Close Reading: ‘Blankets’ from TAUHOU by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall

This is an attempt to unpack the prose piece ‘Blankets’ from TAUHOU by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, Te Herenga Waka Press, 2022. The passage is taken from Page 47 of the text.

Technically this is a ‘chapter’ in the novel TAUHOU, but maybe it is a short, short story. It has its own power that is for certain:

BLANKETS

I am in the back of my father’s car. My sisters are here too and we are driving through a small beach settlement. The houses are prefab weatherboard, rundown, with junk in the front yards. It’s sunny, clear, and cold.

The two-storey houses have blankets hanging over the balcony railings. They’re that kind of mink blanket Natives all around the world love. These ones have wolves and eagles on them, in red or blue. Underneath the car tyres, shells and sand and glass crunch away, like we’re driving over roadside middens.

We’re on our way to the beach.

*

BLANKETS is a standalone piece within TAUHOU. As a scene-setter, this passage encapsulates so many of the themes of the book, from memory to the exploration of Indigenous families, through the feelings of both seeming like a stranger in your own place, and then to the energy of re-familiarising yourself, to the point of not feeling alone in the world. BLANKETS achieves aspects of all of these themes in microcosm. The title immediately connotes warmth — which is paid off in the final line “We’re on our way to the beach”, but is more literally referenced when in the second paragraph actual blankets are mentioned. They are described first in colour and design and position (“hanging over the balcony railings”), but then they are gathered to represent “Natives all around the world” who “love” such blankets.

It is both condemnation and cuddle; one of Nuttall’s great strengths in this deceptively short novel (it’s a mere 160 pages but contains centuries) is her ability to write as both the subject and the observer, to be both sympathetic and critical, yet to always be empathetic. You feel her warmth across most of the pages in this book. But also, she is able to use a single word to change up the feel. In this instance it’s ‘Natives’, with its capital letter. It reads as down-the-nose dismissive, if not downright discriminatory. We will get to another example of the weight of a single word towards the end of this passage.

But first, it is also worth noting that TAUHOU is something of an experimental novel, factional stories gathered, and in fact stronger, and larger, due to the warmth that radiates as a through line. Is it a collection of short stories presented as a novel, or is it a novel built from short stories? Either way, even if we are sticking with it as very much ‘a novel’, it is fair to say that within the experimental form there are standalone chapters which contain small (on the surface) stories.

TAUHOU feels like it is doing a lot of thinking around traditional storytelling, which is to say it is presenting ‘versions’ of what might once have been in oral storytelling but placing them on the page — in fact they are (as far as we can know) on the page here for the first time; cleverly referencing the oral traditions that are a part of Indigenous storytelling. I like BLANKETS just for its title’s evocation of that (campfire) ‘warmth’. But of course it is more than that; there is far more than that.

The opening paragraph is also reminiscent — in its way — of key scenes from slightly earlier New Zealand novels in the canon, and ones with terrific film adaptations. I think, specifically, of Alan Duff’s 1990 publication, Once Were Warriors (and its 1994 Lee Tamahori adaptation) and then Kirsty Gunn’s 1994 publication Rain (and its 2001 Christine Jeffs adaptation) which both feature families in cars, driving through settlements with weatherboard houses that have junk on the lawn, that are rundown, and in the case of Warriors there is the Indigenous people of New Zealand, some of the characters at war with their own cultural legacy. And in Rain there is of course the magical setting of the (Kiwi) beach. Even if it is not in fact the setting for any real ‘warmth’ at all.

Nuttall is also a very textural writer, and BLANKETS has the line “Underneath the car tyres, shells and sand and glass crunch away, like we’re driving over roadside middens.” Here is a line that is doing a lot of work. On a simple level, it has the texture element instantly, the “crunch” of sand and glass and shells under the car’s wheels, these elements are precious in the art and jewellery of traditional Maori customs whereas here they are simply crushed, but also the use of the word ‘middens’ is key. Middens, being an archive of ancient coastal life ways and environments, a record of thousands of years, something to preserve, and here they are being put under the wheel — there’s something about the decision to use that word. And it has a heaviness that signals the actual heaviness of driving over your own legacy, or of having had it driven across. We can go back to the title now and think of how BLANKETS are so often referenced in the original negotiations between the Indigenous and early colonisers. Blankets being part of that story. Blankets — and the wool they are made from — so often a part of the New Zealand story.

Nuttall’s best work in TAUHOU is full of deceptively simple sentences. Short pieces that resonate, that leave you thinking about them, and then returning. BLANKETS is a great standalone for exactly this reason, and feels like a great ‘teaser’ for the book, for both the way it can be excerpted/extracted from, and the way that it was built from those smaller parts in the first place.