Two worlds meet
Because of its geographical remoteness, New Zealand was populated late in the world clock, although Polynesians did arrive between the 11th and 13th centuries, according to various estimates, and were therefore the sole occupants until the "rediscovery" of the archipelago by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman in 1642. Historians agree that as early as the 16th century, the natives were structured into communities which, although they did not use a writing system, preserved traces of their family tree through oral tradition. This science - whakapapa - was fundamental, as the inheritance of ancestors formed the basis of community life, and ensured the spiritual cohesion (mana) of the group. Over and above this "practical data", a veritable oral literature was born, based on a rich mythology centered on the exploits of the mythical hero Māui. Because of his strange birth - his mother, Taranga, having thrown her premature child into the sea - he is as much the son of men as of the oceans, this demigod status granting him magical powers over the surrounding nature. His name was used to baptize some of the archipelago's islands - the North Island being Te Ika-a-Māui (Māui's fish), the South Island Te Waka-a-Māui (Māui's waka - boat) - but New Zealand as a whole was called Aotearoa, which some translate as "land of the long white cloud" and which is linked to the myth of another legendary figure, Kupe, who is said to have been the first explorer to set foot on New Zealand soil. Last but not least, we should mention the corpus of songs, prayers and rituals - such as public speaking on the marae, a sacred place - that governed community life, confirming the importance of orality for the Maoris when the first British settlers arrived at the beginning of the 19th century, a few decades after James Cook's passage (an expedition to be discovered in particular in Les Trois voyages du Capitaine Cook : récit by Jules Verne, published by Magellan & Cie).
At first, the missionaries had no interest in local mythology, and even denigrated it, especially as the language barrier did not facilitate exchanges. Richard Taylor (1805-1873) and William Colenso (1811-1899) were the exceptions: the former signed A leaf from the natural history of New Zealand in 1848, the latter had published 5,000 copies of a fragmentary version of the New Testament translated into Maori by Williams Williams two years earlier. The local language had indeed been transposed into written form by the missionaries, but in the case of the Treaty of Waitangi, this revolution was not necessarily in the natives' favor: the founding deed, transcribed in both languages and signed in 1840, would indeed present serious differences. In any case, Maori was forbidden to be taught. Nevertheless, a number of Britons, including George Grey (1812-1898) and above all Edward Shortland (1812-1893), were initiated into its mysteries and worked with the natives to collect and transcribe the founding myths. This ambivalence - acculturation versus fascination - endured, but unsurprisingly, the first texts of New Zealand literature were written by the settlers and their descendants.
Emerging literature was primarily concerned with describing the conditions of life in this new colony, as Mary Anne Barker (1831-1911) did in her correspondence with her sister, Louisa Scott, who had remained in England(Une Femme du monde à la Nouvelle-Zélande, L'Harmattan). From the same publisher, it is possible to obtain certain texts by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), who drew inspiration from his stay in New Zealand in the 1860s for the first chapters of his utopia Erewhon (Gallimard). The end of the century saw the emergence of a certain desire for independence from the Old Continent. This nationalism took up Maori traditions and legends to oppose the Crown, in a short-lived movement known as "Maoriland". It is associated with the book Musings in Maoriland by Thomas Bracken (1843-1898), from which the poem New Zealand Hymn was extracted and which serves as the national anthem under the title God Defend New Zealand, as well as with the works of the poet Jessie Mackay(The Spirit of the Rangatira and other ballads), Arthur Henry Adams(Maoriland and other verses) and Alfred Domett, who imagined a highly romantic love story between a European castaway and a Maori woman in a 14,000-verse poem(Ranolf and Amohia). Numerous novels were also inspired by the wars between the Maoris and the settlers. But a more liberated, feminine generation was soon to emerge, pioneered by the poet Blanche Baughan - born in 1870 in England, died in 1958 in New Zealand - even if she had to use only the first letter of her first name to conceal her gender, and so avoid frightening the critics.
