Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Bone People by Keri Hulme The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6601033f381f1782 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6601033f3dee4aa9 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. The Bone People by Keri Hulme. By Emily Burns Morgan. ublished in 1985, The Bone People won the Booker McConnell Prize (now known as the Man Booker) the same year. Despite this accolade, I had never heard of it, and likely would not have if not for my new book club, who chose it as this July’s “light” summer reading (jk, it’s not light at all; I love my new book club). Despite its relative obscurity, Keri Hulme’s novel is as timely today as it was in 1985, addressing pressing questions for our post-colonial and increasingly globalized world: How much of a “traditional” culture is worth holding on to? Must “outsider” forces always have a negative influence? When and how can we blend cultures to achieve something better than the originals? What does the “health” of a culture really mean, anyway? Set in a rural town along the coast of the North Island of New Zealand, The Bone People follows three main characters—Joe, a Maori man; Kerewin, a part-Maori woman; and Simon, a child of European heritage. The three are first brought together when Simon, after injuring his foot while playing truant, sneaks into Kerewin’s house-tower. A mute child of indeterminate age (Kerewin guesses somewhere between five and seven), Simon wears a pendant stamped with his name and address, and is able to communicate via hand gestures and writing. Inclined at first to throw him out, a sudden storm softens Kerewin’s heart, and she ends up allowing him to stay while she attempts to reach his family. The local telephone operator tells Kerewin that Simon’s father is “a nice bloke” but “won’t be home till late. … If he gets home, that is” (the suggestion being that he’s out drinking). As Simon’s other relatives are also unavailable, the operator suggests Kerewin call the police if she wants to be rid of the child right away: “They know what to do….” Despite her professed desire for isolation, Kerewin lets the child stay. There is something about him she likes. A relative picks Simon up in the morning, so it’s not until the boy and his father come around again that afternoon “to make things right” that Kerewin is first introduced to Joe. As the child is fair and blonde, his father’s dark eyes and complexion come as a surprise, as does the fact that Kerewin likes him almost immediately (though not as a sexual partner; we will find out later that Kerewin is “asexual”). Joe and Simon stay for coffee, then dinner, then drinks around the fire. Most nights after that find the three eating and drinking together and becoming a kind of family, with Joe and Kerewin forming a parental unit for Simon, who could not be happier with the arrangement. Joe, too, is thrilled. Only Kerewin, the loner, is uneasy, despite her grudging happiness. In addition to an affinity for drinking until morning, Kerewin and Joe also bond over their Maori ancestry. Though Kerewin is “blue-eyed, brown- haired, and mushroom pale,” by blood “but an eighth Maori, by heart, spirit, and inclination” she feels all Maori. “Or, I used to. Now it feels like the best part of me has got lost in the way I live.” This sentiment, one to which Joe relates, struck me at first as rather vague—having no knowledge of Maori culture, I found outside reading necessary to extend my comprehension of what the author might mean. Kerewin lives alone in a tower she has built to isolate herself from any kind of intimacy, particularly with her family. Gay Wilentz’s “Instruments of Change: Healing Cultural Dis-ease in Kerri Hulme’s the bone people ” is useful in understanding the extent to which Kerewin’s isolation separates her from Maori culture. According to Wilentz, the Maori concept of health includes not only bodily wellness but also spiritual, psychic, and familial health. Kerewin, obviously, is lacking in these last three areas, and Joe, too, for reasons we will discover later, has damaged his spiritual and psychic well- being and his connection to his family. Thus, for both Joe and Kerewin, the Maoriness they consider the essence of their being is at stake. Given this shared grief for their lost culture, it seems counterintuitive, symbolically speaking, that a European child should be the force to bring them together. Even though Hulme’s characters are vivid and realistic, they are clearly symbolic entities as much as individual people, and as such the reader is obliged to deduce what each one might stand for. Since the author, like her female protagonist, is a New Zealander of some Maori descent, the most obvious answer is that Maori characters symbolize the loss of indigenous culture while the European portrays the dominating forces of colonialism. Such a straightforward reading doesn’t seem to work, however, because here the representative of Europe is a defenseless child, treated violently by the