The official frowned. ‘Would you come this way, please?’
Mystified, Mum and Dad followed him. ‘Is there anything wrong?’ Mum asked. She was getting a terrible feeling about this.
The customs officer did not reply. His supervisor stepped up to look at the passports. ‘Do you have baggage?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Mum answered. They were escorted to the carousel to collect their suitcases and then taken to a small room where they were asked a number of questions and their bags were searched. The customs officer wanted to know about the river stones and the bottle of water, and he took a hammer to one of the stones to see if there was anything inside. A long consultation took place, and Mum and Dad were then advised of their predicament.
‘I am very sorry to inform you,’ the customs officer said, ‘that you will not be able to enter Tunisia. You will be kept here in the airport and, when your flight leaves tomorrow, you will be put on it for return to Paris.’
At his words, my father looked at my mother. Tears were streaming down her face. Dad’s love for Mum showed in his concern for her and, heart beating fast, he tried to intercede with the customs officer. ‘Will you not give us just today so that my wife can go to pay her respects to her brother? Sir, we —’
He gasped for air. Then he gave a moan and would have crumpled to the floor had Mum not supported him.
‘It’s all right, Dad,’ Mum consoled him. She looked at the customs officer. ‘Do you have a chair for my husband?’ she asked.
3
I took another break from the story. Once upon a time, I would not have questioned the directness or ingenuousness of my writing. But I know more postcolonial theory now, and not only do I write literature, I also teach postcolonial identity. Is any of this reflected in the story? No.
My problem was that I was, well, still indigenous. Unlike Derek Walcott, a poet of African, Dutch and West Indian descent, born in St Lucia and commuting between Boston and Trinidad, I was not a ‘divided child who entered the house of literature as a houseboy’ and who had become a paradigm of the polycultural order, making of English a polyglot literature. Nor, like Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize winner for his tumultuous, multiheaded myth of modern India, Midnight’s Children, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, Timothy Mo, Rohinton Mistry or Pico Iyer, was I a transcultural writer, the product not so much of colonial division as of the international culture that has grown up since the war, and addressing an audience as mixed up and eclectic and uprooted as themselves. Situated at a crossroads, they reflected on their hyphenated status in the new-world global village with a different kind of sophistication than mine as an indigenous writer.
And where was my sense of irony? To this day, my closest friends bemoan the fact that I don’t have an ironic bone in my body. If I had, I might have been able to undercut the otherwise positive, sacralised and hopeful nature of my mythmaking. I would, instead, have highlighted the nihilistic despair of the victimised and oppressed and the need to continue to propose political and revolutionary solutions. Hybrid writers have often commented, as Edward Saïd did, that: ‘The centre is full of tired scepticism, a kind of knowing irony. There’s something very stale about it.’ As for American literature, it had been sapped by such trends as minimalism. Bharati Mukherjee has written, ‘The real energy of American fiction is coming from people who have lived 400 years within a generation. They’ve been through wars, orbited the world, had traumatic histories prior to coming, and they’ve got big, extraordinary stories to tell. In place of the generic account of divorce in Hampstead or Connecticut, the international writers offer magically new kinds of subject matter and electric ways of expressing it.’
Perhaps there is another way out. My postcolonial colleagues might honour me not for the more political novelising that has been the central poutokomanawa of my artistry — but, rather, for the activism that has been associated with it.
For instance, First Nations friends still talk about the time, over twenty-five years ago, when they came to see me at the Harborfront Festival, Toronto, where I was to read my work. They told me that no First Nations writer had ever been invited to read in Canada’s most prestigious literary festival, and they asked me to represent them. I was so angry that when I came to read I instead let rip to the primarily white and unsuspecting audience, accusing them and Canada of racism of the worst kind: denial of the native existence and erasure of First Nations culture as a willful exercise of Canadian genocide. By the time I finished, there was a stony silence. Greg Gatenby said to me as I walked off the stage, ‘Well, that was interesting. I’ve never seen a writer committing suicide in public before.’
I am an example of one of those writers who could never resist the disastrous.
Ah well, to proceed.
To be frank, I do not know why my parents were detained at the airport at Sfax. I imagine that there was some irregularity with their passports. The most likely explanation is this:
‘I am very sorry to tell you both,’ the senior customs officer said, ‘but you must have a visa to enter our country. Without it, I cannot permit you to visit.’
But I am only guessing at the reason. There may have been another: perhaps their passports looked too new and clean and therefore suspiciously false. They may have needed different entry documents. The names on their airline tickets might have been different from the names on their passports — Mum and Dad had both Maori and Pakeha surnames. Perhaps they had been mistaken for a couple of criminals on Interpol’s list.
‘Therefore,’ the senior customs officer advised them, ‘I will retain your passports and, as I have already told you, you will both be held in custody at the airport. When your plane leaves tomorrow for Paris you will be escorted onto it. At that time, your passports will be returned to you.’
After a while, however, the senior customs officer relented somewhat, and agreed to allow Mum and Dad to remain in the transit area where at least there were dutyfree shops, food outlets and comfortable seating. After all, how far would an old lady and an old man with a walking stick have got if they decided to make a run for it? And without passports?
Mum and Dad were just two old people, bewildered and unable to get to their destination. But my father regained his strength. ‘Sir,’ he tried once again, ‘whatever the problem is, surely, as reasonable people, we can find a solution? My wife and I are here in your country for only a short time. What harm can we do in that time?’ He showed the customs officer photographs of Uncle Rangiora. ‘All my wife wishes to do is to visit her brother’s grave, pay her respects, and then we will be on our way. Will you not permit us to do that?’
No matter how much Dad tried to explain the situation and to apologise for any error they may have inadvertently made, he just couldn’t get through to the senior customs officer, who was adamant.
What made it worse was that the incident really hurt my parents’ sense of pride and personal honour. ‘You are treating us as if we are criminals,’ Dad said in a temper. ‘I may have received the occasional parking ticket but my wife and I have never been before a judge or committed any crimes. To be treated like this is deeply shaming.’