Editor's Note: This essay was written and accepted in October 2024.

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New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox talks about the act of writing fiction as saying “this is how it looks to me; is this how it looks to you?”

I wish the answer was yes more often. We come from different places, different backgrounds, have different experiences, live different lives; we filter what we’re reading through our own lens, we can’t not. Most of my readers are Americans. They’re not stupid or bad readers, they’re just from a completely different cultural milieu and they don’t seem to realise it. When I was younger and more hopeful I thought fiction could unite us, but I don’t know anymore.

Here is where I say: this is how it looks to me.

I try to write Kiwi sci-fi, Māori sci-fi, sci-fi rooted in the world around me. There are a lot of jokes, a lot of cups of tea, a lot of big smiles. That means something different to me than it means to you. We’ll get there.

The seminal New Zealand play Foreskin’s Lament, by Greg McGee, is about a doctor who returns to his rural community after graduation and has a hard time reintegrating with small town culture, where a man with a degree is looked up as weak, feminine, unreasonably emotional. ‘What are ya?’, they ask, a sook? A fag? A fucking girl? When a player is injured during a rugby match, Foreskin begs him to stop playing and go to hospital.

The man doesn’t, and dies on the field. At his funeral, Foreskin launches into a monologue that gets angrier and angrier, until he’s just shouting WHAT ARE YA, WHAT ARE YA, WHAT ARE YA, screaming it until the words lose all meaning. In doing so he commits the ultimate Kiwi sin: it’s one thing to have those emotions, it’s another thing entirely to say them out loud. It’s a powerful and cathartic moment, the sort of rant most Kiwis have pushed down at least once in our lives. We’d never actually do it though. You bury that shit like Foreskin buried a friend. You can’t just say what you’re feeling, what are ya?

I envy Americans sometimes. Kiwis write plays fantasising about being able to just speak our minds for once; Yanks are so direct. It seems like a double-edged sword, but I never met a Yank who was afraid to speak their mind. It’s an openness that’s antithetical to everything I was taught. They ask me direct questions and I give indirect answers because that’s proper, you see? You can’t just say things. When Kiwis have a problem we talk around it, draw a chalk outline with words, let the listener figure out what’s missing, but Yanks just say “oh my god a dead body!” You get to the fucking point. I always know where I stand with youse, there’s no question about how you feel, even when the answer is horrible.

© Alexandra Stronach

In 1986, rugby player Buck Shelford got his scrotum torn open by an opposing player’s cleats and – after suffering the ministrations of the team doctor – returned to the field and continued to play. Buck’s a hero, we’re told; that’s what Kiwi blokes are meant to do. You don’t complain, you don’t cry out, you take the hit and keep going. Girls cry out, you’re not a girl are you? Because that’s a terrible thing to be. My transition happened fifteen years later than it really should’ve because I buried that ken of myself so deep, because the men and boys around me told me that there’s nothing worse to be than a girl. Girls are weak, and weakness is antithetical to who we are. If there is a girl inside you, bury her.

I saw the 2004 Kiwi film Fracture when I was maybe a bit young for it. It ends with a woman laying her head down on the train tracks and smiling as they start to vibrate. I still think about her smile sometimes.

I remember being 12 years old during textiles class when another boy pushed a pin into my shoulder. I didn’t cry out, and he was impressed. He did it again and again and I didn’t cry out, and all the boys agreed that I was tough, even though I liked to sew. I gave up sewing a year later, because I could hear the rumours swirling around me. What are ya they asked, gay? A girl? Well yes to both, but I’d die before I let them actually know. When he asked me whether the pins hurt I smiled and made a joke about it, because that’s what you do. You gonna cry out? You gonna let everybody know you’re weak? What are ya?

2021’s Coming Home in The Dark is a recent standout in NZ cinema, based on a short story by Owen Marshall. It involves a nice suburban family going camping and getting kidnapped by the locals, and as the night wears on it turns out the kidnapping is not random, and the suburban family aren’t so nice. The dad taught at a state run boys’ home, a type of real institution where physical, sexual, and emotional abuse was rife. He didn’t hurt the boys, but he didn’t stop the men who did. He didn’t say anything either. You don’t speak out, you don’t rock the boat. Doesn’t matter if the boys under your protection are being abused, better to let it happen than make a fuss.

The Yanks think we’re cute. We don’t fight or shout, we sit around drinking tea and making jokes. New Zealand is a quaint place you think about retiring. We don’t have wars (except the century of wars that almost annihilated the Māori people) we don’t have mass shootings (except one of the deadliest in human history), we’re just a straightforward and simple people to project a cosy fantasy onto (please ignore the highest teen suicide rate in the developed world). You don’t hear us disagreeing, because what are we ay? We wouldn’t just say it.