Maoris entrusted with his care, and thus an object of great sympathy for the reader. In “The White Whipping Boy: Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People ,” Antje M. Rauwerda points out that Simon’s origin story is similar to that of the Maori god Maui. Like Maui, whose mother, legend has it, tossed her premature son into the sea wrapped in her hair, a battered Simon is washed upon the New Zealand shore wrapped in seaweed. Ocean spirits find and save Maui, while Joe rescues Simon after a shipwreck kills at least two of the people he was travelling with. Terrified and mute, Simon does not know how old he is; Joe assumes two or three. Aside from the wreck itself, “X-rays showed [Simon] had widespread injuries to his pelvis and hips.” We later find out that the people Simon was with may have been heroin dealers. That Simon has been abused before landing in New Zealand and becoming Joe’s son seems extremely likely. Keri Hulme. In “The Bone People,” she complicates the usual presentation of the dynamics of colonialism. Rather than presenting an image of a robust European culture arriving to squash the native population, then, “The image of the injured white child suggests that the Pakeha [European] are also already damaged. The damage they effect in Maori New Zealand is a product of their own weaknesses and injuries. In effect, Hulme implies that Maori culture is devastated by an even more bankrupt and broken Pakeha culture. Simon thus embodies the problems Hulme imagines within Pakeha culture as well as becoming a whipping boy for Maori frustrations” (Rauwerda). Wounded by his own culture, Simon is also violated by his new one. After becoming attached to Joe and Simon, the reader discovers, along with Kerewin, that Joe has been brutally beating his adopted son. Joe’s rationalization for this is that Simon is a wayward child—he skips school and steals—but of course the real reason is the abuser’s own inner turmoil. Joe’s wife and biological son passed away not long after Simon joined their family, and the man clearly resents the boy for living while his own family died. This is the most upsettingly realistic aspect of the book, and one worth more discussion than I can do justice to here. The problem for readers is that it is hard not to like Joe—when he’s not beating his son, he’s warm and loving and kind. One can hardly avoid feeling sorry for him; he himself was beaten as a boy, and seems in many ways to be doing the best he knows how with Simon. On the other hand, of course, his treatment of Simon is unforgivable. Can we love a character who does terrible things? Can we admire a culture with a long history of violence? Hulme doesn’t let us off the hook regarding the Joe question; instead, she complicates the issue by making her characters represent not just themselves, but a larger group. Rauwerda argues that the violence done to the white Simon is used “to invoke disempowered and disadvantaged colonial whiteness. The violence the child suffers suggests that whiteness must be punished in order that Maoriness can regain pride of place in New Zealand.” Though damaged already, the novel suggests that whiteness will need to suffer further punishment (even if that punishment is only symbolic) for the damage it has inflicted upon the colonized country. In The Bone People , the body of Simon stands in for that of the European colonizer. The problem with this reading is that Simon is 1) a child, and 2) so extremely likable that it is almost impossible not to condemn Joe and even Kerewin for not taking better care of him. In fact, the adults’ love of the child is often their only redeeming quality. So why didn’t Hulme choose a mean old white man, someone cruel and selfish and unlovable, to stand in for the colonizer? Because while a more straightforward story may have sold more books, it would not have made for as complicated, or true, a narrative. I agree with Rauwerda that Hulme’s point is that the colonizing Europeans are childlike—truant and drunk and petulant and stubborn, but also sweet-natured and for the most part well-intentioned. Like Simon, they steal everything they come across without really understanding their own motivations for doing so. Hulme doesn’t condone Joe’s beating of the child, but instead uses it to contrast the European qualities with the Maori, suggesting that the Maori inclination is to violence while the European is to provocation and manipulation. Neither tactic is ideal. Nessie School of Languages. We believe that the 1985 Booker [1] -prize-winning novel, The Bone People , was published (after lots of corrections) to basically start an immediate communication with all those New Zeelanders who are highly concerned with their national identity, as it definitely gives them the opportunity to change completely their traditional conception of their society by adopting back the ancestral Maori values and spirituality. This difficult novel allows freely the introduction of a great deal of opposite principles, in order to contrast both Maori and modern