Striding Both Worlds: Witi Ihimaera and New Zealand's Literary Traditions

Striding Both Worlds

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

134 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Striding Both Worlds Witi Ihimaera and New Zealand’s Literary Traditions

Melissa Kennedy

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: Marian Maguire, “Herakles discusses Boundary Issues with the Neighbours” (lithograph, 2007; 5.7 cm x 7.65 cm) Courtesy of the artist From: Marian Maguire, The Labours of Herakles as a New Zealand Pioneer (Christchurch: PaperGraphica, 2008): Plate 3. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3357-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0056-1 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Striding Both Worlds

ix

1 Mori Nationalism ‘New’ Mori Literature Romanticism, Realism, and the National Imaginary National Mori Literature Bicultural Nationalism: Waituhi: The Life of the Village Limits of Bicultural Nationalism: “Selfish” Writing

2 International Aesthetics Underreading and Overreading Inter-Reference: A Verdian Matriarch Testing the Limits of Inter-Reference: Rewriting Mansfield

3 The Local and the Global Mori Modernity Crossing Genres, Crossing Technologies: Whale Rider Being Mori in the World: Chosen Communities Cultural Specificity and Global ‘Scapes’

4 Ambivalent Indigeneity Indigenous Postcolonialism Indigenous Diaspora Eidolon and Ambivalence

1 1 11 25 35 46 61 61 74 89 109 109 115 124 136 155 155 174 188

Conclusion: Composite Identity and Literature

205

Works Cited Index

215 235

Acknowledgements

T

H I S B O O K is a reworking of my doctoral dissertation, “Striding Both Worlds: Cross-Cultural Influence in the Work of Witi Ihimaera,” a cotutelle collaboration between the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, and the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. I would like to express my immense gratitude to Mark Williams and Jean–Pierre Durix, for teaching me the art of research, analysis, and writing. My thanks also to Janet Wilson, Paul Sharrad, Sylvie Crinquand, and Kon Kuiper for their invaluable input and guidance. Thanks are due also to the editors and publishers of the following journals and textbook for permission to reprint material which appeared in earlier forms: Journal of Postcolonial Writing; Les Cahiers du CICLaS; Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings; Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Post-Colonial Literatures. I am grateful also to Nicola Frean, Special Materials Librarian at the Beaglehole Archives, to Witi Ihimaera for providing audio material, prompt answers to many queries, and great doses of enthusiasm, and to Marian Maguire, for her kind permission to use her fantastic and most fitting image on the front cover. Many thanks to Gordon Collier, for his insightful and patient editing, and to Emily White, for her astute eye. I also owe a great deal to my family and friends in New Zealand, France, the U K , and Japan, for their unwavering support.

Introduction —— Striding Both Worlds

I took a firm step forward into the Pakeha world. Firmly, I retained it. Somehow, I managed to stride both worlds.1

I

T A N G I ( 1 9 7 3 ) , the first novel by a Mori to be published, Witi Ihimaera creates the fictional world of Waituhi, a rural Mori village based on the real place where the writer is from. In the tangi or funeral wake, 2 Ihimaera describes a Mori life-world hitherto largely unknown to mainstream white (Pakeha) New Zealand. The fictional Waituhi, introduced earlier in Ihimaera’s short-story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1971), is a rural safe haven, a repository of traditional cultural knowledge and values. In the above quotation, Tama, the protagonist, steps out of this cultural idyll at home into the Pakeha world of formal schooling and work, a move which threatens, and may even be incompatible with, that of the Mori: “the world I was growing 1

N

Witi Ihimaera, Tangi and Whanau (1973; 1974; Auckland: Secker & Warburg,

1996): 78. 2

Mori words will, as a rule, be lightly glossed on their first mention only.

x

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



up in was a Pakeha one [and] it was difficult to retain my Maoritanga.”3 Ihimaera’s wish to “stride both worlds,” an image of bestriding Mori and Pakeha cultures, implies a dualistic perspective of Mori and Pakeha as culturally, socially, and economically divided, a viewpoint represented in the novel by the opposing poles of Waituhi and Wellington. The birthright of whakapapa or ancestry anchors Tama to the Mori heritage embodied in Waituhi and its characters. The Pakeha world, conversely, is exterior, learned at school rather than naturally acquired. Stepping over from one pole to the other requires knowledge of and skills in both Mori and Pakeha domains. While Pakeha do not have the key to access Mori culture – the Pakeha couple shuffle nervously at the gates to the marae for the tangi – Tama serves as emissary, making the move to come over and welcome them in. Ihimaera’s fiction of the 1970s also fulfils that representative and educative function, describing Mori culture for the first time to a Pakeha and international readership. The Mori–Pakeha dynamic in Tangi exemplifies that taking place contemporaneously in New Zealand society generally. The 1970s marked the beginning of a reconsideration of race relations between the majority Pakeha and the indigenous Mori, sparked by increasing pressure from Mori for recognition and manifested in demands for political sovereignty and the revalorization of Mori culture, termed a renaissance. The 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act, which validated the Treaty as the nation’s founding document, coupled with Mori protest erupting into the public domain, overturned the nation’s hitherto assimilationism, establishing a policy of biculturalism which engages with the special place of Mori in the nation-state. Negotiating the terms of this monumental shift in Mori–Pakeha relations, on all levels of society, has been a long process that continues to the present day. As a yardstick for Mori concerns, Mori literature has been instrumental in expressing both the cultural flourishing of the Mori renaissance and the political demands of sovereignty. Indeed, Ihimaera’s early fiction laid the foundations of Mori literature in English as a recognized genre of New Zealand fiction, and its style and content continue to be recognizable in most Mori writing in the 2000s. In particular, the position from which the writer directs his or her narrative remains a constant: as Ihimaera puts it in an interview, writing by Mori is writing “from the inside out,”4 describing a unique 3

Ihimaera, Tangi, 78. Juniper Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’: Ihimaera interviewed by Juniper Ellis,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 176. 4



Introduction: Striding Both Worlds

xi

Mori social, cultural, and imaginative world-view that validates the Mori drive for political sovereignty through cultural autonomy. From tentative beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, with notable first works by Ihimaera (first collection of short stories, first novel), Patricia Grace (first book of fiction by a Mori woman), and Hone Tuwhare (first book of poetry in English), the publication of Mori writing from 1980 has been remarkably prolific. In the footsteps of Ihimaera’s earlier anthologies Into the World of Light (1982) and Te Ao Mārama (1990–96), the biennial Huia Publishers short-story collections (1995–) continue to provide a forum for new Mori writers and for New Zealand literary criticism pertaining to Mori fiction. Since the emergence of a revitalized Mori writing in English in the 1970s, the New Zealand literary community, understood as predominantly Pakeha, has embraced Mori writing in an inclusive gesture which nonetheless carefully maintains and honours its creative difference. Debate over the value of Mori literature beyond the sociological import of its content similarly looks to the Mori imaginary to describe the fiction in terms of a Mori aesthetic. For example, Ihimaera explains that the linear Western story is replaced by a circular, multiple or orally inflected structure construed as natural to an oral storytelling culture,5 while Mori belief-systems, such as myth and metaphysical animism, challenge labels such as realism and fantasy.6 This emphasis on a unique literary perspective argues that Mori fiction cannot be contained within Western genre categories and stylistic classifications, but is instead something different in its internal cohesiveness, telos, and affect. The appointment of Mori writers and critics to academic roles and as commentators on Mori fiction reinforces this nationally consistent view of Mori centrality to all aspects of creating, publishing, and interpreting their own cultural output. Ihimaera’s career exemplifies this Mori and Pakeha enthusiasm for promoting Mori cultural agency on national and international levels. On the strength of his first publication, Pounamu, Pounamu, Ihimaera was offered a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1972, which he unabashedly describes as the role of a “token” Mori representative.7 In the mid-1990s, he took up another type of diplomacy as a lecturer and mentor for new Mori writers at Auckland University, where he has been Professor of Mori and Pacific literature and creative writing. His prolific output – short fiction, novels, poetry, 5

Jane Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Kunapipi 7.1 (1985): 104. Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 100–101. 7 Nicola Shepheard, “The Storyteller,” North and South (November 2003): 51. 6

xii

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



operas, a play, a children’s story, a ballet, editions of numerous anthologies and guides to New Zealand – arguably makes him the country’s pre-eminent Mori writer today. Nevertheless, in Tangi, there is much about the Mori world of the Waituhi of Tama’s – and no less the author’s – youth that is both Mori and Pakeha. The rural Waituhi that features throughout Ihimaera’s fiction is not a discrete enclave of preserved tradition. Rather, from first colonial settlement to the present day, such communities have been incessantly forced into contact with, and thereby changed by, colonial, Pakeha, and, latterly, global influences. The debate surrounding the concept of Moritanga, ‘cultural pride and strength’, illustrates a conception of bestriding and traversing both worlds as cross-cultural interaction rather than as bridging a gap between the isolated entities of Mori and Pakeha. In contrast to the Mori anthropologist Ranginui Walker’s definition of Moritanga as a blueprint for continual Mori resistance as a kind of buffer against cultural loss,8 several non-Mori commentators analyze the concept as contaminated by British colonial and Pakeha cultural constructs. For critics who challenge the separatist basis on which national biculturalism is founded, deconstructing Moritanga supports their claim for crosscultural interaction and influence. In Patrons of Maori Culture, Steven Webster argues that Moritanga, in a direct response to the pressures of colonization, emerged as “a whole way of struggle” with the dominant settler society.9 In a literary context, Patrick Evans invokes Webster to situate Moritanga within a wholly Pakeha framework10 in order to query the extent to which Mori renaissance literature may claim a deep-seated and authentic difference from Pakeha fiction.11 From this perspective, then, the concept of striding both worlds is not about crossing over from one pole to another but, rather, about how Mori culture is always already part of and caught in a web of historical and contemporary, local, national and global influences and inter-

8

Ranginui Walker, Nga Pepa a Ranginui: The Walker Papers (Auckland: Penguin,

1996): 25. 9

Steven Webster, Patrons of Maori Culture: Power, Theory and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance (Dunedin: U of Otago P , 1998): 7. See also Michael King, Te Ao Hurihuri: The World Moves On: Aspects of Maoritanga (Wellington: Hicks Smith & Sons, 1975): 16. 10 Patrick Evans, “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 72. 11 “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” 77–79.



Introduction: Striding Both Worlds

xiii

actions. As Chris Prentice puts it, “the communities may be ‘closing ranks’, but the ‘outside’ is already ‘inside’ before the gates are shut.”12 To understand Moritanga as constructed out of a long history of cross-cultural interaction is to accept that Pakeha culture and people are in some way part of a Mori world-view. Indeed, the ambition to redefine New Zealand race relations in the biculturalism of the mid-1980s required looking anew at the country’s foundations for both Mori and Pakeha. Alongside – and partly in response to – the Mori sovereignty and renaissance movements, Pakeha national identity was also recast.13 Pakeha willingness to identify themselves as an integral, somehow natural and ‘native’ part of New Zealand was essential to the institutionalizing of a bicultural state in the 1980s. Today the tendency is to historicize the period from a Mori perspective, often in the terminology of Mori sovereignty, as a proactive demand for agency in the face of Pakeha resistance. However, such a stance tends to forget that Pakeha, despite a history of political hegemony, have widely embraced biculturalism. Furthermore, Pakeha recognition, as Michael King puts it, “that people with security of identity in one culture are more easily able to integrate with another”14 acknowledges that encouraging pride in Moritanga secures a sense of legitimacy and belonging for both Mori and Pakeha. The Pakeha engagement with precepts of Moritanga, including a revision of settlement history, the integration of Mori cultural and linguistic terms, and self-identification as ‘indigenous’, is evident in key Pakeha fiction of the 1980s by Ian Wedde, Maurice Shadbolt, and C.K. Stead, as well as in King’s polemical Being Pakeha: An Encounter with New Zealand and the Maori Renaissance. Whereas white New Zealanders in the past were averse to the Mori label ‘Pakeha’,15 12

Chris Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 104. 13 Other key reasons for the interest in (re)defining Pakeha identity issues are found in the major changes in New Zealand politics in the 1980s, particularly market deregulation and momentous changes in the social state, which called into question the concept of nationhood and the place of New Zealand in the world. 14 King, Te Ao Hurihuri, 15. 15 At the moment of colonial contact, Mori labelled the white European settlers as different from their own state of normalcy, the word ‘Mori’. Whereas, in its original usage, Pakeha referred to anyone who was non-Mori, today it tends to have a more restricted meaning referring to European (predominantly British) New Zealanders of several generations’ standing. More recent immigrants are still marginalized by Pakeha as foreign. Although the term ‘Pakeha New Zealand’ appears to be a doubling of signi-

xiv

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Margot Butcher describes a changing trend in census statistics since the 1990s. By the 2001 Census, Butcher finds that the majority prefers to identify as Pakeha rather than European, and there is an increasing number of nonMori who identify ethnically as Mori.16 To embrace the term ‘Pakeha’ as an identity-marker is not only an identification in relation to Mori but also as part of a Mori view of belonging to Aotearoa New Zealand. Quite simply, one cannot be a Pakeha anywhere else. The cultural collaboration fostered by a Pakeha interest in learning about Mori culture, and expectations that working together benefits both Mori and Pakeha, suggest that biculturalism is not formed by a binary of two opposites but by cross-cultural influences already within both halves. Over and above perceived differences that feed an argument for unique cultures, modern Mori and Pakeha cultures are both produced out of the historical and contemporary relationships between them. Currently, as Mori continue to demand further autonomy and to claim rights acknowledged in the Treaty of Waitangi and supported by the Waitangi Tribunal, it is predominantly Pakeha who seek to highlight cultural imbrication. While it is clearly necessary to acknowledge the wish among Mori to register difference, this does not invalidate attempts to conceive of culture differently. As Evans puts it, Mori– Pakeha debate “show[s] all the intimacy and familiarity of yet another row between long-term marriage partners.”17 In agreement with a reading of biculturalism and Moritanga as demonstrating cultural interdependency, Striding Both Worlds analyzes Ihimaera’s oeuvre in terms of what it shares with Pakeha, European, and other postcolonial and indigenous cultures and literatures. Ihimaera’s fiction is heavily indebted to artistic traditions handed down from the English canon. His writing style contains echoes of Anglo-Saxon bardic poetry and of English Romantic lyricism and the sublime, and he frequently employs the modernist vignette of heightened consciousness and postmodern pastiche, particularly with reference to American pop and film culture. The Pakeha legacy of cultural nationalism is also evident in his use of social realism, with its demotic, colloquial fication, the proper noun is often employed – including throughout this book – as a substitute for ‘white’, which has negative, race-based connotations. 16 Margot Butcher, “What is Maori? Who is Pakeha?” North and South (August 2003): 37–38. 17 Evans, “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’ and the Maori writer,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 24.1 (2006): 23.



Introduction: Striding Both Worlds

xv

and vernacular language, and the equally familiar depiction of a rural masculine world, man against nature, ingenuity and endurance, the bush, and rustic, modest rural communities. These influences are mixed with aspects of Mori storytelling, rhetoric, allegory, and myth to create the highly readable and popular fiction for which Ihimaera is renowned. Yet, throughout his fiction there is an unreconciled tension in the multiple ways in which the Mori writer employs Western cultural references and literary traditions. At times, his writing challenges Western conceptions and expectations of history, fiction, and literary modes, while in other work he deploys these constructs without apparent mistrust. Similarly, while some of his fiction is thinly disguised political activism, his love of opera, the fantasy of baroque excess, and a curiosity for other peoples and cultures also inform writing that experiments with integrating positively other idioms into his Mori world-view. To recognize in Ihimaera’s fiction the ever-present tension that seeks to separate Mori and Pakeha yet simultaneously benefits from both cultural and literary traditions is to illuminate the contradictions, difficulties, and disputes at work in New Zealand’s ongoing interrogation in the 2000s, of its national cultural identity as ‘one nation’, bicultural or potentially multicultural. Ihimaera’s work mirrors a parallel debate over the direction that New Zealand literature (both Mori and Pakeha) is taking, as the international orientation of some new writing challenges a perceived obligation to map the local in a distinct New Zealand idiom. In its methodology, this study of Ihimaera’s negotiation between Mori– Pakeha and Mori–international influences similarly bestrides both worlds, situating Ihimaera’s work within not only national but also international and historical processes of identity and literary formation. In New Zealand, Mori fiction is predominantly read through a bicultural frame. This is extended to a postcolonial context in comparative work that classifies and studies Mori writing alongside other minority and indigenous literatures – for example, in Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narratives: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts, Eva Rask Knudsen’s The Circle and the Spiral: Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori Literature, and Michelle Keown’s Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body. While bicultural and postcolonial frameworks certainly speak to many of Mori literature’s concerns, their tendency to interpolate into the text social, cultural, and political issues taking place off the page risks overlooking the text as fiction – in effect, forgetting that literature is an imaginative interpretation of the world rather than a ‘real’ account. Indeed, as Elleke Boehmer de-

xvi

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



scribes it, in what she admits is an unfashionable and politically incorrect criticism of postcolonial literary criticism as unfairly privileging politics over aesthetics, “the postcolonial entails a definition drawn not from the work but the world; that it first and foremost denotes history, not aesthetic form.”18 Whereas such overt counter-discursivism sets minority literature against the dominant and dominating Pakeha and English literary traditions, keeping in view the international and historical development of literature offers another perspective from which to understand the writing and reading of Mori fiction in English. Although there is much willingness on the part of New Zealanders and foreigners alike to learn about Mori culture, Ihimaera’s indebtedness to the English literary tradition in his fiction, and the fact of writing in the English language and in recognizable genres of novel and short story, validate reading from a text-centred rather than a culture-centred position. Pascale Casanova’s argument for an international and ahistorical consideration of all fiction is pertinent here: The consideration of literary works on an international scale leads to the discovery of further principles of contiguity or differentiation that make it possible to associate works that are not usually thought of as being related and sometimes to separate ones that are customarily grouped together, thus bringing out neglected properties.19

The international scale of Casanova’s analysis applies as much to her interpretative techniques as to the range of literature she addresses. As she puts it later in her argument, a text’s specificity and its place in the vast domain of literature may only be found by “constant passing back and forth between that which is nearest and that which is farthest away, between the microscopic and the macroscopic, between the individual writer and the vast literary world.”20 Applying Casanova’s emphasis on focus-shifting, this study of cross-cultural influence in Ihimaera’s fiction moves between the poles of Mori and European discourses, through a series of cultural and literary close-ups and long shots. From text-centred analyses innocent of cultural politics through to study of Ihimaera’s manuscripts and correspondence archives, Striding Both 18

Elleke Boehmer, “A Postcolonial Aesthetic: Repeating upon the present,” in ReRouting the Postcolonial, 176. 19 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (La République Mondiale des lettres, 1999; Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2004): 178. 20 The World Republic of Letters, 352.



Introduction: Striding Both Worlds

xvii

Worlds aims to open up interpretative pathways to Ihimaera’s imaginary that challenge the conventional, accepted reading of Mori literature in New Zealand. True to a dialogic impetus of moving between different positions, each chapter inserts Ihimaera’s fiction into a new context, with the aim of highlighting Casanova’s principles of similarities and differences, too easily overlooked in approaches focused on cultural rather than literary analysis. Chapter 1, “Mori Nationalism,” attaches the demographically small and historically brief configurations of the Mori claim for political and cultural recognition to other national struggles, from the emergent European nation-building of the nineteenth century to the decolonizing independences of the 1950s. To place Mori sovereignty and the Mori renaissance in an international and historical perspective is not to diminish the particularity of New Zealand’s nationhood issues. Rather, it highlights the legitimacy and, indeed, normalcy of debates on identity and culture that figure so prominently in New Zealand. While the nationalist function of Mori writing expects a certain amount of representative cultural specificity, inspection of work which Ihimaera calls “selfish” reveals artistic complexity that demands more flexible and layered kinds of reading attention. In Chapter 2, “International Aesthetics,” a look at ways in which fiction distances itself from the world and from reality valorizes the imaginative and technical range of Ihimaera’s texts. Moreover, close study of the historical development of various stylistic and generic modes – baroque, epic, opera, and rewriting – which Ihimaera employs shows that these features of English literature themselves encompass aspects of the postcolonial struggle. Whereas the second chapter analyzes incoming influences and inspiration to Ihimaera’s Mori fiction, Chapter 3, “The Local and the Global,” identifies aspects of a Mori world-view that Ihimaera exports, leaving Waituhi for the metropolis of New York and London, and engaging with other indigenous and minority struggles in Canada and Vietnam. Theories of transculturation and glocalization cast positive light on contemporary Mori culture’s growing interest in internationalization and commercialization, which is received with wariness in New Zealand. Finally, Chapter 4, “Ambivalent Indigeneity,” approaches some of the questions and problematics that have emerged out of the different types of cross-cultural influences identified in the preceding chapters. The curious way in which Mori fiction of the 2000s is often so similar to that of the 1970s raises the question of whether indigenous literature may somehow be caught in a demand for self-representation, a set of expectations concerning form and content. Ihimaera’s stance as Mori and as writer is often ambivalent. His increasing use of the terms of minority struggle for em-

xviii

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



powerment demonstrates a certain sense of duty to ‘act’ as an indigenous writer of the contemporary postcolonial era. Conversely, his interest in diaspora and chosen cultural attachments challenges the perception of indigeneity as a knowable, fixable, bounded identity. In turn, this poses the question of whether Mori fiction which is unrecognizable as Mori may still be labelled and valued as such. Ihimaera’s fiction, spanning almost forty years, embodies this conflictual yet generative process of embracing change while retaining the force of Mori renaissance and sovereignty aims. It may be argued that a refusal to centralize the Mori position reduces cultural specificity to an assimilationist, eurocentric universalism of the kind that pervaded dominant views of the subaltern from the Enlightenment to colonialism. However, Casanova’s research on tendencies in literary production and evaluation, and also the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, which stresses the importance of social context in shaping artistic production and evaluation, argue that the culture and literature labelled ‘European’ or ‘Western’ are already hybrid, non-static, and subject to the same processes and pressures of identity-formation as those currently at work in New Zealand. To recognize that culture is neither a place nor a period, but a constant and continual interanimation played out through contestatory stances, challenges, and justifications, validates the particular concerns of Mori culture at the same time as it does not allow it unique status by rights of precedence, authenticity or autonomy. A sense of respect is here important, but also an acknowledgement that respect for cultural difference does not prevent fruitful debate. Despite conflicting definitions and usages of Moritanga, commentators concur that the concept has been and continues to be a central and powerful unifying force for Mori claims to cultural and political sovereignty. Similarly, to read Ihimaera’s fiction for what it shares with other cultures and literatures is not to denigrate its specificity or the role that Ihimaera has played and continues to play in promoting Mori literature and cultural pride. The subject of this book has come about from my own experience as a Pakeha New Zealander, of a generation that came into political consciousness in the 1990s. By this time, the Mori renaissance, if not finished, was already historicized, and the ground-shifting economic and political restructuring of the 1980s was largely complete. New Zealand’s position, in the closing decade of the millennium, was firmly bicultural, with an eye fixed keenly on the international horizon. This desire to measure the country by international standards sent me, like many New Zealanders before and since, to live and work



Introduction: Striding Both Worlds

xix

in Europe. This rite of passage, which pegs the self to overseas benchmarks, has particular resonance for the international success of Mori culture and arts which this book addresses. My experiences as an immigrant and foreigner, and with several communities whose national identities underwent major upheavals in the twentieth century, including Turkish, Lithuanian, Yugoslav, and North African, have shaped my understanding of how cultural and literary identities are formed and negotiated cross-culturally and internationally. Similarly, my methodology in working between Mori, Pakeha, and European (predominantly French) cultural discourse and literary critical practices brings to Ihimaera’s fiction a range of interpretative possibilities that illuminate his contrastive and sometimes even conflicting positions. In its emphasis on the plurality and the fluidity of boundaries between self and other, Striding Both Worlds advocates the non-resolution of cultural and literary interpretation. 

1 Mori Nationalism

‘New’ Mori Literature

I

throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the eminent Pakeha New Zealand writer and literary critic Bill Pearson analyzes Pakeha writers’ representations of Mori. In particular, he criticizes most such fiction for succumbing to simplistic, often unfounded stereotypes of the Mori character and of Mori–Pakeha relations. Although, by the mid-1960s, some Pakeha writers were capable of “writ[ing] sympathetically of Maori,” Pearson argues that there remains “an incomplete appreciation of the distinctness of Maori communal life and of cultural features that Maoris prefer to retain.”1 In Te Ao Hou, a journal of articles and short fiction by Mori published by the Department of Maori Affairs from the late 1950s, Pearson registers possible new directions for New Zealand literature to take, as an “authentic Maori outlook” begins to offer up “Maori attitudes to life which have escaped the Pakeha writer.”2 Pearson anticipates “the appearance of a Maori 1 2

N SEVERAL ARTICLES

Bill Pearson, Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays (Auckland: Heinemann, 1974): 146. Fretful Sleepers, 66–67.

2

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



novelist of outstanding talent,” and is confident “that Maori writing will be distinct in its passion, its lyricism and unforced celebration of living.”3 The appearance of Ihimaera’s first collection of short stories, Pounamu, Pounamu, in 1972, quickly followed by two novels, Tangi (1973) and Whanau (1974), was heralded as that new voice which launched Mori fiction. Although predated by the stories in Te Ao Hou, the Pakeha anthropologist Margaret Orbell’s early anthology of Mori fiction, Contemporary Maori Writing, and Hone Tuwhare’s 1964 poetry collection, Ihimaera, and, later, Grace as the first woman to publish a short-story collection, were greeted as Mori ‘firsts’ ushering in a ‘new’ category of New Zealand writing. Ihimaera describes his motivation to write in terms of a desire to provide a Mori perspective on New Zealand’s national literary imaginary. Indeed, he refers to Pearson’s 1969 essay “The Maori and Literature” as a particular stimulus.4 Both in his texts and in a considerable number of interviews and essays, Ihimaera assumes the role of educator, drawing attention to a unique, specifically Mori world-view emerging reactively against the assimilationist expectations of mainstream Pakeha culture and society. In his aim to describe the “emotional landscape [of] the Maori people,”5 Ihimaera’s lyrical trilogy Pounamu, Pounamu, Tangi, and Whanau re-creates “tender, unabashedly lyrical evocations of a world that once was,”6 emphasizing values of love, rural community, and tradition set in counterpoint to the cultural paucity brought about by contemporary urban dislocation. In very early reviews of Mori fiction in English, Pakeha literary critics measure the works against European aesthetic standards. Pearson defends this in his review of Orbell’s Contemporary Maori Writing as the ultimate accolade and proof that this collection holds its own on the national literary stage: It is nevertheless no less than their due that the contributors to this volume should be judged by the same ultimate aesthetic criteria as other writing is judged by.7

3

Bill Pearson, “The Maori and Literature: 1938–65” (1969), in Essays on New Zealand Literature, ed. Wystan Curnow (Auckland: Heinemann, 1973): 137. 4 Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story, ed. Cherry Hankin (Auckland: Heinemann, 1982): 167. 5 Witi Ihimaera, “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception,” Turnbull Library Record 15.1 (Winter 1982): 47. 6 Ihimaera, “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception,” 50. 7 Pearson, Fretful Sleepers, 155.



Mori Nationalism

3

H. Winston Rhodes is less certain, acknowledging in his reviews of Tangi and Whanau that Mori writing is predicated on such different premises from those of Western literature that it is difficult to combine the two: Tangi becomes accessible to the Pakeha reader provided that the latter is patient with his own misunderstandings [and] aware that literary conventions are closely related to social traditions.8

Rhodes suggests that the Pakeha literary tradition may not have the capacity to account fully for the ambitions of Mori fiction. In a resoundingly negative manner, R.S. Oppenheim also registers the shift in New Zealand letters towards interpreting Mori fiction from a “social location” rather than from within a literary frame, a change in perspective which he puts down to the Pakeha public’s thirst “for a deep draft of ethnicity” and the “self conscious Maoritanga” of Ihimaera’s generation.9 Ken Arvidson similarly defines Mori fiction as “a functional literature,” useful “in the service of some cause or causes,” and for its “archival function”:10 Maori literature is an accumulation of works which in the main have objectives different from their own perfection, and broadly speaking these objectives or ends are political.11

As Mori activism became increasingly important from the mid- to late 1970s onwards, Pakeha reviews of Ihimaera’s writing demonstrate a gradual distancing, unhitching Mori fiction from Western considerations of the form and function of literature. The emergence of Mori fiction which appeared motivated more by social objectives than by literary ambitions destabilized the critical authority of the non-Mori critic, who was unable to comment on a culture that was, in effect, ‘foreign’. Although Oppenheim makes it clear that he disagrees with his review’s non-literary interpretative viewpoint, his comments are prescient in reading the currents that would define the direction of Mori writing and New Zealand’s literary criticism from the 1970s on. Following Pearson’s and Ihi8

H. Winston Rhodes, “Tangi,” Landfall 108 (December 1973): 351. R.S. Oppenheim, “Pounamu, Pounamu,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 84.4 (December 1975): 507. 10 Ken Arvidson, “Aspects of Contemporary Māori Writing in English,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Mark Williams & Graham McGregor (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 117. 11 Arvidson, “Aspects of Contemporary Māori Writing in English,” 120. 9

4

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



maera’s emphasis on the specificity of Mori literature, New Zealand literary criticism has largely focused on the Maoriness rather than the literariness of Mori writing, describing the sociological and anthropological import of these texts, of their faithful depiction of a Mori world hitherto inaccessible to outsiders.12 As Barry Mitcalfe puts it, in his review of Tangi, this first novel by a Mori writer would be a valuable “set text in a university sociological class.”13 Similarly, Norman Simms, in an early review of Ihimaera’s fiction, evaluates the writing as drawing on a Mori heritage which is quite distinct from the English tradition of New Zealand’s national literature.14 Even those reviews which do connect Ihimaera’s style and imagery with European precedents focus on aspects of that tradition compatible with Mori cultural precepts. Pearson notices echoes of the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer in Ihimaera’s imagery, finding a close correlation between Mori and Anglo-Saxon culture: “it is not surprising that a Maori should respond [...] to the literature of a people of a tribal society with strong ties of kinship, pursuing agriculture and war.”15 In another European precedent, Simms famously labels Ihimaera “a Maori Zola,” a connection which recalls the French writer’s aspiration to anthropological naturalism in depicting a predominantly rural working class.16 Mitcalfe’s and Simms’s emphasis on textual truth goes hand in hand with the similar demand for the writer’s own authenticity and authority to represent 12

By comparison, non-New Zealand literary critics have more thoroughly analyzed Ihimaera’s work in relation to European literature: Hartwig Isernhagen discusses linguistic experimentation in “Why Novels? Why Short Stories? A Note on the Use of Genres in the Works of Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.2 (1993): 34–37; Armando Jannetta likens Ihimaera’s lyricism to English Romanticism and modernism, and analyzes the animistic fantasy-sequence of the greenstone patu swimming through the air in “The Greenstone Patu” as akin to “The Dream of the Rood,” in “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 12.2 (1990): 17–28; For Jean–Pierre Durix, in Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1998), this same scene is influenced by magical realism. 13 Barry Mitcalfe, “Pounamu, Pounamu,” New Zealand Book World 6 (1973):15. 14 Norman Simms, “Maori Literature in English: Prose Writers, Part Two: Witi Ihimaera,” Pacific Quarterly Moana 3 (1978): 338. 15 Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 170. Ihimaera likewise connects the two cultures in an interview with Jane Wilkinson (“Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 103). 16 Simms, “Maori Literature in English: Prose Writers, Part Two: Witi Ihimaera,” 338.



Mori Nationalism

5

a Mori voice. The satisfaction with which the dust-jacket of Pounamu, Pounamu describes the collection as Ihimaera’s “personal vision of Maori life as it is now, and of its values now” validates the text by attaching it to the life of the author. With the assertion of Ihimaera’s credentials to write from inside Mori culture comes a concomitant query about the appropriateness and skill of the Pakeha critic in interpreting Mori fiction. Reviewers of Ihimaera’s second collection of short stories, The New Net Goes Fishing (1977), which employs post-1975 protest vocabulary to confront Mori–Pakeha disparity, are undecided on how non-Mori critics might go about commenting on the explicit, sometimes aggressive, politicization in these stories, or whether to do so is an appropriate response to such fiction. While a socio-political purpose is negative from Oppenheim’s literary standpoint, it is acceptable and even expected in minority literature of the postcolonial era. Hence, when Richard Corballis and Simon Garrett bluntly criticize Ihimaera’s cultural politics in some New Net stories as “propagandist”17 and “barely-disguised sociological treatises,”18 Otto Heim defends Ihimaera’s work as common to writing on race relations, which requires an immense effort “in constructing a political ideology as adequate consciousness.”19 It is clear from both Ihimaera’s authoritative stance and Pakeha reviewers’ equivocality that both Mori and Pakeha have encouraged a separatist vision of the writing and reception of Mori literature. Nevertheless, the Australian literary critic Paul Sharrad offers a counter-argument. Sharrad analyzes an early Mori play, Harry Dansey’s Te Raukura (1972), which, the critic argues, has been sidelined for not adhering to the expected, neat Pakeha–Mori dichotomy: It appears that neither an “outside” (Western) nor an “inside” (indigenous) critical formation has known what to do with this work. This is because both the traditional Pakeha and the oppositional Maori literary histories both function out of the same set of assumptions; they are merely the majority– minority “identity politics” inversions of each other [. . . ]. Both critical camps value “firsts,” but the one emphasizes art and cannot accept Dansey’s work as meaningful in the context of a well-constructed, self-contained realist “play,” and the other emphasizes politics and cultural tradition and cannot 17

Richard Corballis & Simon Garrett, Introducing Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984): 48. 18 Corballis & Garrett, Introducing Witi Ihimaera, 45. 19 Otto Heim, Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1998): 178.

6

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



accept that this otherwise oppositional work seems to move into a European genre and the dominant national ideology.20

In his consideration of the conditions which shape minority writing and its criticism, Sharrad shows how the construction of a unique cultural identity for both Pakeha and Mori is predicated on the inverted and oppositional use of the same precepts. In effect, Mori and Pakeha are dependent on one another, so that defining what is unique in Mori literature is a process of rejecting and negating that which is valued in the Pakeha equivalent. The tendency to read Ihimaera as espousing a distinct Mori world-view, through a novel use of literary form and function, accords with the oppositional literary histories that Sharrad sees as central to New Zealand literature. Indeed, Oppenheim’s speculation in his early review of Pounamu, Pounamu that Mori fiction will be read in accordance with its social location rather than in the tradition of English literature has prevailed in New Zealand literary criticism. As already implied in Pearson’s early anticipation of a new voice, the discourse of difference crystallized in the establishment of cultural biculturalism in the 1980s, a kind of nationalism that encouraged sensitivity to fundamental cultural differences between Pakeha and Mori New Zealand. By contrast, Sharrad’s reminder of the close, interdependent relationship between Mori and Pakeha literature offers a different way of reading Ihimaera. At first glance, ‘nationalism’ might not seem an appropriate term for describing the construction of only one of New Zealand’s major constituencies, which remains dependent on and contained within the national framework. The sovereignty movement is, however, a reaction against a ‘one-nation’ stance, with its very terminology reflecting a nationalist ambition: ‘renaissance’ and ‘revolution’ connote an ambition to make something new of the old, to reformulate the past within the parameters of the present, while the term ‘sovereignty’ cannot help but contain echoes of colonial empire. The emergence of Mori protest in the 1970s brought about a sea-change in New Zealand’s identity on all levels, overturning assimilationism and instating biculturalism, symbolized by the newly joint name Aotearoa New Zealand. As the conjunctive name perhaps indicates, the bicultural nation is not a melding

20

Paul Sharrad, “Wrestling with the Angel: Pacific Criticism and Harry Dansey’s Te Raukura,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 323.



Mori Nationalism

7

of two cultures but the acknowledgement of their dual title.21 Biculturalism validates the existence of fundamental, irrefutable cultural differences between Pakeha and Mori New Zealanders, which necessitates different ways of managing Mori and Pakeha interests in politics and society. Precepts of difference underlie all national struggles for recognition and independence, whether they are from a dominant culture, a political regime, or an empire. The desire for Mori sovereignty and cultural renaissance to define and describe who and what is Mori illustrates a common feature of nation-building, evident in nineteenth-century European revolutions and their antipodean counterpart, the emergent New Zealand identity in the late 1800s and early 1900s known as ‘Maoriland’. The same urge to differentiate is also found in decolonization movements around the world in the latter half of the twentieth century – a similarity confirmed by the frequent use of postcolonial theory and terminology in both Pakeha and Mori discussions of biculturalism. Perceiving the Mori drive for cultural and political devolution as within a discourse of nation-building leads to a similar understanding of Mori literature: rather than working against the national literature established by the dominant Pakeha, Ihimaera may be interpreted as both responding to it and contained in it. Mori literature is thus seen as the latest configuration of earlier new modes of writing in New Zealand’s literary tradition. Indeed, for Casanova, the way in which new literatures employ a common nationalist imaginary provides evidence that postcolonial fiction is inscribed in the long international history of literary development: In one sense, [decolonization] is only the continuation and extension of the revolution inaugurated by Herder: the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, obeying the same political and cultural mechanisms, moved to assert linguistic and literary claims of their own. The consequences of decolonization in the literary world were of a piece with the national and literary upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe, carrying on the Herderian revolution by other means.22

To understand Mori sovereignty and renaissance within a common nationalist and decolonizing urge shows Ihimaera’s literary strategies, styles, and subject-matter as similar to those of other nationalisms, rather than as unique to a distinct, impermeable Mori world-view. Furthermore, his importance, as 21

Alternatively written as Aotearoa-New Zealand or Aotearoa / New Zealand, in each case the punctuation reinforces the binary divide. 22 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 79–80.

8

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



pre-eminent Mori writer and a highly visible spokesman for Mori culture, reflects the major role that the imaginary plays in establishing and consolidating the cultural basis on which ambitions of sovereignty are based. In La Création des identités nationales, the French sociologist and historian Anne–Marie Thiesse illuminates the commonality of nation-building in her thorough enumeration of what she calls a “do-it-yourself” kit-set or an identity “check-list,”23 a set of techniques that she applies across many European countries, each of which claims unique and immutable features.24 Thiesse’s search for similarities exposes nation-building as a paradoxical impulse in which each nation’s authority, based on defined and accepted foundational differences, overlooks the common strategies used by all. Recognizing some of Thiesse’s tropes of nation-building in Ihimaera’s fiction highlights the extensive borrowing which makes up the Maori literary imaginary, thereby permitting one to argue that cross-cultural influence is inherent in all literatures. Indeed, Casanova identifies the same common process at work in the literary national imaginary: Allowance being made for certain minor variations and differences associated with a particular political history, linguistic situation, or literary heritage, the main initial stages of literary formation are [. . . ] essentially the same for all literary spaces that have belatedly come into being as the result of assertions of national identity. An almost universal and transhistorical order of development.25

Certainly, postcolonial theory accounts for similarities of style, subject, and objectives between minority literatures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Describing similarities with earlier European nationalisms, however, is avoided. Parallels between Mori and other national struggles for recognition have been noted in New Zealand literary and cultural critique. As Chris Prentice 23

Anne–Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales: Europe X V I I e – X X e siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1999): 13, 14, English used in the original text. 24 Its features include: a national language recovered in rural enclaves and from elders; a national history, folklore, myth, and typical landscape, written and painted; a cult of ancestors selected to represent a prestigious, heroic, and cohesive past; artefacts and objects of high cultural value which again point to a great past; the stereotyping of a certain mentality or national character; a national anthem, flag, typical costume, cuisine, music, flora or fauna. Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales, 14. 25 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 178–79.



Mori Nationalism

9

elaborates in “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” Mori sovereignty’s use of the terms ‘renaissance’ and ‘revolution’ “cannot be assumed to be innocent of echoes of Europe.”26 Going beyond the specificities of European campaigns for artistic rejuvenation and independences, which have only distant relevance to a late-twentieth-century indigenous situation, Prentice draws closer connections with the U S Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Indeed, Mori protest groups, especially Nga Tamatoa, were directly influenced by American civilrights activism, which grew out of the earlier New York ‘boom’. The Harlem and Mori renaissances share features of socio-political unification grouped around sudden urbanization, a politicized, sometimes militant racial consciousness, and a surge in cultural production which reflected these issues.27 Several of Ihimaera’s stories in The New Net Goes Fishing feature characters involved in activism similar to Nga Tamatoa, hence displaying indebtedness to American antecedents. For example, in “Clenched Fist” and “Tent on the Home Ground,” his use of the American words “brother” and “black” replaces the distinctly Mori terms ‘cousin’ and ‘brown’ to signal politicized group identity, as does the imagery of the black panther and upheld clenched fist. Importantly, the Harlem Renaissance and later black civil-rights movement show that the demand for recognition of cultural nationalism does not necessarily equate with a claim for an independent state. As Benedict Anderson, in his seminal work Imagined Communities, and, more recently, Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large both stress, nationalism’s cohesive power comes from its ideological components. This is borne out in the strong group identities maintained in many exiled, refugee, migrant, minority, and indigenous communities in the world today. The Irish Renaissance provides another international parallel at a hinge period between European nationalism and twentieth-century decolonization. As such, it is often cited as a precursor to the postcolonial phenomenon.28 In a New Zealand context, Mark Williams finds strong similarities between Irish, 26

Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 85. “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 86–87. 28 As well as analyses of Irish literature in Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, see also Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003); Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Field Day, ed. & intro. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1990); and Declan Kiberd, “Modern Ireland: Postcolonial or European?” in Not on Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism, ed. Stuart Murray (Exeter: U of Exeter P , 1997): 81–100. 27

10

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



postcolonial, and Mori cultural revivals, particularly their interlocking imperatives of renaissance as continuity with a mythic past and rupture with an undesirable present.29 Indeed, the importance of James Macpherson’s Ossian myth in the Irish revival emphasizes the importance of fortifying distant (hi)stories to legitimate contemporary claims for sovereignty. Ossian’s impact in Ireland and on the Continent illustrates the ways in which national histories are absorbed into the popular imagination and into a local and contemporary reality through literature and art. Indeed, for Simon During, the deployment of Macpherson’s text in Scottish cultural revivalism, British and French colonial campaigns, and European Romanticism makes Ossian a figure that foreshadows both postcolonial discourses and global dissemination.30 As Edward Chamberlin puts it, in his argument for the relevance of American Indian traditions in the present, storytelling is crucial to the construction of “ceremonies of belief” – which has little to do with the truth of their content.31 Similarly, at the same time as Albert Wendt argues “we must rediscover and reaffirm our faith in the vitality of our past, our cultures, our dead,”32 he also confirms that, when faced with a choice between differing conceptions of the past, “usage determines authenticity.”33 This position towards the past echoes that of the Irish critic Seamus Deane, in his introduction to the “Field Day” essays about identity in Irish writing. The way the same stories appear with different motivations, including separatist, unionist, pro-British, pro-Gaelic or pro-Eire, highlights the fact that each discourse re-centres the past for its own purposes.34 Ihimaera’s recycling of Maori myths and key moments from its colonialist history makes similar claims for the continuing relevance of and need for legitimating (hi)stories. In particular, his writing of the First Fleet legend of the seven founding canoes stakes a strong nationalist claim for 29

Mark Williams, “The Long Maori Renaissance,” in Other Renaissances, ed. Zhou Gang, Sander Gilman & Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Palgrave, 2006): 207–26. 30 Simon During, “Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation After All?” Postcolonial Studies 1.1 (1998): 43–45. 31 Edward J Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (2003; Manchester: Carcanet, 2006): 2. 32 Albert Wendt, “Towards a new Oceania,” Mana Review 1.1 (January 1976): 51. 33 Wendt, “Towards a new Oceania,” 52; see also Vilsoni Hereniko, “Representations of Cultural Identities,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 162. 34 Deane, “Introduction” to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Field Day, 21.



