And so the argument rages about Witi's infidelity to the god of original thought. It seems to me people who are interested - and we need to remember there are many who aren't - take one of four positions, and I have outlined them below. For better or for worse, I have fallen back on Position Two [see previous post], which I hasten to say is not a moral high ground. Every 'position' has its elements of faith, its strengths and its weaknesses, and those who espouse it have good reasons for doing so. Some of my close friends have taken the other positions, and I respect them for that.
Position One: 'Old Testament'
Thou shalt not plagiarise and thou shalt know my anger when thou does, in my eyes your action has sullied your past work and sullies your future work, any forgiveness is conditional on exemplary behaviour in future, we will use the 'big guns' - experts and the media - to get our point across, we will express ourselves in legal and academic terms even though neither is directly relevant to the work of an artist but hovers on the edges tapping your perplexing shell like a bird with a sharp beak, we will be watching you beadily, forever and ever ...
Position Two: 'New Testament'
Plagiarism is not something writers should do but we recognise it is a difficult area for creative people and mistakes will be made, we will be verbal in our disappointment hauling on our experience of your work as a whole - its originality and its impact - personally and culturally, we will refuse to savage you for your mistake but instead will try to gauge its level and impact, we will call on you by name, when you express contrition - we will forgive you in long sentences on many blogs and facebook pages and letters to the editor, we will buy your books again. Amen.
Position Three: 'Agnostic'
We believe there are facts and there is fiction, there is fact in fiction and fiction in fact and fiction in fiction and fact in fact, and however you approach this complex area as a writer [or a thinker, a doer, a be-er], you must always act in good faith and with the highest integrity. Before we can make a judgement of any sort, however, facts need to be gathered and analysed, and we will take the time to point them out to those who are not aware of them ... then, well, that's just the beginning...
Position Four: 'Atheist'
Plagiarism, under many different guises and names, is the order of the day for writers; we care more about whether or not the writing is good enough and that demands a high level of originality and personal guts. End of story.
Late addition to post on 23-11-09. Following a comment here from lit-blogger Paradoxical Cat, I have developed a fifth position:
Position Five: 'Pagan'
We have many ways of approaching the issue rather than the expected, more straightforward route, we build the sacrifical fires of satire and wit to burn the self-important and those without intelligence and wit in each of the other four positions, but like all fire-starters we have to make sure we have a safe place to stand downwind of the fires ...
Showing posts with label the trowenna sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the trowenna sea. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Trowenna Sea
Witi Ihimaera's The Trowenna Sea. I work at the bookshop on a Friday, and the owners are away so no-one's shifted the stack. I pick it up and put a lime-green post-it note on top for Laurie, 'Return these to Penguin. Due to plagiarism, they are reprinting and will replace.' I wonder about keeping them and selling them as they are - after all, surely everyone knows now that there are unacknowledged passages there. Surely, in a country as small as ours, the acknowledgment has been made - legally, morally - at least in part. Isn't that enough? Look at the size of the thing - think 0.4% plagiarised - think of the original work in there crying to be let out. Can't we get on and sell it? [note, it is already a bestseller...]
But Witi wants the book to regain its mana, he's asked for it back, and I suppose, in the end, it's his call. And his publisher supports him. Geoff Walker, my publisher too, sounded sad on the radio. He talked of their long relationship and how this would all be set right. I know how much the relationship matters to Geoff. Not long ago, he gave a dinner in Auckland for his fiction writers. He spoke of how important we are to him. With one novel to my name, I sat next to Witi, Witi sat next to Kapka. We drank good wine and ate good food. It was a good night.
But there it is, The Trowenna Sea - green-stickered - humiliated - waiting to return.
Witi Ihimaera is a literary hero of mine - I still remember the day I opened Pounamu Pounamu. I was a pakeha teenager with bunkbeds; it was night-time. I opened the green covers of that slim book and there was a world I didn't know existed - kicking and screaming, funny and moving, deeply alive. And then years later, Bulibasha: all that energy and charm and humour and love in the covers of one book. Whale Rider: the characters, the mythology, the magic. I can forgive Witi Ihimaera anything because he has given me so much. What's happened now can't wipe that out.
I am sickened by how fast the NZ public is to leap on a beloved writer's back and dig the spurs in, crying, 'You, storyteller, how dare you steal!' Storytelling is about stealing, writers always steal, it's just that we also have to turn what we steal inside out so it looks like something else. That is the issue. Why Witi did it, how he did it, I don't know and I can't say. I'm disappointed. I think he should have refused the money he won this week. But the spurs, people, why the spurs?
Working at a university, I know how wrong it is not to synthesise research. To put it bluntly, plagiarism is a bigger crime at university than murder - although Auckland Uni has, strangely, not demonstrated this. Anyway, all of this is about protecting original thought. I get that, so does Professor Witi Ihimaera. Hence the recall. Hence the green sticker. Let it rest at that.
But Witi wants the book to regain its mana, he's asked for it back, and I suppose, in the end, it's his call. And his publisher supports him. Geoff Walker, my publisher too, sounded sad on the radio. He talked of their long relationship and how this would all be set right. I know how much the relationship matters to Geoff. Not long ago, he gave a dinner in Auckland for his fiction writers. He spoke of how important we are to him. With one novel to my name, I sat next to Witi, Witi sat next to Kapka. We drank good wine and ate good food. It was a good night.
But there it is, The Trowenna Sea - green-stickered - humiliated - waiting to return.
Witi Ihimaera is a literary hero of mine - I still remember the day I opened Pounamu Pounamu. I was a pakeha teenager with bunkbeds; it was night-time. I opened the green covers of that slim book and there was a world I didn't know existed - kicking and screaming, funny and moving, deeply alive. And then years later, Bulibasha: all that energy and charm and humour and love in the covers of one book. Whale Rider: the characters, the mythology, the magic. I can forgive Witi Ihimaera anything because he has given me so much. What's happened now can't wipe that out.
I am sickened by how fast the NZ public is to leap on a beloved writer's back and dig the spurs in, crying, 'You, storyteller, how dare you steal!' Storytelling is about stealing, writers always steal, it's just that we also have to turn what we steal inside out so it looks like something else. That is the issue. Why Witi did it, how he did it, I don't know and I can't say. I'm disappointed. I think he should have refused the money he won this week. But the spurs, people, why the spurs?
Working at a university, I know how wrong it is not to synthesise research. To put it bluntly, plagiarism is a bigger crime at university than murder - although Auckland Uni has, strangely, not demonstrated this. Anyway, all of this is about protecting original thought. I get that, so does Professor Witi Ihimaera. Hence the recall. Hence the green sticker. Let it rest at that.
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