Adventure Divas (29 page)

Jeannie, bless her well-connected soul, reached back to her Chicago roots and contacted former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun (who was then the outgoing U.S. ambassador to New Zealand) and enlisted her to help us set up the meeting with the PM. We made a dozen calls to Clark’s press secretary and promised to fax the questions ahead of time, all for five minutes with a prime minister who, I am told,
doesn’t suffer fools.

Clark grew up in the countryside and became politicized during her time at university in the 1970s. She joined the Labour Party in 1971, and she has been ascending the ranks ever since, focusing on issues ranging from housing to environmental conservation to health. She became prime minister in 1999, when the Labour Party was elected to govern.
Time International
magazine notes her candor with journalists and says Clark represents “a paradox in the national psyche: tolerance with an authoritarian streak.” Under her leadership, New Zealand has pursued some controversial measures, including legalizing prostitution and enforcing the ban on nuclear warships from the country’s ports. She is currently involved in a battle to defend Maori affirmative action, which has become a central issue in New Zealand politics. Clark, it’s worth noting again, stood in strong defense of Hinewehi Mohi when she sang the national anthem in Maori.

The Valiant, once again tugging our caravan, pulls up to Helen Clark’s office, next to Parliament, which is a gray stone building with lots of columns. Simon and I dash out of the car, late and underdressed as usual. Since the hotel fire, my wardrobe has been exceedingly limited. I am wearing a (clean) white T-shirt, jeans, and a mint-green leather coat streaked with smoke damage. Entry could be questionable, ambassadorial endorsement or not. Simon, at least, is in a collared shirt.

“What do I call her?” I ask Simon, puffing, as we take the stairs to save time. “Madame Prime Minister? Her Honor?”

“She’s known as the Queen Bee around here,” he says, “and
here
”—he ominously gestures out the window toward the beehive-shaped Parliament building next door, “is known as ‘Helengrad.’ ”

Doesn’t suffer fools.

We make small talk with the PM’s young, sandy-haired, navy-blue-blazer-clad press secretary in the lobby as we wait. “Do you know Keri Hulme?” I ask. “Know of her, certainly,” he says. “Sounds like she’s doing more fishing than writing these days,” he says glibly, referring to her long-awaited follow-up book to
The Bone People. Hiss!
I want to lash out and defend Hulme against this dapper, wet-behind-the-ears flunky who has probably never written more than a dehydrated position paper.

We are ushered into the prime minister’s office, which is as you would expect. Clean. Dignified. Well lit. I get the impression that none of the real work gets done in this room. The prime minister walks in with a small entourage. She is just as I’d read in articles: formal, direct, tall—and, I might add, somewhat
manly.
None of the press ever mentions that. As someone who’s been called “manly” from time to time, I take some comfort in our shared characteristic, and relax a bit. We sit down and talk, man to man.

“Thanks for taking the time to see us. I, um, well, what we’re trying to do with this program is understand the character of your country . . . through its people . . . so, um, can you offer a bit about the character of a New Zealander?” I ask, sensing that launching softly is the tack to take with this formal leader. I feel awkward, but she saves me.

“New Zealanders are very practical people,” she says. “They are do-it-yourselfers. They’re the weekend mechanic. You’ve got the strong farming industry background where people did it themselves, fixed it themselves, made it themselves . . . so all that’s deeply ingrained in the culture,” she responds, incredibly matter-of-factly.

I’ve always admired Kiwi literature and film’s curious strain of independence, twisted black humor, and deft politics, so I ask, “What’s your philosophy toward funding the arts? New Zealand produces brilliant filmmakers and writers.” I’m thinking of filmmaker Jane Campion’s
Sweetie,
Lee Tamahori’s
Once Were Warriors,
Gaylene Preston’s
War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us,
writer Janet Frame’s
Faces in the Water,
and, of course, Keri Hulme’s
The Bone People.

“I’ve given a lot of priority to the arts because I think that through the arts and culture you express the soul and heart of your nation,” she responds.

I stop myself from asking her about Hulme, because this interview is all about the show’s nutgrab. If the Queen Bee can’t explain the country’s estro-power, who can?

