Sam Te Kani

In The Name of the Father; A Personal Meditation on Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

I was fourteen when I read The Bone People for the first (and only) time, and it was devastating. Because of my father.

My late father—Raymond Jimmy John Te Kani—went through the foster system in the less monitored varietal, the whangai. Which isn’t to say the pakeha system which we know and love (cough) doesn’t have its atrocious blind-spots, letting children fall into the hands of predators and careerist foster-parents gaming the system for a buck (does that still happen?). Rather, I mention this only to point out there may exist significant cultural distinctions between whangai and state, a conversation definitely beyond the scope of this essay. That said, the parallels between what The Bone People attempts to do and say about such systems, and my own experience with the potential cultural frissons therein, strikes incredibly close to home. As a parent my father was intermittently nurturing and volatile. My pakeha mother did the best she could to absorb his rage when it surfaced, which was difficult to gauge because anything could be a trigger beyond rhyme or reason. It became apparent though, after years of coexisting with someone so clearly harbouring fantastic hurt, that the rage itself lacked particular logic, that my father’s violent mood swings were the result of an internalised abuse replicating itself in the absence of therapeutic attention. Stimuli good or bad could send him, like there was something inside him wanting air and which would piggyback any and every opportunity to make itself known, in the manner of a deranged and criminally neglected toddler. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as disdainful. I’ve long since made peace with these years, and with the person my late father was during this time. Again, I was only fourteen when I first read The Bone People, and it's perhaps for the reasons above that I found it so impactful. Because in the cyclic nature of abuse which Hulme gestures at I saw a reality I’d known as a murky given, couched in embarrassment and pain, raised on a compassionate and generous plinth. And regardless of your stance on Hulme’s treatment therein—of violence and domestic abuse—it was something of a religious experience to see it in prose, if not with social or political realism, then with an expansive emotional realism.

I know this topic is done to death, but the ways in which Hulme braids Maori motif with other western mythic and esoterica is just gorgeous. Perhaps now, in a climate of cultural tribalism—vetted by mediated connectivity which bullies its users into positionality and legibility—such a work wouldn’t land like it did in the late eighties, when the visibility of our homeland and its particular grain wasn’t a stated priority (outside of the sanitised cultural performances of tourism, of which for better or worse New Zealand is a refined trailblazer). Such a work coming out now, perhaps, might be largely resisted for its flagrant parallelism, for its audacious planting of Maori conceits and experiences in Western-European iconographies. I am of course talking about The Bone People’s promiscuous deployment of classical Greek imagery, its tarot imagery, and its poetically licenced use of the koru as a launching pad for the universal profundities of the spiral—no doubt pointing to renewal and regeneration, beyond the koru’s concrete usage as architectural storytelling and ancestral mapping. Hulme was arguably doing many conscious things with this method—appealing to the sensibilities of a literary readership, camouflaging Māori-ness intertextually by way of a broad and global introduction, or even finding her own meaning in the social and cultural immiseration of the quote-unquote Māori experience.

