
Magdalene of the Black Rose

a Blaise Cendrars

Magdalene of the black rose

I think of your voice
your willowy arms, green reach,
all of days done with sudden rain;

Lady, into your hands I give 5

this stony body
these blunt words
this hail-hammered suffering hardened man.

II
O n the Bridge o f Sighs
I turn to your metaphors, 10
between a palace and a prison
come to you alone
Lady of snow and crocuses
who received me once in your white room
who made legible my life 15
who gave me ointments and fetishes
to brave the rnidlife passage
of this world.

You were the lamp

among entangled roots, 20
sure steading
on the steep descent,
you the bed of the river I crossed in flood;

I was the granary you filled.

214
 Ha r m a t t a n

The circumstances attending Mary Kingsley's pioneering explo­

rations ofWest Africa make a curious story. Until she was thirty
she lived with her parents in Cambridge, England, and had almost
no life of her own. What she knew of the world she gleaned from
her father's library, and from his accounts of his frequent travels.
In the fall of 1 888, when she was twenty-six, her mother became
seriously ill. Not long afterward her father's health also began to
fail. Later, she would describe the following four years as "work
and watching and anxiety, a narrower life in home interests than
ever, and a more hopelessly depressing one, for it was a long losing
fight with death all the time." Of herself she writes, "I was no
more a human being than a gust of wind." When her parents died
within six weeks of each other in 1 892 and there were "no more
odd j obs any one wanted [her] to do at home", Mary Kingsley
turned her attention to her father's unfinished anthropological
work on primitive law and religion. Opening his atlas, she toyed
with the idea of going to South America, considered Ethiopia,
then settled on West Africa. Her mindset was typical of someone
bereaved. Confessing more feeling for the world of mangroves,
swamps, rivers, and the sea than the world of human beings , and
indifferent to her own future and fate, she said, "I went down to
West Africa to die."
Mary Kingsley's story was much on my mind when, a year
after Pauline's death, I went back to Sierra Leone. But I made this
journey, not to annihilate myself, but to see what remained of the

223
past, and what might be retrieved from its ashes.

It was dark when I stepped from the aircraft, with a soft rain falling,
the night cool. For a moment I hesitated, trying to see into the
darkness. Then I went down the steps after the others.
There appeared to be people camped on the tarmac: shadowy
figures among piles of cardboard boxes and bundles of clothing.
Smouldering braziers.
Lungi International Airport.
The unlit fa�ade offered no welcome.
Inside the terminal building it was pandemonium. People were
milling around the doorways, fighting to get through. The odour
of sweating bodies was overpowering. Thin hands grabbed at our
flight attendants. A wild-eyed woman, choking with frustration,
berated us in a language I did not recognise. A shouting man
waved a fistful of foreign banknotes in the air. Soldiers in fatigues,
who I thought at first were trying to restore order, elbowed their
way past.
"What the hell's happening?" someone asked. The Lebanese
guy in front of me muttered something about a forced exodus
of illegal immigrants. A fat man in a white linen suit, addressing
no one in particular, wanted to know how our baggage could
possibly be unloaded in the chaos.
I moved in a state of torpor and bewilderment. To me it seemed
that the crowd was the body of a feverish giant, and I was a piece
of shit passing through his gut.
Outside the terminal, I forced my way through a maelstrom of
headlights, blaring horns and young men demanding to carry my
duffel bag. I scanned the crowd for a face I knew. I half expected
to see Sewa. I thought he might have sent a car. But how could
anyone have got out of the city in this traffic?
By the time I boarded the bus it was almost first light. I
collapsed in a back seat and stared at the ambiguous silhouettes
of the bush, wondering vaguely what had precipitated the exodus.

224
The vengeful aftermath of another failed coup? An attempt to find
scapegoats for the bankrupt economy?
An odour of decaying vegetation and brine wafted through the
open window. Six years had passed since I was last here. I had
written to Noah and Sewa during those years, but their postcards
back only reminded me that my letters were poor compensation
for my continuing absence.
I waited at the ferry landing as the light leaked into the sky. The
peninsular mountains came out of the haze like darkroom images.
Raw sienna scars showed where the bush had been slashed and
burned. Below the bush line I made out the towering cotton trees
and rusty roofs of Freetown. Here Pauline and I had seen out the
rains; from here we had sailed when the rains returned. Here I
had gathered the raw materials for everything I had written.Yet a
terrible gap existed between the regions I had created in my mind
and the country I was now re-entering like a thief.
I hoisted my duffel bag onto my shoulder. A brick of brand­
new banknotes, one thousand of them in exchange for two
hundred dollars, dug into me. I tried to recollect details of the
night - the departure lounge at Gatwick, the afternoon I'd spent
with Harry in Soho only twenty-four hours before. But every­
thing was blurred and remote. All I could remember was the half­
empty aircraft pounding through the night, myself unable to sleep
for thinking of the void into which I was being hurled, and frag­
mented images - the grimy panelling, the torn upholstery, the
cracked plastic of the cabin light, and a group of attendants leaning
over a half-conscious woman, covering her nose and mouth with
an oxygen mask, her desperate eyes begging for air.
Did this happen or was it something I dreamed?
The bus clattered onto the ferry. Passengers got off. No words
were exchanged. I was drenched in sweat. My ears were ringing
from tiredness. I stood at the rail, shuddering as a chain was dragged
across the iron deck. As we moved out into the river, I felt that my
body and the boat were one, chipped and battered, forcing their

225
way through the Stygian water.
The engines throbbed inside my skull.

A man with a toothbrush in his hand watched me from the

verandah of a house. He spat a gobbet of toothpaste and saliva
onto the red earth as I walked past. A scabrous dog, sniffing at my
heels, followed me down the rain-gouged laterite lane.
The humidity was oppressive. I picked up a stone, intending
to throw it at the dog, but couldn't muster the energy. Perhaps I
didn't have the heart.
Sewa's house was isolated from the corrugated-iron shanties of
the quarter by a wall with glass shards cemented into it.
When I banged my fist on the iron gate a disgruntled houseboy
in bare feet unlocked two padlocks and drew back the bolt. He let
me in without asking who I was.
Rose came out to greet me. She seemed taken aback, as if my
letter, with my arrival details, had not reached her. We embraced
like strangers.
"Sewa's in Zimbabwe," Rose said. "At an I. L. O. conference."
Rose's daughter Nadia appeared, and hid shyly behind her
mother.
"Nadia's home today," Rose explained. "She's not feeling well.
Do you remember Michael?"
I followed Rose and Nadia into the house, out of the glare and
the heat.
"We didn't think you would come back. Especially now, with
things so bad. But then, with Pauline . . . "
Rose stood in the gloomy parlour, the curtains drawn against
the sun, and I felt I had no business to be there alone.
"Where's Baromie?" I asked. "And Chelmanseh and Abu?"
"They're at school. They just left. You probably passed them on
your way here."
When Rose said she would get Prince to prepare a room for
me and fix me something to eat I wanted to tell her not to bother,

226
that I would move on, even though I had nowhere else to go. But
I could see she was taking refuge in busyness, and when she left
the room I went to the window and looked out across the inlet.
Everything was familiar. The smell of palm oil and dried fish. The
big mango trees between the house and the foreshore. The cough
and thud of pestles in a wooden mortar. Women pummelling their
laundry on a granite boulder at the water's edge. It was what I had
wanted to recover, these mundane elements of a life Pauline and
I had shared. Yet now they only made me realise that nothing was
really the same or could be ever again. Memory is no stranger to
the land of the dead.
Rose brought me a plate of fried eggs and spam, slices of cabin
bread, a thermos of tea - her best approximation to an English
breakfast. I ate without appetite as she fussed about the parlour,
straightening antimacassars on the plush sofas and checking to see
that Prince was preparing my room.
When I 'd finished eating, she called Prince to come and take
the dishes away. Then she showed me my room.
" I 'll leave you to rest," she said. "Do you want me to close the
door?"
"Thanks."
I kicked off my shoes, stretched out on the bed and fell instantly
asleep.

A rooster was crowing raucously. I tried to force myself awake, but

it was like being underwater, my body waterlogged, the sounds of
the surface a long way off. Then waves of desolation swept over
me, and I was fighting back tears. Why had I come back? What
did I hope to gain? Yet this was surely how Pauline had felt in
Kabala, loneliness and despair gnawing at the pit of her stomach
like hunger. I closed my eyes, imagining her alone in the house
during the weeks I was away amassing data, filling my notebooks
with ethnographic imponderabilia. She is in the hammock on the
porch. Vultures claw restlessly on the tin roof. She has pinned to

227
the wall her friend Anne's postcard of Kings College chapel in
the snow. From the hammock she can see the room which was to
have been her study. Through the barred window, she observes the
fronds of the palm outside, weighed down with chattering palm­
birds. On the table, her books are already curled and cracked by
the heat, and the harmattan has covered them with red dust. In the
corner of the room, a mason bee is secreting another rim of red
mud on its nest. While my days are filled with myths and magic,
hers are marked by the clank of a bucket lowered into a well, a
child crying, the patter of drums, and at night the weary trill of a
single cicada in the ceiling. As I sleep, she lies awake, stifled by the
smell of the chaff palliasse. She is killing time. She is seeing her life
drain away like dirty water. She curses me for having dragged her
to this God-forsaken place, having to hear me out when I come
home with stories of things I have seen and accomplished. Her
mind is like the fired grassland. Thoughts come to her that she can
do nothing with. When the fire is out, there is only smouldering
resentment against the fact that she has to carry the burden of
supporting me, that she has shelved her own life so that I can have
mine, that I stride ahead of her, all energy and ambition, acting for
all the world as if she does not exist.
And yet, deep down, I knew that Pauline did not experience
these things, and that I was simply projecting onto the past my
own self-lacerating guilt.

On the road into the city throngs of people were trundling hand­
carts or carrying basins of cassava on their heads. Near the filling­
stations, long lines of vehicles waited for a rumoured delivery of
petrol. At the pumps, plastic containers of every size and shape
formed neat rows. The heat from the broken road made the sweat
pour from my face.
Like a sleepwalker I drifted through old neighbourhoods.
Oranges, groundnuts, heaps of red peppers, okra, onions, and
bunches of cassava were laid out on rickety stalls. Women shouted

228
the prices as I passed. Kids chased each other through the market,
brandishing plastic weapons. Beggars hissed for handouts.
I made my way down to the waterfront. I wanted to find The
Damascus where Pauline and I used to go for hamburgers. But
the cafe was long gone. Another shattered window and derelict
interior, another sign obliterated by heat and rain.
At the City Hotel I took a seat at a tin table on the balcony.
There was a faint breeze off the sea and a smell of asphalt and
oranges. An army truck moved down the street, with soldiers
sitting impassively in rows, weapons between their knees.
I wondered whether the club-footed waiter would recognise
me. But when I ordered a beer, he said nothing. I looked down the
street to where the sky was soaking up the sea in a heavy haze. I
watched the whores stumbling up the steps. I had come back from
the dead. I was a wandering ghost, invisible to them all . . . a white
egret under the oblivious feet of a grazing herd.
One of the whores was wearing a black vinyl miniskirt and
lacquered wig. Audaciously, she greeted me by brushing her hand
against my crotch and asking if I wanted to love her.
" Bo, lif me ya ! " I said angrily.
" Yu say mi na senjago-oo ! "
"No," I said, " I didn't mean that."
She sniffed the air and stalked away, and I began writing a post­
card to Heidi, who was staying with friends in Canberra. Then I
remembered that I had no stamps, and the post office had been
out of stamps for several days.
At the telephone exchange there were several anxious Euro­
peans trying to place calls. They were wearing cheap sandals and
embroidered shirts. They greeted me with sickly smiles, as though
our anomalous presence and colour demanded some mutual
recognition.
It was more than an hour before my name was called and I
entered the cubicle and unhooked the receiver. A recorded voice
repeated over and over: "You've been connected to the Freetown

229
international exchange. Will you hold on the line please, thank you."
After a twenty-minute wait I was informed that there had been
no reply.

That evening Rose warned me to lock my windows. In spite of

the curfew, bandits roamed the city after dark. The wealthy could
afford to hire armed guards to protect their property. But with
Sewa away, we were vulnerable. And it was no use seeking police
protection; the police, like other civil servants, were so rarely paid
that extortion had become their livelihood. Rose said that the
children slept in the room next to hers. But often she could not
sleep, waiting for the dogs to bark, hearing gunfire in the city and
the shriek of sirens.
"Does this happen every night?" I asked.
"Not every night."
"Things have got a lot worse in the last six years."
"Yes," Rose said, "life is very hard for us."
"Do you think things will get better or is it too late?" I was
thinking of the festering mounds of garbage I 'd seen in the down­
town streets, the hulks of cars in the filthy backwaters of tidal
creeks where people tended their plots of chilli and cassava.
"I don't know, Mike. I don't know what to think. Nothing works
any more. The public hospitals have run out of medical supplies.
You even have to buy aspirin and soap on the black market. Petrol
is thirty leones a gallon - if you're lucky to find any. A bag of rice
costs one hundred and eighty. People beg for food."
"It can't be easy," I said, "watching things fall apart, not being
able to do anything about it."
"You learn to accept things ." Rose shucked off her sandals
and tucked her feet under her. "Do you mind me asking about
Pauline?"
" She had cancer," I said. "She died of cervical cancer."
"Dear God," Rose muttered.
I didn't really know where to begin. Pauline used to say that a

230
person's death summarised and illuminated his or her whole life.
It was something she'd taken from her studies of the Vikings . But
how was I to tell the story of her life?
"It was diagnosed early," I said, bitter at the thought of it. "It was
treatable. The English radiologist said she should have a hyster­
ectomy, then cobalt and chemotherapy. Pauline could accept a
hysterectomy, but not radiation and chemotherapy. She had sworn
never to go through that ordeal again. The radiologist told her she
was taking her life into her own hands. Pauline walked out of the
room. I stayed and tried to explain what Pauline had been through
when she'd had Hodgkins. The radiologist said she could sympa­
thise, but Pauline wasn't a doctor, and she would have to respect
the advice she'd been given; it was her best chance of getting
well again. I didn't know which way to turn. I read some medical
textbooks and tried to get a sense of what we could expect. But
Pauline had other ideas. When I told her that the prognosis was
good if she began a full course of treatment, she said she didn't
want to be bombarded with medical statistics, she wanted my
love and support. She thought she could make herself well again.
She read Krishnamurti and turned to Christian Science; she went
back to her study of Zen. She said that tumours were shadows of
the mind cast across our bodies. She was convinced that through
meditation and deep relaxation she could become the kind of
person who could not be ill. She seemed to be seeking some kind
of purity of heart. A state of grace. I couldn't share her faith. But I
didn't argue. She was so resolute. It was inconceivable to me that
she might die."
Rose fetched a deep sigh. "She had no treatment at all?"
"We tried a course of vitamin therapy for a while. We were sure
everything was going to be all right. She had to drink a pint of
carrot j uice every day and take all kinds of pills. Selenium, ginseng,
amygdalin, dolomite, evening primrose oil . . . I 've forgotten half
the things she had to take. For a while, she seemed to be getting
better. The doctor said the tumour was reduced in size . . . "

23 1
 "She went back to the radiologist?"
" No, to our G.P. I don't think he really believed in the meta­
bolic therapy, but he told Pauline he would respect her decision
and offer what help he could. We were really hopeful. But then the
toxins from the carrot juice began making Pauline ill . She felt she
was losing control. She stopped the whole regimen. She desper­
ately wanted to be in touch with some kind of deeper reality. She
went on long walks by herself. She made me vow not to tell anyone
she was ill. She didn't want people relating to her as a sick person.
It was a terrible time. For two or three weeks, we hardly talked to
each other. I felt I was losing her, yet was confused about what was
happening. I'm not sure she knew what was happening either. It
was as if everything was fated, and there was nothing we could do
to understand it or bring it under control. It wasn't a question of
living or dying. The words are too abstract. For Pauline, I think, it
was never really a matter of treating the disease. It was a question
of how she was to accept it. She wanted to live without clinging
to life, without bargaining. She wanted to yield completely. So that
death could not touch her. . . "
I could not go on. I was fighting back tears. Rose leant over and
placed her hand on mine. I told her I hadn't spoken of these things
with anyone. Until that moment, I had never voiced the anguish
I felt after Pauline had died, wondering whether I should have
prevailed upon her to revoke her decision, to undergo medical
treatment.
"I feel I failed her, and I can't stop thinking that . . . "
"Mike, it doesn't really matter what Pauline thought or what
you think. What matters is that you forgive yourself. And forgive
Pauline, too."
" Forgive? What do I forgive? "
"You have t o accept and forgive," Rose said, " i f you are t o go
on."
"But don't you see ! " I said angrily. "That's what I did, that's
exactly what I did! I accepted. I did not protest. I did not try to

232
dissuade her. I did not rage against the dying of the light! "
I stopped myself. I apologised. I said I was exhausted from my
JOUrney.

In the days that followed I had a feeling that something cata­

strophic was about to happen, but Rose assured me that it was
because I hadn't yet adjusted to the political situation.You became
deaf to the whispers about judicial murders, the bodies buried
in wasteland without ceremony. You steered clear of the security
police. You turned a blind eye to the armoured columns moving
laboriously up-country. As for "official" news, it was less reliable
than hearsay. There were always enemies of the state, infiltrating
the country from the east. And the President's " Special Friends"
were always arresting saboteurs, preventing coups, and purging
traitors.
I spent more and more time at the house, writing in my journal,
playing with the kids, talking to Rose. After the siesta hours, the
houseboys would beg Rose to let them start for home in case they
got held up in the traffic. I would fetch the children from school
and help Rose close the gate upon the outside world. The rhesus
monkey which Prince kept chained to the railing at the back steps
always wore a persecuted, pained expression as we went indoors,
as though we were abandoning it to its fate.
That night, Rose asked me if I still intended going up-country.
I gazed out into the night where bats were massing and squealing
in the mango trees. "Yes," I said, " I 've been thinking I should go
this week."
"Are you going to do more research?"
Nothing was further from my mind. "No," I said, "I just want to
see Noah, and visit Firawa, and see how things have changed."

On the cab of the Toyota was written NO CONDITION

IS PERMANENT. But the irony was almost lost on me. The
crowd surged forward, and I was shoved into the vehicle. I sat

233
dumbfounded and sweating between two enormous Mandingo
women. Leg-tied chickens squawked underfoot. An infant bawled.
I felt oppressed by nostalgia for a place I could not name.
Twenty miles north of the city, the Toyota Coaster ran out of
petrol and was abandoned. I flagged down a badly-overloaded
poda-poda. It banged and scraped along the road before stopping.
Everyone shouted for me to get in, and laughed uproariously
when I threw up my hands and said it was impossible. An hour
later, I managed to hail a bush taxi and got to Mile 91 at noon.
There were roadblocks everywhere. Soldiers dumped our
luggage onto the roadside and ransacked it for contraband. No
one protested. We turned out our pockets. We paid dashes. We
repacked our belongings and climbed back into our vehicle. Make­
shift barriers were lifted, or the decking was replaced on bridges
over turbid streams. In the cramped and stifling bush taxi, the talk
grew animated again, endless anecdotes about how diamonds got
smuggled out of the country in coffins, in basins of rice, or under
the gowns of old women.
I reached Koidu after a five-hour trip over a degraded, scab­
rous road. The vehicle ground to a halt outside the market. People
shouted impatiently for their bags. The air was filled with dust.
I tugged my duffel bag from a heap of vinyl suitcases, enamel
basins, and bundled clothing, and headed down the street.
My shadow formed and reformed on the laterite road.
I asked people to point the way to the address Rose had given
me. It was a mudbrick house with a rusting roof, and the kids
playing in the lane outside said Noah was not there and they did
not know when he would be back. I sat in a chair on the porch,
overlooking the lane, and waited.

Outside Koidu town

diamond-miners sluice
and pan
the shallow streams;

234
 Queues at the one
gas station open
wait for a tanker
from the south;

Black marketeers
deal in rice and soap;
street kids
sell cures for scabies -

Alum, tortoise shell,

powdered bone.
Incurably alone
I scribble

In my j ournal
in the gathering dark -
another miner
who cannot strike it r ich

Who consults diviners

and sits the bad
times out,
yet remembers

Driving all night

ten years ago
and coming home
to our Kabala house

Where we made love

on a straw palliasse
and wanted
for nothing.

Night was falling when Noah returned.

Ali had found him playing draughts in the market, and told him

235
there was a tubabu waiting at the house.
It hadn't even crossed his mind it might be me.
We embraced. We clenched each other's forearms, m the
Kuranko fashion. We tried to find words to cross the gulf between
us. But I was bone-tired. And Noah was clearly bewildered. He
did not know how to reach my grief. The closest he could come
was to say that Yebu Bah, from whom he was now separated, was
living not far from Koidu . Perhaps we could go and see her in the
mormng.

At first I failed to recognise her. She was sitting on a stool in the

backyard, poking sticks into the fire. Her shoulders were flabby
and hunched, her breasts like withered gourds.
When I greeted her she looked at me with a forlorn expression,
and tugged her lapa over her breasts.
I drew up a stool and squatted beside the fire. Ants were
scurrying from the split wood. Yebu did not look at me. She kept
sliding her callused foot across the hardened earth, among broken
groundnut shells, rice husks, cassava parings and stones.
I asked after the children.
"They are well."
I asked if her parents were still in Kabala. If everyone in her
family was well.
Then we sat in silence.
Gazing at the surface of the water in the pot, I remembered
how she and Pauline used to joke about the poster in the Kabala
clinic that showed germs like little gremlins jumping out of a pot
of boiling water and running away. What would Pauline have felt,
seeing Yebu now. Ten years ago she possessed the grace and energy
of a girl. She brought us gifts of oranges and papayas, and in return
Pauline gave her loaves of bread baked in our camp oven. Yebu
would break into gales of laughter at the slightest provocation.
It intrigued her that Pauline spent so much time with me. Was it
because I was possessive and wanted to keep an eye on her? Was I

236
jealous of other men? She liked to mock Noah's arch-seriousness.
She flirted behind his back, and stole coins from his pockets when
he took his siesta in the porch hammock - mischievous protests
against his seriousness and self-absorption.
After a while, Yebu got up and began sweeping around the
hearth with a switch broom.
"Awa," I said, " m 'bi nala."
She seemed not to care whether I stayed or went. Yet once she
would have teased me for hanging around the women's cooking
yard, and jokingly impugned my manhood.
Noah had already vanished. He and Yebu had not exchanged a
single word. I took my duffel bag and made to go.
Suddenly, she looked at me, letting the switch fall against the
side of her leg, and said in English, enunciating the words with
painful care: "I am sorry about Pauline."

After two days in Koidu I took leave of Noah and headed north.
He asked ifl wanted him to accompany me. But he was only being
dutiful, and I told him no, I was happy to make the trip alone.
I had let myself believe this j ourney would be a j ourney back
in time. I had thought that the familiar road, the red earth, would
bring me to a place where Pauline was still alive. The idea was as
illusory as the way the granite inselbergs appeared to recede over
the horizon as you drove toward them. By the end of the day, I had
withdrawn into myself, deaf to the palaver around me and blind to
the endless plains of elephant grass and fire-blackened lophira.
As the battered, overloaded poda-poda drove into Kabala, past
One-Mile, I caught sight of our old house, now almost hidden by
palms and mango trees. A ghost of what had been.
Next day I pressed on to the Seli River.
Though there was now a bridge at Yirafilaia and trucks going
to Firawa, I was determined to continue my j ourney on foot, as I
had in the past.
The swamps gave way to forest.

237
 The forest gave way to savannah.
Filaments of burned elephant grass, like commas and colons, lay
along the side of the track.
As the sun came up through the mist, I began to recognise
places where we had once stopped to rest. A granite tor, haunt of
a female djinn, where people brought offerings of fruit and kola.
A grove of locust trees, the pods like withered penises. I heard a
suluku bird calling its name repeatedly in the grass.
I drank fresh water from my flask. Suddenly, Pauline was standing
beside me. I had only to turn and offer her the flask and she would
take it, and I would watch her drink, and the water would spill
from her mouth and run down her neck; her dark hair cropped,
her cotton blouse unbuttoned, she would smile as she passed the
flask back to me. Once, I thought I heard her call my name.
At the foot of steep clearings in the bush, people had begun
the harvest. Men were threshing sheaves of rice on the tamped
earth. Puffs of dust were spirited away by the wind as the women
winnowed. When I sang out to them, the men and women paused
in their work and threw back greetings without asking who I
was or where I was going. I had the feeling that I was a ghost,
moving with Pauline like cloud shadow over tawny grass, or like
mist across the surface of a stream. And the people bending to
their tasks among the golden stubble were ghostly too. Unaware
of the chaos in the south.
In Firawa, I sat in the shade of a mango tree with the chief and
his elders. It too was a replay of the past. Chief Sewa relayed his
remarks through a praise-singer who shouted "nomor ! " in approval
of everything his master said. People were happy I had come back.
I was welcome to stay for as long as I wished. No harm would
come to me. I was their "stranger" .
Yet for all the customary assurances and goodwill gifts of grain,
the faces of the old men were grim.
For two years, people had not had enough to eat. At harvest
time, strangers came and ordered the villagers to sell their rice.

238
Those who refused were threatened. It was Government policy, so
the strangers said; the directive came from the President himself;
the army would intervene if there was any resistance. So people
sold much of their rice for a pittance, knowing it would be resold
on black markets in the south. And when the hungry time came,
people had to eat cassava and yams, and when these crops were
finished, they starved.
"Why should this happen?" one old man demanded to know.
"The President says we must place our destiny in his hands,just as
we place our destiny in the hands of Chief Sewa here. The Presi­
dent says he is father of the nation. He will take care of us. But if
this is true, why does he force us to sell our rice, denying us the
profit, leaving us so little food that our children waste away and
die? And why should he let strangers come and threaten us? Isn't
life harsh enough as it is?"
I had no answers. When I tried to explain I had come back to
Firawa to see old friends, the elders became impatient, so I bit my
tongue and feigned interest as each man in turn voiced his bitter­
ness and indignation.
I spent the afternoon at Abdul's house, sitting at the end of the
porch, lulled by the jabber ofAbdul's sewing machine. Then, in the
gathering dusk, I walked to the other end of the village to find the
house that Saran Salia had given Pauline and Heidi and me when
we lived in Firawa six years before.
The house was a charred ruin.
I spent the evening there, fossicking among the debris. Some
fragments of tortoise shell, a few broken porcupine quills, a handful
of cowries, a couple of crumpled horns, a trace of mica in the ash
and rubble: these were all that remained of the healing arts the old
man had practiced, and which had, perhaps, died with him. I sat
on the fire-blackened porch where we had spent so many hours
talking together. Fire finches flickered like lost souls in the gutted
rooms, tapping out - or so I imagined - some message from
the afterlife that I was too dumb to decipher. I strolled across the

239
abandoned garden we had made together and found the bedrag­
gled palm from which he had cut a bunch of bananas - a symbol
of kinship, as well as for sustenance on our j ourney. I stood awhile
in the darkness. Insects shrilled in the grass. I thought if I were
patient enough, if I had faith, he would appear out of the shadows,
leaning on his stave, a conspiratorial grin on his face, his hand
outstretched . . There are many ways that a bird can fly in the sky . . .
.