Mori Nationalism

11

Mori ownership of Aotearoa. Like Macpherson’s Ossian, the factuality of an organized mass migration is largely dismissed by anthropologists,35 yet it is not the veracity so much as the desirability of reconstructions of the past that is important for a national imaginary. Thus, by insistently writing the myth, Ihimaera endorses its importance for contemporary identity-formation. For example, recounting the arrival myth as the response to his childhood question “what is a Maori?” the narrator of Tangi equates the heroic mythic journey which conquers Aotearoa with Mori identity and tribal affiliation.36

Romanticism, Realism, and the National Imaginary In parallel with nationalistic motivations for and content of Ihimaera’s early fiction, his style of writing similarly recalls earlier phases of nation-building. As a reaction against the formal strictures of neoclassicism, late-eighteenthand nineteenth-century Romanticism embodies many of the values associated with nationalism of the equivalent period, construed as a democratic revolution, drawing strength from popular grass-roots and egalitarian values. Although, clearly, Romanticism cannot be collapsed into nationalism, they share an emphasis on emotion, the organic, liberalism, and equality, often found all at once in the rural working class. Literary works of the Romantic period cited by Anderson, Casanova, and Thiesse in relation to nation-building include Herder’s oral folklore and peasant songs, the Grimm brothers’ legends and fairytales from rural elders, Jean–Jacques Rousseau’s retrouvailles from his walks in the French countryside, and Macpherson’s Ossian. Exemplified in the philosophical and literary work of the above writers, Romanticism and nationalism combine in art to bridge the gap between the imagination and the real, edifying a sense of national identity through storylines played out in a setting and by a hero that the public can identify with and imitate – to the point where the nation itself is the main character of the epic heroic struggle.37 The same nationalist characteristics are found in the much later domain of postcolonial writing. As Jean–Pierre Durix points out in a discussion of the historicizing impulse in early postcolonial texts, the “village novel,” exempli35

Allan Hanson, “The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and its Logic,” American Anthropologist 91.4 (December 1989): 892; Margaret Orbell, Hawaiki: A New Approach to Maori Tradition (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1985): 60–66. 36 Ihimaera, Tangi, 48–49. 37 Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales, 136.

12

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



fied by Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, combats the reductionist colonial view of the indigene by depicting in great detail indigenous culture as rich in tradition and complex in organization.38 Durix assigns Tangi and Whanau to this group, a point supported by Ihimaera’s claim that Waituhi: The Life of the Village, an opera based on the novel Whanau, “has no main characters at all, the main character is the village itself.”39 Ihimaera’s distinctive voice, subject, and narrative perspective, by turns lyrical and social-realist, reflect the profound influence of English Romanticism on New Zealand’s cultural self description. Indeed, Ihimaera directly calls attention to his connection with the English Romantics, in his comparison of his Pounamu, Pounamu and The New New Net Goes Fishing with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience respectively.40 A Romantic sentiment – or its negation – predominates in Ihimaera’s work of the 1970s. Many of his narrators are Mori elders or children, and the relationship between them – or lack of it – offers a way into the themes of alienation, through the dying village elder, the child lost in the city, or its opposite: namely, cultural preservation through the transmission of traditional tribal knowledge. Many critics acknowledge that Ihimaera’s lyrical and elegiac voices are carried by the pastoral mode. They do not, however, unpack the Romantic implications of Ihimaera’s model of a Wordsworthian heroizing of the ‘rustic’ peasant as poetic subject, deeply and emotionally connected with the land. As Wordsworth indicates in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” the pastoral vision is organic, growing out of the soil rather than learned through education.41 In Tangi, Ihimaera’s narrator puts in perspective Mori children’s difficulties with doing their schoolwork: Dad and Mum couldn’t help us [with our homework] because they knew little of such things. That didn’t seem to matter to us; their knowledge was of the earth and of loving the earth and that seemed more important.42

38

Jean–Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1998): 25–26 39 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 107. 40 Juniper Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 170. 41 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (1802), in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie Finke & Barbara Johnson (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001): 650. 42 Tangi, 79.



Mori Nationalism

13

This is reformulated in Whanau in a way that equates ßknowledge of the land with a strong sense of roots and, ultimately, happiness. The boy, Andrew, “env[ies]” his father, a labourer: You’re content; I’m not. You know about the earth; all I know about it is from books. Your life is here and you only want to stay here; I don’t know where my life will lie. But wherever it is, it will not be as happy as yours.43

The Romantic pathos in this passage is generated from the boy’s immense respect for his father, a role model the boy cannot replicate, because his ambitions (university, professional career) require that he leave home. In passages in the novel that depict these male characters at work, Wordsworth’s “essential passions of the heart” and the “elementary feelings”44 that he cites as typical of the rural peasant not yet contaminated by the Industrial Revolution are translated into a fundamental connection between Mori and the land: [Rongo] had felt the earth crying out for seed. He had felt the yearning of the land for peace, for it had become accustomed to the rhythm of the yearly planting. And there had been a crying out of his blood too. The rhythm of the land and the rhythm of his blood had been one and the same. And he had begun the planting and both blood and land had gradually become calm. And he felt the strength of the land calling him.45

The linking “and” in each sentence augments the metaphoric connection between the Mori farmer and his land. Wordsworth’s Romantic heart, represented by the blood in this passage, makes emotion the conduit between man and his natural environment, something that Ihimaera’s characters express in spontaneous outpourings of love: for Rongo, “the tears from his eyes, it would be they which would water each green shoot.”46 As already implied in the Romantic portrayal of rural elders who are respected and envied by a less-grounded youth, elegy undercuts the desire to salvage the Mori past in a way meaningful for the present. Thiesse argues that constructing the national imaginary is always a recuperative gesture motivated by a strong urge to rescue cultural artefacts and native language under the aegis of urgency and struggle, to be salvaged, enumerated, and preserved

43

Ihimaera, Whanau, 69. Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” 650. 45 Ihimaera, Whanau, 54. 46 Whanau, 54. 44

14

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



before the traces of these originals are lost.47 Many of Ihimaera’s early stories work around the theme of cultural salvage – which Arvidson calls the “archival function.”48 For example, “Fire on Greenstone,” “Gathering of the Whakapapa,” and “The Greenstone Patu” all record the loss of taonga tribal treasures and tribal knowledge. Seen through the eyes of the younger generation, who regret not having paid more attention before their elders passed away, these stories highlight a generation-gap symbolic of the very real break with tradition caused by nineteenth-century colonization. Indeed, cultural salvage has played a key role throughout the development and consolidation of Moritanga in the twentieth century, of which Ihimaera’s Romanticism is but a more recent instance. Walker cites Apirana Ngata’s efforts to preserve artefacts in the early 1900s, and his 1928 establishment of the first school of Mori arts, as the beginning of the modern Mori renaissance.49 Ngata’s poetry similarly creates its lyrical pathos out of the threat of losing a valued cultural past, particularly evident in his poem “A Scene from the Past,” written in the mode of ‘Maoriland’ Romanticism, as thoroughly analyzed by Mark Williams and Jane Stafford.50 In his study of intertextuality in Ihimaera’s writing, Armando Jannetta outlines how the search for roots and past authenticity is a key feature of both the Romantic sublime and modernism. In these contexts, he points to Ihimaera’s reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic imagery in “I, Ozymandias” in The New Net Goes Fishing.51 Here, lyrical poignancy is overlaid with the harshness of social reality in the story of a successful young Mori man who recognizes a prison labourer as his best friend from his rural childhood. The shock of recognition sparks memories of their shared past, depicted as a pastoral idyll. Under the guise of the characters’ having been made to learn “that dumb poem about Ozymandias” as schoolboys,52 Ihimaera draws on Shelley’s 47

Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales, 21. Arvidson, “Aspects of Contemporary Māori Writing in English,” 117. 49 Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990): 188–91; Nga Pepa a Ranginui, 48–51. 50 Jane Stafford & Mark Williams, “Victorian Poetry and the Indigenous Poet: Apirana Ngata’s ‘A Scene from the Past’,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 39.1 (2004): 30–36. 51 Armando E. Jannetta, “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 12.2 (1990): 18. 52 Ihimaera, “I, Ozymandias,” in The New Net Goes Fishing (Auckland: Heinemann, 1977): 179. 48



Mori Nationalism

15

imagery of the sands of time effacing the pretentions of an ancient king who sought immortality in a stone effigy. For Shelley, nature’s relentless movement highlights the brevity and insignificance of a man’s life and mocks his attempts to maintain a hold on an instant and to be remembered, as in the “half sunk” or “shattered” statue of the poem. Ihimaera transplants Shelley’s philosophy to the context of modern Mori experience: just as all men are fated to be forgotten or reduced to vestiges of their former glory, Mori culture of the past is fallen and crumbled and cannot be remade in the present. In seeing his childhood friend, the narrator is haunted by “a sandstorm which has uncovered those shattered remains of a life we once shared.”53 In his mind, the character replays the moment of recognition, where he saw his friend’s shame and bitterness, but he can neither undo nor forget it. The story’s duality, between childhood and adulthood, Mori tradition and Pakeha modernity, represents the “faultline”54 that Ihimaera evokes as the consequence of a broken unity with past, rural, wholly Mori communities. Ihimaera’s Romantic vision imagines that a reconnection with pre-contact Mori values of land, ancestry, and mythology may offer a way out of the cultural desert of Shelley’s poem. In the project of nation-building, such rupture between a positive past and an unsatisfactory present provides the basis for cyclical revolution and renaissance, of reinvesting the past with the values of the present. The way New Zealand critics have avoided signalling Ihimaera’s debt to Romanticism reveals a negative perception of pastoral lyricism in New Zealand literature. This silence is doubly inscribed in the national literary consciousness of the twentieth century. First, it corresponds to the rejection of early – often amateur – efforts at depicting a local sentiment at the turn of the twentieth century, in the writing known as Maoriland. Secondly, it accords with the separatist drives of Mori sovereignty and renaissance, intent on pointing out aspects of Mori literature deemed new rather than shared with the European tradition. There is, similarly, little mention of Ihimaera’s use of mid-twentieth-century Pakeha cultural nationalism, the realist mode that emerged out of the Depression, from Allen Curnow and Frank Sargeson’s generation of the 1930s. As a development in the national imaginary away from colonial settler culture, the literary landscape of this mid-century genera-

53 54

Ihimaera, “I, Ozymandias,” 175. Ihimaera, “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception,” 50.

16

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tion embraced values of masculinity and hard work, in vernacular depictions of clearing and taming a rugged land.55 As the New Zealand literary tradition necessarily grew from its European (predominantly British) roots, its early writing continued this style, adapting its content to the antipodean climate: for instance, by replacing English motifs (skylarks, blossom trees) with antipodean ones (bellbirds, kowhai). By the 1930s, in a reaction against the predominantly Georgian Romanticism of Maoriland writing, epitomized by Quentin Pope’s 1930 collection Kowhai Gold, the next generation of poets strained to prove their independence from both England and their colonial legacy, to shrug off the loftiness of Romantic sensibility. Pakeha nationalism rejected the Romantic tenets of Maoriland in favour of harsh realism, sensitivity replaced by a sensible, no-nonsense masculine figure of the man alone. Allen Curnow, the poet and critic who spearheaded the movement, sums up the shift from Romantic to realist: By visions is meant, of course, things actually seen and faithfully reported: not Ezekiel wheels but real wheels, not turnip spooks but turnips at market prices. It is out of such things that vision is required of a poet here and now.56

Within the new direction of recording the “here and now,” Curnow claims that his 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse is the first “comprehensive” anthology to feature poetry unique to New Zealand. When he claims that “reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces,”57 the “we” he proudly and confidently puts in the agentive position is the Pakeha poet who feels that both he (and, only on rare occasions, she), and his poetry’s vision “belongs, here, uniquely to the islands of New Zealand.”58 55

In an ambitious and sophisticated feat of double ‘reverse engineering’, this tradition has undergone a renaissance in the visual work of Marian Maguire, many of whose lithographs combine ‘heroic’ Grecian, Maori, and colonial-European traditions of land-taking and cultivation in a form of ‘anti-bucolics’. See esp. Maguire, The Odyssey of Captain Cook: lithographs, with an essay by Anna Smith (Christchurch: PaperGraphica, 2005) and The Labours of Herakles as a New Zealand Pioneer, with essays by Elizabeth Rankin and Patrick O’Sullivan (Christchurch: PaperGraphica, 2008). 56 Allen Curnow, Look Back Harder: Critical Essays 1935–1984, ed. Peter Simpson (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1987): 10. 57 Curnow, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, ed. Curnow, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960): 17. 58 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, ed. Curnow, 17.



Mori Nationalism

17

This search for local reality is twofold, incorporating both a recognizable locale and persona: a truly national literature predicated on a defined and definable New Zealand location and peopled by New Zealanders. The recognizable tropes of the national identity fostered by Pakeha writers of Curnow’s generation are equally evident in Ihimaera’s Mori version of a rural setting, working-class male heroes, and local vernacular. Ihimaera’s settings read like a roll-call of rural activities common to the New Zealand masculine tradition from Sargeson and John Mulgan through to Barry Crump. Scrub-cutting, mustering, shearing, man’s battle against the elements, living in whare ‘huts’, men relaxing after a hard day’s work, rugby, beer and pub culture, feature in all of Ihimaera’s fiction of the 1970s. The Mori writer’s use of these themes of hardship and mateship appears closely modelled on Sargeson’s short stories. As in Sargeson, Ihimaera’s narrators are often children or young adults socially out of their depth.59 Through the child’s-eye perspective, the writer achieves an undercurrent of tension, brought about by ellipses of narrative viewpoint, as the reader fills in the underlying meaning that the child’s gaps in knowledge fail to identify, or which the adult is reluctant – or unable – to put into words. This technique generates a sense of sorrow, which, for Ihimaera revolves around the social gulf between Mori and Pakeha, whereas for Sargeson it marked a working-class / middle-class discrepancy and hypocrisy. Thus, Ihimaera’s narrators in “Yellow Brick Road,” “The Escalator,” and “Return from Oz” mirror Sargeson’s in “Last Adventure” and “An Attempt at an Explanation.”60 In stories such as these, both writers make heroes of the poor and the dispossessed: in eliciting readers’ sympathy for the narrator, Ihimaera and Sargeson support the underprivileged. Ihimaera extends Sargeson’s heroizing of the rural working class to make a claim for Mori as typical New Zealanders, reminding readers of the demotic values on which mid-twentieth-century national identity was built; a rural setting where the working man’s hard labour and clear sense of community values and mateship stake a claim for democratic equality.61 The protestant work ethic of the outdoors labouring man, coupled with the idealized, iconic identification with the land rather than an urban setting, indi59

This narrative perspective also registers a debt to Katherine Mansfield shared by both writers, as discussed at length in Chapter 2. 60 Frank Sargeson, The Stories of Frank Sargeson (1964; Auckland: Penguin, 1982). 61 In another parallel, both Sargeson’s and Ihimaera’s homosexuality permits a rereading of their stories with an eye to homosexual undercurrents in the ribaldry and rivalry of close mateship.

18

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



cates a point of similarity between Ihimaera’s Mori fiction and the Pakeha nationalist tradition. Commentators on Ihimaera’s early work often point to the short story “One Summer Morning” from his first collection, Pounamu, Pounamu, as exemplary for its mastery of several unusual narrative points of view, which critics imply are original to Mori writing.62 What critics do not mention, however, is that the subject of the almost hyperreal monologue – a rural boy’s impatience to become a man – is fully inscribed in the New Zealand masculine tradition. There is little lyricism in this story, which takes its narrative frame from describing the narrator, Hema’s, sequence of morning tasks. The move into manhood is symbolized in his mission to move out of the short pants of his boyhood into long trousers. Rural life is depicted as a world of responsibilities. In the opening pages, Hema spells out his chores (light the stove, boil the water, have a cold wash, milk the cows) and the home and farm conditions (no heating, a wood stove, outside wash-house, broken guttering, falling-apart fences). The primacy of the masculine world is consolidated at the end of the story. When Hema finally works up the courage to ask his father for a pair of pants, “I’m a man now. I’m thirteen years old. Can’t you see?”63 his father’s response is to spell out a man’s role: — From now on, I expect you to act like a man. No more cheek to your mother, no more putting water into the milk, no more quarrelling with your sister, and a lot more work and responsible action! Okay? And you can get started now. After kai, you go down to the shed and feed the dogs. Then saddle my horse so it’s ready for me. Then after that, you better come back and do the chores you usually leave for night-time. Chop the wood, make your bed, clean out the grate in the sitting room, feed the hens. . . 64

Although both the setting and the parents’ expectations were quite normal in rural New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s, Ihimaera is confident that his (predominantly urban) readers of the 1970s onwards will sympathize with the boy. This added distance accentuates the boy’s contentedness: modern readers cannot help but admire his gutsiness, and it is here that Hema reflects the national cult of ‘the good keen man’. In the national imaginary, stoicism is the dominant, positive attitude towards the difficulties of working-class life. 62

Bill Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 169; Jannetta, “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction,” 19. 63 Ihimaera, “One Summer Morning,” in Pounamu, Pounamu (Auckland: Heinemann, 1972): 102. 64 “One Summer Morning,” 103.



Mori Nationalism

19

Ihimaera’s use of stoic heroism sets up a sharp contrast between positive rural hardship and negative urban comfort, in effect valorizing Mori poverty, construed as more desirable than values of Pakeha modernity. The unique cultural identity that gives shape to the national character cannot be dissociated from the shape of the land in the national imaginary. Certainly, colonists, settlers, Pakeha, and Mori interpret the land differently, each imposing their own landscape on nature. The motivation, however, is shared, as establishing an imaginative connection with one’s homeland is a feature of all projects of nation-building. Throughout the twentieth century, the quest for a truly New Zealand identity turned on a desire to come to terms with the land, defined in literature, the fine arts, and, in the Mori tradition, in oratory, performance arts, and carving. The importance of the land to Ihimaera’s Mori imaginary is not so much unique as a direct response to (and away from) Maoriland and Pakeha cultural-nationalist predecessors. As colonial settlers grew into their new environment, they imagined their way into the land through the European traditions of the walking tour, landscape painting, and gardening. In the tradition of the Romantic sublime, spectacular landscapes evoke feelings of awe and mystery, which quickly slide into mysticism. For example, the early poet Jessie Mackay attempts to convey a spiritual connection with nature, but one that hides its meaning from the new arrivals (1903) – the great water scarred slopes [of Te-Marua] are like the face of a giant old Maori warrior, seamed with the sacred moko and gashed in many a long-past fight. A passion of Ossianic melancholy glorifies the Northern soul with a nameless romance. Te-Marua broods over the past; the river sings loud of ancient things.65

– while she points to the melancholy, nameless romance and indecipherable singing issuing from the landscape, by the mid-twentieth century the Pakeha cultural nationalists had become insensitive to this. Hence, New Zealand is “a land of settlers / With never a soul at home”66 and the landscape is a terra nullius, in which “the plains are nameless and the cities cry out for mean-

65

Jessie Mackay, quoted in Jane Stafford & Mark Williams, ‘“Fashioned Intimacies: Maoriland and Colonial Modernity,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 38. 66 Allen Curnow, “House and Land” (1941), in Curnow, Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941–1997 (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1997): 235.

20

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



ing.”67 Although mid-century Pakeha aimed to be at ease in their environment, their depiction of nature retains a certain hauteur. Roger Horrocks illustrates this point in his important essay “The Invention of New Zealand” by stringing together some first lines of poetry from the index of Curnow’s 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse: Alone we are born, 286 Always, in these islands, meeting and parting, 179 And again I see the long pouring headland, 281 In this scarred country, this cold threshold land, 285 Instructed to speak of God with emphasis, 261 It got you at last, Bill, 22968

Like Mackay’s description of Te Marua, the poets behind these lines guard their wary distance, pointing to a heroic relationship of man against nature, of man isolated by nature, which is menacing in its grandeur. This perspective prompts John Newton to argue that, even though the Pakeha realist project claimed to shrug off Maoriland literary precedents, cultural-nationalist writing sublimates rather than replaces the awe and mystery of Maoriland Romanticism.69 From their work on settlement studies, Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Stephen Turner find the Maoriland and Pakeha nationalists’ reaction to the land typical of white settler societies. The nascent New Zealander cannot call on the usual nationalist claim to authority via a mythic or historical past, because that past is predicated on the disruption brought about by colonial forebears, and on the presence of the indigenous population. For settlers and, later, Pakeha, making themselves at home in the new land instead hinges on a rupture with that undesirable beginning, of somehow becoming native, which is problematic because the land is already inhabited.70 In an early articulation 67

Charles Brasch, “The Silent Land,” in A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–50, ed. Allen Curnow (Christchurch: Caxton, 1951): 133. 68 Roger Horrocks, “The Invention of New Zealand,” A N D (1983): 24. 69 John Newton, “Colonialism Above the Snowline: Baughan, Ruskin and the South Island Myth,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.2 (1999): 85–96. 70 See Alex Calder & Stephen Turner, “Introduction,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (Special Issue, “Settlement Studies,” 2002): 7–17; Jonathan Lamb, “The Idea of Utopia in the European Settlement of New Zealand,” in Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas & Hilary Ericksen (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 1999): 79–



Mori Nationalism

21

of this difficulty, Pearson’s 1952 essay on the Pakeha character, “Fretful Sleepers,” identifies the fear of non-belonging as expressed in their hostile lack of eloquence in describing and defining their relationship with the land: caught between the mountains and the sea, never far from the silence of the bush and the stars, we are in the bland frightening witness of the infinite, and we haven’t created a social convention strong enough to reassure us [. . . ]. But the hostility is not in the landscape: our countryside is as admirable and lovable as any in the world. It is we who are hostile, because we haven’t made up our minds whether we have accepted it, whether we mean to stay, why we are here anyway, or what life is all about.71

A lack of strong cultural and artistic conventions and traditions means that writing landscape for both Maoriland and cultural-nationalist poets turns on writing loss and disorientation. The settlers’ nostalgia for Britain, and the mid-century Pakeha denial of both their British origin and their indigenous counterpart, prevented them from becoming part of their national location: while colonists and settlers could only stand back to paint or sketch the landscape from the distance of European artistic conventions,72 in an anecdote in Fretful Sleepers Pearson describes a Pakeha excursion to a site of natural beauty on the West Coast, which enters nature, only for most visitors to head to the bar to drink and listen to the wireless.73 The emergence before the mainstream public gaze of Mori cultural mores with the sovereignty movement and Mori renaissance in the 1970s reinserts continuity into the landscape. Ihimaera writes the Mori back into the landscape by centering a Mori perspective on nature in the interstices left by inchoate white New Zealanders, effectively bringing to the surface the Mori voice which was undecipherable to Maoriland writers and silent to the Pakeha nationalists. Mackay hears an “Ossianic melancholy” in the ancient song in the cliffs and river of Te Marua, which she finds haunting because she does 97; Lamb, “Problems of Originality: or, Beware of Pakeha baring Guilts,” Landfall 40.3 (September 1986): 352–58; Turner, “Settlement as Forgetting,” in Quicksands, 20–38. 71 Bill Pearson, Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays, 28. 72

See Newton, “Colonialism Above the Snowline: Baughan, Ruskin and the South Island Myth,” and Ian Wedde, “The Isle of Poplars: Does Landscape Exist?” in Wedde, How to be Nowhere: Essays and Texts, 1971–1994 (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1995): 262–72. 73 Pearson, Fretful Sleepers, 28.

22

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



not understand it. Mackay’s Mori Ossian loses its mysticism for Ihimaera, whose access to the language and culture enables him to interpret the song. Nevertheless, his personification of the earth, like Mackay’s, is a similar allegorical conflation of the natural Mori (tangata whenua) and nature: [Huia’s] is a handsome face, framed with a long, black scarf. The features are sculpted of earth and sky; the chiselled planes softened by wind, rain and sun. It is a face that has seen the passing of the seasons and understands that all things decay and fall of their own accord. A calm face, which accepts the inevitable rhythms of life: that the sun rises and sets, night follows day, and that winter always comes.74

Ihimaera’s passage reverses Mackay’s simile, so that, instead of nature’s being like Mori, it is Mori who are metaphorically akin to nature. This allows a turn of perspective, so that, whereas Mackay’s Mori are too natural to adapt to changing times, for Ihimaera, Mori have survived because of their very naturalness. He indicates that being attuned to nature, and accepting “the inevitable rhythms of life,” offers Mori an insight into the cyclical nature of life, something which contains in it the seeds of social and natural revolution. While Curnow’s men were setting out for the mountains, clearing the bush, and battling with the harsh elements, Ihimaera’s description of man’s interaction with the landscape of the same mid-century period is much more prosaic and less intrusive. Whereas Pakeha nationalism was about making a mark on the land, in Ihimaera’s fiction it is nature that makes its mark on the Mori – literally, in the above passage (or, moko-like, symbolically), on the woman’s features. Ihimaera’s characters eke out their existence in a kind of earthy patriotism reminiscent of the Russian nationalist writers, and, as mentioned earlier, Sargeson’s stories emerging from the deprivations of the Depression years. In “The House with Sugarbag Windows,” Ihimaera describes the way that, in the rural Mori community of the 1950s, “life [was] ruled by the seasons”:75 The earth was good to them and kind but even she could not sustain them through all her seasons. Winter, when earth grew old, was the leanest season of all [. . . ]. Then it was a matter of keeping warm, carrying on and waiting for the earth to grow young again.

74 75

Ihimaera, Tangi, 24. Ihimaera, “The House with Sugarbag Windows,” in The New Net Goes Fishing, 161.



Mori Nationalism

23

But it was the way of things. The family lived in stoic acceptance, knowing that after winter summer always came.76

In such passages, Ihimaera revives Romantic lyricism to make hardship look positive, as Mori embrace provinciality, which is aligned with the community spirit of whnau or extended family. Nationalism valorizes the rural enclave which is home to the archetypal national persona. Mori nationalism, then, claims for its own a landscape rejected by the dominant discourse. The sites of continuity between Mori and the land that feature in the Mori artistic landscape are often the unwanted, forgotten rural communities. The same technique has been used by other colonized cultures. By way of describing the importance of creating a positive image of home, the Martinican writer and critic Édouard Glissant writes: “the potential of landscape resides in the way in which it works against neutralizing generalization”; the poétique of landscape overrides the “physical” land.77 The poétique of the imaginary valorizes aspects of the local landscape to fit with each particular national self-identification. In the Caribbean context of colonial dislocation, Glissant describes the difficulty for Martinicans in forming an attachment to the island on which they are not native and have no autonomy. Thus, for Patrick Chamoiseau in his novel Texaco, the representative Martinican landscape is the mushrooming slum cities of rhizomatic bricolage. This postcolonial valorization of sites overlooked by the colonizers follows a strategy used during the earlier period of European nation-building, when neighbouring countries made national symbols of different features of their shared landscapes.78 Ihimaera’s national landscape is Waituhi, the small North Island East-Coast village he grew up in. Waituhi is neither idyllically picturesque, of the kind Maoriland sought, nor majestically rugged, as in those landscapes depicted by Pakeha cultural nationalists. Nevertheless, the village epitomizes Ihimaera’s positive provincialism because it is a site of unbroken, albeit impoverished,

76

“The House with Sugarbag Windows,” 160–61. “Le possible d’un paysage, c’est ce par quoi il fait qu’on s’oppose à la généralisation neutralisante”; Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981): 261. (My tr.) 78 Thiesse gives many examples, such as Hungary, which, like Austria, has mountains, but, after independence from the Austrian empire, the symbol of which is imposing, grandiose mountains, Hungary chose the plains as symbolic of a wild, vast, harsh liberty. Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales, 191. 77

24

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Mori settlement, and so represents the emotional and physical continuity in the face of struggle that validates Mori sovereignty. In stories throughout Ihimaera’s first collection, Pounamu, Pounamu, readers are introduced to key components of Waituhi, with special attention being paid to the homestead, the Rongopai marae with its meeting-house, and the graveyard. The village is depicted as rundown and ordinary. The first full description of the village is given in Tangi: A Maori village a few miles from Gisborne. There are no shops, no reason at all for Waituhi to be here except that this is the hearth of the Whanau A Kai. This is their home and here they live. A road runs through the whanau and the houses are strung out like beads along the road. Some of the houses are very old, with paint peeling from the boards and rusting corrugated roofs. Others are State houses, shining and new. Some are just tin shacks, with newspaper and pictures from magazines as wallpaper. Dirt tracks lead from the road and along them live others of my family [. . . ]. Th[e] river, for me, is like that river which once flowed through Eden. And this place, Waituhi, is my Eden. Just as there was a gateway to Eden, so also is there a gate to Waituhi. The road curves round a small hill where an old colonial home now stands. Once, there used to be a Maori stockade upon that hill. You can still see the terraces where the tall wooden fences used to be.79

Waituhi is Ihimaera’s national landscape because it is a wholly Mori domain: Pakeha would have no reason to stop there. As such, the village is a model setting for the Mori national imaginary, bringing together a Romantic pastoral version of spiritualized, animate nature and nostalgia, and a present compromised by Pakeha modernization. Thus, State houses, tin shacks, peeling paint, and dirt tracks sit alongside the evocation of Eden and the still visible remnants of a proud past. The landscape of Waituhi contains an entire ideology, in which the lean-tos and the homestead’s flaking paint denote family solidarity and a strong work ethic, despite a legacy of colonial oppression. Waituhi bears its scars and poverty with the pride that comes from survival. The poétique works on the physical to valorize the landscape; in this way, the ostensibly derelict village is described positively, imbued with value far superior to its real value in economic terms. The success of Ihimaera’s Mori landscape can be measured by the extent to which his vision has been assimilated by Pakeha. The 2002 film of a later 79

Ihimaera, Tangi, 114–15.



Mori Nationalism

25

Ihimaera novel, The Whale Rider (1987), is set in Whangara, a village neighbouring Waituhi. However, while Ihimaera’s depiction of life in a rural Mori enclave contains social criticism of Mori marginalization and the devastating effect of urban drift on rural communities, the 2002 film version of the novel is wholly positive. In an example of what Prentice calls the way “the ‘not romantic’ can be romanticised,”80 the ‘natural look’ has become desirable. Contemporary New Zealand fashion for rural retreats, ‘kiwiana’, home renovation, and native planting has revalorized the whare, bach and rural outpost of cultural nationalism and Mori provincialism, so that villages such as the one featured in the film and depicted in Ihimaera’s writing are alluring rather than off-putting. Mori landscape has provided a way for New Zealand to find a national landscape through an indigenous rather than an imported British model. Since the international success of the film Whale Rider made Ihimaera and his East-Coast locale widely known, Hawkes Bay tourism today advertises scenic drives and guided tours of sites which feature in the film. The historical development of New Zealand’s national imaginary from a Maoriland to a Mori landscape is expressed in the distance between the early-twentieth-century walking tour chronicled, for example, in Blanche Baughan’s travel guide, The Finest Walk in the World (1923), and the twentyfirst-century equivalent, guided visits to Whangara.

National Mori Literature Ihimaera’s arrival on the national literary scene is a key moment in the history of New Zealand literature. His constant reiteration, in interviews, editorial introductions, and author’s notes, of his early work’s publication and reception creates, in effect, a founding myth of the emergence of Mori fiction. In accordance with the common nationalist rhetoric of struggle, he describes the difficulty he experienced in getting his manuscripts accepted by a Pakeha publishing industry reluctant to take the risk on Mori writing.81 Yet the purported difficulty of having Mori fiction published, understandable within a nationalist context, is somewhat incongruous with the larger, international 80

Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 104. Witi Ihimaera & D.S. Long, “Contemporary Maori Writing: A Context,” in Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing, ed. Ihimaera & Long (Auckland: Heinemann, 1982): 1; Ihimaera, “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception,” 51; Mark Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Landfall 179 (September 1991): 282. 81

26

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



picture in which minority literatures emerged in mainstream Western publishing in the 1960s, of which Ihimaera’s first publisher, Heinemann Educational, was a significant player.82 Another anecdote that Ihimaera circulates as a defining moment in both his career and, by extension, the development of the Mori genre concerns his placing a ten-year embargo on his work, from The New Net Goes Fishing, written in 1975, to The Matriarch, published in 1986. By way of explanation, he cites a pivotal incident in his career in the mid1970s, of receiving stories written by schoolchildren which mimicked his own.83 This event gave him cause for concern about the implications for Mori writing: I didn’t want to be the only one on-stage and I didn’t want to be the only representation that was around. [. . . ] I realized that because there wasn’t sufficient work there, the iconic representations that young children were growing up with were those that I had constructed myself.84

Despite Ihimaera’s self-imposed embargo, he remained active in promoting Mori literature, and thereby influential in the propagation of a literature of nation-building. Ihimaera and Don Long co-edited the first anthology of Mori writing edited by Mori, Into the World of Light (1982), in which the editors claim to be motivated by the Mori “tribal” and “cooperative” sense of responsibility to support other Mori writers.85 The anthology is focused on consolidating Mori renaissance and sovereignty imperatives, confirming Ihimaera’s claim of not being the first short-story writer by displaying a significant body of Mori writing. In keeping with Thiesse’s terms of cultural recuperation, in the introduction Ihimaera and Long describe the collection as the recovery (literally bringing into the world of light) of an “underground movement.”86 The fiction is largely preoccupied with the same issues and tensions as in Ihimaera’s own fiction of the time. Almost all of the texts are about Mori identity, foregrounding Mori language, myth, customs, and protocol, and describing central Mori concerns, particularly those of whnau and whenua. The Introduction’s general tone, along with much of the work in 82

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 50–55. 83 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 171; Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 289–90. 84 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 171. 85 “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 171. 86 Ihimaera & Long, “Contemporary Maori Writing: A Context,” 2.



Mori Nationalism

27

Into the World of Light, is aggressive. It describes Mori culture as involved in a momentous struggle for recognition, as is evident in words such as “fight,” “malaise,” “trauma,” “crisis point,” “dislocation,” and “disruption.” This leads to the “period of political and cultural protest”87 of the burgeoning 1970s Mori renaissance, which includes the arrival of a written Mori literature that “burst upon the landscape.”88 As Prentice points out, the term ‘renaissance’ in this anthology emphasizes “rupture and renewal” rather than continuity.89 This anthology takes the first tentative steps towards defining Mori literature on its own terms. Its aggressive terminology advocates sovereignty as separatism rather than as bicultural understanding and mediation. Ten years later, Ihimaera’s second anthology, co-edited with Long, Irihapeti Ramsden, and Haare Williams and published in five volumes from 1992 to 1996, expands the same themes. Like the earlier collection, the title Te Ao Mārama also means ‘the world of light’. The anthology demonstrates a growing confidence and interest in exploring new forms and new directions for Mori writing. However, these remain on the level of describing cultural strength rather than defined by strictly literary aesthetic preoccupations. For example, the second, non-fiction volume, He Whakataatanga o te Ao – Regaining Aotearoa, subtitled Maori Writers Speak Out, is a collection of social treatises from the 1970s and 1980s on sovereignty issues. One reviewer on the dust-jacket claims that this volume is “indispensable” for students of politics interested in New Zealand race relations, an assertion which recalls Barry Mitcalfe’s similar comment about Ihimaera’s own fiction of the 1970s. Similarly, the third volume includes poetry by street kids brought together by Apirana Taylor to participate in a social project for a whnau concept of mentoring and community support for young urban Mori on the fringe. Making good poetry was a by-product rather than the main initiative of this group, something which supports Arvidson’s early point that much Mori literature is less concerned with its own perfection than with its social and political purpose – a literary rebellion challenging the European “‘well-wrought urn’ approach.”90 As a whole, the anthology builds a picture of the strength of Mori culture as manifested in writing, rather than of the strength of Mori writing 87

“Contemporary Maori Writing: A Context,” 3. Into the World of Light, 5. 89 Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 89. 90 Ken Arvidson, “Aspects of Contemporary Māori Writing in English,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Mark Williams & Graham McGregor (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 120. 88

28

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



itself. Indeed, the rhetorical kaupapa or mission statement that stands in place of an introduction bears out the central attachment and obligations to culture rather than to literature. The Mori writer’s commitment to kaupapa inscribes his or her work in the promotion of Moritanga in forms acceptable to Mori organizations and tribal elders who, by virtue of their deep knowledge of central Mori concepts, are the “custodians” of retaining tikanga and tapu.91 As Ihimaera puts it in one of his first lectures: whether we liked it or not, we were given a clear instruction from our people [. . . ] “We are doing this for our people. For the Maori people.” What I am often surprised about is that I have yet to hear a pakeha person say “I am doing this for the Pakeha people of New Zealand.”92

The importance of social and political imperatives to both the writer and his or her fiction gives a nationalist shape to such literature. Into the World of Light and Te Ao Mārama, like Ihimaera’s own early fiction, offered a model and guidelines for up-and-coming Mori writers. Ihimaera’s prominence in shaping the emergent Mori literary genre echoes Curnow’s authoritative role during the earlier Pakeha cultural-nationalist period. His Penguin anthology in particular is a seminal text in New Zealand literature, a national reference-point from which other major anthologies, such as Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen’s 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, take their bearings. Ihimaera’s anthologies play a similar foundational, shaping role in the genre of Mori fiction. In a 1991 interview, Ihimaera explains the importance of Te Ao Mārama. In reflecting on the intimidating task of editing the five-volume series, he surmises that the anthology will reflect a transitional, momentary phase of Mori literature: this might be the very last time that we can have an anthology which is called “Contemporary Maori Writing and Oral Literature”, because it seems that our writers are moving far beyond what we normally accept as being the traditional context of Maori writing. [. . . ] It may well be the only occasion where the opportunity has been given to view the hopes and dreams and realities of a people. Our world is moving so fast.93

91

Ihimaera et al. Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing Volume 3: The Flowering (Auckland: Reed, 1993): 15. 92 Ihimaera, “Maori Life and Literature,” 48. 93 Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 293, 294.



