FROM THE NOVELLA
MEDICINE WOMAN TO
THE FILM WHITE LIES
— TUAKIRI HUNA
SCRIPTWRITER AND
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
When I first read Medicine Woman by Witi Ihimaera, in the collection Ask the Posts of the House (Reed Books, 2007), I found it a perfect piece of storytelling. A balanced structure that contained complexity, was generous in its understanding of human drama and had a delightful sense of humour. A profound story but not a pretentious one. A little gem! The story would not leave my mind. It kept visiting me while I was driving on the motorway, when falling asleep, while cooking … Paraiti, the medicine woman, was a stubborn presence who refused to leave and I became haunted by her. I felt that was a clear sign that the story told by Witi Ihimaera was speaking to me from places other than where the original work had come from. Places that belonged to my intimate family history and my most unresolved conflicts as a person in the world. It was a call from the core of my origins to look for answers that mattered to me, being myself a half-caste, a woman, a mother and a descendant of people who have been eternal immigrants or brutally colonised by others. A call coming from every drop of the Mexican, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, indigenous, Italian, Spanish and Russian blood that runs through my veins. The blood of my tipuna. My very own whakapapa.
Never uprooted from its origins, but with enough independence to become an organic entity with a purpose of its own, the creative process of writing an adaptation and imagining a film story is the work of an alchemist. For that process to happen, I asked Witi Ihimaera if he would give me freedom and independence from him as an author, and allow me to take the original novella Medicine Woman and transform it first into a screenplay and ultimately a film: White Lies — Tuakiri Huna. Witi was generous and trusted me. Only then could this script have been conceived and a film born.
Writing the script White Lies — Tuakiri Huna has been for me an uninterrupted experience of adaptation, not only through the process of transforming a literary work into a cinematographic expression, but also as a pilgrimage through a cultural, linguistic and spiritual vision that was unknown to me.
I was privileged to be guided by people who know the Maori culture from deep within. People who honour the tikanga and who are proud guardians of a sacred knowledge.
THE SCREENPLAY AND THE FILM
ADAPTATION
1. the act or process of adapting.
2. adjustment to environmental conditions, as:
A. adjustment of a sense organ to the intensity or quality of stimulation
B. modification of an organism or its parts that makes it more fit for existence under conditions of its environment.
3. something that is adapted; specifically: a composition rewritten into a new form.
— MERRIAM-WEBSTER ONLINE DICTIONARY
Adapting an original work of literature into a film makes sense to me only when the story can be filtered through my own identity as a filmmaker and as a human being. The heart of literature and cinema each palpitate with a different beat. They have different needs in terms of the narrative devices, skills and tools required for a story to be told.
Looking for answers to the demands of the specific language of cinema, I made fundamental changes in the transition from the novella Medicine Woman to the screenplay. These changes took the story of Paraiti, Rebecca and Maraea to a new destination: the film White Lies — Tuakiri Huna.
THE TITLE: LIES THAT KILL
‘Verdades a medias; mentiras que matan’
There is a popular saying in Mexico: ‘Verdades a medias: mentiras que matan’. In English it would be something like: ‘Half-truths are lies that kill’. I looked for an equivalent to that saying in English, and I believe White Lies is the right expression within the setting of the film. In the historical context of colonisation it conveys precisely the meaning of that piece of Mexican popular wisdom. While normally the saying ‘white lies’ refers to ‘lies told to avoid hurting someone’, in the film the term has a double meaning: the traditional meaning and a literal one. When the literal and the traditional collide, the title becomes a more complex phrase, reflecting the layers of deceit and suffering being explored in the story. Ani Prip, Hineira Woodward and Mina Prip, who knew the script from its earliest origins, gifted us with the te reo Maori translation of Tuakiri Huna*.
That is the origin of the title of the film, born from the novella Medicine Woman. All through the voyage of languages and cultures, the fundamental concepts of the original work, written by Witi Ihimaera, have been retained. I believe that this is the most precise example of how the human conflict of identity and truth is a universal drama, no matter in which language, era or culture it is seeded.
THE CONTEXT: A MYTHIC PIECE OF TUHOE
HISTORY AND A FABLE ABOUT HOPE
In the culture in which I was raised, mythology was either the exclusive territory of a remote god of unappeasable nature, with an indifferent and imperative will, or the playground where capricious and moody gods imposed their complicated ways onto the destiny of human pawns.
