Storytellersunplugged

The atoms of my being are scattered across too many places.

I’ll watch a movie that is arguably set in a “foreign” culture or place to perhaps 99% of its audience - and things will swim into my conscience from absolutely nowhere and slot into their own proper places. Most recently - “Whale Rider”, a New Zealand-made movie set deeply into a New Zealand Maori culture, and the science fiction series “Charlie Jade”, set in South Africa and filmed in Cape Town.

“Whale Rider”. Don’t get me wrong, I am not any sort of expert on Maori - the language, the culture, the context. But I have lived in New Zealand for six years, and I know enough. I start watching that movie, and the scene shifts to a Maori temple and gathering place - and my subconscious supplies the name, it’s a marae.  Before one of the actors lets the name drop in dialogue. A name that might be utterly meaningless to someone watching this movie on cable in, oh, Ohio, someone who has never seen a Maori carving, who has no idea what any of it means… and I do. I recognise it. My mind concatenates, goes off at a tangent, supplies other scattered bits of Maori language and culture that I have picked up - haere mai, welcome, haere ra, goodbye, kia ora, hello. The fact that “wh” is pronounced like “f” in English, and not like the wh in what or who.  The time when I carved, with my own fair hand, the stylised image of a taniwha, a water spirit, out of a piece of cow bone. The memory of what black volcanic sand looks like, with deep purple streaks in the black, and shimmering with tiny specks of mica so that you start to lose all sense of perspective when you look straight down on it and it feels like you are walking on a starry sky. The landscape of Mordor as found on the volcanic badlands of the mid-North Island. The bright red feathery blossoms of the pohutekawa trees at Christmastime. The sharp taste of manuka honey. The restless Wellington wind. The tall kauri trees which were once so prized as masts for the tall ships, and slaughtered mercilessly for that purpose. The odd flightless birds of the place, the barren Southern Alps where I first stood up on a pair of skis, the weird accent that once had me picturing a mad image of a friend of mine falling down the backs of horned cattle instead of down some steps when she told me that she had hurt her foot falling “down the steers”. The only ski resort in the world, as far as I know - on the North Island which floats on a sea of simmering magma - where the lodges have posters with instructions of what to do not in case of an avalanche but in case of a volcanic eruption.

“Charlie Jade”. They keep having these wide panoramic shots of Cape Town - and I know the place, I keep pointing out where on the side of Table Mountain my University was, the big black skyscraper downtown which is the City COuncil building and where my father worked for more than a decade, the flower market outside the railway station. And once again my mind is off and running - the memory of the beaches at Muizenberg (Mouse Mountain), Vishoek, the beautiful white-sand crescent of tiny Llandudno beach with its lamentable lack of parking and the cold current that runs just a little way offshore which makes the water here cold enough to turn your leg blue up to your hipbone if you stick your toe into the water. The beach at Boulders where you share the ocean with a colony of tiny and opinionated penguins, the only parking lot in the world where the signs say “Beware of Penguins”. Chapman’s Peak drive, with its breathtaking views. The Cape of Good Hope, where you strain your eyes to see the line that divides the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic and the endless wind blows grit and awe into your eyes. Government Avenue, where I hand-fed squirrels on park benches. The place where my first and fiercely loved dog remains, buried in a corner of a garden we had to leave behind, close to a bank of flowers which never bloomed again after she died.  The University where I graduated with my three degrees, the diplomas still dutifully rolled up in their protective sleeve, a career which I trained for but never really followed.

And the things I wrote in both those places.

The book that became the “Changer of Days” duology (”The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days” in the USA), the epic fantasy which was originally written in the lab while I waited for hard-science experiments to be done and which was eventually published as two books by Harper Collins New Zealand. The book I wrote in New Zealand about my growing up in Africa.

Goeie more, haere mai, haere ra. 

It all makes me wonder what I am still to write, what treasures places I have lived in or visited but not yet written about - or in - might yet hold for me. I have been living in the USA for eight years now, five of them in the Pacific Northwest, and already there are traces of that in my work - with my latest books, the YA trilogy,  a little bit of a love letter to my current home with excursions to other favourite cities, like San Francisco and New York.

I’ve also written about places I’ve never been - basing the story of the “Jin Shei” books in the culture and context of a fantasy-recast China. But even there, although I’ve not physically set foot in the Summer Palace, I would go knowing a patchwork of weird and unrelated facts. I would probably recognise depictions of Chinese dragons, I know how to say “hello” in Mandarin, I know what Chinese music sounds like and what Chinese food tastes like, looks like.

It’s odd when you start recognising things on a movie screen from the places you’ve been. It’s even more strange when you start recognising things from places where you haven’t. But in some ways I am a tenuous spirit which spans the globe - I can say hello and goodbye and thank you in languages as widely disparate as Serbo-Croat and a Polynesian dialect spoken in Moorea, in the Tahitian archipelago; I can identify half a dozen poisonous snakes from central Africa; I know what kind of a noise a lion makes in the twilight; I know what is the significance of a shell necklace given as a parting present in Tahiti; I know what vanilla vines look like, and kudzu, and poison ivy, and lily of the valley, and peony. I know what a dolphin whistle sounds like underwater. I have seen a plague of beached jellyfish shiver and scintillate and slowly die on an expanse of empty beach. I’ve heard oceans whisper on pebble and sand, and roar against the faces of cliffs.

I recognise this world, and know it, and yet am constantly surprised and astonished and awed by it.

And people wonder where ideas come from.