Mori Nationalism

29

Ihimaera sees this as a period to be passed through, thus envisaging the recuperation and publication of texts in Te Ao Mārama as intended for posterity, to map the changes of the 1980s, which he calls “one of the most crucial in our history.”94 In the kaupapa introduction to the final volume, the editors write: The time has come to recognise that Māori writing cannot continue to be lumped under one generic heading. For instance, Māori writing in Māori is different from Māori writing in English. And within the genre of Māori writing in English there is a whole range of work. One size does not fit all. Even Māori writing in Māori observes different dialects and genres.95

The expectation, then, is of an ever-expanding meaning of Mori literature, one that builds on the foundation that Ihimaera’s own fiction of the 1970s was so instrumental in establishing. Whereas in the early 1970s Ihimaera was one of only a few Mori writers well-known on the national stage, the cultural rejuvenation inspired by the Mori renaissance and supported by biculturalism has led to the flourishing of Mori literature, a genre which today boasts many writers with solid knowledge of language, myths, protocol, and traditions. Ihimaera identifies fiction concerned with recuperating tradition and engaging in race relations as a passing phase, and anticipates future experimentation in Mori literature. In a similar manner to Thiesse or Anderson, albeit more militant in its formulations, Frantz Fanon’s exposition of the importance of national consciousness to restore the “psycho-affective equilibrium”96 that colonialism destroyed has been crucial in legitimating the discourse of nation-building in a postcolonial context. In particular, Fanon’s enumeration of three phases of emergent national struggle in the art and literature of colonized peoples has proven to be a template applicable to many decolonization efforts and their literatures.97 Despite the combative tone of Fanon’s incitement to nationalist struggle, even the third stage of “revolutionary” national literature is not intended to be isolationist. In fact, for Fanon,

94

Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 294. Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing Volume 5: Te Tōrino – The Spiral (Auckland: Reed, 1996): 17. 96 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre, tr, Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963, New York: Grove): 148. 97 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 239–41. 95

30

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery of universalizing values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows.98

Drawing on Fanon, Chinua Achebe also notes the necessary but temporary phase of national consciousness. He describes the claims of the Negritude movement to an “African personality” as “props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again. Once we are up, we shan’t need any of them.”99 Nation-building is seen as a natural and necessary phase for all cultures to pass through: not an end in itself but, rather, the prerequisite to open engagement with the outside, the international, and the global. In a literary equivalent of Fanon’s emphasis on the limitations of nationalism, Casanova describes the evolution of literary concerns from a first generation of national writers, who “refer to a political idea of literature in order to create a particular national identity,” to a later generation who “refer to autonomous international literary laws”:100 Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism.101

In a similar evocation of a natural line of development in minority literature, Jane Wilkinson, in her early interview with Ihimaera, cites William McGaw’s conception of four key stages in new literatures. He enumerates the minority aim to combat “cultural erosion” and “set the record straight,” followed by “cultural adaptation and adjustment,” which is later replaced by an increasingly “urban and social focus,” and a final phase in which “the individual and personal focus replaces the social.”102 In the interview, Ihimaera agrees with this schema, noting that, already by 1984, the “catch up” phase of his own early fiction was giving way to McGaw’s later phases of adaptation and urban 98

The Wretched of the Earth, 247–48. Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–87 (London: Heinemann, 1988): 30. 100 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 325. 101 The World Republic of Letters, 200. 102 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 108. 99



Mori Nationalism

31

settings.103 Indeed, Ihimaera’s 1991 forecast that Te Ao Mārama is a product of its times that will quickly become historicized iterates a belief that Mori literature will move on from its nationalist beginnings. By the end of the 1990s, a period that in the final Te Ao Mārama of 1992 Ihimaera had expected to be transitory, he describes being puzzled “that the players in the field are still the same as they were when we [Ihimaera and Grace] started to write.”104 Not only are the writers the same, but so, too, is the style and content of their writing. Ihimaera enumerates the priorities of “a literature of race relations,” “writing [as] a decolonization process” with an obligation to subvert non-Mori structures and perspectives.105 Similarly, Lydia Wevers, in a 2001 article that traces contemporary Mori fiction collected in the Huia publishers’ biennial Mori short-story anthology, concludes that for this writing the “primary imperatives,” which include the after-effects of colonization, the maintenance of group identity, and the politics of land and dispossession, are “still firmly locked on to the politics of being Maori.”106 This reiterates her argument, almost ten years previously, that Mori fiction is chiefly concerned with expressing “what it is to be Maori. [.. .] a fight to retain and continue the past into the present, to force a space for Maoritanga.”107 While neither Ihimaera nor Wevers offers reasons for Mori writing’s development in this manner, Patrick Evans provides a useful context by situating Mori fiction within the nation-building impetus of Moritanga. Evans is primarily concerned with arguing that Mori fiction risks becoming caught in “conventionalized” tropes.108 He demonstrates how many new writers continue to work in the mould of earlier Mori fiction – for example, James George’s Romantic, lyrical novels and Craig Marriner’s harsh realism, which focuses on urban destructiveness mitigated only by epiphanic encounters with nature.109 By connecting Mori fiction’s familiar landscapes, recourse to naturalness, Mori names, and Mori vocabulary to constructions of Mori103

Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 109. Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 169. 105 “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 175. 106 Lydia Wevers, “Talking About GenX,” in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph (Cross / Cultures 47; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2001): 387. 107 Wevers, “Short Fiction by Maori Writers,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.2 (Spring 1993): 31. 108 Evans, “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” 79. 109 “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” 79. 104

32

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tanga, Evans describes the continuing force of nationalism that forms and informs Mori consciousness. Evans’s argument for ongoing adherence to artistic tropes of the Mori renaissance suggests that the past tense of Prentice’s article “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” is a little hasty.110 Prentice correctly notes a shift, in the context in which Mori cultural output is considered, from a national to an increasingly global perspective. However, whereas Prentice argues that globalization has now become “the dominant cultural dynamic,”111 the vigour of Mori-centred fiction in the tropes pioneered by Ihimaera in the 1970s suggests that the core of Mori literature retains its nationalist role. Indeed, even Ihimaera’s fiction of the 2000s continues to draw heavily on his early work, and his narrative perspective, voice, and writing style, as well as characters, settings, and engagement with issues of tradition, modernity, and sovereignty, are continually recycled: the nationalist features identified in the present chapter are as evident in his revised Tangi, which consists of the first part of The Rope of Man (2005), as they were in the original Tangi of 1973. Similarly, Mori anthologies of the late 1990s and 2000s largely follow in the footsteps of Into the World of Light and Te Ao Mārama. The nationalistic impetus of the kind described in the previous sections continues to underpin much Mori fiction in English published in the 2000s. Huia’s biennial Mori writing competition carries on the kaupapa of Ihimaera’s vision of Mori fiction. Since its inception in 1995, the Huia competition, and the collection published from this, Huia Short Stories, has provided a forum for new writers. The introduction to the first collection states its purpose thus: Huia Publishers has chosen a role in encouraging Māori writers and will continue to provide opportunities for them [. . . ]. Māori writers must develop their skills and build on the body of Māori fiction that, in the past, has been given life by so few. We hope that, in time, these writers will contribute to the development of the literature of Aotearoa New Zealand.112

110

On defining the period of the Mori Renaissance, see also Mark Williams, “The Long Maori Renaissance,” in Other Renaissances, ed. Zhou Gang, Sander Gilman & Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Palgrave, 2006): 207–26. 111 Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 97. 112 Huia Short Stories 1995 (Wellington: Huia, 1995): 8. Only the first three Huia anthologies have introductions; later volumes do not have any introductory note.



Mori Nationalism

33

In keeping with the tradition established by Into the World of Light and Te Ao Mārama, Huia’s collections continue to depend on a definition of Mori writing which necessarily begins with the writers’ own lineage. Submissions to the competition are judged predominantly by Mori writers, including Ihimaera, Grace, and Keri Hulme, whose own success played a key role in establishing the Mori literary genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Huia’s aims, in the above passage, suggest that there continues to be a need to separately and actively encourage and promote Mori writing, a conviction shared by the national arts funding body, Creative New Zealand, which supports Huia’s project. This claim is partly explained by the editors’ insistence that Mori writers are a rare breed. The first two introductions emphasize the dearth of Mori writers in the past: “the few Māori writers of fiction who have been published have carried the impossible burden of reflecting all the experiences that are Māori.”113 This was an understandable statement in Ihimaera’s 1982 anthology, but rings less true in 1995, in the wake of Te Ao Mārama’s 1,000piece effort from almost three hundred contributors. Another resemblance to the earlier anthologies is Huia’s use of the rhetoric of Mori radicalism, evident in its terminology of marginalization, echoing that of Into the World of Light – for example, “cultural displacements,” “imaginative autonomy,” “counter-colonised,”114 “identity, empowerment and loss,” “appropriation.”115 Together, the above priorities situate contemporary Mori writing in a national rather than international context: as the jacket of the 2001 Huia Short Stories 4 proclaims, “these stories could have come from no other country.” Location-specific writing implies that Mori writing must be identifiably Mori, and, indeed, the common themes identified in this writing support a national outlook of self-definition. Huia’s claim for cultural specificity echoes Curnow’s key definition of the New Zealand imaginary as “local and special” in his introduction to the 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. The aim for cultural self-representation has meant working largely within the recognizable style established in the earlier anthologies: as the first Huia introduction states, “the focus is almost exclusively on Māori communities.”116 The relationships that Mori characters have in these texts reflect the communities which are perceived as meaningful to Mori: if there is to be any salvation 113

Huia Short Stories 1995 (Wellington: Huia, 1997): 7. Huia Short Stories 1997, 8. 115 Huia Short Stories 3 (Wellington: Huia, 1999): vii–viii. 116 Huia Short Stories 1995, 7. 114

34

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



from disconnection from the land, loss of Mori heritage, and the contemporary minefield of domestic violence, poverty, unemployment, and lack of opportunity, this is to come from support within the Mori community, centred on family and tribal affiliations, and drawing strength from a shared cultural past which is potentially self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Pakeha are largely outside this world-view. Indeed, much of Huia’s fiction is written in the tropes of Ihimaera’s early work. The lyrical voice continues to be associated with depictions of Mori communities, summed up by Huia as stories which “describe situations of work, travel and the marae with the warmth and good humour of whānau.”117 Alternately, the harsh realism of The New Net Goes Fishing is ever-present: as the editors note, some of this fiction “reveal[s] the pain of Māori and the brutal, abusive settings and relationships they are experiencing.”118 Huia thus explicitly associates Mori writing with a self-documenting, cathartic process that emphatically asserts the Mori presence in New Zealand, a proactive proclamation that Pakeha must take the Mori population into consideration. In effect, Huia’s priorities declare that the Mori renaissance is ongoing and contemporary rather than confined to an historical moment of the previous decade, as Prentice’s essay and Ihimaera’s speculation in Te Ao Mārama indicate. More than ten years after the first Huia, the 2007 and 2009 collections continue to maintain the Mori publisher’s aims of cultural specificity, along with an increasing number of stories written in the cultural-nationalist mode. About half the short stories remain anchored in or inspired by common Mori themes and tropes, although with proportionately more set around urban poverty, domestic abuse, wayward children, drugs, alcohol, and prison: fewer stories offer recourse to a strong rural community or nature. The remaining stories are not marked as Mori, but instead as deeply rooted in a New Zealand idiom of language, setting, and social and cultural references. In demotic solidarity with a predominantly urban working class and the down-and-out, this Mori fiction claims, not the uniqueness of Mori, but their intrinsic inclusiveness in whatever might be labelled ‘New Zealand experience’. This may include overseas work or holiday experience, but the link with home is always palpable. In a new move for Huia, the 2009 collection contains four stories that situate Mori overseas, yet all of these apply a Mori perspective on and empathy with a foreign situation of indigenous or minority subjection. 117 118

Huia Short Stories 1995, 8. Huia Short Stories 1995, 8.



Mori Nationalism

35

In counterpoint to this tendency to describe Mori as New Zealanders, in their local and international experiences, the 2009 collection also contains fiction that is hermetically Mori: six stories are written in te reo. The Mori publishing company’s credo, perhaps together with the funding policies of Creative New Zealand, has given a shape to Mori writing different from expectations of a turn to the international and to the aesthetic espoused by writers and critics such as Casanova, Fanon, and Achebe. Biculturalism fosters Mori–Pakeha differentiation and maintains a deep interest in monitoring the national heartbeat. Perhaps exacerbated by Huia’s selection of stories which are almost all written in the first person, a significant body of Mori fiction today retains a socio-cultural, documentary function.

Bicultural Nationalism: Waituhi: The Life of the Village During the self-imposed exile of the embargo years, Ihimaera was nonetheless active. In addition to co-editing Into the World of Light, Ihimaera wrote an opera libretto, Waituhi: The Life of the Village (1984). In both the 1981 Turnbull Lecture and his 1984 interview with Wilkinson, Ihimaera emphasizes the need to break the stereotype of pastoral Mori writing in favour of a more radical engagement with the difficulties of Mori–Pakeha race relations in the 1980s. This change in direction coincides with an ambition to explore different genres in order to express the multiple facets of Mori culture and to cater for diverse audiences. In his support of television, songs, opera, video games, and break-dancing as valid forms of Mori cultural expression,119 Ihimaera makes a claim for Mori culture as profoundly influenced by historical European and modern Pakeha modes. Waituhi, which, with music by Ross Harris, played for a week in September 1984 at the Wellington State Opera House, is the first New Zealand Mori opera and also Ihimaera’s first attempt at synthesizing his political aims with his interest in different creative media. As such, the opera is a bridging work situated between the lyrical novel Whanau, on which it is based, and the confrontational revisionist epic The Matriarch (1986), which, as will be discussed in the next chapter, is also structured operatically. However, Waituhi, which has not been restaged and was never commercially published as a libretto and score, is generally over-

119

Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 99.

36

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



looked.120 The unusual choice of genre and complex artistic references in Waituhi muddy the tidy shift commonly identified in Ihimaera’s oeuvre from the pastoralism of the 1970s to the openly political and aggressive, sovereignty-centred Matriarch. In a later interview, with Juniper Ellis, Ihimaera draws attention to the way in which he sees music as a structuring force in his work, from Tangi, “a symphonic work,” through Whanau, “an overture, 121 to the whole opera of The Matriarch. Opera gives Ihimaera a different format in which to attempt to reconcile his Romantic vision of wholeness with his ambition to record the political drives of modern-day Mori reality. Frustrated with his early lyrical novels’ failure to close the faultline between modern reality and past tradition, Ihimaera claims that the emotion and immediacy of an oral culture is better expressed in music and theatre than in literature.122 The Mori writer and librettist describes Waituhi as “marae music theatre,” a blend of the “singing word”123 of Mori tradition and European theatre: “It’s simply what you would see on a marae or a Maori meeting place in New Zealand, except that instead of being supported by one instrument it’s supported by an orchestra.”124 Ihimaera’s adaption of a European performance genre to a Mori context transforms the lyrical novel Whanau into political opera, creating a nationalist work that brings together all the elements of the national imaginary. The plot’s three strands; the transmission of oral lore from one generation to the next, a village wedding, and land disputes between members of the community, draw on an extensive range of Mori oral modes and choral action-songs as well as operatic forms and techniques. The opera’s central motif transmits tribal myth and history in the Chant of Creation handed down from village elder to child. As in the earlier novel, this demonstration of cultural strength is moderated by an elegiac tone, mourning the loss of Mori tradition as the elder dies. The opera’s second storyline, the village wedding, is a performance of Mori ritual, including marae protocol, action-songs, dance, and prayers – an extravaganza of Thiesse’s identity check-list featuring traditional 120

Waituhi may be soon revived, as Ihimaera has recently rewritten the libretto as a screenplay for a potential H D film. Personal communication, September 2010. 121 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 170. 122 “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 169. 123 Ihimaera, “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception,” 49; Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 170. 124 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 99.



Mori Nationalism

37

expressive culture. The opera’s third motif centres on conflict over land ownership, both within the Mori community, such as Arapeta’s “I want the land / It is mine to have,” and in recounting colonial appropriation, in Paora’s chant “[a]nd then the Pakeha came to Aotearoa [...] / he struck at the people / and ate up the land like a shark.”125 In adhering to many features of creative nation-building, Waituhi embodies the ambitions of Mori sovereignty and renaissance of the early 1980s. The wedding of the opera’s central scene, Acts I I and I I I , set on the forecourt and in the church of a marae, involves all the cast in a community celebration. On the surface, this ensemble piece is completely Mori in style and structure. The chorus enacts a recognizable Mori wedding ceremony, in which Mori chant and harmonies combine with traditional costume and action-song choreography. As the chorus moves into the wings for the ceremony heard off-stage, the classic opera theme of the fallen heroine emerges, with the jilted lover singing an anguished aria of unrequited love. Underlying the apparent Maoriness of the wedding scene, however, is Ihimaera’s indebtedness to European opera. Among his musical influences and inspiration for Waituhi, Ihimaera cites the Italian verismo composer Pietro Mascagni,126 the Andalusian nationalist Manuel de Falla, and the two Czech nationalists, Bedich Smetana and the musical expressionist Leo Janáček.127 In the most overt of these European influences, the wedding scene is an almost perfect reconstruction of the first act of Mascagni’s Italian verismo opera Cavalleria Rusticana (1890). In Cavalleria, a Sicilian village square features a church where the ringing bells call the peasant chorus to Easter mass. This clears the stage for the tragic heroine to sing her aria of lost love, punctuated by offstage chanting from the chorus in church. The dramatic tension of the heroine’s solitude is broken, in both Mascagni’s and Ihimaera’s operas, by the chorus bursting on stage, ready to celebrate their respective festivals. Ihimaera’s interest in following Mascagni’s schema so closely indicates the direction he envisages for his opera project. In the Wilkinson interview, the librettist speaks of the inspiration of Mascagni’s rustic drama for his Mori opera. Ihimaera explicitly links Mori and Sicilian cultures, explaining 125

Waituhi: The Life of the Village, annotated libretto, MS 1984, Archives Waituhi, A1994/02, Act III. 126 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 103. 127 “Opera Brief for Waituhi: The Life of the Village,” MS 1984, A1994/02; “Waituhi: The Life of the Village,” annotated libretto, MS.

38

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



his ambition for Waituhi to transplant the “tribal oriented people”128 of Sicilian verismo into his local version. He finds that Mascagni’s music is passionate and direct “heart music,” values which, for him, accord with the Mori stress on “emotional expression.”129 Verismo, which means ‘realism’ in Italian, refers to a minor genre of literature and opera important from the 1860s to the 1890s. In the newly united Italy, verismo was clearly nationalist, rejuvenating pride in rural life, local traditions, and dialects. Verismo techniques have been noted in operas by Mascagni, de Falla, Smetana, and Janáček, all of whom were strongly attached to both aesthetic and political revolutions of their times. Janáček’s and Smetana’s work came to embody Czech nationalism, and staging their operas in Prague and internationally throughout the twentieth century brought support for the turbulent task of nation-building. The Sicilian Cavalleria Rusticana, the Neopolitan Pagliacci, by Ruggero Leoncavallo, and de Falla’s Andalucian La Vida Breva were written for national competitions at a time when the art of opera seemed to be dying out. Ihimaera’s interest in the work of verismo opera again reinforces an understanding of Mori cultural renaissance and political sovereignty within a broad historical and international framework of nationalism. The historical development of the opera genre exemplifies the importance of art as a site of renaissance, reflecting, in its changing styles, the social concerns of a given period. The naturalist verismo is an extension of its Romantic predecessor, especially of Verdi’s early operas, which incited nationalist fervour in the Risorgimento movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Further innovations in opera over the course of the twentieth century consolidated verismo’s tentative foray into making the art form more real and more relevant to its audience. Significantly, Ihimaera labels Waituhi “music theatre,” a term employed by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in their post-war partnership (1927–30) aiming to make opera appeal to a broader audience through increased realism and direct political messages.130 As Ihimaera puts it, Waituhi

128

Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 103. Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 107. 130 Kurt Weill, “Quelle voie pour l’opéra?” in Musique et dramaturgie: Esthétique de la représentation au X X e siècle, ed. Laurent Feneyrou (Série Esthétique; Paris: Panthéon–Sorbonne, 2002): 191–94. Originally as “Die Oper – wohin?” Berliner Tageblatt (31 October 1929), repr. in Kurt Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, mit einem Anhang: Ausgewählte Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Stephen Hinton & Jürgen Schebera (Berlin: Henschel, 1990): 68–70. Tr. in Kim H. Kowalke, 129



Mori Nationalism

39

“is music theatre and it’s political theatre: it’s about the dilemma of all minority cultures within a majority system and it’s a very critical work.”131 In accordance with Weill’s dramatic rather than stylized opera, Ihimaera and the composer Ross Harris claim: “we would prefer that the singers try to sing dramatically than ‘musically’.”132 This is especially important in lyrics that make forceful sovereignty claims, such as condemning Mori deracination, urbanization, and family fragmentation, lines supported by minimal orchestration. Weill’s politicized music theatre was further supported by concurrent developments in musical styles, including Arnold Schoenberg’s atonalism, Anton Webern’s tonal technique, and Pierre Schaeffer’s experimentalism, to which Harris’s score for Waituhi is indebted.133 In their partnership, Harris and Ihimaera hope to have created a “new idiom,” one that encourages identification on the different levels of classic opera, avant-garde music theatre, and Mori stage show. The range and complexity of Waituhi’s influences inscribe the Mori opera in an international and historical lineage. Indeed, Ihimaera’s claim that “the opera is not intended to be realistic or representational but, rather, imaginative”134 asks that the libretto be firmly placed within opera conventions rather than those of political activism. At the same time, far from being a negation of nationalism’s political motivations, operatic Romanticism, verismo, and music theatre demonstrate the European music theatre genre’s compatibility with aspirations to indigenous sovereignty. The project’s coordination and reception, by contrast, respond to different directives from Ihimaera and Harris’s ambition to synthesize Mori and European cultural expression. Staged during the turbulent, often aggressively separatist period of the 1980s, Waituhi was interpreted solely on the basis of its Mori elements. The desire for Mori to demonstrate their culture’s strength and difference from Pakeha art forms effectively obscured all considerations of the piece as an opera considerably inspired by European antecedents. The Mori focus was evident in the politics of Waituhi’s staging. For instance, all the singers and actors were Mori with experience in Mori culture groups such as kapa haka performance, while the set was designed by the wellKurt Weill in Europe, 1900–1935: A Study of His Music and Writings (Ann Arbor M I : U M I Research Press / Bowker, 1979): 506–508. 131 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 99. 132 “Opera Brief for Waituhi: The Life of the Village,” MS, 2. 133 Jeremy Commons, “Waituhi,” Opera Australia (Sydney) 83 (November 1984): 15. 134 “Opera Brief,” 1.

40

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



known Mori artist Para Matchitt. Similarly, Waituhi was reviewed almost entirely on the merit of its Mori components, for which it was commended for demonstrating Mori culture’s ability to adapt to non-Mori and contemporary artistic influences.135 In stark contrast to acclaim for its Mori aspect, reviewers remained baffled by the operatic parts and, diplomatically, preferred to plead ignorance of opera rather than risk passing judgment on the quality of the arias. For example, Richard Cresswell tentatively finds that the arias “overcomplicate rather than enhance and support the action [.. .] but that may reflect my operatic ignorance.”136 The New Zealand audience’s lack of comprehension of Waituhi’s operatic and musical influences undermines Ihimaera’s project to use the “singing word” as a suitable mode to transmit Mori culture, thereby revealing a gap between the creators’ intention and the work’s reception by its audience. That the audience failed to pick up on the significant influence of verismo and avant-garde opera reveals some incongruities in the translation of the European art form to contemporary New Zealand: the Pakeha audience was so anxious to understand Waituhi as a Mori concept that it forgot to look to its own performance traditions as well.137 In Waituhi, knowledge of Mascagni’s opera brings a depth and resonance to the Mori opera that recall a time and place where opera was commonplace, accessible, and inspirational. As a nationalist style, verismo’s unembellished, earthy, unabashedly provincial tone chimes with Mori renaissance aims, while Weill’s music theatre similarly indicates European precedents for Ihimaera’s experimentation. Although it would seem fruitful to highlight these similarities, the resounding silence that met Waituhi as an opera illustrates the highly selective reading of Ihimaera’s 135

Richard Cresswell, “Waituhi,” Salient (24 September 1984): 14; Hiria Rakete, “Waituhi,” unknown magazine (nd): np, A1994/02; Rebecca Simpson, “It’s a Great Month to be Maori,” More (September 1984): 41–42; J.M. Thomson, “Para Matchitt’s Design for an Opera,” Art New Zealand 33 (Summer 1984): 22–23. 136 Cresswell, “Waituhi,” 14. 137 An equivalent debate over verismo opera’s effectiveness in making a social comment exists with regard to the translation from the literary to the opera genre. Verismo literature, exemplified by Giovanni Verga, author of the novella Cavalleria Rusticana on which Mascagni’s opera is based, criticizes the harsh realities of poverty, famine, war, and other social difficulties and disparities of the later nineteenth century. Verismo opera, by contrast, tends not to connect with these issues, something which highlights the difficulty of translating across genres. Mancini and Rouveroux, “Le vérisme existe-t-il?” in L’Avant scène opéra: Leoncavallo, Mascagni, 4–13.



Mori Nationalism

41

texts that, from the beginning of his career, established the writer as synonymous with the Mori literary genre. To systematically highlight features deemed uniquely Mori in Ihimaera’s operas absolves audiences and critics from having to do their own work to access the opera in all its complexity. The public uncertainty about the value for Mori expression in the seemingly incongruous opera genre betrays a reluctant adherence to a certain ideology in which Mori are presumed to be shut out of an imported upper-class European art form, a genre commonly perceived as the apogee of high art – hence unsullied by any social or political commentary and thereby excluded from the bicultural arena. In contrast to the emphasis among most New Zealand reviewers on cultural concerns, Jeremy Commons, in an Opera Australia review, faults Waituhi as a performance. He finds that the show was severely compromised by the inexperienced actors and singers, and, to a lesser extent, by the unprofessional orchestra. Most of the cast could not read music and had little or no classical singing or theatre acting experience. Consequently, according to Commons, Harris’s score was inappropriate and altogether too difficult for the singers, who struggled to hit the right notes. The opera critic also deems Matchitt’s set design inappropriate. Although the panels of abstract Mori patterns were visually arresting, the set was cumbersome and did not “act,” producing the effect of bunching the players in the centre of the stage.138 While Commons’s criticism is surely legitimate, his critical review stands out against the resounding absence of negative opinion on the part of reviewers and interviewers in local New Zealand magazines.139 The debate over the validity of assigning Western value-judgments to postcolonial minority fiction and performance exemplifies tensions between writing and reading perspectives that potentially talk at cross-purposes. Indeed, Ihimaera, along with many other writers and editors, including those of Te Ao Mārama and Huia Short Stories, claims that Mori writing is by and for Mori, with an inclusive and supportive kaupapa charter that dismisses the notion of literary judgment as a Western consideration ill-suited to Mori arts. 138

Commons, “Waituhi,” 15. All reviews are sourced from Ihimaera’s archives, which contain many congratulatory cards, letters, e-mails, as well as reviews from local, national, and international newspapers and magazines gathered by a clippings service. I am grateful to Nicola Frean, Special Materials Librarian at the J.C. Beaglehole Room, for raising the question of whether Ihimaera also keeps negative letters and reviews, and thus whether the archives perhaps give a misleading picture of public response to his work. 139

42

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Responding to such a stance, Evans suggests in his survey of Mori fiction of the early 2000s that the aura of self-sufficiency cast by Mori literature gives an impression that Pakeha are “simply irrelevant”140 to Mori concerns, which are increasingly private.141 Sharrad makes a similar point in his review of fiction by new writers in Pacific anthologies, whose policies are similar to Huia’s. He claims that literature which is preoccupied with its local context may not always translate well into an international domain. He argues that this local rootedness ought not to be construed as negative but as altogether different from the aims and expectations of international postcolonial fiction and its academic critique – in effect, rendering his own view irrelevant, as the fiction is more intimately local than his evaluative criteria make room for.142 The merit of Sharrad’s position is that he acknowledges the importance and usefulness of national, regional or local art for the communities in which and for which it is produced, while fairly pointing out that such work is unlikely to attract a large readership beyond that community. The confidence and authority with which Mori writers have taken control of their fiction, as well as all other levels of literary production, circulation, and criticism, has effectively discouraged critique from outside their own culture. With the key exception of Karl Stead’s trenchant censure of the literary quality of Mori fiction, Pakeha critics tend not to comment on literary value, a stance already evident in the guarded and increasingly distanced analyses in the 1970s by the Pakeha critics Rhodes, Oppenheim, and Simms. Mori are often critical of Pakeha presuming to speak on behalf of the indigenous culture. Examples of incidents of highly publicized Mori protest against Pakeha and foreign scholars’ academic work include the boycotting by Ihimaera, Hulme, and Wendt of Stead’s Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories, a strong Mori reaction against Allan Hanson’s article on the “invention” of Mori culture,143 and, more recently, repudiation of Christina Thompson’s American view of Mori in Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story (2009).144 In a self-regulat140

Evans, “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’ and the Maori writer,” 23. Evans, The Long Forgetting: Post-Colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2007): 191. 142 Sharrad, “Re-Viewing Reviewing: Thoughts on Pacific Poetry and Hybridity,” Kunapipi 27.2 (2005): 209. 143 For commentary on Hanson’s article, see Evans, The Long Forgetting, 94; Lamb, “The New Zealand Sublime,” Meanjin 49.1 (Summer 1990): 667–68. 144 Paula Morris, “Lost in Translation,” The Listener (23 August 2008): 24–26. 141



Mori Nationalism

43

ing reflex in which Pakeha tend not to write about Mori, few Pakeha novelists have central Mori characters. A notable exception is Tom O’Connor, who scrupulously sets out the credentials which have earned him the Mori cultural authority to write an historical novel about Te Rauparaha, Tides of Kawhia (2004). Pakeha acquiescence in the aims dictated by Mori for their own representation is evident in the way Pakeha respond to Mori writing. In Wedde and McQueen’s 1985 The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, Mori writing is presented in both the original Mori and English translation, in order, Wedde explains, to let the Mori voice stand “on [its] own terms.”145 Wedde’s claim that the role of an anthology is to allow a minority voice or language autonomy of self-representation, “especially when they have something to say and are saying it,” 146 puts agency firmly in Mori hands. The same Pakeha accord with bicultural politics underpin Mark Pirie’s The NeXt Wave (1998) and Fiona Kidman’s The Best New Zealand Fiction 2 (2005). Both anthologies select Mori writing that features style, form or content described as specific to and indicative of unique Mori cultural imperatives: in his introduction to “Generation X,” or “new” fiction, Pirie identifies the drives for Mori writing as fulfilling “socio-economic and political purposes,”147 while Kidman describes the Mori writers in her collection as “Maori voices that speak with intensity from their point of belonging.”148 If Mori writing has been liberated from its earlier need to document and is now celebrating cultural strength in diversity, as Te Ao Mārama proudly proclaims, then Pakeha anthologists have proven wary of demonstrating this. Just as Mori anthologies such as Huia Short Stories continue to select fiction that adheres to the modes pioneered by writers such as Ihimaera, Pakeha anthologists also select work that maintains Mori cultural difference. It would appear that, in the domain of New Zealand literature, both Mori and Pakeha are keen to honour the difference inherent in – and expected by – biculturalism. Evans’s comment that Pakeha are “irrelevant” in Mori fiction, supported by the laissez-faire Pakeha critical (non)approach to Mori literature, is cer145

Wedde, How to be Nowhere: Essays and Texts 1971–1994 (Wellington: Victoria

U P , 1995): 63. 146

Wedde, How to be Nowhere, 60. Mark Pirie, New Zealand Writing: The NeXt Wave, ed. Pirie (Dunedin: U of Otago P , 1998): 5. 148 Fiona Kidman, The Best New Zealand Fiction 2, ed. Kidman (Auckland: Vintage, 2005): 17. 147

44

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tainly a compliment in its indication that Mori literature has achieved the sovereignty and renaissance aims of self-management. Mori control of taha Mori or ‘things Mori’ has created a situation in which Mori are the producers, distributors, teachers, and critics of their work. The question of selfdetermination here inclines to that of self-regulation, as the Western sense of art is subsumed under a culture-centred model. Nonetheless, there is perhaps also a danger in such autonomy. In particular, Mori self-sufficiency raises the question of whether a cultural framework is capable of accounting adequately for all artistic output. Production in English and for an international market has led postcolonial artists and critics to question culture-centred and culture-specific evaluative criteria of artistic production. In addressing the effects of Western critical silence towards postcolonial fiction, Chelva Kanaganayakam cites Zulfikar Ghose’s bald statement that “post-imperialist guilt is responsible for a lot of bad art that the former imperialists dare not criticize.”149 Kanaganayakam tempers this polemical charge with the proviso that it is primarily the responsibility of the culture concerned to make such judgments: “Good and bad are labels that we cannot dispense with, but their authority must come from the nation that is being written about.”150 An Australian anthropologist, the late Eric Michaels, in Bad Aboriginal Art, reiterates Kanaganayakam’s culture-specific stance. Although he initially sets out to evaluate Aboriginal painting, Michaels concludes: “these works are to be judged first and foremost in terms of the social practices that produce and circulate them.”151 Sharrad, in his review of contemporary Pacific poetry, similarly begins his article as a discussion of literary evaluation and the difficulty of encouraging new talent while also holding onto certain expectations of artistic merit: “A few more workshops, rigorous culling and redrafting would lead to more compelling books of verse.”152 However, like Michaels, in the second half of his essay Sharrad backs down from his judgmental stance to

149

Ghose, quoted in Kanaganayakam, “Appeasing an Embittered History: Critical Practice Reconsidered,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken L. Goodwin & Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 60. 150 Kanaganayakam, “Appeasing an Embittered History,” 60. 151 Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1994): 162; see also Stephen Muecke, “Aboriginal Literature and the Repressive Hypothesis,” Southerly 48.4 (1988): 416. 152 Sharrad, “Re-viewing Reviewing,” 207–208.



Mori Nationalism

45

critique his own metropolitan academic position, which, he suggests, renders him unqualified to comment on the value of the work. Kanaganayakam, Michaels, and Sharrad all place the inherent nature of a given culture above the eurocentric artistic standards and criteria in which they were trained. However, in the context of opera – albeit a Mori opera – such a position is less tenable, as is indicated by Commons’s critique that the set design and the cast’s singing ability did not do justice to Waituhi’s production. While questions of literary value – rather than cultural value – remain largely unasked in regard to Mori fiction, it is more difficult to sidestep judgments about artistic quality in Waituhi, where there is an audible difference in the singers’ confidence and the audience’s appreciation between operatic sections and the haka, karanga, and chorus numbers.153 New Zealand critics’ reluctance to judge the performance’s quality is somewhat at odds with Waituhi’s professional composer and singing coach, and its staging in a national theatre. The ambition to define, encapsulate, and evaluate Mori art and literature within a cultural paradigm echoes the similar foregrounding of demonstrative, expressive culture as the predominant sign of a chosen Mori identity in bicultural New Zealand. However, the conflation of public culture and personal identity is problematic at the point where an individual’s sense of Moritanga differs from the perceived public conception. Case studies in the fields of sociology and cultural anthropology illustrate the difficulty of accounting for the heterogeneity of lived Mori culture within the parameters of biculturalism.154 Revealing the multiplicity of Mori experience coincides with growing wariness in New Zealand towards the pervasiveness of (bi)culturalism in 153

My comments are based on audio recordings of the concerts. My thanks to Witi Ihimaera for providing cassettes of Waituhi. Commons also notes in his review: “On the occasions when the opera moved towards traditional chant or action song, [...] the cast gained confidence and the performance gathered zest” (15). 154 See Belinda Borell, “Living in the City Ain’t So Bad: Cultural Identity for Young Maori in South Auckland,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, ed. James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh & Teresa Teaiwa (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 191–206; Hal Levine, “Moving Beyond Cultural Essentialism,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, 104–17; Toon van Meijl, “Culture and Crisis in Maori Society,” in Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific, ed. Erich Kolig & Hermann Mückler (Hamburg: L I T , 2002): 47–71; Steven Webster, Patrons of Maori Culture: Power, Theory and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance.

46

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



civic discourse and the expectation that diverse social, political, and economic issues can be dealt with through cultural understanding.155 In the literary domain, unease over biculturalism’s extensiveness is played out in the debate over whether literature should chart social concerns or remain aloof from politics, and the position of the artist as cultural representative or marginalized figure. The way in which Waituhi was welcomed for its Mori components and ignored for its opera aspects exemplifies a prevalent sense of uncertainty about commenting on Mori work that is not demonstrably – or wholly – Mori in outlook or content. For New Zealand commentators on the opera, Ihimaera’s prominence as a Mori writer and his involvement in the production obscured Waituhi’s operatic objectives. By contrast, writing for an Australian opera periodical, Commons is free to ignore the cultural identity politics in order to concentrate on the musical genre.

Limits of Bicultural Nationalism: “Selfish” Writing In its opera genre and significant influence from European traditions, Waituhi is at least partly motivated by artistic expression not easily contained by biculturalism. In several interviews, Ihimaera makes a distinction between his work that is motivated to write on behalf of Mori, and that which is more personal, which he calls “selfish.” Among his selfish preoccupations are his writing about gay identity in Nights in the Gardens of Spain156 and his engagement with opera.157 Ihimaera equates “selfish” writing with individuality: I am becoming less and less a person who is writing on behalf of a culture and believes he has a role in articulating their concerns and not his own; I have become more a writer who is articulating selfish concerns.158

The author’s comment accords with Casanova’s and McGaw’s description of a gradual distancing from nationalist concerns and an alignment with those of the individual and the personal. Ihimaera’s frequent insistence on his selfish155

Important texts that regroup essays on this theme include Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa–New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley, Cluny Macpherson & David Pearson (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1996); New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, ed. Liu, McCreanor, McIntosh & Teaiwa; Diana Brydon, James Meffan & Mark Williams, ed. Culturalisms (special issue of New Literatures Review 45–46 (2009). 156 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 179. 157 “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 181; Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 103. 158 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 103.