In Maori cosmology, the origin of myth is rooted in and nurtured by the legacy of the ancestors. The deeds and misfortunes of the tipuna can be traced through each person’s whakapapa, paving the route back to their most primal narrative and essential traditions. It is in the living memory of the people that history and mythology breathe from the same source. And it is from there, as well, that the everyday reference to right and wrong takes place, and where the fibres that weave the tikanga are harvested. Origin, mythology and identity are not just a reflection of Maori ways and reasons of being — they are one and the same, always inextricably intermingled, like an ancient heart flooding blood to the present. The scale and dynamics of all this fascinate me.
The myths of people cannot happen away from their land — they are interconnected. The story of the film White Lies — Tuakiri Huna has its natural origin in Te Urewera, as it is there, in the land of the Tuhoe people, that Witi Ihimaera placed Paraiti the medicine woman — it could be no other way.
The Tuhoe story ‘Te Tatau Pounamu’ was a major source of inspiration to me during the process of writing this script.
‘Te Tatau Pounamu’ (the greenstone door of peace)
By the early 1830s, Tuhoe were equipped. They became involved in extensive attacks on other tribal groups in the central North Island. It is from the fighting in these years that a seminal oral narrative of Tuhoe, which would be reworked over time, emerges: the story of Paora Kiingi I (Paora Te Au or Te Tawai), who chose to halt the fighting.
A senior grandson of Te Unuaraki, Paora Kiingi I assembled a vast military expedition intended to avenge his grandfather’s death in battle at Whangara, on the East Coast. The Mataatua waka tribes co-operated in building a large canoe out of a totara felled in the Huiarau ranges, but it did not leave the mouth of the Whakatane River. At the feast held just before their planned departure in 1829, Paora Kingii I aborted the expedition. Instead, accompanied by his uncle, Te Whenuanui I, he journeyed to the East Coast to create ‘te tatau pounamu’ (the greenstone door of peace), a binding covenant.
Encircled Lands, Te Urewera, 1820–1921, Judith Binney (Bridget Williams Books, 2009)
In the film, Paraiti journeys from the initial belief that victory is only accomplished through an act of revenge, to the eventual discovery that no one ever wins unless it is through the resolution of ‘te tatau pounamu’, the covenant of peace — no matter the name of the enemy, or the colour of their skin. This is an element that deepens Paraiti’s connection to the identity and history of the Tuhoe, and at the same time gives her the universality of someone who honours humanity and whose heart is capable of compassion beyond race.
I feel privileged and honoured for the opportunity I had in this film to rework this piece of Tuhoe history.
THE STORY: ABOUT
COLONIALISM AND IDENTITY
Faced with the imposition of a foreign cosmogony — as the colonial phenomenon is, no matter in which part of the world or when in history it happens — there are two separate questions that hold the key to survival:
Who are we?
Where do we belong?
The research of this theme was the main motivation that guided me through the process of writing the script. This is what the film White Lies — Tuakiri Huna is all about.
Tradition or assimilation? Tolerance or denial? Life or death? Utu or a covenant of peace?
To place such questions and find the answers, I changed the inner motivation of the characters and the dramatic dynamics between them. The intention behind this narrative structure is to provide each one of the characters in the film with the role of expressing and embodying their search. Paraiti, Rebecca Vickers, Maraea and the unborn baby are shaped in the film to give voice and meaning to the very core of the discovery and creation of their true identities. The dramatic element that ignites and fuels the narrative of this film is the experience of motherhood, the primal and universal symbol of identity, continuity and life.
In the film, Paraiti, Rebecca Vickers and Maraea — our three main characters — are bonded by a pregnancy that each one of them faces from different and opposing perspectives. An unborn child, the very symbol of hope and the future, becomes a main character in the story, imposing on each one of these women inescapable confrontations. The challenges and choices that Paraiti, Rebecca Vickers and Maraea face will finally guide each to find out who they are and where they belong, even when such a discovery points to a tragic destiny.
The journey of these women is not only a symbol of how the fabric of contemporary New Zealand was woven, but also a fable of hope in a world still not aware of the very simple truth that the choice of creation over destruction, tolerance instead of suppression, is the only possible way.
