Witi Ihimaera

Witi Ihimaera (born February 7, 1944, Waituhi, near Gisborne, New Zealand) is a Māori author whose novels and short stories explore the clash between Māori and Pākehā (white, European-derived) cultural values in his native New Zealand.

Ihimaera attended the University of Auckland and, after stints as a newspaper writer and a postal worker, Victoria University of Wellington. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the latter institution in 1971. In 1973 Ihimaera began his career in New Zealand’s foreign affairs ministry. He served as New Zealand consul to the United States, among other offices, until 1989.

In 1972 Ihimaera published his first short-story collection, Pounamu, Pounamu (“Greenstone, Greenstone”). It was written for secondary-school students and presents one of his characteristic themes—traditional communal Māori society confronted by mechanized individualistic Pākehā society. His Tangi (1973; “Mourning”) is the first novel in English by a Māori author. The novel Whanau (1974; “Family”) presents a day in the life of a Māori village. The Matriarch (1986) and its sequel, The Dream Swimmer (1997), investigate the ramifications of European colonization of New Zealand over several generations of a Māori family. In The Whale Rider (1987; film 2002), the dynamics of Māori society are examined through the eyes of a young girl who must overcome gender prejudices to assume her place as the next leader of her people. Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995; television film 2010) concerns a middle-aged married man with children who comes to realize that he is homosexual; the novel was widely viewed as a roman à clef. Ihimaera was himself married to a woman and later discovered that he was gay.

A long-standing feud between two Māori families in the 1950s drives the events in Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies (1994; filmed as The Patriarch [2016]). The Uncle’s Story (2000) relates the stories of two generations of gay Māori men. Contemporary characters are inserted into a Māori myth about warring birds in Sky Dancer (2003). The Trowenna Sea (2009), a fictionalized version of the story of a Māori man imprisoned on Tasmania in the 1840s, became the focus of a controversy after several passages were discovered to have been plagiarized. Ihimaera attributed the lapse to lax research practices and purchased the remaining copies of the book from his publisher. Elements of the Ludwig van Beethoven opera Fidelio fuse with the true-life tale of Parihaka, a Māori community that answered European encroachment with a campaign of nonviolent resistance, in The Parihaka Woman (2011).

Ihimaera published numerous short-story collections, among them The New Net Goes Fishing (1977), Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1989), and The Thrill of Falling (2012). One of the novellas from the collection Ask the Posts of the House (2007) was rewritten and filmed as White Lies (2013). The play Woman Far Walking (2000) tells the story of the Māori people from the perspective of an ancient woman who has witnessed key events in their history during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Little Kowhai Tree (2002) is an illustrated book for children about the growth of plants and the interdependence of the environment.

Ihimaera surveyed Māori life in the nonfiction Māori (1975), written for the foreign affairs ministry; it was later turned into a promotional film. He coedited Into the World of Light (1982) and edited the five-volume Te ao mārama (1992; “The World of Light”), both anthologies of Māori writing. He also edited Where’s Waari?: A History of the Maori Through the Short Story (2000), which includes stories about the Māori by European observers as well. Ihimaera’s later works included Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood (2014) and Native Son: The Writer’s Memoir (2019).

In 1990–2010 Ihimaera taught writing and English at the University of Auckland. He was named a Distinguished Companion in the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2004.