I said I’d talk about tea, didn’t I? Tea seems to occupy a different place in American culture to here. It’s a fancy drink to you, it’s something you sip with your pinkie out. When you ask for ‘tea’ in New Zealand you’ll get English Breakfast Tea, aka gumboot. If you ask for something else you’ll get a side-eye like you asked for a fancy cocktail in a dive bar. I don’t drink tea out of nice porcelain cups, I drink it out of a nasty weather-beaten thermos at 3am when the steam is rising off it is my only source of heat. You ask the average rural Kiwi they’d say coffee is for poncy city slickers, tea is the drink of the people. The men who called Foreskin a faggot for trying to save a life, they’d be drinking tea. That’s the tea I write about, but that’s not the tea Americans read.

I was reading Gideon the Ninth right before my egg cracked. The reviews said Griddle was so funny. I read it and all I saw was a traumatised woman having a particularly Kiwi response to pain: she can’t just say it hurts, so she turns everything into a joke. It’s her only outlet, the only socially-acceptable way to seize back any power. I don’t see a funny girl, I see a girl who is doing everything not to scream.

Imagine being a woman in this society; imagine being a queer woman in this society; imagine being a trans woman. To be a good Kiwi is to be tough, resolute, to never cry out, to not be a fucking girl. Imagine being asked to be petite and gentle and feminine but not too gentle and feminine because that’s weakness, and we abhor weakness. Women everywhere must ride a razor of incompatible expectations, but the particularly Kiwi manifestation of that evil is that women must be women without ever being fucking girls. No softness, no weakness, no vulnerability, no crying. That’s the bear trap Gideon Nav has found herself in. Hell, she’s not even allowed to speak, so she’s laughing while waiting for the jaws to snap her leg off, because what else can she do? The Ninth House is built on buried women.

In Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill, the eponymous protagonist dresses herself up in fox fur to attend the social season and walks amongst her fellow Kiwis, all of them overcome with emotion, none of them able to do anything about it. They don’t seem to want to be there, everybody is so lonely, but to let on their loneliness would be ruinous, so they grin and bear it and keep up appearances.

“... an ermine toque and a gentleman in grey met just in front of her. He was tall, stiff, dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she’d bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw. Oh she was so pleased to see him—delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she’d been—everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming—didn’t he agree? And wouldn’t he, perhaps?... But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep puff into her face, and even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on. The ermine toque was alone; she was smiling more brightly than ever.”

I can’t help thinking of the final shot of Fracture. It’s such a Kiwi response to smile as the train bears down. In Miss Brill, a woman drops a bunch of violets and when a little boy tries to hand them back to her she throws them aside ‘as if they’d been poisoned’ because being seen to desire something frivolous and beautiful is not who we are. It’s a bit sooky, a bit girly, a bit soft. She dropped them for a reason.

Miss Brill takes herself home and on the way goes to the bakery. She gets herself a slice of honey cake. She only likes the cake if it has almonds in it, and she can’t guarantee it will, and she certainly can’t ask the baker to set one aside for her. That would be weakness, that would be admitting needs and wants. She goes home, puts her furs in the box, and as she closes the lid she imagines the fox is crying, because she can’t bring herself to admit where the sound is really coming from.

That’s Kiwi femininity. We’re not allowed to want or need. We’re expected to take the hit and keep playing and God help us if we make a fuss about it. Easier to imagine a skinned animal crying than a good Kiwi gal.

I write Kiwi women. I can’t not. That’s who I am, that’s everybody I grew up around. New Zealand culture is about shutting up, putting your head down, and not making a fuss. Silence tastes like grave dirt. The more adventurous or tired or difficult of us spit the filth out as dark little jokes. It’s one of the only outlets we’re afforded, one of the only tools we have to keep ourselves from choking. Readers pick my books up and they tell me I‘m so funny, it’s just like The Locked Tomb, and I want to scream. I would never though, I wouldn’t want to be a fuss.

I remember working a job that almost killed me, trying to hide the bags under my eyes by making cups of strong tea then lying in my bed with the bags leaking over my eyes, staining my sheets the brown-almost-black of grave dirt. I remember the night a mix of alcohol and new meds sent me into a dissociative psychotic episode and hours later I found myself at home clutching a mug of tea so hard I almost broke it. I remember drinking tea while reading Gideon the Ninth and having a breakdown because the recognition hurt so much.

I put tea in my books and the Americans read it and associate it with comfort and tell me so. I’m sweet, like tea. I want to scream but – as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now – I can’t. That’s our culture: if you have a difficult emotion bury it, throw it in the grave alongside the girl inside you.

