THEO PANAYIDES meets a Cypriot Kiwi who is part artist, part writer, part activist but in retirement shows no sign of slowing down
Christodoulos Moisa pauses mid-story, nursing a beer as we sit in the home of a mutual friend. “As always with me, there are complications,” he notes wryly. “I won’t get into that, because it’ll take time.”
Yes, it’s true: there are always complications when it comes to Christodoulos. Even his nationality is complicated. Is he from Cyprus, or New Zealand? He was born there, 66 years ago, grew up (unusually) in both places, lived most of his life there, is now here for a couple of months but about to fly there on the day after our interview. His Greek is fluent (both his parents were Cypriot), but his English is pure Kiwi. The country of his birth is “New Zilland”, the native people there are the “Maari”. When money is wasted, it goes “down the gurgler”. Right at the end, as I’m about to leave, he asks if I have a car. Well, of course I have a car, I reply, puzzled. “No, a card,” he enunciates, and laughs his booming laugh.
The booming laugh suits his appearance, which is tall and striking. He was “very fragile” as a child, and notably thin as a younger man, but he’s filled out and bulked up to become an impressive-looking pensioner – silver hair, bushy beard, big prominent features incongruously adorned with a pair of small round glasses. He has the air of a country squire, with a pinch of the swashbuckler. The laugh, as already mentioned, is loud and low. Once he gets going, he’s hard to interrupt.
Another complication: what does he do, exactly? Wikipedia calls him “a New Zealand poet, artist, photographer, writer, essayist and art teacher” – but which is the most important strand? There isn’t one, he insists. “I’ve just finished a photography exhibition. I’m preparing a painting exhibition. I’ve got a novel that I’ve finished, so I’ve got to proofread that when I go back. I’m supposedly retired,” he points out, and laughs his basso profundo. “I’ve got another book of short stories,” he adds, with a glance at the book he gave me as a gift – a volume of 24 stories titled Blood and Koka Kola – “I’ve got another book of poems, I’ve got another novel on the go, I’ve got a play. So, you know…”
His job, for many years, was as an art teacher, rising to become Head of the Arts at a girls’ school in Wanganui, on the North Island – but he only became a teacher in his 40s, drifting into the job more or less by accident. Before that he did all kinds of things, from rare-book librarian to resident artist for an archaeological dig. “I worked in the freezing works,” he says mysteriously (it’s a New Zealand term for a meat-packing plant, where the country’s famous lamb is frozen for export). “I worked as a van driver, as a petrol-station attendant…” When he came back from art school in London, in the 1970s, he could work weekends at the petrol station – earning double pay – and make enough to pay his rent and paint for the rest of the week. That’s how he built up a solo exhibition within two years of his return, with 18 paintings and about 90 drawings.
How many did you sell?
“None!” he replies cheerfully.
That’s another point, of course: no-one could pretend that Christodoulos is a world-famous painter, or poet, or anything really. He’s won awards, to be sure (they’re listed on Wikipedia and his own official website, http://moisa-artist.com), but mostly at a regional level. Even within New Zealand, he’s hardly a pillar of the country’s cultural Establishment: “I was [always] a bit of an outsider”. He was “in the provinces,” he explains, having lived most of his life in relative backwaters, away from the bright lights – and artistic pretensions – of Auckland, and there’s also the problem (if it is a problem) that he’s never had an easily-identifiable signature, whether in painting or writing. “The idea of the poem selects the style,” as he puts it.
In other words, it’s never been about painting or writing to please a coterie of fans, or impress the critics. It’s always been about painting or writing – or designing, or printmaking, or taking photos – for his own satisfaction: because he wanted to, or because he had to. What causes someone to produce such a ceaseless torrent of creative work? The answer lies presumably in his personality, or perhaps his background.
Something else should be mentioned here: Christodoulos is a lifelong social activist, taking part in demonstrations and devoting himself to worthy causes. Vietnam came first, at the time of his ill-fated BSc (he dropped out halfway through), then he fought against lead in petrol – “Petrol companies used to buy the opinions of people doing research, as the tobacco companies did and the plastic companies are doing now!” he says hotly – and protested against the Springboks (South African) rugby tour in the days of apartheid. The passion derives from his father, he explains: the late Evangelos Moisa from the village of Marathovounos, a politicised man and perhaps “a closet Communist”.
Evangelos worked in the mines, lost his job for taking part in a strike, then sailed around the world as a ship’s stoker. He led a mutiny off the coast of South America, at the end of which the captain – having isolated him by promising the other mutineers better food rations – had him thrown overboard, forcing him to swim for his life. (“It sounds like a myth,” admits Christodoulos. “But that’s what he told me.”) He ended up Down Under, opened a fish-and-chip shop in a coastal town in New Zealand, won the hearts of the locals by providing free chips for primary-school kids every Christmas – then left in a hurry, with his wife and six-year-old son, when a doctor told him he’d die if he stayed in New Zealand.