Mori Nationalism

47

ness may be intended as a comment on his own personality, a sign of humility in interviews which unwaveringly approach him and his work as a beacon of Mori success. The comment is also a warning to interviewers and readers not to associate all his fiction with the same representative motives. Indeed, the Mori writer’s description of Waituhi as political theatre yet also imaginative rather than representational indicates a less clear-cut position for Mori literature than bicultural differentiation would seem to recognize. Ihimaera’s nonMori operas, Tanz der Schwäne and Galileo, his 2006 ballet, The Wedding, his Pakeha gay novel Nights in the Gardens of Spain, his fantasy novel Sky Dancer, and his participation in Bill Manhire’s Are Angels OK? collaborations between writers and scientists – all these further complicate expectations that Ihimaera’s voice represents Moritanga, or that he conceives of all of his work as driven by cultural imperatives. Although Ihimaera consistently emphasizes that he is, above all, a Mori writer, his conception of what Mori writing may consist of is by no means singular or static: There is no such thing as a Maori voice. There are many voices, tribal or, more and more, individual. As for me I’ve never wanted to be predictable, and I am so proud to have many voices in my kaupapa. They make me shift around.159

More recently, Ihimaera describes his work as “operat[ing] between a wide range of polarities. [...] it’s frankly all over the place.”160 If Ihimaera sees different ways of writing, then there are similarly different ways of reading. Ihimaera’s oeuvre oscillates between work which asserts Mori identity, in a literature which he labels “race relations,”161 such as The New Net Goes Fishing, The Matriarch, and Woman Far Walking, and “selfish” writing, such as that about gay identity, in Nights, and his experimentation with other genres, particularly opera. In two interviews, one in a national magazine, The Listener, the other on National Radio,162 Ihimaera clearly delineates two very different relationships that Mori have with contemporary New Zealand society. The first is an issue of Mori sovereignty asserting Mori rights, and is 159

Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 295. Ralph Crane, “Writing Maori: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Island 110 (Spring 2007): online. 161 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,”176. 162 Tim Watkin, “The Homecoming,” The Listener (26 June 2004): 18–23; Kim Hill, Interview with Witi Ihimaera, National Radio (12 June 2004): audiocassette recording, A2006/21. 160

48

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



thus concerned with Treaty redress, recuperation of culture and history, and the process of articulating grievances over the devastating impact of colonization and Pakeha assimilation policies. The second is that of negotiation between Mori and Pakeha New Zealanders of their shared cultural inheritance and future: “The problem is people think of it as one debate. But it’s two dilemmas,” [Ihimaera] says. There’s the relationship between Maori and the Crown, which, for as long as the tribunal process lasts, is a legal one, and therefore adversarial. “That needs to be addressed and addressed quickly.” But the relationship between Maori and Pakeha is quite separate. “That’s going along very well.” He has two daughters with a Pakeha mother. The cultures, he is confident, are “crossing over.”163

Understanding the two quite different aims for Mori negotiations of cultural autonomy and strength helps identify different interpretative strategies for Ihimaera’s fiction. Like the “adversarial” Tribunal process, literature of race relations emphasizes that which is unique in Mori culture, while writing of the “crossing over” relationship focuses on that which is shared with Pakeha and, by extension, European cultures. This second kind of writing does not set Mori in opposition to Western cultural and artistic traditions but, rather, works with them. This writing, therefore, cannot be reduced to an allegorical function as thinly disguised autobiography or as representing Mori culture: although this may be one, partial, interpretation, the work invites other readings beyond Mori, bicultural, national or even postcolonial preconceptions of minority difference. In support of an argument for plurality of cultural (and literary) interpretation, Ihimaera, in an early newspaper interview, expresses the need for “equality between Mori and European.”164 The comment prompted Umelo Ojinmah, in the mid-1980s, to diagnose Ihimaera’s growing cultural inclusiveness and advocation of cultural mixing: Maori people will have to begin to understand and to have more grace about the creative spirit of Pakeha people. We are not the only ones who will interpret our culture [...] now or in the future.165 163

Watkin, “The Homecoming,” 22. Roy Murphy, reporting Ihimaera and quoted in Umelo Ojinmah, Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision (Dunedin: U of Otago P , 1993): 4. 165 Ojinmah, paraphrasing Murphy on Ihimaera, in Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision, 58. 164



Mori Nationalism

49

Ihimaera’s positive biculturalism here indicates that differing interpretations are inevitable and even desirable. He offers Pakeha a legitimate response to Mori fiction by suggesting that they will discover their own interpretations of Mori through the text. Ihimaera’s understanding that different audiences will interpret Mori culture differently acknowledges a relationship between Mori writer and Pakeha reader, a contract that appeals to reader-response theory common to Western literary reception, in which fiction’s potential for polyphony lies not with the author’s intention but with the reader’s interpretation. Such a position is radically different from current writing, reading, and critical practice in New Zealand, which responds to postcolonial theory’s challenge to a (Western) reader-centred view by privileging minority agency and encouraging minorities to control the way their cultures are represented and received. Ihimaera’s comment that Pakeha will interpret Mori differently is a reminder that the bicultural nationalist frame is merely one way of reading among many. While interpreting Waituhi only for its Mori aspects fails to register the artistic depth of the European opera genre, creating confusion for its audience, the emphasis on Mori identity issues in responses to Ihimaera’s first gay novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, actually falsifies the text. Ihimaera’s self-proclaimed selfish novel is his only work to date that features a Pakeha protagonist and non-Mori setting, which he explains as responding to a desire to maintain “an inclusive approach,”166 to represent the “commonality” of all gay New Zealanders167 in a novel that is, as much as anything, “an analysis of divorce.”168 The novel’s title, from de Falla’s musical composition of the same name, further points to this work as informed by Ihimaera’s own love of classical music. Indeed, the novel also includes extracts from Verdi’s opera Othello.169 A comparison between Ihimaera’s narrative strategies in Nights in the Gardens of Spain and in work that centres a Mori perspective highlights the carefully created fictionality – and, indeed, literariness – of the gay text. In the novel’s structure and subject, the author carefully creates an atmosphere of anonymity, of masks and of fiction, which discourage the reader 166

Katherine Findlay, “Heralding the New Tribe,” Mana 9 (Winter 1995): 76. Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,”179. 168 Nicola Shepheard, “The Storyteller,” North and South (November 2003): 57. 169 For analysis of Ihimaera’s use of this opera in the novel, see Alistair Fox, The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction (Dunedin: Otago U P , 2008): 180-81. 167

50

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



from identifying the writer’s own life with the narrative subject. Accentuating fictionality is a key to making Nights a work of fiction and not an autobiography. Indeed, the published version is a rewrite of two earlier attempts, which Ihimaera felt compelled not to release “out of deference” to his family,170 because the script “was too close to the people in it.”171 Ihimaera’s insistence on the novel’s fictiveness is a break with the narrow gap between fiction and reality characteristic of most Mori fiction. As Lydia Wevers describes it, the strongly autobiographical and realist “impulse to document” in much Mori fiction is the result of the Mori renaissance encouragement for writers to bear witness to their own experiences as Mori.172 Certainly, in much of Ihimaera’s writing, fact and fiction are blurred by his use of historical figures and real settings in the ongoing fictionalization of the village he grew up in, Waituhi, its local history and whnau. However, unlike the ethnographic candour of Ihimaera’s Mori settings, Nights is secretive, from the sign-less black door of the Steam Parlour to the carefully vague descriptions of place and the nameless and faceless characters of the Auckland gay scene. This scene of ambiguity and anonymity leads into a fictional world or, perhaps more accurately, a real world full of illusion, fantasy, and dreams, reinforced by overlapping fictions, including fairytale, Greek mythology, tragic opera, ballet, and cinema. In contrast to Ihimaera’s Mori fiction, in which the author’s profound knowledge of Moritanga brings overarching meaning and cohesion to plot and characterization, from its very beginning Nights invokes images of detachment, uncertainty, and even wariness. As in many of Ihimaera’s novels, Nights opens with the moment of arrival at the novel’s central location. The protagonist David, as yet an unnamed “I,” parks down a back street and enters

170

Findlay, “Heralding the New Tribe,” 77. Shepheard, “The Storyteller,” 57. 172 Lydia Wevers, “Talking About GenX,” 386. Indeed, the close rapport between writer and fiction is borne out in the lengthy edifying explanations of editorial selection and the authors’ backgrounds in Into the World of Light, Te Ao Mārama, and Huia’s authors’ notes. In many of the authors’ notes in Huia’s anthologies, the way writers choose to describe themselves strongly resembles markers of Maoriness in the fiction, particularly an emphasis on connection to the land and sea, whnau and whakapapa, Mori food, language, and the practice of other traditional arts such as carving. The authors come across as ambassadors for the success and strength of the Mori renaissance. 171



Mori Nationalism

51

the “anonymous black door” of one of his gay haunts, the Steam Parlour.173 Unlike the gaudy, seedy, and slightly threatening imagery of the gay “netherworld,”174 the arrival and departure motif in Ihimaera’s Waituhi novels, including Whanau, Tangi, and Whanau II, allows the writer to describe the characters’ deep connection with the land and tribe. When the whnau on the back of the truck arrive in Waituhi in Whanau, for example, drunk, singing, sleeping or bickering, the author balances their frivolity with the following interlude: [The village] is a backwater place and there is no reason why it should be here except this; the Whanau A Kai live here. This has always been their home and this will always be their land. It is their hearth.175

Seriousness and conviction of tone in this passage override individual relationships, so that, throughout the novel, the historical and ancestral fact of Te Whanau A Kai makes being Mori the predominant factor, even though some characters do not ‘act’ Mori at all, and even reject their family and community. In Nights, however, neither ethnic nor even sexual identity provides a secure frame or overarching meaning, and the voyage-and-arrival motif is destabilizing rather than being anchored in place. David’s constant driving around Auckland illustrates an attachment to place that is either superficial, as he cases gay joints seeking anonymous sex, or tenuous, as in his nightly drives to the family home he has left, to secretly check up on his ex-wife and daughters. In a further strategy that textually renders alienated identity, the novel’s linear plot, in which the action unfolds for the reader and narrator at the same time, allows no moment of transcendence or way out of the constant pressure to name oneself. In this, Nights is particularly bleak, describing contemporary urban society as irreconcilably fragmented. As David, post-coming-out, goes about creating new relationships and commitments with his gay lover, friends, and family, there is a strong sense that life is a sequence of events which require negotiating as best one can at the time, usually with limited or incomplete information. This is markedly different from the often circular storytelling of Ihimaera’s Mori novels, in which myth, family, and land frame the individual in Moritanga. Whereas in Mori fiction myth plays an integral 173

Ihimaera, Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Auckland: Secker & Warburg, 1995): 7. Nights in the Gardens of Spain, 10. 175 Ihimaera, Whanau, 7. 174

52

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



part in Mori conceptions of the self, in Nights fiction and performance undermine reality: David tells the story of his marriage and family life as a ‘once upon a time’ fairytale of “Happy Family,”176 yet this cannot save his broken marriage or protect his young daughters from the distress of divorce. The above-mentioned textual strategies, combined with a lack of omniscient narrator or authorial steering, shakes the reader’s expectations of thematic closeness between the novel’s fiction and the author’s own life, and between issues of gay and Mori identities. Certainly, the comparison between ethnic and sexual marginalization is latent, as is the biographical component of the novel. However, in Nights more than any other of his novels, Ihimaera takes pains to distance himself from his protagonist. As Alistair Fox points out, with regard to Nights, “it is significant that Ihimaera, in his first attempt to propose the change that was closest to his heart, should feel obliged to do so at a displaced remove.”177 In his study of masculinity, The Ship of Dreams – a title which Ihimaera’s gay character David also uses to refer to his ruined ideal of a conventional family – Fox thoroughly analyzes conflicting and unreconciled identities in Ihimaera’s work, including the author’s difficulty in bringing together his own life-style and sexuality with expectations of the Maori community. Despite this novel’s major change in content and style as compared with Ihimaera’s work of the previous twenty-five years, the majority of reviewers, interviewers, and literary critics continue to focus on the Mori aspect of the novel, represented by the highly symbolic Noble Savage character and, at a remove, Ihimaera’s own double identity as both gay and Mori. The Noble Savage, who is seen only through the eyes of the Pakeha protagonist, is a minor figure in the book. In his daily routine, David notices him occasionally in passing – literally, as he drives by in his car. In the five times David encounters him in the novel’s time-frame, which spans at least six months, they have only brief exchanges and one brief conversation. In the 300-page novel, the Noble Savage occupies two-and-a-half pages at most. Despite this seemingly slight role, the Noble Savage’s lines are the most often cited. An extract centering on this character is anthologized in Te Ao Mārama 5. Katherine Findlay opens her interview with an extract from the novel of the Mori gay and lesbian karanga and haka at the Auckland Hero parade, and continues throughout to draw links between gay and Mori identity, and Ihimaera’s own 176 177

Ihimaera, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, 37. Fox, The Ship of Dreams, 172.



Mori Nationalism

53

roles in these spheres.178 In Ellis’s interview, Ihimaera admits that he identifies most closely with the Mori character, and reiterates the similarities in issues facing marginalized gay and Mori in New Zealand.179 Nonetheless, the emphasis on the Noble Savage has created an unbalanced view of the book, in which gay relationships and the poignant portrayal of coming-out and family rupture are glossed over in favour of the cultural politics of ethnic marginalization which occur outside the novel. In fact, even within the novel, the Noble Savage’s role is out of joint with the rest of the narrative, which takes extraordinary care to retain the focus on the individual and experiential and to avoid grand gestures of socio-political commentary. In a gay text that nevertheless manages to lightly pass over the potentially tense – but arguably unavoidable – issues of A I D S and discrimination against homosexuals, the Noble Savage’s cultural politics are jarring, adding a programmatic angle to an expressly non-political text. The New Zealand critical emphasis on these overt signposts reveals a pervasive expectation that writing by Mori inevitably represents Mori cultural issues. Readers collapse the gap between fact and fiction; they hear Ihimaera’s Mori voice in the Pakeha narrator’s story, even though the novel’s narrative strategies would seem to discourage such an approach. New Zealand readers cannot read Nights as anything but a novel of race relations, or as at least allegorically pertinent to Mori cultural sovereignty. However, reading the text at face value, rather than as pre-emptively inserted into a socio-cultural context, undermines any seemingly natural elision of sexual focus in favour of cultural politics in the national arena. This shows how quickly the issues which seem most evident in New Zealand become confused by an outside reader’s lack of understanding of, or interest in, the local economy of Mori writing, exposing the bicultural and postcolonial reading biases that predominate in contemporary New Zealand literary analysis to be culturally conditioned. Distance reveals plural ways of reading Mori artistic expression, as lack of familiarity with Ihimaera’s own sexual and cultural identity politics would not – possibly even could not – permit Nights in the Gardens of Spain or the opera Waituhi to be interpreted in the same way as a New Zealand readership or audience would. While it is arguably possible in New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, in the postcolonial domain to replace a Western literary frame and evaluating prac178 179

Findlay, “Heralding the New Tribe,” 74–81. Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 178–79.

54

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tices with Mori criteria, in the international sphere the Mori novel becomes part of the broad category of English literature or, in Waituhi’s case, opera. This means that even though the Mori text may be written or staged according to culture-specific values, once outside its local environment it will inevitably be evaluated according to Western practices and expectations concerning the genre’s form and function, aesthetics, mimesis, representation, the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, and the pleasure of the text or performance. Demonstrating reader responses based on other systems and references, which judge and appreciate the text according to different criteria, challenges the monopoly of bicultural reading strategies in New Zealand. With regard to Waituhi, illuminating its influences from verismo and Weill’s music theatre counteracts the standard emphasis on the opera’s Maoriness in order to concentrate on those elements most likely to stand up to translation overseas. Following Waituhi’s season in Wellington, a tour in Paris was considered, with the support of the French Embassy in Wellington. Had that production eventuated, it is likely that the question of the singers’ capabilities would have been addressed and the verismo connection emphasized, so that the Mori show would fit the expectations of European audiences. By contrast, Waituhi’s short life-span and the fact that it did not go abroad suggest that an over-emphasis on local objectives risks limiting the work’s meaning outside of its immediate context – here, Mori sovereignty’s insistent self-sufficiency. To point out artistic weaknesses as an opera does not deny Waituhi’s importance in a cultural frame, in which Matchitt is a renowned New Zealand artist and many of the singers are internationally successful in kapa haka performance troupes.180 Nor is this intended to suggest that European performance art and a Mori local production are incompatible. Rather, the different interpretations of Waituhi by New Zealand reviewers and Commons’s critique for Opera Australia illuminate how each critical perspective limits interpretation and affects evaluation.  The suitability of reading Mori literature as within the international and historical development of literary tradition is by no means uncontested. For one thing, not all fiction by Mori aims to respond to an international literary 180

In fact, following Waituhi, Matchitt’s sets were sent to the Festival of the South Pacific, where they were installed in a gallery in New Caledonia. J.M. Thomson, “Para Matchitt’s Design for an Opera,” Art New Zealand 33 (Summer 1984): 22–23.



Mori Nationalism

55

scene, with local, national, and community-specific interests significantly influencing the kind of writing produced. A second caveat against privileging a global literary reading is that mapping the impact of the foreign ‘outside’ on the native ‘inside’ is problematic for minority discourses, which often register their culture’s changes in terms of cultural loss. One way around the charge of eurocentrism is to relegate Western literary criteria to a secondary role, instead interpreting indigenous fictions according to their own culture’s systems of the imaginary. In the context of Mori and Pacific fiction, both indigenous and Western critics have applied this approach. As well as the kaupapa introduction to Te Ao Mārama, recent essays and texts centering on indigenous conceptions include Albert Wendt on tattooing, Robert Sullivan and Eva Rask Knudsen on the spiral motif, Bridget Orr on the wharenui, and Michelle Keown on the Polynesian body.181 While accepting the validity – some would say, desirability – of arguments against reading Mori fiction within the paradigms of English literature, one of the advantages of Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production and Casanova’s world republic of letters is that they work across time and space in ways that expose similarities. By contrast, other disciplines, such as Mori studies, sociology, English literature classified by genre, nation, or period, and discourses such as Mori renaissance, nationalism, and postcolonialism, either do not notice the confluences or work by agendas seeking only deflections from Western practices. To centralize the international nature of fiction written in English reveals several levels on which Western influences may be defended in postcolonial writing. Mikhail Bakhtin’s essays on the heteroglossia of narrative language and the fundamental hybridity of the novel form argue

181

Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 399–412; Robert Sullivan, “The English Moko: Exploring a Spiral,” in Figuring the Pacific: Aotearoa and Pacific Cultural Studies, ed. Howard McNaughton & John Newton (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2005): 12–28; Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral: Australian Aborigine and New Zealand Maori Literature (Cross / Cultures 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004); Bridget Orr, “The Maori House of Fiction,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidre Lynch & William B. Warner (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1996): 73–95; Michelle Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing (London & New York: Routledge, 2005).

56

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



for fiction’s long history of challenge to social, cultural, and artistic mores.182 For example, Ihimaera’s immersion in Romantic sensitivity and nostalgia and his espousal of the social realism of struggle are as effective in expounding Mori sovereignty’s claim to recognition as they were in legitimizing the nation in the nationalist literatures and operas of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Europe. From this perspective, many of the strategies used in postcolonial literature may be imagined not as radically unique but, rather, as the reformulation of existing literary techniques in a new context. Recognizing Western culture’s profound infiltration of the subjectivity of its colonial subjects, Graham Huggan claims that to reduce African literature and Western publication and literary criticism to a binary ‘us /them’ mechanism “negates the transculturative potential inherent in a lengthy history of European encounters.”183 He cites the African critic and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who encourages African writers to engage with, rather than to erase, the European influence: “since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us.”184 Huggan uses Appiah to suggest that a way out of exoticizing ethnographic fiction is to privilege aesthetics. In the following passage, ‘Africa’ may be replaced by ‘Mori’: Europe is, like it or not, a part of Africa; and that African literature is best regarded as neither celebratory self-expression nor reprehensible Western imposition, but rather as a hybrid amalgam of cross-fertilised aesthetic traditions that are the historical outcome of a series of – often violent – cultural collisions.185

To see Mori literature within this historical and international schema does not ignore the politics of eurocentrism, nor the assumption that European norms are universal, which both Bourdieu and Casanova show to be constructed out of the same power-dynamic as that which labels other literatures ‘minor’ and relegates them to the margins. Similarly, to identify Mori renaissance and sovereignty ambitions as already within the process of nationbuilding does not detract from the unique cultural and literary manifestations 182

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981): 259–422. 183 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 55. 184 Appiah, quoted in Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 56. 185 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 56.



Mori Nationalism

57

of Moritanga. Rather, the syncretism of international and historical literary and cultural formation, influence, and inspiration encourages dialogue, discussion, and debate – at the risk of conflict. In fact, for the Marxist critic Neil Lazarus it is precisely postcolonialism’s deeply problematic connection to European traditions and institutions that enables cultural minorities to rebuild: “it is more useful to reconstruct by [.. .] ‘hating tradition properly’ than to jettison or relinquish it.”186 In agreement with Huggan’s and Lazarus’s claims for the need to engage with the difficulties of cross-cultural interaction, Homi Bhabha conceives of culture as arising from constant friction between and exposure to differences encountered from both inside and outside. His emphasis on movement makes culture not a concrete object but a constant engagement among its various parts. When Bhabha argues that “the meaning of culture” comes from “the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between,” he presupposes an existing climate of debate, from which an “international culture” can be envisaged.187 Bhabha’s conception implies that alienation, or at least instability, is healthy for cultural exchange. Like culture, fiction also thrives on an uneasy relationship with, for example, the reader, reality, and the constraints of its very form. For Bourdieu, new writing is generated and motivated by constant friction and movement, as each new writer positions him- or herself within or against the consecrated literary models of the time, creating “a field of position-takings [...] the product and prize of a permanent conflict.”188 Bourdieu’s concept of literature is similar to Bhabha’s location of culture as emerging performatively: literature and culture are not objects but events, produced out of difference but using the tools and common principles available to all. Just as Bhabha’s theory opens a space for minority cultures to create themselves through engagement with other cultures – no longer schematized as centre and margin – Bourdieu sees all texts, Western or postcolonial, consecrated or avant-garde, as produced out of interaction with other writers and readers belonging to, or in conflict with, their cultural environment(s). From this perspective, it is not possible to configure Mori writing as positioned against a static, hegemonic bastion of impenetrable Western literature: the very fact of writing in English is to enter into dialogue with notions of aesthetics, canon, and genre within 186

Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 9. 187 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 38. 188 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 34.

58

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



the terms of literature. Ihimaera’s frequent differentiation between Mori as a “sacred” language and English as “profane”189 in effect distinguishes between the ‘talismanic’ indigenous language, which has fixed boundaries and restrictions, and an historical and international plurality available in English: “I can ransack wherever it’s been, Greek culture, Roman mythology, American literature, I can do all of that.”190 Bill Ashcroft makes a similar claim for understanding the use of the English language as a freedom rather than a constraint despite its historical implications: “to what extent does a common literary language – the colonial language, the language of power and subjection – become the space of potentiality because it releases the writing subject from the myth of a fixed identity?”191 Both the English language and literature are pre-programmed to cope with difference and change. The over-emphasis on the Mori aspects of Ihimaera’s work at the expense of literary or operatic influences and similarities disallows fiction its inherent ambiguities. The usefulness of the contradictions between literature as public or private, representative or individual, national or international, lies in the tension between the stances and, perhaps, the very impossibility of their resolution or reconciliation. For Mori literature, this implies the need for ongoing dialogue between the positions, something which requires acknowledgement of the debate’s non-reconciliatory nature. Such engagement cannot be played out if writers and their work are always conceived of as, and imagine themselves to be, representative, because this is by nature a process of instating criteria of belonging and exclusion, which inevitably run up against indefinable declensions of authenticity and authority. Through his different works, Ihimaera makes paradoxical claims for Mori literature, claims that must be engaged with on their own terms and not through a preconceived template which fixes Mori writing in a rigid category with an expected content and way of reading. A cultural approach may be an appropriate and useful vantage from which to interpret Ihimaera’s literature of race relations, with the reader accepting, for example, the revisionist history and antagonistic stance towards colonizers and Pakeha in such works as The New Net Goes 189

Ellis, “‘The Singing Word’,” 174; Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 293. Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 175. 191 Bill Ashcroft, “Transnation,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial, 82. Unlike Bourdieu or Casanova, however, Ashcroft’s postcolonial perspective leads him to make his claim tentatively, as one of a set of questions which “are ‘unaskable’ because they seem to undermine the necessity of resistance (“Transnation,” 82). 190



59

Mori Nationalism

Fishing, The Matriarch, and the rewritten Whanau II. However, an understanding of Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Waituhi as private and personal, rather than as motivated by and attached to national race relations, requires alternative reading strategies. Ihimaera’s “selfish” writing calls for a similarly selfish response from the reader, privileging the pleasure of the text in a personal reaction to the work. A text-centred reading does not deny that both works are also deeply implicated in cultural politics: a product of its times, the early 1980s, Waituhi makes a strong and emphatic claim to the complexity of land disputes, while the issues of gay identity in Nights, as Ihimaera as well as many reviewers and critics point out, parallel those of Mori struggles. Nevertheless, focusing on techniques in the fiction itself releases other meaningful elements of these works too easily overlooked by a cultural bias. Ihimaera can, and should, be read from both directions: the individuality of his writing and his sense of responsibility to the Mori community as separate but combined aspects of his oeuvre. To take Ihimaera’s fiction beyond the limitations of reading only within the national context of a binary of New Zealand race relations allows a more reader-interactive engagement with the text according to the values of dialogism as expounded by Bakhtin. 

2 International Aesthetics

Underreading and Overreading

I

H I M A E R A ’ S C O N S T A N T S E A R C H for new ways of writing, through different genres, in collaborations, and in his rewrites, exemplifies the mobile nature of Mori cultural expression. In his 2003 novel Sky Dancer, Ihimaera chalks up another ‘first’, taking Mori literature into the fantasy and science-fiction genre. The novel features a mythic, epic battle between seabirds and landbirds, enacted in real-time in small-town modern New Zealand with a portal enabling time-travel and a quest sequence that, like video games, collects symbolic keys for an epic mission involving human transformation and anthropomorphic birds. The key birds in the battle, and the human char-acters that intervene, are all Mori. However, the Mori aspect is substantially played down; indeed, it is not revealed that the two main characters, the rebellious teen Skylark and her naive and child-like mother Cora, are Mori until quite late in the book. In place of Mori culture, the novel centralizes a wealth of other cultural references and connections. Reviewers have pointed out similarities between Sky Dancer and Lord of the Rings and its hero, Frodo, The Whale Rider and its heroine Kahu, Luke Skywalker, The

62

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Dream of the Rood, the Holy Bible (particularly Revelations), the Book of Mormon, Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Hollywood action-movie clichés.1 Despite such diverse references, all reviewers stress the presence of an allegory on contemporary Pakeha–Mori race relations. Iain Sharp interprets the novel as “full of sly sociopolitical resonances,” giving as an example a battle between a native fantail and an imported Caspian tern, which the fantail wins: “From a symbolic point of view, this is stirring stuff – a triumph for the tangata whenua – since the fantail (piwakawaka) is said by some Mori to be Aotearoa’s first inhabitant.”2 In a more negative review, Norman Bilbrough is troubled by the juxtaposition of the “frivol[ous]” pop vernacular and weighty allegory: Possibly the story is a metaphor for contemporary situations: the destruction of what was once an essential primeval world by raptor humans; the threat of colonisation to Maoritanga; the eroding of our fragile ecosystem by consumerism, etc. [. . . ] And most likely it was the author’s intention to undermine any serious moral tone that might creep in. But I think the story requires that kind of weight; it needs a constant moral agenda instead of presenting as a rather quirky entertainment. And no matter how inventive magic realism can be, it requires a cohering and authentic relationship with reality; even if the connections have to be spelt out, and written simply on frequent signposts.3

Bilbrough’s view is that the many guises the story wears, from romance and road movie to fantasy, give the novel an “identity problem. In a sense it’s too inventive.”4 He finds this invention negative because it obscures the novel’s message. Bilbrough’s view sets up a binary relationship between reality and fiction, social message and entertainment – with the first side of each pairing expected to be the weightier. His reading, however, is thwarted by the novel’s categorization as fantasy or science fiction, or, in one review, as young-adult fiction, all genres in which any moralizing – if, indeed, there is any – is sub1

Norman Bilbrough, “If a Hen Crows, Wring Its Neck,” The Listener (13 December 2003): 57; Iain Sharp, “New Heights,” Dominion Post (nd), A2006/21 [review of Sky Dancer]; Ihimaera, “Performing English: Creative Teaching and Writing Practices – Four Views of the Classroom,” end-of-semester seminar (Department of English, Auckland University: 24 October, 2003): Departmental e-mail to Stephen Turner, np (A2006 /21). 2 Sharp, “New Heights.” 3 Bilbrough, “If a Hen Crows, Wring Its Neck,” 57. 4 “If a Hen Crows, Wring Its Neck,” 57.



International Aesthetics

63

merged by narrative modes that privilege imagination, often to the point of escapism. Bilbrough’s disappointment in the novel reveals expectations that are less concerned with the possibilities of fiction than with those of Mori fiction of the kind expected of Ihimaera. In a similar manner to his unprecedented Pakeha gay novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, the discrepancy between what the text and the writer each represents highlights the way in which the New Zealand literary community has become accustomed to interpolating a Mori agenda into each novel. Ihimaera’s fiction thus cannot stand alone, because the writer’s cultural politics are expected to be “spelt out” and “signpost[ed].” As a result, Bilbrough, who is also a published New Zealand writer, is “lost,” “confused,” and finally “exasperated” by a novel that does not stand up to the kind of culture-centred interpretation that his reading position demands. Ihimaera’s response to Bilbrough’s critique is angry and dismissive, berating the reviewer for “substandard” work: [Bilbrough’s critique] indicate[s] he is operating from a somewhat conventional, limited, outdated aesthetic applying a much too subjective theoretical approach, and without due understanding of the postcolonial, postmodern, metafictional text which plays with time and utilises pastiche to transcend boundaries and interrogate the structures of meaning. Obviously when a critic of limited means applies limited criteria [he reveals?] his lack of understanding of any work which operates within the contexts of the diasporic, indigenous, glocal and global novel.5

Ihimaera’s emotional response does not define exactly how he sees Bilbrough’s interpretation of Sky Dancer as “limited.” In particular, he is unclear about his stance towards the usefulness of textual aesthetics and literary theory in judging a work of fiction: he chides the reviewer for applying an undefined “outdated aesthetic” and theoretical perspective, yet defends his novel on aesthetic terms of metafiction and pastiche. Rather than this being a question of literary aesthetics in general, I suggest that Ihimaera takes exception to Bilbrough’s perception of his novel as lacking in a cultural aesthetic, and his criticism that this novel fails to abide by the standard tropes of Mori fiction, in which the expected weighty metaphors and moral agendas are reinforced by the seriousness of tone and the reliability of the Mori narrator/ author. Ihimaera takes 5

Handwritten draft response to Norman Bilbrough’s review of Sky Dancer (2003), A2006/21. Ihimaera is unsure whether he submitted his rebuke to The Listener, or whether the magazine chose not to publish it (personal communication).

64

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



particular exception to the reviewer’s closing comment: “Ihimaera has handfuls of balls in the air. I wish he’d stuck with just a few.”6 Instead, Ihimaera emphasizes the text’s plurality as positive. For him, Mori writing ought not be confined to a straitjacket of simplicity and similarity, but be recognized for its complex use of the tools of fiction. Ihimaera expresses frustration at the obtuseness of Bilbrough’s review, which, in the author’s view, fails to engage with the whole scope of his novel. Although not aimed at national critical techniques generally, the author’s complaint of limited critical criteria may be extrapolated to encompass a perceived shallowness of critical reading practice, a charge that finds a precedent in a forcefully argued article by Simon During. In the first issue of the experimental Auckland literary journal A N D (1983–85), During begins his essay “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits” by asking a potentially divisive question: “Is New Zealand literature underread?”7 He contends that New Zealand reading practice tends not to challenge its critical modes, nor look too closely for texts that seem to ask for different readings. His critique equally applies in the early 2000s to the seemingly static, singular sense in which Mori literature is construed, with the question of underreading having particular resonance in Ihimaera’s reaction to the review of Sky Dancer.8 To counter the strong cultural-nationalist impulse of national critical practice, During demonstrates an “overreading” of one of Sargeson’s most-read short stories, “The Hole that Jack Dug.” This consists of a close textual study, employing semantics and semiotics inspired by Freud and Barthes,9 which aims to show how multiple interpretative strategies uncover aspects of the work previously ignored. By attaching the local to the international, During’s overreading reveals “a play of differences and levels”10 based on an image of the artist’s 6

Bilbrough, “If a Hen Crows, Wring Its Neck,” 57. Simon During, “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” A N D 1 (1983): 75. 8 I have somewhat inverted the directions of During’s under / overreading. His argument criticizes New Zealand letters for interpretation that is “separate from and adequate to the texts themselves” (75) – in effect, for not being suspicious of the author’s intentions or aware of the politics that govern its social context (76). The opposite is true of interpreting Mori fiction, in which what the text says is brushed aside in favour of the social and cultural context of its writing. My use of During’s concepts instead rests on overreading as a technique of going against the grain of common critical practice. 9 During, “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” 79. 10 “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” 91. 7



International Aesthetics

65

self and text as “formed partly in someone else’s terms – the terms of international and world-historical modes.”11 The scope of During’s comparative readings shows New Zealand writers and academics as belonging to an international community of English language and literature, a point raised earlier by Stead.12 Both critics’ privileging of textual strategies and criticism lifts the New Zealand text out of its local context (for the most part founded on Curnow’s vision of local truth and reality), to reinsert it in a field of international literary trends and techniques. To apply During’s and Curnow’s strategy to Ihimaera’s fiction creates a critical frame which analyzes Mori literature for what it shares with its Pakeha and European counterparts: in effect, stressing similarity and heterogeneity rather than difference and singularity. During’s charge of New Zealand underreading finds particular resonance in Ihimaera’s desire, in his reaction to Sky Dancer’s review, to escape the confines of apparently “limited criteria.” The Mori writer defends Sky Dancer from a literary standpoint rather than according to cultural criteria, positioning it within “the postcolonial, postmodern, metafictional text which [.. .] transcend[s] boundaries and interrogate[s] the structures of meaning.” Here, Ihimaera asks for his work to be read within frameworks of international Western literary aesthetics and theory. To apply During’s technique of overreading to Sky Dancer provides a textcentred rather than a culture-based interpretative strategy. In Salman Rushdie’s terms, this allows the text “the privilege of being the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of languages can be acted out.”13 Rushdie’s essay, which highlights the plurality of fiction, claims that fiction is a site of interaction on many levels. Thus, although cultural politics may be interpolated into interpretations of the novel, the text cannot be reduced to one overarching, definitive signification: the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations between them, which are relations of power. The novel does not seek to establish a privileged

11

“Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” 92. Stead, “From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in Recent New Zealand Poetry” (1979), in Stead, In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1981): 140. 13 Salman Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?” (1990), in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 427. 12

66

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



language, but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyse the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.14

Rushdie’s argument reformulates Bakhtin’s discourse on polyglossia and polyphony, in the way that fiction brings together composite parts while simultaneously leaving traces and echoes of its disparate sources.15 Privileging the plurivocality of the text shrugs off the immediate attachment of a cultural or moral agenda which, as During says, elides discrepancies and difficulties in the text by superimposing the dominant literary and cultural reading position. By contrast, During’s phrase-by-phrase parsing of the beginning of Sargeson’s story aims to be “vigilant”16 to the text itself, to be aware that Each work may function on a number of levels for instance; what is presented on the surface may be undermined somewhere or somehow else. Overreading [. . . ] actively seeks out such moments of disunity.17

Through his analysis of the text’s different levels, such as language, the interplay of author, narrator, and reader, and its relationship with reality, During reveals fiction’s capacity for plurality, which destabilizes interpretative authority. It is clear from the outset of the novel that Sky Dancer does not take place in Ihimaera’s pastoral nostalgic or social-realist modern Waituhi. Instead of a marae, cemetery, and the remains of a p providing the boundaries of community, as in Tangi, Whanau, and The Matriarch, this small coastal town of Tuapa contains the iconic New Zealand pub, fish and chip shop, and community hall offering housie, as well as a video shop, a takeaway bar, “a massage parlour advertising in Korean and Japanese,” and an “all-night diner.”18 This setting indicates that Tuapa is a different community from the rural Mori enclave that features in most of Ihimaera’s fiction. Tuapa may resemble a real New Zealand town, but it simultaneously suggests a movement away from familiarity, towards a difference marked by the particular juxtaposition of local and foreign locales and language, as signalled by the carefully chosen multinationality of the shops and of the language used to describe them, particularly the Americanism ‘diner’. In his analysis of heteroglossia in the novel, Bakhtin describes “the author’s freedom [.. .] of saying ‘I am me’ in someone 14

Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?” 420. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 356–66. 16 During, “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” 79. 17 “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” 76. 18 Ihimaera, Sky Dancer (Auckland: Penguin, 2003): 11. 15



International Aesthetics

67

else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other’.”19 He here describes plurality and distance as underpinning the relationship between the novel’s language and its mimetic value. For Bakhtin, the novel is a privileged genre because the mimetic truth-function is already in a contested state of play, which thereby allows fiction to highlight the behind-the-scenes polyphony of every utterance. It is the author’s knowledge and control of interrelated, multiple linguistic signifiers that make the novel the site of intentional hybridity: the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language.20

The word ‘diner’ is one such example of a signifier deliberately placed to exploit multiple semantic references. During’s technique of overreading is here revealing. To a New Zealand audience or readership, familiar with ‘tearooms’ or ‘café’, the diner carries echoes of 1950s and 1960s American movies or, later, sit-coms, in which it functions as the community gathering-place, featuring colourful local characters as well as providing a stage for key moments in the film’s action, especially romantic or confrontational. Tuapa’s diner fulfils the same function, as the drop-off point and site enabling many of the main characters to meet and interact. Notably, the diner is an anachronism, casting Tuapa and its predominantly middle-aged clientele as significantly behind the times, trapped, linguistically, in recalling the one-liners of their movie-going youth. Ihimaera continues to play on the spatial and temporal distance indicated by the unfamiliar setting of the fictive American diner in the opening dialogue between the main characters, Cora and Skylark, and the locals, which is a pastiche of Hollywood film characters and famous one-liners: “You’ve broken down, Miss?” [Lucas] asked, all solicitous, as if Cora had stubbed a tiny red-painted toe. “I’ll get Arnie to tow your Jeep in ... Hey, Schwartzenegger!” he shouted, turning to the far end of the garage. Arnie, the apprentice mechanic, did, in fact, look like a Maori version of Big Arnie himself. The hair was American crewcut. The face was handsome in a pretty-boy kind of way. The body was unbelievable. Even in his overalls, Arnie was a sight to see. “The little lady’s Jeep is just up the street,” Lucas told him.21 19

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 314–15. The Dialogic Imagination, 361. 21 Ihimaera, Sky Dancer, 12. 20

68

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



In Bakhtin’s terms, the Americanisms in the text “brin[g] different languages in contact with one another,” here superimposing American 1950s-era film dialogue on a New Zealand setting and put into the mouths of Mori characters. Bakhtin’s “living image” – here, of a Mori community – becomes heteroglossic, illuminated by a foreign language. In Sky Dancer, one of the strongest questions of illumination is how the overdetermined ‘diner’ and misplaced Hollywood pastiche may be seen to illuminate the New Zealand and Mori setting and storyline. This is a difficult task, because overlaying an American film-scenario-like script on a Mori fishing town, Tuapa, and Mori characters, including Arnie, Cora, and Skylark, challenges the reader’s expectations of a familiar Ihimaera setting to the point of rejecting any direct relationship with a possible real community. This is quite different from the use of Hollywood film references in Ihimaera’s earlier novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, where the young narrator’s fantasy offers an emotional escape from an oppressive family, dominated by the patriarch and circumscribed by rituals both Mori and Mormon. Throughout Bulibasha, Simeon is mocked and humiliated each time he departs from the ‘real’ world of whnau solidarity and working-class ethic. His curiosity and imaginings about ‘foreign’ culture such as movies and books is perceived as a threat to the close and closed Waituhi community of Grandfather Tamihana’s overprotective exclusion not only of Pakeha, but also of other Mori neighbours. By contrast, Sky Dancer’s language and characterization turn the tables on readers’ expectations of an authentic, realistic Mori community. Recognizing the text as primarily fantasy-genre fictive and self-referentially aware of its fictionalization, in the tradition of American pastiche, requires engagement with notions of mimesis, of the text’s relationship to reality and the textual strategies that signal its departure from conceptions of the real. Both Sharp’s and Bilbrough’s reviews of Sky Dancer note the text’s contradictory stance towards Mori fiction’s usual viewpoint. Both reviews point to possible allegorical meanings that accord with Mori myth or parables, at the same time as they acknowledge that the novel’s many levels of overt fictionalization disturb such a reading. Their responses underline the destabilizing effect of fiction, which both repeats reality and repeats itself. For J. Hillis Miller, fiction does not “fit” the real world, and so a novel may surprise the reader, destabilizing any ambition to provide a concrete or definitive analysis:



International Aesthetics

69

The hypothesis of possible heterogeneity of form in literary works has the heuristic value of preparing the reader to confront the oddness of a given novel, the things in it that do not “fit.”22

Miller eagerly takes the non-fit of reality to open out the text as a site of tension created between two forms of repetition, between a classicist understanding of repetition as imitation, the copying of a predetermined original, and Nietzsche’s concept of the fundamental disparity which makes like objects only ‘ghosts’ of one another – what Baudrillard, Deleuze and others call ‘simulacra’. The non-fit, which, in Miller’s view, makes even realistic texts ironic,23 recalls, in the postcolonial context, Bhabha’s sense of the subaltern’s self-conscious mimicry, of being “almost the same, but not quite” like the dominant discourse.24 Ihimaera’s use of mimicry applies both to the Hollywood pastiche – Tuapa is not quite like an ordinary New Zealand town – and to the way he twists the usually serious tone of the Mori content to parodic effect – Tuapa is not Waituhi. In Bhabha’s terms, Tuapa is an ambivalent site that “continually produce[s] its slippage” with expected mimesis.25 On a linguistic level, the town’s name also signals a deflating seriousness: in Mori, one of the significations of ‘tuapa’ is ‘to frolic’. The recycling of recognizable Hollywood clichés in Sky Dancer exaggerates the fictiveness of Tuapa and its characters while at the same time downplaying the novel’s Mori aspects. In fact, the imported American cultural references sustain the plot development. The first of the novel’s climaxes is triggered by Cora’s performance in a Broadway musical, “Bye Bye Birdie,” while the second, the turning point in the final war of the birds, is sparked by Arnie and Skylark implementing battle sequences from their favourite Hollywood films. Conversely, the aspects of Moritanga usually depicted so seriously in Mori fiction are minimal. This inversion is intimated from the novel’s beginning, in Ihimaera’s familiar arrival motif. In Sky Dancer, Cora and Skylark’s moment of arrival in the village is deflected with farce, when Cora’s bad driving has her almost hit two old Mori women crossing the road. The women are only briefly described, in caricature, “hair covered with

22

J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982): 5. 23 Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, 4. 24 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 25 The Location of Culture, 86.

70

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



scarves, dresses of a formless black,”26 as the Jeep passes them by and continues into town. This introduction to what turn out to be the two key Mori matriarchs in the novel is deflated with comedy, as Cora takes her hands off the wheel and covers her eyes: “Mum,” Skylark asked after a while, “do you think you could take the steering wheel again?” With Cora, you had to keep on joining the dots. “The wheel? Oh! Yes, of course.” Puffing nervously, but still shaken, Cora guided the Jeep into Tuapa.27

The inverted focus emphasizes the comic and ridiculous and plays down the potentially meaningful meeting with the Mori women. Certainly, the cinematic references, Hollywoodesque dialogue, and focus on action inscribe the novel in the genres of adventure quest and fantasy rather than in ethnographic realism. In another example, in the early pages of the novel, it becomes apparent that the seabirds are targeting Skylark, providing the kind of animistic portent that, in his earlier fiction, Ihimaera explains in terms of Mori mythology and superstition, the most notable examples of which are the spiders in The Matriarch and the whales in The Whale Rider. The connection between the heroine of Sky Dancer, with her obviously symbolic name, and the attacking seabirds, however, is not divulged. Ihimaera sets adventure-movie cliché in place of an explanation: “I’ve never seen anything like it” [. . . ] “Oh my baby,” Cora screamed. “My baby, she’s alive.” Skylark’s head cleared. She saw her mother wringing her hands, reprising her role as a distraught parent on Shortland Street. “I’m definitely back on the planet,” Skylark said to nobody in particular. “You were attacked by a bird,” Cora explained. “This lovely gentleman –” she pointed out the Maori fisherman – “he saved you.” “Call me Mitch,” the man said, smiling. “Mitch Mahana.”28

Hitchcock’s avian gothicism, the New Zealand medical soap opera Shortland Street, and James Bond heroism obscure those aspects of the passage able to be interpreted within a Mori frame. The above passages may be illustrative of the aspect of the novel that Bilbrough indicts. When the critic disparages the novel as “quirky entertainment,” he is taking exception to a superficiality that is not balanced by a com26

Ihimaera, Sky Dancer, 11. Sky Dancer, 11. 28 Sky Dancer, 15. 27



International Aesthetics

71

pensating “serious moral tone”: Sky Dancer does not “signpost” its Maoriness clearly enough. Indeed, Skylark, Arnie, and Cora do not express any recognizable Mori cultural traits; they do not speak Mori, are not deeply attracted to nature, and show no particular respect for their elders.29 Instead, they wear their Moritanga lightly, and the shared references of their daily routine owe more to Hollywood movies, Cora’s minor celebrity status, and Broadway show tunes than to any common recourse to traditional Mori practices. Moritanga here is what Evans, in his argument against a current mode of New Zealand writing heavily influenced by postmodern disillusion and a trend towards disassociation of place, calls Maoriness as “something lightly applied like make-up.”30 Evans’s dissatisfaction with this kind of writing is based on the way it caters to stereotypes of Mori, including the brokenness of urban modernity salvaged by recourse to a spiritualized nature. Evans argues that this hieratic aura is deeply ingrained in the collective national consciousness, with the Mori position reified by post-Mori-renaissance Pakeha sensitivity.31 Ihimaera’s Mori characters in Sky Dancer are, indeed, stereotypical. From the brawn-but-no-brain Arnie to the out-of-date traditional kuia spinning stories and recounting myths to the unaffected cool teen, Skylark, each performs a role that is as clichéd as the Hollywood dialogue they speak in. Yet, these Mori caricatures serve a different purpose in this novel from those in his 1970s work. Ihimaera’s early fiction features self-deprecating humour which sends up Pakeha stereotypes of Mori. Examples include the Pakeha landlord who will not rent to Mori – except Rangi Johnson, because he has a Pakeha wife: “you’re different [...] You’re married to Mrs Johnson”32 – or the Pakeha boss who considers his Mori workers as lax: “you want five days off to go to a funeral? Ridiculous! [...] You Maoris will just have to learn to

29

Importantly, it is the two Mori matriarchs who, through an impressive network of whnau and whakapapa, discover Cora’s Mori roots, although not until half way through the book. This minor mystery eventually reveals the Mori connection which links Cora and Skylark to the Mori quest to save Manu valley, permitting, by the novel’s close, a Shakespearian – and wholly Mori – restoration of balance in nature and family. 30 Evans, “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” 79. 31 “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” 78–80; “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’ and the Maori writer,” 17–19. 32 Ihimaera, “The Kids Downstairs,” in The New Net Goes Fishing, 98.