European values, which, we reckon, that lots of times might be confusing the reader. The author also plays brilliantly with dreams that strongly contradict reality, and make us enter in a mysterious world full of fantasy, in which we may come across all kinds of vain events: enchantments, supernatural facts, nightmares, connotations between night and day, and so on. The novel is then supposed to be full of dichotomies between Maori and Pakeha cultures and myths, Christian and regional spiritualism, earth and water, male and female, light and darkness, and above all, the eternally existing idea of past and present. The plot deals with the life of an unconventional female artist, who lives isolated on a coastal town of New Zeeland, after breaking her relationship with her biological family, and tries to make up for this emptiness by thinking about the past and collecting objects from a happier time. Her life starts to change when she meets a blond young boy who is mute. Moreover, they run into another important character, an angry Maori widower who is all the time grieving for his wife?s and son?s death. The three protagonists, who have little in common, are introduced in a mysterious world, where night falls upon them as a nightmare. Darkness mirrors death, that?s why they are really frightened when the sun sets. They have strange problems of adaptation and behaviour, but their close friendship gives them enough strength to overcome all kind of obstacles. The fact that there are two artists in the story, Kerewin Holmes and the old man, is also remarkable, since artists? presence seems to be highly regarded within the Maori community, because of their straight communication with the gods. They are privileged because they can see things in a different way. Kerewin is one of these artists, although she is going through a bad time. She uses art as a way of isolating herself from the rest of the world and to maintain contact with her homeland, which she has been forced to leave. She paints and sculpts according to her momentary wishes. From the very beginning, Keri Hulme uses spirals [2] , which are an old motif in Maori culture. They appear in nature and are frequently shown in shells and snails. Already in page seven, we find the image of a house, a tower with a main spiral staircase which connects all the rooms. Many reviewers point out that they are a key symbol in this novel, as they have an ancient philosophy bound to, which is crucial for the final resolution of the main protagonists? problems. These characters are the ones who let off a vast combination of positive and negative feelings, related to human weaknesses and strengths, frustration and amazement, satisfaction and awes. As an anonymous critic [3] stated: ?This is more than a tale of child abuse and disattachment. It makes you ache for the child, while at the same time causes your heart to nearly burst with empathy for him?. TECHNIQUE TO GET. THE READER?S ATTENTION. After reading The Bone People and a large number of reviews about it, we have learnt that Keri Hulme is highly interested in framing the journey of the human soul to truth, through the mind of her characters. Therefore, she uses the famous ?stream of consciousness? narrative technique, through which, we can follow a character?s thoughts in a very free way in order to find the inner truths. She appears to be following legendary James Joyce?s and Virginia Wolf?s steps, although there are obvious differences among them, specially as far as the issues the New Zealander author writes about are concerned. We must take for granted that Joyce would have never accepted Kerewin?s rejection to become a solitary artist, which was one of his most devoted ideas, and would be totally against Hulme?s final solution to get rid of the three protagonists? problems through their total integration in the society. However, there are also some similarities, as Hulme?s characters also experience the constant flow of their thoughts and feelings, as we can notice in lots of paragraphs where there is no punctuation at all and dialog has totally disappeared, because these personal sensations are strong enough to move into one another. At this point of the explanation, we shall add Hulme?s own words, which may help to verify what we have just affirmed: [4] I have a theory about how you engage readers? attention, and it?s basically as a result of the reading I?ve done and the things that work for me. And I find that there?s a sort of a way of not being completely straightforward with what you are writing but using emotionally loaded material that will grab people. And the way that I play with words and bend them slightly – or just outright mutilate them – tends towards to work in that context. All those pioneer modernist writers who followed this psychological technique were always trying to grasp things that were in people?s minds and the ways they worked. As far as Hulme is concerned, she also puts a huge emphasis on making the readers guess the meanings of dreams, as they belong to the deep