THE DYNAMICS BETWEEN CHARACTERS:
TUAKIRI HUNA, A DANCE OF HIDDEN IDENTITIES
In the novella Medicine Woman, Witi Ihimaera holds the dramatic action through a narrative structure of two parallel forces — Paraiti and Rebecca Vickers. Maraea, in the novella, retains her Maori identity but is basically a passive element as the silent servant obedient to the wishes of her daughter and mistress.
In the screenplay and later on in the film, Maraea goes through a radical transformation. She becomes the most active element in the drama; she is the unseen designer and doer of all, the puppet master behind all actions. It is Maraea who imposes on Rebecca Vickers the bleaching of her skin, kidnapping the true Maori identity from her daughter.
Rebecca Vickers, then, is the result of her mother’s wishes. She is, in the film, the one who has become an obedient servant to what her mother thought ‘would be best for her’ even if, by doing so, she has destroyed all references to who Rebecca Vickers is in the world. In the film she is a lost and bleached soul pretending to be a grande dame in a silent and lonely golden cage.
Through the manipulation of Maraea’s hidden strings, the dynamic between the three women in the film becomes a constant confrontation of masked faces and buried secrets, a trap of White Lies. Inside that trap, each one of them is an antagonist to the other, and yet, at the same time, they all need one another to survive their actions and the consequences of their choices. In this triangular narrative structure, the three main characters in the film become active participants in the drama.
In the film, there is a completely new narrative element that triggers Paraiti’s decision to go back to the villa of Rebecca Vickers and terminate the pregnancy. Paraiti is an impotent witness to the death of a young Maori mother and her unborn baby. Aroha and her child die in a Pakeha clinic, where Paraiti is humiliated by the matron in charge, and she is powerless when threatened with being sent to jail ‘only for having medicinal herbs’. Not only that, but Paraiti is incapable of saving the most sacred symbol of maternity in the Maori universe: the whenua (the placenta) of the dead mother, which, instead of being returned to the land and the ancestors, is thrown on the rubbish heap of the hospital, as if it is a piece of garbage.
This event becomes the major turning point for Paraiti. It is the living experience of an undeniable reality that her world, the universe of her ancestors and the very possibility of continuity of her culture, is crumbling under the power of the imposition of a new and foreign law.
The burial of the placenta becomes, in the film, a major symbol; the symbol of identity, continuity and of restoration of justice. It is the greenstone door of peace, ‘te tatau pounamu’.
THE CHARACTERS: TELLING WHITE LIES
In terms of the motivations that guide the actions of each of the three main characters in the story, there are important changes from the original novella Medicine Woman to the script and film White Lies — Tuakiri Huna.
PARAITI: THE MEDICINE WOMAN
An important difference in the configuration of Paraiti as a cinematographic character is that in the original novella Medicine Woman, Paraiti is not a mediator between the human world and the spiritual world.
In the script and the film, Paraiti grows from initially being someone who can only deal with minor infections of the body to a medicine woman who finds, precisely in the spiritual world, the answers to her doubts and the strength to cross territories of darkness and emerge from them with the purest and most sacred of all forms: the new life of a baby. This process of growth is the map and the compass to her journey through the film.
Another fundamental change in the film is the fact that Paraiti decides to save Rebecca’s baby before she knows it is a Maori child. She fights for the life of the unborn child regardless of the colour of its skin. This was for me a crucial element to convey as storyteller and a vital condition to the configuration of Paraiti, as it is the ultimate expression of her human quality, a quality that gives her the moral stature and power to offer Rebecca Vickers redemption. This is a redemption that can only happen by Rebecca reclaiming her own identity and making peace with her motherhood. In the film, Paraiti gifts Rebecca Vickers the freedom that can come from the truth, from the possibility of making her own choices, and invites her to start a new life with her baby daughter, far from a life enslaved by white lies, under a ‘tuakiri huna’.
REBECCA VICKERS: A SKIN BLEACHED WHITE
In the original novella Medicine Woman, pale white skin is a ticket for Rebecca Vickers into Pakeha high society. Bleaching her skin is a choice she takes, and ultimately uses, along with the sexual attraction of her youth, to ‘catch the eye’ of her rich and much older white husband. Her inner motivations are purely greed and vanity.
Contrastingly, in the film, the bleached skin of Rebecca is the most tangible reflection of the conflict which gives meaning to the film: the dilemma of identity.