For me it’s the image of The Tower, the sixteenth card in the major arcana cycle of the tarot, that hits with particular import. Here is depicted a burning tower, with two crowned unfortunates plummeting to their deaths from the instant of cataclysm—the once-mighty finding their regal complaisance shattered by an unforeseen wrath. Wrath because disaster when it hits always feels like the malice of a vengeful god, which may or may not be a lingering Abrahamic hangover. As we all know, Judaeo-Christian templates are harder to purge than a severe bout of herpes, no matter the wafer-thin avowal of secularism with which our society prefaces itself. Thusly, catastrophe is frequently calibrated as the karmic punishment for some moral slight, left unattended in the darkness of peripheries until such a time it returns to balance the leger. Susan Sontag says as much in her work on society’s moralistic framings of disease, specifically AIDS and cancer. In Illness As Metaphor (1989) Sontag unpacks nominal (and now period) treatments of each disease, respectively—cancer parochially deemed the spontaneous return of some repressed desire or sexuality, and AIDS an Icarus-like correcting of an excess thereof. In both instances Sontag pays attention to how connected the rhetorics of these diseases are, or were, to an imbalance of sex; as if to say nothing happens in the body without a corresponding causality in sex, as an essential ontological core. Sexuality then, in the Foucauldian sense, is the very ground on which subjecthood and identity is formed, and the primary reference in these readings for when the body exhibits disruptive symptoms. Obviously this work appeared as a response to government inaction around the AIDS pandemic as it initially emerged, and how moralising rhetoric was used to justify a prejudicial passivity, where more immediate concerted action might’ve stopped the disease in its tracks (in the West at least). Fingers crossed that since then we’ve reached a more empirical view of disease, especially in light of covid. Though if anything hysterical misinformation and Trumpist conspiracy breaching mainstream discourse signals that we are still operating in moral binaries of right and wrong, good and evil, and that the rush of moral indignation is still a potent opiate. Even when it comes to phenomena better dealt with in the minimalist registers of science.

Anyway, The Tower. In The Bone People Hulme’s arguably autobiographical protagonist Kerewin lives in a tower, where she’s isolated herself from the wider community ala artistic bohemia. She’s definitely an Aquarius. There are various reasons for her doing this which I can barely remember (more than a decade since I read the thing now), though I do recall having the impression that whatever Kerewin’s reasons for her voluntary celibacy and social hiatus, it had something to with an estranged father. Dads again. Are the non-disappointing ones just an exception to the rule? So there she is, Kerewin aka Keri Hulme, doing whatever artists do when you’re not looking at them, when they’re not performing their trauma for a ravenous public. Lo and behold a child breaks into Kerewin’s tower and tries to steal something of sentimental value to her, something gifted to her by the estranged-father. For all intents and purposes, an intrusion divinely sent to strum an old wound and get an aging sycophant out of a rut. From this Kerewin is hustled by a burgeoning chain of events into reluctant proximity with the child, Simon, and his foster father Joe. Human interaction finding a way back to her despite the flimsy fortifications she’d put in place against it. The Tower, lacking a consummate knowledge of the ground on which it stands, built of ire and despair. Not firm enough ground at all.

This is perhaps the loudest lesson of The Tower, as a card and as a chapter in the hero-story which the twenty-three cards of the major arcana tell. It stands for everything we’ve come to cleave to, old structures, old ways—ways which at one time we might’ve gleaned clarity and support from, but which have ultimately decayed with the passing of time and which now beg to be destroyed in heralding the new. If anything it symbolizes those old embattlements which no longer serve their purpose of defence and security. With the turning of the wheel they are now a prison. And so, depending on where it appears in a spread, The Tower asks us to either painstakingly dismantle the defensive habits we’ve made that are now blocking the flow of life, or strap in for external forces to do this on our behalf. Our choices with The Tower are gruelling Marie-Kondo-esque inventory, or the wrath of god. Both are ultimately for our highest good, and yet few would consciously choose the cataclysm of god’s cybernetic wrath in debugging the libidinous circuitry of our lives. That said, our culture worships security, a fevered commitment consolidated in the cult of owning property. At this point it’s a compulsion, and one at odds with The Tower’s imploring of us to meet life’s challenge with exuberant risk. So perhaps, against this ambient programming whereby security is strained towards as moths fluttering to their brightly lit dooms, we could dissect the addictive fantasies—making hay while the sun’s out, investment property, fucking ‘legacy’—and divert energy and resources towards our lives as they are, and not how we pine for them to be. More often than not the ideal state of security behind this collective fantasy is not a positive construction in itself, but a negative propulsion away from anxiety, away from the uncertainties of a volatile economic structure, and away from the barbarous logics of wealth accumulation and national prosperities. The dream of security then, and a lust for property, is more about the sharpness of the stick than the seductions of any particular carrot.  Security, escape, a magic pill, a snake-oil cure-all. A delusion. The shakier the foundation, the harder The Tower falls.