72

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



live with the times.”33 Contrary to this, Sky Dancer inverts its parody, so that, rather than exposing Pakeha unawareness of Moritanga, the way the novel downplays and makes fun of clichés about traditional Mori culture flusters the exorbitant sensitivity brought to Mori fiction by post-Mori-renaissance, bicultural Mori and Pakeha, exemplified by Bilbrough’s review. In effect, Sky Dancer’s humour sends up the seriousness towards Mori culture that has resulted in the kind of facile, formulaic portrayal of Mori characters that Evans takes exception to. Ihimaera wants to lighten up. As Sharp says in his review, Skylark is a heroine “stroppy enough to challenge timeworn conventions,” and elsewhere the novel “has a bit of fun at the expense of traditional marae protocol.”34 From this perspective, Evans’s intended criticism of “Maoriness [.. .] lightly applied” is perhaps a sign of Sky Dancer’s success. The novel’s departure from the known tropes of Ihimaera’s Mori fiction not only exposes another view of contemporary Moritanga, but its reoriented perspective quite possibly also attracts another audience. In an early interview, Ihimaera explains the importance to Mori culture of attracting a wider audience among Mori, particularly urban youth: let’s face it, with American influences and the whole pervasive subjection of all cultures to internationalism, what you’ve sometimes got to do is to give your own culture a new currency, a value which young people can respect – and they certainly cannot respect something which they might regard as being out of date. So we’ve moved into the electronic age. [. . .] we have a young Maori population in the cities which is shiftless, which is unemployed, which, for its leisure activities, plays the machines, plays cards, gets into trouble. [. . .] Even these [space invader] machines, we can still put Maoritanga into them.35

Rather than depict the kind of Mori expressive culture expounded by the Mori renaissance, in this novel Ihimaera caters for the kind of video-gameplaying urban youth who form the subject of Toon van Meijl’s sociological study.36 As van Meijl demonstrates, many young urban Mori feel threatened 33

Ihimaera, Whanau, 53. Sharp, “New Heights.” 35 Wilkinson, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 99. 36 Toon van Meijl, “Culture and Crisis in Maori Society,” in Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific, ed. Erich Kolig & Hermann Mückler (Hamburg: L I T , 2002): 47– 71. Van Meijl’s example of the experience of urban adolescent ‘dropouts’ attending a marae training centre illustrates the discrepancy between “public presentations” (55) of the culture, based on learning Mori language, rituals, and traditional values, and the 34



International Aesthetics

73

and alienated by tradition, which is meaningless to them. Sky Dancer marks the first time that Ihimaera’s own writing has engaged with this sector of Mori society. The privileging of action adventure and recourse to Hollywood and video-game formulae is a means of keeping up to date in a way that might appeal to a broader – or altogether different – group or groups. Remembering the primacy and the fictionality of the text is important to the reading of a novel such as Sky Dancer, for which trying to establish the writer’s ideological position is at least partly thwarted by the text’s multiple dimensions, which serve to undermine such a stance. The novel can grasp but not definitively pin down the gaps in its own production. This is why, for Bakhtin, a good novel does not strive to map empirical data but to create artistic “images of languages.”37 Overreading such images of languages in Sky Dancer reveals the hybridity of the novel genre, including the heteroglossia inherent in language, which Ihimaera purposefully engages in with his Americanisms and Hollywood anachronisms, and the unresolved, unstable relationship between mimesis as similarity or difference, in this text enacted by a depiction of Mori culture and community that does not quite fit with Morirenaissance expectations. The text’s polyphony undermines a straight cultural reading which relies on a serious tone that supports stable, well-defined boundaries of belonging. On the contrary, as attested by reviewers’ references to multiple visual and written texts, including The Whale Rider, the Bible, and Lord of the Rings, Sky Dancer’s influences come from everywhere, and its cultural touchstones are present on several levels, from individual words, such as ‘diner’, through recycled scenes from well-known action films, to a parodic inversion of Ihimaera’s earlier depiction of Moritanga. Among possible interpretations, Bilbrough’s reading is valid, but it makes the mistake of thinking that it is reading correctly, rather than offering one reading among many. youths’ “private feelings” (62) about being Mori, through their lived experience of low educational achievement and unemployment. His study highlights the gap between the prevailing (public) sense of Mori culture and (private) individuals who do not identify with that: [The disadvantaged youngsters] know they should construct their cultural identity as Mori in terms of cultural ideology, but they cannot, and they realize they never will. For that reason also, an increasing number of young people no longer wants to make an attempt to subscribe to the public discourse prescribing to Mori people that they have “to know who they are, where they are from and what they are on about. (64) 37 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 366.

74

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Anti-mimeticism as a literary device counters Bilbrough’s understanding of Sky Dancer as a failure because of its unclear, unreal relationship to the Mori culture that exists outside of this text. Ihimaera’s suggestion that Mori fiction needs to cater to a younger audience familiar with fantasy, science fiction, and the syncopated flow of time in video games accepts as relevant and valid this novel’s version of Maoriness. From this perspective, Sky Dancer may be placed alongside, rather than in opposition to, Ihimaera’s Waituhi novels. By understanding the non-fixed plurality of each text, the novel genre is seen to be not singular but heterogeneous, based on a web of aesthetic relationships between and within texts, writers, and readers, constantly revised and repositioned in accordance with changing cultural and historical perspectives.

Inter-Reference: A Verdian Matriarch Ihimaera’s major novel The Matriarch, the fruit of his ten-year ‘embargo’, marks a new direction from his writing of the 1970s. As an attempt to “go vertically into our culture,”38 the novel employs an epic structure, allowing Ihimaera to frame contemporary culture and protest in a long history that, on its Mori side, stretches back to the Mori origin myth and, on its Pakeha side, looks back to precolonial Europe. This historical scope provides a strong sense of continuity for both the evolution of Mori culture from past to present and the history of Mori interaction with Pakeha. In effect, the epic timescale emphasizes the multiple ways in which Pakeha and Mori cultures are intricately intertwined. Interpretation of the novel quickly became a sparring point for reviewers in the leading New Zealand magazines and among the academic literati. Although opinions diverged, focusing on stylistic, thematic, and structural aspects of the novel, a recurring doubt appears about The Matriarch’s ambitions and success, a feeling perhaps best summed up by Alex Calder’s review, in which he writes “W O W S T O P B U T .”39 Titles of reviews and critiques which appeared shortly after the novel’s release reveal a predominant understanding of the novel as a Mori-centred revisionist history. Trevor James’s “Lost Our Birthright Forever? The Maori Writer’s ReInvention of New Zealand,” Stead’s “Ihimaera: Old Wounds and Ancient Evils,” and David Dowling’s “Historiography in Some Recent New Zealand 38

Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 171. Alex Calder, “The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera – Two Responses,” Landfall 161 (1986): 80. 39



International Aesthetics

75

Fiction” all categorize The Matriarch as a novel of revisionist history which, within the 1980s Mori renaissance and sovereignty movement, is openly antagonistic towards Pakeha. While biculturalism provides a clear context for The Matriarch’s revisionism, critics were less sure about how to interpret the novel’s extensive intertextuality, which includes the Old Testament, Roman mythology, Greek tragedy, Venice, and Verdi’s operas. Many commentators read the European aspects either as allegory, particularly the Old Testament exile of the Hebrews40 and the Italian Renaissance and Risorgimento,41 or in the postmodern context of fragmentation, polyphony, and pastiche.42 A common criticism is that Ihimaera fails to hold together these disparate elements: Stead calls The Matriarch a “fail[ed]” novel because of the writer’s inability to control conflicting elements of its multiple story-lines and diverse narrative style;43 King’s review, “A Magnificent New Zealand-Baroque Near-Success” finds Ihimaera’s vision not “sufficiently penetrative to unify the many disparate parts into a single work;”44 for Elizabeth Caffin, the novel is “missing [.. .] a single confident artistic vision.”45 In a later essay, Prentice provides one perspective from which to understand and to frame the above reactions to The Matriarch. In “Nationalism vs. Internationalism?,” an essay which pivots on the oppositional “versus” of her title, she describes the novel as a “product of literarynational desire, and [appearing] out of the national-cultural body.”46 In an 40

Williams, Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1990): 125. 41 John Beston, “The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera – Two Responses,” Landfall 161 (March 1986): 84; Trevor James, “Lost our Birthright Forever? The Maori Writer’s Re-Invention of New Zealand,” S P A N 24 (April 1987): 119–20. 42 Calder, “The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera – Two Responses,” 84; David Dowling, “Historiography in Some Recent New Zealand Fiction,” Australia and New Zealand Studies in Canada 2 (Fall 1989): 60; Jannetta, “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 12.2 (1990): 20–23. 43 Stead, “Ihimaera: Old Wounds and Ancient Evils” (1986), in Stead, Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1989): 192. 44 King, “A Magnificent New Zealand-Baroque Near-Success,” Metro 6 (1986): 170. 45 Elizabeth Caffin, “A Fictional Performance,” The Listener (16 August 1986): 52. 46 Prentice, “Nationalism vs. Internationalism? Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch and Critical Abjection,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken L. Goodwin & Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 549.

76

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



echo of Hulme’s the bone people as the novel that “New Zealand has been waiting for,”47 Ihimaera’s much-publicized embargo and increasingly political outlook presaged the arrival of The Matriarch. Prentice suggests that the novel’s success was measured against pre-defined expectations of a Mori-renaissance novel. This anticipatory situation is not unique to Ihimaera’s 1986 novel – it recalls Pearson’s essays of the late 1950s and the 1960s expecting the emergence of a significant Mori writer. As a Mori-renaissance work and therefore centred on a search to assert a distinct Mori identity, the novel was expected to seek “unity of [.. .] artistic vision, of tone and voice, and of event.”48 However much The Matriarch is, certainly, concerned with revisionist history, the explication of key concepts of Mori culture, and the expression of modern-day identity, the novel is also epic, operatic, and baroque, all modes which resist interpretation in terms of singularity and unity. From this alternative perspective, the feeling that this work is too ambitious – as Bilbrough would put it, Ihimaera “has handfuls of balls in the air” – is no longer a criticism, but a compliment. The novel’s contestatory, radical, and aggressive politicization of Mori– Pakeha relations makes it difficult to account for Ihimaera’s use of Verdi’s operas. Reading opera as a metaphor for bicultural difficulty requires selecting the Mori writer’s citations from the two operas, Nabucco and Aida, that deal overtly with race relations in order to validate a tidy conflation of Ihimaera of the Mori renaissance with the Verdi of the Italian Risorgimento. This argument both prioritizes the writer’s and the composer’s roles as popular ambassadors for cultural concerns, and attaches Mori–Pakeha race relations of the 1980s to an international, historical continuum of struggles for independence. In their determination to attribute a contestatory meaning to Verdi’s opera in The Matriarch, such analyses relegate the novel’s performative and fictive aspects to a secondary role behind cultural politics. Otto Heim presents a useful alternative in his consideration of music and cinema in The Matriarch. He finds that the visual technique in the Te Kooti sequence transform[s] history into myth, removing it from the realm of social action and productive effort to the realm of visibility and consumption, where it appears as a picture, a spectacle or a symphony.49 47

Joy Cowley, “the bone people,” The Listener (12 May 1984): 60. Prentice, “Nationalism vs. Internationalism?” 550. 49 Otto Heim, Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1998): 199. 48



International Aesthetics

77

Here, questions of human agency are cast aside in favour of performance and effect. Heim’s perspective from outside the New Zealand bicultural optic suggests that the novel’s historiography may be unconvincing – even, for Heim, “ahistorical.”50 Instead, in the layering of other kinds of fiction within the novel form, particularly opera, film, and theatre, he argues for interpreting the novel from within the tradition of visual spectacle, as exaggeration rather than as an imitation of reality. Heim’s argument is revealing in terms of opera, arguably one of the most excessive of art forms. Indeed, opera’s success rests on its hyperbolic embellishment of reality, with the suspension of disbelief permitting its departure from mimetic expectations in order to create the ornamentation necessary for orchestral, vocal, and dramaturgical virtuosity. Of all the arts, music most strongly resists a mimetic reading, an argument that extends to the dramatic gestures of opera, in which the story-line and libretto provide only the pretext for, not the meaning of, the performance. As one musicologist puts it, “opera remains an artificial form as the music is more an interpretation than an imitation of reality” 51 – a comment that recalls Ihimaera’s and Harris’s claim that Waituhi is intended to be “imaginative” rather than “realistic.” In general, music’s commentators are very wary of mapping concrete meaning onto form: aural composition may connote abstract senses but it cannot denote anything specific. Indeed, it is questionable whether music can communicate anything at all, an argument held by Pierre Boulez, who is renowned for his aesthetic purism. The non-mimetic function of opera and music leads to a reconsideration of Ihimaera’s interest in Verdi’s operas. Although aligning the cultural politics of the Mori novelist with those of the Italian composer is a valid approach, it is far from complete.52 First, of the two operas commonly picked out by 50

Heim, Writing Along Broken Lines, 148. Roland Mancini & Jacques Rouveroux, “Paillasse,” in Roland Mancini & Jacques Rouveroux, Fayard Guide de l’opéra (Paris: Fayard, 1995): 886. “l’opéra reste en effet une forme artificielle, la musique étant bien plus interprétation que véritable imitation.” (My tr.) 52 In much the same way as I am here arguing against the common perception of Ihimaera as always motivated by cultural politics, some Verdi scholars also play down the composer’s involvement as a Risorgiomento revolutionary. Indeed, the political reticence of Verdi, as a wealthy landowner who spent much of his time living in Paris, is understandable. Verdi’s genius as a popular artist was in responding to changing fashions that guaranteed public success. Guide des opéras de Verdi: Livrets, analyses, 51

78

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



critics, only Nabucco (1842) qualifies as a nationalistic work, written at the height of Italian resurgence in the 1840s.53 Conversely, Aida (1871), which appears both in The Matriarch and throughout The Dream Swimmer, exemplifies Verdi’s elite works that dazzle spectators with extravagant sets. Rather than evincing the grass-roots patriotism of the earlier period, Aida was written for the Italian Opera of Cairo in celebration of the completion of the Suez Canal, undeniably a bastion of colonial success. In a colonial act of appropriation, it is thought that the opera’s libretto was taken from a Khedive storyteller and rewritten by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette.54 By simplifying the author’s acknowledgement of Verdi to a few citations from two popular operas, and by ignoring the five other operas that Ihimaera draws on (The Force of Destiny, Macbeth, Othello, Don Carlos, A Masked Ball), critics and reviewers underestimate the extent to which opera informs The Matriarch’s structure and story-line. Ihimaera’s interest in Verdi’s operas has been significantly underread by New Zealand commentators who seek to tame the novel’s disparate and tangential inter-references into the resolved, singular meaning of a Mori-renaissance narrative. A notable exception is Alistair Fox’s study of masculinity in New Zealand fiction. For Fox, the lack of closure in The Matriarch is an inevitable result of the conflicting and damaging psychological issues confronting Ihimaera and the character Tamatea. In his psychoanalytical reading of the The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer, Fox identifies opera as “psychic ‘keys’” 55 which unlock emotional turmoil on personal, cultural, and political levels, which he carefully explicates through close attention to Ihimaera’s use and misuse of Verdi’s libretti.56 The opera art form resists any neat and tidy reading. On the operatic stage, the different arts of symphony, singing and theatre do not sit together as collaboration, but produce tension in their difference. As Michel Leiris puts it: “the conjugation of opposites generated on stage leads the spectacle to the discographies, ed. Jean Cabourg (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Pierre Milza, Verdi et son temps (Paris: Perrin, 2001). 53 Many of Verdi’s earlier and lesser-known operas do feature religious and political freedom, on subjects including the Crusades, Peruvians against Spanish rule, and European nations struggling against imperialism. However, all of the operas that Ihimaera chooses to borrow from, including Aida, are known for their foregrounding of personal relationships. 54 Milza, Verdi et son temps, 371–75. 55 Fox, The Ship of Dreams, 136. 56 The Ship of Dreams, 136–49.



International Aesthetics

79

highest degree of tension.”57 This strained amalgamation creates excess and effusion, which attaches opera to the aesthetics of the baroque, a style which emerged in Europe in the seventeenth century congruently with opera. As Laplantine and Nouss summarize: The baroque stage reunites arts and genres, speech, image, and music. In the baroque aesthetic, every element aims to overflow its limits, stretching towards the other and joining with it, in a constant dynamic of decentering, overflowing, and transformation. The baroque is fundamentally an art of metamorphosis, of a métissage of forms.58

Opera functions as a baroque interface which also contains a palimpsestic history of its own: opera as the highest expression of baroque excess; nineteenthcentury opera as popular art in non-unified, illiterate Italy; opera as symbol of colonial high art; opera as today an obscure and anachronistic art; opera as rewrites of works of fiction adapted for the stage; opera as inspired by historical events and distorted for reasons of censorship; opera as carrying a social message; opera as pure divertissement. Opera is itself dense with historical, cultural, and artistic inter-references. As each performance reinterprets the work, it responds directly to various aspects of its past interpretations. This is evident in the way critiques and reviews often compare and contrast a production with those of previous directors, conductors, singers, and choreographers. In an exemplary case of intertextuality read across cultures, eras, and art forms, Franco Manai and Kirsten Hanna’s article “The Italian Myth of Galileo in New Zealand Opera” puts Ihimaera’s libretto for his 2002 opera Galileo alongside Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo and Liliana Cavani’s film Galileo. In Ihimaera’s libretto, they find echoes of Cartesian philosophy, Lucretius’s poetry, and Dante’s Inferno, and, in John Rimmer’s music, influences from fifth-century hymn and twentieth-century atonalism.59 57

Michel Leiris, quoted in François Laplantine & Alexis Nouss, Le métissage (Paris: Flammarion, 2001): 52: “la conjugaison de contraires qui s’y produit peut porter le spectacle au degré de tension le plus extrême.” (My tr.) 58 Laplantine & Nouss, Le métissage, 50: “La scène baroque est celle qui réunit les arts et les genres, le verbe, l’image et la musique. Dans l’esthétique baroque, tout élément cherche à déborder ses limites pour tendre vers un autre et le rejoindre, dans une constante dynamisme de décentrement, de débordement et de transformation. C’est fondamentalement un art de la métamorphose, du métissage des formes.” (My tr.) 59 Franco Manai & Kirsten Hanna. “The Italian Myth of Galileo in New Zealand Opera,” European Studies 21 (2005): 263–76.

80

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



To take the history of opera from Verdi’s nineteenth-century Lombardy to Ihimaera’s 1986 Waituhi equally demonstrates another layer of Laplantine and Nouss’s baroque “transformation” and “metamorphosis.” When applied to the postcolonial Mori context, opera again functions on another level of baroque difference. Although, commentators argue that Ihimaera employs baroque effects, including Venice and Verdi, to attach Mori to European high art,60 bypassing the Pakeha, whom Williams neatly summarizes as “quotidian British burghers recreating English lower-middle-class suburbia in the Antipodes,”61 this perceived pinnacle of culture is already inflected by a history of cross-cultural negotiation. The baroque is already inscribed in a question of cultural difference, arising out of the influence of the discovery of the Americas on European art and culture in the seventeenth century. As the orderliness of Europe was flooded by reports of strange objects and peoples in the New World, the baroque was a term for all that was shocking or bizarre.62 In the process of internalizing the exotic that Christopher Pinney describes as the inherently creole nature of Europe, the bizarre came to mean, more generally, a dissonance or jumble of styles.63 Baroque principles are also applicable to the novel form. Bakhtin’s use of the term in The Dialogic Imagination reinstates the sense of alienation and bizarre difference produced by the baroque. Bakhtin proposes that the baroque marks a significant discovery in the novel’s historical development, in the seventeenth century, as the attraction of exoticism allows “a re-clothing of surrounding reality in alien material, akin to enacting a sort of heroizing masquerade.”64 The “alien material” of the novel means that self-expression and self-representation are portrayed with ambiguity: To find oneself, to realize oneself in the alien, to heroize oneself and one’s own struggle in alien material [. . . ]. The Baroque feeling for the world, with its polarities, with the excessive tension of the contradictory unity permeating its historical material, squeezed out any trace of internal self-sufficiency, any internal resistance the alien cultural world (which had created this material)

60

James, “Lost Our Birthright Forever?” 120; Williams, Leaving the Highway, 125. Williams, Leaving the Highway, 125. 62 Timothy Hampton, “Introduction: Baroques,” Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 1–9. 63 Christopher Pinney, “Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002): 125–61. 64 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 387. 61



International Aesthetics

81

might offer; it transformed the world into an externally stylized shell for its own special content.65

Bakhtin highlights how the baroque juxtaposition of images in the novel enacts the mimetic relation between the real and the fictional by creating tension between similarity and difference, illuminating what J. Hillis Miller calls fiction’s non-fit with reality, so that the unknown, the strange, and the unexpected act on the known and the familiar. In the baroque text of The Matriarch, consisting of jarring juxtapositions of voice, tone, time-frames, and cultural references, opera provides an overarching organizing schema – albeit also baroque. Opera may be read as permeating all levels of the novel’s language, characterization, content, and theme. The Matriarch’s Prologue signals the novel’s insertion into a realm of theatricality and opera, effectively underwriting the traditional Mori cultural setting in a metatext of fiction. In this, the novel’s beginning supports Heim’s claim that The Matriarch is closer to spectacle and performance than to social action. In the first two paragraphs, the narrator, Tama, explicitly labels the matriarch, also known as Riripeti or Artemis, an “imaginative reconstruction,” and also intimates that the force of her personality has similarly turned his own life “into fiction from fact.”66 In a direct indication of the matriarch’s role as a stage figure, her beauty and voice are likened to the Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, who was renowned for her interpretation of Verdi’s heroines (13). From the outset, Ihimaera assumes the role of playwright. His descriptions on the novel’s first page resemble stage directions, even being italicized as in theatre or opera: the matriarch “was sitting with the child on the highest terrace”; set design is detailed: “the clouds, swirling through the sky, cast strange patterns like fleeting kowhaiwhai designs”; there are indications of lighting for dramatic effect: “her beauty shone out with a gleaming light,” “Beneath the veil, shimmering like tears, were the pearls in her hair.” Once the stage is set, the opera begins, as “the matriarch turned to [the child], and her voice thrilled with excitement” (1). The resonance of the matriarch’s singing voice continues over the five-page Prologue as she sings or chants her ancestry from the beginning of the world to the coming of the Pakeha. The Prologue signals that Ihimaera is offering The Matriarch as a musical composition: indeed, Ihimaera’s long-term interest in, and compre65

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 387. Ihimaera, The Matriarch (Auckland: Secker & Warburg, 1986): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 66

82

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



hensive knowledge of, music and opera are clearly influences on his expression as a writer.67 Elsewhere, he has made explicit the connection between Mori expression, music, and the novel: the Maori language is the singing word and therefore a source of that sense of music. Also music tends to me to be either very very mathematical or else very emotional, and so the sorts of techniques that you use in the novel are of course the same as in music. There’s a theme and then the theme is modulated in some way and there are variations on the theme.68

Opera in The Matriarch and its sequel, The Dream Swimmer, is part of Ihimaera’s goal of reclaiming “the epic nature of our lives.”69 This motivation sets these novels in a typical opera context: historical characters on an historical stage that provides a fictionalized space in which various responses and interpretations run the gamut of theatrical emotion and musical ornamentation. The opera theme is repeated and modulated throughout The Matriarch: a novel written not in chapters but in five acts is an opera in Bakhtin’s sense of the baroque as providing an “externally stylized shell” in which Ihimaera contains the “special content” of Moritanga. In both The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer, musical orchestration and ornamentation are used as description, as if the text were the musical score and the dialogue the libretto. Thus the karanga (song of welcome on the marae) is “a clear aria of crystalline purity, a Verdian arc,”70 and Tama’s feelings for his mother an “adagietto” of sadness.71 The matriarch’s singing voice is a “cantilena” of sound (45), and even puppies in the background squeal “appog[g]iaturi” (63). Throughout The Matriarch, Ihimaera quotes, copies, adapts, and alludes to Verdi’s orchestration, characters, plot, and staging. This provides a subtext that lends weight to the action on the page. At the end of Act Two, “The Song of Te Kooti,” for example, the matriarch sings from Aida’s death scene, where the heroine and her lover are entombed alive: And the matriarch began to sing, her voice a thread of sound, to the universe itself, “Presago il core della tua condanna, My heart forewarned me 67

Ihimaera studied music and piano from a young age. He has reviewed New Zealand Opera productions in magazines such as Pacific Way, Quote / Unquote, and The National Business Review. 68 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 170. 69 “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 173. 70 Ihimaera, The Dream Swimmer (Auckland: Penguin, 1997): 343. 71 The Dream Swimmer, 362.



International Aesthetics

83

of your condemnation.” They were strange words to sing, words of suffocation, of darkness coming with the sealing of a stone crypt, of being buried alive away from air and light. (196)

Verdi’s set is also transposed onto the scene of The Matriarch without direct reference to the opera it derives from, as in Act Four, “The Statesman.” Riria takes the place of Amelia, the heroine in Verdi’s A Masked Ball who, in the second act of the melodrama, veiled and alone at midnight, descends a hill to pick herbs at the foot of the moonlit gallows. Ihimaera summons Riria to the scene: “so let our call go echoing forth across the night, and let our meeting again take place on a landscape charged with symbolism – a lonely spot at the foot of a steep hill” (341). The chieftainess emulates Amelia, appearing “like a veiled shade” (342), “cover[ing] her face with shame” (341). Verdi’s orchestration echoes the heroine’s fear in the high and tremulous notes of a prayer that rises above the low and constant line of the principal theme. Ihimaera translates the quavering emotion of the soprano’s voice into waiata, a feature of which is the solo female voice rising above the chorus: “Ara, and listen to her waiata of fear and sorrow, keening across the night sky and conjuring up the lamentations of the dead” (341). Further operatic echoes are apparent in the action and dialogue of Ihimaera’s novel. From Nabucco, the power-play between Nabucco and Abigail is similar to Tama and Ihaka’s double-edged relationship of obligation and betrayal. Abigail refuses to forgive her father, who attempted to disinherit her and condemn her to slavery: Out! How dare you beg for mercy, Your tears come too late and do not move me: Audacious old man, you did not hesitate To dishonour me.72

This situation is mirrored in Tama’s refusal to absolve his grandfather Ihaka for attempting to put another heir in Tama’s rightful place: Yes, cry your heart out, old man, try to move me with tears, but none of your tricks will work on me. I know them all, grandfather, trickster, actor in the grand style, thief. (410)

Many of Ihimaera’s opera-informed passages work well as simple imagery, even if the underlying references are only meaningful to attentive opera buffs. However, knowledge of Verdi’s operas sheds light on parts of The Matriarch 72

Nabucco, I I I .iii.

84

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



that critics find unexplained on other levels. For example, although it is true that Artemis is an ambivalent hero for Mori sovereignty – according to Stead, her magic is unbelievable and her feats achieve little73 – both her and Tama’s actions are coherent within the rules of the Romantic opera hero and heroine. These are solo figures engaged in a Promethean struggle for liberty and legitimacy, compromised or thwarted by unjust social, ethnic, political, religious or familial constraints. These circumstances create pathos for the hero, hinging on his elevated moral stance rather than his exploits, with the heroine’s qualities of prescience, intuition, and understanding providing a focus that generates the atmosphere of impending tragedy. In this context, Artemis’ arias, which are all from Verdi’s tragic heroines, provide a framework of elegy, foreshadow tragedy, and heighten drama as a way to colour Ihimaera’s description of family dynamics, past memories, and the retelling of history. When the narrator claims that “hers is a blinding presence, imperious and commanding, bidding me forever forward to battle with the world of the Pakeha” (207), he identifies her as a Verdian hero, driven by desire in an impossible quest that can end only with her death. Any exercise in spotting the opera in the Mori novel, with the intention of asserting structural cohesion based on a different artistic vision, will still fall into the trap of attempting to account for the novel by resolving apparent contradictions. Bakhtin’s description of the baroque as anti-mimetic, and the musicological argument against music as representational, contest any such wish for synthesis. Similarly, to conceive of The Matriarch as a baroque epic challenges the expected cohesion of a novel of race relations. In her study of postcolonial Anglo-Indian epic novels, Jacqueline Bardolph discusses techniques for foregrounding fictiveness, such as magical realism, the unreliable narrator, and the juxtaposition of non-European storytelling with the novel form.74 Through this, she postulates that one of the important features of postcolonial epic is not progress or resolution but the textual journey through fiction itself. In regard to The Matriarch, Prentice notes something similar, claiming that Ihimaera’s emphasis on the matriarch’s fictiveness means that, within the epic tradition, Artemis is the filter through which all the novel’s sections are to be seen: “Artemis is less the ‘destination’ than the ‘vehicle’,” so that “within this teleological quest narrative [...] the process or the journey 73

Stead, “Old Wounds and Ancient Evils,” 192–93. Jacqueline Bardolph, “Les ‘enfants’ de Rushdie: Quel réalisme, quelle magie?” in Le réalisme merveilleux, ed. Xavier Garnier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998): 19–34. 74



International Aesthetics

85

is the point.”75 An emphasis on non-linearity illuminates the baroque nature of epic, in which counterposing different narrative perspectives and stylistic techniques foregrounds the self-referentiality and plurality of the novel genre. Bardolph illustrates her point by citing from Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, in which the narrator is exhorted to “be wily, be twisty, be elaborate. Forsake grim shortness and hustle. Let us luxuriate in your curlicues.”76 The baroque language of storytelling here coincides with Ihimaera’s vision of the repeated modulations and variations of the musical theme which he says informs his vision as a writer. Read as a novel of race relations, The Matriarch, with its many layers of intertextuality, obscures the underlying message in which Tama’s family history stands in for the Mori people’s struggle on a national level – the sense in which Calder interprets the novel as an epic.77 Both The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer are failed quests in which the narrator takes his reader on a journey that spans several generations in the search for a way out of Pakeha domination of Mori. Nevertheless, by each book’s conclusion, despite millennial, messianic, tribal, bicultural, and international propositions, the hero has failed to resolve the central issue of Mori subordination. From Calder’s position, the novel’s secondary narratives, fragmented and distributed throughout the text, including Tama’s visit to Venice, the Wellington hui of 1949, Ihaka’s challenge to Tama’s mana, Te Kooti, Wi Pere, and Rastafarianism, obfuscate the main story-line. By contrast, in Bardolph’s view of the epic as a fiction built out of inter-reference, such stories are integral and individually, internally complete. Indeed, The Matriarch’s lengthy departures from the main plot are embedded in the text in a manner reminiscent of the circling, repeating, and digressive techniques of oral narrative, anecdote, and allegory. Opera plays a key role in these textual digressions as Riripeti’s arias open and close each of the novel’s five acts and signal each cycle of intra-textual deviation.78 Ihimaera’s extensive embedding of Verdian opera makes an argu75

Prentice, “Nationalism vs. Internationalism?” 549. Chandra, quoted in Bardolph, “Les ‘enfants’ de Rushdie,” 27. 77 Calder, “The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera – Two Responses,” 80–81. 78 Each act directly connects one Verdian opera to the Act’s main theme: Act Two likens Te Kooti’s struggle with Aida’s capture in Egypt; Act Three re-enacts Nabucco’s power-play between his two daughters, with Ihaka placing an impostor ‘brother’ as heir to Tama’s inheritance; Act Four describes the Mori politician Wi Pere within the same dynamic as the political posturing in Verdi’s A Masked Ball; in Act Five, intimations of the matriarch’s mortality are akin to Desdemona’s final aria in Othello. 76

86

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



ment for the epic novel not as a linear progression towards a final destination, but as a frame within which to contain stories within stories. In a letter to James, Ihimaera explains the novel’s “Italian connection” as a way to communicate to Pakeha the magnitude of central aspects of Moritanga, including Te Kooti (a Mori Garibaldi), Ringatu teachings (the Israelites enslaved in Egypt), and Hawaiki (Venice): “I felt that New Zealanders were ignorant of their [Mori] history and needed a European analogue to begin to understand this importance and significance.”79 Ihimaera implies that Pakeha are – or ought to be – familiar with opera, the Bible, and European references, just as he is. The way in which Ihimaera normalizes his European referents concurs with the insistence of the Cuban writer and critic Alejo Carpentier on the importance of inter-reference as a means of describing the unknown subject in terms which will be understood by his Western readers. In his essays on cross-cultural interdependence, Carpentier encourages openness to all cultural and historical influences: to understand and to know is not to be colonised. To be informed is not synonymous with submission. [. . . ] the regular study of foreign cultures, present or past, far from implying intellectual underdevelopment, is an opportunity for the universalisation of the Latin-American writer [. . . ]. We are the product of several cultures, we are fluent in several languages, and we respond to various – legitimate – processes of transculturation.80

Carpentier promotes “baroque prose” – particularly by piling up adjectives or, to avoid this, by “adjectivizing certain nouns that, in this case, function in a metaphoric manner”81 – as valuable for defining and naming objects unknown 79

James, “Lost our Birthright Forever?” 112. “[Pero] entender, conocer, no es equivalente de dejarse colonizar. Informarse no es sinónimo de someterse. [. . . ] De ahí que el enfoque asiduo de culturas extranjeras, del presente o del pasado, lejos de significar un subdesarrollo intelectual, sea, por el contrario, una posibilidad de universalización para el escritor latinoamericano. [. . . ] Somos un producto de varias culturas, dominamos varias lenguas y respondemos a distintos procesos, legítimos, de transculturación.” Alejo Carpentier, “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana” (1964), in Los pasos recobrados: Ensayos de teoría y crítica literaria, ed. Alexis Márquez Rodríguez & Araceli García–Carranza 80

(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2003): 135, 136. 81

“por la adjetivación de ciertos substantivos que actúan, en este caso, por proceso metafórico. [. . . ] es una prosa barroca” (Carpentier, “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana,” 140).



International Aesthetics

87

to the Western reader. Hence, instead of describing South America by employing the physical description, local language, and glosses common to the ‘ethnographic’ fiction that Carpentier disparages for fostering exclusionist difference, the Cuban critic calls on a system of familiar European literary, artistic, and cultural references. For example, in his novel The Lost Steps, the narrator from New York describes the spectacular geography of the Orinoco by comparing it to the world of Bosch, fantastic depictions of Babel, hallucinatory illustrations of the temptations of the saints, a Cyclopean staircase, a Gothic cathedral, and a heavenly setting suitable for a Last Judgment tableau.82 Carpentier evokes the South American landscape in minute detail by actively engaging the Western reader’s imagination. Thus, instead of a voyage towards a heart of darkness of failed articulation and alienation, inter-reference makes possible the narrator’s journey into the forest as a symbolic awakening. Carpentier asserts: “there is not, and will not be, a crisis of the novel so long as the novel is an open novel, a novel containing multitudes, a novel filled with fine, strong, protean variety.”83 Carpentier’s generative baroque echoes are, in effect, a version of Bakhtin’s two key concepts, dialogism and carnivalesque, precepts of inter-reference which form the basis of Julia Kristeva’s important work on intertextuality.84 It is such openness that Ihimaera imagines in bringing into play “a European analogue” in his letter to James, above. However, calling upon baroque intertextuality in Bakhtin’s, Bardolph’s, and Carpentier’s sense, implies a degree of complicity between writer and reader based on intellectual and motivational equality: the writer is not charged with elitism or eurocentrism, and the reader’s knowledge of literature is broad enough to participate in the dense inter-reference. The fact that Ihimaera’s readership failed to identify and engage with the range of operatic extracts and references in The Matriarch, just as they failed to do so with the verismo in his opera Waituhi, suggests that Italian cultural and operatic inter82

Carpentier, The Lost Steps, tr. Harriet de Onís (Los pasos perdidos, 1953; tr. 1956; London: Minerva, 1991): 171–72. 83 “No hay ni habrá crisis de la novela, mientras la novela sea novela abierta, novela de muchos, novela de buenas y fuertes variaciones”; Alejo Carpentier, “Cervantes en el alba de hoy” (Alcalá de Henares, 4 April 1978, on the occasion of receiving the Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Prize), in Los pasos recobrados, ed. Márquez Rodríguez & García–Carranza, 287. 84 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia U P , 1986): 34–61.

88

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



references are largely meaningless for the majority of Mori and Pakeha readers. The novel’s extensive inter-reference poses interpretative difficulties. The Old Testament, European mythology, Venice, opera, as well as the Mori aspects, including language, myth, tribal lore, local history, protocol, and oral traditions, are significant and enriching for those readers who can access them, but for those who cannot, they encumber and obscure. The broad range of intercultural references, of which passages cited in Mori and Italian are perhaps the most conspicuous, means that most readers find themselves excluded at one point or another. Such textual opacity enacts Bakhtin’s description of the novel genre as alienating in its “excessive tension” that belies unity. While discussion around The Matriarch accepted that Ihimaera’s Mori perspective may legitimately shut out Pakeha readers, this was not considered inherent to the novel genre, as it is for Bakhtin, but, rather, as an expected upshot of politicized Mori sovereignty. At the same time as the hardworking Pakeha reader accepted the Morirenaissance injunction to adjust his or her reading habits to embrace Mori ways of writing, the antagonism of emergent biculturalism in the 1980s called into question Pakeha competency to interpret a novel that centralizes the Mori by challenging Pakeha authority. Faced with accounting for those parts of the text outside common (Western) critical and reading experience, Pakeha acknowledge that their expectations to be able to access all elements of a Mori-renaissance novel might be out of order. Calder describes the ensuing anxiety: “there is something, well, colonial in a Pakeha reader’s assumption that his reading habits were already adequate, already equal to a novel like The Matriarch.”85 As a quest for knowledge, the novel demonstrates the power of acquiring, owning, and withholding information on multiple levels, with critics focusing especially on the novel’s aggressive stance towards Pakeha, antagonistic revisionist history, and pages in untranslated Mori. The way in which the novel resists being tamed by academic elucidation indicates a subversion of the liberal notion that knowledge equals power – that which Edward Said so thoroughly criticizes in Culture and Imperialism. Although this effort was almost solely directed at the Pakeha response to The Matriarch’s Mori content, the critical silence surrounding opera also illustrates, in a much less polemical manner, the difficulty and even danger of interpolating cultural politics into fiction which, by its nature, escapes mimetic expectations. Opera provides one kind of knowledge, structure, and literary device, 85

Calder, “The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera – Two Responses,” 80.



International Aesthetics

89

but one that exists solely on a level of textuality: doing the work to unravel opera’s inter-reference points only towards more fiction, and does not clarify or in any way reconcile the text with notions of truth or reality beyond the text. The novel’s inter-reference creates confusion (if it is not understood), or effusion (if it is), ultimately emphasizing subjectivity and tension in a way that neither the narrator nor his Mori or Pakeha reader will ever resolve. In the context of 1980s emergent biculturalism and the corresponding radical revision of 150 years of Pakeha–Mori race relations, and in accordance with the “repressive hypothesis” in which Prentice accurately inscribes The Matriarch’s publication,86 the desire to make this novel representative of its period is understandable. In many respects, Ihimaera’s rewrite, Whanau II (2004), fulfils the role that critics of the 1980s expected in The Matriarch. More than a rewrite of the 1974 pastoral novel of the same name, in its aggressive stance against Pakeha, its repetition of historical events such as those involving Te Kooti, the Matawhero massacre, and Ngatapa, and the novel’s reconfiguration of the elder-and-child relation, Whanau II enacts the parts of The Matriarch pertinent to a national epic. By cutting out the extensive reference to cultures outside the immediate national context, the later novel explores more thoroughly historical and contemporary Mori–Pakeha relationships. Now that Whanau II has to some extent vindicated Ihimaera’s desire to record the historical impact of colonization on his village, Waituhi, it is perhaps no longer necessary to read The Matriarch searching for unity.

Testing the Limits of Inter-Reference: Rewriting Mansfield With The Matriarch being received primarily as an investigation of Pakeha– Mori race relations, Ihimaera’s extensive inter-reference was largely overlooked. Critics’ attention was somewhat diverted by more troubling aspects of the novel, notably the accusatory tone of Ihimaera’s direct address to the reader as “you, Pakeha” (172) and his apparent plagiarism of well known historical texts harnessed to his revisionist approach to the New Zealand land wars. In one of the most thorough examinations of Ihimaera’s copying (in this case, of paragraphs from an entry by Keith Sorrenson in An Encyclopedia of

86

Prentice, “Nationalism vs. Internationalism?” 549.

90

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



New Zealand87), Williams analyzes the way in which the Mori writer interpolates an emotional and angry response which not only challenges, but also insults, the Pakeha bias of colonial history, thereby exaggerating the difference between Pakeha and Mori perception of the same events.88 Ihimaera’s counter-discursive strategy is a forthright example of postcolonial writing back, quite literally taking the Pakeha perspective on history and imposing his own commentary on it. Apart from Williams’s critique, Ihimaera’s unacknowledged borrowings – rectified in later editions – did not generate any great degree of debate in the media or in literary circles. This may be compared with the heated dispute surrounding Jane Campion’s possible plagiarism of Jane Mander’s novel in her 1993 film The Piano, or, in an Australian literary example discussed further in Chapter 4 below, Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper. Plagiarism is one of the most serious of ‘crimes’ in literature: its threat to key concepts of ownership, originality, and authority may lead to very real consequences in the legal implications of copyright infringement. However, Ihimaera’s plagiarism was generally explained as part of his historiographical repositioning, with his challenge to individual writers’ ownership turned into a metaphorical challenge to Pakeha authority,89 ‘writing back’, in the popular terminology of Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s formative The Empire Writes Back, to the dominant discourse. Given the leniency with which Ihimaera’s misrepresentation was met, it is somewhat surprising that the New Zealand reception of his appropriation of Mansfield’s stories, three years later, was so hostile. In his 1989 short-story collection Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, Ihimaera diverts the issue of plagiarism to one of outright rewriting. In a similar manner to academic acceptance of Ihimaera’s historiography in The Matriarch, the Mori writer’s rewriting of Mansfield was received under the rubric of postcolonial writing back. As such, the collection is largely interpreted as a search for difference from Mansfield’s original stories, with the expected motivation of resituating the absent or marginalized Mori of Mans87

Keith Sorrenson, “[Maori Wars] Section I I I : The Effects of the Wars on the Maori People,” in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A.H. McClintock (Wellington: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1966), vol. 2: 483–87. 88 Williams, Leaving the Highway, 130–31. 89 Such contextualizing of Ihimaera’s copying in The Matriarch is compared, in Chapter 4 below, with the altogether different response to his plagiarism in The Trowenna Sea.



