Arts
The Bifocal World of John Pule
This Niuean Writer and Painter Is Still Searching For A Place To Call Home
 |
|
|
At age 19 he was working in a factory in Auckland and his supervisor pulled him aside, pointed to the floor of the factory and asked him if he wanted to spend his future there. “What are you doing here?” the older man asked him.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
“I didn’t even know what a future was,” Pule says, sitting on a lauhala mat on the floor of his office at the Department of English on the University of Hawai‘i at Ma¯noa. He was there as a guest professor of creative writing in the spring of 2002. Pule quit his factory job and hid himself in a shack in the back yard of a friend’s house. They ran an extension cord to bring electricity to the makeshift studio and it was here that Pule started drawing and writing.
What came out was his life—or what he could figure out about it at the time. “I just wanted to write about growing up in New Zealand, and about being the youngest of 17 kids and about migration—but I wasn’t sure how to organize ideas, so I just started writing.”
It was a way, he says, of decolonizing his mind.
A friend showed his first pile of writings to Penguin New Zealand. “They took me to lunch and said they liked what I did and they’d publish it, but I’d have to spell things right. Then we’d have lunch again and they’d make more changes. I really liked this having lunch thing,” Pule adds wryly.
That story became his first book, The Shark that Ate the Sun, which was released in 1992. That book was followed eight years later by Burn My Head in Heaven.
 |
|
|
“My heart and my thoughts were always on Niue. But here I was living in Aotearoa on someone else’s land. Writing helped change me, painting helped change me. I went back to Niue as often as I could, and I’d weed and clear the graves for my family and friends’ families. It’s a way of saying I’m back.”
He says people in Niue aren’t impressed. “We go back home with our Nikes and our jeans and we think we know things. But the local people just think we’re stupid. They know where all the trees are and the pathways and where the mythologies and the stories live.”
In recent years Pule has found ways to combine his two ways of seeing the world. He’s begun investigating the traditional Polynesian art of bark cloth painting. In Niue it’s called hiapo. (In Samoan it’s called siapo, in Hawaiian, kapa.) Many times, beginning in the 19th century, Niuean hiapo artists painted words on to their bark canvasses. Frequently these were sentences taken from scripture.
Painters who can write, or writers who can paint, are a rare breed. Asked how he meshes his two arts, Pule says that “the two arts start out separate. But slowly, while I’m painting the writing starts to take over my thinking. Putting ink on canvass changes me. Writing changes me. I see other people, other Pacific Islanders trying to make sense out of living on other people’s land. What is my relation to land that is not Niue?”
But his writing got him in trouble with some of his friends and family. Like many novelists, the real people in his life kept popping up in his fiction. “My family sometimes had difficulty with what I had written.” His fiction was sometime too true for comfort.
Before returning to his studio in Auckland, Aotearoa in June, he had his students writing and drawing at the same time. For their final projects he asked them to do 10-minute videos along with their writing. “They really came up with some good ideas,” he says.
Art is a bifocal project for Pule and he’s always spending part of his life trying to teach others how to see the world in more than one way.