240
 P a rt T h ree

To a n d F ro W i t h i n t h e W o r l d
a n d U p a n d D ow n U p o n I t
 Russ i a n Dol l s

I travelled to Uppsala in Sweden without a cent in my pocket.

The flight from Canberra to Sydney was carrying the touring
Soviet basketball team to its next match. The Soviets had defeated
the Australian Boomers the night before in the third test of the
Wang Super Challenge. The tallest man on the team was Vladimir
Tkachenko, whom the press had nicknamed "the genial giant" .
At Sydney airport he was besieged by press photographers. They
wanted to get a shot of Vladimir shaking hands with a small boy.
I was reminded of that illusory room in psychology textbooks -
seven-foot four-inch Vladimir, lantern-jawed, Zapata moustache,
stopping to clasp the tiny hands of the tentative child. Franken­
stein's monster.
Between Bangkok and Dusseldorf a Finnish woman told me
the story of her life. Her husband was Australian. They lived in
Melbourne. She was flying home to see her parents for three
weeks. "A lot of Finnish women marry foreigners," she told me,
and nodded in the direction of the Finnish men across the aisle
as if to underscore her meaning. Sex tourists, the men had been
drinking steadily since we left Bangkok. They dozed and snored
and woke abruptly to order more Carlsberg. They reminded me
of the trolls in my childhood edition of Grimm 's Fairy Tales. " It's
the cost of spirits in Finland," the Finnish woman explained. "The
State has got the monopoly. Only once or twice a week can the
men afford to get drunk. When they do, they do it with a venge­
ance. Not like Australian men."

243
 " Quite," I said.
"Are you Australian?" she asked.
"No."
"Your wife?"
"My wife died three years ago."
"You have children?"
" I have a daughter. She's in Canberra, staying with friends while
I'm in Sweden ."
At the mention of Sweden, one of the sex tourists leaned across
the aisle, grinning inanely. "I business man," he said, "very good
business man." He ran a hand along his meaty forearm, then across
the simulated placket and necktie of his polyester shirt, as if it was
somehow proof of his acumen.
"I alcoholist." The troll's companion tumbled sideways, and in
a throaty slur spelled out his own triumphs. "Holiday . . . Thailand
. . . You understand! . . . Girl. Girl. Girl!"

When my daughter Heidi and I moved from New Zealand to

Canberra, I had no immediate prospects of a j ob, but through the
timely intercession of an old friend, Bob Tonkinson, I landed a
half-time, temporary position in the department of anthropology
at the Australian National University. It was a new beginning,
and I threw myself into teaching with enthusiasm. Over the next
eighteen months I came to regard my colleagues as friends, and
the city as my home. So when the department advertised a tenured
position, I felt confident that my teaching and publication record
would stand me in good stead, and I had left for Sierra Leone fully
expecting to return to a secure j ob.
I did not even make the shortlist.
Stunned, I appealed to the head of the department for an expla­
nation.
"The consensus in the department was that you are not really
committed to anthropology," he said.
How had this impression been formed? Was it because I

244
combined literature with ethnography? But I had told no one
of the novel I was planning to write, based on my recent experi­
ences in Sierra Leone - a book that would interleave a story of
personal loss with images of a disintegrating country. In any event,
if I had recourse to fiction it was because I did not want to add to
the anthropological literature of disappointment - memoirs that
conflate the dashed hopes of a middle-aged ethnographer with
the passing of traditional society, and foster the illusion that the
world was a happier place when both were younger. But other
rumours could as easily have undermined my credibility. Word
had got around, for example, that I taught "the anthropology of
self-development." Could this farcically distorted understanding
of the course I taught on hermeneutics and critical theory explain
the prejudice against me? The head was unwilling to discuss my
situation any further.
With hindsight, I realise that I should not have been so mysti­
fied or surprised. Anthropology was my vocation, and I had lived,
breathed, and written it with as much vitality and integrity as
anyone I knew. But creative writing had commanded an equally
imperative place in my life. Did one undermine or invalidate the
other? Though I had long ceased thinking of them as mutually
antagonistic, many academics - purists and pedants to the last
- regarded science and art as antithetical, as unalike as chalk and
cheese, or east and west, and recoiled from their intermingling
with the same horror as a racist recoils from miscegenation.
Broke and bewildered, I began work as a plongeur in the kitchens
at University House. Sweaty, greasy and dejected, I stood at a stain­
less-steel sink filled with scalding water, scrubbing and scouring
aluminium pots, pans, trays and utensils, and stacking them in the
automatic rinsing machine. I had done this kind of work when
paying my way through university, but now found it unbearable.
It was not the menial nature of the work so much as the bitter
irony that the only j ob I 'd been able to find was on the campus,
and that, as I toiled away in the kitchen the swing doors to the

245
bistro would open whenever a waiter came through, revealing my
erstwhile colleagues at intimately-lit tables, making small talk over
glasses of red wine.
My boss was Rena. She had emigrated to Australia twenty­
eight years before, and married a Yugoslavian. Greece had changed
for the better, she said, but she would never go home. "Life is
hard," she told me, "but you can't complain."
Over the next few years on a dole, struggling not to complain,
or to bear grudges against those who had judged my "commit­
ment to anthropology" so harshly, I found consolation in the story
of Arnold van Gennep whose classic work on marginality (Les
Rites de Passage, Paris 1 909) strangely echoed the author's own
career. Twelve years after the publication of his pioneering mono­
graph, van Gennep could find no academic position, and settled in
the south of France where he raised chickens for the rest of his life,
living in reduced circumstances and known locally as "the hermit
of Bourg-la-Reine" . Yet he "did not decline into sour resent­
ment, or even display in his writings any patent bitterness; on the
contrary, troubles and setbacks never perturbed him: he set them
aside and completely forgot about them."

Of my first jet-lagged hours in Uppsala, I remember little, apart

from the embarrassment of being invited to a breakfast with several
distinguished anthropologists, and having to dream up excuses for
why I was not ordering anything from the menu.With what maso­
chistic pride and pig-headedness one protects oneself from the
ignominy of penury! I had been invited to participate in a confer­
ence of Africanists and to stay on at the university for ten days,
giving seminars and lectures. Yet I felt like an interloper, and was
deeply ashamed of my straitened circumstances. Strolling through
the old town, the opening lines of Knut Hamsun's Hunger came
to mind: "It was during the time I wandered about and starved
in Christiana: Christiana, this singular city, from which no man
departs without carrying away the traces of his soj ourn there". As

246
if suddenly brought to my senses, I went immediately to my host,
Anita Jacobson-Widding, in the department of cultural anthro­
pology, and explained my predicament. Not only did Anita get me
an immediate advance on my honorarium; she had it increased!
And so I wired Heidi some money and bought myself a three­
course meal.
The university had booked me a third floor room at the Grand
Hotell Homan, overlooking the River Fyrisan and the twin­
towers of the cathedral. After a sound night's sleep, I woke before
first light and set out to explore the town. The cobbled streets
were wet from overnight rain, and as I crossed the Fyrisan I felt
a strong sense of deja vu . Convinced I had been there before, I
racked my brains trying to fathom the associations.
Then I realised, or remembered: this was where Ingrnar Bergman
had filmed several scenes of Fanny and A lexander. Here was the
weir where the two children imagined themselves drowned. Here
was the cathedral. And here was the street that ran past the theatre
where Oscar Eckdahl was actor and manager.
Oscar's Christmas speech to the staff and players of his theatre
is an illuminating account of how our private lifeworlds are
embedded within the wider world like Chinese Boxes:

My only talent, if you can call it that, is to love the little world inside
the thick wall s of this playhouse. And I'm fond of the people who
work in this little world. Outside is the big world, and sometimes this
little world reflects the big one so that we understand it better. Or
perhaps we give the people who come here the chance of forgetting
for a while, for a few short moments, the harsh world outside. Our
theatre is a small room of orderliness, routine and love.

Oscar sees the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm as a rela­

tionship between the secure space of hearth and home (the theatre
is above all a familiar place) and the harsh, open space of the world.
Each person is enclosed within a family, each family within a
community, as a seed is lodged within its hull. These contrasts also

247
suggest a contrast between what is elusive or concealed, and what
is accessible and can be grasped.
Many anthropologists reduce the personal to the cultural, as if
people living in the same place, participating in the same economy,
and having roughly similar views about boat building or begetting,
sorcery or sociality seldom if ever call their lives into question, and
only change their ways of thinking and acting when the outside
world forces itself upon them. But to be human is to be, in some
respects, uniquely oneself, yet in other respects to be the same as
everyone else; "as a Roman common-sense 'psychologist' pointed
out long ago, Si his faciunt idem, non est idem (if two people do the
same thing, it is not the same thing) " .
Michel Foucault - who did his primary research for Madness
and Civilization while living and teaching in Uppsala in 1 95 5 ,
seemed t o be seeking toward the end o f his life for the oblique
connections that link the public surfaces of discourse with the
private depths of biography. Drawing inspiration from Nietzsche's
view that every great philosophy is "a confession on the part of
its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" ,
Foucault was clearly fascinated not only by the ways in which
truth is defined by the dominant discourse of a period or a society,
but by the ways it is realised and embodied in individual lives.
This struck a chord in me.
As a boy, I was mystified by what drew people to their various
trades and destinies. What led Mr Trigger to take up butchery, and
his brother to become a chimney sweep? What unspoken gratifica­
tion did Mrs Peters, our draper, derive from the curiously magni­
fied sound of her scissors on the wooden countertop as she sheered
through a yard of cotton, and what, in her foreign past, presaged
the skill with which she pulled a length of silk from a bolt and laid
it along the calibrated brass edge of the shop counter? What were
the secret links between their invisible and visible lives?
In Uppsala, my thoughts kept returning to this relationship
between who we are and the worldviews or professions to which

248
we are drawn. One afternoon I visited the garden of Carl von
Linne at Svartbacken. Linneaus lived in Uppsala most of his adult
life, his ambition to create a systematic taxonomy for all known
animals, plants, and minerals. But what was it, I asked myself, that
determined his "deep-seated, almost compulsive need for clarity
and order," his passion for cataloging and sorting into groups and
subgroups everything that passed through his hands? And what
led him to turn from empirical studies of wild nature to a taxo­
nomic systematising that made order and the artifice of structure
the greater imperative? Even his private correspondence reveals
this systematising zeal, this unshaken belief that he was "a prophet
called by God to promulgate the only true dogma" .
Late one night, I shared my preoccupations with Rene Devisch,
who taught at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and
had come to Uppsala for the same conference in which I was
presenting papers.
In Rene I discovered a kindred spirit, and Rene's own story
was a compelling example of the interplay between biography and
ethnography that so intrigued me.
A few years after our meeting, Rene published some of the
details of his story:

I n 1 972, after a few weeks of progressively mixing with the people

of the Y itaanda territory, I was given a double identity. I came to
be considered as a reborn chief Taanda, namely N-leengi, who,
in 1 939, had been led into exile. Moreover, I appeared to them
to be a good omen as I often reciprocated hospitality with the
offer of first-aid medical treatment, an activity which throughout
my stay took up an average of two hours a day. Perhaps reassured
by this aid, my hosts came to domesticate somewhat the unprec­
edented and intrusive nature of my presence by ascribing to me
a capacity to divert evil or danger. They first had perceived me
as a sauf-conduit during a fatal thunderstorm one evening in late
January 1 97 2 , when lightning set fire to the house of chief Taanda

249
 Kapata's successor, N-noongu. Kapata was alleged to have sent the
lightning - it was the night preceding his death - in an attempt
to kill his successor. Upon my arrival in the area at the beginning
of January, chief Kapata had been in mortal agony, and I was solic­
ited for medical help. Because of my association with Swa Kapata,
people believed that he had reached his exceptionally old age in
anticipation of my arrival. During a council following his burial, I
became in some way assimilated with Kapata's predecessor. Surely
unaware of the etymology of my first name - " Rene", literally
"the reborn" - a delegate from the regional chief N-nene asso­
ciated me in a kind of mythic narration with "Taanda N-leengi,
reborn from death". The Belgian colonial administration had taken
N-leengi into exile at Oshwe far away in the Kwilu region, some
five days' walk eastward, where he had died upon arrival in 1 939.
He was accused of having participated in the anticolonial revolt of
the Bamvungi prophetic movement. Somehow this position made
my anthropological interest in the ancestral past of the Yaka appear
as something genuine to the tradition. As I experienced things,
this event initially added to my confusion in the fteld, and only
later did it make sense when I discovered how one 's biographical and
genealoJ?ical pedigree can be redif med to conform to a consensus with regard

to one 's succession as titleholder.

This final sentence carried very personal connotations for Rene,

who had been named after his mother's beloved younger brother,
who died during her pregnancy. The son of a woman so grief­
stricken that she imagined her child to be the reincarnation of her
dead brother, and who named, nurtured, and dressed him as though
he were indeed this Other, Rene was obliged to inhabit a "double
identity". In the course of psychoanalysis in later life, exploring
the paradoxical ways in which these reincarnations and overlap­
ping identities had confounded him during fieldwork, as well as
the uncanny thematic correspondences between his theoretical
interests and his own biographical circumstances (his first two

250
books were on death and ritual rebirth) , Rene decided to contrive
his own symbolic death and shed the identity that had been foist
on him in infancy by his grieving mother. He thus assumed the
name Renaat - acknowledging his Flemish patriline, declaring
his self-determined rebirth, and signalling a shift in intellectual
orientation toward the bodily and visceral realities that he had,
thus far, neglected.
I told Rene how uncannily his story paralleled Pauline's.
Pauline's uncle Paul had been much younger than her mother.
In fact Pauline's mother practically raised him, and sometimes
spoke of him as if he had been her son. Paul was killed in the war.
But a few days before she received news of his death, Pauline's
mother had a vision of him. Pregnant with Pauline at the time,
she must have dozed off while milking a cow, her head fallen
against the animal's warm flank. She was roused by a voice, Paul's
voice, seeming to come from close at hand. ''I'm in Beaufors now,
Noellie," he said.
Pauline's mother looked up Beaufors in the atlas, and checked
out several reference books in her local library, assuming Beaufors to
be a town in France where her brother was stationed. She drew a
blank. A week later the family received a letter saying that Paul had
been killed when his Beaufort had crashed in Northern Ireland.
Returning from a training flight, his aircraft had ploughed into
an embankment only yards short of the runway. The accident
happened at dusk - coincident with the antipodean dawn when
Pauline's mother heard his voice. It was then that she decided to call
her child Paul or Pauline, because when her young brother died, the
baby inside her became like a dead weight. Pauline grew up in the
shadow of her mother's loss, sensing a strange identification with the
uncle whose photo hung in the corridor at her school, someone
whom she could never replace in her mother's affections.
It was in Uppsala that I began drafting the work that would
become Paths Toward a Clearing. One of my aims was to show
that the personal is always implicated in our academic theorising,

251
much as it is implicit in the myths and folktales that comprise
any cultural heritage. Though I took my theoretical bearings from
William James and John Dewey, I was inspired by the ground­
breaking ethnography of my friend Michael Young who, in his
1 983 study of Kalauna narratives, threw light on how myths
simultaneously express collective values and personal preoccu­
pations . In this western Massim society, every lineage possesses
its own corpus of myths (neineya) , which are inherited and j eal­
ousy guarded by male leaders. When Young first sat down with
Iyahalina and asked the old man for "the story" ofhis life, Iyahalina
spoke into the tape recorder for two hours without interruption.
On playing back this soliloquy, Young discerned not a single auto­
biographic detail in what was seemingly a sequence of familiar
myths, interspersed with details about Iyahalina's duties as a "ritual
expert" (toitavealata) . But when Young teasingly took the old man
to task for having recounted nothing of his childhood, marriage
or work experience abroad, Iyahalina grinned and said, "Yes, like
that", implying that the myths he had told and the events of his life
were in effect one and the same, for he clearly identified with the
ancestral figures in the myths, and his own personal quest for legit­
imacy as the leader of his hamlet found precedent in their actions.
Clearly, men like Iyahalina both introject the dramatic structure
of the myth and project their personal preoccupations onto it. As
Young puts it, "Men such as Iyahalina, who internalize their myths
to a marked extent, such that they perceive their lives in terms of
the idioms and ideals that the myths promote, appear to submit to
them while yet exerting their own purposes through them . They thereby
unwittingly modify their myths quite subtly in the process."
When, approaching my own troisieme age, I turned from writing
anthropology to writing my memoirs, I would follow the Kalauna
example, as well as draw upon what I had learned of the ways
in which Kuranko proj ect their personal situations onto mythical
scenarios - writing about myself obliquely, making the lives of
others allegories of my own.

252
 Q u i et D a y s 1 n D a r l i n g h u rst

G abriel Garcia Marquez once said that conce1vmg the first

sentence of a book was for him the key to the entire work. If
he got the first sentence right, the rest of the book would pretty
much write itself.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano

Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father
took him to discover ice.

Sometimes, Marquez added, it took him many years longer to hit

on the first few lines than it took him to write the rest of the book.
Fifteen in the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude. "I couldn't find
the tone," he said of this work. "It had to ring true for me. One
day, as Mercedes and I were driving to Acapulco with the children,
it came to me in a flash. I had to tell the story the way my grand­
mother used to tell hers. I would start with that afternoon when
the little boy is taken by his grandfather to discover ice."
This is a writer talking. But the same thing holds true for a
reader. There are certain opening sentences that impress one so
deeply that they become iconic. Not only do they contain and
anticipate the story that will follow; they succeed in capturing the
mood of that moment in our life when we opened the book for
the first time. Remember?

" Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure."

" Call me Ishmael."

253
 "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy
after its own fashion."

"As I write, night is falling and people are going to dinner."

"Maman died today."

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

" I t may be that universal history is the history of a handful of

metaphors."

I was the first to reach him after he fell. I thought he was already
dead. But then I saw that he was still breathing.
Passers-by neither stopped nor seemed concerned. Was it
because he was a vagrant, his clothes grimy, his fly unzipped, his
dark red blood pooling on the pavement where he'd fallen? I
ran into Remo's to find a phone and call an ambulance. When I
returned to the street, people were eddying around him, mildly
curious but still not stopping. I knelt beside him and asked if he
could hear me. I do not think he had much idea where he was or
what was going on. He lay in his greasy frayed trousers, his spindly
arms outstretched, as if awaiting crucifixion.
When the ambulance arrived, one of the paramedics placed a
plastic muzzle over his nose and mouth. The old man's eyes rolled
about, staring at nothingness. A second paramedic grasped his
hand and said, "Tell me if you can feel me squeezing your hand."
No response. The cops and paramedics wore starched, sky-blue
uniforms. An oxygen bottle scraped across the pavement. A look of
vague panic crossed the vagrant's face. Then they lifted him onto a
stretcher and took him away.
Francine and I shared an apartment on Crown Street. Francine
was working for an anthropologist at the University of Sydney,
preparing an inventory of psychiatric and psychological studies
of Aboriginals that would show how Europeans have habitually

254
invoked the jargon of science to g1ve spurious legitimacy to
distinctions between "them" and "us".
My own task was not too dissimilar. Working solidly on Paths,
I was trying to deconstruct some of the arcane ways that anthro­
pology renders the worlds of others intelligible. I worked at my
desk all morning. After lunch I read for a while, or went to the
Mali cafe for an espresso. Later I walked to the domain and swam
lengths in the Andrew (Boy) Charlton pool. As ideas for my next
book drifted into my head, I j otted them down on the back of an
envelope or a scrap of paper. I already had the title for this book
- Pieces of Music.
" If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going
back to it till you got it right."

It was the day after Australia Day, and the queues at the Depart­
ment of Social Security were longer than usual and the air electric
with irascibility and resentment. The young guy ahead of me had
heavily tattooed arms. His cigarette packet was stashed under the
sleeve of his T-shirt. He was muttering impatiently about how
fuckin' long he'd had to wait.
When the clerk told him that his form could not be accepted
because he had not registered with the CEA, he exploded. "Ya
fuckin' bastard! " he shouted, "ya stupid fuckin' cunts," and he
stormed out of the office.
Opposite me, in a second queue, a skinny, freckled mum in
skin-tight jeans was yelling at her kids, ordering them to keep
away from the fish tank and stop squabbling.
The woman behind her was Croatian. Or so I imagined. She
was wearing an embroidered blouse. Her greying hair was drawn
into a bun.
Two girls were standing behind her. One had peroxide hair, and
wore a sneer. The other sullenly dragged on her cigarette.
The Croatian woman pointed to the No Smoking sign above
us, and gently asked the girls not to smoke. "Please," she pleaded,

255
"the air is so fresh today, please not to spoil it."
The girl with the cigarette said, "Tough shit," and averted her
face. The other smirked. Then her face turned into a snarl-smile as
she too lit up and let the smoke curl out of her nostrils.
The Croatian woman appealed to us all now. "All you people
silent. Why not tell these girls. Lift them up. We must reach out,
touch them, tell them what a beautiful world this is. They should
not smoke, ruin their health, this is the only life we have, we should
not destroy it."
No one responded.
"Pull yer head in," said the slattern. "It's me last cigarette. I'm
not gunna chuck i t away."

I met the Nigerian drummer in Paris Express, and invited him

back to our apartment for dinner, and to meet Francine.
" Life is a luxury," Ade exclaimed after we had eaten. "And a
necessity. Celebrate! "
Nothing i s simpler when you are i n love.
If we were broke, we would make pasta with a sauce of olive
oil and garlic, flavoured with sprigs of oregano, rosemary, basil and
thyme from the herb garden Francine had planted in pots on the
windowsill. If we had money, we would eat in Chinatown and take
in an old movie at the Mandolin. Sundays we treated ourselves to
a breakfast at the Bagel House in Taylor Square.
But there were times when I despaired. I saw little point in
publishing ethnography when my every attempt to find a univer­
sity position had come to nothing. I doubted my ability to write
fiction. And I felt panicked by the money I owed - for Heidi's
rent in Canberra, for the costs of moving to Sydney, for the phone
and electricity, the rental of a post office box.
There were times, too, when I would be so overwhelmed by
the past that I wondered whether I would ever be free to fully
embrace the new life I had embarked upon with Francine. One
morning, for example, I sat down to write, only to be suddenly

256
transported back to Menton in the south of France. I recalled my
Olivetti typewriter on the rickety table in the Katherine Mans­
field room, the soft cor coro coo of pigeons, and the dilapidated
bench under the loquat tree in the yard where I sat and drank
my morning coffee. At others times, stimulated by nothing more
remarkable than the whine of a mosquito, the smell of the sea,
or dry leaves blown through an open door, my mind would drift
back to when Pauline and I were living in Wellington, or to Sam's
boatshed on the Paremata estuary . . . the Palace Hotel in Leopold­
ville . . . the City Hotel in Freetown . . . and I would feel suffocated
by the immensity and intensity of the lives I had already lived. Yet
every one of these moments had, in its time, also been overshad­
owed by the past! During my first few months in Menton I was
haunted by dreams of Sierra Leone. In the Congo I was sometimes
so nostalgic for New Zealand that I thought only of how and
when I might go home. And ironically, the year in Crown Street
would, in due course, itself become a touchstone, for when Fran­
cine and I were preparing to leave Indiana in 1 996, I found myself
celebrating the prospect of our return to Sydney as a return from
exile, a return, after too long a hibernation, to life!
Thus does every new departure inevitably shake loose the dust
and debris of the past.
But sometimes the past threatens to bury us. Encumbered by
old attachments and engrained habits, we cannot move.
What is growing old except this ineluctable process of immo­
bilisation under the weight of memory?
If the past was turning me to stone, it was worse for Francine.
She had to live in the shadow of my previous incarnations. She
had to go along with me, rather as Mariel Hemingway has to
go along with Woody Allen in Manhattan, watching old movies,
listening to old songs, adjusting to a world in which the older
partner was young but in which she has never lived. Having to
conjure the illusion of a face she had before she was born.
And then there was the shadow of my life with Pauline. One

257
evening I played a tape ofVilla Lobos's Bachianas Brasilieras, only to
find myself in tears, remembering Pauline. "Sometimes," Francine
said, "I find it very difficult, living with a married man."
Was I , like the deros on the street, so mired in my own past and
so doomed to relive it, that I had gone beyond the point of being
free?
But Francine gave me new life. When she was with me, I became
immune to the past.
"Let's go to the beach," she would say. And in half an hour, I
would experience the world in a new light. We would plunge into
the surf, then sit on the beach as the sun went down, and later buy
fillets of deep sea perch with french fries and wedges of lemon,
and walk on the cliff path to Bronte. "Don't be silly," she would
say, when I confessed my anxieties, my sense of doom, "you will
never wind up as a dero ! "

Toward the end o f March, I finished Paths, and packaged the

manuscript for mailing to Indiana University Press.
As I set out for the post office, I found myself walking a few steps
behind a good-looking woman dressed in a shapely green suit.
Just past a designer leather shop called Wheels and Doll Baby
a couple of deros were sitting on a doorstep. As she approached
them, the face of one of the deros lit up. His eyes widened, his
hands opened, his arms extended, and a radiant smile spread over
his face. He looked for all the world as if he had seen an angel.
"You're so beautiful! " he exclaimed.
Though the woman was still walking ahead of me, I sensed
immediately that she had been moved by the dero's spontaneity.
It happened that she was going to the post office too. When
she stopped to post her letters, I walked around her and unlocked
my mail box. It was empty, but as I turned to go I found myself
looking directly into her face. She was smiling with pleasure at
what had just happened. And smiling, too, in recognition, I think,
of the fact that I had witnessed and shared the epiphany.