It seems he’d developed asthma and bronchitis, exacerbated by the damp climate – so the family came back to Cyprus in 1954, only to be met with another death sentence when EOKA fighters publicly warned Evangelos to stop promoting British goods (as they put it) or face the consequences, so back they went in 1959, just before independence. Christodoulos was 11, and very mixed-up. The incident in Cyprus had “totally destabilised me”, but New Zealand had its own problems: he recalls the divine taste of ham, and the taste of his first real ice cream (“because it was made out of milk”) – but he also found it hard to learn English, being dyslexic, and was “heavily bullied” during most of secondary school.
Where did that leave him, the nomadic child of an angry, politicised father, ferried from one end of the world to another twice in five years? Well, it’s complicated. Christodoulos may have been fragile – “Even as a kid I was never macho, I’d side with the weak” – but he wasn’t a victim. Years later, he ran into a Samoan biker kid who always used to pummel him at school (the Samoan was now a security guard, Christodoulos a rare-book librarian), and the man admitted – much to his surprise – that he always used to admire him at school, “because it didn’t matter how many kids were on you, you used to fight back”. The shy Cypriot boy learned karate, built up his confidence and also revealed his artistic side, designing posters for school plays and so on. Still in his teens, he sold two posters for NZ$1,000 apiece, a staggering sum in those days (a few years later, his parents sold their house for NZ$20,000).
He fought back. That, I suspect, is a key to understanding the man. He fights back, whether in the context of a worthy cause or life in general, and perhaps his torrent of creative work is also a way of fighting back. At one point we talk about his grandfather, known as ‘Makrigiorgis’ or ‘Long George’, a famous storyteller back in the village – but also a man who fled to Paris after his wife’s death, squandering much of the family fortune. “My father really despised his father,” concludes Christodoulos – and maybe that’s why, because Long George ran away from his problems instead of fighting back.
Christodoulos Moisa isn’t necessarily an easy-going person. “For about 30 years I had this thing about noise,” he recalls. “Any noise used to wake me, and I couldn’t get to sleep”. At one point, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (he’d received another death threat in Cyprus in the early 70s, the time of the infamous EOKA B), a doctor pointing out that he always liked to sit next to the window with his back to the wall: “The only people who do that,” she noted, “are undercover cops and soldiers”.
He’s never been married, despite a number of serious relationships, and has no children. Even as a teacher, he says, “I never fathered [my pupils]. Lots of teachers mother or father the kids; I never did that”. Despite his compassionate politics (he rages more than once against “Thatcherite economics”), it’s hard to say how tender-hearted he is as a person. Defining someone on the basis of an hour’s acquaintance is a bad idea – but suffice to say that you come away with a strong impression of fire, not softness.
Take, for instance, the story he tells about a long-ago run-in with a teenage pupil, who – after weeks of bad blood – yelled out “Moisa, you poofter!” as Christodoulos was taking his evening walk. The school refused to do anything, saying it was outside school hours, “so I rang up the police, didn’t I? And I said ‘I want to charge this person with defamation. He called me a poofter in a public place. I’ve got nothing against gays, I support gay rights, but I’m not a gay person, and he defamed me’.” The cops intervened, and the panicked boy (who’d been driving without a licence) humbly apologised. “So I said to him: ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you lock horns with me, and – well, if you think you’re stubborn, you don’t know me, mate. I accept your apology’.”
Locking horns with this big, booming fellow should perhaps be avoided – yet he’s given so much of himself over the years, from social projects to worthy causes. He’s taught poetry to crippled children, raised money to restore a ‘marai’ (a kind of clubhouse where Maori meet) and taught art in prisons, his eager pupils including a Satanist and a man who’d murdered both parents. What’s his latest cause, now that he’s retired? “Well, the last thing was saving some trees,” he replies, laughing loudly, “down the main boulevard. And we saved the trees. They’re oaks, and they wanted to chop them down for some stupid reason like town planning, to put in a ditch, you know? – and the trees had been there for 130 years. Wonderful, grand old trees. So we won that one.”
What is he, exactly? What does he do? How to pin him down? Then again, why would you want to? “There’s a saying ‘You’re a jack of trades and master of none’,” says Christodoulos Moisa, sipping his beer. “But I think that’s wrong. Look, I’m a poet, I’m a prose writer, I’m a non-fiction writer, I’m a photographer, I’m an artist, I’m a printmaker. Now, if you take every one of those things, say, 10 years ago, you might’ve said ‘Well, he’s not very good’ – but what happens is, if you keep persisting and working, you eventually get your 10,000 hours [of practice] in each one”. It’s about persistence, stubbornness, a way of imposing one’s will – or just making the most of one’s life. “It’s like when I read books, I read five or six at a time,” he explains. “And then, at the end of it, I’ve finished six books!” Is that so complicated?
