Although Tanya Landman’s first book was published just three years ago, she already has thirteen titles to her name. Most of them are for readers aged four to eleven, but it’s with her recent foray into teenage fiction that Landman has really found her forte.
Her latest novel, The Goldsmith’s Daughter, is on the Carnegie Medal longlist, and Apache, the story of a Native American warrior, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Prize.
Given that Landman was born and raised in England, her interest in American Indians seems somewhat surprising, but when one discovers that she grew up in Gravesend, where Pocahontas is buried, it becomes less so.
'That image of Pocohantas must have sunk somewhere into my subconscious.’
‘There’s this beautiful statue of her by the Thames silhouetted against this cold, grey expanse of the river. I used to find it very moving, and when I learned more about the story of what had happened to her and how she’d died before she’d made it home I found it terribly sad. That image of her must have sunk somewhere into my subconscious.’
When her agent mentioned warriors in the course of a conversation, the image of a Native American woman carrying a spear suddenly appeared in Landman’s mind. Despite not knowing whether such a thing was a historical possibility, she was gripped by the idea and promptly mapped out an outline for a novel about a woman warrior.
It was only then that she began research to establish whether her subject was at all plausible. ‘The first name I looked into was Geronimo because it was the first name that came into my head. When I Googled his name I found that he’d dictated his autobiography a few years before he died.
'That was my first point of reference and that led me into doing more research into the Apache experience. Because of the nature of the territory, their style of fighting was guerrilla fighting. It was more dependent on skills rather than brute strength, so they did have women fighters fighting alongside the men.’
The novel begins with a horrific scene in which a four-year-old boy is decapitated in a massacre by Mexican soldiers. Fourteen-year-old Siki is determined to avenge her brother’s murder and sets out on the path to becoming a warrior.
Her personal journey is paralleled by her tribe’s increasingly futile struggle to retain their way of life as they are overwhelmed and finally conquered by white settlers. Yet despite such harrowing and emotive subject matter, Siki’s voice, and the book’s tone overall, remain dignified and restrained throughout.
‘When you read the source material, what comes across is an immense eloquent dignity. That was the kind of tone I was striving to catch. I kept reading over and over again those different first-person accounts.
‘When you read the source material, what comes across is an immense eloquent dignity.'
'I did a lot of acting at school and university, so I just thought into character. I think that was quite hard for my children. My oldest is 10. He’d look at me and say, “You’re in Arizona again, aren’t you, Mummy?”’
After reading the first-hand accounts she found that Siki’s voice came with surprising ease. ‘It’s almost like – it sounds demented – but it was like sitting listening to the radio. I could kind of hear her speaking.
'It’s quite a peculiar thing. Sometimes when I do schools they ask if I will read. I don’t like reading it out loud because the voice is not my voice, and when I read it in my south east accent it sounds wrong to me. I don’t know what kind of thing you tune into when you write, but it’s a strangely external thing.’
The characters are based on Geronimo, Lozen and other Apache warriors, but Landman felt that tying them more closely to history would limit her creatively, so she gave fictional names to both protagonists and tribe. ‘I wanted to have the freedom to follow her story. If I was tied very specifically into an actual set of people it wouldn’t have given me the freedom to move with the characters.’
‘Real life is not satisfying dramatically in the way that fiction is. What’s interesting about fiction is that unlike any other kind of art form it can really take you right inside somebody’s heart and mind so that you are looking at the world through somebody else’s eyes.
'That person can be from a different culture, race or religion, but you get this opportunity to really get this different perspective. The primary reason for me doing it was to really engage the reader’s imagination, and that was why I wanted that freedom to be able to plot events in a satisfying way rather than being constrained by having to be historically 100% accurate. With Apache it’s an emotional journey rather than necessarily a historically accurate one.’
'With Apache it’s an emotional journey rather than necessarily a historically accurate one.’
Having said that, she did do copious amounts of research and asked a historian from the Fort Sill Apache tribe to comment on the text. Even so, the author’s note in which she acknowledged that she had to ‘stretch things in order to make the story work’ prompted some concern about authenticity from American Indians.
‘It’s a book that I wrote for myself, for the teenager that was me. I am very well aware that for people whose ancestors went through those kinds of events, reading the book will be a very different experience.
'There are people that think that white people shouldn’t be writing about Native American subject matter, which, given the history, I can completely understand. From my point of view, fiction is about engaging the reader’s heart and mind and capacity for empathy.
'Really, when it comes down to it, we do all come from a common ancestor. If you’re saying that one group of human beings can never begin to understand another group of human beings, that’s a major problem, really.’
One way in which Landman hopes to foster that understanding is through school visits. When she first began talking about Apache in schools, she assumed that most of the teenagers would have an idea about Native Americans from TV westerns, or, perhaps, the film Dances with Wolves.
She was stunned to discover that, instead, the word ‘Apache’ sparked associations with helicopters and computer programs. ‘When I’ve gone to schools I’ve had to do a quick potted history of America, because a lot of kids don’t know that the United States came about because it was settled by white Europeans. There’s this assumption that the States was always there.’
‘I think it’s very interesting that there are so many books written about the Holocaust, like Once and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Writers of my sort of age are realising that our children are growing up without that sort of knowledge and we don’t want our children to forget.
'But somehow, we in Europe have managed to forget and not talk about what our ancestors did when they moved to America, and I don’t think they should forget what was done.’
'When I started doing this I was getting that answer that Apache was a helicopter.'
‘I feel quite missionary about it. I feel it’s an important book in that sort of way. Teenagers are really really moved by it. Because it says that it’s not, strictly speaking, a historically accurate book, they then are moved to go and find out more and go back to the original sources, which is a great thing.
'When I started doing this I was getting that answer that Apache was a helicopter. If the book goes some way towards changing that – it’s only a book, it’s not going to change everything – I will feel I’ve done my job.’
