Q1: From the blurb: ‘Part autobiography, part reportage, part quest’ . . . Did this sort of approach form in your mind as you considered what you next wanted to write, or has it been an organic, iterative process to get it to land where it has?
Very much so, it evolved through trial and error, a writing over, and over, a stripping out. The key was settling on the beaded curtain as an organising device, and then thinking compositionally about where pieces fit and what can be carried from one to the next . . . A few years ago, I bought a book of blank musical staves to write in by hand. I was curious to try and place words and phrases and as a composer places notes. Prose can let in too much air and be self-serving. It can run away with the sound of its own voice. I wanted observations and experiences jammed up against each other. I also needed a compositional framework, and that is where the beaded curtain comes in to carry the threads of this book, and for things to surface and disappear and resurface, the way motifs do in music.
Q2: It must have been a challenge — corralling and containing and not letting things bleed all over the place?
That is the risk of any composition. In this instance, a beaded curtain can contain or support a lot of disparate bits of information, quests, journeys, reflections, digressions, memories. It can lose its shape and integrity if any one of those things overwhelms the next.
Q3: Might this be one of the books that has most tested you?
Oh yes. It took some years to write. Madness is making the same mistake over, and over, right? I tried that for a while!
Q4: Witnessing and noticing, a life in which a notebook is always close by. Is this a writer’s compulsion, and possible affliction, or is it absolutely core to your being in the world?
I am one of those writers who like writing on the hoof. To that end, a notebook is an essential item. A notebook doesn’t let you off the hook. It behoves you to look more closely, more attentively, because what you see — or think you have — will end up in that notebook.
Q5: This book has fury in its veins, perhaps most evident in the passages about the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. One can’t just witness and then move on. Will that fury always be there for you?
I don’t know. Who can know how one will feel in the future. But that ‘fury’ you describe has been with me a while. There is no shortage of things for it to attach itself to. It is impossible to predict which experiences will keep their hooks in you forever after. The book has two cornerstones. One, Berlin’s stelenfeld, or ‘field of stones’, a memorial for the dead Jews of Europe. It had a mysterious pull on me. I have spent three years in Berlin over a decade. During each stay, I visited it two or three times a week, making notes on who happened to be there, jotting down my impressions and thoughts. The other key experience in the book is an exhibition of clothes from Hiroshima I saw in Vancouver. It remains one of the most extraordinary encounters of my life. In both cases, I did not seek these things out to dwell on. I stumbled on both. I do think we have a responsibility to actively engage with new experiences. Otherwise, we are reduced to consumers of spectacle. It turns into TV that we sit before in a soporific state. I saw something extraordinary and deeply moving in the clothes from Hiroshima. In the months and years ahead, I carried that experience into my own life. Witnessing does not require you to have a closeup seat at the panorama. I don’t think time and space necessarily comes into it. Nor does witnessing begin and end with the event. You can still have a relationship with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima whether you are born ten years after the event, as I was, or seventy-five years later.
Q6: You write about your very famous brother. When did you decide he should be part of this?
As much depends on who is doing the witnessing, it felt necessary to say something about where I come from, and to identify key fingerprints on me. I am the youngest of five siblings, and by quite some margin. I mostly grew up as an only child with these older glamorous siblings floating about in the ‘outside’ world. In that arrangement, the youngest is inevitably conscripted into the witnessing role. The grownup siblings are living their lives. You are still in daycare, so to speak, shackled to the house, the backyard and the dog, and the neighbourhood.
Q7: And you mourn your sister Pat. Is this your tribute to her?
She would have loved to read that. But sadly, she is dead, and even more sadly I would need to disappoint her and say no — it isn’t ‘a tribute’, but an instance of younger brother witnessing older sister’s splash in the world. Pat was dying as I was working my way to the end of the book. The piece ‘Huia’ that begins the book is almost the last thing I wrote. Nevertheless, she does have a special place because of all my siblings she is the only one I lived with under the same roof for any length of time when I went to live with her at fifteen. Well, aside from my youngest sister, Lorraine, ten years older than me, but she moved out when I was six or seven.
Q8: The section on both Archibald and James K. Baxter is so very powerful. You have respect for one and scorn for the other, or is that too crudely put?
Not ‘scorn’ I hope. I admire James K’s singularity. After all, he imagined a bi-cultural framework for this country long before it became mainstream. But along the way he had become the very thing he craved — a prophet, a seer. Is there room for scorn . . . Let’s just say I am constitutionally dismissive of prophets of any description. When Baxter wrote ‘the young are mastered by the dead’ I find it very plausible he was aware of his father’s impact on him.
Q9: Baxter and the poet Gu Cheng — writers who went too far and put their minds in harm’s way. A salutary lesson for all writers?
A salutary lesson for all. In the case of Gu Cheng, imaginative ambition is best left on the page.
Q10: Let’s come back to the title, The Beaded Curtain. No matter how hard we try to be focused in our witnessing we can only ever have a partial view. But it is a human responsibility to witness nonetheless?
I think so. To be fully present, as it were. Even a partial view is still a legitimate view. It does not make it a lesser experience. Many of the houses in the street I grew up in had a beaded curtain hanging in the backdoor. It meant the view was compromised and it shifted constantly enlarging or narrowing the view depending the strength of breeze acting on the curtain. The view of ‘outside’ consisted of glimpses, and these were often followed by doubts over what had been glimpsed. It seems to me that is about the most honest transaction we can hope for as witnesses.