heart of the native mythology of her country. Therefore, her main aim seems to be forcing a proper interpretation of them, which, it goes without saying, is in no way an easy matter. Moreover, she masters the use of symbols in this novel, which may definitely serve her to deepen in her tireless search for the truth and the controversial discovery of the self. And what is more, sometimes we aren?t even able to notice whether the character is thinking or speaking, as the writer loves being subjective all the time and again does force free interpretation. As we said before, there is a total lack of oral transmission, and that?s the way the writer seems to long for locking utterly all the doors to reality. Sometimes we do find long chats about nothing, which makes the readers feel the nonsense of it all. Most times, it is the supranatural what she is keen on exploring [5] , as we can see in the following flow of sentences (we dare not mention the word dialog), in which she plays with the meaning of words to show again the great difficulty of a proper communication: WHAT DO YOU SEE AT NIGHT? He shudders and shakes his head emphatically. ?In the dark you mean? What do I see in the dark?? No. He waves the paper. WHAT DO YOU SEE AT NIGHT? ?Okay, what do I see at night? Stars?? ?The night itself, like darkness)? ?Ah you mean something that can?t be seen, like ghosts? ? Hulme creates very strange characters that will not discover their personality until they feel totally free. On the one hand, Kerewin distrusts everybody and is afraid of anything, as she feels an outcast everywhere, just because she has been separated from her natural background, her fama (family). Her understanding comes when she loses her isolation. On the other hand, Joe has failed everything he has tried in his long painful life, and hasn?t even found out who he really is, until he gets the revelation he is a carver. According to the most precious Maori values, from now on, he will achieve his proper place in society, so we have already got the answer to all the devastation he has suffered. This constant trip to the knowledge of the self has led them first to their personal acceptance, and later to happiness. That comes when the writer seems to want them to pronounce loudly: Ka pai (Thanks mate) and Kia Koa Koe (wishing you joy). MY PERSONAL VIEW. As far as I am concerned, highly-awarded Keri Hulme?s The Bone People is unquestionably the most difficult novel that I have ever read in a foreign language. What is more, I must admit that without the help of some of the didactic literary reviews I have been carefully checking, I wouldn?t have understood much of the plot and, consequently, nor would I have been able to write any single comment about it. The novel is soundly based on Maori spiritual myths and rural life, so quite a bit of knowledge of their principles is badly necessary in order to follow the plot properly. I?ve learnt [6] that several Maori cultural practices are still kept alive nowadays in New Zealand, and most formal meetings and celebrations tend to use their ancient language in action songs, and receive visitors accompanied by the hongi , or pressing together of noses on greeting. They also cook food in earth ovens ( haangi ) on preheated stones. Carved houses, which serve as centres of reunion and ceremony in their villages, are still being built. Although for many Maori people the most significant issue in the country remains that of the land ownership, conscious of the terrible injustices they suffered with the European land dealings in the 19th century. This strong rooting to their territory is bound to be found in most chapters of the story, as it is the actual basis of the conflict between the Pakeha and Maori society. In this way, the novel does become a great celebration of Maori spiritualism, and handles a rich mixture of subjects that combine realism and fantasy, comedy and pathos. On the other hand, now I?m willing to play the literary commentator so as to locate this novel into the varied trends of the narrative written in English in the 1980?s. I daresay it deals with the kind of fantasy known as magic realism [7] , which is supposed to move beyond the usual limits of the story so as to bring in a new range of experiences. These kind of novels enjoy a strong plot, in which daily realistic episodes mix with unexpected ones, which cannot be explained and might belong to a dream, fairy-story or myth. This is a genre developed and improved by quite famous writers such as Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie, whose writings have also tried to bring together east and west. Just to finish, I can?t avoid mentioning that Keri Hulme has been the only New Zeelander, male or female, to receive the prestigious Booker Prize , which was very important for the right international projection of this country?s literature. I have also read a few reviews complaining about Hulme? s not being a prolific writer, which means her literary work is highly expected by readers who enjoy psychological stories