258
That winter, Francine was invited to attend a Cross-Cultural
Psychology Conference at the University of Newcastle. She asked
me to go with her. Still bruised from my experiences in Canberra
I said I didn't feel up to mingling with academics. "You don 't
have to mingle with them," she said. "You only have to keep me
company."
I sat through a couple of the papers. They were preoccupied
with the differences between "us" and "them", and deployed verbal
oppositions such as "cognitive/ connative", "individual! collective"
so glibly that one might easily have been fooled into thinking
that the world of human experience was actually constituted in
these terms. But then, worldly experience was not something
these scholars possessed in great depth, as was made clear when a
renowned professor summed up a panel discussion on "individu­
alism versus collectivism" by recounting a meeting he'd had with
two Chinese plumbers in a Hong Kong hotel room. Somehow,
the plumbers had confirmed the distinction.
I met Francine in the cafeteria at lunchtime, and said I was
going to give the afternoon session a miss. We began making plans
for where we might meet later on, but were distracted by the
woman ahead of us. She was trying to explain to the server that
she did not want a full meal. She wanted only half. The server
explained that there was no half meal. The only meals were the
ones on the chalkboard.
I asked the woman, whose English was not perfect, if I could
help.
She wanted only half a meal, she said, because she could not
afford a full meal.
"Let me," I said. " Francine and I would be happy to take care of
this." And I ordered a full meal, and paid.
Parvin was attending the conference with a colleague, also
from Iran. Over lunch she and Amin explained that they had very
little money because the Iranian authorities set a strict limit on

259
how much one could take out of the country. They had asked the
conference organisers to reduce their registration fees, but to no
avail; that is why they found themselves in the embarrassing posi­
tion of having to economise on their meals.
When the conference ended, Francine and I invited Parvin and
Amin to stay with us in Sydney for a few days. It would be point­
less to return to Iran immediately, we said, and we offered to show
them around the city and introduce them to some of our friends.
This would give them, I added, something more than academic
memories to go home with.
In Sydney they told us their stories.
Before the revolution, Amin had played in a symphony
orchestra. When the orchestra was disbanded, he reinvented
himself as an ethnomusicologist. He was particularly interested in
traditional lullabies, and had prepared an illustrated lecture on the
subj ect for the Newcastle conference. But one of Amin's videos
had been destroyed by the authorities at Tehran airport, because
it showed a woman breast-feeding her infant. The other had been
tied and sealed. He hadn't fared much better on his arrival in
Sydney. A young customs officer grabbed Amin's Iranian lute (tar)
and berated him for bringing wood and skins into Australia. Then,
despite Amin's protestations, he took his biro and stabbed at the
skin and tore apart the bridge of the instrument, ostensibly in
search of concealed narcotics. Amin reacted with disbelief.
"Well mate," said the customs officer, "that'll teach ya not to
pollute Australia with stuff like this."
I was astonished by Amin's equanimity in the face of this
bureaucratic humiliation . But he regaled us with the first of his
many hilarious stories of the Sufi trickster-hero, Nasrudin - his
way of converting misfortune into farce. Even more surprising was
that within two days Amin was telling me how, when he returned
to Australia with his family, as a migrant, he would have taught his
three children Advance Australia Fair so they could sing it to the
customs officers on arrival!

260
 Parvin, however, construed every setback personally, as a tragedy
in the making. "There's no j ustice," she complained. "There is
simply no j ustice."
Considering their polar personalities, it surprised me that they
got on so well. Like brother and sister, Francine said.
After dinner, Parvin dressed Francine in a maghnae, so that she
could experience what it was like to move about in such a shape­
less garment - her body hidden and constrained. Parvin was a
child psychologist. She told us of the desperate and disturbing
fantasies that arose from gender separation in Iranian schools.
But Parvin herself was prey to her own fantasies, having had so
little direct contact with the West. Strolling through Kings Cross,
we found ourselves in the middle of a stag party - a drunken
youth, shackled to an iron ball, bargaining with a prostitute while
his mates, as embarrassed as they were belligerent, egged him on.
Then Parvin wanted to stop and listen to an old hippy singing
doomsday songs about nuclear war and cosmic union while
picking tunelessly at some metal strings he'd attached to a stick.
Around the corner a junkie accosted us, demanding that I buy
the glass table top he was holding awkwardly in his hand. When I
ignored him he threatened to break the table top over my head.
" It's so beautiful," Parvin said. "I love the life, everyone so happy,
so full of energy." And she described Shiraz at eight in the evening,
as silent as a graveyard. "In Iran, you can't trust anyone," she said.
Denunciations, persecution, informing were endemic, all in the
name of the revolution. There were public hangings. Friends got
together and vowed not to talk politics, but by the end of the
evening politics is all they talked about. Some played Michael
Jackson videos and shared cans of Coca-Cola! But then the elec­
tricity would fail. "When I went to America to study violin,"
Amin said, " I saw how politically passive everyone was, and hated
it. Now I too have become passive, and I hate it."
Next day Parvin made Francine promise to take her to lunch at
McDonald's . As for me, I would take her to a James Bond movie in

261
the afternoon. She wanted to see Sean Connery. I pointed out that
James Bond was now played by another actor, but we found a Sean
Connery movie anyway, and Parvin said she perhaps preferred
him looking older.
In the morning we all strolled down to Darling Harbour to
help Parvin and Amin register for the Australian Psychology
Congress. Armed with letters that Francine had asked colleagues
at the University of Sydney to write on our friends' behalf, we
asked the Congress officials if Parvin could be given a concession
or cut in her registration fee. The officials looked at the letters
we gave them, and quickly reached their decision. The petition
from Dr G. at Sydney University counted for nothing. "She has
no authority to lead you to believe that concessions can be made."
I spelled out what Parvin and Amin had had to endure, coming to
Australia. Surely . . .
"If we allowed everyone from Bangladesh or the Soviet Union
to attend the Congress for nothing, the Australian Psychological
Association would have to foot the bill. We cannot set prece­
dents."
But as a sign of goodwill, the official gave Parvin a name tag so
that she could attend the opening ceremony at the Opera House.
And so we wandered about among the starched white table­
clothes, the sparkling wine, the waiters and waitresses, the officials
in blazers with walkie-talkies, and Parvin saw why the registration
fee had been beyond her means. It had gone to pay for all this!
"There's no justice," she declared, as we walked away.
For the rest of the morning we busied ourselves with getting
extensions to Parvin's and Amin's visas, and rescheduling their
flights. Unfortunately, Iran Air had no office in Sydney, so we could
not cancel the Bombay-Tehran leg of their return trip. Parvin was
distressed. Her visa extension had cost us fifty dollars, she wanted
her c. v. typed, which would cost twenty dollars, and here she was
without a cent to her name. "You are so kind. I don't know if God
sent you, or whether there are people in the world so kind. I only

262
hope someone is as kind to you some day."
The irony was that our "kindness" only exacerbated Parvin's
distress and Amin's ambivalence. Both were eager to seek political
asylum in Australia, and Amin wanted to enlist the support of the
Conservatory of Music in filing his claim. Parvin wanted to make
contact with other Iranians, and seek their advice. But every move
we made only seemed to destabilise them, and make them feel
powerless and pathetic.
I could understand how they felt. The year before, my old friend
Bob Tonkinson had invited me to give a seminar and lecture at the
University of Perth. The honorarium would pay my rent for a
few months, and help stave off the bank's threats to foreclose my
mortgage. But without money in my pocket, Bob's and Myrna's
hospitality crushed me with a sense of my own penury and power­
lessness. Consumed with self-pity at my inability to repay their
generosity, I proved to be a poor guest. Sometimes it is harder to
receive than to give.

That weekend we decided to accept an invitation to dinner at the

home of some Iranian immigrants in Blacktown. Parvin had met
the grandmother on the flight from Tehran; perhaps Abbas and
Ziba would provide some answers.
They met us at the railway station in their Toyota, and drove
us to their newly completed home. The living room floor was
covered in dull pink velveteen carpet. There were brass pots filled
with artificial flowers, and above the fireplace was a painting of a
chalet beside a mountain lake, all garish blues and oranges.
We sat on the carpet in front of an immense TV console, and
ate pistachios and drank tea. The old grandmother, in black stock­
ings and headscarf, sat by a window, staring out at the bulldozed
clay and the bedraggled eucalypts.
When dinner was served, Abbas put a video on for us. It was of
some well-heeled Iranian exiles at a party in Los Angeles. When
the belly-dancing began, Abbas insisted that his daughter perform

263
for us. She was shy and plump, and didn't want to get up. Abbas's
face was grim. He ordered her to dance. She fled the room.
Abbas poured tumblers ofJohnny Walker whisky for everyone.
He was happy in Australia, he said. He'd owned a car dealership in
Tehran. Now he ran a shop. The whole family worked there. His
aim was to own two shops, like his brother-in-law. His brother-in­
law had been in Australia longer than Abbas. That's how he came
to own two shops and three houses. His wife was envious of her
sister. And the grandmother lamented the quarrelling, but could
do nothing. She had even lost faith in Islam under the mullahs . . .
I imagined Parvin concurring, "There is no j ustice."
Abbas's elder daughter started up a conversation with Francine.
She wanted to go to university, she confided. She wanted to meet
an educated man, and marry pure, a virgin. She respected tradi­
tion. Then she asked Francine how old she was. When Francine
told her, she asked me the same question. She was curious to know
how we met. "Was Francine my student?"
"Not exactly," Francine said. And she explained that she had
attended a lecture of mine just before going to France for a year.
After the lecture she had asked if I knew of any anthropologists in
France. I had suggested she meet George Devereux, and gave her
his address in Paris.
A year later, I said, on my last day in the department of anthro­
pology at the Australian National University, I ran into Francine,
just back from France. I asked her if she had gone to see George
Devereux. She had. I asked if she knew that George had died only
a few weeks ago. She said her father had recently died too. Rather
than hang around the department where I was already persona
non grata, I asked her if she would like a coffee. That is how we
met.
We had now watched several videos and eaten dinner, and
decided that it was too late to catch a train back to the city.
Abbas was only too happy to have us stay. We could have the
master bedroom, closet doors with glass panes, floral eiderdown,

264
ornamental bedhead, and ensuite. But Abbas was not willing to
relinquish Francine's company j ust yet. He insisted she stay up
awhile longer and drink some more beer. Instead she followed me
down the hallway to the bedroom. Abbas baled her up in the hall
and tried to pour his bottle of beer down her throat. Amin was
quickly on the scene, and Abbas retreated like a scolded bear.
"Can I see your room?" Amin asked.
He walked around in awe. Then, to his great amusement, he
discovered a brown plastic watering can in the ensuite. I assumed
it was for watering the pot plants. But Amin insisted it was for
washing oneself after using the toilet. He said he wanted to buy
one to take home, as a souvenir.
I laughed.
"Mulla Nasrudin! " he chortled, glancing at us conspiratorially
as he crept from the room.
We woke early, to immediate pandemonium. Francine had
reached for the light switch beside the bed, only to discover that
it was a burglar alarm. Then, as the house rang with alarm bells
and shouts, Abbas's daughter slipped into the room to get some­
thing from the bathroom cabinet (her tampons) .We showered and
dressed, and found Amin and Parvin waiting for us. Parvin had a
headache. Amin was impatient to leave.
On the train back to Sydney, Amin shared his feelings. The
hospitality had been great, he said. But in the light of day he could
see the misery it covered. The bickering sisters. The homesick
grandmother. The talk of making money. The adulation of the
wealthy, decadent exiles in LA. "I am thinking of my three chil­
dren," he said. "Of my music. Of the help I give the retarded kids I
teach in Shiraz.Yesterday I was a pessimist. Today I am an optimist.
Do you know the difference? The optimist sees a glass of water
and says it is half full; the pessimist sees the same glass and says it
is half empty."
" I too do not think I would be happy here," Parvin said. "And
I am missing my family."

265
 We helped them rebook their flights. The following day we
took a taxi to the airport. Seizing the attention of the Greek cab
driver, Parvin bombarded him with her now familiar litany of
complaints. The morning news reports of the killings of thousands
of young mojahedin fighters at Kermanshah had been the last straw.
"Why are we going back?" she asked. "Where is the justice?"
Amin's mood could not have been more different. After we had
checked in, a broad smile creased his face. "I have kept a Nasrudin
story for this moment," he said. " It's about coming to the bottom
of the world, and being upside down. A man asked Mulla Nasrudin
how he would like to be buried when he died. 'Head down,' said
the Mulla. ' For if the way things are in this world is the right way
up, I want to be upside down when I enter the next!"'

Parvin had come to refer to us as her "angels". In this case my

"angel" was Michael Herzfeld. Michael and I had met the previous
year in Canberra and become friends. When I went to Uppsala,
he invited me to Bloomington, Indiana, to present a couple of
seminars and give a poetry reading, which I did. Though I was too
na1ve to realise it at the time, this was all part of a plan Michael
had hatched to get me a position at Indiana University. His efforts
paid off. One morning in late May, he phoned to say that I had
been offered a college professorship. I felt immediate relief and
immense gratitude. I would no longer have to file a dole form
every fortnight, or keep up the pretence that I was seriously
looking for work. After years in the wilderness, I would no longer
have to live in penury and ignominy. But at the same time I felt
great trepidation. Despite the hardships of life on the edge, my
hands, like the hands of Sisyphus, were pressed against the gritty
surface of reality, and I did not want to lose this sensation of the
weight of the world. I thought of the people who had been part
of our lives that year. Fletcher Knight, through whom so many
years before I 'd met Harry St Rain. Richard Wong, who had run
an antiquarian bookstore in Paris before marrying an Australian

266
and, to his chagrin, migrating to Sydney. Shalo Mbatha, who had
gone underground after the schools' uprising in Soweto in June
1 976, then fled to Swaziland and Germany before finding her
way to Sydney (I ghost-wrote her story, and reconnected with her
many years later when she returned to a free South Africa) . Ewen
McDonald, who had taught with Pauline at a Palmerston North
high school before moving to Sydney - a city he had opened up
to Heidi and me with ebullience and generosity. Parvin and Amin,
of course. And Kathy Golski and Woj cieck Dabrowski - friends
from Canberra who had also moved to Sydney. How would I
endure life in this American academic town?
"You are an anthropologist?" Francine reminded me. "Now
you'll have resources to do fieldwork again. Isn't that what you've
dreamed of? You'll be as much in the thick of things as you want.
I think it's a brilliant opportunity."
She was, of course, right.

267
 M i h i f o r Te P a k a k a

Where better, I figured, t o begin my fieldwork o n the meaning of

home than in the country where I was born and raised. So I flew
from Indiana to Auckland, arriving the day after Kiri Te Kanawa's
first homecoming concert in the Auckland Domain.
The diva's face was splashed over the front pages of the Herald
and Star. She had drawn a crowd of one hundred and forty thou­
sand - more people than had ever gathered at one place, for
one purpose, in the history of the country. But the reviews were
ambivalent. Newspaper critics described her programme as banal
and sentimental: Johann Strauss's Gypsy Baron Overture, hits from
post-war musicals, popular Maori songs like "Pokarekare ana". But
she had kept her audience spellbound, and with her final encore
- "Home Sweet Home", sung in Maori - everyone forgave her
aloofness, the years in which she had not found time to perform in
her native land. In the words of one critic, the mystique of distance
gave way to the magic of"her presence, live, close to home".
Kiri Te Kanawa embodied the New Zealand dream of interna­
tional recognition. " Quite simply there is no other New Zealander
alive who exerts such a fascination over so many of us, as a sort of
national icon in absentia," wrote one j ournalist. She was "our Kiri" ,
the local girl who made i t overseas yet never forgot her humble
origins or the family friends and teachers who set her on her path
to stardom. Behind the adulation lay the same chauvinism of the
underdog that found expression when the New Zealand crick­
eters defeated the poms in England in 1 983, when Prime Minister

268
Lange refused to let US nuclear ships berth in New Zealand ports,
when the New Zealand yacht Steinlager won the 1 990 Whitbread
Around the World race, and when, in a moment of nationalistic
triumph, a red-socked crew of Kiwi yachtsmen wrested the Amer­
ica's Cup from the Americans on 1 4 May 1 995.
But such patriotic fervour has a more sinister side. Not only
did Kiri disdain ethnic politics; her very Maoriness seemed ill­
defined. You had a disturbing sense that she was pandering to the
middle-class Pakeha dream of assimilating things Maori into a
largely white world. Albeit unwittingly, she abetted a dream as old
as colonialism itself - the creation of a European dominion with
indigenous trappings.
The year of Kiri's homecoming was also the sesquicentennial of
the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
On 6 February 1 840, a group of Northern Maori chiefs
conceded governance of their lands to the British crown, though
retaining absolute sovereignty over their homelands and treasured
possessions. The British, however, saw the Treaty as a surrender of
sovereignty. The result was one hundred and fifty years of mutual
misunderstandings and unresolved grievances, and on Waitangi
Day 1 990 the Queen would have a black flag hurled at her and
be heckled in Maori, her speech inaudible for cries of"Go home!
Go home ! "
TRICK OR TREATY? was the epigraph scrawled i n black
on a downtown building. Over it someone had spray-painted
MAORIDOM IS STINKING BOREDOM. But though the
writing was on the wall, the contradictory messages of the graffiti
were belied by the slogans you saw on New Zealand television.
Huia Tuia, Tui Tuia, " Our People, Our Year," was the catchphrase
- the Maori words giving spurious legitimacy to a notion of
nationhood biased toward Pakeha interests. You began to feel that
for a lot of Pakeha the past was water under the bridge, that there
were no unresolved historical issues, no wounds to heal. It was the
same during the pageant at the opening of the Commonwealth

269
Games: the re-enacted landfalls of successive waves of migrants
- Maori, English, Irish, Scots, Dutch, Vietnamese, Cambodian
- masking the political force of prior occupation, and the claims
of tangata whenua, the people of the land, who had lost control of
their country through fraudulent deals, conquest and confiscation.
I wandered around the city looking for familiar landmarks.
But here too the past was being razed, and glass-fronted towers
now reflected the isthmus skies. I strolled down Princes Street and
past the Grand Hotel, one of my student haunts. The body of the
building had been demolished and a multi-storeyed office block
was going up on the site, behind the old far;:ade. THE GRAND.
AN ARGUS FLETCHER DEVELOPMENT TO BE KNOWN
AS PEAT MARWICK HOUSE . Things historic, like things Maori,
were being reduced to surface decoration, masking the vulgarity of
the new. It suggested to me that behind the antipodean penchant
for postmodern pastiche lay a curiously provincial hope - for if
there was no one place or period where new fashions and great
ideas came into being, then the cringing provincial could believe
he was no longer peripheral; indeed, he might even entertain
the thought that his own backyard might be as much a centre as
anywhere else.

Heavy humid days. Soft rain on asphalt. The smell of citrus trees
and mown grass. Hibiscus and rank lantana in a suburban garden.
After the long winter months in America, my senses were alive
again. I walked barefoot on beaches of crushed shell, swam in the
blue gulf waters, drank in the scented air. At night, after my parents
had gone to bed, I rummaged through boxes of musty books,
rereading old student essays, early poems. The opening lines of one
juvenile poem reminded me of how strongly I had always felt the
need to leave:

Departing from this last lit visible neck of land

Shrouded in mist beyond the warning light

270
 I turn to view this city, once my home,
After the friends and loves have left
Who made it so . . .

With this longstanding personal sense of transience had come a

strong awareness of indigenous belonging. For Maori, whakapapa
or genealogy recalls the places one's forebears called home. Reciting
the names of ancestors charges them again with life, bringing to
mind places where one has roots. Papatuanuku, the earth mother.
Papa, the earth floor or site of a dwelling. Papa kainga, one's home
place. Home is also toi whenua, the land of one's birth, whenua
being bot :1 ground and placenta. Such a place becomes a person's
turangawaewae, a place where one can plant one's feet firmly on
the ground, a place where one has the right to speak and act, and
can, accordingly, feel at home. Though a person's homeland be
conquered, confiscated or sold, this ancestry is never lost. Whites
have yet to understand that possession is not nine points of the
law. As the Maori adage says, Whata ngarongaro he tangata, toitu
he whenua - human beings pass away but the land remains. A
range of mountains or a wild stretch of coast draws a person back
to his or her beginnings, informs the imagination, inspires speech.
Every gift is charged with the life-force (hau ora) of the giver, but
the hau of the gift pines for the place from whence it came, and
seeks to return there as the wind returns, bearing life-giving rain
to a parched land. In the past, exile was a living death. In times
of war, prisoners would beg for a pebble, a bunch of leaves, or a
handful of earth from the homeland, that they might weep over a
tangible symbol of home. Or they would dream of familiar places
and wake lamenting:

E kuika nei,
Matua ia ra e tahuri mai?
Wai te mea ka rukupopo,
Ka whakamate ki tona whenua, i.
(Who will share in my

27 1
 terrible longing?
For there is no one sadder
than he who yearns for his native land.)

For as long as one lives on the land or returns regularly to it, a fire
burns there (ahi ka) . But if one goes away and does not return, the
fire goes out (ahi mataotao) .
In all my years away I had never repined for New Zealand, for
the simple reason that I had never entirely abandoned the idea that
some day I might return there to live. Mine was a voluntary exile.
Yet this had not prevented the fires going out, and I had done little
to rekindle them. I had come home often, to be sure, stayed with
my parents in Auckland, seen a few old friends, but on each visit
felt more and more a stranger to the country where I was raised.
In Auckland I spent an afternoon with friends from Manawatu
days. On my last visit to Auckland, Hugh had introduced me to
some of the carvers and weavers working in the meeting house,
Tane-nui-a-rangi, on the university campus. Now the great carved
house was finished and we went inside.
To enter a Maori meeting house is to be taken into another reality.
The noise of the outside world is hushed. As your eyes become
accustomed to the gloom, you become aware of the carved ances­
tral figures along the walls, eyes blazing, bodies tensed with fero­
cious power. The soles of your feet make contact with the woven
mats on the floor. The ambience is one of unnerving intimacy.
You are drawn back to primordial beginnings, when Tane placed
his head against the body of his mother, the earth, and thrust his
legs upward against the body of his father, the sky, admitting the
first shafts of light into the primal darkness, making room for the
generations of man. In fact a meeting house is conceived of and
addressed as an ancestor: the ridgepole likened to a backbone, the
rafters to ribs, the doorway to a mouth, the windows to eyes, the
interior to a womb. Less obvious to an outsider is that the house is
pervaded by the vital spirit of the ancestor whose name it bears.

272
 I moved slowly through the house, identifYing the ancestors who
captained the great canoes and bestowed upon their descendants
the wherewithal of life. But my mind was wandering to another
place, another time . . .

During my years in the Manawatii, Te Pakaka Tawhai had been

one of my closest friends and colleagues, and Pauline, Heidi and
I spent two memorable summers on his family's East Coast farm.
One afternoon, Te Pakaka and his brother Joe drove me north to
the isolated settlement of Reporoa. We stopped for a while on a
high ridge. The hills were bare except for stands of cabbage trees
and an occasional dark grove of karaka. Cloud shadow and wind
combed the long grass. Far below the shoulder of the hill, breakers
like braided ropes unravelled on a long white beach.
The road wound down into a hollow in the hills, where the
meeting house,Te Auau, was cradled as in the palm of an upturned
hand.
Unlike most meeting houses, Te Auau had not been conceived
as the body of an ancestor. Carved figures with out-thrust tongues
and glaring eyes do not defY the visitor. The spirit ofTe Auau is
one of welcoming and warmth. Entering it with Te Pakaka and
his brother Joe, I experienced for the first time in my life what it
meant to have roots in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We spent no more than an hour there, among photos of men
who had gone away to war and not returned, tukutuku panels
whose pastel tones reminded Te Pakaka of"a fading rainbow". In
Te Auau you feel the integrity and mana of those who put their
energy and genius into its construction, the living presence of
those who have gone before. And it was part and parcel of the
landscape around us, whose every knoll and hollow Te Pakaka and
Joe knew by name, whose every ngaio and peach grove brought
alive, for them, the mythic past . . .

273
I followed Hugh out of the house into blinding sunlight, and we
stood for a while in the street, exchanging news of our children.
But I was thinking of Te Pakaka, the rumours surrounding his
death, and wanted Hugh to clarifY what had happened.
It seemed that Te Pakaka's family had insisted that he be buried
at the urupa on his own marae, tradition demanding that the dead
be brought home and buried among their forebears, that they be
remembered and mourned together. But Te Pakaka's widow, who
was not Maori, had wanted him buried in the town where they
had lived and where their children had been born. The bitter wran­
gling came to a head at the funeral. Te Pakaka's sister harangued
the congregation, demanding that Te Pakaka be returned to his
proper resting place. Te Pakaka's widow remained unmoved. In
the end a compromise was proposed by one of Te Pakaka's Maori
colleagues: let Te Pakaka be buried on the Aorangi marae. Though
Aorangi was neither Te Pakaka's birthplace nor the place he had
lived and worked for the last sixteen years of his life, it was a place
he knew, a marae on which he had often stood and spoken. So
that is where he was laid to rest. Unlike the arguments among
the bereaved. His Ngati Porou kin went back to the East Coast,
disowning Te Pakaka's mixed-blood children and threatening the
widow with dire consequences should she ever remarry.
I could readily imagine their distress, and recalled how Paka
had once pointed out to me that there was something deeply
amiss when one observes seagulls far inland, scavenging on human
trash, for every species and every person has its own appointed
place in the scheme of things, a place where it properly belongs.
To transgress those boundaries was like mingling the water from
different catchment areas or moving genetic material from one
species into another - a disruption of their respective whakapapa
and mauri, a loss of the primordial balance between Ranginui and
Papatuanuku, an infringement of tapu, and thus an invitation to
disaster.