I keep coming back to Amelia Jacobson’s incredible essay Ghost Stories. The Carrington Road campus of Auckland’s Unitec was a psychiatric asylum up until 1992. Jacobson walks the halls as a disabled woman and reflects on the histories of the other women kept there, often against their will:

“From my teens, I absorbed narratives about emotional women, difficult women, hysterical women, and the fear of this label and the pathologising of my pain seeped into my subconscious. So I was compliant, warm, and medically articulate, but never overstepping to claim I knew my body better than the experts. These concerns were solidified in 2018, when I read an article about Stephanie Aston, a young woman with the same condition as me, who continued to advocate for herself despite being labelled with factitious disorder – a modern iteration of hysteria – and denied medical care. This September, years after I began this unravelling, I heard she had died. These are not problems of the past. I think of the stories of women like Johanna Beckett, who was admitted to Seacliff Asylum in the 1900s, who subversively asked during her clinical photo, “Do you want a picture of a madwoman? I’ll put straw in my hair and make faces.”

Johanna Beckett was such a funny bitch. I can’t help but admire her – that’s some true blue Kiwi humour right there. How do you cope with a situation like that? You turn it into a joke. They try to bury you, you spit the dirt right onto their nice clean clothes. The Unitec website has a section on the history of Carrington, and according to them it starts in 2018. That’s what we do when there’s a difficult truth, we bury it. We stand on its grave as fists beat from below.

“The fluorescent light flickered as the course co-ordinator asked me questions, and I felt a sense of confinement. Struggling to stay present, I explained I was recovering from a recent surgery. Concern flicked over her face as she emphasised the intensity of the programme, checking that this would not be an ongoing issue. I reassured her that I was fine, I was prepared for the pace. She continued with a warning, that people with “underlying things” find they bubble up in the second or third year of the programme, and wanted to confirm that wouldn’t be me. I reassured again, the unease of the clinical space crawling against my skin.”

New Zealand’s history of eugenics and incarceration is just the logical endpoint of our culture that is rooted in abnegation, in denial, in repression. If something is difficult, we simply don’t talk about it. If it refuses to stay quiet and unseen, we lock it away, we bury it, then we turn it into a campus and pretend it never happened and we keep doing the same horrible shit with big smiles on our faces.

In 1928 New Zealand almost passed a bill that would allow the government to sterilise ‘social defectives’. What that means was intentionally left broad, but I’m a Māori trans woman with a history of mental illness and I can make a few guesses. The only reason the bill didn’t pass is because it was an election year, so it got put on pause until afterwards, and by the time another right-wing party got into power it was 1946 and eugenics was a third rail. I have to live in a country that almost passed that law. Even today I try not to stand out. I worry I laugh too loudly, say too much. If I was a good Kiwi gal I’d know how to bury it. I should be more polite. I should smile more. I shouldn’t make a fuss.

In 1856 Dr Isaac Featherston, a prominent politician, said “The Maoris are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty, as good, compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow.”

It makes me want to SHOUT, “I’m still here. We’re still here. And we haven’t forgotten that cloying condescension, we’re doing this for your own good, be grateful, when we bury you there will be such lovely flowers”. We can’t forget it, because it never went away. New Zealand wanted to be ‘more British than British’, our inferiority complex and our need to prove ourselves as the one true son of civilisation meant that everything inconvenient, anything that wasn’t white and cis and het and male and tough and polite and uncomplaining got crushed.

It’s everywhere once you start looking. In Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi wrote Marvel a golden palace built through colonial violence, where a single crack in the tiles will spill forth a bloody history. Asgard looks great for a holiday though. Everybody there seems so nice.

Americans think we’re cute because we’re nice. We smile and don’t raise our voices. We crack jokes and drink tea. You’ll never hear a Kiwi say we’re suffering, because our culture is built around denying it. What are ya mate? Whaddarya? Whaddarya? Whaddarya? Whaddarya?

Quoth old mate Foreskin: they ask you whaddarya but really, really don’t want to know.

All science fiction has its basis in the real world. This is the real world I base mine in. It has jokes and cups of tea and big smiles. Sometimes I’m in awe of the power of fiction to unite us. I can say to the world “this is how it looks to me; is this how it looks to you?” and if I listen to the wind sometimes I’m lucky enough to hear a yes. Then the space between us blows out and I realise it does not look to you like it looks to me. American look at the chalk outlines Kiwis write and say “wow, somebody drew a silhouette! Neat!” and the only responses we’re socially permitted are to smile, make a joke, or make a cuppa.

This is where I ask: how does it look to you? as I say:

What are ya?

Me? I’m a funny girl. Want some tea?

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Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.