Maraea’s decision to bleach her daughter’s skin is what, in her eyes, will save her daughter from the suffering that being a half-caste would cause her, yet ultimately it robs Rebecca of her true identity. Maraea’s ways are wrong and twisted, but her ultimate motivation for bleaching Rebecca’s skin is a wish for a better life for her daughter, ‘not the life of a pariah’ like her own. This, to me, encapsulates the very reason for creating the film White Lies — Tuakiri Huna.
In the novella, Rebecca’s child is a result of a moment of adulterous passion. In the script, however, the child is the product of Mr and Mrs Vickers’ marriage. Rebecca’s conflict is not of infidelity, but rather resides within her own concealed identity and the fear of being discovered and rejected as one of the people her husband considers savages.
In the novella Medicine Woman, maternity is never a positive experience for Rebecca. Anatomically she carries her child, but emotionally she is completely disconnected and her only aim is to erase any possibility of existence for the baby.
In the film there is a transformation in the way Rebecca experiences motherhood. The bleached and destroyed woman who descends to the basement of the villa to give birth in the old traditional Maori way is a different person from the mother who emerges once the baby has been born. This is the transit of someone who has been living in absolute denial of herself and is finally redeemed by the restoration of her identity and her motherhood. It is her newborn daughter, a baby with brown skin, who finally liberates Rebecca from her past. This transit acquires, in the film, a sacred dimension that emerges from the presence of Paraiti, as a woman who walks in both the spiritual and temporal world.
MARAEA: A DIFFERENT MOTHER
In the original novella, Maraea holds on to her identity in a shy but significant manner. She prepares the birthplace for Rebecca in the old Maori ways and she tries to prevent the murder of her newborn granddaughter at the hands of Rebecca, who throws the baby into a river.
In the film, Maraea is ready to do anything to wash from herself and from Rebecca any traces of her Maori blood. Not only did she bleach her daughter under the promise that ‘all will be better if you are white’, but she is also the one who finds Paraiti and brings her to see Rebecca Vickers to perform an abortion on her — the abortion of her own Maori grandchild. In the film, the character of Maraea is not there to obey the wishes of her mistress, but to fulfil her own purpose: the preservation of herself and Rebecca from the life of the vanquished, the colonised — the people with dark skin.
In the last scene of the film between Maraea and Paraiti, the mother tells Paraiti, in a chilling and defeated voice, ‘At least my daughter has a life, a house, land … That is much more than I ever had, Paraiti. Much more than what you have.’ It is the terribly mistaken strategy of a mother, lost on the side of those who have been defeated and desperately looking for a way to ensure the survival of her daughter.
THE LANGUAGE
The use of te reo Maori and English in the film’s dialogue becomes a clear and precise way to express the clash between two different worlds and, at the same time, celebrates the identity of the film.
Paraiti uses her language as an assertion of her identity and a tool to remind Maraea that no matter how properly she speaks in English she is and always will be a Maori woman.
One of the most fascinating and revealing experiences during the process of writing this film was the transition from the original novella Medicine Woman, mainly written in English, to the language of te reo Maori of the Tuhoe people of Ruatahuna in the screenplay.
In that process, every word acquired new and rich connotations. Through the deep knowledge of their language, the translators Kararaina Rangihau, Whitiaua Ropitini and Tangiora Tawhara took the dialogue to a place way beyond the functional purpose of naming, describing and communicating. They provided this film with a poetic cosmogony, music with multiple meanings and the organic, living expression of a profound, ancient, complex and holistic culture.
THE VISUAL GEOGRAPHY
The film has a diverse, powerful and vast source of visual inspiration. Each one of the many universes within this story has its own unique landscape and iconography, and each one is strongly attached to the individual identities of our three main characters. These territories are not only the natural environments for each of them, but they also reflect the worlds where they belong. They become an extension of the character’s dramatic narrative.
Paraiti is an organic element within the green density of bush and humid light of the magnificent mountainous landscape of Te Urewera. Meanwhile, her marae is the sacred refuge where everything makes sense in her ancient understanding of life and the universe. A town created by the English settlers, with its shops, movie theatre and hospital, is the landscape within which Maraea wanders, sneaking from the corners, trying to blend into the Pakeha world. And, finally, the villa where Rebecca Vickers lives is a suffocating and closed trap … a cage that enslaves her, and a womb from which she will be reborn as a mother and where her identity will be redeemed.