International Aesthetics

91

field’s stories into a place of centrality. In this optic, critics employ a compare-and-contrast methodology to bridge the considerable gaps separating Ihimaera from Mansfield: namely, seventy years, 20,000 kilometres, gender, and race. Distance and difference are evoked to question Ihimaera’s compulsion to respond to Mansfield’s work from a personal and Mori motivation, as he puts it in his epistolary introduction.90 Williams sees Ihimaera’s revisions as changing the original texts’ meanings in a way that “upsets” the mainstream Pakeha vision of Mansfield’s place in New Zealand’s literary history.91 From a similarly contrastive stance against Pakeha writing and reading, Caffin’s resoundingly negative review finds Ihimaera too “knowing” and “aware” of his position as the foremost Mori writer, which she feels has led him to write a collection that “watch[es] his audience more carefully than his subject.”92 Within the French tradition of analyse de texte, Carole Froude Durix points to the differences that his gap-filling brings to the original, finding that Ihimaera “slips into those significant open spaces that are characteristic of a Mansfield text.”93 Liselotte Glage likens “the re-interpretations and the re-assessments”94 of rewriting to the act of translation, showing the dangers and difficulties of retaining the original sense in a foreign context. Although Glage acknowledges that all re-assessment is contingent on perspective, something which she indicates might help break down the oppositional sense of writing back, her assumption that Mori and Pakeha readerships inhabit entirely different cultural spaces means that her study, like many others, again highlights only the gaps and differences in interpretative strategies from both sides. 90

Ihimaera, Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (Auckland: Viking, 1989): 10. Further page references are in the main text. 91 Williams, “On the Beach: Witi Ihimaera, Katherine Mansfield, and the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Tropes and Territories: Postcolonial Short Fiction, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queens U P , 2007): 341. 92 Caffin, “K.M. Curios,” The Listener (26 August 1989): 66. 93 Carole Froude Durix, “Point Counterpoint: Both Sides of the Broad Road in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and Witi Ihimaera’s ‘This Life is Weary’,” in The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. Paulette Michel & Michel Dupuis (Sydney: Dangaroo, 2001): 186. 94 Liselotte Glage, “Rewriting or Writing Back? Witi Ihimaera’s Dear Miss Mansfield,” in Crabtracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English, ed. Gordon Collier & Frank Schulze–Engler (Cross / Cultures 59, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 321.

92

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Either as rewriting or as writing back, then, Ihimaera’s collection was largely held to be in some way a corrective to Mansfield’s stories. Indeed, both techniques call into question the authority of the original: rewriting poses a direct challenge to a specific literary target, while writing back applies to a more general urge to challenge the legacy of colonialism. However, rewriting is not only a postcolonial phenomenon, and has existed throughout the history of literature, as Glage points out by citing Chaucer’s open claim that his Troilus and Criseide is modelled on the work of his literary predecessors.95 Chaucer’s acknowledgement makes the point that all rewriting to some extent pays homage to the previous text, and that an ambition to update, recontextualize or criticize the original presumes that it remains in some way relevant in the present. In its evocation of similarity and difference, rewriting is also illustrative of the fundamental plurality and polyphony of the text as a site for refracting reformulations. This has always caused debate, concerned, as Said argues throughout The World, the Text and the Critic, with questions of originality and imitation, based on a conception of literary influence as filiation, a handing-down through the generations. Said uses the genetic implication of the term to suggest that filiation conceives – quite literally – of a foundational respect for paternal literary authority. Hence, in terms of rewriting, the latter text is always considered in relation to the former, with its originality residing in its departures from its predecessor. Postcolonial rewriting has altered the terrain on which contrastive analyses of literary reformulation are conducted because an aesthetic consideration, which presupposes English literature to occupy an internally cohesive field, is not sufficient for writers introducing external cultural and literary perspectives. In the politics of writing back, critics of postcolonial rewriting often look for aspects of the text that undermine its predecessor’s cultural and literary authority, a tendency opposed by Huggan’s and Appiah’s insistence on the need to acknowledge all cultural and literary input. Key texts read in a manner intending to deconstruct an imperial perspective include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which centres the mad Bertha Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, in which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness journey to the interior is re-enacted multiple times until the South American jungle becomes assimilated and natural to a creole imaginary. It is likewise with this optic that commentaries on Dear

95

Glage, “Rewriting or Writing Back?” 322.



International Aesthetics

93

Miss Mansfield argue that Ihimaera centralizes the barely discernible Mori and New Zealand referents of Mansfield’s stories. While postcolonial writers in English undoubtedly integrate elements of the English canon, the rules of fiction, and the novel form, such influence is frequently amended by a professed ambition to subvert English literature’s stylistic, structural, and linguistic standards. Although by nature a comparative methodology, postcolonial practice tends not to analyze points of similarity with Western literary tradition because this is seen as committing the error of assuming that marginalized writers simply use European forms to describe non-European content, a stance which reinforces eurocentric paradigms.96 By way of countering this implied eurocentrism, Arun Mukherjee challenges the idea that postcolonial writers are chiefly intent on writing back to the West. As part of her highly critical stance towards the expectation that postcolonialism is able to contain and account for all indigenous, minority, Third-World, and settler-society texts, she claims a plurality of motivations, positions, and intended audiences for postcolonial fiction. Mukherjee denies that minority writers are primarily concerned with “interrogat[ing] European discourses.”97 Rather, she claims that “our cultural productions are created in response to our own needs and we have many more needs than constantly to ‘parody’ the imperialists.”98 Mukherjee’s reminder of a range of motivations for the postcolonial text is relevant to a study of Dear Miss Mansfield. Far from taking an interrogative stance towards Mansfield’s European discourse, Ihimaera declares his collection to be inspired by his wish to celebrate Mansfield’s achievements, to pay “homage” and to “say ‘thank you’” (9). In an introductory letter to his collection, Ihimaera describes his aim as wanting to “respond” by way of offering a “personal tribute to [her] life and [her] art” (9). He makes a personal and direct address to the earlier writer in the introduction to the collection, and again in a second letter in As Fair as New Zealand to Me, a collection of letters by New Zealand recipients of the Katherine Mansfield fellowship to Menton, France. In the latter, Ihimaera collapses many of the gaps between himself and Mansfield on which a reading of difference depends. He composes the letter directly to Mansfield in the pres96

Huggan, “Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization and the PostColonial Text,” Kunapipi 11.1 (1989): 29. 97 Arun P. Mukherjee, “Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (Autumn 1990): 6. 98 Mukherjee, “Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?” 6.

94

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



ent tense, as if she were still alive and corresponding with him. He broaches the distance between Auckland and Menton by signalling how well he knows the town, and responds to her life there by aligning her views with his own, including venturing an opinion on the French character and commiserating about bronchitis. The letter’s style is an affectation of Mansfield’s, a feminizing that comes across in Ihimaera’s case as camp, something which he even overtly signals by mentioning the New Zealand gay scene. He also recounts an anecdote of how the local police mistook him for an “Algerian gigolo” on the beach at Menton (103). As well as laughing over the implied sexualization of the episode, the tale reveals something about how au fait Ihimaera is with shifting truths and blurred identities. Elsewhere, in another example of ethnic confusion, Ihimaera describes being mistaken for an Ainu while in Japan, a cultural confusion that he takes pleasure in.99 In this second letter to Mansfield, Ihimaera relishes assuming different roles, in being both a poseur and an impostor on the French Riviera. Such posturing draws out another link with Mansfield. Damien Wilkins reminds us that Mansfield, too, toyed with images of herself as exotic, dressing as a gypsy or in Arabian shawls or Japanese kimono, also evident in the many derivatives of her name, including the Russian ‘Yekaterina’ and ‘Katya’.100 Mansfield’s imitation spills over into her writing, as she slips into the voice of other writers, including Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov, just as, in turn, Ihimaera assumes Mansfield’s style, tone, and voice. In his second letter, Ihimaera projects an intimacy with Mansfield: he gives her another nickname, the Mori ‘Katerina’, elsewhere spelt ‘Kataraina’, which imagines that they are speaking the same language. Inevitably, there is an ironical distance in this stance, which Ihimaera inflates in showcase fashion, recounting to his confidante the terrible reviews he had received for Dear Miss Mansfield: One of the reviewers said that this was a mean trick of mine to play on a poor defenceless White woman who was living overseas. You, defenceless? Ha! [. . . ] I had forgotten that you were such an icon. You should have warned me but, instead, what did you advise? Risk! Risk everything! Care

99

Peter Dowling, “Maori writer takes on three cultures,” Asahi Evening News (24 December 1995): 6. 100 Wilkins, “Katherine Mansfield: Short Story Moderniser” (2001), in The New Zealand Edge: Heroes: Katherine Mansfield, www.nzedge.com (accessed 10 June 2006).



International Aesthetics

95

no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. Darling, that’s the last time I’ll take your advice. It landed me right in the middle of doggy doo doo. (103)

The parody, however, is aimed at the New Zealand critics reading the letter, not at Mansfield or his relationship with her: he really does accept her advice. This is reinforced when he closes his letter on the following, more serious note: I still live by your advice, Risk! Risk everything! In Maoridom we might perhaps say it another way, Tama tu, tama ora! Tama noho, tama mate! If you stand you live! If you lie down, you die! I continue to drive my life with passion and commitment to the iwi Maori – and in the pursuit of that goal you had: Of making our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World. (105)

Ihimaera aligns his vision, of life as of art, with Mansfield’s. In doing so, he asserts that his Mori perspective is consistent with, not different from, Mansfield’s own, as indicated in his citing of a Mori proverb as a kind of cultural translation of Mansfield’s own statement. Ihimaera does not see himself as writing against his predecessor but, rather, as writing along with her. In his collection and the later letter, Ihimaera draws attention to similarities he imagines between himself and the Bloomsbury expatriate. He represents her as quintessentially a New Zealander, as marginalized as a colonial abroad in much the same way as he is marginalized as a Mori in mainstream New Zealand, and for her alleged lesbianism as akin to his gay identity. For each of Ihimaera’s coalescences, a counter-argument exists to maintain distance: Mansfield’s early notebooks register an impatience to get out of New Zealand and its restrictive colonial culture;101 her tendency to float between social groups leads Vincent O’Sullivan to describe her state of “discomposure anywhere”;102 the nature of her friendship or relationship with her Mori school friend Maata is unclear. Ihimaera certainly misconstrues aspects of Mansfield’s life, but one comment in the introduction to Dear Miss Mansfield indicates that he does so knowingly: “It is the modern way, Miss Mansfield, for 101

Williams, “On the Beach,” 339; 344 fn. Vincent O’Sullivan, “ ‘ Finding the Pattern, Solving the Problem’: Katherine Mansfield: The New Zealand European” (1988), in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margins, ed. Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State U P , 1994): 13. 102

96

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



us to have become as much fascinated with your life as with your stories” (9). Ihimaera offers his misreading alongside many others, including John Middleton Murry’s selective packaging of her stories and journals after her death, and Pakeha New Zealand’s appropriation of Mansfield as a national writer and icon of emergent Pakeha identity. Ihimaera adopts a version of Mansfield that he feels is compatible with his own artistic vision and position in New Zealand society. The close personal connection that he creates with her is different from the way in which he legitimizes his right to speak as a Mori. Whereas his whakapapa gives him an innate right to speak as Mori, his relationship with Mansfield is chosen. This exemplifies Said’s theory of chosen affiliation, which sidesteps the hierarchical relationship implicit in organic filiation, but nevertheless maintains the idea of a family connection, a democratic kind of adopting for one’s own writers and texts deemed meaningful. Affiliation allows Said to reconceptualize originality and repetition so that they are no longer linear and temporal, something which moves “backwards into lost primacy at best, and regained utopias at worst.”103 Rather than pure inscription, rewriting is a “parallel script”104 compiled as a “bibliosystem, a kind of activated library whose effect is to stimulate the production of forms of disciplined, gradually actualised freedom.”105 In this system, writers choose their own affiliations, which, through echoes in their texts, are shared with the reader: writers “invite us to share the larger transcendental or private systems of order and value which they have adopted.”106 Similarly to Said’s sense of transcendence, Nikos Papastergiadis, in extending Bakhtin’s argument for an inherent hybridity in language and literature, cites Yuri Lotman’s “semiosphere” of cross-cultural semiotics to illuminate the transformation that occurs when a foreign text is adopted and adapted to a new literary context. Following a phase during which the foreign text tends to be idealized as containing some “salvific” truth missing in the local culture, in the third stage

103

Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard

U P , 1983): 139. 104

Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, 138. The World, the Text and the Critic, 139. 106 Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 1979): 32, quoted in The World, the Text and the Critic, 19. 105



International Aesthetics

97

there emerges the tendency to deprecate the source of origin from which the text came and an emphasis that the true potential of the text is only realized by being integrated into the receiving culture. Reception has led not only to transformation but is also a form of transcendence. Before it was debased and distorted, now it has the grace of truth and universality.107

In a passage which uncannily echoes Said’s and Papastergiadis’s point about the potential transcendence of inter-reference, Ihimaera describes the way in which his imagination responds to literary influences. He recounts studying Anglo-Saxon literature as an undergraduate student, reluctantly, because he did not imagine that it was relevant to his life: Forty years later, the impact of that course still resonates through my own work as I try to write a Maori literature in the language of English. Indeed, the Wanderer motif is very much embedded in my novels and in the next, Sky Dancer, you’ll find the same tree as in Dream of the Rood there in the middle of the forest – except that it’s a New Zealand forest. So I am a firm believer [. . . ] in opening up to [. . . ] the possibilities, if I can, of transcendence through the discoveries possible in the magnificent accident, the reading the unexpected.108

In each case, the writer and the critics use the term ‘transcendence’ to describe the power of literary influence to make a new text more than the sum of its composite parts, to break out of the binarisms that imagine a writer to only be writing back to his or her predecessors. For each, literary influence is generative. While Said validates and normalizes literary influence by deconstructing the myth of originality, Judie Newman endeavours to break down the hierarchical relationship between original and rewrite by focusing on the original itself. She upsets the notion of historical primacy by challenging the assumption that the canonical author and text are set in stone. Her study of intertextuality and rewriting, including J.G. Farrell’s use of the Romantic poets, Nadine Gordimer’s use of Shakespeare, and Shashi Tharoor’s mimicking of Forster, Kipling, and Rushdie, reveals that “there are no master narratives 107

Nikos Papastergiadis, “Restless Hybrids” (1995), in The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt & Ziauddin Sardar (London & New York: Continuum, 2002): 173–74. 108 “Performing English: Creative Teaching and Writing Practices – Four Views of the Classroom,” end-of-semester seminar (Department of English, Auckland University: 24 October, 2003), Departmental e-mail to Stephen Turner, np.

98

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



masquerading as eternal verities.”109 A view of the canonical, colonial writer as shifting is particularly valid for the reading of Mansfield, a writer whose stories, as well as her life, remain elusive. Said’s and Newman’s arguments aim to validate inter-reference and influence in ways that do not depend on colonial–postcolonial binarisms of hierarchy and position. Accepting these critics’ precepts dissolves another binary structure, that of the postcolonial prioritizing of difference at the expense of similarity. Peter Hulme argues a case for reading points of similarity and shared vision between postcolonial rewritings and their canonical counterparts. In his analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea, Hulme describes Rhys’s family background, a task that provides insight into certain aspects of her novel, in the same way, he suggests, in which the lives of Charlotte and Emily Brontë are often analyzed in relation to their novels. Hulme encourages close study of the local characteristics of such rewritings, in order to extract these texts’ “counter-discursive strategies.”110 Nevertheless, he warns that the way in which many postcolonialists teach “revisionary couples,”111 such as Wide Sargasso Sea alongside Jane Eyre, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe alongside Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, risks instating an opposition between colonial and postcolonial that is too rigid and lacking in nuance. He concludes thus: once the local has been fixed, once the materials out of which a text has been made have been located and studied, the critical movement has finally to be outwards, towards the larger picture of which the locality forms only a part, for too easy a contrast between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea would risk missing that Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys do finally belong to the same world. Readings that focus on the counter-discursive strategies of Wide Sargasso Sea vis-à-vis Jane Eyre, though often carried out with impeccably radical motives, have tended to set the categories of ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ in stone, failing to see the multiple ways in which Jane Eyre is, in its production of its materials, already negotiating matters of West Indian slavery, even if the figure of Bertha is the only obvious textual residue of this negotiation. This is not to collapse differences but to argue for the need to 109

Judie Newman, “The Ballistic Bard: Intertextuality and Postcolonial Fiction,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken L. Goodwin & Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 100. 110 Peter Hulme, “The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iversen (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1994): 85. 111 Hulme, “The Locked Heart,” 72.



International Aesthetics

99

understand the complex trafficking that exists between texts (and their authors) in the world, even ones that seem to invite consideration in terms of oppositions.112

Hulme’s study reveals that the different locations of Rhys’s upbringing in Dominica and Brontë’s on the Yorkshire Moors do not mean that their respective texts are diametrically opposed. In fact, the way in which these writers assimilate their environments and family histories into their texts is very similar. Hulme’s interest in how life carries over into fiction, and how fiction interacts with other fictions, opens a space to illuminate “textual residue” and “complex trafficking” between colonial and postcolonial pairs in a way that acknowledges both texts as in an unstable relationship with each other. These concepts are revealing in the following analyses of the way that Ihimaera picks up “textual residues” in Mansfield and trafficks her strategies for his own uses. Ihimaera’s short story “A Contemporary Kezia” benefits from Hulme’s reminder not to oppose a story’s locale. The latter half of the story replicates Mansfield’s “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” from her first collection, In a German Pension (1911). In turn, Mansfield was accused of plagiarizing Chekhov’s story “Sleepy Head” (1906), with which “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” shares remarkable similarities.113 Ihimaera’s story is not as close to Mansfield’s as hers is to Chekhov’s, and, of course, Ihimaera’s collection openly acknowledges Mansfield’s influence. Nevertheless, comparing the three stories highlights some of the textual trafficking exposed in conscious or subconscious rewriting. To recall Hulme’s suggestion to consider any text locally first exposes how Chekhov’s story is essentially late-nineteenth-century Russian, Mansfield’s is English modernist, and Ihimaera’s is unmistakably Mori of its time. Like many Russian social-realist writers, Chekhov depicts a harsh world for the peasantry. In “Sleepy Head” the child employed as housekeeper and nanny is locked into a life of hardship, as both her daily routine, which allows her no sleep, and her memories of her past life with her family indicate. Even in the luxury of sleep, the child dreams a reality in which one’s lot in life is borne with stoic acceptance: 112

Hulme, “The Locked Heart,” 85. Middleton Murry denies that Mansfield plagiarized Chekhov. He insists that the story is based on a personal experience and that at the time of writing she could not have had access to a translation of Chekhov’s story. Elisabeth Schneider, “Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov,” Modern Language Notes 50.6 (June 1935): 394. 113

100

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Varka sees a wide road covered with liquid mud; along the road stretch wagons, men with satchels on their backs crawl along [. . . ]. And suddenly the men with the satchels and the shadows collapse in the liquid mud. “Why is this?” asks Varka. “To sleep, to sleep!” comes the answer.114

Mansfield rewrites Chekhov so that the alternative to the child’s daily routine is a both Romantic and modernist escape into a dream world. The story begins and ends with the dreaming image of “a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all.”115 This pastoral, peaceful refuge of the mind’s eye intensifies the uncouthness of the German household, in which the child’s perhaps artistic sensitivity clashes with the inelegance of the Frau and Man. These contrasts make Mansfield’s story a social critique of the child’s exploitation by a seemingly undeserving class of society. Such implied commentary makes In a German Pension deeply satirical, a satire which relies on the distance between the lower-middle-class Germany depicted in the story and the upper-middleclass London of Mansfield’s readership. In a reversal of Mansfield’s acerbic satire, Ihimaera rewrites her story with a sincere and sympathetic narrator, who suggests that the reasons for a child to be put to work may be culturally and historically acceptable. His depiction of the child called by sacred weavers to take on their domestic chores is contextualized in the opening paragraph, which sets the scene of mid-twentiethcentury rural poverty: “Everybody had a role in keeping the family alive and well. Your Nani’s role was given to her when she was four” (84). The child accepts her role, including its difficulties and punishments, unquestioningly, with a similar, although altogether more positive, sense of fate and duty to that experienced by Chekhov’s peasant girl: She was put straight to work and, because her mother had told her to be obedient, she did the work without complaint [. . . ]. The first few months, though, she got a lot of punishment from those two old ladies. I guess they wanted Nani to learn faster. (85–86)

Even though the story is cast in a positive light, the child still dreams of a way out of the immediate hardship of her tasks. As in Chekhov’s and Mansfield’s 114

Anton Chekhov, “Sleepy Head,” in The Best Known Works of Anton Chekhov (1906; Whitefish M T : Kessinger, 2005): 317. 115 Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1985): 757.



International Aesthetics

101

stories, the symbol of the child’s wish for escape is the road, although in Ihimaera’s story this is not only a dream. The child sits at the side of the road hoping and waiting for her mother to come and get her (87). Across the different environments of these three stories, the pathos remains the same. Whether played out in Russian tenant housing, in a German townhouse or a Mori whare, each story maintains the focus on the child as innocent and naive. This enables the impact of each story’s last lines, where the child’s intense focus on escape into sleep or, in Ihimaera’s case, a literal way home down the road of the child’s dreams, has her kill the baby, or the old weavers, with no understanding of her act’s repercussions. In an example of what Caffin disapprovingly calls Ihimaera’s “fatal” overwriting, “spell[ing] out the point already made by Mansfield,”116 the Mori writer ends his story by describing the old weavers’ deaths and underlining the child’s innocence: “Tell her [...] that she does not need to forgive herself for being a nine-yearold girl. After all, how was your Nani to know [...]?” (88). The narrator’s explanation does detract from the poignancy generated by the child’s abandonment of the old weavers. However, as a narrative embedded within a contemporary frame story, in which the narrator tells his young children their Nani’s life-story, the tale’s emphatic ending has an important rhetorical function. In a further layer of rewriting, Ihimaera repeats the story of Nani’s childhood in his play Woman Far Walking.117 “A Contemporary Kezia” is turned into direct speech but is otherwise only minimally changed, and in this version the scene ends with the child’s abandoning the weavers and escaping down the road, thereby recapturing the tension and pathos of the event. The short story’s dramatization, in a play that compiles incidents of conflict between Mori and Pakeha from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi to the year 2000, revives Chekhov’s social criticism. Within the play’s openly aggressive stance, in which colonial history and the Pakeha are blamed for Mori social and cultural impoverishment, the child’s story reinstates a strong sense of victimization that the fully Mori context of “A Contemporary Kezia” could not permit. In the play, Ihimaera effectively bypasses Mansfield’s satire, instead reformulating Chekhov’s covert criticism of Tsarist Russia in his own critique of the effects of colonization on Mori. Just as Hulme finds that Brontë’s novel, with the marginalized Creole Bertha

116 117

Caffin, “K.M. Curios,” 66. Ihimaera, Woman Far Walking (Wellington: Huia, 2000): 20–29.

102

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Rochester, already prefigures postcolonial concerns, through Mansfield Ihimaera activates a postcolonialism already latent in Chekhov. Further similarities between Chekhov’s, Mansfield’s, and Ihimaera’s stories are evident in the way in which the child who was tired functions across these texts, channelling social criticism by engaging the reader’s sympathy for the underprivileged. Like Mansfield’s, many of Ihimaera’s stories, in Dear Miss Mansfield and also in the earlier collections Pounamu, Pounamu and The New Net Goes Fishing, feature a child narrator. The marginalized Mori character takes the place of Mansfield’s tendency to feature or empathize with the poor, lower-class, or victimized, who are often girls and women. In accordance with a common feature of the modernist vision, Ihimaera lends his characters a unique artistic sensibility that elevates life to art. This is most evident in the Romantic, even sublime configuration of the Mori connection with nature, discussed in Chapter 1 above, and the staged, operatic posturing of the matriarch’s teachings in The Matriarch. Yet, for Ihimaera, it is not the artist who possesses heightened sensitivity but the Mori, who is able to draw on extensive traditional cultural wealth. By centralizing naive children, the uneducated working class, and the traditional learning of Mori elders, Ihimaera privileges a Mori naturalness and attention to feeling which is often juxtaposed with an external Pakeha rationality. Heightened sensitivity animates and underpins many of his stories: the Mori imaginary, including whnau, whakapapa, and tradition, overlays and overpowers the often mundane reality of contemporary Mori experience, which includes rural poverty, unemployment, and dispossession. Through modernist sensitivity, Ihimaera adapts Mansfield’s technique of deflating the importance of the story’s setting, often events such as weddings, funerals, parties, holidays, balls, which withdraw into the background as she brings to the fore intimate details, sensations, and emotions. Just as Mansfield concentrates on minute detail that all but the most sensitive, Romantic characters miss, many of Ihimaera’s stories also turn on vignettes which suggest that Mori see depth and resonance in things that Pakeha are too obtuse to see, or that are meaningful only in a Mori imaginary. “The Affectionate Kidnappers,” which rewrites Mansfield’s “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped,” is perhaps the one story in Dear Miss Mansfield that most clearly adopts a postcolonial stance of writing back. The story challenges Mansfield’s eurocentric vision and, by extension, the Pakeha national literary perspective that has claimed Mansfield for its own. Unsurprisingly, this story is perhaps the most frequently cited in postcolonial comparisons of



International Aesthetics

103

the two writers.118 A directly comparative reading of this story with Mansfield’s highlights the Mori writer’s ungainly efforts that, in their didacticism, leave little to the imagination. For example, what is only implied by the ending of Mansfield’s story is spelt out in Ihimaera’s, as a Mori elder imagines the event from the Policemen’s perspective: “a little naked girl, kicking and screaming, beating her fists against two black women, a Pakeha blondie girl, looking for all the world as if she was going to be drowned” (113). Yet, in the closing moment, Ihimaera changes tack from the story’s overt, antagonistic filling-in of background information. Instead, he adopts the earlier writer’s technique of heightened consciousness, in which epiphany generates an intense emotional response to a symbol – often provided by nature – a focus that at once captures and reveals the character’s subjectivity. As Mansfield wrote in a letter about the New Zealand stories, cited by Wilkins in his discussion of “Prelude”: “I tried to catch that moment [.. .] I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again.”119 Seventy years later, Ihimaera’s attitude towards his non-Mori reader is similar to Mansfield’s relationship with her English reader. This final passage does indeed “lift that mist from [his] people” in such a way as to give the reader a glimpse of a Mori world-view that nevertheless remains obscured by its intense cultural specificity: The two women sat in the gathering dark. Puti thought, I will never forget. All those little men in blue coats. Little blue men. With their whistles. Running, running towards us. With their police batons raised. It was – Suddenly, she felt Kuini nudging her and pointing down to the floor. Kuini’s voice was still and drained of life. “Anei,” she whispered. Although the light was waning, the pattern in the dust could still be seen. “Anei, te roimata toroa.” The soft sounds of waiata swelled in the darkness like currents of the wind holding up Kuini’s words. “E noho ra. Pearl Button,” Kuini said, “taku moko Pakeha.” The syllables drifted like two birds beating heavily eastward into the night. Then the light went, everything went, life went. (113–14)

The passage may be read, as it is by Williams and Glage, as writing back due to the apparent exclusion of the non-Mori reader by the Mori language and cultural referents in the women’s final exchange. However, the passage is open to several other readings, depending on the different levels of cultural, 118

See, for example, Glage, “Rewriting or Writing Back?” 321–29; Williams, “On the Beach,” 333–45. 119 Wilkins, “Short Story Moderniser,” np.

104

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



linguistic, and aesthetic knowledge brought to the text by different readerships, which are by no means split into neat Mori and non-Mori categories. The imagery of encroaching darkness and the spoken and sung Mori create the simile of “syllables drift[ing] like two birds beating heavily eastward into the night.” In its intense literariness, the images of the birds and the night elevate the women’s capture and punishment to a poignant, lyrical finale that connects back with the ellipsis intended by Mansfield’s limited child-eye narration. For Mansfield readers, the italicized phrases signal Ihimaera’s borrowing from her original, in which “little men in blue coats – little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings.”120 For readers who do not understand Mori, Kuini’s final words nevertheless successfully intimate the closure of the final sentence, while a sense of transcendence through nature is provided by the birds winging eastwards, into the morning light. For a Mori-literate audience, which includes many but by no means all Mori, some non-Mori New Zealanders, and foreigners interested in Mori culture and armed with a basic Mori dictionary, translating Kuini’s farewell “Goodbye, Pearl Button [...] my Pakeha grandchild” finally adds little to the already evident meaning. The key to Ihimaera’s passage rests on the “pattern in the dust” in the waning light. This signals a Mansfieldian epiphany, a device that to some extent overrides the story’s cultural and linguistic specificity. In Mansfield’s epiphanies, a moment of insight is often imaginatively linked to a symbol that is meaningful only to the subject of the epiphany, such as the pear tree for Bertha in “Bliss,” and the doll’s house lamp for the Kelvey children in “The Doll’s House.” It is not important that the reader share in this luminous understanding, simply that he or she notices this particular literary device and accepts its importance for the character and thus for the story’s dénouement. The way in which the epiphany undercuts Romanticism by highlighting the subject’s marginality emphasizes modernist fracture. The intense desire to privilege or retreat into heightened sensibility is deflated by the story’s refusal to linger there: in the above examples from Mansfield, Bertha’s moment of connection with her “friend” is betrayed when she realizes her husband is having an affair with the woman, and in “The Doll’s House” the ostracized children are unceremoniously sent away from the well-off Burnells. The epiphany in “The Affectionate Kidnappers” functions similarly, in that, in reading the Mori symbolism in this pattern on the floor, the kuia understand the 120

Mansfield, “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,” 534.



International Aesthetics

105

reason for and consequence of their actions, yet are powerless to offer a defence. Whether or not the reader sees the symbol in the pattern, the story’s final message hinges on the kuia’s response to it: Kuini’s “still” voice, “drained of life,” and the heavy drifting syllables in effect foreshadow the closing sentence, “the light went, everything went, life went.” The ultimate elegiac source of this vision stems from the irreconcilable gap between the epiphanic moment and the story’s prison setting. For Ihimaera, the schism between imagination and reality is based on a different sort of modernist rupture than Mansfield’s, that of broken continuity in Mori culture brought by colonization. As Williams identifies, in an analysis of Ihimaera’s use of Mansfieldian epiphanies, the Mori writer’s use of this device assumes a role of cultural critique, as “gaining understanding does not change the circumstances that provoked the moment of insight.”121 The epiphany at the close of “The Affectionate Kidnappers” textually enacts that rupture in cultural knowledge: many readers cannot access its symbolic meaning, and even for the kuia who do understand the portent, it cannot save them from the Pakeha justice system, in which such symbolism is redundant. In keeping with Said’s affiliation of chosen influence, Ihimaera adopts the epiphany to write of Maoriness within a wholly European aesthetic device, which he finds relevant and revealing for his own context. To uncover the signification of the “pattern in the dust” requires an understanding of Mori symbolism, in which Kuini recognizes “te roimata toroa,” the tears of the albatross, a weaving pattern incongruously found in a Pakeha prison. In Mori symbolism, the roimata toroa pattern evokes tears shed for a loved one, usually related to war, death or catastrophe. Allusion to the myth of the sacred albatross returning from Aotearoa to Hawaiki is reiterated in the image of the “two birds beating heavily eastward into the night,” a journey towards the South Pacific site of mythic origin and return, as the spirit of the dead journeys back to Hawaiki. The pattern is thus a premonition of the kuia’s death, which is again intimated in the story’s final line, “the light went, everything went, life went.” Across the different possible readings, Ihimaera’s closing moment retains knowledge or lack thereof in a literary context, of modernist epiphany and Mori symbolism, rather than one of purposive cultural difference. For Ihimaera, a Mori imaginary is not incompatible with Western aesthetic form and function: his Mori response to Mansfield, as indicated by his

121

Williams, “On the Beach,” 339.

106

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



authorial positioning in his two letters, is inclusive and generative rather than contrastive and exclusionist.  In the schema of postcolonial writing back, a study of examples of mimeticism, inter-reference, and rewriting in Western literature is problematic because it disregards the epistemological break by which postcolonial literature is imagined to oppose or challenge the aesthetics of the English canon. This is evident in the expectation among New Zealand critics that Ihimaera can only access Verdi and Mansfield antagonistically: the colonial–postcolonial schism inhibits an engagement with texts in a singular field of literary expectations. Although Bakhtin’s heteroglossia of language, J. Hillis Miller’s non-“fit” between fiction and reality, and Rushdie’s and Said’s insistence on the text itself as the arena of discourse all deconstruct notions of a Western cultural centre and literary canon, the opposite drives of recognizing postcolonial difference are always present. In particular, nationalist and ‘nativist’ recourse to precolonial tradition, use of the indigenous or minority language, most radically supported by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and resistance to the novel form as non-indigenous, invite reading minority literature within the binary terminology of centre and margin. Such expectations indicate possible limitations of categorizing works of fiction as postcolonial. As a genre of writing and a means of grouping writers, postcolonialism exhibits, on an international scale, the same desire to label work as representative and to account for its differences therein as do national literatures. In the Mori context, the limitations of nationalism and biculturalism as adequate interpretative frameworks for Mori fiction were discussed at length in the preceding chapter. In many Pakeha responses to Sky Dancer, The Matriarch, and Dear Miss Mansfield, a search for Mori cultural and literary difference stifled recognition of the significant influences of literary and operatic inter-reference in these texts. The difficulty of expecting minority fiction to engage with local specificity is evident when brought to the study of those texts which do not seem to challenge the English canon. Debates have focused on Michael Ondaatje, whose novels do not always actively support minority agency, or on V.S. Naipaul, who stands by the form of English literature over and above cultural specificity.122 Such writers, along with critics 122

On the politics of representation of minority issues in fiction, see Anna Rutherford, “Introduction: The Essential Heterogeneity of Being,” and Gareth Griffiths, “Cul-



International Aesthetics

107

such as Arun Mukherjee, contest a narrow understanding of postcolonial fiction as necessarily – or only – about relationships or dynamics between periphery and centre. Their challenge to the term ‘postcolonial’ is constructive rather than negative; the uneasy relationship with Western literary traditions places postcolonial literature in the privileged position of being the very site of contestation. Drawing attention to both unique (postcolonial) and shared (literary) features in Ihimaera’s fiction exposes the potential of textual interreference to transcend a text’s local time and place. In approaching any text individually or postcolonial literature as a whole, it is rewarding to pay attention both to local specificities and to international and historical cultural and literary interconnectedness. Ihimaera’s stance, in his writing, interviews, and public roles, demonstrates the strain of attending to both the local contemporary and the international historical. In oscillating between claiming that his writing is part of Western literature and distinct from it, Ihimaera appears to conceive of the colonial (Pakeha) and postcolonial (Mori) as binary: he at once aims to ransack wherever the language has been and “subvert” those cultural and literary traditions.123 Nevertheless, a professed aim to undermine English literature is not always clear in Ihimaera’s work. For example, his fiction shows very little subversion of nationalism and Romanticism, as discussed in Chapter 1, or a modernist search for transcendence, discussed above, although these are foundational to the construction of the English canon and, in fact, have served to enforce and reinforce its self-supporting hegemony. Nor does Ihimaera employ irony and parody in the ways invoked by postcolonial critics. Instead, his use of these techniques of subversion is often aimed at his postcolonial and even Mori audience rather than intended to undermine Pakeha reading habits or Western literary form. The two specific cases of baroque opera and rewriting in Ihimaera’s work open out the binary colonial–postcolonial positions. Rather than being concrete terms against which a shifting postcoloniality must negotiate its relationship, the baroque, opera, and rewriting have themselves arisen from and changed in response to historical pressures. This illustrates Bourdieu’s and Casanova’s arguments for a common process of artistic production, consecration, and challenge that applies across periods and nations. Indeed, Bourdieu’s sociology and Casanova’s literary analyses, along with ture and Identity: Politics and Writing in Some Recent Post-Colonial Texts,” in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Rutherford (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1992): vi–vii. 123 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 175.

108

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Deepika Bahri’s work on the Frankfurt School, show that tensions between aesthetics and politics, centre and periphery, are not confined to the postcolonial domain. Rather, the minority writer’s challenge to Western literary tradition performs the common role of the avant-garde demanding recognition from the consecrated centre. Of their respective time and place, the baroque and opera also occupied this function. The baroque’s challenge to classicism, emerging from seventeenth-century colonial contact, and the importance of nineteenth-century Italian opera for regional unification efforts prefigure postcolonial concerns. Similarly, the use of rewriting throughout the history of English literature has always engendered debates over primacy and originality or, alternately, has been a call to acknowledge the heteroglossic capacity of fiction to constantly engage in, and be a site of, dialogue across time and space. Both of these issues are at the heart of contemporary postcolonial difficulties in achieving clearly workable definitions and fulfilling coherent aspirations. Baroque opera and rewriting, then, bear the imprint of their historical residue, which, when trafficked in a postcolonial context, reveals new or forgotten contiguities. To highlight the constant movement at work throughout the (historical and international) evolution of literary style and form is to challenge the notion that Mori literature’s determination to describe its cultural specificity entails rejection of Western fiction. 

3 The Local and the Global

Mori Modernity

T

M A T R I A R C H and Dear Miss Mansfield play out textually some of the antagonisms between Mori and Pakeha cultures that defined the turbulent 1980s. By contrast, Ihimaera’s fourth novel, The Whale Rider (1987), provides a much more positive model of Mori-renaissance cultural rejuvenation. Indeed, in style, structure, and content, this brief fabular narrative closely corresponds to a literature of nation-building. Set in the East-Coast village of Whangara in the 1980s, the novel describes a wholly Mori universe, with modern life centred on the marae and the beach, and lived predominantly in accordance with tribal traditions which are informed by legendary ancestors and ancient esoteric learning. Non-Mori influences and the effects of modernity, including pollution, Mori marginalization, unemployment, and dispossession, exist as external threats but do not figure within the novel’s tightly defined location. The encroachment of such social and cultural menace is, however, clearly signalled in the difficult task undertaken by the leader, Koro Apirana, to find an heir worthy of his tribal HE

110

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



knowledge and capable of leading the tribe into the future. The novel’s tension, played out in the parallel development of Koro’s search for a boy and his granddaughter Kahu’s deep connection with her tribal history, hinges on the difficulty of fostering tradition in the broken context of a Mori present both diminished and changed by colonization. Koro and Kahu are heroes of the Mori renaissance because of their belief in and reverence for traditional Mori culture as the key to a strong Mori identity in the present. In Koro’s successful turning to the Mori past to save his tribe, it appears that in this fable Ihimaera advocates the redemptive potential of traditional Mori culture. An anachronistic figure embodying traditional Mori culture, the young Kahu is described as a “throwback”:1 she prefers Mori food, language, and kapa haka to the Pakeha alternatives; she displays an affinity with the sea, particularly dolphins and whales; and she accepts her grandfather’s uncompromising rules of tribal hierarchy which subordinate females. Despite these setbacks, she proves her mana by passing tests that are wholly traditional and specific to the tribe: she recites her whakapapa, retrieves a stone thrown in the sea, and, ultimately, rescues a pod of stranded whales by communicating with the bull whale and riding it out to sea. In heroizing Kahu’s feats and attributes, The Whale Rider privileges pre-modern Mori traditions based on notions of tapu, mana, and a natural mysticism that sets Mori apart from the Western modernity of the Pakeha present, in which sacredness no longer structures social experience. While these traditional Mori values are positive and enabling in this story, During points out the danger of separating Mori / Pakeha into a pre-modern /modern opposition. In the legitimizing claim to modernity of colonialism that underpins the project of settler societies, autochthones must either “remain stuck in the ‘past’ or they europeanise themselves. Only at the price of their destruction may they enter the mainstream of world history.”2 During challenges the legacy of colonial logic which continues to imagine a strict dichotomy between indigenous primitivity and colonial modernity, a separation made possible only by the “mutual misrecognitions and forgettings”3 of their inevitable interaction; a particular cultural 1

Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (Auckland: Heinemann, 1987): 30. Further page references are in the main text. 2 During, “What Was the West?” Meanjin 48.4 (Summer 1989): 759. 3 “What Was the West?” 767. For other articles and texts that similarly interrogate the supposed rigid boundaries between Mori and Pakeha, see also During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39.3 (September 1985): 366–80; Jonathan Lamb, “Metamorphosis and Settlement,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20



The Local and the Global

111

amnesia that maintains Moritanga “at the far side of the difference.”4 His examples from the colonial period, of whites “gone native” and Mori adopting sophisticated European mannerisms that allowed them to prosper in New Zealand and even circulate in English society, effectively show up the myth of neat racial binarisms. Close studies of early colonial contact between British and Mori indicate that Mori were keen traders, who quickly assimilated tools and technologies brought by colonial settlers, and who adopted Western processes in order to profit from farming, boat-building, and tax-collecting.5 During’s examples of colonial Mori who took on seemingly Western concepts, such as the prophet Te Kooti, who adopted aspects of Christianity for his own Ringatu faith, and the Rotorua tour guide Maggie Papakura, who studied anthropology at Oxford, make a claim for modernity as always already part of Mori culture and world-view.6 Analyzing an indigenous perspective of cultural modernity, Stephen Muecke investigates Aboriginal conceptions in Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. Defining modernity as any culture’s ability to embrace newness and to adapt to change brought about from both internal and external influences,7 he argues that modernity did not arrive in Australia with Captain Cook, but was already present in Aboriginal cultures, as proven by their ability to employ a range of responses to colonization and modernization, including “compliance and collaboration, resistance and inventive adaptation.”8 Like During, Muecke emphasizes that negotiation and translation occurred in both indigenous and colonizing cultures, with both sides exhibiting moments of modernity and primitivity. Whereas During attempts to sidestep the awkwardness of collapsing the two seemingly opposed (2002): 18–38; Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772, ed. Anne Salmond (Auckland: Viking 1991) and Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2003); Jane Stafford & Mark Williams, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914 (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2006); Turner, “Settlement as Forgetting” and “Being Colonial / Colonial Being,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002): 39–66. 4 During, “What Was the West?” 763. 5 Ruth Brown, “Maori Spirituality as Pakeha Construct,” Meanjin 48.2 (1989): 254–56; During, “What Was the West?” 767–69. 6 During, “What Was the West?” 767–69. 7 Stephen Muecke, Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2004): 6. 8 Muecke, Ancient and Modern, 138.