274
Overnight there had been electrical storms and heavy rain, but the
air was now fresh and clear, and the sun was glinting on the backs
of the offshore waves.
I stopped once, between O potiki and Te Kaha, to look at some
flax kits that were for sale. When I inquired about one named
Patikitiki (bones of people - from war) , asking if the pink hue
was from whinau bark, the Maori women looked at me suspi­
ciously. The dyes were secret, she said, then added, "Don't I know
you? What's your name?" I told her my first name. "Your surname,"
she said. She was disappointed. "No, you're not the one. For a
moment I thought you were that man who wrote the book about
our kits."
I understood her concern - the age-old tension between the
notion of knowledge as a gift that brings life and the notion of
knowledge as a commodity, to be invested, traded, and exchanged
outside the community to which it belongs. In diverting the
gift of knowledge toward the market place, books betray its life­
sustaining power and, as a consequence, those whose existence
depends upon it may become weakened or ill. It was a problem
Te Pakaka had wrestled with for as long as I knew him - trying
to keep faith with the protocols of oral tradition while producing
work for academic consumption.
As if reading my mind, the woman told me that her son was
about to leave for Brisbane where he was enrolled in a course at
a Polytech. She thought of Brisbane, Australia, and of the outside
world as places of profiteering, greed, selfishness, and loss. "I just
hope he doesn't forget the things he learned here at home," she
said.

I reached Ruatoria at the end of a scorching afternoon, and turned

down the gravel road toward Tuparoa.
As I stopped the car, the shrilling of cicadas instantly filled the air.
Te Pakaka's house was exactly as I remembered it: the driveway
lined with blue hydrangeas and agapanthus, hens pecking and

275
scuffing in the dirt by the back door.
I rapped loudly on the door and waited. There was a radio
playing inside. I peered through the dining room window but
could see no sign of life. I shuddered at how dark and shabby the
room had become, as though I 'd expected it to be the same as
it had been on New Year's Eve fifteen years before: Te Pakaka's
sisters busy in the kitchen, children racing about,Te Pakaka's father
preparing to serve the marinaded cabbage tree hearts (kouka) we
had gathered the previous afternoon on a hill above the sea, and
telling us how the ti symbolises the power of Life to overcome all
hardships and rise anew from barren or devastated ground. Hence
the healing and regenerative power of the kouka.
I went up to the orchard, thinking Te Pakaka's sister might be
there. The peach and nectarine trees were shaggy with lichen.
There was no one in sight.
Walking back to the house, I saw how truly ramshackle it had
become, and remembered Te Pakaka's distress in the winter of
1 985 when his father's arthritis made it impossible for the old man
to maintain the place. He had wanted Te Pakaka to come home
and repile it, to replace the roof and rusty guttering. "A time of
change," Te Pakaka had said to me, touching his hand to his heart.
"Time for me to go home. I want to go home now."
I climbed the fence into the neighbour's paddock and walked
through lank grass toward the cattleyard. The neighbour and
his sons were sitting on a rail fence in the yard. They had just
killed and skinned a cattle beast. The flayed carcass hung from the
lower branch of a big macrocarpa. Flies buzzed above the blood­
drenched earth.
No one showed any interest in me as I approached.
The neighbour was wearing a black bush singlet, and held a
cigarette between his thick fingers. As I began to speak, one of his
boys began dragging the greasy hide up the dirt track toward the
house.
''I'm looking for Faith," I said. Faith was Te Pakaka's sister.

276
 The big guy drew on his cigarette and squinted through the
smoke.
"I was a friend of Paka's," I explained. " I've j ust driven down
from Auckland."
"She not there?" the man asked.
"The radio's on in the dining room, but I knocked and no one
answered."
"Might have gone to town," the man said.
There seemed little point in asking any more questions. I walked
away from the killing yard and climbed through the fence again,
feeling the big man's eyes on me all the way.
By the time I got back to the car, he and his sons had mounted
their horses and were going down the road in single file, followed
by three black dogs. They had haunches of meat wrapped in
sacking across their pommels.
The air pulsed with the shrilling of cicadas. I was in half a mind
to drive to Reporoa, but in the end I went back the way I 'd come,
churning through the dust toward Ruatoria.
I parked my car outside the post office and wandered down
the main street, looking into the local stores to see if I could find
Faith. Then I walked back to the post office and asked the woman
at the counter if she knew Faith Tawhai. I explained that I was
looking for her. She wasn't at home and a neighbour had told me
she might be in town.
''I'm Faith's cousin," the woman said. "Where you from?"
"Auckland."
"You don't sound like a Kiwi."
" I live in the United States," I said.
"Come over for the Games?"
"No, I'm just looking up a few old friends."
"Oh," she said, disappointed. Then I asked her again if she knew
where I might find Faith. She told me I might try down at the
rec. Seeing my puzzlement, she told me I should go back along
the Tuparoa road a little way until I came to Whakarua Park. "She

277
could be there," she said, "at the hall."
Uepohatu Hall was named for one of the renowned chiefs of
Ngati Porou, a direct descendant of Maui, the mythical discoverer
of Aotearoa. The hall was the inspiration of Sir Apirana Ngata,
who supervised its construction in 1 942 - a time when the
Maori Battalion was suffering calamitous reversals in the North
African desert. No family in Ngati Porou was spared the anguish
of loss. To help share the grief and reaffirm the value of life, Ngata
brought people together in night schools to receive instruction in
genealogy and to recover the waning arts of carving, weaving, and
poetry. To give material form to this cultural renaissance, Ngata
proposed that a great hall be built as a permanent memorial to
all who had fought for freedom in the two world wars. But for
succeeding generations, Uepohatu Hall would become not only a
memorial to warrior ancestors but a place pervaded by the spirit
of those who built it. As Te Pakaka once remarked, U epohatu was
"a memorial not so much to those for whom they wept but to the
fact that they wept" .
For Te Pakaka, Uepohatu had other memories as well. In the
summer of 1 945 he and other boys from Manutahi Primary
School were sent to help work on the hall. Te Pakaka stoked fires
for cooking paua, helped the tukutuku frame makers, and fetched
and carried for Ngata himself. Sometimes Ngata would summon
Te Pakaka to work with him on the tukutuku . Te Pakaka would
take a seat on the reverse side of the tukutuku frame, pulling the
dyed flax threads through the slats while the great man regaled the
awestruck boy with stories of his artistic forebears or instructed
him in waiata. Te Pakaka was aware that he was involved in some­
thing momentous, and would never forget a single detail of that
long hot summer: the stipend he was paid which enabled him
to shoe his horse Dan, the breathless trips to the local shop for
Ngata's tobacco, the way the great man ate half slices of bread
heaped with marmalade at tea breaks, and afterward smoked his
bent and foul-smelling pipe before laying it aside and returning to

278
work on his translation of the Bible.
Te Pakaka once told me that Uepohatu was one of the few places
that brought Maori and European traditions together without
compromising either. The interior of the hall is carved and deco­
rated in the style of other Maori meeting houses, but the outside
is unembellished and resembles an ordinary European community
hall. Within the body of the hall, Biblical motifs are juxtaposed
with images of the rivers, mountains and shoreline that sustained
the soldiers far from home. And in its dedication to Uepohatu, the
hall harks back to Maui who, using his grandmother's lower jaw
as a fish-hook and clotted blood from his own nose as bait, hauled
up the North Island (Te Ika a Maui) , with Hikurangi emerging
first from the waters - a place of salvation and newborn life. Was
this why, after Pauline died and I went back to the coast, Joe had
carved a bone fish hook and given it to me with the cryptic words,
" For when you go fishing again"?
Te Pakaka once wrote that Uepohatu "embraces to itself the
mana of all the peoples of New Zealand" , its purpose "to concen­
trate the mana of all New Zealanders under the one roof."
This was also the source of Te Pakaka's charisma and strength:
his ability to steer a course between two cultures, to strike a balance
between two traditions without sacrificing the integrity of either.
His mastery of the taiaha and his passion for karate. The generosity
with which he greeted my interpretations of Ngati Porou stories.
When we stayed on the coast, I would help out with the shearing.
One afternoon, after hours of back-breaking work in a shearing
shed in the Waiapu valley, Paka told me the story of a pregnant
woman who, craving kai moana, ignored a tapu and, night after
night, crept down to the coast to gather shellfish. One morning, as
she retraced her steps upriver to her own kainga, the sunrise found
her out and she was turned to stone. There she is today in the
middle of the river, arrested forever, her kits filled with the illicit
seafood. The story inspired a poem, which I showed to Paka. He
smiled. I had got the story a bit wrong, but I had made something

279
compelling of what I had heard, something that was mine, and that
was all right. What mattered was life - life that produced life.
Toward the end of his life Te Pakaka embraced the Baha'i reli­
gion, searching as men like Ngata had done for the common
humanity that might make coexistence possible. Perhaps it was
appropriate that Te Pakaka should be buried at Aorangi, half way
between his birthplace and the place where his children were
born.
I did not find Faith. I walked back from the rec, got into my car
and headed south.
It was late afternoon. The distant peak of Hikurangi lay inland
among the shadows of the ranges.
And then I heard the voice. At first I did not think it strange that
it was so familiar and so near. I was aware only of my difficulty in
understanding the Maori. But I knew, even before I knew that this
was no ordinary voice, that the one reiterated word, wairua, meant
that I was being told that Te Pakaka was there in spirit, returned to
his people, to that place, and that he had come home.

280
 B e i n g i n La n d sca pe

L onely children often invent imaginary friends. In my case I

developed a deep identification with the land. When I thought of
the world to which I was naturally heir I did not think primarily
of family or lineage, but of a quiet bend in a local river, a pine
plantation, a remnant stand of native bush, a hill from which, on a
clear day, I could see the mountain. These elements defined a social
microcosm of which I felt intimately a part. Winter and summer,
I explored, charted, named and absorbed this world of mine until
there wasn't an acre I did not know by heart. This was at once my
lifeworld and myself. Animate, attuned and entangled. It's why I
have always felt a deep affinity with Paul Cezanne. His paintings
of Mont St Victoire touch me like no others. These landscapes,
like the landscapes my mother painted, are really abstract portraits
- worlds not of rock and pine but of the flesh.
This mystical participation in nature was, I came to realise, not
peculiar to me; it defined a national disposition.
Although New Zealand and Algeria are geographically distant,
they share a similar colonial history. It is this history, Albert Camus
suggests, that shapes a social imaginary in which landscape comes
to figure as a central motif.
Writing in Noces about such places as Algiers, Tipasa, Oran,
and Dj emila, Camus frequently alludes to the cult of physicality
that filled the cultural void in which the pied-noir found himself.
Having, on the one hand, no first-hand everyday knowledge of
metropolitan France, and on the other, no practical understanding

281
of Arab or Kabyle lifeworlds, the outsider tended to drift into a
poetic, mystical relationship with the physical landscape - the
sun, the light, the sea, the mountains - and cultivate an ideal­
ised athleticism focussed on sports and sexual prowess. The New
Zealand in which I came of age was strikingly similar. Though
my grandparents still spoke of England as a motherland to which
one was both constitutionally and sentimentally tethered, I tended
to see it as an antiquated, class-conscious, and distant country to
which I would never belong. At the same time, I felt that indig­
enous Maori culture was, despite its exotic allure, equally beyond
my reach. Perhaps this is why I grew up feeling not so much
betwixt and between two cultural worlds, as cultureless. As a result,
I wavered between a "ferninised" and poetic sensibility, anchored
in the landscape, and a "masculinised" ethos whose ritual foci
were body-contact sports such as rugby and athletics. But the
authentic social belonging that finds its consummation in culture
and community always lay elsewhere.

Doing fieldwork in Central Australia, I rediscovered this sensuous

connection between person and place. I also discovered a deep
affinity for the desert.
Deserts have been all things to all men. Some have seen them as
hostile and inhospitable, as places of loss and punishment. In 1 876,
the explorer Ernest Giles described the Tanami Desert in the
Northern Territory as a " centre of silence and solitude . . . despair
and desolation". Half a century later, F. E. Baume called it a "tragedy
of desolation . . . miles of heat and flies, dust and spinifex" . And of
those same horizons, Michael Terry wrote that "you could see till
the seeing made eyes hurt" . This was a place where white men
suffered "desert sickness" and "desert nerve strain", and thought of
Aboriginal people as the very embodiment of the cruel, treach­
erous, and unstable character of the desert itself.
For others, deserts are where one becomes fully aware of one's
human finitude - "shamed into pettiness" , as T.E. Lawrence put

282
it, "by the innumerable silences of stars" . Edmond Jabes observes
that "in the desert the sense of the infinite is unconditional, and
therefore truest. In the desert you're left utterly to yourself." The
leitmotif runs through the writings of many mystics, for whom
the harshness of the desert is a precondition for self-realisation.
"I succumbed to the desert as soon as I saw it," writes Antoine
de Saint-Exupery in Terre des Hommes. " For the first time since I
was born it seemed to me that my life was my own and that I was
responsible for it." Saint-Exupery goes on to compare his experi­
ence of the desert with the experience of falling in love.
Deserts both free and fill the mind. Recalling the time he
was forced down in the mineral wilderness of the Sahara, Saint­
Exupery wrote, "I possessed nothing in the world . . . yet I discov­
ered myself filled with dreams." And W H . Auden observed that
in a desert you are likely to be "visited by desperate longings for
home and company".
I experienced all of these things. But few of my meditations
spoke directly to Warlpiri understandings of their country.
The first time I travelled through the Tanami I was overwhelmed
by its emptiness and silence. As if in resistance, my subconscious
set to work to inscribe this tabula rasa with its own idiosyncratic
graffiti.
Beyond Yuendumu you cross a vast spinifex plain studded with
termite mounds. In due course I would learn that this was a land­
scape of the rain Dreaming - a natural enough connection for
anyone familiar with the desert, because termites in their flying
stage swarm immediately after the first summer rains. But when
I saw the termite hills they reminded me of piles of rusty slag. Or
Paleolithic figurines with pendulous breasts, gravid bellies, tiny
heads. One minute I would be seeing Giacometti figures welded
into a dark conglomerate, the next I would be recalling Monet's
haystacks.
Each night my dreams took me deep into my past. I was flooded
by memories of Sierra Leone and of Kuranko friends. People and

283
events that had shaped my life now came to mind with halluci­
natory vividness, making me wonder if rebirth is at all possible
- whether one can ever hope to walk out into the world as if for
the first time. Yet, during those initiatory weeks in the desert with
Francine, camping each night under the myriad stars, I began to
feel that the residue and detritus of my past was being swept away.
As I spaded the spinifex from the hard, brick-red earth to make a
camp, or lit a fire of mulga in the gathering dusk, I felt renewed.
If home is where a person is at peace with himself, where he can
honestly say there is nowhere else he would rather be, then the
desert had become my home.
It wasn't only the landscape that had this effect on me; it was
the people. I came to feel at home among Warlpiri, sitting with
them, being with them. It wasn't always easy, of course.Warlpiri are
opportunists, who give as much as they get. Though they live in
permanent communities, a nomadic habitus still prevails, and they
make the most of a resource when and where it is available, squan­
dering money, driving vehicles into the ground, gorging them­
selves on food, and binge-drinking. Outsiders like us were a new
resource. People were forever asking us to drive them somewhere,
to hunt, collect firewood, or visit kin - especially those with
whom we had ties of adoptive kinship. That we would provide
food for whoever spent time with us went without saying. Yet
there were no hard feelings if we failed to meet these demands, or
ran out of money and supplies. The nomadic ethos prevailed. Even
small children learned that sharing requires forthright demands,
not passive anticipation. If a resource ran out, you did not waste
time protesting; you simply moved on, or you gave where once
you took. Since it was impossible for large numbers of people to
settle for long in any one place, you did not bargain on constancy.
Outside your immediate family, social ties were forged and allowed
to fall into abeyance as the seasons and exigencies of desert life
changed. Most of the year you were moving far afield in small
groups, only occasionally encountering your countrymen. Their

284
presence was like the presence of the Dreaming itself sensed but
often unseen.

Though my first experiences of the desert were characteristically

European, they gradually yielded to Warlpiri understandings.
One of our first campsites was at a place called Ngarliyikirlangu
- literally "belonging to us".
We arrived at the end of the day, and as I cleared a space in
the spinifex and unrolled our swags, Francine unloaded supplies.
Then, before darkness overtook the landscape, I set off to climb
the granite tor behind us.
From the top, I looked out over an unbroken plain of spinifex
and withered mulga. Huge boulders threw thimbles of shadow
over the terracotta earth. And as the sun went down, the cyclopean
stones of Ngarliyikirlangu began to glow as if they had absorbed
heat from a fire.
I had been told that Ngarliyikirlangu was a sacred site, but had
no notion what inner meanings found expression in the immense
rocks, tumbled over the plain (they are petrified remains of mashed
balls of yakajirri berry that bush turkey and emu left scattered over
the plain after a great fight) . Nevertheless, I knew from ethno­
graphic reading that the shadowy line between the embodied and
the intangible, between surface appearance and bedrock reality,
was fundamental to the Aboriginal worldview. Fred Myers speaks
of the Dreaming as a noumenal dimension of Being out of which
everything emerges, in which all life forms are steeped, but which
people must be taught to see.
A couple of months after camping at Ngarliyikirlangu, I would
visit a place called Parnta, hundreds of miles to the north. A few
yards from Old Parnta's permanent river hole, Japanangka would
point out a dead ghost gum to me, and a sapling that had sprung
up at its base. The tree was a Dreaming spirit,Japanangka said. This
was the site of an emu Dreaming that came from Ngarliyikir­
langu (I immediately recalled the similar soil and identical species

285
of trees there) . Japanangka went on to explain how a male and
female emu, travelling together from the south, stopped here to
drink. When the female had slaked her thirst, she came and slept
where the ghost gum now stands. When the male had finished
drinking, he followed her, but only to wake her and urge that
they move on. They continued their j ourney, far to the north. But
some of the female's feathers remained where she had slept, as
kurruwarri. Kurruwarri is like seeds,Japanangka explained, or like oil
or water poured on the ground; where it soaks in, it leaves a stain.
So the emu ceremony, songs and sacred designs lie in the ground
there, around the tree - the public "business" near the surface, the
sacred deeper down.
Dreamings thus pervade and impregnate both human and
extrahuman worlds, and may be revealed through instruction,
through dreams, or in the conception of a child - birth being,
for Warlpiri, the root metaphor for the various ways in which the
Dreaming perennially emerges from the ground, enters the light
of day, and becomes embodied in the here and now. In many ways,
the Dreaming echoes Heidegger's notion of Dasein - of that
which is continually being brought forth, given presence, revealed,
or made apparent in the speech and actions of our everyday exist­
ence. The Dreaming also resembles the idea of the unconscious
- that "landscape of shadow" which psychoanalysis construes as
an abyssal region of the mind but, in other traditions of thought,
figures as a region in space encompassing the unknown and the
inscrutable. Psychoanalysis also shares the Warlpiri view that
dreams may give people access to the things that lie beyond ordi­
nary awareness. Most pertinent, however, is that both traditions
exemplifY a universal human assumption that the visible world is
grounded in the invisible, and must, to borrow a Warlpiri meta­
phor, be "drawn out" from it. Even scientific thought participates
in this view that truth is elusive, cryptic, and concealed, and can
only be uncovered through special techniques.

286
Flies whined and buzzed, crawling into my eyes. A hot blustery
wind flipped the pages of my notebook against my hand as I
wrote down details of the day's events. When it became too dark
to write, I clambered down the rock face and walked back to our
camp. The sky was changing from lilac to indigo, and Orion and
the Southern Cross were already visible.
That night we cooked a spinach risotto, and boiled a billy can
of tea made from the wild lemongrass that scents the air at Ngar­
liyikirlangu.
We had just completed an exhausting ten days of fieldwork
in Yuendumu . But at places like Ngarliyikirlangu one is instantly
replenished. Partly this is because one is surrounded by an empty
land. When the sun sets and the flies stop buzzing, there is nothing
to do but sit and listen to the silence. But it is also because one's
life is stripped of everything superfluous. All that matters are the
bare essentials: water, food, a fire, a cleared space to sleep under
the stars.

The crumpled flame of a mulga fire

a cicada incessant in the grass
the stony silence of the night . . .

I turned in early, but found it hard to sleep. I watched Orion

and the Pleiades disappear in the west as Scorpio rose in the east,
like a shallow dish scooping up the inky water of the sky. The
night wind fanned my face. The fire guttered out. I lay on my back
and looked straight up into the vertiginous vault of the heavens.
Sagittarius. The Milky Way turning on its hidden axis. The whole
sky wheeling in steadfast silence. I felt as if I were floating. Rather
than lying on the ground looking up, I was suspended in space
looking down and out into the depths of the sky. I felt dizzy and
exposed, a kind of agoraphobia, I guess, born of a lifelong habit of
living indoors.
How ironic, that in such an undisturbed landscape one should
be unsettled by the absence of walls!

287
One thing that struck me time and time again during those early
days in the desert, before we fell in with Warlpiri and no longer
had much time to ourselves, was how quickly the neutral and
anonymous space of the world gets transformed into a place you
think of as your own. You turn off a desert track, drive across
spinifex, bumping over the rough ground toward a desert oak,
stop the vehicle, get out, build a fire, boil a billy, lay out your swags,
and within half an hour an area that had no prior or particularly
personal associations begins to take on meanings that are uniquely
yours. Everything you do and say and feel in that place intensifies
this almost proprietal sense that you and the place are now inex­
tricably linked. This transformation, whereby something we think
of as impersonal and other - as an "it" - becomes something
we experience as personal - as "ours" - is one of the miracles of
human life. Millions of human beings share the same language, yet
each and every individual will, at any given moment, be creating,
within the parameters of a strict syntax, combinations and permu­
tations of time-worn words that capture and communicate the
phenomenological quiddity of things as he or she experiences
them. The same is true of stories. The narrative forms known to
humanity are finite and ubiquitous. Yet in the ways we adopt and
enter into these master narratives, we communicate experiences
that we feel are singularly our own. As for other human beings, we
see them simply as faces in a crowd, as an anonymous mass, until
we enter into dialogue with them. Forthwith a stranger suddenly
possesses a voice, a history, a name . . . and what transpires between
us may change our lives forever.
But what relevance did these ruminations have for under­
standing how Warlpiri experience their world?
Where we might speak of human existence as played out
between diametrically opposite domains - being and nothingness,
order and chaos, self and other, or culture and nature - Warlpiri
speak of an interplay between patency (palka) and latency (lawa) .

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This is somewhat like the interplay in Maori thought between
tupu (the unfolding or growing potentiality of every living thing)
and mate (the process of weakening, sickening or diminishing) .
Nothing is static or fixed in these lifeworlds; everything is waxing
or waning, and as one life comes into being, another fades away.
Identity thus emerges and lapses in accordance with a person's
changing relationships with others and with the ancestral earth.
The interplay of palka and lawa in Warlpiri thought inspired
new directions in my own thinking.
Palka means embodied in present time (jalanguju palkalku) . LAwa
means j ust the opposite. The words apply equally to the perpetual
corning and going in Warlpiri social life and to the flux of things .
Anything that has "body" is palka - a rock hole or river with
water in it, the trunk of a tree, a person whose belly is full, country
where game is plentiful, a person who is present. But if a rock
hole is dry, a stomach is empty, tracks erased, or a person faints,
falls asleep, goes away, or dies, then there is lawa, absence. Palka is
that which exists, the wherewithal of life, including people and
possessions. By contrast, lawa connotes the loss of the persons and
things that sustain one's life. However,just as persons disperse then
gradually come together again (pina yani ) , so ceremony can bring
the ancestral order back into being, fleshing it out in the painting,
song and mimetic dance of the living. Giving birth to a child,
singing up the country, or dancing the Dreaming into life, are all
modes of "bringing forth being" (palka jarrimi ) . And the passage
from absence to presence is like the passage from night to day . . .
That which has been, however, always leaves a trace. And these
traces are sometimes ancestral, sometimes personal, though these
two domains flow imperceptibly and inevitably into one another.
Thus, while the body of the land carries the imprint (yirdi ) of
ancestral j ourneys and epochal events, it also bears traces of the
living as they move about upon it in the course of their lives.
By the same token, every individual's body is the site of a similar
merging of mythical and personal time. A man may reincarnate

289
traits of a Dreaming ancestor, and his body will come to bear scars
(murru) , such as initiatory weals on the chest and "sorry" marks on
the thighs that are manifestations of the Law. Yet everybody also
carries idiosyncratic scars - from broken limbs, burns, fights, and
aging - that recollect irregular and singular events. It is the same
with names. A nickname commemorating some incident in one's
life will complement the Dreaming name one inherits from an
ancestor.
Warlpiri attitudes to footprints nicely capture the ways in which
the ancestral and the personal coalesce.
After a death, the footprints of the deceased are systematically
erased from the earth. Groups of kinswomen, their foreheads,
cheeks, upper arms, and breasts caked with wood ash and kaolin,
move through the settlement trailing wilted branches of eucalypt,
" clearing" away the footprints of the deceased, rubbing out every
trace of his or her presence. In this way, the dead lose their singular
identity and enter ancestral time as spirits.
But footprints are also crucial to respecting the Law in everyday
life.

" I could not go to my brother's camp," Jerry Jangala reminisced,

"because his wife might be there. If I wanted to see my brother, we
would have to meet somewhere else. I wasn't even allowed to cross
my brother's wife's tracks; first I would have to wipe them out with
my foot and only then I could go on. And if my brother would see
his wife's tracks and mine going in the same direction, there would
be a big fight, I would not be able to convince him I hadn't even
seen his wife."

Finally, footprints are observed for the insights they give into
events that have taken place in one's absence.
Michael Terry describes this nicely, if Eurocentrically, for
Aboriginals are less interested in identifYing a person from his or
her prints than with gleaning information about the actions and
events in which that person was involved.

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 An old Aboriginal recently saw some human footprints on a patch
of sand near the Alice Springs railway station. He looked at the
tracks intently, scratched his head and said, " Michael Terr y 's in
town" .
There would have been nothing remarkable about that but for
one thing: the Aboriginal had not seen my tracks for twenty-five
years . . .

Michael Terry goes on to describe the idiosyncratic character

of his footprints - the result of a habit of dragging his left foot
slightly, which left a thin trail in the sand on the outside of the
heel. Men's prints differ from women's in similarly subtle ways.
Men's toes lie flat and are extended, women's toes are gathered
more, and women leave an inswept imprint behind the ball of the
foot as a result of carrying loads and having, as a result, flattened
arches. Old men have flatter and more even prints; younger men
are more sprightly and step more on the toes.
Aboriginal people also track the imprint of tyres on dusty desert
roads as assiduously as they track human footprints, pointing out
that though all tyres appear alike to the unobservant eye, each has
an idiosyncratic tread and unique pattern of wear and tear that
make it readily identifiable as belonging to a particular vehicle, a
particular person.