Things come to a head when Simon breaks something in Kerewin’s tower-home, another sentimental something which she’s heartbroken over. After Kerewin somewhat apathetically gives Joe the go-ahead to punish Simon with reasonable violence, the child is hospitalised and Joe imprisoned. As the three are physically separated Kerewin has her own Tower-moment, which any second-rate tarot-reader (myself included) can tell you frequently materialises as illness. For Kerewin it’s got all the hallmarks of stomach cancer, though her isolation means this goes largely undiagnosed. Committing to her fate she languishes in her tower until she’s visited by a spirit that miraculously heals her, bringing her out of her dark night of the soul physically weakened but also profoundly restored. In her newfound clarity she destroys her tower, no longer needing its stale protection. Surviving this ordeal puts her back in life’s stream. Meanwhile Simon is sent to a foster home—though obviously he runs away the first chance he gets—and on being released from prison Joe becomes a Hermit-like wanderer (notably, The Hermit is the ninth card in the major arcana of the tarot). Earlier in the novel Hulme likens Joe’s physical appearance to Hephaestus, the Greek blacksmith god who was similarly exiled, but who remains one of the few exiled gods to eventually return to Olympus and resume his station with Zeus’s approval. In this way Joe is repatriated through a chance meeting with a shaman-like character, who transmits to Joe his ordained guardianship over a sacred waka alleged to house the spirit of a god. In his role as custodian, and in working on the waka as a proto-Hephaestus himself—god of forging and craftsmanship—Joe similarly exits a dark night of the soul, mending himself as the once-lame. In Greek myth Hephaestus was born lame, for which his mother Hera threw him out of Olympus in disgust. Likewise is Joe so lamed, not by anything congenital but by the grief he carries for his dead wife and child (his biological one), and for the substrate of hate and self-loathing in being displaced from his Māori heritage. In fulfilling his sacred task over the waka this ancestral line is reopened, and his spiritual lameness healed—which is a very a pretty picture, but I don’t personally think traditional practices have the magical effect of salving centuries of generationally transmitted hurt, no matter how masterfully they are executed.

Perhaps rightly Hulme received criticism for how domestic abuse sits amidst her tale of spiritual deadlocks and cultural displacement, glanced at as a device representing the (colonial) sickness binding her three main characters together. Personally I like the flattening treatment therein, for how it presents violence as a common feature of certain realities without pandering to a potentially unfamiliar audience. Confronting yes, but not without a certain realism. When violence is woven into the language of the everyday, it does lose its novelty and becomes as ho-hum as anything else. For me the discomfort critics may’ve had with Hulme’s blasé insertion of child abuse is the point. If she’d couched it in shock and awe this nuance might’ve been lost in the writerly scavenger hunt dictating the hybrid mythic she builds from the ground up, in her weaving together of Māori and Western motif. There is a harrowing allusion though, in the drawing of Joe as Hephaestus, between Joe’s violence and that god’s subtle craftmanship with hammer and anvil. In this tableau are we meant to see Joe’s abuse of Simon, the foster child in his legal care, as member to a percussive arsenal of productive gestures? Or perhaps here, in Hephaestus’s smithery, there’s some connection being made between those physically labouring classes—living outside the opportunity hoarding of socioeconomic elevation—and violence as a native working-class language. For me personally, more resonant in Joe is the implication of woundedness—via Hephaestus’s lameness—with violence as a symptom, if only because this is something I know well, and which hits in prose with elegant (and laboured) articulation. Too elegant? Perhaps. But I’m forced to commend Hulme for trying.

Samuel Te Kani (Ngāpuhi) is a part-time generator of erotic science fiction, critical essaying on cinema, opinion pieces ranging from innocuous to blasphemous, and seriously good times (ask anyone). When he's not watching horror movies or stuffing his face with fried chicken, he's writing or waiting tables. He originally hails from Northland but currently resides in Auckland on Karangahape Road.