112

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



concepts by evoking the umbrella term “postculturalism”9 to account for cultural imbrication as process, Muecke settles for the “indigenous modern,” a term that semantically displays its ambivalence.10 The Whale Rider appears to be a typical Mori-renaissance novel in its foregrounding of traditional elements of Mori culture which place Mori and Pakeha on opposing sides of During’s modern–primitive divide. Nevertheless, the novel does engage with modernity. Far from being stuck in a mythic past that can no longer function in the manifestly modern – and increasingly modernizing – world, Kahu’s struggle and success represent the kind of change that ensures the ongoing relevance of her tribe’s traditions in the present and future: she embodies the indigenous modern. Kahu uses skills and structures that exist in Mori culture itself to challenge and extend cultural parameters. In the last chapter, Koro finally accepts Kahu with the acknowledgement that, “boy or girl, it doesn’t matter” (121). With this statement, nestled between ritual prayers and a final mystic communion with the whales, the novel resolves two crucial questions about the future that Koro poses earlier in the book: “Will we have prepared the people to cope with the new challenges and the new technology? And will they still be Maori?” (59). The Whale Rider’s ending assures the reader that the tribe’s future leadership goes hand in hand with change, made possible and accepted in and by a long history of similar such heroic deeds, illustrious ancestors, and mythic conquests built into the fabric of Mori lore and expressed in storytelling, carving, and whakapapa. Engaging with an indigenous version of modernity is not confined to the text itself, but is also part of the environment that gave rise to the novel. Ihimaera’s inspiration for The Whale Rider and the conditions of its writing neither emerged from a desire to record traditional Mori culture, as in Pounamu, Pounamu and Tangi, nor was it primarily intended as a response and challenge to Pakeha hegemony within the antagonism of bicultural differentiation, as in The New Net Goes Fishing and The Matriarch. In 1986, on a diplomatic posting in New York and living with his male partner after having separated from his wife, Ihimaera describes writing The Whale Rider for his visiting daughters, inspired by the sight of a whale in the Hudson River.11 The 9

During, “What Was the West?” 767. Muecke, Ancient and Modern, 138. 11 Handwritten draft speech, for Whale Rider premiere New York (2003), A2004/20; Moana Moeka’a, “Writer rides into Rarotonga from New Zealand,” Cook Island News Daily (7 July 2003); Whalerider D V D “Behind the Scenes.” 10



The Local and the Global

113

whale has particular resonance for the tribes of the East-Coast Ngati Porou confederation, and Ihimaera interprets its appearance in New York as no less symbolic than if it had appeared in New Zealand. In fact, Ihimaera systematically interprets the Hudson as if it were Mori. As he recounts, When I was in New York, for instance, and saw rainbow signs in the clouds or a swirl on the Hudson River – I have a kaitiaki whose name is Hine Te Ariki, who is in European terms a mermaid – then how could I not take heed? Does the Maori world stop when you leave the Pacific? So I would always look for those symbols or those signs even in New York, reinterpreting them as if New York was a Maori world – which it is.12

Ihimaera’s interpretation of indigenous symbolism in a foreign context and his non-traditional family structure confirm an indigenous adaptation to modernity.13 Even if the lyrical novel does not overtly describe the antagonism of 1980s emergent biculturalism, or reflect Ihimaera’s own unconventional lifestyle, these aspects underpin the novel’s attitude towards Mori culture and identity as being comfortable with changing circumstances, rather than as threatened by enforced adaptation. Ihimaera’s Mori world-view, or philosophy in Muecke’s terminology, transcends both spatial and temporal divides, as his claim that “New York [is] a Maori world” transports the indigenous culture from its native territory to a foreign one, and the 1986 Hudson River whale is translated into the retelling of an ancient legend. For Ihimaera, Moritanga is neither trapped in a static past nor fixed in its place of origin. To recognize that modernity is already inherent in Mori culture is to accept that the culture has a role to play in national and international arenas, rather than remaining locked in traditionalist and essentialist displays of precontact authenticity. As Muecke puts it, indigenous negotiations across the traditional–modern divide are complex and multiple, and apply a range of strategies depending on the desired outcome:

12

Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 285. Unconventional in the sense that Ihimaera is the eldest son of an eldest son. His father is the current guardian, decision-maker, and leader of Te Whanau A Kai, and traditionally this mantle of leadership would be passed on to Ihimaera in turn. He enumerates how his life is “inconsistent” with normal succession patterns: “I married a Pakeha woman, I am now a gay man, I have had daughters (not sons) and I don’t live with the iwi [...]. I am happy to relinquish that [leadership] role at the tribal level to my aunt who lives in Waituhi.” Email to Margaret Meklin (9 August 2003), A2006/12. 13

114

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



At the very simplest, being modern means having a range of inventive responses to the contemporary world. In Europe this meant responding to rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. In Australia, for Aborigines, [. . . ] [s]urvival has literally meant a lot of creative work, not only of a modernist sort in culture, but also in the technological, bureaucratic and economic systems that are usually associated with modernity.14

Here, modernity is the capacity to respond on all levels to influence, impact, and imposition, thereby releasing Aboriginal culture from the confines of the European spectrum, which ranges from primitive tradition to assimilated modernity. Indigenous modernity, which does not coalesce the term ‘modern’ with a cultural period or cultural content, allows that culture is a highly complex negotiation, inseparable from economic, political, and wider social influences and pressures. Thus, the “creative work” of Muecke’s modernity legitimates cultural expression as much through entrepreneurial decisions as in its accordance with cultural values. Ngati Konohi’s integration of a modern hero, Kahu, in The Whale Rider, During’s example of Maggie Papakura in the U K , and Muecke’s similar study of Aborigines who mediated between tribes and the white communites, all highlight cross-cultural exchange implicit in indigenous modernity. James Clifford, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, terms this component of change and exchange “tradition as hybrid process” and “inventive impurity.”15 Clifford offers a complex analysis of both the process of cultural exchange and his own reaction to this. On visiting an exhibition at the British Museum, “Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands,” in 1993, Clifford is drawn to the many apparently incongruous signs of Western contact in photographs depicting Wahgi in traditional attire. Upon noticing that one young woman’s ceremonial garb includes earrings made of beer-can pull-tabs, Clifford initially reacts by deconstructing tribal authenticity: he is tempted to label these earrings non-traditional, in keeping with postmodern anthropological wariness towards newness that maintains a clear us–them dichotomy. However, he is disturbed by his own response, which he ascribes to Western social science’s claim to interpret another culture’s display within its own self-enforcing terms and criteria. Clifford asks whether, from an indigenous perspective, beer tops might be assimilated to tribally 14

Muecke, Ancient and Modern, 145. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1997): 176. 15



The Local and the Global

115

controlled and regulated decisions on self-representation: “why, one wonders, shouldn’t people such as the Wahgi experience invention and hybrid process as part of their ‘phenomenological reality’?”16 “Hybrid authenticity,” Clifford concludes, is the process of appropriating new materials through indigenous translation.17 Muecke’s indigenous philosophy and Clifford’s native phenomenological reality offer ways of understanding the process by which external influences interact with indigenous ones in the conversion – or translation – of the The Whale Rider’s traditional Mori culture into international cinema, in Niki Caro’s 2002 Whale Rider.

Crossing Genres, Crossing Technologies: Whale Rider Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider attracted little attention on its publication in 1987, following in the wake of the monumental The Matriarch and quickly passed over by the argument surrounding Dear Miss Mansfield two years later. It was not until the release of the film Whale Rider, scripted and directed by Niki Caro in 2002, that interest in the book revived, although there had been several earlier attempts at adapting the novel into a screenplay, including one by Ihimaera himself.18 Whale Rider was an instant success in New Zealand and overseas, unexpectedly winning awards at film festivals in Seattle, San Francisco, Manila, Maui, Sundance, São Paulo, Chicago, Lake Placid, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Mexico City – at least ten local awards and some twenty-five internationally, either for the film itself or for its young star, Keisha Castle–Hughes. As with earlier international exports of New Zealand literature and film, notably Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning the bone people, Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck, and films such as Once Were Warriors and The Piano, international success has ensured that Ihimaera’s novel and Caro’s film quickly became New Zealand classics and, concurrently, the subjects of much academic analysis. Such sustained interest is unsurprising to James English, who, in his study of the impact of international awards on cultural products, predicted that the film’s success would confer “world-canonized” status on the novel, elevating The Whale Rider alongside

16

Clifford, Routes, 182. Routes, 185. 18 Ihimaera’s collected archives include draft film scripts and negotiation over script rights in letters and emails: A1997/06; A2000/07; A 2002/39; A2003/20. 17

116

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Hulme’s the bone people as representative New Zealand texts in international postcolonial studies.19 Caro’s film invites a reading alongside Ihimaera’s novel, less as a comparative exercise than one of mapping continuities, as the local tribal myth is repackaged in a Mori-renaissance novel, which is reworked for the global interests of an international film. While the majority of film adaptations of novels are interpreted as completely separate from, or only loosely based on, the work that inspired them, several major points of crossover between Ihimaera and Caro support reading The Whale Rider and its film version together. First, Ihimaera played a key role in Whale Rider, as the film’s associate producer and also as the link that made possible Caro’s entering into the Ngati Konohi community of Whangara, to which Ihimaera claims whakapapa connections through his mother and brother-in-law. Similarly, despite expectations of fictionality in the genres of novel and cinema, Ihimaera and Caro maintain a close connection with the real by enlisting the participation of the Mori community of Whangara, its marae and beach, and Ngati Konohi historical and legendary narratives. Finally, Ihimaera’s revision of his original novel for release as an international edition (2003) has created a unique situation in which adaptation goes in both directions: as Evans puts it, the international edition is “the book of the film of the book.”20 Currently in New Zealand, both the 1987 and the 2003 versions are in circulation, but one reviewer of The Whale Rider: International Edition suggests that the updated version will eventually replace the original text in future reprints, a trend she equally predicts for Ihimaera’s other rewrites, Pounamu, Pounamu, Whanau, and Tangi.21 The film Whale Rider follows the novel very closely, with the few changes and additions modifying the principal story-line very little. More noticeable is the shift in narrative voice, as the predominantly realist film genre is limited in its ability to re-create Ihimaera’s lyrical voice and the sublime anthropo19

James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2005): 390. 20 Evans, “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’,” 12. 21 Linley Boniface, “Unfinished Business,” Dominion Post (20 September 2003): E12. An exhaustive textual analysis of the various editions of the novel can be found in Lars Eckstein, “Think Local Sell Global: Magical Realism, The Whale Rider, and the Market,” in Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English, ed. Rainer Emig & Oliver Lindner (Cross / Cultures 127, A S N E L Papers 16; Amsterdam & New York, 2010): 93–107.



The Local and the Global

117

morphism of the bull whale narrating the mystic and mythic connection between the whales and the Ngati Konohi tribe. Instead, aside from the opening lyrical credits-sequence with voice-over, Caro relegates whales to a more natural role, swimming in the sea and stranded on the beach, images composed of clips from nature documentaries and special effects created by synthetic models. She transfers the whales’ function as a symbolic, nostalgic link of continuity with the past to a waka canoe, which stands in place of the whale for the mythic journey from Hawaiki to Whangara of Ngati Konohi’s ancestor and tribal founder. This displacement at once assigns whales to a benign, natural position more familiar to a twenty-first-century audience,22 while maintaining the focus on traditional Mori beliefs, this time in the waka’s design, ritualistic carving, and send-off in accordance with Ngati Konohi custom. Ihimaera’s novel ends on a note of family intimacy, with Kahu waking up in hospital, after having nearly drowned while riding the whale. By bringing together Koro and Kahu, the whales here resolve the break between past and present, myth and reality, which Ihimaera describes throughout the text with the term “interlock.” Caro’s movie adds one more scene after this moment, extrapolating the past–present continuum from a familial to a tribal level. In the final scene, set on the beach in front of the marae, the restored waka, led by Koro and Kahu (in the film named Paikea), is launched with a traditional send-off by the local people of Whangara. Until this moment of the film, all outside movement and interaction has been frustrated or denied: Koro scorns Porourangi’s career as an artist overseas and rejects his son’s foreign girlfriend, and Paikea tries to leave with her father but feels inexplicably drawn to stay. In its closing sequence, Whale Rider features two significant breaks with local tradition that point to a future non-insularity for this remote East-Coast community. Porourangi’s pregnant new wife, a blonde German, is at his side, and instead of a local Ngati Konohi action-song, the film closes with “Ka Mate,” a haka that belongs to the West Coast Ngati Toa tribe, which is performed by the national rugby team and is an internationally recognized sym22

For close analysis of the various functions of whales in the film, see Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 104–105; “Transcultures and the Right Use of Whales,” in Baudrillard West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 80–101; and “Riding the Whale? Postcolonialism and Globalization in Whale Rider,” in Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions, ed. Clara A.B. Joseph & Janet Wilson (Cross / Cultures 85; Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2006): 247–67.

118

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



bol of New Zealand. The mixed marriage and familiar haka add points of identification for national and international audiences alike. While Caro’s grand finale is surely motivated by the visual spectacle expected of a ‘happyending’ film, handing over the star role to the people of Ngati Konohi exemplifies Clifford’s, During’s, and Muecke’s arguments for the inherent modernity of indigenous cultures. As foreign elements nonetheless accepted by the tribe in the story, the German wife and “Ka Mate” haka are further, exaggerated instances of the cultural change signalled by the acceptance of a female, Paikea, as the tribe’s future leader. In a somewhat less blatant version of the beer-can tops, cigarette packets, and Hawaiian shirts that stand out for Clifford among the plumes and face-paint at the “Paradise” exhibition, this scene indicates the process of “hybrid authenticity” as translation across generations (from Koro to Kahu), nations (from Whangara to Germany), and cultural codes (local kapa haka to the All Blacks’ haka). Behind the scenes, other levels of cultural hybridity act out Mori assimilation of modern techniques and Western concepts through the channels of traditional protocol. The Whale Rider D V D ’s Making Of features information about Ngati Konohi’s involvement throughout the film as well as input from other Mori craftsmen. These behind-the-scenes clips, such as the making of the waka and the ritual of the canoe’s baptism, are depicted with ethnographic candour. They invite the viewer not just to witness a display of traditional culture, but also to understand the protocols and traditions behind it, a motivation reminiscent of the educative function of the Mori renaissance in the arts, and of ethnography in general. Of course, for Whale Rider, the audience’s impression of cultural authenticity is mediated by the known formula of Hollywoodesque box-office films, by which commercial demands tied to budget and projected sales mean that the desire for accuracy may be expected to succumb to the more practical aim not to get it right, but simply to make it look right. Defining the waka as a cinematic prop or a real cultural artefact, and the filming of Ngati Konohi’s send-off as ritual or merely the staging of a ritual, activates the debate over cultural authenticity or its fake simulation. In the D V D ’s “Te Waka: Building the Canoe,” the viewer is informed that time and budgetary restrictions meant that the prop was built of laminated timber and fibreglass in one month, whereas a traditional waka would be carved out of a single totara tree trunk and might take years to complete. For Whale Rider’s waka, the carved prow and stern, designed and carried out by Mori carvers educated in the traditional and sacred skill, were made out of polystyrene in three days, to such a high standard that, according to the master



The Local and the Global

119

carver, “you can’t tell the difference between whether its real [.. .] or polystyrene.” Members of Ngati Konohi, who had taken roles as extras throughout the film, then launch the waka accompanied by a traditional ceremonial blessing and send-off. This footage was included in the film. The polystyrene waka was assigned a somewhat higher cultural value than the average disposable theatrical commodity inspires. In fact, it was not treated as a commodity at all, but as a real waka from its inception through to its positioning as local artefact: once the production had no further use for the prop, the canoe was donated to the Whangara people, where visitors can now see it on display at the Ngati Konohi marae, alongside a real one. Ironically, the fibreglass material will possibly mean that this waka outlives its real wooden counterpart, although time makes the difference between them more visible, as the polystyrene carved parts begin to crack and crumble away. The film’s behind-the-scenes hybridity cannot simply be construed along clear-cut lines of Mori acquiescing to, or being appropriated by, Pakeha or Western directives. The production team’s consultation with the Whangara community, through cultural advisors including Ihimaera and the Ngati Konohi kaumtua and rangatira (elder and chief), Hone Taumaunu, turns filmmaking into a cross-cultural negotiation, with exchange of values, skills, and knowledge on both sides. Although the waka was funded by a joint New Zealand and German film production, and made out of unconventional materials, it was ascribed value because built by Mori and in accordance with agreedupon decisions concerning design and use. Similarly, Caro’s representation of Mori culture was accepted by locals because of her attention to and encouragement of local involvement. Indeed, Caro states that Whale Rider is first and foremost Ngati Konohi’s story.23 To this end, the Pakeha director consulted with Mori, learned the language and protocol, and involved the Whangara community, shooting on location, renting accommodation there and including locals as extras.24 Such strategies give Mori a strong position of agency and a level of control over how Ngati Konohi wishes Whangara and its people to be portrayed. Caro underlines the fact that gaining “Ngati Konohi’s blessing to tell their story” was fundamental to the project’s suc-

23

Shepheard, “Making Waves,” North and South (February 2003): 82; Whale Rider, dir. & screenplay Niki Caro (South Pacific Pictures / Apollomedia / Pandora Film, N Z / Germany 2002; 101 min.): D V D “Behind the Scenes.” 24 Shepheard, “Making Waves,” 85; Whale Rider, D V D “Behind the Scenes.”

120

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



cess,25 an emphasis that counterbalances criticism from some quarters over the appropriateness of allowing a Pakeha to direct a film about Mori. Taumaunu sums up the experience of making the film as based on a close relationship between the filmmakers and local Mori: “we have built up a beautiful relationship [...] built on mutual trust, mutual respect, and a lot of give and take”;26 “I never saw Niki as a ‘Pakeha’ or anything but a woman who spoke my language, who was humble and sensitive.”27 The legend of the whale rider, in its different representations, from the ongoing circulation of Paikea’s founding myth in Ngati Konohi practice, through Ihimaera’s Mori-renaissance novel, to Caro’s high-tech film, exemplifies an adaptability of both the form and the context of Mori cultural expression. Mori consultation and involvement in the film, achieved through Mori decision-making and legitimizing processes, recalls Muecke’s claim for indigenous modernity as strategies of adaptation, thus shifting the question of what culture is to one of how it may be produced and circulated. The polystyrene waka and Ngati Konohi’s backing of the film project demonstrate an apparently unproblematic crossing-over of cultural concerns to commercial and international domains. Such movement challenges the view that the highest Mori cultural order features authenticity, tradition, originality, and symbolic value, a notion that once again contrasts a static native past with dynamic Western contemporaneity. Rather, Whale Rider may be seen within a long history of Mori entrepreneurship, of legitimating cultural expression as much through executive decisions as by a moral code of conduct. As an active participant in translating their culture into modes aimed at outside audiences, Ngati Konohi is a recent example of the nineteenth-century postculturalism that During cites. The difference is in the confidence: whereas During uncovers behind the scenes cultural mixing masked by colonialism and the sometimes aggressive separatism of 1980s sovereignty pressure, by the time of Whale Rider, audiences are watching it happen on screen: the very purpose of a D V D Making Of is to expose a film’s ‘secrets’. The D V D ’s voice-over, in “Te Waka: Building the Canoe,” asserts: “the story of how the waka was designed and created is one where legend, technology and tradition meet.” The confidence with which Mori carvers show the chainsaw cutting the waka out of polystyrene conveys a sense of Mori as being confidently in 25

Shepheard, “Making Waves,” 84. Whale Rider, D V D “Te Waka: Building the Canoe.” 27 Shepheard, “Making Waves,” 86. 26



The Local and the Global

121

control; not at all victims whose cultural specificity risks being swamped by the steady roll of global capitalism. When the master carver claims that “you can’t tell the difference” between real cultural and unreal commercial expressions of Mori culture, his statement is one of degree and of perspective. While “you,” the viewer, cannot see the difference, the craftsman certainly can. Of course, there are differences between a nineteenth-century wooden waka and a polystyrene and fibreglass one made for a movie. Mori agency means Mori control of and profit from its cultural production and output in a way deemed appropriate within that culture. To recall Muecke on modernity, agency is the privileged position by which the indigenous culture has access to the multiple layers of its representation, spanning local and global, traditional and experimental, ceremonial and commercial, quotidian lived culture and occasional staged culture. On a larger scale than Mori profit from involvement in and spin-offs from Whale Rider, Mori management of joint culture- and market-driven projects is also at work in Waitangi Tribunal settlements awarded to tribes in recognition of colonial misdeeds. Although the government’s acknowledgement of past wrongs is an important part of the grievance/ grieving process, it is the financial packages that enable Mori tribes to take a more proactive part in shaping their culture(s) on a tribal rather than national level. A key example is the South Island tribe Ngai Tahu, which has become a major corporate force in their region. In the following interview excerpt, the strategic advisor and tribal member Te Maire Tau outlines the tribe’s strategies for best supporting Mori concerns: As a tribe, we have to recognise that the world has changed. We’re a capitalist democratic society with liberal values. As a tribe – and as a people as a whole – we have to accept that we’re no longer a traditional community with traditional values, because capitalism won’t back down. [...] The most successful groups dealing with Ngai Tahu are the ones who approach us in a corporate way without this smokescreen of liberal agenda. We find it very easy to do business with them, rather than us getting tied into the politics of liberalism.28

Far from being a case of corporate concerns replacing cultural ones, Ngai Tahu is a model example of Muecke’s indigenous modern. The tribe invests in business ventures in order to fund a long-term social plan to improve Mori standards, particularly in health, employment, and education, as well as a cul28

Bruce Ansley, “A Wealth of Talent,” The Listener (6 March 2004): 17.

122

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tural plan, which includes fostering their regional dialect, nature conservation of sites of historical and traditional importance, and implementing Mori structures such as runanga (tribal council) in business. Tau agrees that the notion of culture and how to protect it has changed by necessity rather than choice: in the 1980s, the cradle-to-the-grave welfare state was replaced by criteria of bicultural positive discrimination, a race-based liberalism which Tau sees as useful in its time (enabling the Waitangi Tribunal settlements) but now redundant in the twenty-first century, giving way to corporate strategies. When Tau enthuses “in my wildest dreams, the tribe in 50 years should be a global corporate,”29 tribe and corporation are seen to share features of organization, motivation, and a complex vision of how the local and global interconnect. Similarly, while the collective, cohesive impulse of emergent nationbuilding presented a relatively united front in sovereignty and renaissance aims in the 1970s–80s, a singular sense of Maori culture has since been fragmented by Tribunal settlements and tribal corporatization which empower individual tribes to negotiate their own economic and cultural welfare. Despite such outward-looking and dynamic conceptions of culture and its propagation expressed by Mori, including Ngati Konohi, the master carver for Whale Rider and Ngai Tahu spokesman, there is some reluctance in New Zealand to envisage Mori culture as a complete way of living, internally governed according to its own principles. Instead, the way in which the designation ‘Mori’ tends to stand predominantly for cultural content has, in recent years, contributed to a difficulty among both Mori and Pakeha commentators in accounting for non-traditional usages. In particular, the deployment of culture in and for economic gain on an increasingly international level causes confusion, as what Muecke calls “inventive responses to the contemporary world” may be seen to empty out – or perhaps sell out – cultural value, the authenticity of which is linked to a supposed pre-modernity, innocent of capitalist and consumerist ideologies. It appears that New Zealand’s national biculturalism and free-market economy pull expectations of Mori cultural representation in two strikingly different directions. The Mori sovereignty and renaissance axis is geared to asserting foundational differences from Pakeha New Zealand. In the other direction, the social and economic sea-changes of the 1980s, which launched the country into ‘user pays’ and competitive global capitalism, has prompted Mori to employ strategies of global business to make sure that Mori profit from the international interest in indigenous cul29

Ansley, “A Wealth of Talent,” 18.



The Local and the Global

123

tures. Although Clifford, Muecke, During, and several other Pakeha commentators stress the long history of globalization which, like modernity, features cultural change through cross-cultural influence, both Mori and Pakeha are apprehensive about the way contemporary globalization is changing the function of culture, no longer confined to its place of origin or contained in a sphere uncontaminated by politics and economics. In her examination of the Mori renaissance, Chris Prentice analyzes Whale Rider’s whale-stranding, simulated by the film’s German special-effects company with fake whales and computer graphics, to question the meaning of Mori culture: there are urgent questions to ask about the meaning and uses of ‘Maori culture’ in contemporary globalisation [. . . ] relat[ing] to a context where art and culture converge, and where culture and politics – specifically political economy – share a common logic. What challenges face contemporary Maori cultural politics as the post-colonial habit of addressing the position of Maori in relation to the nation state must deal with intensifying globalisation? As globalisation problematises the nation state, detaching identities and politics from specificities of location, will indigeneity be floated on the global cultural market?30

Prentice’s questions register a sense of pressing concern for the prospective loss of culture as a lived reality, giving way to a compartmentalized “cultureas-sign.”31 Her position exhibits the well-intentioned sensitivity to minoritycultural specificity that, through biculturalism and its attendant focus on ‘cultural safety’, has pervaded New Zealand national consciousness since the 1980s. Concern for a potential collapse of culture into political economy and marketplace values seems to hide a fear of reverse cultural essentialism: the global consumer – arguably a latter-day colonist – undermines bicultural or postcolonial assiduity which strives to access the minority viewpoint by setting aside mainstream cultural expectations. And yet, Te Maire Tau’s ease with discussing Mori culture in corporate or globalization terminology, and the confidence with which the Mori carver on the Whale Rider D V D announces that “you can’t tell the difference,” defy any presumption of loss and desecration. Their outlook suggests that when Mori intentionally take their culture out into the world, the responsibility for quality control rests with the Mori producer rather than the non-Mori consumer. Nevertheless, to a large 30 31

Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 91. “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” 97.

124

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



extent, Mori control is made possible in the national context by the politics and policies of biculturalism, which have also to a large extent percolated into the social fabric in New Zealand. However, whether Mori can maintain control of their culture’s representations and dissemination on the international level remains questionable and, indeed, problematic.32 Confidence in an ability to negotiate the minefields of cultural meaning that Prentice accurately enumerates also underpins two of Ihimaera’s more recent novels, The Uncle’s Story and The Rope of Man. These novels, which take Mori culture out of Waituhi and into an international arena – “indigeneity [...] floated on the global cultural market” – feature characters skilled in adapting indigenous strategies and adopting foreign ones. In a similar way to Ihimaera’s interpretation of the whale in New York, these novels bring a Mori world-view to international settings. The complexity of his exploration of content hybridity (what is Mori) and the process of hybridity (how it is deployed) reveals the pressing need in New Zealand to re-evaluate the strategies of assimilation and differentiation that currently give shape to contemporary Mori culture.

Being Mori in the World: Chosen Communities Ihimaera engages with the translation of Maori culture from home to abroad in his interview discussion of the inspiration for The Whale Rider. When Ihimaera finds Mori symbols in a New York setting, he makes a claim for the extension of Mori culture to a global environment: New York is no longer construed as foreign to the Mori imaginary. In order to incorporate New York into his Mori view of the world, Ihimaera claims: “The marae was and still is the heart of our culture, but the whole world is our turangawaewae [empowering foundation] now,”33 and “I wasn’t just a Maori who was brought up in Waituhi or a Maori in New Zealand, but I was a Maori in the world.”34 Strength of identity at home, Ihimaera suggests, enables Mori to 32

On the question of Mori control of their culture’s representation in the international production of Whale Rider, see Prentice, “Riding the Whale?” 256–58. For analysis of Mori control of their culture’s dissemination, including copyright and intellectual property rights across several examples, see Peter Shand, “Scenes from the Colonial Catwalk,” Cultural Analysis 3 (2002): 47–88. 33 Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 285. 34 “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 284.



The Local and the Global

125

carry their cultural identity into the world without fear of getting lost. The novelist has a similar vision for his fiction. In his defence against Bilbrough’s review of Sky Dancer, Ihimaera inscribes the intensely local referents of small-town New Zealand in contemporary currents of “the diasporic, [.. .] glocal and global.” Although each is distinct in its focus, these terms share a common understanding of home as shaped by and responsive to influence from and interaction with the outside world. In particular, in its blend of ‘global’ and ‘local’, the neologism ‘glocalization’, theorized by Roland Robertson, provides a useful theoretical frame for Ihimaera’s “a Maori in the world” attitude. Just as nation-building is an international phenomenon by which each nation uses the same set of tools and techniques to frame their own unique content, Robertson argues that each locale is an assemblage of globally available strategies and components.35 Robertson’s is not an argument for the homogenization of locality, as such critics of globalization as Jean Baudrillard would have it, nor for an understanding of one as the opposite of the other. Instead, he illuminates aspects of global awareness always already present in the local. There is much support for arguing for an inherent imbrication between local and global, through a long history of global interaction. For Anthony Giddens, globalization is a natural extension and consequence of modernity, which James Mittelman demarcates as beginning at least five-hundred years ago in European exploration and establishment of trade networks. Similarly, Bahri inscribes the new cultural and literary perspectives of the postcolonial in a long history of modern on a global scale. Following During’s early article “Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation After All?” there has been a steady increase in literature describing postcolonialism as already rehearsing many key points of globalization.36 Robertson, situating his own argument in a similarly historical and 35

Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities (Theory, Culture & Society), ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995): 31. 36 Currently, postcolonial studies appears to be at a cross-roads, with recent conferences and texts discussing the term’s increasingly interdisciplinary nature, intersecting previously distinct fields of literature, human geography, and economics. In particular, postcolonial theory has yet to fully describe its relationship with globalization, transculturation, and diaspora, but important collections, such as Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions (2006) and Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (2010), work hard to illuminate the term’s changing contexts.

126

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



international schema, places global exchange and “world formation” within a broad sweep of territorial and historical (space and time) interaction and interpenetration between the particular and the universal.37 When applied to culture, this syncretic concept of mutually inclusive global localities and local globalities aligns with theories of transculturation, which Wolfgang Welsch identifies as the process of cross-cultural “entanglement.”38 Ihimaera’s conception of the compatibility of New York with a Mori philosophy or worldview demonstrates both a ‘glocal’ and a transcultural logic in which New York is no less a Mori space than Waituhi: he connects two localities in ways that ignore or bypass the nation. In a succinct summary of Robertson’s term, Diana Brydon, in an article that accentuates similar dynamics of interaction in postcolonialism and globalization, glosses the ‘glocal’ as an ability “to live attuned to different temporal and civilizational systems without needing to choose definitively between them.”39 Certainly, when Ihimaera interprets the patterns in the Hudson River at New York no differently from how he interprets the swirls and eddies in the river that runs through Waituhi, he collapses difference and distance to occupy both places simultaneously. The social sciences’ increasing interest in mapping cultural interaction and movement via local and global models challenges the more static construction of culture along ethnic or national lines. Instead of precepts of national cultural homogeneity and the nation-state as a controlling apparatus, Robertson applies Étienne Balibar’s concept of “world spaces”: [World spaces] are places in which the world-as-a-whole is potentially inserted. The general idea of world-space suggests that we should consider the local as a ‘micro’ manifestation of the global – in opposition, inter alia, to the implication that the local indicates enclaves of cultural, ethnic, or racial homogeneity.40

37

Robertson, “Glocalization,” 34–35. Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Forms of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (Thousand Oaks C A : Sage, 1999): 198. 39 Diana Brydon, “Cracking Imaginaries: Studying the global from Canadian Space,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Christina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 112. 40 Robertson, “Glocalization,” 39. 38



The Local and the Global

127

In a theoretical version of Clifford’s detailing Wahgi integration of foreign components in their traditional costumes, Robertson argues that every locality contains the potential for receiving and assimilating global products and processes in a way meaningful in their local environment.41 Robertson’s local– global interaction, like Clifford’s, During’s, and Muecke’s mapping of indigenous modernity, stresses each culture’s ability to adapt imported (global) influences to fit into their own (local) world-view. In a passage that echoes Muecke’s argument for complex modernity, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, writing in the same volume as Robertson, Global Modernities, argues for the multidimensionality of globalization, “modes of organization”42 operating on transnational, international, macro-regional, national, micro-regional, municipal, and local levels: Globalization, then, increases the range of organizational options, all of which are in operation simultaneously. Each or a combination of these may be relevant in specific social, institutional, legal, political, economic or cultural spheres. What matters is that no single mode has a necessary overall priority or monopoly.43

Pieterse’s interest in bringing multiple discourses into play demonstrates modernity’s ability to adapt to different circumstances, just as Robertson’s use of ‘glocalization’, an economics term derived from 1980s Japanese business jargon, once again supports an understanding of culture as polymorphous, encompassing social, political, and economic domains, and pertaining to movement as much as to content. As Welsch puts it, “transculturality refers to a transition.”44 In the ubiquitous term ‘culture’, Pieterse identifies two opposing concepts, which he claims are often used indiscriminately. The first is a localized sense of culture, learned territorially, and is thus specific. The second conceptualization is of culture “as a general human ‘software’,” learned in and through translocal interaction:45 Culture 2 or translocal culture is not without place (there is no culture without place), but it involves an outward-looking sense of place, whereas culture 41

Robertson, “Glocalization,” 38. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” in Global Modernities, 50. 43 Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” 51. 44 Welsch, “Transculturality.” 208, fn26. 45 Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” 61. 42

128

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



1 is based on an inward-looking sense of place. Culture 2 involves what Doreen Massey calls ‘a global sense of place’: ‘the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations.’46

Whereas inward-looking culture demarcates its boundaries by identifying differences from the outside, translocal culture looks for similarities between itself – which is already heterogeneous – and others. Pieterse’s model demonstrates how ‘a’ culture is composed of contradictory facets, a point relevant to the apparently opposing conceptions of the form and function of Mori culture and its literature discussed in the previous section. In keeping with objectives of self-definition and autonomy, Mori renaissance and sovereignty typify Pieterse’s culture 1, while Mori interest in reinforcing and disseminating its culture using the tools of corporate global capitalism exemplifies culture 2. Although contradictory, the inward- and outward-looking senses of culture are mutually self-supporting: the strength of culture 1 fosters the confidence to explore culture 2. Thus, the optimism with which Ngai Tahu, Ngati Konohi, and Ihimaera, in his self-styled ‘glocal’ novels, take Moritanga out into the world is made possible by secure knowledge that the culture is also thriving in the local community at home. Within the context of culture 1’s concern with self-description, implementing the imaginative strategies of nation-building, Mori sovereignty and renaissance definitions of Moritanga tend to collapse complex cultural identity into predominantly expressive culture, so that a waka, a haka or a Mori novel is interpreted as mimetic, its ‘reality’ standing in, metonymically, for the culture as a whole. By contrast, translocal culture 2 raises the anchor of place to insert culture into a process of translation, which in turn reinserts the imaginative function of cultural creation, the simile or synonym. Ihimaera’s New York Mori world implies such a translocal sense of culture. Because he seeks Mori signs beyond a (nationally defined) Mori locality, the author is conscious that he needs to make an effort of translation in order to interpret local New York signs within his own frame. In the national context, Ihimaera may claim that East-Coast whales are Ngati Porou symbols, a claim which Pakeha, believed to be outside of this life-world, would not refute. However, in New York, a Mori interpretation of animistic portents is only one of many possible translations of a whale and swirl patterns on the Hudson River. A culture’s ability to look outwards requires its recognition of alternatives and 46

Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” 61.



The Local and the Global

129

differences: it can no longer claim to own the only way of seeing. Making a similar point, Doreen Massey suggests that a locality exists by virtue of its disparate historical and international influences; it is therefore impossible to draw boundaries around a community, which means different things for different members.47 In other words, everybody perceives his or her environment differently, and a locale is built out of what Pieterse calls the different “organizational options [...] in operation simultaneously.” In its focus on multiple contiguities with cultures normally considered foreign, transculturation challenges the cohesiveness of the nation as a binding body of community solidarity. On the other hand, arguably too emphatic an emphasis on constant movement and fragmentation exaggerates the pervasiveness of globalization in the world today, glossing over the fact that the nation-state is proving remarkably tenacious both in terms of international state power-relations and the cohesiveness of Anderson’s “imagined communities.” However, work by globalization theorists such as Robertson, Pieterse, Welsch, and Massey, and on modernity, by Clifford, During, and Muecke, amounts to a timely reminder that the nation is constructed rather than natural, and functions on the basis of processes of cross-cultural translation and negotiation. In The Uncle’s Story, interesting negotiations of Mori culture are played out in the novel’s oscillation between past and present, local and global settings. In the family and tribal dynamics of an East-Coast rural Mori community, the 1990s protagonist Michael Mahana struggles for recognition as homosexual, for which he is castigated as a “fail[ure].”48 The novel, which begins with Michael coming out to his parents and ends with his coming-out at an international conference, follows several gay Mori characters’ attempts to reconcile their sexual and tribal registration. As Michael explains to his Pakeha lover, “My people are among the most homophobic in the world [...] I’m not supposed to exist” (22). Unlike in The Whale Rider, where the modern difference of Kahu’s tribal accession is contained within a wholly local tribal cosmology, the silence and taboo surrounding Mori homosexuality requires some outside support. As traditional Mori culture, represented in the novel by Michael’s rural whnau, does not itself contain ways of accounting for or dealing with gays and lesbians, Mori must look to other cultures’ tradi47

Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place” (1991), in Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray & Jim McGuigan (London: Edward Arnold, 1993): 238. 48 Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story (Auckland: Penguin, 2000): 16. Further page references are in the main text.