We were heading back to Lajamanu, and had decided to break our

journey at Jila, some ninety miles northwest ofYuendumu.
Francine ran the Toyota off the track and we got out to stretch
our legs . The long grass was flecked by the setting sun. Spinifex
pigeons fluttered up from the grass. The vanes of the water bore
creaked in the wind.
The men travelling with us - Pincher Jampijinpa, Nugget
Jangala, and Pepper Jupurrurla - wandered around, inspecting
the ground. It was habitual. People would scan the landscape

291
for bush tucker and examine the road for familiar footprints or
tyre tracks, deducing from scant signs what had happened in the
country since they last passed through. While I would often be lost
in thought, Warlpiri were always focused on the world immedi­
ately at hand.
I followed Nugget, who pointed out the spoor of a brown snake
in the dirt. Then we peered into the four empty houses of the
outstation, the dead hearths on the tamped earth, chips of wood
where someone had rough-adzed a boomerang. Nugget told me
who it had been.
I walked back to the Toyota, untied the swags and bedrolls from
the roof-rack, and threw them down. Pincher took the spade and
began clearing a campsite. The men heaped the spinifex into a
windbreak. Then Pepper and I headed off toward a dead tree to
gather firewood.
When we got back the swags were laid out in a line and fires lit
between them. Nugget, Pincher, and Pepper camped to my right.
On my left, Francine was engaging Nola (Pincher's mother) in
a conversation, informed more by goodwill than understanding.
When Wanda (Pincher's sister) finally rendered a strident transla­
tion of what her mother was saying, we realised that Nola was
concerned we had built our fire too close to the windbreak; the
grass might catch fire as we slept. Wanda then returned to her
task of cooking the goanna she had caught, holding it by the tail
and flipping it over in the coals. The goanna flinched and stiff­
ened as the heat scorched its flesh. Minutes later, Wanda's kids were
devouring the charred meat and demanding more.
Nola appeared to be both elated and saddened by Jila. This was
her country, of the rat kangaroo Dreaming, belonging to Japaljarri
and Jungarrayi, Napaljarri and Nungarrayi.
She kept repeating the word wiyarrpa, referring to the dear
departed as much as to the place in which the living and the dead
were now reunited.
It made me think back to the events of the afternoon. Every

292
place we passed had called out some response from the people
with whom we were travelling.
Ten miles out of Yuendumu we had crossed the first of many
dry creek beds. Pepper explained that this was his Dreaming. The
wampana (hare wallaby) had travelled this way in the Dreaming. It
came from a place called Winparaku (Blanche Tower) in the south,
accompanied by a snake called Yarrapiri. They travelled on toward
the north, eventually reaching Darwin and the sea . . .
Then Nugget interrupted Pepper to say that we were now
crossing a rain Dreaming track. But the shadowy tors and jumbled
boulders held other meanings for Nola. Here at Yupajarrayi, she
gave birth to one of her daughters. Not far away, beneath a wall of
red rock, a brother died. "She can't go there, she can't camp there,"
Wanda shouted from the back of the Toyota.
It was a foretaste of what was to happen twenty miles further
on. Francine and I had hoped to make camp in a creek bed where
we'd stopped to boil a billy when we first drove north. But as
Francine braked the Toyota and made to turn up the creek bed,
Nugget cried out. I glanced back to where he and Pepper were
sitting in the back, looks of dismay and disapproval on their faces.
"What's wrong," I asked.
"No room here ! " Nugget exclaimed. "Too many dead fellas
here. We got no room."
I glanced at Pincher. He pursed his lips and stuck out his jaw,
pointing us back onto the road. "Lots of people bin pass away here.
Too many pirlirrpa here. We can't camp here, we got to go to Jila."

That night I fell asleep listening to Nugget and Pincher intoning

verses from the rain Dreaming. They sat facing their fire, clacking
their boomerangs as they sang.
When I woke at first light, they seemed not to have moved.
Blankets were drawn up over their hunched shoulders. Then
Nugget stretched out a skinny arm and began to scratch at the
mosquito bites on his shin. Further away, Pepper was shoving a

293
log into the embers of his fire. His hair was tousled. He seemed
absorbed by the flickering flames.
I shook the dew from the canvas cover of my swag. The desert
wind was cold, the sky reddening in the east, and birds breaking
into song.
My reverie was broken by Wanda's gruff voice as she shared
shreds of cold goanna meat among her kids. Nola sat apart,
murmuring something to herself.
Wanda explained to Francine that her mother had dreamed of
one ofher aunts who had died at Jila many years ago. In the dream
her aunt had been in another country, singing songs of the mala
(rat kangaroo) Dreaming. " She is homesick for her own place,"
Wanda said.
I told Wanda that I had also had a dream. I had dreamed of my
daughter who lived in Canberra.
Wanda looked gravely at me. "That means she is thinking of
you. She worry for you. She upset you've gone away."
Whether or not Heidi felt this way, I certainly felt guilty some­
times at living so far from her. But this time I could console myself
with the thought that she would be visiting us in the desert in a
few weeks' time.
We boiled a billy, made tea, ate a breakfast of dried bread and
baked beans, and broke camp.
Francine took the wheel. Nugget and I sat beside her. The
Toyota stank of sweat, ash, goanna meat, orange peel and tobacco.
The road to Puyurru was seldom used. "This grass is too long,"
Pincher exclaimed, as saplings and seedheads scraped the under­
side of the Toyota. " It's got to be burned off. You got to look after
the country." Burning was a way of " cleaning" the country, similar
to sweeping the floor of a house.
At Puyurru we stopped to look around. As usual, the men
stalked about, eyes glued to the ground, picking up the spoor of
animals, deducing what had happened there. Nugget was in his
element. This was his place. He showed me the silted-up depres-

294
sion where water could be found. He pointed out old campsites.
Suddenly, he walked quickly from where we were standing and
headed for a group of gnarled dogwoods. I followed him as he
zigzagged through the scrub.
Then he knelt and began grubbing about in the sand. A few
seconds later he grunted with satisfaction, and held up a rusty
knife blade. He had left it there a long time ago. The handle had
been eaten away by termites.
Nugget sat down under a dogwood, and picked at the rust with
his thumbnail. The brim of his soiled red Stetson was pulled down
over his eyes, his face in shadow.
"What is the Dreaming here?" I asked.
"Ngapa (rain) ," Nugget said. "That rain bin come up from
Kalapinpa, bin travel north, past that place I bin show you yesterday,
right up here, this Puyurru."
Nugget named the key sites along the songline, tracing it north
as far as Kulpulurnu. As he spoke he drew circles in the sand with
his forefinger, linking them with a firmly drawn line.
Kulpulurnu was where all the rain tracks converged. Nugget
had been conceived there. Though he hadn't visited the place for
many years, he was confident he could find his way back there, just
as he had found his old hunting knife.
He drew his hand across the stubble of his chin and smiled.
"Maybe we can go there some time, Jupurrurla, in your Toyota."
We wandered back to the Toyota where the others were waiting.
Francine relied on Nugget to find the track. The vehicle bumped
and lurched over broken ground, bashing through scrub and
porcupine spinifex, guided by the subtle movements of Nugget's
hand - the same movements, made in silence, that men use when
hunting.
Nola shared Nugget's memory of the land. Every now and then
she would ask Francine to stop the vehicle, and wander a few
yards into the spinifex in search of bush tomatoes or bush raisins.
Wanda and the kids blundered after her, yelling for Francine to

295
bring plastic bags which they could fill with bush tucker. Nola
appeared rejuvenated. She dragged Francine after her, regaling her
with stories of how she walked through this country, sometimes
travelling as far north as Lajamanu. When she stumbled and fell,
she picked herself up laughing, and went on pointing out places
on the horizon that had figured significantly in her life and where,
as a young woman, she had hunted.
Wanda, who grudgingly translated some of her mother's remi­
niscences, seemed to get more and more morose. She kept telling
Francine about a place where "Japaljarri passed away, where Japal­
jarri turned into a tree."
Half an hour later we stopped near the place Wanda had been
talking about.
I was shocked to see that Nola was in tears. The men said
nothing. But Wanda jumped out of the vehicle and led Francine
and me across sparsely grassed ridges of red sand to a desert walnut
tree. One branch of the tree had been snapped off in a whirlwind.
It lay on the ground, surrounded by withered foliage. This tree,
Wanda explained, was Nola's father. Nola was walking about with
her face streaked with tears. "She's crying! " Wanda exclaimed, as
though this might amuse us.
Japaljarri was indeed Nola's father. One summer he had gone
north to meet up with other countrymen and perform a ritual at
Kunalarunyu. When the ritual was finished he set out for home.
But the dancing had tired him. He fell asleep where the tree now
stands, and died there in the morning.
"So he was your grandfather?" I asked Wanda.
"He true bloke," Wanda assured me. "He bin pass away here, turn
into this tree." She pointed with her lips at the fallen branch. "He
goin' to lose his other arm now, my grandfather, poor bugger."
Nola was still crying, wandering away into the spinifex and
inspecting the ground for traces of the past.
Pincher sidled up to me. "Her father's pirlirrpa is here," he said,
"his kuruwarri. " Both words mean roughly "vital essence", the first

296
residing within the body of a person, the second within the body
of the earth.
I noticed that a lot of seedlings were springing up in the sandy
ground around the tree, but it seemed to mean nothing to Pincher.
He told me that his mother's brother used to get drunk and come
to this place. "He used to sit under the tree and cry too, like my
mother is crying. Crying for their father."

When we were on the road again, I asked Pincher how old he had
been when his mother's father passed away.
Wanda answered for him. Pincher had been a little boy at the
time. And "that Nangala" (the anthropologist Nancy Munn) had
been living at Yuendumu .
So even we strangers sometimes leave our fugitive traces in the
immemorial land!

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 W e a ry B a y

After living and working in Central Australia, I saw Cape York

as another country. The difference was not simply ecological -
between desert and rainforest - or even social; it reflected the
changed circumstances of our own lives.
When Francine and I made our first foray into the desert three
years before, in 1 990, everything seemed auspicious.
After driving all day we'd made camp at dusk among some
sparse mulga. As darkness fell, we built a fire, made billy tea, and ate
baked beans on toast. Then we spread our swags on the bare earth
and prepared for sleep.
In the early hours of the morning I woke, needing to piss.
Nearby, the fire was still smouldering. The landscape was all but
invisible.
Only yards from our camp I lost my bearings. The embers of
the fire had been swallowed by the darkness, the stars shed little
light, and the moon was down. At first I tried to find the dirt track
we'd driven along only hours before, feeling for our tyre marks
with the soles of my bare feet and using the faint silhouette of the
mulga to define the way. But the silence and the night enveloped
me.
It was then that I decided to sit down. To listen to the land. To
experience the night.
I sat for a long time, thinking of nothing, while my eyes grew
more and more accustomed to the darkness.
When I saw a pale smudge of light quavering on the horizon,

298
my first thought was that my eyes were deceiving me. I looked
away, then back again. It was still there. I stared at it. I thought
it might be the glow from an Aboriginal settlement, but such
settlements cast little light, and besides, the nearest one was more
than fifty miles away. Then I figured it must be the headlights of
a car. But we were well off the Tanami road, and I could hear no
sound.
Suddenly, it became clear to me. I was looking at the shadowy
disc of the moon. It was rising before my eyes.
The tip appeared, of the crescent drawn up like a golden comma
from a vat of indigo. Within minutes the moon was a glowing
sliver above the horizon, rising steadily.
I walked back to our camp, spellbound that the moon should
have come up at that very moment, and at the very spot on the
horizon where my eyes had been fixed.
An hour later, the sky became grey in the east. Then it turned
dull russet, and birds began chirruping and piping around me.
We broke camp and headed north as the sun came up.
Our fieldwork on Cape York in 1 993 began in darkness too.
But this time it was like the darkness of eclipse.
Our plan was that while Francine did fieldwork toward her
Ph.D. , I would research Green and Aboriginal views of the natural
world. Having visited Cape York eight years before, I knew of
the confrontations between Greens and developers in the Dain­
tree National Park; now the same area was the focus of a Native
Title claim by Kuku Yalanji people. How might one understand
the genealogies and entailments, conceptual as well as political, of
these culturally different agendas?
After a night in Laura and a slow drive down the coast, it was
late in the day when we arrived at Weary Bay and set up our
tent in a clearing among the mangroves, a stone's throw from the
campsite of the family with whom we were going to live. For
some reason, I felt drained and desolate. In contrast with my first
experience of the desert, the prospect of living for a year with

299
our two-year old son, Joshua, in a tent in the rainforest, filled me
with despair. As I contemplated the dark forest pressing in around
us, the wet sandy earth skeined with tatty roots on which we had
pitched our tent, and the bleak encampment of our neighbours
- tarpaulins over foam mattresses, the rain pattering through the
leaves, the sky overcast - I saw the place as an outward expression
of my inward state. I was nothing. No one. I had no past, no iden­
tity, no knowledge, no capacity. And remembering other places
and other times, making the same reluctant beginning, I did not
know whether I could go through it all again.
It rained heavily in the night. Rainwater collected underneath
our foam mattresses and soaked through the sheets. Then Joshua
was awake, crying for his bottle. As Francine fumbled for a flash­
light, I clambered out of the tent into pitch darkness. Our vehicle
was only ten paces away, but as I barked my shins on the stumps
of trees and walked into overhanging branches, I realised I was
heading in the wrong direction. I took my bearings as best I could,
and moved off to my right. This time I waded into the scrub. It
was all I could do to find my way back to the tent, where I took
Joshua from Francine while she went in search of our vehicle.
At first light I walked down to the beach. A flight of Torres
Strait pigeons moved in from the sea and, a few minutes later, nine
more, to feed in the bush. The waves flopped ashore in desultory
protest. And on the horizon, a container ship moved as slowly as a
clock hand against the rising sun.
It was James Cook who gave Weary Bay its name.
When the Endeavour went aground on the Great Barrier Reef
a few minutes before 1 1 p.m. on Monday, 1 1 June 1 770, panic and
anxiety seized Cook's crew. Faced with the real and immediate
danger of being cast away with no hope of ever returning home,
the crew's fears were not assuaged for two days, by which time the
ship's pumps were finally able to bring the leaks under control. On
Wednesday, 1 3 June, Cook wrote, with characteristic understate­
ment, " this fortunate circumstance gave new life to every one on

300
board." He added, it was "much easier to conceive then [sic] to
discribe [sic] the satisfaction felt by every body on this occasion."
But before the Endeavour limped north to sanctuary on the
Cook River where it could be careened and repaired, there passed
a weary time, and the names Cook gave to various landmarks on
the way attest to the prevailing mood: Cape Tribulation, Weary
Bay, Hope Islands. Weary Bay - "an opening that had the appear­
ance of a harbour" - was sighted on Thursday the 1 4th, but on
closer inspection was found not to offer enough depth of water
for the ship.
When I returned from the beach, I said to Mabel, " It's beautiful
here."
But this comment on what I saw as the pristine remoteness of
the place was immediately contradicted by Mabel's pragmatism.
"This is my bubu, my country," Mabel said. And she described
the green turtles offshore, the bush yams and dakay (mud clams) in
the scrub, and said that she hoped it would not be long before she
and her family could settle, undisturbed by outsiders, in this place
that was rightfully theirs.

Mabel's remarks brought home to me the extent to which country,

for Aboriginal people, is a social reality, steeped in memories of
births, deaths and marriages, of seasonal movements in search of
food, and of the traumatic disruptions of colonial history. But it is
not passively being on or in the land that gives the land its vitality
and meaning; nor are these qualities the result of contemplation.
Rather, it is the vita activa-the process of living and moving
with others on the land and drawing one's livelihood from it that
charges the landscape with vitality and presence. Country there­
fore embodies the sweat, energy, thought and feelings of those
who invest their labour in it, just as a fabricated object becomes
charged with the vitality of the person who shapes it. Like the
Ionian "theorists of nature" in the sixth and seventh centuries,
Aboriginal people assume the world of nature to be "saturated

30 1
or permeated by mind." The ebb and flow of tides, the fury of
storms and earthquakes, leaves buffeted and trees broken by high
winds, all testifY to the ways in which nature is not only filled
with energy and power, but "ensouled" . Accordingly, relationships
between realms that we conventionally separate as natural, cultural
and supernatural are all seen as social relationships, governed by the
same principles that obtain in interpersonal life. Among the Kuku
Yalanji, such analogical reasoning means that the ecological zones
of "sea" and "inland" are also cultural categories - "of the sea"
(jalunjr) and "away from the sea" (ngalkaljt) - connoting different
social essences, different smells. This logic also explains why sea
and inland things must be kept apart. So one is enjoined not to use
dugong, turtle or bullock (which are "meat") as bait for fishing,
but to use only fish bait to catch fish (the others being "whitefella
bait") . And don't use saltwater fish to catch freshwater fish, or vice
versa, one is told. To infringe any of these cultural rules will cause a
flood . . . an ungovernable overflowing of natural boundaries.
Thus one learns that misfortunes that would in one's own life­
world be dismissed as accidents, or regarded as simply in the " nature
of things" actually have social causes; someone must be responsible
for them, someone must be to blame. The same reasoning explains
why " natural" phenomena are so closely and continually exam­
ined for their social implications, as when a shooting star is said to
signal a death, or a man running amok is said to have a pregnant
wife.
This is not to imply that Aboriginal and Western worldviews
imply absolutely different lifeworlds. That these worldviews seem
so essentially dissimilar may be more an artefact of our long­
standing habit of exoticising "primitive" people than a reflection
of any empirical reality - a habit still evident in the tendency
of many contemporary philosophers of ecology to excoriate
global capitalism by urging a recovery of the allegedly more eco­
sensitive, sensuous, reciprocal relation between humanity and the
natural world that premodern thought is said to exemplifY. All

302
such constructions of the Other are deeply flawed. In the first
place, they inevitably construct nature as benign, and narcissisti­
cally invoke experiences of the natural world that are pleasing
rather than destructive or discomforting to us. (The Kuku Yalanji
notion of storms as the malevolent expression of human ill-will, of
lightning as retributive j ustice, and of earthquakes and volcanoes
as signs of the earth's outrage, call such romanticism into ques­
tion) . In the second place, such constructions gloss over the fact
that a sensuous experience of connectedness between people and
nature is never permanent or pervasive, but always, except in the
case of madness, occasional - arising in specific social contexts,
tied to specific social purposes, and constrained by cultural ideas
and ritual codes. That Mabel and McGinty, our hosts, made keen
observations of the bay whenever we arrived there to fish -
remarking the spoor of a snake in the sand, traces of mullet or a
stingray offshore, the state of the tide, subtle nuances of the sea, the
weather, and the season that entirely escaped my notice - was not
because they participated in nature but because they were practised
in that way of life in that place. In this sense their participation in
the place they called their own was no more "mystical" than the
participation of a mechanic, say, in the assemblage of machine parts
on which he is working, or a scholar in a collection of rare manu­
scripts, or a sculptor in the obj ect she is shaping. All , so to speak,
put themselves into what they do, creating thereby the conditions
under which they may experience that sense of fusion between
bodyself and object that we tend to talk about in terms of natural­
ness, sympathy and attunement. In short, states of consciousness,
as Marx repeatedly observed, are tied to our modes of interaction
with the world in which we live. Just as tribal people experi­
ence a "fetishistic" relationship with the obj ects that make up their
quotidian environment, so people who live in urban, high-tech
environments are wont to experience the same attachments, affili­
ations, and fusions with the things that are part and parcel of their
workaday lives.

303
After two days working long hours with McGinty and his brother­
in-law Babaji to clear our campsite, I went down to the bay alone.
I stripped, washed and scrubbed myself in the sea, then dressed.
The beach was deserted. But as I sat in the shade of a pandanus
palm, thinking back on the day, and on the fulfillment I had found
clearing our campsite with McGinty and Babaji, an aluminium
dinghy came slowly inshore from the open sea.
It was Mabel's brothers, Sonny and Oscar, and her brother-in­
law Sam. They had been out to Hope Island, hunting green turtles.
As they beached the dinghy, and drew it up onto the sand, I went
down to greet them.
The sea sloshed around my ankles and gently j olted the dinghy.
The two boys, Philip and Louie, ran down the beach brandishing
their fishing spears. Sam and Sonny hauled the biggest turtle onto
the gunwale of the dinghy and tied a rope around its right flipper.
Then, as the old man of the sea appeared to gaze about, befuddled,
Sam beat its brains out with a sledge-hammer.
I watched intently as Sonny began to butcher the turtle.
"We call turtle 'meat' (minya) , not 'fish' (kuyu) ," Sam explained.
And he told me that great care had to be taken when separating
the meat from the carapace, for if the bile is spilled it contaminates
the meat and makes it inedible.
In the face of such pragmatism, what place did my own unspoken
sentiments have, as I watched this beautiful creature - so out of
its depth, so out of its element - being hacked open before my
eyes? And how might one reconcile the great difference between
the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal sensibilities that collect around
such an event? For while many eco-conscious Australians regard
the green turtle (Chelonia mydas) as both a beautiful and endan­
gered species, Kuku Yalanji regard its green fat as a delicacy, and
hunt and eat it with relish.
That evening, Sonny disinterred the cooked turtle from the earth
oven he had dug at the outstation, and the fat was shared around.

304
I ate without much appetite, caught between competing cultural
persuasions, and aware that, this time round, my writing was going
to be biased toward description and poetry, not analysis.

Green Turtle

Sam smashes its head in

with the same sledge-hammer
I used this afternoon
to ram our tent pegs home.

A hemisphere turns
turtle; Sonny hacks
its mildewed, sea-marbled
breastplate free.

It recoils from the sky.

Head lolls.
A flipper feebly pushes
Sonny's knife away.

They empty
the long grey rope of its life
onto the sand by the thudding boat
which holds two more

And its carapace is a vessel

filled with a wine lake
in which clouds
float, birds fly, leaves fall.

305
 Tou r i stes Trop i q u es

W hen Cockroach took offence at Bob's spectacles, got hold of

a shotgun, and blew Bob's brains out while he was sitting with
some Aboriginal friends playing a hand of cards, we all suffered
the repercussions. Cockroach was a whitefella, a fugitive from
the south who'd been living on an island in the river for several
months; Bob, also white, whom everyone called "that old man",
was married to McGinty's sister Winnie. Poor bugger, with his
torn bell-bottoms and bare feet, his straw hair, blonde eyebrows
and sun-blistered face, always so abashed and self-effacing, I now
wish I had got to know him better. He was buried in Sydney by
his sister, his only living kin. As for Cockroach, the cops came and
took him back to New South Wales as well.
Bereft, and with six grandchildren to take care of, Winnie
turned up at our rainforest camp one day, expecting her brother
McGinty to give her refuge. Her arrival could not have been more
ill-timed, for next day McGinty's niece turned up with her white
boyfriend, Darren, and their two kids, and also settled in. McGinty
resented Darren's braggart and self-centred manner - his endless
stories of outwitting cops, ripping people off, getting something
for nothing. Nor could he and Mabel abide the way Darren would
bluster into their camp without asking, "cutting in" on conver­
sations that were none of his business, "talking freely". At first
McGinty tried to make light of these intrusions. "I bin watching
him. He can't understand. Might be too hard for him." But then
the hints of irony disappeared. " Bama [Aboriginal] way," explained

306
McGinty, "father-in-law and son-in-law don't sit together like
that. Darren should have more respect." When he asked his niece
to help her boyfriend understand the protocols of bama kinship,
Christine simply shrugged and said that if Darren didn't talk "he'd
just sit there like a stuffed monkey".
A few days later, McGinty and Mabel did what they always did
when the tensions and demands of an overcrowded camp became
intolerable; they decamped to the beach. Francine and I, also
needing a break and fresh supplies, decided it would be opportune
for us to go to Cairns.
Winnie and her oldest granddaughter, Wilma, came with us.
Though only ten, Wilma was her grandmother's intelligence and
conscience, and seemed able to intuit or anticipate every eventu­
ality. On the way to Cairns she explained that her grandmother
shouldn't have been drunk when Bob was at Wujal, as if to imply
that if Winnie had taken better care of" that old man" Bob would
not have been killed.
When we reached Cairns, Winnie wanted to locate her
daughter, Lulu, who had j ust been released from jail for knifing
her boyfriend. "Where Lulu?" she sang out to the bama in the parks
we passed. Wilma tried to hurry her grandmother along, breaking
into Winnie's conversation with some bama along the waterfront
to remind her that we were double-parked in the middle of a
busy street and needed to get to our hotel. " Come on! We can't
stop here. We gotta go now." When we finally did drop Winnie
and Wilma off at the house where they were going to stay, Wilma
made sure she had our hotel address and telephone number so that
we could rendezvous later, and she could call us for a "loan" .
The following morning I ran into Lulu and her new boyfriend,
Tom, in the railway park. Lulu was wearing a grunge shirt over
leopard-skin tights. Tom sported a beard, and was wearing a base­
ball cap and thongs.
"We killing time," Lulu explained. She and Tom had gone to
Winnie's and Bob's old house that morning to pick up their things,

307
but "the place stank, like someone dead in there". Winnie told
Lulu that all their possessions had been taken away and dumped,
Lulu's and Tom's things included.
"I read about you in the newspaper," I said.
Lulu had a clipping in her pocket, and was proud to have had
"her story" published. And her nights in custody awaiting trial
hadn't been all that bad, she said. "When the men got together
they really liked to see us. Food was good. You could watch TV"
Now that she had a new boyfriend, everyone said how well she
looked . . .
The article in the Cairns Post was headlined "Probation for
Knife-Wielding Park Drinker" .

A mother of six who chased after a man on the Esplanade in Cairns

while wielding a knife was yesterday placed on probation for 1 8
months.
Doris Lulu Kulla Kulla, 3 1 , of Wujal Wujal, pleaded guilty in
Cairns District Court yesterday to going armed in public in a
manner causing fear on May 1 2 .
Crown prosecutor Carl Heaton told the court Kulla Kulla had
repeatedly swung a 1 5 em knife at her former de facto in an inci­
dent on the Esplanade that day.
He said even when a police patrol arrived and the man ran to
officers for help, Kulla Kulla had continued to lunge at the man
with the knife . . .
John Harrison, for Kulla Kulla, said his client had been on the
Esplanade dr inking earlier that day when the man accused her of
selling herself on the street and they had an argument.
They had been throwing insults at each other during the day,
including the man telling Kulla Kulla she was a dead woman if she
went with another man . . .

