This Pākehā Life, with Alison Jones

I recently spoke to Alison Jones, whose book This Pākehā Life - An Unsettled Memoir, was shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and has been one of our best-selling non-fiction titles in 2021. 

Something that I use to give potential readers the general flavour is Alison’s work is her thoughts on why we (non-Maori New Zealanders) should embrace the term pākehā:

New Zealand is the only place in the world that you can be pākehā, and that is a unique identity. And to consider yourself pākehā and to express that as part of your identity is to acknowledge that you have a relationship to Maori.

Let me ease your mind by saying that this book isn’t a lecture. It’s one woman’s very relatable story that runs the gauntlet through funny, sad, nostalgic, frustrating, romantic, embarrassing and triumphant.

It’s a book for anyone trying to make better sense of Maori/Pākehā relations in New Zealand at this time, and I believe this book has the power to do a lot of good.

Mrs Blackwell: I often find myself starting my recommendations with "This isn't a book I would normally choose but..." Of course, that doesn't mean anything if the person I’m talking to doesn’t know what my normal choices are, but what I’m trying to say is that despite the hellishly poetic title this book looks like it’s going to be uncomfortable and like many book buyers, I don’t naturally gravitate to books that are going to make me uncomfortable. 

So I'm curious, what kind of readers did you have in mind when you wrote this book?

Alison Jones: I’ll start by noting that this is a memoir and not an autobiography in the sense it's not about everything in my life, it's a memoir about a relationship. About my engagement in Maori/Pākehā relations through my life. It’s a very focused memoir, and that's why it's called This Pākehā Life. 

The Unsettled Memoir part is really an invitation for us to become unsettled but be okay that we're unsettled. 

“I can understand that people would say, "I don't really want to read  a book about being Pākehā, because it'll probably be full of finger-wagging and lectures about how Pākehā are bad. I'll just go onto something that's more entertaining.”

I completely understand that, but I wrote it quite deliberately, with a Pākehā, and other non-Maori audience in mind, who are interested in their relationship with Maori, but they can't quite put their finger on why it makes them feel uncomfortable. 

I thought, I’ll write this book that tells interesting stories about the way I became Pākehā, my thoughts and my stupidities and my joys and all the aspects of those relationships and maybe other Pākehā can relate to that and see that we’re all in this together.

It's not easy and it's not just a walk in the park but that's all right in itself.

Mrs Blackwell: In other interviews I’ve heard you say that Pākehā often get caught at one of two ends of the spectrum: that we're either very defensive about our history or we're trying to ignore it altogether. I know at different times in my life I felt both of those things. Is there a comfortable middle ground?

Alison Jones: I think the middle ground is learning to be comfortable with the discomfort. 

We can't deny our history. It happened. We are a colonised society. 

Who I am and how I am, and how I am in the world is a product of everything that went before. To embrace that and to understand it makes me feel richer in myself. 

Not long before I wrote this book, I discovered a whole whakapapa [genealogy] I didn't know I had, who fought as officers in the Taranaki Wars and in the wars against Tainui in the 1860s. I also had great, great grandfathers who were members of parliament in the 1860s. In effect were presiding over the removal of land from Maori. 

We can talk about that, its dreadful effects and face it. These events happened and my ancestors were part of it. So how am I going to be in this world today knowing that history and knowing its effects on Maori? If we're all diving under the duvet and saying, "Ah, no, it's all too awful" then how is anything going to change and improve? We’re going to be stuck in some kind of weird paralysis or ignorance. 

They say ignorance is bliss, but you can't actually remain ignorant in New Zealand because Maori politics, Maori/Pākehā relations are ongoing. We've got to face up to it and decide how we’re going to be a partner in this relationship.

Am I going to be clear and open about it and think about how we can move forward to a positive future? Or am I just going to sort of put my fingers in my ears and shout loudly?

Mrs Blackwell: I recently went to a Featherston Booktown event on the ongoing relevance of the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Maire Tau (Ngai Tahu) suggested that to relitigate what his ancestors decided, or agreed with Pākehā, is to disrespect his ancestors. What sort of obligation do you think we have to our ancestor’s decisions, good or bad?

Alison Jones: I think that's absolutely a perfect point that we do have obligations to our ancestors, to remember them and to remember what they did, good and bad.

I learned from Maori the concept of whakapapa [the Maori concept of genealogy, linking you to all your ancestors and to the earth] so for my own sense of myself I can’t deny the fullness of my ancestry and of my ancestor's actions.

Remember too that Maori are not saying “Everything's wonderful in my whakapapa” either. All of our ancestries are full of good and bad actions, we all have these things, but it's a matter of acknowledging what has happened.

There are some really interesting and good sides of it and there are some extremely bad sides. We see today the inequalities between Maori and Pākehā and just to really simplify, we (Pākehā) know our own privilege and our own position is affected by that history. So we have to decide how we move forward from here.

Mrs Blackwell: I’d like to finish our interview by asking you a couple of writing questions. How have you developed your writing practice and processes over time?

Alison Jones: I've always enjoyed writing, from being young and being a goodie two-shoes at school! I think being an academic we're always expected to write has helped too, we're expected to churn out articles and books. I'm lucky that I have an editor for a husband and he's brilliant at taking my work and really shaking it about, and we have good conversations about what works in terms of writing. So all those things combine to make me fascinated by writing and its expression.

In an academic context, I’m horrified how at university we just say to students, "Well, write an essay on this, write a thesis on that” and what becomes most important is what we read and what data we collect rather than actually the craft of writing, which to me is the most important thing. You can take something that's really quite dull and make it extremely exciting if you write about it well, and you can take really interesting things and write badly, and now everyone's going to sleep over your writing. 

I think you can learn to improve your writing, but it does take effort and time. Most students, and many academics, just think, "Oh well, I can just write it down," as though that's not a very complicated thing to do, but it's very complicated and difficult.

I keep telling my students that writing is rewriting. You never just write something down, you rework it, rework it dozens of times to make it flow and to make it sing on the page.

Mrs Blackwell: I’ve been reading Patricia Grace’s memoir and she kicks off by talking about how she likes to write with a mechanical pencil on paper, and to move around the house and follow the sunshine. What are your preferred conditions for writing?

Alison Jones: Patricia is amazing! Years ago, when she had young kids, she'd say she'd write at the kitchen table. I thought, "Oh my God, you're an amazing woman." 

I'm not really that kind of writer who can just write on a scrap of paper. Although I take notes often when I hear or see something happening, but generally speaking I don’t write with pen and paper. 

I'm lucky I have my own room at home and I can close the door. When the door is closed in my house, that means nobody is to enter except in an emergency!

I don’t tend to start before 10am because I'm not a morning person and I can go through until about 6pm. When I'm writing something that I'm enjoying and feel quite intensely engaged with, it doesn't take much to get me to my computer. But if it's not going very well, I'll find all sorts of things, important things like weeding and dishes, you know the kind of thing that absolutely has to be done right now!

Mrs Blackwell: I think we can all relate to that!