“Could you talk a little bit about women’s contributions to social and historical developments in New Zealand? I understand that Maori women were at the head of the renaissance in Maori culture, and I know women got the right to vote quite early—twenty-five years earlier than in the United States. What happened here as opposed to other places?” I ask.

“Well, I think it’s partly due to New Zealand’s being a pioneer society in the nineteenth century, when women worked pretty hard. Not having your right as a citizen to get your vote recognized is tough in those circumstances. Obviously women got out and led the campaign for the right to vote; I don’t recall too many men. The women were on the front line demanding it, and they had a little government at the time which was prepared to go along with it.

“But unfortunately it took many decades for women to actually come into power. They were really represented in very small numbers until the late 1980s and 1990s,” explains the prime minister.

Okay, we’re getting there. You’re out there digging fence holes right along with the blokes, so you should have the right to vote. But run the country?

“Right now there are lots of women in top power positions, and I’m wondering if you feel this power is really institutionalized. And what’s brought it about?” I ask, pressing the thesis.

“It’s partly a function of the new voting system we adopted. Prior to the system, we’d reached a level of twenty percent women in Parliament, which by U.S. standards is quite high, but it’s really not high by northern European standards. We’re now up to over thirty percent. And it still needs to go somewhere yet. Is it institutionalized? Yes it is, because for political parties now to do well electorally, they have to appeal to women; you can’t just shut off half of the population. And there are parties who do very well by, for, and with women, and there are parties who don’t,” she says.

“Why do you think the States is not doing as well?” I ask.

“It’s partly a function of the electoral system. In New Zealand, when you had the single-member constituency, it was often easier for parties to portray the males as the character who would be the local representative. That’s the way it always was. But when you move to a proportional system, parties have to attract proportions of votes for a party, then they have to pay a lot more attention to being representative, and that’s when women do get a lock-in,” says the prime minister.

Huh? How totally unsexy. I wanted mana, and virile rogue strains of Amazonian DNA, or secret cults or, or, or, annual summits of powerful women in the country’s equivalent of Sun Valley; but she’s telling me—I think—that it boils down to a revised electoral system. I could barely follow what she was saying, it was so mundane. But essentially, it seems to go like this: After Marilyn Waring dissented over the nuke question, and the Labour Party won the election of 1984, Labour appointed a nonpartisan commission to investigate the long-held claim that New Zealand’s electoral system did not properly represent the politics of the people. As a result of the commission’s findings, a mixed member proportional (or MMP) electoral system was developed in the mid-1990s in which voters cast two ballots, one for a local member of Parliament and one for a party. While conventional (white male) candidates tend to fill the slots for MP, the parties often try to balance their tickets by running women and minorities on the second ballot. Across the board, countries that use proportional systems like this have more women and minorities in public office than countries that use a “majoritarian,” winner-take-all system, like the United States.

In New Zealand, the new system meant more women and minorities got elected into office, and thus, their power became institutionalized.

Meeting Helen Clark and digesting the banal details of electoral system theory made me recognize Adventure Divas’ movement, throughout my travels, toward dwelling on the spiritual and personal characteristics of divadom. I set out for Cuba sensitive to the individual lives and work in the context of the communist political system; by the time I left India, I was ready to trade the blockades and voter registration for a good sit with the Dalai Lama. Helen Clark has brought me back to center and reminded me that sometimes the hard work of improving the lives of women is rote, and that divadom is as much about political construct and as it is about personal potential.

The demands of production
sometimes make me a user. A hateful admission, but true. This is what I am thinking as I slug back some Earl Grey on a windy front porch in Wellington with filmmaker Gaylene Preston.

Prime Minister Clark’s commitment to the arts helps make filmmakers like Preston, who is widely regarded as
the
maven of Kiwi film, thrive. But I’m also here because Preston is the only filmmaker ever to get Keri Hulme to talk to her at length in front of a camera. Preston used Hulme’s devotion to whitebaiting as a structure for a documentary called
Kai Purakau.
My tri-weekly faxes to Hulme (“We’ll be in your area in late April, might you be willing to meet?”) have finally been receiving some response, albeit spotty and noncommittal. I want Gaylene to help me understand Kiwi film
and
land the elusive Keri Hulme. I’m desperate. And I’m a user.