A very feminine first generation
Was it because New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote (in 1893!) that they had easier access to writing and (relative) freedom of movement? In any case, the women who took up the pen and gave New Zealand literature its first letters of nobility were pioneers in their chosen field. Jane Mander (1877-1949), for example, was brought up on the move by her father's seasonal work, and her choppy schooling, which sometimes prevented her from attending, did nothing to dampen her love of reading. From this childhood, already a novel in itself, the young woman graduated as a primary school teacher, but eventually turned to journalism, devoting her free time to increasing her general knowledge rather than looking for a husband - which was quite unusual at the time - and traveling to meet new friends and literary acquaintances. After a career marked by many twists and turns, she finally published six novels, including Histoire d'un fleuve en Nouvelle-Zélande (reprinted by Actes Sud in 2002), largely inspired by her youth in contact with the Maoris. In her works, she planted the seeds of non-conformist, not to say feminist, thinking, which earned her the reputation of being immoral. A novelist in New York, an editor in London and a promoter of New Zealand authors on her return to her native land in 1932, she suffered from poor health - and censorship - towards the end of her life. Yet Jane Mander is the perfect example of a free, independent and clear-sighted woman, a model that could be emulated by another writer with an equally sinuous and extraordinary destiny, Katherine Mansfield. She was born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington on October 14, 1888. Her family - especially her mother - was rather conservative, but London, where she went to study at the age of 15, gave her a new lease of life: in love, where she met a lover, and inspiration, where she published her first texts under her grandmother's name. Her vocation was thwarted - both professionally (she had intended to play the cello, but her father confined her to bookkeeping) and emotionally (a new female romance cost her a scandal) - and her return to New Zealand was short-lived: from 1908 onwards, and until her premature death from tuberculosis in 1923, she traveled constantly, to England, France, Switzerland.. However, her work - quite limited in scope, her best-known collection being La Garde-party et autres nouvelles (Gallimard), although her correspondence is also worth a closer look(Lettres, éditions Stock) - was to prove decisive, laying the foundations for Modernism, a literary (and more generally artistic) movement that reached its apogee during the First World War, focusing on feeling, lived experience and interior monologue, as in Mrs Dalloway by Katherine Mansfield's greatest admirer, Virginia Woolf.
It would be impossible not to mention Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982), for although she exercised her talents in crime fiction - a very popular genre in New Zealand, given the number of writers who devoted themselves to it, sometimes with a fantastic or gothic touch (Andrew MacKenzie, Ronald Hugh Morrieson or, more recently, Paul Cleave) - her writing was not devoid of a very fine psychological approach, a guarantee of a success that went far beyond the borders of England, where she spent most of her adult life. Since 2021, Archipoche has been republishing the complete adventures of her recurring hero, Roderick Alleyn, inspector at Scotland Yard. Margaret Greville Foster (1902-1964), better known by her pseudonym Texidor, did the exact opposite: born in England in 1902, she lived in New Zealand from 1940 to 1948 (and died in Australia in 1964). At the heart of Auckland's very active literary society, she became part of the existentialist movement, with some very dented characters(Home front, These Dark Glasses). It blossomed thanks to the attention of Frank Sargeson (born Norris Frank Davey, 1903-1982), who himself gave life to tortured anti-heroes, in his numerous short stories(Conversation with My Uncle, A Man and his Wife, That Summer) as well as in his novels(I Saw in My Dream, I for One...) In addition to his reputation as a writer, Sargeson acquired that of a leader of a generation all geared towards intellectual pursuits. Benefiting from a "literary pension" paid by the State, his recognition also came from his peers, who were quick to praise his contributions and the help he gave them. Among his protégés, we must at least mention Janet Frame (1924-2004), whose first novel Les Hiboux pleurent vraiment and Un Ange à ma table (in two volumes) feature prominently in Joëlle Losfeld's catalog.
A new beginning
In the period following the Second World War, New Zealand enjoyed a veritable literary craze, the most striking marker of this effervescence being the creation of the magazine Landfall by Denis Glover (1912-1980) and his friend Charles Brasch (1909-1973). Both poets, for twenty years they were responsible for this quarterly, whose columns included verse, short stories, reviews, photographs... and, above all, immediate success, which continued to grow even after the two men left the venture. A new generation of authors rivaled each other in inventiveness, and 1922 alone saw the birth of the poet Kendrick Smithyman, the novelist Maurice Duggan and the historian Keith Sinclair, applauded for The origins of the Maori Wars and then for A History of New Zealand. The backdrop to this revival is the search for a national identity, and the aboriginal people are not excluded from this questioning, as demonstrated by the rise to fame of Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008), one of the first poets of Maori descent, highly regarded for his innovative style from the 1960s onwards. He was followed by the Maori couple Jacqueline Cecilia Sturm, née Te Kare Papuni, and her husband James K. Baxter. Despite their stormy relationship, overshadowed by Baxter's alcoholism, both were committed to the preservation of native culture in addition to their writing. Maurice Shadbolt (1932-2004) - three-time winner of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award, created in 1959 - also drew inspiration from the history of the archipelago: Season of the Jew, Monday's Warriors and The House of Strife make up his New Zealand Wars trilogy, begun in 1986 and completed in 1993. Patricia Grace, a Métis woman, fully embodied this renaissance, becoming the first Maori woman to publish a collection of short stories(Waiariki, 1975). She was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007, a distinction she shared with Witi Ihimaera, born in 1944, whose work has been partly translated by Au Vent des îles (Kahu, filles des baleines, La Femme de Parihaka, La Patriarche : une saga maorie). Keri Hulme shot to fame with The Bone People, the story of an artist's encounter with a wounded child, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1985, before falling back into complete anonymity. In contrast, Alan Duff never stopped publishing after his first novel, L'Ame des guerriers, published in 1990 and available in French from Actes Sud. In it, he paints a bleak picture of contemporary Maori society, confined to living in squalid conditions on the outskirts of big cities. An important and indispensable book that reminds us that equal rights and equal treatment are still a pious hope today.