"You must have been really wild," I said. " I ' m glad I wasn't down on
the Esplanade when you were running around with that knife ! "
Lulu laughed. "Too much," she said - putting her fist i n her

308
mouth to mime drinking - "and fightin' ." Then she asked if
there would be room in our Toyota for her and Tom when we
went back to Wujal.
"We can squeeze you in," I said.

I walked to the Cairns Pier. I wanted to locate the wildlife show

that Wilma had told me about.
Taking a short cut, I entered the lobby of the Radisson hotel.
The lobby was a plastic and plaster rainforest. Although real
water trickled through it, splashing gently over real stones, and real
goldfish swam in the pool beneath the waterfall, the forest was a
replica of the real thing. Plaster cassowaries, tree kangaroos, frogs
and turtles inhabited the simulated foliage. Stuffed snakes, croco­
diles, and opossums lurked beneath plaster trees that had been
festooned with plastic lianas and epiphytes. And strolling through
this artificial wilderness, without any apparent awareness of it,
were immaculately dressed Japanese tourists, their bodies smelling
of soap and shampoo, their skin as polished as porcelain. Other
tourists were sitting at tables, discussing plans with travel agents
for trips to the reef or rainforest. Still others were setting off, sun­
hatted, into the Pier to shop. So different was this world to the
Bruegelesque one I had j ust left that it made me reflect on the
itinerant, vagrant, improvised routines that governed our everyday
life in the field, and echoed an older nomadism - of the peren­
nial search for food and booze; of carousing, loitering, waiting in
parks, pubs, parking lots, railway yards, cheap digs and doss houses;
of fights; of splitting up and coming back together. And I thought
back to a trip we had made a week earlier to the old sugar mill
north ofAyton: the decaying ruins reclaimed by the rainforest, and
Lizzie digging for scrub hen eggs, Mabel warning us about the
hallucinogenic mushrooms along the path, the danger of falling
bloodwood branches, the death adders under the dry leaves . . .
I walked through the hotel into the mall. A paunchy tourist
was being photographed with a full-sized photo of Paul Hogan

309
as Crocodile Dundee - akubra hat with plastic croc teeth in the
band, a stuffed boa in his hand, the background a painted rainforest
scene. Elsewhere, people were inspecting kitchen towels decorated
with Aboriginal motifs, acrylic dot canvases, and painted boomer­
angs.
I became fascinated by a young couple who were viewing
something on the monitor of their video camera. Their faces were
aglow with such delight and vitality that I wondered if the sight
of the real thing had been as inspiring for them. Or is it that this
kind ofj oy springs not from the thing-in-itself but from a sense of
the command and creative control that a camera gives - a sense
that one has captured and subj ected to one's own will a minia­
turised homologue of a world over which one has, in reality, little
mastery? Is this why tourists so often view the world through the
lenses of cameras, and visit museums - because these enable them
to arrest and domesticate reality, even at the cost of reducing the
world to a collection of lifeless obj ects?

An analogy is sometimes drawn these days between ethnographic

fieldwork and tourism. It's all a question of travel, the argument
goes, of boundary-crossing, of hybridity and blurred genres, of the
globalisation of culture. But this comfortable, Archimedean "view
from afar" is all too reminiscent of the armchair anthropology that
was eclipsed a hundred years ago by the fieldwork tradition. It's
not primarily a question of whether ethnography gives us "truer"
insights into other peoples' lives than the tourist gaze; it is a matter
of the radically different experiences that come from visiting rather
than actually living in another society.
This difference may be likened to the difference between
magical and political action. The first is a form of play, in which
one relates to a homologue of the real world - a toy, a miniatur­
ised image, a simulacrum - and is thereby safeguarded from the
dangers of making direct contact with the obj ect of one's interest,
as in a zoo or museum. The second involves Jace-tojace interaction

310
with others on their terms, and therefore carries the constant risk
that one may lose one's stability, security, and identity. Tourism
is a vicarious way of relating to the world. It provides, as the
Swedish ethnologist Orvar Lofgren puts it, "a cultural laboratory
where people . . . experiment with new aspects of their identities,
their social relations, or their interaction with nature." But this
experimentation, Lofgren stresses, is shaped by the "cultural skills
of daydreaming and mindtravelling. Here is an area in which fantasy
has become an important social practice." To go on holiday is to "get
away from it all", not to exchange one set of difficulties for
another. Ethnographic fieldwork is not only sustained for a long
period; it involves direct engagement and social commitment.
Though one cannot free one's mind entirely of ethnocentri­
cism and fantasy, an ethnographer is committed to a methodical
form of what Hannah Arendt called the "visiting imagination" ,
in which one puts oneself in the place of others, not in order
to dream but to work at the task of seeing to what extent one's
understanding may be transformed through personal immersion
in another way of life.
One may also see the difference between tourism and ethnog­
raphy in terms of positioning.
Like a voyeur, the tourist is always careful to position himself
at a safe distance from the action. Curious about the Aboriginals,
say, whom he sees sitting under the tamarind trees in the park near
his hotel, the tourist wants to satisfY his curiosity without getting
too involved. He is fascinated, captivated, drawn toward the spec­
tacle, yet doesn't want to become sullied by an encounter with the
Other, to be held responsible, to be challenged or obligated in some
way, to have his routines and security disturbed. In positioning
himself, the tourist uses a camera with a zoom lens to capture an
image of the Other. Or shops for ethnic souvenirs - microcosms
of another lifeworld that he will not actually enter - to take
home and spin a story around. Or has his photo taken with a Paul
Hogan cutout. Or watches some tribal theatre or traditional dance,

311
imagining how he might have lived had he been born in another
time, in another place.
There are ethnographers who operate in this way, to be sure.
Just as there are travellers who develop ethnographic skills. But
generally speaking, tourists want to remain peripheral observers
who only rarely - and then under protest - become embroiled
in the lifeworlds of others. But the true difference between tourist
and ethnographer is not really a difference between passivity and
activity per se. It lies in the way passivity is experienced.
Because an ethnographer is unavoidably drawn into the thick of
things - the fights, the competing demands, the family intrigues,
the everyday struggle for survival in his or her adopted society -
yet is not recognised as a true actor whose role is essential to the
life of that community - he or she will sometimes experience
this marginality as a form of impotence and passivity that is exis­
tentially unendurable because it implies that he or she matters to
no one and makes no difference to anything. Yet these emotions
are the very measure to which the ethnographer, unlike the tourist
or the voyeur, has become involved in that other lifeworld. And it
is this vulnerability, this frustration, this resentment, this periodic
despair, that testify to the extent to which he or she has assimilated
the values, the protocols, and the priorities of that place. Indeed, it
is these emotions that define the worth of the understanding that
he or she will take from the field.
Why?
The reason is that this understanding is at once practical and
social - practical because it is the outcome of an experiment
in which one risks oneself, taking oneself to the limits in order
to understand, through direct interaction, the extent to which a
socially conditioned human being can become other than he or
she is; social, because this understanding has been reached with
others, and so provides realistic rather than imaginary or abstracted
insights into the limits and possibilities of human coexistence.

312
Next day Wilma phoned. Her grandmother was ready to go home.
We picked them up at Ozanam House. They'd slept there their
first night in Cairns, and slept rough the second in the corner of a
nearby playing field. It was warm, Wilma assured us: "We weren't
cold."
As soon as they'd clambered up into the back of the Toyota, we
drove ofT in search of Lulu and Tom at the fountain. But Wilma
was impatient to get going. "We can't drive round lookin' for them
two; we gotta go," she said.
But we found Lulu, who climbed in beside us, and we continued
on our way, cruising the streets in search of Tom.
As we passed the old wharfside pubs where bama loitered in the
parking lots or ambled up and down the street, Winnie began to
get impatient. "That fuckin' Tom, I bin see 'im there waitin' for
you. I gotta get home to my little girls. Tell 'im to hurry up."
"We can't find 'im," Lulu said aimlessly after a while.
Tom no longer seemed to matter. Someone's money was due
today, so the park mob would have some food.
Lulu clutched her bottle of VB beer, her eyes heavy, words
slurred.
"I might stay, eh?"
As I drove ofT, the image of something I had glimpsed earlier in
the day came back to me in the form of a haiku.

So that's it!
An ibis walking around
the tyres of a Toyota.

313
 Lea v i n g I n d i a n a

W aiting for my limo, about to leave Bloomington for the last

time, my mind went back eight years to the autumn of 1 988 when
I first arrived. Then, too, the city had appeared dark and remote,
as if glimpsed through smoked glass, and I had been filled with
misgivings . I had left my eighteen-year-old daughter in Australia
to travel halfWay around the world to a place that felt as foreign
as Siberia. Now, making the return journey, I felt that I was once
again leaving my life behind.
In the early fall of 1 9 5 1 , Gary Snyder came down this same
road. He had not stayed either. Hitching across the Nevada Desert
on his way to Indiana where he would begin graduate studies
in anthropology, he found himself waiting for a lift on the old
Nevada Route 40. A few days before, he had bought a copy of
D.T. Suzuki's Essays in Zen, First Series in a "metaphysical" book­
shop in San Francisco. During his long wait for a ride, he began
reading Suzuki's book. It signalled a complete change of direction
in Gary Snyder's life. "I didn't know it at the moment," he wrote
almost thirty years later, but "that was the end of my career as
an anthropologist." In fact Snyder lasted one semester at Indiana
University, and when he dropped out he confided to his friend
Nathaniel Tarn, "I realized that I didn't want to be the anthropolo­
gist but the informant."
I stood on the porch of my friends' house, watching a fallow
deer graze nervously in the gully below me, biting off clumps of
moss, lifting its head, sniffing the air, listening for menace. It was

314
perfectly camouflaged in the russet colours of the late fall, calm
despite the possibility of being disturbed in the open, and I felt a
deep affinity with it.
When the limo appeared like an apparition in the driveway, I
shouldered my bags and descended the steps.
The limo driver got out of the car and hurried to get to the
trunk before me.
"No need," I said. ' ' I 'll keep the bags with me."
Why did I think of the limo as a hearse, the driver an under­
taker, this a journey across the Styx?
The limo glided down the road toward the turnpike. Some
rottingjack-o-lanterns grinned toothlessly on a porch. Dead leaves
skittered against the kerb. And out on Highway 37 the billboards
advertised fast food outlets, day mortuaries, and insurance compa­
nies ( Wrongful Death Claims, A nimal A ttacks, Auto & Truck Accidents,
Slip, Trip & Fall, Difective Products) . It was all a familiar part of my
life in America, yet suddenly it felt as strange as it had been when
I first arrived, unable to work out the cardinal points, missing the
mountains and the sea . . .

The truth is that no one leaves home and casts himself adrift in
the world without good reason; no one, not even Basho, abandons
his life unless it has first deserted him. Basho lived in Edo (Tokyo)
for several years, writing poetry, recognised and comfortable. But
his soul was in turmoil as he struggled to empty his life of worldly
attachments, and recover the face he had had before he was born.
When his students built him a small house in Fukagawa, at an
isolated spot on the eastern bank of the river Sumida, Basho gladly
moved there and borrowed his new name Basho from the species
of plantain that had been planted beside his house. "The leaves of
the Basho tree are large enough to cover a harp," he explained.
"When they are wind-broken, they remind me of the iqjured tail
of a phoenix, and when they are torn, they remind me of a green
fan ripped by the wind. The tree does bear flowers, but unlike

315
other flowers, there is nothing beautiful about them. The large
trunk of the tree is untouched by the axe, for it is completely
useless as timber. I love the tree, however, for its uselessness . . . I sit
under it, and enjoy the wind and rain that beat against it."

Tonight, the wind blowing

Through the Basho tree,
I hear the leaking rain
Drop against a basin .
Oars hit waves
And my intestines freeze,
As I sit weeping
In the dark night.

He practised Zen during this period, still struggling to see the

world for what it is, but in the end it was two entirely fortuitous
events that opened his eyes. In 1 682, after two years beside the
river, a great fire engulfed Edo, and Basho's house was destroyed.
The following summer his mother died. One year later, aged
thirty-eight, "in the August of the first year ofJyokoyo among the
wails of the autumn wind" , he left his "broken house on the River
Sumida" and set out on the first of his great journeys.

Determined to fall
A weather-exposed skeleton
I cannot help the sore wind
Blowing through my heart.

After ten autumns

In Edo, my mind
Points back to it
As my native place.

So where was my native place? Where, for me, was home?

My fieldwork in Central Australia had persuaded me that such
questions are best answered, not by reference to substantives or

316
essences, such as house, country, nation or family, but by paying
attention to whatever gives one, in any particular cultural or social
situation, a sense that one's actions matter, that one possesses some
say over the course of one's life, and that one's humanity is recog­
nised. Home is not so much a roof over one's head as it is a state
of mind.

A place we travel from

and pine for
when the going's hard,
a sense of living
as we choose.

But even states of mind can be divided, and my own sense

of being at home in the world had, for me, always involved an
oscillation between, and a struggle to reconcile, opposite poles
of experience: north and south, solitude and sociality, poetry and
ethnography.
"Why burn your bridges?" one friend asked me. "If things don't
work out in Sydney, keep open the option of coming back."
"You're committing professional suicide," another said, as though
she already knew intuitively that the j ob I had found in Sydney
would fall through, and I would find myself, for the second time
in my professional life, out of work.
At the airport, people were being conveyed along the moving
walkways, or streaming and eddying around the check-in counters
like so much flotsam. The washed-up were soliciting for alms.
In the corner of the bar where I waited for my flight, the TV
sets were advertising the next NFL Sunday Night game, and
corporate men in shirt-sleeves were drinking bourbon on the
rocks and strategising. "The thing is," I heard one of the young
executives say, "we're in a transitional phase right now; we've got
to see ourselves as in transition."
What of me, I thought; should I also see myself, not as washed
up, but in transition?

317
 Not long before leaving Indiana, I had completed writing The
Blind Impress, my book on the life and times of the New Zealand
outlaw, Joseph Pawelka. In researching and writing this book on
a self-styled "man against the world" , I revisited my own begin­
nings in small-town New Zealand, and discovered an affinity with
Pawelka whose escape from Wellington's Terrace Gaol in August
1 9 1 1 and subsequent disappearance are mysteries that no one has
been able to solve. My fascination with the entangled themes of
escape, travel and rebirth that drew me to Pawelka had, of course,
earlier attracted me to Blaise Cendrars. Even today, I have only
to take my dog-eared copy of Bourlinguer from my bookshelf
to imagine I can hear the shouted goodbyes, final calls, banging
doors, shrill whistle, and laboured shunt and pant of steam as the
Trans-Siberian screeches over its frozen tracks at Novgorod . . . or
the creak and pulse of a freighter pounding through the Southern
Ocean . . . the echoing of voices in a great vaulted railway station
at dawn - images that Cendrars crams into that one word bourl­
inguer for which there is no exact equivalent in English (roughing
it, hitting the road, travelling to the ends of the earth) .
I have never regarded drugs and sensory deprivation as means
to expanding one's consciousness. Travel has always been my key.
For to travel is to open up the possibility of another life, a chance
of starting over in a place that you have chosen - though the
price of this metamorphosis is inevitably the eclipse of your first
life, and a loss that will shadow you forever.
Fire and ash are the universal images of this perennial rebirth. If
the phoenix is to arise, one's previous life must be reduced to ashes.
This is why Cendrars coined his name (he was born Frederic­
Louis Sauser) for its associations of embers, cinders, and auto-da­
fe. With Nietzsche's smouldering lines in the back of his mind
- " Und a lies wird mir nur zur Asche I Was ich Iiebe, was ich fasse. "
("And everything of mine turns to ashes I What I love and what I
do.") - Cendrars was also aware that Blaise and braise were near
homonyms, and the sobriquet Cendrars ironically conj oins ashes

318
(cendres) and art (ars in Latin, as in arson) .
Nor does this initiatory and nomadic impulse wane with time!
At fifty-two, Cendrars was as convinced as he had ever been that
intellectual vitality could only be sustained by breaking old habits,
clearing out, burning one's bridges, uprooting oneself, and losing
oneself in other latitudes. "Nothing remains of all the outrageous
years of my youth, feverish, frantic, angry, and romantically adven­
turous," he writes, "but an insatiable need for displacement and
transplantation."

My father could not have been more different. He shrank from the
outside world, more so as he grew older. His relationship with my
mother meant the world to him; his family, he said, were all that
mattered. When my mother died, he amazed us with his resolve
"to get out and about again". But whenever I phoned him long­
distance, he would talk at length about some new ailment that had
undermined his confidence and made him housebound.
The day I finished my first stint of fieldwork on Pawelka, I drove
from Kimbolton in the Manawatii to Auckland to see my father. I
drove all night, and arrived in Auckland j ust before dawn.
My father answered my knocking on the front door by asking
who it was. Even when I assured him it was me, he kept the door
chained while he took a look.
Once inside, I followed him down the hallway to the kitchen,
pained to see how unsteady he was on his feet, how frail he
appeared in his old dressing gown.
"I let myself sleep in a bit these days," he said. " Not much point
now getting up with the lark."
He put the kettle on and asked if l would like some breakfast. As
I helped myself to some cereal and set out cups and plates on the
table, he told me about the attacks of vertigo that had destabilised
and defeated him.
"I can't understand it," he said. "And the doctor doesn't seem to
be able to work out what the dings it is."

319
 But he wasn't going to give in. He was determined to play
croquet again. He practised hitting balls along the hall carpet. The
trouble was he could hit a ball accurately indoors, but out on the
croquet lawn, in the open air, he failed to hit anything.
"I don't know what I'm doing wrong. It hurts me like mad."
We sat at the dining table as dawn broke.
"But I'm persisting," my father said. "It'll come right. It's only a
matter of practice. It'll get better bit by bit."
But I knew it would not get better. I knew that he could not
play croquet because my mother was not there to play with him.
And his loneliness was all the more heart-breaking because he did
not seem to recognise it. The Jackson talent for reinventing oneself
had finally deserted him.
I caught a couple of hours sleep before rej oining him in the
dining room.
He had several chocolate boxes on the table, filled with old
photographs and letters.
"I don't know if I ever showed you this," he said. "I don't know
whether you've ever seen this."
Of course, I had seen them all.
He kept returning to his youth, to the years before his dead-end
j ob in the bank. His love of carpentry, and the wooden toys he'd
made for our Christmas stockings when we were children. He also
spoke of the friends he had back then. He told me about the day
he and a couple of mates spent at a river hole outside Inglewood.
When it came time to head for home, they decided to walk back
across country rather than thumb a ride on the main road. They
walked in the rain for five hours. It was seven in the evening when
they reached Inglewood. My father went straight to the Coffee
Palace, where he was staying, and fell asleep. He forgot that he had
arranged to meet his fiancee at seven-thiry.
"Another time, Bob Street, Vern Devereux and I climbed the
mountain from the North Egmont House to see the sun rise. We
thought we'd missed it, because the sky began to lighten before we

320
reached the summit. But the summit was in cloud, so we had a clear
view after all, and we watched the sun come up over Ngauruhoe
and Tongariro way to the west. I took that photo. Did I ever show
it to you? I used that old Box Brownie I gave you ."
"Yes," I said, remembering the mountains as I had seen them in
the moonlight ten hours before and recalling the old sepia snap­
shots of my father standing on a rocky spur, ice-axe in hand, or
lying on a scree slope with his climbing mates.
My father got out his harmonica, and began playing.
The songs went back to the period after World War One when
he was growing up. "My bonnie lies over the ocean . . . John Brown's
body . . . Pack up your troubles . . . My darling Clementine . . .
There's no place like home . . . Keep the home fires burning . . . "
The maudlin tunes depressed me. I suggested we go out for a
while. Perhaps we could walk up to the local shops. I needed to
buy some coffee.
"That's a good idea," my father said.
"Maybe later we could go downtown."
It took us half an hour to walk the two blocks to the shops.
Crossing the road was a nightmare.
But it cheered my father up and he was eager now to have me
drive him into the city. He wanted to go to a couple of second­
hand bookshops and search for old books about Taranaki.
"When I'm on my own," he said, " I don't seem to be able to get
up much interest in anything."
" I know how you feel. I 've been through it too."
" It's hard to cook meals for yourself. It's hard to get up much of
an appetite if you're on your own."
On the way into the city, I tried to talk to him about grief.
I wanted him to know that he was not alone in his pain, that
everyone suffered bereavement in much the same way. It was like
the bond between parent and child: one of the things we all share,
no matter who we are, what we believe, what society we grow up
m.

32 1
 I told him about Joe Pawelka. I mentioned the traumatic lung
operation he'd undergone, how it had sapped his strength and
left him with a strange hiss in his voice. I told him how Joe got
married, only to have his wife walk out on him after two months.
I recounted his losses.
" I think a lot of his anger was a protest against loss. A sense of
cosmic unfairness. Why me? Why now? And this sense ofloss must
have been made worse because of his sense of social inferiority.
His wife's family looked down on him and made him feel inad­
equate.Yet the strange thing was that when he was recaptured after
his first escape from jail he never said a word against her, but kept
affirming what an affectionate woman she was . . . "
"When I met Emily," my father said, referring to my mother,
"her parents thought I wasn't good enough for her. It's funny, but
it's a fact . . . sometimes now I wonder what she saw in me."
" I felt the same with Pauline," I said. " I t must be a Jackson
trait, this sense of being inferior." But then I thought, no, it is a
Pakeha New Zealand trait, a trace of our colonial past, orphaned
from our motherland or ancestry, obliged to settle in a country
that we took by chicanery and force from others, and in which we
still struggle to negotiate the terms of a viable belonging.

322
 F u l l C i rc l e

I had not planned to go back to New Zealand to live, but after

leaving Indiana few things in my life went according to plan. I
had taken a "fractional appointment" at the University of Sydney,
thinking it would give me time to write, but following a change
of government and cutbacks to university funding my two-year
contract was declared non-renewable. Attempts at getting back my
j ob at Indiana University came to nothing, and applications for
positions elsewhere proved fruitless. But at the eleventh hour, I
succeeded in getting a research fellowship in Wellington, and so
came home.

When Blaise Cendrars visited New Zealand m the 1 920s, the

country reminded him strongly of his native Switzerland. Years
later, in a memoir entitled Christmas in New Zealand, he recalled
his antipodean sojourn as follows:

If there is a Land of Milk and Honey anywhere on this earth it

is, at first sight, New Zealand. On these two isles of the blessed,
pedigree herds and flocks graze the lush grass of deep valleys. From
one year to another, nothing disturbs them. You can travel by car
for days, or on horseback for weeks, and never meet a living soul.
You can cross ridges, descend into untracked valleys, and never
leave these pasturelands. Except for a petrified waterfall, a wild spot
decked out in Swiss miniature and reserved for newlyweds looking
for a place to honeymoon or retired couples celebrating a golden

323
 anniversary, and some groves of tropical plants - as exotic, rare,
and hardy as those in Ceylon, especially the great cruciform tree
ferns which are all that remain of the primitive flora of the country
- nothing picturesque meets the eye. The entire interior is divided
into rectangles by high, five-stranded barbed wire fences that sepa­
rate the paddocks. Valley succeeds valley in soft succession with
nothing to interrupt the sameness and monotony of the glistening
grassland that spreads everywhere, indelibly green, reflecting the
sky as does a sheet of water, invading the landscape, pervading it
with quietness, stillness, peace, and warm silence.

Idyllic though it was - or seemed to him in retrospect -

Cendrars would have been the last person in the world to want
to settle in such a place. It's not exactly that his memory plays
him false (his allusions to eucalypts and shark nets in his opening
paragraph) ; nor that he overlooks the violent history of disposses­
sion that lies behind the deforested hills and pioneer farms. Rather
it is the irony that he should eulogise the pastoral ambience and
domestic bliss that he fled as a fifteen-year-old boy, vowing never
to return.
Cendrars concludes his memoir with an epiphany.
It is the austral summer. He has been riding through the back­
blocks all day. He's bushed. Night is falling. The night of Christmas
Eve. The sky is filled with stars - like a million disoriented fire­
flies. Overhead is the Southern Cross.
As he dismounts and ties his horse to a tree, a wan light betrays
the position of a farm house at the head of the valley. A piano is
playing . . .

I approached the house without a sound, and have never forgotten

the astonishing sight I saw : a man and a woman, he in a smoking
jacket, she in a decolletee evening gown with a string of pearls
around her neck. They were sitting side by side on an upholstered
stool, their backs to the open window, and playing the piano with
three hands. The piece was Pagliacci. Behind them, on a table, an

324
 oil lamp, a plum pudding in a tin water-bath on a Primus stove,
a bottle of whisky, some glasses . . . I stood there for a long while
despite the tiredness that had come over me, watching those two
people playing solely for each other, shoulder to shoulder, smiling
radiantly. They were alone on the face of the earth . . .
At midnight I introduced myself . They didn't tell me their story.
Maybe they didn't have one. They were a happy couple, and had
chosen to be alone. It's a priceless secret . . . peace . . . content­
ment . . . But no one passes an entire lifetime in such complete
isolation, and the man had been in the war and, like me, lost an
arm there . . .
Strange meeting. But that Christmas Eve was a good one. He
with the right, I with the left, drinking together.
An Anzac from the Artois.
My God, how small the world is when you travel!