I know Gaylene knows how to get an unlikely film made. Her best-known documentary is the internationally acclaimed
War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us,
which is about the generation of women who stayed home and ran New Zealand when all the men were off fighting World War II. The documentary’s success was a complete surprise, most especially to Preston herself.

“
War Stories
was an idea that I immediately tried to make go away for a good two years because I thought, you know, I felt it was a really bad career move. If I had a career, and I wasn’t sure I did,” she says, brushing the brown bangs off her forehead.

“After your eighth film?” I ask, figuring if that’s not a career, what is?

“Making a film about seven old ladies talking about the world isn’t exactly a good career move, you know. It was a local film that was going to have a local audience that was just for us. It wasn’t intended to travel internationally,” she said.

“I had seen these women who had told wonderful stories in our archive and I was scared someone was going to die, so I started filming without any money. The women weren’t in any way encouraged to be stroppy sheilas, but the stories they tell and the way they tell them, that’s them coming out of the closet. So I think I only make films about stroppy sheilas,” she says. “Stroppy sheilas,” Gaylene and I had determined, was the Kiwi equivalent of
diva
.

Gaylene’s penchant for unorthodox heroines extends into her feature films, too. Long ago I noticed that tough, un-Cinderella-like heroines people the Kiwi media-scape. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Xena, the Warrior Princess, is from New Zealand.

“You know the famous film of the heroine who somehow kind of gains autonomy. Gets independent, becomes in charge, and everything’s tickety boo. That’s the happy ending. Well, I’m challenging that,” she says, leaning forward for emphasis. “I’m likely to make a film about somebody who doesn’t know what she’s doing. I find it much more interesting, you know, than the driven, sort of focused, hero. We’re not leaving them—Thelma and Louise—we’re not doing that suspended . . . suspended,” she dramatically dismisses the idea with a sweep of her hand and a roll of the eyes, “over the Grand Canyon in a freeze frame—”

“Well,
that
’s the point,” I interject emphatically, as Gaylene touches on one of my least favorite moments in an otherwise acceptably adventurous (if a bit paternalistic) film. “For them to be liberated, they have to
die.
”

“No, nooo, not in our film,” says Gaylene, meaning the Kiwi genre. “I’m taking Thelma and Louise and they’re going to Mexico,
dammit,
and when they get there everybody better watch out. Because Thelma and Louise are not the women they were when they set out, and one of them is fairly
mad.
So we’re saying this liberation thing isn’t just . . . it’s . . . actually quite dangerous.” Gaylene nods to a common theme of subversion and madness in Kiwi art.

“But you can live through it,” I add.

“You can live . . . you can live and cause trouble!” she says, waving an index finger in the air with cheerful emphasis. “So this is what we’re up to and we’re trying to get a large audience worldwide to go along with this idea,” she concludes, and takes a sip of tea.

“You take on a new spirit and challenge with each of your projects,” I say, thinking of her diverse films, which range in topic from haunted cars to storytelling old ladies to the pro-democracy movement in East Timor.

“This is no way to run a career, if you’re thinking about it,” she responds, putting down her teacup.

“Okay,” I say, considering my precarious global gig tracking down people who sometimes don’t even want to see me. Publishing certainly offered a consistent paycheck and less smoke damage.

“Don’t do it,” Gaylene warns again, seriously.

“Okay. But, um. What was it like making a documentary with Keri Hulme?” I ask, twitching from the Earl Grey, no longer able to keep my full agenda under wraps.

“I got in touch with Keri, which wasn’t easy. She was under siege.
The Bone People
had just been published in Germany and she was getting a lot of unwanted attention. Anyway, I knew from anecdotal things that Keri was elusive, that we could go all the way down there [to the South Island] and find that she wasn’t there for all sorts of good reasons. That she’s shy. And she’s an artist protecting her work, actually,” Gaylene says, obviously respectful of Hulme’s curious choices.