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Heather
McPherson
"I was born in a war
I was born in a cry"
Some state house families were big. We had six children, others eight
or
thirteen. The women worked hard like my mother; you didn't see them
much.
You saw more of the men, men like my father who limped or talked funny
or
walked funny or had no legs. Some houses the windows suddenly smashed
back
and shattered glass and hoarse men's voices flew out. Others, important
men
of the town called bringing ice creams to eight year old girls with
little
old pinched faces.
At primary school we learned Walter de la Mare and Wordsworth and round
the
fire in electricity blackouts my father read aloud Banjo Patterson.
At Gate
Pa church we learnt about the battle the redcoats didn't win. We walked
to
Sunday school through trenches. Our bible class stayed at Ohinemutu
marae
and met Canon Huata. My bible class prize for 1954 was Katherine
Mansfield's Collected Stories. The stories that reverberated in me were
the Woman at the Store and How Pearl Button was Kidnapped. The first
because I knew the loneliness of the countryside. The second because
it
interwove with my own Pakeha girl fantasies...
Identity. War. Violence. Sexual exploitation. Minorities. Margins.
Backwaters. There it all was. Growing consciousness. My Scots genealogy
connecting with Maori experience - clan/tribal structures, imperialism,
colonisation, rebellion, subversion, struggles to reclaim...later another
'invisible' excluded identity to reclaim...
Of course I'm a feminist. I like to say feminism saved my life. Through
my
struggle to be a writer, a solo mum, through the joys & pains of becoming
a
lesbian, sometimes a partner, a lesbian solo mum with a boy child, through
Spiral, the Women's Gallery, anti-violence work, lesbian/feminist theory
and friends have supported me, friends becoming family and family, friends
- a rich life fabric.
And for a (bicultural) community, for our civilisation that must give
us
and our grandchildren a future - the issues will not go away.
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