Like Cendrars, I also thought of New Zealand through its land­

scapes. But for me, they were the mythologised landscapes of
Fairburn, Curnow, Baxter, and McCahan.
In 1 958, the year I began my studies at Auckland University,
Colin McCahan travelled to the US. When he came home to
Titirangi after several months away, he found the place "cold and
dripping and shut in" . Recalling the tumbleweed blowing across the
Nevada desert, and the " open land round Ox Bow & the nothing,
endless land around Salt Lake & out of Colorado," McCahan "fled
north in memory and painted the 'Northland Panels' ."
McCahan described what he was trying to do as "like spitting
on the clay to open the blind man's eyes."
He painted the eight strips of canvas that make up the 'Panels'
in the space of a single afternoon, working on the sun deck of his
Titirangi house, and retouched the canvases during the following
weeks. The canvases remained unframed. McCahan intended
us to walk among them as we might journey through the land,
catching glimpses of it from the window of a train or car. Rain

325
falls, the weather clears, a gravel road disappears into a dark green
hill, clouds are bundled along a ridge in the wind, sometimes the
sky is black against the white of the sea. It is a landscape "with too
few lovers" , with which we have yet to come to terms.
Francine certainly found it so. She could not face the isola­
tion, and returned to Sydney with our children. I stayed behind,
inhabiting a space I seemed to have always inhabited there - and
sought in the stories of Somali and Iraqi refugees analogues of
my own marginality. My house overlooked Evans Bay. From the
front room I could watch the light and weather change over the
Orongorongos. Every evening, when I walked around the bay, I
would pass th e house I had shared with Harry St Rain thirty-eight
years before, and the apartment Harry and Annette had rented
in Oriental Bay. I wrote to Harry, saying that I was happy to be
back, despite the prospect of having to commute to Sydney to
see my family. Remembering his last visit to Wellington, Harry
compared the experience to re-reading the books of one's youth.
"The first time there's an exhilarating, bewildering, frightening,
sexy newness. The second time? It's like trying to warm up last
night's meal."
I could not have felt more differently. I walked along a coast
stacked high with bleached driftwood. The cold wind off the sea
pummelled my face. In the distance, the greenness of the hills
rumoured the long-lost forests.
Though mindful of Thomas Wolfe's admonition that "you can't
go home again" , I told myself that I was not returning home; the
slate had been wiped clean, and whatever life I had lived before
in New Zealand was a previous incarnation. The landscapes rein­
forced this experience. Familiar as they were, they also evoked
memories of other places I had felt at home. Walking on Welling­
ton's Mt Victoria and looking down through the pines onto the
blue rasped surface of the sea, I was again on the coast between
Corinth and Salamis, and tasted retsina on my tongue. When I
went up to the Wairarapa, the arid alkaline light reminded me of

326
Provence. And lying in long grass beside a braided South Island
river, with the wind pouring over the land, I imagined I was back
in Africa, outside a village called Bibwe in the Bas-Congo, an
antelope splashing across a shallow stream in the darkness, and at
dawn a small boy going down the road playing a thumb-piano on
his head. I also took strange comfort from a letter I 'd received from
a New Zealand publisher a few years before, rejecting the manu­
script of Pieces of Music. "Unfortunately, you have lived abroad for
so long that you have become an unknown quantity here; effec­
tively, you are dead."
When I went to see a doctor, though, it was for a routine
checkup, not to get confirmation that I was still alive.
The doctor was Carol Shand. I 'd met her and her husband
Erich Geiringer many years before, and had no expectation that
she would remember me. But after completing her examination,
she astounded me by saying, "You're Michael Jackson. You're the
bloke who ran off with Fleur Adcock."
I was flabbergasted. This had happened in another lifetime,
when I was twenty-two and working in the Alexander Turnbull
Library. Fleur, a qualified librarian, also worked there. I knew and
admired her poems. When she discovered that I also wrote poetry,
I suppose it was inevitable that we would become lovers, despite
the fact that she was married to Barry Crump, who was, at the
time, crocodile-shooting in tropical Australia.
Carol and I did not exchange another word. But when I walked
out of her surgery and onto Kelburn Parade, I felt both amused
and irked. It was as if her ofthand remark had suddenly eclipsed
the person I thought I was and thrown me back into a past with
which I no longer identified. In reducing my existence to a rela­
tionship that had lasted no more than a few months in my youth,
her innocent comment seemed to negate everything I had become.
And yet, when I reflected, wasn't this the price all refugees pay? In
the country of asylum they are recognised only in so far as they
fail or fall short of the prevailing norms. Who they are in their

327
own eyes is a story they seldom get to tell. They dream of one day
returning home. There at last they will be taken in, embraced, and
recognised. But for many, this is precisely what does not occur. To
their bitter disappointment they discover that they are nonentities,
that an entire generation, born in their absence, knows nothing of
them. To then learn that many of their contemporaries have died
or been defeated by life, and that their own vitality and survival is
like salt in a wound is even more disheartening. When the migrant
went away, all those many years ago, he was written out of the
lives of those who stayed behind; now, returning, he is an anachro­
nism, a revenant, a ghost of his former self. He is remembered, and
addressed, solely in terms of what he was. What he has become
- the consummation of so many journeys, hardships, and illu­
minations - has no currency, is of no interest. And for as long as
he remains in this place where he no longer has presence, he will
be typecast and returned to his previous existence, trapped like an
insect in amber.
When I met Fleur, I had little idea how fabled and courted she
was. A year before, when I was working as a steward on the inter­
island ferry, Jim Baxter had come aboard one evening muttering
something about a mercy mission he was on to rescue Fleur from
the jaws of a crocodile - Jim's characteristically ponderous and
allusive way of saying that he was going to try to prevent Fleur,
his close friend, from marrying a lout like Barry Crump. A couple
of hours later, having finished my watch, I j oined Jim in his cabin
where he was smoking cheroots and drinking lemonade. He made
his journey to Dunedin seem like a vision quest. It was therefore
fitting that the day Fleur and I became lovers, we visited Jim in
his poky partitioned office at School Publications to receive his
blessing.
Others predicted trouble, and warned.
Brian Bell dressed like Dustin Hoffman playing Ratso in
Midnight Cowboy. A sleazy Balthazar, he kept his secret chronicles
of the city, though in another time and place he might well have

328
made his living as a pimp, informer, or spy. Not long after I had
moved in with Fleur, Bell accosted me on Lambton Quay. Full of
admiration for my pluck and clearly curious about how quickly
things would come to an unhappy end, he asked how old I was,
then added, "You've got a lot of guts, cuckolding Crump."
As far as I knew, Barry was still in northern Australia hunting
crocodiles and collecting material for another novel. Fleur did not
expect to see him for a long, long time. But one day she received
a telegram. Barry's mate had abandoned him on an uninhabited
island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He was now safe, but had decided
to quit croc-shooting and come home.
I was thrown into a panic. The man's aggression was legendary,
and a confrontation inevitable.
I took refuge with my friend Brijen Gupta, and waited.
It was like High Noon. Waiting for Fleur to call. Waiting to find
out where Barry would meet me. Waiting for the showdown.
It was a Saturday morning when Fleur phoned. She and Barry
had been playing 500 to decide my fate. Fortunately for me, Fleur
had won, which meant that Barry wouldn't shoot me. He'd meet
me at the George Hotel at noon.
I walked to the hotel, fearing the worst.
The public bar was crowded, but I soon spotted him in the
company of a bunch of wild-looking individuals I 'd never seen
before.
He poured me a beer from the jug on the bar, while I asked
lamely whether he'd had a productive time in the Gulf.
But he wasn't there to talk about the Gulf. He was there to beat
the shit out of me. If it hadn't been for Fleur, pleading for my life
and winning at 500, he would have killed me.
"Just get one thing straight," he said. "You keep what's happened
to yourself. You start bragging about any of this, and there's no
card game'll stop me making you wish you 'd never been born.
You got it?"
I got it. And walked away unscathed.

329
Inevitably, the story got around. Over the years, it was embel­
lished and expanded until, when my friend Vincent O'Sullivan
recounted it at a reunion of some of the barflies who'd frequented
the Duke of Edinburgh hotel in the late sixties, it had all the line­
aments of myth. Unfortunately, I was away in Sydney at the time,
spending time with my family, so I didn't get to hear Vincent's
version of my high noon with Crump. But Vince is a great racon­
teur, and by all accounts his version of this moment of ignominy
in my young life was the hit of the evening.
It put me in mind of Marx's famous observation: that all the
facts and personages of history occur twice - "the first time as
tragedy, the second as farce".

Harry once said that we do not own our own lives - we are not
in sole possession of the truth about ourselves. And such control
as we do have over our own stories ceases at the instant that we
enter into a relationship with another, and our identity is meta­
morphosed by what transpires between us.
Does this mean that truth is relative? That intersubj ectivity
splinters reality, allowing no agreement as to the facts?
The question began to weigh heavily on me. This was partly
because Francine and I were going over the ground of our life
together, painfully trying to pinpoint the wrong turnings we had
made, reconsidering our frequently irreconcilable stories. Listening
to refugees recount their harrowing tales was also bringing home
to me the extent to which our stories are shaped by self-interest
and the exigencies of survival, not by veracity. And when I resumed
work on the memoir I had begun during my last year in the US, I
found myself asking how one justifies writing about others - be
they individuals like Harry, or entire societies such as Kuranko and
Warlpiri.
A few months before I moved back to New Zealand a review
appeared in The Australian Review cif Books by Beatrice Faust. I

330
had been close to Beatrice for a while in 1 963 when I lived in
Melbourne - before she became famous for her civil liberties
campaigning, her role in the women's movement, and her books.
In her review of an old friend's autobiography (I shuddered to
think it could have been mine! ) , Beatrice excoriates Peter Blazey
for his "outright fabrications" and "venial mistakes" . Writing a
memoir one enj oys a degree of interpretive licence, she says, for
no one's life should be considered his or her sole property, but it
is quite another matter to impose on the world an "embarrassing
compost of forgetting, censorship, omission, distortion, hyperbole,
fantasy, fiction and dud writing" .
For many fiction writers, playing fast and loose with the facts
is justified on the grounds that stories are more valuable to us
than chronicles. Though our lives may not be wholly plotless and
pointless, they do not naturally possess the symmetry of stories.Yet
it is difficult to imagine how a life could be recounted, let alone
endured, were it not for the wisdom of hindsight - our genius
for retrospectively making our lives conform to the shape of our
dreams, and answer our present concerns. In a series of radio inter­
views toward the end of his life, Cendrars freely admitted that
he had mythologised, and allowed others to mythologise, certain
episodes in his life. "Those are the things one says," he noted wryly,
"when one wants to tell stories, to put a little order into one's
existence."
Gore Vidal writes: "A memoir is how one remembers one's own
life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates,
facts double-checked." In opting for memoir, Gore Vidal celebrates
the ability of "idling memory" to "get right what matters most."
I could not share this faith in memory. Human memory is
notoriously unstable. And the empirical present is like a curse. Not
only do we readily forget the past; we tend, over time, to experience
rumoured and imagined events as vividly as if we had actually
participated in them. Speak, Memo ry is, as literature, the most satis­
fYing memoir I know. But Nabokov's insistence that every detail

331
of the past is recoverable if only we are diligent enough, down­
plays both the mutability of memory and the hand of the fabulist
in its refashioning. No matter how earnestly one strives to remain
faithful to the facts of one's life, one is confounded by the fallibility
of memory and one's intolerance of chaos.
I think of this as the Walter Mitty effect, for it's not as if we
lead "real" lives in the first place - lives that we may, even when
memories are keen, later recollect and write about. "I am not
writing my life story," averred Dennis Potter when asked about
the autobiographical content of his plays, "but I am living a fictional
life . . . " In this sense fiction and life imitate each other. There is
never a single immutable persona; a person is changed by contin­
gencies and crises, as well as by the effects of aging, and we are all
different depending on whom we are with.
In the end I found my pretext, neither in Nabokov's confident
belief in exactitude nor in Vidal's idling memory, but in the idea
that truth is a function of relationship, not of identity. Accord­
ingly, one has to free the personal voice from the conventional
autobiographical burden of tracing the development and career
of a personal identity, and, as Marguerite Yourcenar does in her
Souvenirs Pieux, go "beyond the confines of individual history
and even beyond History . . . " to explore, "the hopeless tangle of
incidents and circumstances which to a greater or lesser extent
shape us all". For how can one know oneself except in relation
to the history one inherits, the social milieu into which one was
born, the parents who raised one, the places one has lived, and the
people one has known, befriended and loved?
"We live . . . lives based upon selected fictions," Durrell has
Pursewarden say in the second volume of his almost forgotten
Quartet. "Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in
space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think."

Intermittently, between 1 92 1 and 1 926, Ernest Hemingway lived

in Paris. During this period he ran into Blaise Cendrars, and some

332
thirty years later recalled the encounter in A Moveable Feast:

The Closerie des Lilas had once been a cafe where poets met more
or less regularly and the last principal poet had been Paul Fort
whom I had never read. But the only poet I ever saw there was
Blaise Cendrars, with his broken boxer's face and his pinned-up
empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand. He was a
good companion until he drank too much and, at that time, when
he was lying, he was more interesting than many men telling a
story truly. But he was the only poet who came to the Lilas then
and I only saw him there once.

A page later, Hemingway's cattiness gets the better of him. After

describing some of the veterans one used to see in the Lilas, he
says that in those days one did not trust anyone who had not
been in the war . . . "and there was," he adds, "a strong feeling
that Cendrars might well be a little less flashy about his vanished
arm."
Here is Cendrars' more generous recollection of the same occa­
swn:

I was drinking; he was drinking at a table next to mine. He was

with an American sailor on leave. He was in uniform - probably
that of a non-combatant ambulance aide, unless I ' m mistaken. I
had already lost my arm. It was the end of that other war, the
last of the last. We talked between tables. Drunks love to talk. We
talked. We drank. We drank again. I had an appointment in Mont­
martre with the widow of Andre Dupont, a poet killed at Verdun.
I went there every Friday to eat bouillabaisse with Satie, Georges
Auric, Paul Lombard, and, sometimes, Max Jacob. I brought my
boozer American friends with me, thinking I 'd give them some­
thing good de chez nous to eat. But the Americans aren't fond of
good food; they have no good food at home; they don't know what
it is. Hemingway and his sailor didn't care for my arguments. They
preferred to drink until they weren't thirsty any more. So I planted

333
 them in a bar on the rue des Martyrs, I can't remember which, and
ran to treat myself at my friend's widow's house.

As for Henry Miller, he saw nothing but envy m Heming­

way's ambivalent recollections. Cendrars was the authentic man of
the world, the bourlinguer that Hemingway dreamed of becoming.
Miller made no bones about it. Hemingway was "a phony, a
gutless coward compelled by weak nerves to turn to violence, the
way others turn to drugs or madness." Miller hated Hemingway's
"twofisted, bravado brawling side, the pose of the aficionado -
hunter of wild beasts, fisher of sharks, bandoliered soldier heading
into battle." According to Miller, Hemingway was nothing more
than a bully, bolstered by media myths, and he felt no scrap of
admiration for Hemingway's "stenographic" style, in which reality
is "traced by the eye alone in the absence of the brain".
Perhaps Simenon should be allowed to have the last say.
When Hemingway died, five months after Cendrars, several
obituary writers spoke of the two authors in the same breath -
both larger than life, legendary in their bravado and their ability to
mix worldiness with writing. Simenon dismissed the comparison.
A parallel might be drawn between their lives, but their deaths
were utterly different.
While Hemingway chose to commit suicide rather than endure
a painful and lingering death, Cendrars took exactly the opposite
course of action.

Far from killing himself, he lived with his illness for many years,
paralysed, fighting it tooth and nail, and, I ' m told, refusing to take
any of the medicines that would have eased his suffering, so that,
despite everything, he would keep his lucidity. I believe this. This
was just like him. For I knew him well.

We all reflect so differently on one another that it is impossible to

know where the truth lies. But we can, I think, evaluate our actions
and ideas in relation to life, asking whether we increase or diminish

334
it. By life I do not mean j ust my life or yours, but life with a capital
L, encompassing all that surrounds and outlasts us, and which we
variously call history, nature, God or tradition. I liken this encom­
passing to the sea, standing on some shoreline one thinks, this is
the same sea Sophocles described, the same tides that washed the
pebbles on Dover Beach . . . Or clouds, rolling, dispersing, bundled
across the sky by the wind; these are the same clouds that Virginia
Woolf saw on that spring day when she walked around Oxford,
taking notes for her A Room cif One 's Own.
When we are young we think mainly of ourselves. We think our
own life is identical with Life itself. Bent on our own purposes,
wrapped up in our own affairs, we are often blind to the existence
of others, as if our forebears lived in darkness and we alone were
destined to see the dawn. But then we grow older. Our experience
takes us beyond ourselves, and we reckon with how profoundly
we have been affected by others, and how we in turn have affected
them.

335
 J ou r n ey t o Y i r n ta rd a m u r u r u

W e were camped near Jila. The Nakamarra sisters - Liddy, Lady

and Beryl - had heaped clumps of spinifex to form a windbreak
and laid out their bedding on the exposed earth. Francine and I
had cleared a space beside them. On the other side of us, also sepa­
rated by a bolster of spinifex, Pincher Jampijinpa's elderly mother,
Nola, was nursing a smoky fire of mulga sticks into life while
cautioning us, in a hoarse voice, against building our fire too close
to the spinifex. Not far away, others were also preparing for the
night, kindling fires, heating water in blackened pots, preparing
damper to cook in the coals. Everyone's space was similarly sepa­
rated, by mounds of spinifex and by that discreet avoidance of eye
contact that gives you an uncanny and immediate sense of privacy
in an Aboriginal camp.
As darkness fell and some of the women began singing yawulyu
songs, I strolled over to the men's camp to see Paddy Nelson
Jupurrurla and Nugget Jangala. I 'd travelled with these men
on many occasions, and felt comfortable around them. Beryl's
husband,Japaljarri was also there - a dour, stolid man who'd been
drinking at Rabbit Flat for the last two days. A bear with a sore
head. A fourth man, Japanangka, I had met for the first time that
afternoon. He was extraordinarily solicitous of me, and asked if I
understood that we were "brothers-in-law". "Your elder brother­
in-law looks after you," he explained. " Grows you up."
I woke next morning with the sky reddening in the east, a night
dew on the green canvas of my swag, and the air cold. Liddy was

336
softly singing a song of that place, and when Francine greeted her,
Liddy said she had dreamed of her aunt Lorna in Lajamanu. Her
auntie had also been singing the songs ofWapurtali. "Maybe she is
thinking about Wapurtali too," Liddy said.
We broke camp under a cloudless sky, sunlight brushing the
long thin seedheads of the spinifex. Like flung seine nets, flocks of
budgerigars flew up from the grass.

We stopped the vehicle often, to get out and look around.

Everyone, that is, except Japaljarri, who sat like a stone, in half­
lotus, appearing to take no interest in anything, staring into space.
(I still had much to learn, for simply sitting on the ground, being
there, itself consummated a social relationship with the ancestral
and anthropomorphic essence of a place.)
Wherever we stopped along the overgrown track, the men and
women with whom we were travelling spontaneously disclosed
fragments of the stories that were inscribed in the landscape. I
thought of this as " inscape", the word Gerard Manly Hopkins
coined to describe the way in which the natural world reveals and
releases its divine essence.
Just north ofYurmurrpa, Jupurrurla pointed westward to an
outcrop of rocks known as warrajinpa (lone rock) where the rain
Dreaming ran north and the shields of two newly-initiated men
had been transformed into rainclouds. Nearby, he showed us a
place he called "my mother" , since it belonged to his matrikin.
An upright slab of limestone had been decapitated by lightning
a few years before. " Wirralpa," Jupurrurla said, "poor bugger," and
everyone laughed.
Then the Nakamarra sisters pointed out the location of a site to
the south, where a great fight had taken place between ngarlajiyi
(small yam) and yarla (large yam) . This was Liddy's father's country,
and she recounted its story. The people of Wapurtali had small
yams; the large yams were all at Yurmurrpa. Jealousy caused the
fight, she explained. And in the fight the Yurmurrpa people broke

337
the legs of the Wapurtali people with boomerangs, forcing them
back to Wapurtali, a place designated on whitefella maps as Mount
Singleton.
We drove on, heading toward the range. Jupurrurla sat beside
me, silently indicating which way I should turn whenever the
track forked. I had only to watch the slight wavering or flick of his
flat hand to turn the steering wheel and remain on course. There
was no talk. The only sound was of saplings, spinifex grass, and
anthills scraping against the chassis.
When the track petered out, we began the laborious process of
bush-bashing - twisting and turning to avoid gulches and mulga
thickets - but moving steadily and quietly toward the range.
Finally we reached the wide floodout around Braidings Bore, and
the sandy bed of a creek that led to Yirntardamururu.
We walked the last few kilometres, straggling out under the
blue shadows of the range.
Jangala told me that as a young man he had worked for Braiding.
Braiding was a hard task-master. People did not remain camped for
long at the station. They hunted around Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs) ,
and foraged as far north as Jila - for ngurlu (grass seed) , yawakiyi
(bush currants) , yakajirri (bush plum) , and yarla (yams) . Yirntar­
damururu was the main camp, the permanent water, to which
people from far and wide gravitated in the summer months. In
winter, they hunted in small bands - perhaps ten men and their
wives and children, two or three young men, five old people.
"This place my father," Jupurrurla explained. "That Japanangka"
- and he indicated the younger man by pointing with his chin
- "my wife's brother . . . he's kurdungurlu (a 'ritual helper') for
this place." Jupurrurla picked up some grindstone shards, as if to
confirm what he had said.
There were deep pools of water in the creek, with granite
outcrops and boulders all around.Jupurrurla reminded me that this
was also a site on the marlu-jarra (two-kangaroo) Dreaming track
that came down through the centre of Australia from Gurintiji

338
country in the north, and ran on south via Nyirrpi to Uluru and
Kataj ulu. The two kangaroos had brought men's business into
Warlpiri country. " Here," he said, "is where they camped two or
three weeks." And sure enough, there in the rock were the kidney­
shaped impressions left by two kangaroos sleeping on their sides.
Not far away he showed me another kuruwarri - a sign, a mark, a
vestige of the Dreaming: a perfect circle of white limestone inlaid
in the granite.
It was mid-afternoon when we headed back to Jila. Skin burned
by the sun, chafed by the wind, grazed by sharp branches, and
grimed with soot, I steered the vehicle along the old tracks that
Jangala now remembered. In the back of the vehicle, the women
spoke to Francine of their elation at having visited a place they
had not seen for twenty years - a place close to Ngurdipatu
("place of many birds") , also on the two-kangaroo track, where
they had been born. But now they wanted to hunt.
Again we stopped, and the women disappeared into the grass­
lands, while the men walked about inspecting the brick-red earth
for the spoor of animals.
I sat down in the shade of a mulga tree.
When Japanangka j oined me without speaking, I thought of
saying something, but it did not seem to be required. So I allowed
myself to hear only the insects trilling in the grass, the blood
pulsing in my head.
Then Japanangka pointed skyward. He had heard the murmur
of an aircraft, seen its aluminium glint 35 ,000 feet above us in the
clear blue sky. " Going to Europe," Japanangka said. " Singapore."
Suddenly I had this heightened sense of the difference between
earth and ether - of how at peace I felt, sitting there with
Japanangka, cross-legged on the ground, without the slightest
desire to be in the airplane, to be anywhere else. Maybe it was
because I was getting older. Jupurrurla had spoken to me two
days before about the homesickness people feel when they are
far from their own country, their yearning to return there to die

339
. . . and it is a theme reiterated in myths that describe how ances­
tors, wearied by travel and by the work of creating new country,
pined for their places of origin and returned home, through the
air or underground, there to sink back into the earth again, into
a state of nascence, of pure potentiality. Certainly I had never felt
more at peace within myself in any other period of fieldwork.
No ambition for fame or fortune possessed me; not even a desire
for knowledge - which was, all too often, ephemeral, abstract or
chimerical anyway. As the airplane grew smaller and smaller in the
northern sky, I felt that I was at last where I had always longed to
be: on a grassy plain under a cloudless sky, with people for whom
being-in-the-world was defined through the images of sitting on
the ground, of being with others, of closed circles and soft lines
imprinted with the point of an index finger in the red dirt.

For someone who has devoted so much of his life to exploring the
social and cultural dimensions of human existence, it might seem
odd for me to confess an equally profound attraction to environ­
ments that seem to annul the human world. To be sure, there is no
landscape, no ocean, and now no sky, that has not been changed
irrevocably by the work of human hands and the human imagina­
tion. But while acknowledging this, I admit to an abiding convic­
tion that the restive labour of body and mind may be brought
to a standstill, and the world experienced not as an interplay of
human desires and wills, but, as it were, in and of itself, outside the
constraints, worldviews, and proj ects of human existence. Being
beyond words, such experiences naturally defy description. Yet
they may be hinted at, pointed to, albeit roughly, and so suggest
the shape of things the mind cannot grasp or hands hold.
"At the heart of all beauty," writes Camus in The Myth of Sisy­
phus, "lies something inhuman." In the desert, I often asked myself
how is it that I feel so stable in this environment, so centred, so
at home? I think it was because the possibility existed, in the
desert, of a unique balance between the world of people and the

340
world of things. With Warlpiri one was, as often as not, exhausted
by constant demands, as well as by the unfamiliar and relentless
complexity of every social interaction. But one could always slip
away into the desert, and instantly be claimed by an environment
that was as silent and empty as the social world was boisterous
and unpredictable. There, in that vastness of red sand and bleached
spinifex, you came face to face with the elements - a dominion of
is-ness that contrasted absolutely with the world of human impera­
tives and passions. A short walk and you could attain a silence that
was interrupted only by the sound of the blood coursing inside
your head, or the vague wuthering of the wind. You felt nothing
but the sensation of your boots on the earth. You were stripped
bare, and came up against the desert without emotion, without
thought, without desire, embracing emptiness without condition.
If the social world is one of intersubjectivity - a volatile interac­
tion of bodies and minds - the desert is a place of interobjec­
tivity where the encounter with nonbeing is so overwhelming
that it leaves one speechless, and one begins to experience oneself
as sand, grass, sky or stone.
At these times, looking back on the social world that I had left
behind, albeit momentarily, I felt that I now saw it objectively
- not in the sense of knowing it as from afar, but in the sense of
having achieved a relationship with it that was as neutral as my
relationship to the ground underfoot or the sky overhead. This
was exhilarating.
I have felt this liberation only in arid places. Once, for example,
at a time of great grief, I went to Greece to try to regain my spir­
itual equilibrium. I spent a therapeutic seven days on the island
of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, and the sense of proportion that
I experienced at the end of this time would remind me strongly
of my experiences in the Australian desert - this sense of giving
oneself up to something greater than oneself that then returns
one to oneself, renewed. Walking over wild hillsides and aban­
doned stone terraces overlooking the sea, inhaling air scented with

341
oregano and thyme, toughening my body building a stone wall,
feeling the wind on my face, and being surrounded by a silence
broken only by an occasional piping bird or the clonking of goat­
bells, then drinking retsina with friends in the evenings by a fire
of olive logs . . . all made me realise how essential it is, when there
is anguish in one's relationship with those one loves, to seek out a
relationship with the elements - with earth, sea and sky. I call this
relationship inter-obj ective, because this is how one experiences
it. When I read Camus' journal notes, scribbled at sea as he strug­
gled with tubercular fever and isolation on a reluctant j ourney to
North America, and read how he gave himself over to studying the
surface of the ocean each day, trying to capture its subtle changes
in images, I knew exactly of what he was speaking . . .

