Raiment: A Memoir

Raiment: A Memoir by Jan Kemp. UP, April 2022.  RRP: $35. Hb, 256 pp. ISBN: 9781991151148. Review by Elizabeth Heritage

Poet Jan Kemp has released the first volume of her memoir, Raiment, telling the story of her first 25 years of life, from 1949 to 1974. Her childhood was what many would consider normal: a white middle-class upbringing, mum and dad and three kids in mid-century rural New Zealand. Like a lot of people who end up writing memoirs, Kemp is intelligent and highly educated, so the first half of Raiment holds no great surprises: she does well at school, especially English, and gets into university, where she joins the literati. That’s when the story really gets going.

Raiment is told in an earnest, flower-child voice that I found sometimes charming and other times frustrating. I wanted more in the way of critical reflection. Living through the pandemic and the various other apocalypses currently on offer has taught me to crave certainty from the written word; so I wanted conclusion, and neatness, and lessons. But that isn’t what Kemp is doing. Her dreaminess does at least mean she is remarkably free from bitterness or resentment despite everything she has had to cope with. There are lots of lovely moments of joy, such as when she learns to drive: 

‘I passed the licence test with flying colours, even doing a three-point turn perfectly. You mean turn around and go back the other way? Zoom, zoom, zoom and I’d done it.’ (p. 170)

I really admire the fact that at her core, Kemp absolutely knows herself ‘to be a poet above all.’ (p. 210) She starts performing her poems as a young adult, often the only woman in a group of men: 

‘The audience loved … my reading … standing up there on stage declaiming the spoken word as I so loved doing, feeling always I was born to do this. This was my thing.’ (p. 204) 

She takes her art very seriously, regarding the creation of her poems as a mystical, sacred process. 

‘[My poems] came to me without my asking and were my gift to give to the world … I would stand up for them, read them, present them and represent them, whenever they needed me to do so.’ (p. 186) 

Rather charmingly, she says: ‘Some words I just wrote down, because they came, then I had to look up the meaning to see if it fitted.’ (p. 153) 

Kemp very explicitly sees her poems as something she creates instead of children: 

‘it was the sounds in my head I heard, listened to and sometimes wrote down, escaping from Papatūānuku, who as the concept of the Earth Mother I adored, but to whom I did not want to be tied physically by bringing forth an offspring to offer her.’ (p. 154) 

Instead, her body is given to birthing poetry: ‘My poems were my offspring’. (p. 155) As a child, she has a dream that she is flying above her body then has to go down and put it back on ‘as if it were a garment-in-one … I have put on my earthly raiment.’ (pp. 94-95) Later she says her poems ‘were part of me, my raiment.’ (p. 186)

There are several of Kemp’s poems included in the book, my favourite of which is the one she writes upon the death of R.A.K. Mason: ‘I wasn’t so keen on titles in those days, or couldn’t dream them up, so just called it “Poem”.’ (p. 207)

I came unasked to your funeral.

The solemn men, dark-coated,

your friends, give you their pass to heaven 

by a natural door.

We were to have lauded you

you died a week too soon.

From where I stand on the edge

I hear your words they read.

Through the windows of the chapel,

I see cabbage tree flax, 

flat & flex

licking the blue sky,

a whip in a green wind. (p. 207)

One of the things I like about this poem is that it feels very of this land – the kōuka licking the sky. Like many of her generation, Kemp usually seemed more focussed overseas: 

‘it was of huge appeal to me to know someone who had come from somewhere else … What was Europe like?’ (p. 128). 

Although she enjoyed learning languages, she doesn’t appear ever to have considered te reo. The mention of Papatūānuku referenced above is the only time a Māori worldview appears. Nor – unlike her contemporary Alison Jones in her recent memoir, This Pākehā Life – does Kemp seem conscious of her racial identity as Pākehā and the colonial inheritance that brings. The closest she gets is in this one brief passage: 

‘Russell Haley had become my ‘older-poet brother’ – we got on so well just talking, even though he was forever telling me I was so middle class and should somehow not be. I didn’t really know much about class anyway. As Kiwis we were encouraged to think of ourselves as all equal to everyone else. What is class?’ (p. 208) 

And then the subject is dropped. 

One throughline in Raiment that I found heartbreaking is Kemp’s internalised fatphobia, which she accepts as natural and inevitable. From childhood she hates her body: 

‘One day at the Sunday lunch table, Dad says, Janny’s getting quite pretty. I burst into tears … I know I’m not. I’m fat and ugly … Mum is a bit worried, because when she was my age she was also plump and went on a crash diet, so much so that she became anorexic and Nanny had to put her to bed and feed her on porridge.’ (pp 94-95) 

Her fear of being big bleeds into areas other than food. At school she’s good at shotput: 

‘But I’m hugely embarrassed that I’ve thrown it so far … I don’t want to become New Zealand’s Tamara Press. She’s the giant Soviet woman’. (p. 102) 

Later, it’s also a factor in deciding not to have children: 

‘the thought of becoming plump again was frightening to me. And if you were pregnant, you’d necessarily swell out, balloon-like, and then be bound … [to] the flesh … I knew I couldn’t cope with that.’ (p. 153) 

What Kemp sees in the mirror is ‘hugely horrible’ (p. 166), and her disordered eating continues unchecked. At one point she eats nothing at all for days on end ‘Until I saw a green moth that wasn’t there … But joy of joys, I’d lost half a stone’. (p. 221) I kept hoping that Kemp would realise that diet culture is bullshit but she never does: 

‘Weight Watchers said this must be regarded as a lifelong change – once a weight watcher always one – and so it’s been for me.’ (p. 174) That fatalism really got me. 