and are able to understand such complicated plots, led by the stream of consciousness technique. As a review [8] by a university teacher points out: ?Some students hate it because they thought it was impossible to read. And it assure that this book takes time and it?s worth reading?. Booker club: The Bone People by Keri Hulme. The buzz when The Bone People won the Booker prize in 1986 was all about the struggle Keri Hulme had to bring it to publication. First there was the monumental effort of writing it over a 12-year period, then the fact that nearly every publisher rejected it out of hand. Those who were prepared to look at it wouldn't contemplate bringing it to print without severe re-edits, prompting the author to declare she would rather have the book "embalmed in Perspex" than re-shaped. When the book was finally taken on, it was by Spiral, a tiny feminist press in New Zealand led by three women – two of whom had links to the same Maori tribe as Hulme. The initial print run was 2,000 copies. When they sold out and so did the next 2,000, Spiral approached Hodder and Stoughton in New Zealand, who shifted another 20,000 and brought it to the attention of the Booker judges. More than a million sales later, you might be tempted to view the story of Hulme's success as yet another example of the short-sightedness of most publishers and the need for artists to stick to their guns in the face of philistine editors. In a sense you'd be right, but before you condemn those early readers out of hand you, too, should try tackling the first few pages of The Bone People. Here's a sampler: "It is all silence. The silence is music. He is the singer." "They were nothing more than people by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are the instruments of change." "IN THE BEGINNING it was a tension. An element of strain that grew and crept like a thin worm through their embrace." "And he knows the rock of desolation and the deep of despair." You might think I'm being unfair by putting up these lines robbed of their context, but believe me, in context, surrounded by similar friends, and making no more sense, they are worse. Small wonder publishers wanted to edit it. In their position I'd be itching to get hold of the scalpel, too. But it's a good job the women at Spiral were more patient than me, because out of that morass of bad, barely comprehensible prose there solidifies a really good story. Kerewin Holmes (a clear stand-in for the author) is a painter who doesn't paint and lives all alone in an isolated tower. Simon is a strange boy who can't speak (if he tries he vomits), has no sense of personal property, is terrified of needles and hates getting his hair cut. He washed up on the isolated west coast of New Zealand's South island after a shipwreck where he was found by a most-part Maori called Joe. Shortly afterwards, Joe lost his wife and biological child (to flu) and started drinking heavily and beating Simon. The pair of them draw Kerewin into their wobbly orbit when Simon breaks into her unusual house at the start of the narrative. There follows a moving, intimate insight into the lives of these three struggling people. There are passages of great warmth and beauty. There are scenes of fine drunken comedy. There are also moments of brutal violence, made all the more shocking by the clear love Joe shows for his victim Simon – and the reciprocal affection Simon has for Joe, in spite (perhaps even partly because) of everything. Hulme's writing can still be startlingly awful, but generally her storytelling is vivid and to-the-point, backed up by some poetic and evocative descriptions of the New Zealand coastline and Maori myth and legend. This latter strand presents some provocative ideas about ownership, stewardship and cultural survival that add real intellectual heft to the book. Unfortunately, it also brings with it a load of old spiritual bollocks. One hundred or so pages before the end, the-all-too realistic story of abuse and trauma breaks down into absurd mysticism. There's some interest in the incorporation of Maori legend into a modern setting, and respect is also due to a point Hulme has often made in interviews, about how she intended to show her fellow countrymen, intent on looking to the east for "spiritual learning", that there was plenty such stuff on their doorstep. But all that doesn't prevent the final pages of the book being daft, overwrought and distinctly underwhelming. Characters' motivations become mixed up in a soup of wishy-washy magic. Supposedly mystical figures appear more like dei ex machina, muttering mumbo- jumbo and all too conveniently putting the plot back on course. Tension and drama drains away in a flood of herbal drinks and mysterious potions with healing properties. Couple all that with the revelation of a preposterous back-story about Simon's origins and heroin smuggling (yes, that's why he's so scared of needles!), and the book becomes ridiculous. A great shame after so much that is wonderful. It left me wishing it had been better edited.