I have not been back to Central Australia for many years. Opening
the pages of my notebooks from that time, I have to half close my
eyes to complete the picture, to remind myself of the ways I found
fulfillment in being with Warlpiri, and in being utterly alone. All
about me the silence . . . a world that went on forever, without
awareness or will . . . immense, calm, and beautiful, like the sea.
Of what it meant to dispossess oneself of so much, reducing one's
life to a fire, a swag, a spade, some food . . . to have glimpsed what
it might mean to lose one's human identity as well - desire,
ambition, consciousness - to take the last step, and simply allow
oneself to disappear into that immensity that lay beyond, always
beyond . . . so that I would become that - a part of the inland,
insignificant as a grain of sand, the spinifex flecked with light, the
red earth, the horizon uninterrupted, the sky unclouded, and at
night the stars . . .

Bloomington - Sydney - Wellington - Copenhagen 1 996-2005

342
 N otes

E P I G RA P H S

Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres Milanaises 1 92 1- 1 926 (Pion: Paris 1 956) .

James Baldwin, Nobody Knows my Name: More Notes cif a Native Son (Dell : New
York 1 963) , p. 22.

I n te n s i ve Ca re

11 Cendrars 'jinal illness Henry Miller's letter to Miriam Cendrars, Big Sur 22
October 1 959, published in Blaise Cendrars - Henry Miller Correspondance
1 93 4- 1 9 79: 45 Ans d'Amitie, etablie et presentee par Miriam Cendrars (Denoel:
Paris 1 995) , p. 295 . Other details quoted from Reflections: Henry Miller, ed. Twinka
Thiebaud (Capra Press: Santa Barbara 1 9 8 1 ) , p. 40.
13 " the dark line lengthening" Constantine CavafY ( 1 863-1 933) , "Candles", The Poems
cif C. P. Cavafy, trans. John Mavrogordato (Hogarth Press: London 1 95 1 ) , p. 1 8 .

Au c k l a n d

16 At age two and a half I was hospitalised for a tonsilectomy Michel Tournier points out
in his autobiography ( The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Beacon Press:
Boston 1 988) , p. 9.) that tonsilectomy and circumcision have dubious therapeutic
value. More pertinently, both are strategies of symbolic castration, vestiges of initia­
tion rites in which the old impose their will on the very young in the name of
medical purity.
16 " unthinkable anxiety" D.W Winnicott, "The location of cultural experience",
Playing and Reality (Basic Books: New York 1 97 1 ) , p. 97.
17 Inglewood, Taranaki Jerzy Wlodzimierz Pobog-Jaworowski, Polish Settlers in Taranaki
1 8 7 6- 1 9 7 6 (Taranaki Polish Centennial Committee: Inglewood 1 977) .
21 "action alone liberates" Blaise Cendrars, Une Nuit dans Ia Forb (Premier Fragment
d'une Autobiographie), Oeuvres Completes, vo!. 7 (Denoel: Paris 1 964) , p. 1 5 .

D i sta n ce Le n d s E n c h a n t m e n t

29 "About Ron Mason" James K. Baxter, letter t o Michael Jackson, dated 1 7 March
1 960.
34 "Loud man /that toils and sighs" Herman Gladwin, In Praise cif Stalin (Alister Taylor:
Martinborough 1 978) , p. 11 .

Myse l f M u st I Re m a ke

36 Title WB.Yeats, "An Acre of Grass" : " Grant me an old man's frenzy/Myself must I
remake . . . "
38 Cendrars' 1 January 1 935 Orbes review of Tropic cif Cancer. Reprinted in Blaise
Cendrars - Henry Miller Correspondance 1 93 4- 1 979: 45 Ans d'Amitie, etablie et
presentes par Miriam Cendrars (Denoel: Paris 1 995) . See also Brassai, Henry Miller:
the Paris Years, trans. Timothy Bent (Arcade: New York 1 995) , pp. 1 20- 1 2 1.
39 Descriptions of Cendrars Alfred Pedes, My Friend Henry Miller (Neville Spearman:

344
 London 1 955) , pp. 1 5 1- 1 55; Blaise Cendrars: A Night in the Forest (First Fragment
of an Autobiography), trans. Margaret Kidder Ewing (University of Missouri Press:
Columbia 1 985) ; Fela's reminiscences in Jay Bochner, Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and
Re- Creation (University of Toronto Press: Toronto 1 978) , p. 23.
39 Miller's first meeting with Cendrars on 1 3 December Alfred Pedes, My Friend Henry
Miller (Neville Spearman: London 1 955), pp. 1 5 1 - 1 5 5 .
40 Miriam Cendrars o n herfather's inability t o brook competition Interview with Frederic
Ferney, 21 December 1 992, Boulogne-sur-Seine, Frederic Ferney, Blaise Cendrars,
(E ditions Franc;:ois Bourin: Paris 1 993) , p. 1 34.
41 Miller's confession A Literate Passion: Letters ifAnais Nin and Henry Miller 1 932-
1 953, edited and introduced by Gunther Stuhlmann (W H . Allen: London 1 988) ,
pp. 259 and 267.
43 "To the lucky now who have lovers orfriends" Lawrence Durrell, "Alexandria",
Collected Poems (Faber and Faber: London 1 960) , pp. 72-73.

O rd i n a ry M a d ness

54 " There's a cool web if language" Robert Graves, "The Cool Web" , Collected Poems
(Cassell: London 1 965) , p. 47 .
61 Bob Lowry 's typography Denis Glover, Bob Lowry's Books: a Note b y Denis Glover,
pamphlet reprinted from Book viii, August 1 946, Pilgrim Press n.d.

H ote l d e s E t ra n g e rs

84 " The truth is,Jew people know how to live" Blaise Cendrars, "Blaise Cendrars Vous
Parle" , Entretien Deuxieme, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 8 (Denoel: Paris 1 964) , p. 36.
85 "Raze my childhood to the ground" Blaise Cendrars, " Hotel Notre Dame", Trap,
C'est Trap (Denoel: Paris 1 957) , pp. 33-34.
85 Hotel des Etrangers Blaise Cendrars, "Le ye Arrondissement", Oeuvres Completes,
vol. 8 (Denoel: Paris 1 964) , pp. 1 45-1 58. Also Jay Bochner, Blaise Cendrars:
Discovery and Re- Creation (University of Toronto Press: Toronto 1 978) , pp. 23-24.
90 "And the eclipse that I observed" Blaise Cendrars, L'Homme Foudroye (Denoel: Paris
1 945) , p. 1 2.

N a ba n d a Ka l a

1 02 Nabanda Kala "Rumba Lingala" by Rochereau and his "African Fiesta" orchestra,
recorded on the Vita label, Leopoldville, Congo, 1 964.
1 04 " I don 't believe there are any literary subjects" Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine (Grasset:
Paris 1 956 [ 1 926] ) , pp. 222-223.

Pa u l i n e

1 1 7 Feta and Cendrars Jay Bochner, Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re- Creation (Univer­
sity of Toronto Press: Toronto 1 978) , p. 23.
1 1 7 Interview Details drawn from Blaise Cendrars, "Blaise Cendrars Vous Parle", Entre­
tien Premier, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 8 ,(Denoel: Paris 1 964) , pp. 542-543.
1 23 Love is masochistic Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine (Grasset: Paris 1 956) , pp. 6 1--62.

345
F reetow n

1 29 Donald Crowhurst Nicholas Tomalin, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst
(Stein and Day: London 1 970) .

B a rawa a n d t h e Ways B i rd s F l y i n t h e S ky

1 5 1 F. Dostoyevsky and piano keys Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans.
A.R. MacAndrew (New American Library: New York 1 96 1 ) , pp. 1 1 4-1 1 5.
1 5 1 Jean-Paul Sartre and lumps of clay Saint-Genet, trans. B. Frechtman (Vintage: New
York 1 963) , p. 49.
1 52 K. Marx and frozen circumstances Die Frnhschriften, ed. S. Landshut (Stuttgart: A.
Kroner 1 953) , p. 3 1 1 . "Man muss diese versteinerten Verhaltnisse dadurch zum Tanzen
zwingen, dass man ihnen ihre eigene Me/odie vorsingt!"

Ma m i n a Yeg be's De l u s i o n

1 68 " to be born is both to be born of the world" Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology

of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Routledge: London 1 962) , p. 453.
1 68 " the small moment which makes" Jean-Paul Sartre, "Itinerary of a Thought", New
Left Review 1 969 vol. 58, p. 45.

A m a z i n g G race

171 The Atlantic slave trade P. D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (University of
Wisconsin Press: Madison; London 1 969) ; T. Canot, Adventures of an African Slaver
(Routledge: London 1 928) ; G.F. Dow, Slave Ships and Slavery (Marine Research
Society: Salem. Mass. 1 927) ; ]. Walvin, Slavery and the Slave Trade (University Press
of Mississippi: Jackson, Miss. 1 983) ; W Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast
1 545- 1 800 (Clarendon: Oxford 1 970) .
1 74 Amazing Grace Words and music by John Newton ( 1 725-1 807) . Newton wrote
the hymn as a testimony to his religious conversion.
17 4 Kuranko slaves P. Leonard, Records of a Voyage to the Western Coast ofAfrica
(Printed by A. Shortrede and W Tate for Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh
1 833) , p. 1 44.
1 74 John Newton "An Authentic Narrative & c." , Th dtv rks ofJohn Newton, vo!. 1
(Robert Carter: New York 1 844) ; B. Martin, John Newton (Heinemann: London
1 950) .

I n the Sa nd h i l l s

1 97 "I do not write as a profession" Blaise Cendrars, Aujourd 'hui 1 9 1 7- 1 929, Suivi de
Essais et Rijlexions 1 9 1 0- 1 9 1 6 presentes par Miriam Cendrars. (Denoel: Paris
1 987) , p. 1 9 5 .
2 0 1 Antoine de Saint-Exupery Antoine d e Saint-Exupery, Wartime Writings 1 939-- 1 944,
trans. Norah Purcell (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: San Diego 1 986) ; Joy D.
Robinson, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Twayne: Boston 1 984) ; Stuart Gilbert, " Intro­
duction", The Wisdom of the Sands, trans. Stuart Gilbert from the French, Citadelle
(Harcourt Brace: New York 1 950) .

346
I n t h e S i l e n ce of t h e N i g h t

209 Helene Lenotchka Details from Jay Bochner, Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and
Re- Creation (University ofToronto Press: Toronto 1 978) , pp. 2(}-22.
210 La Carissima Blaise Cendrars, L'Homme Foudroye (Denoel: Paris 1 945) , pp.
265-266; "La Carissima est le roman de sainte Marie-Madeleine, Ia plus belle histoire
d'amour, du grand amour qui ait jamais he vecu sur terre", "Blaise Cendrars Vous Parle",
Entretien Premier, and Entretien Cinquieme, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 8 (Denoel:
Paris 1 964) , pp. 547 and 599.
2 1 0 "His silence was its tnlth" Miriam Cendrars, interview with Frederic Ferney,
Boulogne-sur-Seine, 2 1 December 1 992, Fn:deric Ferney, Blaise Cendrars (:E ditions
Franc;:ois Bourin: Paris 1 993) , p. 1 34.
210 Cendrars in World War One Details from Jay Bochner, Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and
Re- Creation (University of Toronto Press: Toronto 1 978) , pp. 56-58 .
2 1 0 " Wherecif one cannot speak" Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Routledge & Kegan Paul: London 1 975), last sentence.
21 0 Speech disperses the world I have freely adapted several Bambara adages about
silence from Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought cifTraditional
Africa, trans. Kate Ezra Martin and Lawrence M. Martin (Chicago University Press:
Chicago 1 979) , p. 1 1 7 .
2 1 1 " Orion" Blaise Cendrars, Oeuvres Completes (Denoel: Paris) .
2 1 2 Remy � death Edouard Peisson, "Blaise Cendrars a Aix-en-Provence" , Blaise
Cendrars 1 88 7- 1 96 1 (Mercure de France: Paris 1 962) , pp. 1 3 1-139. Cf. Blaise
Cendrars"'Dedication" to his sons, Odilon and Remy in La Main Coupee (Denoel:
Paris 1 946) , p. 7: "Monfils repose, au milieu de ses comrades tombes comme lui, dans ce
petit carre de sable du cimitiere de Meknes reserve aux aviateurs et deja surpeup/e, chacun
plie dans son parachute, comme des momies ou des larves qui attendent chez les infideles,
pauvres gosses, le solei/ de Ia resurrection . "
2 1 2 Cendrars and Edouard Peisson in Aix-en-Provence Louis Parrot, Blaise Cendrars,
Poetes d'Aujourd'hui, (Editions Pierre Seghers: Paris 1 948) , p. 7 .
2 1 3 " Paques a New York" Blaise Cendrars, Oeuvres Completes (Denoel: Paris) .
2 1 4-222 Magdalene cif the Black Rose Michael Jackson, Duty Free: Selected Poems
1 965- 1 988 (Mcindoe: Dunedin 1 989) , pp. 82-94.

line 9, The Bridge of Sighs in Venice connected the Doge palace and the state
prisons; over it condemned prisoners were led from the judgement hall to the
place of execution.

lines 1 3- 1 6 , however, allude to memories of the Bridge of Sighs over the Cam at
St John's College, Cambridge.

line 1 1 , cf. Byron: Chi/de Harold� Pilgrimage, iv, I .

line 2 7 , Mt Taylor, Canberra.

line 36, Firawa: a Kuranko village in north-east Sierra Leone.

line 40, Waipatiki (lit. "flounder water") : a place on New Zealand's Wairarapa coast
where Pauline and I sometimes spent weekends. Allusions are also made to James

347
K. Baxter's poem "Waipatiki Beach" in Pig Island Letters (Oxford University Press:
London; Wellington 1 966) .

lines 42, 43, Ambukur is a stone representing perfect womanhood - the focus of
a male cult among the Gamagai, West Highlands, Papua New Guinea. My closest
Canberra friends at the time I wrote this poem - Kathy Golski and Wojcieck
Dabrowki - have kindly forgiven the liberties my unconscious has taken with the
stories they told me of Ambukur.

lines 50, 5 1 , References are made to Machaty's silent film, Ecstasy, starring Hedy
Lamarr.

line 64, briar and tower: The Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel - figures confined
in time and space respectively.

lines 67, 68, According to certain medieval allegories the Virgin Mary is not only
the mother of Christ but also his cross.

lines 77-86, Kali. Jung notes that in Sankhya philosophy the mother archetype is
elaborated into the concept of prakrti (matter) , with three fundamental attributes
or gunas assigned to it: goodness, passion and darkness.

lines 1 1 4-1 35, An oneiric adaptation of a Kuranko narrative, "The Story of Na

Nyale," published in my Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko
Narratives (Incliana University Press: Bloomington 1 982) , pp. 203-208.

lines 1 4(}-1 62, These images are of the Matukituki Valley in Mt Aspiring National
Park, New Zealand, where Pauline and I spent a memorable summer with our
friends B ryn and Isabelle Jones. Elements ofJames K. Baxter's " Poem in the
Matukituki Valley" in Collected Poems (Oxord University Press: London 1 980) are
also present.

lines 1 70, 1 7 1 , An etymological link exists between the action of the ploughman
turning at the end of each furrow and the poet turning at the end of each line:
versus/verse.

lines 17 4-1 77, Maungahania is a marae overlooking the Waiapu river on the East
Coast of New Zealand. The source of the image of the wind (te hau) is a summer
day that Pauline and I were sitting with Te Pakaka Tawhai and Henare Ngata on
the porch of the "bungalow" at Waiomatatini, and were suddenly overwhelmed
by a warm wind moving across the riverfiats toward us, shaking the leaves of the
cabbage trees.

lines 1 9(}-207 , The allusions are to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa in Poland,
and to the siege of the monastery of Czestochowa by the Swedish army in 1 648
during the thirty years' war.

348
H a r m a tta n

223 "It was years of work and watching and anxiety, a narrower life in home interests"
George Macmillan, " Introductory Notice to the Second Edition" of Mary
Kingsley, West African Studies (Frank Cass and Co: London, 1 964) (original 2nd ed.
1 90 1 ) , p. xxi. Details also drawn from "Introduction to the Third Edition" ( 1 964)
by John E. Flint, pp. x:xv-lxvii.
223 " I went down to West Africa to die" Mary Kingsley, letter to Sir Matthew Nathan,
cited by Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley (Penguin: Harmondsworth
1 940 [ 1 932] ) , p. 2 5 .

Russ i a n Do l l s

246 " decline into sour resentment" Rodney Needham's "Introduction", Arnold van
Gennep, The Semi-Scholars, trans. and ed. Rodney Needham (Routledge and Kegan
Paul: London 1 967) , p. xi.
248 "as a Roman common-sense 'psychologist ' pointed out" George Devereux, Ethno­
psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference
(University of California Press: Berkeley 1 978), p. 1 25 .
248 "a confession o n the part of its author" Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil:
Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin: Harmonds­
worth 1 973) , p. 1 9 .
249 Linnaeus i n Uppsala Dictionary of Sdentific Biography, vol. 8, "Linnaeus", ed. Charles
Goulston Gillispie (Scribners: New York 1 973) , pp. 376 and 380.
249 " In 1 9 72, after a few weeks ofprogressively mixing" Rene Devisch, IM>aving the
Threads of Life: the Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka (Chicago
University Press: Chicago 1 993), pp. 2()-2 1 (italics added) .
250 Devisch 'sjirst two books Mort, Deuil et Compensations Mortuaires Chez Les Komo
et les Yaka du Nord du Zaire, co-written with W de Mahieu (Annales du Musee
Royal de !'Afrique Centrale, n° 96, Tervuren 1 979) ; Se Recreer Femme: Manipula­
tion Semantique d'une Situation d'Infecondite Chez les Yaka du Zaire (Dietrich Reimer
Verlag: Berlin 1 984) .
252 Kalauna myth Michael Young, Magidans of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna
(University of California Press: Berkeley 1 983) , pp. 1 9 , 1 77 , 1 78 .

Q u i et D a y s in Da r l i n g h u rst

253 Gabriel Garda Marquez on writing Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Fragrance of Guava
(Faber and Faber: London 1 998) .
255 "If time were like a passage of music" Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (Picador in
association with Collins/Harvil: London 1 983) , p. 237.
266 " I have kept a Nasrudin story for this moment" I have supplemented my memory of
Amin's Nasrudin story with a version published by !dries Shah in The Pleasantries
of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin (Arkana Penguin: New York 1 993) , p. 2 1 2 .

349
M i h i fo r Te Pa ka ka

268 "her presence, live, close to home" and "Quite simply there is no other New
Zealander" , Lindis Taylor, "The Magic Lay Purely in her Presence", Evening Post,
Monday, 29 January 1 990, p. 2 1 .
2 7 1 E kuika nei Anonymous, "Song of Love for a Native Land", Nga Moteatea (The
Songs) , Part 1, ed. Apirana Ngata (A. H . and A.W Reed: Wellington 1 928) , p. 1 83 .
278 " a memorial not s o much to those for whom they wept" Te Pakaka Tawhai, He Tip una
Wharenui o te Rohe 0 Uepohatu, MA Thesis, Massey University: Palmerston North,
New Zealand 1 978, p. 5 1 .
279 "embraces to itself the mana rif all" Te Pakaka Tawhai, He Tip una Wharenui o te Rohe
0 Uepohatu, MA Thesis, Massey University: Palmerston North, New Zealand,
1 978, p. 49.

B e i n g i n La n d sca pe

282 "centre rif silence and solitude" Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance rif
Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals rif Five Exploring Expeditions,
vol. 2 (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington: London 1 889) , p. 320.
282 "a tragedy rif desolation" F.E. Baume, Tragedy Track: The Story of the Granites (Frank C.
Johnson : Sydney 1 933) , pp. 49-50.
282 "you could see till the seeing made eyes hurt" Michael Terry, Hidden Wealth and Hiding
People (Putnam: New York 1 934) , p. 200.
282 "shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences rif stars" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars
rifWisdom (Dorset Press: Poole 1 988), p. 29.
283 " in the desert the sense of the infinite" Edmond Jabes, cited in John Berger, " A Story
for Aesop", Keeping a Rendezvous (Pantheon: New York 1 9 9 1 ) , pp. 63-64.
283 "I succumbed to the desert" Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre
des Hommes) , trans. Lewis Galantiere (Heinemann: London 1 954) , pp. 92, 1 1 3 , 1 1 6.
283 "visited by desperate longings" W. H . Auden, The Enchifed Flood, or The Romantic
Iconography rif the Sea (University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville 1 950) , p. 1 7 .
2 8 5 Th e emu Dreaming a t Ngarliyikirlangu: Darby Jampijinpa, "Bush Turkey and Emu" ,
Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors (Australian Institute o fAboriginal Studies: Canberra
1 987) , pp. 36-40.
290 "I could not go to my brother's camp" Jerry Jan gala in Stories from Lajamanu
(Northern Territory D epartment of Education: Darwin 1 977) , pp. 6-7 .
29 1 "An old Aboriginal recently saw some human footprints" Michael Terry, War rif the
rtarramullas (Rigby: Adelaide 1 97 4) , p. 69.

Wea ry B a y

300 " this fortunate circumstance gave new life" James Cook, Th e Voyage rif the Endeavour
1 768- 1 7 7 1 , ed. J.C. Beaglehole (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1 955), p.
346.
30 1 "afobricated object becomes invested with the vitality" Karl Marx, Pre- Capitalist
Economic Formations, trans.]. Cohen (Lawrence and Wishart: London 1 964) , p. 89.

350
To u r i stes Tro p i q u e s

3 1 1 "a cultural laboratory where people" Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: a History ofvaca­
tioning (University of California Press: Berkeley 1 999) , p. 7 (italics added) .

Lea v i n g I n d i a n a

3 1 4 " I didn't know it at the moment" Gary Snyder, "On the Road with D.T. Suzuki", A
Zen Life Remembered, ed. Masao Abe (John Weatherill: New York 1 986) , p. 207 .
3 1 4 "I realized I didn't want to be the anthropologist" Nathaniel Tarn, "From Anthropolo­
gist to Informant: Interview with Gary Snyder", Alcheringa (Old Series 1 972) , vol.
4, p. 1 09.
315 On Basho Nobuyuki Yuasa, " Introduction" to Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep
North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Penguin: Harmondsworth
1 966) , pp. 9-49.
3 1 8 Cendrars ' change of name Blaise Cendrars, Une Nuit dans Ia Foret (Premier Fragment
d'rme Autobiographie), in Oeuvres Completes, vo!. 7 (Denod: Paris, 1 964) , p. 1 7 . Also
Monique Chefdor, " Introduction" to Blaise Cendrars, Modernities and Other Writ­
ings, trans. Esther Allen, in collaboration with Monique Chefdor (University of
Nebraska Press: Lincoln 1 992) , p. xiii .
3 1 9 " Nothing remains of all the outrageous years" Blaise Cendrars, Une Nuit dans Ia Foret
(Premier Fragment d'une Autobiographie), in Oeuvres Completes, vo!. 7 (Denod: Paris
1 964) , p. 1 5 .

F u l l C i rc l e

323 Christmas in New Zealand Blaise Cendrars, " Christmas i n New Zealand",
Trop, C'est Trop (Denoel: Paris 1 957) , pp. 1 09-1 1 2 .
325 Colin McCahan on the Northland Panels Colin McCahon, Gates and Journeys
(Auckland City Art Gallery: Auckland 1 988) , pp. 77-78.
330 Marx 's famous observation Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
translated from the German (Progress Publishers: Moscow 1 934) , p. 1 0.
33 1 "an embarrassing compost offorgetting" Beatrice Faust, " Loose with the Truth",
The Australian Review of Books, September 1 997, p. 1 1 .
33 1 " those are the things one says when one wants to tell stories" Blaise Cendrars, "Blaise
Cendrars Vous Parle", Entretien Premier, Oeuvres Completes, vo!. 8 (Denoel: Paris
1 965) , p. 543.
331 "A memoir is how one remembers one 's own life" Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: a Memoir
(Abacus: London 1 996) , p. 1 1 .
33 1 the empirical present is like a curse The line is from Theodor Adorno. "Just as no
earlier experience is real that has not been loosed by involuntary remembrance
from the deathly fixity of its isolated existence, so conversely, no memory is guar­
anteed, existent in itself, indifferent to the future of him who harbours it; nothing
past is proof, through its translation into mere imagination, against the curse of
the empirical present." Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E . F. N.
Jephcott (Verso: London 1 978) , p. 1 66.

351
332 "I am not writing my life story" Denis Potter, Potter on Potter, ed. Graham Fuller
(Faber and Faber: London 1 993) , pp. 1 0-1 1 .
332 " beyond the confines cif individual history and even beyond History" Marguerite
Yourcenar, Dear Departed (Souvenirs Pieux), trans. Maria Louise Ascher (Aidan Ellis:
London 1 99 1 ) , p. 3.
332 " lives based upon selected fictions" Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar (Faber and Faber:
London 1 958), pp. 1 4-1 5 .
3 3 3 Hemingway on Cendrars A Moveable Feast (Arrow Books: London 1 996) , p p . 69-70.
333 Cendrars on Hemingway "Blaise Cendrars Vous Parle", Entretiens Huitieme, Oeuvres
Completes, vol. 8 (Denoel: Paris 1 964) , pp. 635--636.
334 Miller on Hemingway Brassai, Henry Miller: the Paris Years, trans. Timothy Brent
(Arcade: New York) , p. 1 72 .
3 3 4 Simenon 's last say Georges Simenon, Quand j'etais Vieux (Presses d e I a Cite: Paris
1 970) , pp. 365--66.

352