Another way in which I kept wanting Kemp to develop different beliefs is in relation to feminism. Let the sisterhood help you! I shouted at the beautifully laid out pages. Get away from all those shitty guys! Most of the other characters in Raiment are men, many of whom patronise, lech, or monologue at her. Having just read Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book, in which she writes about the nightmare of being CK Stead’s daughter, I was curious to encounter Kemp’s view of him: 

‘Karl said to me And when are we going to have an affair, Jan? I knew he was just being clever, so I managed to be just as clever and answered him, When you take the same emotional risk I would, I will, Karl, which shut him up. I hope he was impressed by my quickness of wit. I was.’ (p. 137)

Kemp writes candidly about the sex she had with some of these men, and it sounds mostly awful. Johannes, a much older man to whom she was briefly married, would ‘hold forth’ (p. 175) in ‘endless speeches’ (p. 175) about how everyone should be free to have sex with whoever they wanted, while complaining that women had everything way too easy. 

‘I didn’t find him such a gentle lover. And I didn’t come very often. Was it my fault?’ (p. 175) 

Later she has a boyfriend who ‘rammed and rammed me and said, But you don’t come. Well, I wonder why not. I think … I’m a gentle lover.’ (p. 220) I wanted her to have sex and romance with women instead, but even when she gets close a couple of times, she says it’s not her thing. Towards the end of Raiment Kemp tells a story about almost engaging in a relationship with a married couple, Sandra and Justin: 

‘His arrangement was [that] … we should set up a ménage à trois … Sandra would just have to get used to it’. (pp. 240-241) 

Kemp seems to have been open to this idea but it is nixed by an exasperated Sandra and the plan falls through. If Kemp had any intimate or important relationships with women during this period, they are not the focus of Raiment. 

The feminism I wanted Kemp to embrace was culturally available in the 60s and 70s, although she seems to have found it a bit off-putting. 

‘I had a copy of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch … but I never read it (p. 212) …  Feminism was rife. But I didn’t know how to apply it, except to continue writing my own poems, just as they came, even though I lived in a mostly male-dominated world.’ (p. 237) 

Of course she is right. There is much more to feminism than reading the right books or going on the right marches. Kemp’s feminism is in her dogged adherence to her own art and in structuring her life to protect and facilitate that art, such as when she leaves her shitty husband Johannes: ‘I was starting at last to think for myself.’ (p. 213) 

I realise as I reflect on my reaction to Raiment that I’ve been wanting the Jan in the book to be more like me. I think it’s because Kemp – who I had only vaguely heard of before reading this – is, as a Pākehā woman writer, part of my literary whakapapa. As I read the stories of her life, I felt an increasing connection to her and started to crave her approval and validation. The brutal times we live in have given me a strong urge to divide the world into Good People and Bad People. Since I naturally believe myself to be A Good Person there’s a large part of me that wants to define ‘good’ as ‘like me’, and even though intellectually I know this is nonsense, the feeling persists. I found it frustrating that Raiment ends in 1974 because I was waiting for 1980, the year of my own birth. I want to press my life into Kemp’s and see where we match. I am resisting the desire to google her – or even to read the author bio on the dust jacket – to see whether she and I turn out to have more in common, because I’m waiting to continue reading the story of herself in future volumes. 

I’m not sure what the kaupapa is about spoilers in relation to memoir – after all, Kemp clearly lives beyond 1974. But I can’t finish this review without saying what a superb ending Raiment has. The final scene shows Kemp – now in Vanuatu – and two randos (only one of whom is a sailor) setting sail from Efate in a small boat with the nominal goal of reaching Vanua Levu during hurricane season, a voyage of more than a week. When considering whether to undertake this bonkers adventure, Kemp consults her friend’s ‘girlfriend’s mother, a French novelist’ (p. 248) and does the I Ching. Jan! I shouted. No! You’ll drown! I mean – clearly she doesn’t. But she really could have. Instead, Kemp completes the first volume of her memoir dreamily but tenaciously as always with a poem, ‘Quiet in the eye’. It ends

On the eighth day a cormorant

bespeaks calm waters & land.

Unaccustomed air

is touched by the wild

& within,

that silent space

holds no fear. (p. 253)

Bravo Jan. I’m looking forward to reading more.