130

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tions to contextualize gay experience. Thus, Michael lives in a predominantly Pakeha world of urban New Zealand – surrounded by other Mori and Pacific Islanders likewise living outside traditional communities – and travels internationally for his work as a cultural consultant. Support from his lovers and friends provides a larger cultural perspective from which to come to terms with his sexual and ethnic identity. In turn, Michael gains the confidence to incorporate Mori cultural traditions, especially the masculine warrior ethos of heroism and leadership, in his contemporary lived experience as Mori at home and in the world. The Uncle’s Story employs an outward-looking sense of culture by connecting late-twentieth-century Moritanga with Michael’s uncle Sam’s war experiences in Vietnam, and his own diplomatic experiences in Canada. The traditional, inward-looking concept of the Mori warrior is transformed into an outward-looking sense of culture both locally, extended to encompass Mori homosexuals, and globally, applied to other communities and cultures struggling for recognition in Vietnam and in Canada. By forging strong ties through cultural contact, Ihimaera argues for an enlarged and strengthened Mori culture at home. The key to both Michael and his family’s recognition and acceptance of homosexuality is to be found in the past, in his uncle Sam’s Vietnam War diary, which describes both the atrocities of the Vietnam campaign and Sam’s own homosexual relationship with an American pilot. These revelations in turn help Michael take a vocal stand against homophobia, both in New Zealand and at a First Nations’ conference in Canada. By moving between Michael’s local daily life as a 1990s gay man in Wellington and the other worlds of Vietnam in the past and contemporary indigenous-rights issues in Canada, the Mori-warrior dynamic is employed and translated into a range of situations, moving between temporal and spatial localities. The Mori-warrior ethos is introduced in the novel’s first pages, under the pretext of Michael’s father’s recounting his own father’s leadership in the Maori Battalion, which fought in North Africa and Italy in World War Two (15). Indeed, Mori valour in the World Wars has an important place in the New Zealand national imaginary. Stalwarts of Mori nationalism, such as Ngata and Walker, uphold the Maori Battalion’s feats as a highlight of twentieth-century Moritanga, exemplifying the Mori fighting spirit. Its renown in national history and literature includes recent novels by Patricia Grace and James George. Memory of the Maori Battalion is also kept alive through Mori customs: returned servicemen were honoured in their communities; many boys born in the next generation were named in memory of European



The Local and the Global

131

and North African sites and battles; the Battalion’s stories were kept alive through oral storytelling, including the weaving of whakapapa connections between families whose forebears served together. Mori methods of absorbing and making sense of an event external to a Mori world-view attest to the natural transculturation process, as variously described by Pieterse’s culture 2, Robertson’s glocalization, Clifford’s translation, and Muecke’s indigenous modernity. The Maori Battalion shows that adaptation to modern Western warfare has not necessarily changed the attitude to war according to specific Mori principles: as a global (international and historical) phenomenon, war is an example of Robertson’s sense of the “local as a ‘micro’ manifestation” in which “the world-as-a-whole is potentially inserted.” Thus a Mori-warrior ethos may circulate indiscriminately from nineteenth-century land wars in New Zealand to Michael’s grandfather in Crete, France, Syria, and Egypt, or Sam in Vietnam. Aspects of Mori war culture which feature in the novel include fierce pride in its military tactics, the mana of chiefly leadership, utu, self-sacrifice, and mateship. These principles, arguably integral to war culture throughout the world and its history, have helped foster a myth of Mori as ‘natural’ warriors, with the colonial ‘noble savage’ perpetuated by Mori themselves as applied to each tribe’s local legends about their feats in midnineteenth-century land wars and their survival throughout the twentieth century. In a more negative expression, in his novel Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff uses the warrior trope to account for the high incidence of Mori gang membership and urban violence. In The Uncle’s Story, Ihimaera calls on many of these Mori warrior precepts, retold by Michael’s father, Monte Cassino, recounting the war exploits of his father, Arapeta, in the Maori Battalion. Monte describes Arapeta’s military bravery as in his blood (“Dad relied on the warrior blood of his ancestors – their intelligence, their cunning and their ability to lead – to get him through,” 15), recites names of fellow Mori soldiers, and explains the origin of his name. In the novel’s flashback sequences, Arapeta himself speaks. He couches his marae send-off for Sam, Turei, and George to Vietnam in ritualized oral performance detailing Maori Battalion victories, and bestows leadership and custodianship on Sam (39–43). Arapeta describes Turei’s death as an honour for his iwi: “There was no greater accolade for a warrior consecrated to Tumatauenga, the God of War, than to die in battle” (171), and exhorts Sam to “avenge his death [.. .] take utu against those who killed him” (173). However, while Arapeta’s Mori philosophy comfortably accounts for the military service of Sam, George, and Turei in Vietnam, his principles can-

132

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



not accept Sam’s homosexuality. Consequently, Sam is savagely beaten, disowned by his family, and buried without proper ritual in an unconsecrated place, his memory effaced from the family tree. In this radical response to his son’s sexuality, Arapeta’s violent overreaction, display of dominance, and forced forgetting are ways of dealing with difficulty and difference common to the damaging psychological after-effects of war. In the traditional Mori world-view embodied by Sam’s experiences in the 1950s and 1960s, homosexuality is camouflaged in the camaraderie of mateship and dissimulated in inarticulation. Demonstrating and admitting to being gay results in serious psychological and physical trauma: Sam’s warrior status is brutally revoked because of his sexual orientation.49 By the late 1990s of Michael’s ‘comingout’, the threat of excommunication from the family and thus from Mori culture remains the same. It is only by turning to a foreign cultural context that Michael’s right to be both Mori and gay is validated. Michael updates and exports the Mori-warrior tradition from the preurban-drift, rural Mori whnau community of Sam’s generation into bicultural, postcolonial, late-1990s urban Wellington and Canada. Michael’s comment early in the novel that Mori refuse to acknowledge homosexuality foreshadows the traumatic climax that, in the wholly Mori enclave that Sam belongs to, can lead only to his death and forgetting. By the time of Michael’s generation, however, his Pakeha lover provides the initial way out of the stalemate of Mori homophobia. Jason refuses to accept the unchangeability of Maoridom’s intolerance of gays. Confronted by Michael’s claim that for Mori homosexuality does not exist, Jason replies: “But you do, and I do too. It’s all a matter of recognition for me” (22). Whereas Sam is assailed by doubt that his sexuality is a transgression that has cast him out of the Mori pantheon into Te Kore, the void (155–56, 160), Michael is adamant that one should not have to choose between being Mori and being gay. In the bicultural era, Michael’s life-style and his position as a Mori and bicultural art consultant demonstrate Mori dexterity at appropriating the tools of a Western education, national job market, and global corporatism to ensure Mori prosperity. In fact, for Dieter Riemenschneider, in an article about Mori glocal49

For detailed analysis of the psychological and physical abuse Sam suffers at the hand of his domineering father, see Fox, The Ship of Dreams, 161–66. Similar emasculating violence and bullying occurs in Bulibasha, sparked by Simeon’s non-Mori, non-family-centred interests in (Pakeha) academic success and (American) movies, books and music. See Fox, The Ship of Dreams, 157–60.



The Local and the Global

133

ization, Michael’s urban Mori identity takes into account not only Pakeha influence but also that of the postcolonial “globe-wide consciousness movement’ of minorities.50 Michael, then, is a product of his times, as both Mori and gay identities are embedded in a ‘glocal’ discourse of minority empowerment.51 Indeed, in support of Riemenschneider’s argument, throughout The Uncle’s Story Ihimaera draws attention to the similarity of the struggles of indigenous and gay rights and recognition. This is most clearly symbolized in the figure of Tane Mahuta, nicknamed the “Noble Savage,” and founder of Te Waka Awhina Tane, a Mori and Polynesian gay-support group. The theme culminates in the First Nations conference in Ottawa to which Michael and his lesbian friend, the Toi Mori executive Roimata, are invited in their professional capacity as bicultural consultants. Here, the Mori warrior ethos comes to the fore in their separatist argument for an arts-funding body managed by and for indigenous peoples. Adopting the stance of Mori warriors, updated into the ongoing battle for Mori sovereignty and devolution, and transposed onto that of the First-Nations situation, they exhort First Nations people to “Maintain your sovereign goals, do not let go of your inspiration, hold to your strength. Remember your warrior spirit” (326–27). Similarities between the two indigenous groups are generated by the shared experience of colonialism and victimization, as Michael points out in his speech: “In the past our ancestors were shot, killed, maimed, murdered and hanged [...]. So were yours” (325). The First Peoples’ conference creates a kind of international federation of indigeneity, illuminating moments of cross-cultural recognition that enact Pieterse’s “transcultural convergence.” As pointed out in the author’s Acknowledgments, the conference sequences in the novel are inspired by Ihimaera’s own experience at two Canadian First Peoples’ conferences. The argument that the writer puts in the mouths of Michael and Roimata recapitulates the speech he gave in 1998 in his capacity as Te Atiawa Arts Administrator and General Manager of Toi Mori. In an interview in which he rehearses the conference’s focus, he stresses the similarities between New Zealand Mori and Canadian First Nations peoples: 50

Dieter Riemenschneider, “Contemporary Maori Cultural Practice: From Biculturalism Towards a Glocal Culture,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 18–19 (2000– 2001): 150. 51 Riemenschneider, “Contemporary Maori Cultural Practice,” 151.

134

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



I first came to this conference five years ago to support First Nations in their bids to improve awareness and promote their cultures. We regard that [support] as being extremely important. We see ourselves as being brothers and sisters in skin.52

Ihimaera’s description of “brothers and sisters in skin” identifies commonality between indigenous peoples. Further cultural practices and priorities shared by Mori and First Nations include: the importance of ancestors in the present; an inclusive cosmology of legends and contemporary art; a sense of the ritualistic; animistic nature; the importance of traditional song and dance. Similarly, sexual orientation forms another level of inter-tribal affinity between the Mori and First Nations characters. As Michael puts it on meeting the conference patron: “There’s a kind of recognition that happens when one gay man meets another. As soon as I saw Franklin I knew he was one of us” (315). Such similarities enact Pieterse’s “transcultural convergence,” in which an outward-looking, inclusive sense of culture identifies commonalities even within different culture-specific contexts. The local–local interaction on a global scale between indigenous peoples described in the novel recalls Robertson’s emphasis on cultures’ ability to adapt imported (global) influences to fit into their own (local) environments. As such, the Ottawa conference demonstrates a two-directional flow of transcultural convergence, which in both cases accords with Welsch’s sense of transculturation as transition, agentive to cultural change. With the intention of sharing strategies and information that might be applied in Canada, Roimata and Michael discuss the structure of Toi Mori funding policies. In the other direction, Michael learns of the Indian berdache tradition, in which gays, known as people of “two-spirits,” traditionally held a revered position in Indian society. Although Mori do not have a form of the Indian berdache, Michael’s sense of transcultural connection with Canadian indigeneity allows him to adopt this tradition as his own. Furthermore, the First-Nations characters attribute special significance to the fact that Michael has a twin sister, a detail which means that he is “destined [.. .] [t]o lead the berdache tribe” (330). The berdache tradition, along with recognition at the conference of “the achievements of our two-spirit ancestors to all our traditions” (344) inspires the protagonist to take home the affirmation of a heroic gay identity to confront Mori homophobia. Translating the Canadian experience back into 52

Ihimaera, interview and speech, Canadian First People’s Arts Conference (24–27 September 1998): Conference Proceedings C D - R O M , A2002/39.



The Local and the Global

135

his own Mori locality, Michael leads an ope back to his home marae, carrying the body of a Mori transsexual prostitute and A I D S victim. The ope, an “odd tribe” consisting of transvestites, street kids, and urban rebels, none of whom has ever been on a marae or learnt ritual protocol, nevertheless claim their right, as Mori, to be formally welcomed within the traditional framework of the tangihanga funeral (364). The woman’s karanga onto the marae voices the incorporation of newness into ritual etiquette in a way that marks the end of the transitive phase of transculturation, as difference is absorbed into an internally meaningful structure: “Welcome to this marae,” Lilly called. “Welcome you strange tribe I see before me! Come forward, you tribe of men who love men and women who love women! Welcome, you brave gay tribe, whom none have seen before! Come! Bring your dead who is also our dead –” (365)

In the novel’s final paragraph, Ihimaera draws together the strands of present and past, local and global that have impelled the exploration of indigenous gay identity. In a shift of narrative voice, from the past tense in which the ‘I’ narrator Michael addresses the ‘you’ reader to the present tense which directly addresses Sam, Michael concludes: I have realised, Uncle Sam, that the telling of our stories will bring a location and a history to the world that we build. We who are gay and lesbian must fix the stories with firmness and solder their knots with purpose so that they become part of the narratives [. . . ] all people tell about each other. (371)

Location and history in The Uncle’s Story centre on the East-Coast tribe to which Sam and Michael belong, but from which they have been cast out because of their sexuality. Re-finding and redefining the contemporary local hearth requires international and historical research: Michael goes out into the world and delves into the past in order to discover new stories and to uncover new ways of looking at old stories that “people tell about each other.” The importance of storytelling is a key theme in this novel. Narration, such as reading Sam’s diary and recounting Mori and First-Nations legends and stories at the Ottawa conference, has several purposes, including remembering the past, clearing the air in the present, and bringing together time and space in recognition of common ground. In this, Ihimaera’s novel enacts the central thesis of Chamberlin’s book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? In the context of Canadian indigenous people’s rights, Chamberlin suggests the modality of storytelling as a mediating space to promote understanding and increase

136

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



knowledge, which may in turn potentially overcome intra- and inter-cultural conflict. Through stories that traverse time and space, The Uncle’s Story enacts a transculturative process that creates localities among the potential ‘world-spaces’ available, binding groups in ways unforeseen or inconceivable within classic structures of belonging such as ethnicity and nationhood. By affiliating Mori to First-Nations cultures, and the Mori warrior ethos to the contexts of other wars (Second World War, Vietnam) and battles (Mori and First Nations sovereignty), Ihimaera legitimates and validates gay Mori identity at home.

Cultural Specificity and Global ‘Scapes’ When Ihimaera claims, in his comment about New York as a Mori world, that “the whole world is our turangawaewae now,” he extends a Mori sense of place from the marae ‘heart’ to the global domain. His notion of carrying the ‘heart’ of Mori culture into a foreign context privileges this Mori identity over and above any other: in New York, Ihimaera retains a Mori worldview rather than fitting in with the local culture(s). The above readings of glocalization and transculturation in The Uncle’s Story correspond to Ihimaera’s interpretation of New York, tracing the attachment of a Mori cultural perspective to foreign places. In examples from the novel, Sam’s experience at a Vietnamese temple, his understanding of his relationship with Cliff, and Michael and Roimata’s introduction to Canadian First-Nations legends and symbols, are all interpreted in a Mori spiritual and mythological frame. For these characters, like Ihimaera in New York, the Mori ‘heart’ remains, regardless of location. Yet, if globalization entertains the possibility of completely detaching culture from the localized space of ethnic community or nation, then this requires different forms of cultural expression capable of surviving the move. Arjun Appadurai’s important work Modernity at Large has been influential in exploring the interface between the local and the global in contemporary manifestations of culture and community. A contributing source of Appadurai’s success in the social sciences is surely the way in which his book focuses on the imaginary as key to questions of identity-politics. In effect, he updates the structure of national belonging to a global terrain. The work of the imaginary in defining culture is particularly evident in Appadurai’s coinages ‘ethnoscape’, ‘ideoscape’, ‘mediascape’, ‘financescape’, and ‘technoscapes’, in which the root ‘scape’ recalls nature constructed as landscape, a founda-



The Local and the Global

137

tional metaphor and symbol of the national imagined community.53 Thus, ‘scapes’ bring to the fore the inventedness of culture, extending Anderson’s “imagined communities” to an “imagined world.”54 The difference between Anderson’s study of nation-building and Appadurai’s of globalization is that, whereas modernity was a set of values, born out of Enlightenment principles on which the concepts of (static, bounded) nation and (singular, unique) race and ethnicity were based, globalization is a set of strategies. Under this rubric, Appadurai’s finance, media, technology, ethnicity, and ideology are tools with which cultural attachments are formed, maintained, or fractured: “culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus [...] and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences.”55 By contrast with the tools of nation-building, such as landscape, myth, history, and language, which fix cultural identity to locations by defining inside and outside, applying Appadurai’s global scapes to Robertson’s “worldspace” allows a culture’s systems of knowledge and information to retain currency even when unhitched from their traditional localities, and even when settled in, or transiting through, new locations. It is this two-way dynamic that Clifford calls “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling,” a term which rejects as essentialist any idea of separate categories of people who move (make routes) and people who stay put (make roots).56 Rather, the term accommodates travellers and migrants who remain grounded in their origins, through chosen cultural practices including language and religion, and people who live all their lives in one place but who are unavoidably connected to the outside world – for example, through mass media, remittances, and contact with returnees. Within the mobility of people, products, and information that feature in globalization, Clifford and Appadurai highlight the importance of the imaginary by which communities still manage to create a sense of unique identity. Cultural ‘scapes’ are the imaginative processes employed differently in and by different cultures. In other words, Mori specificity is not to be found in a localized ‘heart’ but, rather, in its particular use of the tools of globalization – the tools of modernity writ large. 53

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 31. 54 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33. 55 Modernity at Large, 44. 56 Clifford, Routes, 36.

138

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Ihimaera’s The Rope of Man (2005), a two-part novel which consists of a rewrite of Tangi and a sequel, The Return, embodies the shift from local to global. Just as The Whale Rider was written while Ihimaera was living overseas, both the early Tangi and its rewrite were predominantly written outside New Zealand: the former from London in 1970 and the latter while Ihimaera was a Senior Fulbright Fellow in 2005.57 The Return picks up where the prequel left off, following Tama – now called Tom – when he returns to Wellington from his father’s funeral at Waituhi in 1973. In recalling the earlier Tangi, The Rope of Man records the changing face of Mori culture and identity over the intervening years. As such, The Return describes a New Zealand nation of the early 2000s which is internationally savvy, and demonstrates, in ways foreshadowed by Ojinmah’s study of Ihimaera’s “changing vision,” a very positive image of Pakeha–Mori biculturalism. Ojinmah’s interpretation of Ihimaera as an advocate for cultural inclusiveness seemed in many ways simplistic in the 1980s, as it ignored the accusatory tone already present in The New Net Goes Fishing, the Turnbull Lecture, and the co-editors’ introduction to Into the World of Light, later borne out in The Matriarch, which Ojinmah’s study pre-dates. Unlike Ojinmah, Pakeha commentators have tended not to argue for positive, interdependent biculturalism. Michelle Keown’s 2005 essay interprets Ihimaera’s work of the late 1990s as showing an increasingly “radical and separatist stance,”58 as does Evans’s 2006 study of Whanau II. In order to maintain his argument that Ihimaera is an advocate of tino rangatiratanga “different cultures – ‘two treasures’ – strong and independent,”59 Evans ignores The Rope of Man. This novel paints a surprisingly optimistic – at times idealistic – vision of modern New Zealand, in which, to employ language from the text, the Mori–Pakeha “dichotomies” of the mid-1900s have been replaced by a “laminated” and “blended” country in which “The lives of two peoples had become inextricably entangled.”60 As discussed earlier, Ihimaera’s writing is split into two distinct motivations, each of which corresponds to his vision of two distinct facets of the Mori–Pakeha relationship. The grieving /grievance process of Treaty redress drives his writing of race 57

Ihimaera, Fulbright Alumni Public Lecture (National Library, 2 November 2005): http://www.fulbright.org.nz/news/releases/051102-nzdreams.html (accessed 10 October 2010). 58

Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing, 127. Ihimaera, quoted in Evans, “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’,” 11. 60 Ihimaera, The Rope of Man (Auckland: Reed, 2005): 215. Further page references are in the main text. 59



The Local and the Global

139

relations, while the social and cultural “crossing over” leads to a portrayal of Mori actively and willingly engaged in cultural mixing. The Return, more clearly than in any of Ihimaera’s previous work, illustrates this second, nonadversarial relationship. In The Return, Tama Mahana, known as Tom outside his immediate family, is a middle-aged television news presenter. He lives in the most expensive apartment complex in London, has a French girlfriend, and has two children by his previous marriage to a Pakeha woman. Although they were brought up in New Zealand, Tom’s children both work for international organizations overseas: his daughter is a corporate banker in Los Angeles, and his son travels the world for Greenpeace. Tom’s cosmopolitan life-style, which would have been called ‘yuppie’ in the 1980s and ‘jet-set’ in the 1990s, is embodied in his current-affairs T V show, “Spaceship Earth.” The programme epitomizes the corporate globalization of worldwide media. Tom describes the show, part of his “Richard Branston-type” boss’s news network, as a challenge to the “American imperatives” of broadcasting, as seen on C N N (298). As suggested by his anglicized name, Tom is known as an international media celebrity, while his Mori ethnicity is largely unknown and not remarked on (319). The personal and professional objectives that shape Tom’s life-style owe more to his life experiences and career trajectory than to any innate sense of Maoriness, to the point where the young Tama of Tangi is virtually unrecognizable. In fact, Tom’s outlook and voice are so different from Tama’s that Ihimaera must occasionally repeat certain events from the earlier novel in order to remind the reader of the narrative continuity. Contrary to what readers familiar with Ihimaera’s work might expect, the writer does not depict an uneasy juxtaposition between the rapacious corporate capitalism of the ‘global-village’, twenty-four-hour news industry (266) and a fiercely guarded, locally centred Mori identity. In this novel, there are none of the ritualized moments of asserting Moritanga, such as performing haka and karanga, or evoking Mori symbols, legends or imagery of the type that is integral to Sam, Michael, and Roimata’s expression of their Mori identity in The Uncle’s Story. If Tom’s Mori identity is not evident on the surface, then this must be attributed in part to his chosen life-style and career, which, unlike Michael’s and Roimata’s, is not directly involved in supporting Moritanga. Tom is by no means a representative Mori, and yet it is this independent and highly individualistic vision of internationally astute Mori that Ihimaera advocates and encourages in this novel. The fact that Tom did not return to Waituhi after his father’s death, choosing instead to

140

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



pursue an international career, somewhat limits his interaction with his Mori roots. This might seem like an argument against the ability of Mori to globalize and still retain the culture, but it accords with Clifford’s interdependent sense of travelling and dwelling. Whereas Moritanga in The Uncle’s Story is located at home yet internationally mobile and applicable to other cultural contexts (dwelling-in-travelling), in The Return Tom keeps in touch with Waituhi from his home in London (travelling-in-dwelling). Tom implements globalization’s tools and strategies in order to maintain his Moritanga from afar and to ensure the continuity of Mori practices in his local community. The first two chapters of The Return bring into play all of Appadurai’s ‘scapes’, demonstrating the way in which these global strategies are often deployed together in order to build up a strong sense of cultural specificity. The novel begins in Tom’s London T V studios, a location that evokes Appadurai’s mediascapes – channels through which information is diffused.61 Through his news show, Tom proclaims his dedication to supporting minority groups and “people power movements” (269), claiming a quasi-subversive “humanist” perspective on news stories that “ma[ke] their impact not from montages of death, destruction and pestilence but from images of resilience, survival and the human capacity to fight back” (183). Tom’s news show and highly successful autobiography make use of the broad reach of global media to expound his personal credo to support the underprivileged. As Appadurai stresses, mediascapes and ideoscapes function interdependently, with the influential media a vehicle for promulgating or contradicting received ideologies.62 Nonetheless, Tom’s altruistic vision is tailored to fit the needs of a multinational corporation. Far from running a volunteer charity organization, the show’s production team must keep a close eye on the ratings in order to justify Tom’s exorbitant salary (298) and to maintain the boss’s budget approval (270). The power of mediascape to collapse temporal and spatial distance is well illustrated in an early scene which brings together Tom and his lover, Gabriella, with a party of young New Zealanders at a bar. Tom’s fellow Kiwis see the celebrity enter the room as they simultaneously watch his news show on the bar T V and flick through a copy of his autobiography. One of the group approaches Tom, hoping for an autograph, which sparks a light-hearted, but meaningful exchange: 61 62

Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 35. Modernity at Large, 35–36.



The Local and the Global

141

Very soon, Gabriella and I were talking to the young New Zealanders as if we had known them all our lives. We were intimate strangers, all bound together by race, nationality and those two peculiar tensions that had always forced all New Zealanders to get on together: location and isolation. (179)

Tom’s description of the group as part of the “huge diaspora of bright young New Zealanders, with skills that allow them to adapt and integrate with any international community” (178), summarizes the moving attachments of Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, motivated to a large extent by the global labour market: the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. This is not to say that there are no relatively stable communities [. . . ]. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move.63

Ihimaera’s novel features and celebrates one particular kind of ethnoscape in the form of the professional migrant. In fact, all of Ihimaera’s characters presented in the first two chapters are far from their place of origin or in constant movement, motivated to travel for work purposes: the “Spaceship Earth” team prepares to take the show to New Zealand to film in Auckland studios; Tom’s daughter, based in Los Angeles, is on a work trip in New York; Gabriella, a publicist, has moved to her company’s London headquarters from her home in the South of France. Such movement, however, does not efface bonds of national identity, as illustrated by Tom’s easy integration into the group of young New Zealanders, and their own social networking, which welcomes into the fold new arrivals (178–81). Although the international job market removes people from their families, the high salaries they command equally enable them to keep in contact with ‘home’. The professional bracket to which these young people, Gabriella and Tom, belong is highly mobile, able to negotiate personal time for family and friends: Tom nonchalantly mentions having stopped over in New Zealand to see his mother on his last trip to Sri Lanka covering the tsunami, and discusses meeting up with Gabriella at the Cannes film festival on his way back to London from New Zealand (176). All 63

Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33–34.

142

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



these passages demonstrate how money and communication (financescapes and technoscapes) link communities (ethnoscapes) across the world, to the point where there appears to be little time-lag, if any, between the New Zealanders in London and those at home: the group discusses New Zealand current affairs, sport performances, T V shows and recent films, and the colloquial New Zealand speech that Ihimaera deftly evokes enhances the impression of home away from home (180–81). In The Return, much of the interaction between characters is maintained through channels of communication rather than face-to-face dialogue. Indeed, Appadurai’s technoscapes, or modes of international communication,64 are deployed from the novel’s first page, where Tom’s mother in Waituhi telephones him at work in London and asks him to come home. This event, which sets in motion the novel’s plot, takes Tom and his T V programme out of their local London environment, a delocalization which demands a high level of technical support in order to make a seamless transition: as long as the techniques of production ensure the same quality, it is not important whether “Spaceship Earth” is filmed in London or in Auckland. Furthermore, although Tom is instrumental in the show’s preparation, he only arrives in Auckland from Waituhi half an hour before broadcast. Telephone, conference calls, and e-mail make these negotiations possible. In a literary technique that echoes the negotiation between global and local, Ihimaera uses this new technology in the plot to juggle his two story-lines. The subplot of organizing a special edition of “Spaceship Earth” is inserted at the beginning of chapters, paraphrased in long-distance calls. Such economy allows the writer to maintain the focus and rhythm of the novel’s main plot, that of a family get-together in Waituhi to make difficult decisions about their dying mother and a family secret. Ihimaera uses Appadurai’s techniques of global modernity to maintain inflections of national and Mori cultural specificity. In particular, the narrator’s emphasis on Waituhi’s prosperity from wine-growing represents in a fictional context Mori skill at ensuring cultural prosperity through business, earlier demonstrated by Ngai Tahu Corporation and Ngati Konohi’s capitalizing on Whale Rider’s success. Tom’s financial support of his family maintains Mori customs of koha (gift-giving) and ensures ongoing land-ownership. For example, he donates money out of respect for his old school teacher and pledges to top up his mother’s estate so that, on her death, all his siblings will have 64

Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 34.



The Local and the Global

143

equal cash settlements without needing to sell or split the family farm. In a similar adaptation of Western techniques to ensure local Mori success, Tom describes the farming community’s evolution from subsistence crops, supplanted by sheep and beef, to kiwifruit and, most recently, wine-growing. With his sister’s convenient marriage to a vintner, the family farm has become the prosperous Mahana Wines: Gone were the rolling vistas of hillside grasslands and river plains growing subsistence crops of maize, marrows, kumara and kamokamo. Waituhi had always been my Eden, but now it was a new Eden, glowing like greenstone [. . . ] the vines flaunted a rich, dark green studded with the translucent grapes for chardonnay and chablis production. (219)

The evocation of greenstone, always with positive connotations in Ihimaera’s imagery, marks a seamless transition from describing the Mori kumara and kamokamo vegetables to imported grape varieties. Waituhi’s agricultural response to market forces is not seen as making it less Mori or less important to Mori: the land is still “Eden.” In its openness to change, the village of Tama’s youth has stemmed the flux of Mori leaving their rural communities for urban centres, as tapping into global modernity has created a new family dynamic and farming arrangements which make Waituhi prosper. In the above passage, the novel replicates textually part of the experience the real Waituhi has undergone, with Ihimaera’s unproblematic slide from farming traditional Mori to imported produce supporting the vision of his tribe. The land of Te Whanau A Kai is owned communally and governed by the Wi Pere Trust, on which Ihimaera and his father are Board members. The Trust is also part owner of Tohu Wines, the first Mori-owned and -branded wine company. According to the company’s C E O , Tohu Wines emerged from three Mori companies interested in finding a way to “export our culture”: “We couldn’t do it as horticulturalists, but we thought we could as winemakers.”65 Tohu Wines enacts many of Appadurai’s financescapes tailored to Mori cultural concerns on a global level: collective ownership in a trust fund marks a Mori application of Western property management; the wine company employs Mori in all phases of production; the Mori brand image is a popular selling-point in the export market, including casinos owned and run by American Indians.66 Through Ihimaera’s novels and Tohu Wines, 65 66

Michael Cooper, “Sign of the Times,” The Listener (11 October 2008): 59. Cooper, “Sign of the Times,” 59.

144

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



the small-town, rural community of Waituhi has a significant presence in the international arena. In a parallel in the novel with what the Tohu Wines director describes as finding an eye-catching Mori label that is internationally marketable, Tom seeks a New Zealand slant for his tenth-anniversary broadcast of “Spaceship Earth,” filmed in Auckland. International in subject-matter, audience, and diffusion, the anniversary special has inflections of its local production with the live New Zealand audience, a “local orientation” (250) intended to complement the programme’s global outlook. Thus, in the show’s segment on Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa, Tom invites to the studio South African immigrants to New Zealand, and interviews New Zealanders who protested in 1981 against the Springbok rugby tour: All of a sudden, through the studio doors rushed South African students living in New Zealand. They came dancing, they came singing in celebration of the end of a rule of tyranny, and some of them were in traditional African costume. The audience began to applaud. As Paul mixed their images onto the Vidiwall, the portals exploded with the vibrant colours of freedom and joy. Among the group were friends of mine who had protested against the Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1981. Joining them – this time not in a haka but a Zulu war dance – was Henrik Kruger. A blond South African boy? Doing a Zulu dance? (306)

In bringing together aspects of local and global news, Tom caters to different audiences. While New Zealanders might recognize and respond to the local inflection of the Springbok tour and presence of South African immigrants, foreigners will focus on the political-freedom aspect of the apartheid clip. In global media, the notion of local audience is by no means attached to place: one imagines that the young New Zealanders whom Tom met at the novel’s beginning will be watching the show in London, where they will nonetheless identify with and respond to the programme’s New Zealand aspects despite their dislocation in a real sense. Appadurai’s focus on the strategies of global and local cultural flows contests a perception of globalization as subsuming culture under corporate capitalism, politics, media, and technology. Rather, Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ suggest that these are only the tools by which culture is deployed, and not culture itself. As the theorists cited in this chapter, as well as Bourdieu and Bhabha, all agree, culture is not an end-product but a process, born at the interstices of interaction. Moreover, to suggest, along with Clifford and Muecke, that all cultures contain an element of modernity which allows them to respond to



The Local and the Global

145

internal and external change by adaptation, refuses any sense of loss and denigration which implies a demotion of culture from real to fabricated, as commercially driven metonyms, described variously as “culture as sign” (Prentice), hyperreality (Umberto Eco), simulacra (Baudrillard), or a fashion for the exotic (Huggan). Nick Perry, in Hyperreality and Global Culture, also warns against a too easy collapsing of culture into commodity: such an apocalyptical tone has come to seem wearily formulaic. [. . . ] It is, therefore, important to insist on the tactical merit of approaching the cultural / economic/social relation from another side, one which does not take the meaning of commodification [. . . ] as a theoretical given.67

While accepting the validity of such terms as simulacra, metonymy, and the hyperreal, Perry does not see them as the negative opposites of more positively connoted pairs such as authenticity and naturalness. Instead, he analyzes cultural “real fake[s],”68 which, like the beer-top earrings of Clifford’s “hybrid authenticity” and the fibreglass and polystyrene waka of Whale Rider, possess their own currency. Much current criticism of globalization seeks to unmask the behind-thescenes motors of simulated or staged culture, in order to point out inauthenticity or hybridity. Recent examples in New Zealand literary criticism include Prentice’s study of the synthetic, computer-controlled simulated whales used in the filming of Whale Rider69 and Evans’s critique of Mori writing as fed by “conventionalised authenticities.”70 Clifford notices a similar tendency to critical deconstruction in his experience of the “Paradise” museum exhibition of Melanesian Wahgi. At the same time as his Western anthropological eye picks out incongruence between traditional and seemingly inauthentic costume, he questions the validity of his way of seeing and thus key concepts of Western anthropology: Does inauthenticity now function, in certain circles at least, as a new kind of authenticity? And having knocked certain purist assumptions off center, isn’t it time to sidestep the reverse binary position of a prescriptive anti-essentialism?71

67

Nick Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture (London: Routledge, 1998): 152. Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 79. 69 Prentice, “What Was the Maori Renaissance?”; “Riding the Whale.” 70 Evans, “On Originality,” 80. 71 Clifford, Routes, 178. 68

146

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Many arguments that chart the demise of culture through globalization, including Prentice’s and Evans’s critiques, employ an ironic, poststructuralist and postmodern stance which, in academic circles, is construed as sophisticated compared with the apparently primitive sincerity with which Mori writers and artists, and their (credulous) audiences interpret manifestations of Mori culture with reverence and faith.72 Yet, questions of faith and sincerity are pertinent to Ihimaera’s use of local inflections in The Return. In the above scene, a postcolonial deconstruction of assumptions of power would decry Ihimaera’s use of South African immigrants singing, dancing, and costumed, as something staged and inflated for televisual spectacle. However, throughout the novel, Tom’s mission to bring to his viewers “images of resilience, survival and the human capacity to fight back” (183) seems quite sincere, and there is no trace of irony in Ihimaera’s voice, which is modernist in its humanist search for transcendence of cultural and political entanglements. This is evident, for example, in the passage cited above, in the way in which the young South Africans “rush” or “explode” into the room, “singing in celebration,” exhibiting “the vibrant colours of freedom and joy.” In his review of the novel, Nelson Wattie, troubled by Ihimaera’s apparently sincere tone, comments: It is hard to determine whether we should read the long description of a current affairs show as satire or as a positive picture of success. Similarly, the international life led by Tom is an extravagant New Age fantasy, but its protagonist seems to ask us to take it seriously.73

72

Certainly an important aspect of such criticism is a wariness that globalization is a new form of dominant culture imposed on minorities, who have little choice but to adapt. The speed of cultural change is here important to the ability of minority agency to keep abreast of change. Clearly, indigenous modernity of the kind Muecke propounds could not keep up with the waves of settlement brought by colonization. Contemporary critics of minority globalization are right to be cautious, to not lose sight of the very real cultural losses that major shifts in power such as colonialism and state deregulation have brought. Indeed, the fear in many parts of the world, including the U S A and Western Europe, that global economics may not always be in the best interests of the nation, also bespeaks a sense of out-of-control change. This point was both illuminated and to a certain extent rectified by the financial crisis and global recession of the late 2000s, the repercussions of which are yet to be fully played out. 73 Nelson Wattie, “From Tama to Tom,” Dominion Post (26 November 2005).



The Local and the Global

147

As well as in “Spaceship Earth” and Tom’s international career, Ihimaera’s optimism carries over into almost all aspects of cross-cultural interaction depicted as “positive picture[s] of success” throughout the novel. As Wattie says, this is neither very subtle nor always entirely believable, and, in terms of Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, one is not sure whether Ihimaera is representing what Appadurai identifies as “realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move.” In particular, Ihimaera exaggerates the composite identities of Eric Amundsen and Henrik Kruger, characters which some readers may be uncomfortable with or find difficult to accept. The very presence of Amundsen, the unwanted outcome of Tom’s mother’s being gang-raped by Pakeha, is a reminder of Mori subjugation. The glib manner in which Kruger, a white South African immigrant, leads a haka (190) and does a Zulu war dance may be interpreted as inappropriate, insensitive cultural appropriations, particularly in New Zealand, where, in 1981, Mori and Pakeha protested on behalf of the segregated blacks against white South African apartheid politics. Nevertheless, Ihimaera’s sincere acceptance of these characters into Mori and New Zealand cultural frameworks exemplifies what Clifford calls “cross-cultural translation”: “a partial, translated truth [...] enmeshed in relations of power.”74 Clifford’s definition acknowledges both transparency and awareness, as essentialist and anti-essentialist aspects are simultaneously in view and selfconsciously on display. Tom registers such awareness in his rhetorical question, “A blond South African boy? Doing a Zulu dance?” italicized to emphasize a certain tone of incredulity, aware that this cultural manifestation might be problematic, or that it at least disrupts conceived notions of cultural ownership and its expression. In the part of the novel dealing with Tom’s family’s accepting Amundsen into their whakapapa, Ihimaera most clearly describes the power-dynamic at work in undertaking the difficult, here traumatic, process of translation. He explicitly links the personal family negotiation with the larger national one: what kind of shape was the family now being forced to take? Indeed, what shape was the New Zealand family taking, as new pressures, new challenges, new blood took us all beyond traditional kinships? All I knew was that the absorption of Eric Amundsen into our family was leading to transformations which we were struggling with [. . . ]. We had tried to grapple with issues of legitimacy, illegitimacy, legal and human rights. [. . . ] There were lots of big

74

Clifford, Routes, 182.

148

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



issues and intimate ones ahead which would challenge our sense of humanity. We’d just have to make the best of it. (314–15)

Ihimaera’s rhetorical questions register his awareness of the difficulty involved in searching for a middle ground of legitimacy that does not attempt to negate either side of postmodern fracture and hybridity: “new pressures, new challenges, new blood” stand alongside but in opposition to “absorption” and “transformation.” As Clifford puts it, “Struggles for integrity and power within and against globalizing systems need to deploy both tradition and modernity, authenticity and hybridity – in complex counterpoints.”75 One of the reasons why it may be difficult for readers to accept the sincerity of Ihimaera’s blended New Zealand vision in The Return is that the world Tom describes is so radically different from that represented in Tangi. In The Return, Ihimaera’s Mori ethnoscape is almost the antithesis of the enclave portrayed with such ethnographic candour in his first novel. As in many of Ihimaera’s stories and novels, The Return begins with a journey home. However, the preparations for this trip, described in the novel’s first two chapters, are markedly different from any other in Ihimaera’s fiction. In particular, Tom’s casualness contrasts with the oppressive, suffocating grief of the opening of both the original and the rewrite of Tangi (“This is where it ends and begins”76), in which Tama leaves Waituhi to return to work in Wellington. Both versions of Tangi, in which the first chapter is almost exactly the same, introduce the reader to a clear binary which separates the Mori home and family in Waituhi from the Pakeha work and friends in Wellington. The reader is under no illusion about where Tama’s loyalties lie: “I will journey away from Gisborne, but I will leave my heart here, to be reclaimed when I return. This is where it belongs and this is where my life begins.”77 The sequel to Tangi is already foreshadowed in the character’s certainty that he will return. However, the tone of that homecoming has significantly changed in the opening of The Return. Here, Tom portrays New Zealanders as at ease with maintaining long-distance family connections and possessing an air of confidence in being able to combine family and work, regardless of distance and professional pressures. The train journey in Tangi separates Tama from his family, leading to melancholy reflections on his past, juxtaposing his aloneness with the greetings and partings of other travellers whom he sees from his 75

Clifford, Routes, 178. Ihimaera, Tangi, 1; The Rope of Man, 12. 77 Ihimaera, Rope of Man, 13. 76



The Local and the Global

149

window. By contrast, in The Return, Tom checks into the Air New Zealand first-class lounge, checks his e-mails, calls his daughter by cell phone, and starts working on his next T V show on his laptop. The (literal) distance travelled in outlook and in confidence between Tama in 1973 on the plane from Wellington and Tom in 2005 is summed up by Tom’s comment from the first-class lounge at Heathrow: Once upon a time, travelling first class was so un-Kiwi, as if it was our born duty to sit at the back of the plane; but we were corporate travellers now, from the land of entrepreneurs. (182)

By systematically calling Tom a New Zealander, or Kiwi, rather than Mori, Ihimaera signals a different direction for Mori culture than that portrayed in the rewritten Tangi, one which seems to include rather than exclude Pakeha – although there is no mention of the significant influence of Asian, Polynesian, and other immigrant cultures in this national identity. In The Return, Ihimaera summarizes the New Zealand national character as directly linked to the way in which Pakeha, over the past thirty years, have engaged with Mori to work through issues of race relations. In a fictional counterpart to what he has elsewhere called “crossing over,”78 or a debate between “us and us,”79 Ihimaera recognizes that both Pakeha and Mori have been influenced by contact with, and have made concessions to accommodate, one another. These configurations register a two-way flow with a firm focus on convergence rather than on difference. Ihimaera extends his notion of cultural mixing to include that of ancestry, recording the oft-cited line predicting that “within a generation every New Zealander w[ill] have some Maori blood or at least have a Maori relative” (215, 320–21). On the novel’s final page, Ihimaera quite literally puts his own words in the mouth of his protagonist. As he explains in the Acknowledgements, Tom’s response to the question “what can Maori bring to the world?” is the words that Ihimaera wished he had said in a B B C talkshow (324): “All Maori and all New Zealanders jointly bring an example of what can be achieved in terms of excellence, equity and justice to all mankind. In our own country we are showing that it is possible to resolve issues of blood, race, ancestry and identity. Internationally, we bring a certain grit, determination, moral compass and integrity to the world’s future.” (322) 78 79

Watkin, “The Homecoming,” 22. Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand.

150

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



This focus on joint effort underpins much of the imagery in The Return, which, unlike the detailed descriptions of Mori funeral rites in Tangi, is not intended to depict Mori concepts as fundamentally different from those of other cultures, either national or international. For example, Tom’s French girlfriend describes the homesickness of the group of young Kiwis in London as “mal du pays” and “love of country,” which Tom retranslates as as “aroha ki te iwi” (180).80 The Rope of Man image of the novel’s title is explained in a Mori context as Te Taura Tangata (191), for all New Zealanders as “an invisible umbilical cord” with the nation, an image repeated as a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, of a spaceman whose line connects him to the spaceship so that he will not be lost but pulled back to safety (227). Te Torino (252), the spiral metaphor for continuity, employed throughout Ihimaera’s fiction and the anthology Te Ao Mārama, is translated into the double helix of D N A (276–77). As with the warrior ethos in The Uncle’s Story, all of the above images from The Return affirm the translatability of Mori culture in ways that are meaningful to outsiders and, in the other direction, through the literary devices of simile and metaphor, other cultures’ images may be connected to Mori concepts such as the intertwining rope and the spiral. This two-way dynamic, in which Mori adopt external influences and modify their own culture, illustrates transculturation. Translation of both cultural and linguistic specificity presupposes a desire to find common ground between cultures, world-views, and philosophies. This accords with Pieterse’s outward-looking culture 2, whose basic assumptions include heterogeneity, networks, diffusion, translation, and diaspora. However, at the same time as outward-looking culture fixes its horizons away from its local setting, the opposite assumptions of culture 1 are also at work. In its emphasis on community, authenticity, race, and ethnicity, culture 1 foregrounds identity at the same time as culture 2 seeks identification.81 Although The Return showcases positive outcomes for Mori culture, the novel does not, or perhaps cannot, forget its roots. 80

The mis-translation or mis-match between the French, English, and Mori terms enacts the semantic plurality that inevitably occurs when the local is taken into the global: an individual’s feeling of ‘homesickness’ can be for his or her region (pays), nation (‘country’), community or tribe (iwi). In this linguistic example of swirls in the Hudson River that Ihimaera interprets in a Mori context familiar to him, ‘home’ has multiple meanings and values. 81 Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” 61.



The Local and the Global

151

As a sequel, The Return would normally be read as an updated extrapolation and continuation of the 1973 Tangi. From this expectation, the 2005 The Rope of Man describes a clear trajectory from culture 1 to culture 2. However, such a linear, progressive sense of literary vision is complicated by the fact that Ihimaera has at the same time revised Tangi, which, like the rewritten Whanau II, uses authorial interludes and an omniscient narrator to make explicit the socio-political commentary that was understated in the earlier novels of the 1970s. The two halves of The Rope of Man make opposing claims about what it means to be Mori. Bald statements inserted in the new version of Tangi, such as “we are of the Maori race, a race with the indomitable courage of the undefeated” (99) and “I soon realised [at school] that maintaining my own personal sovereignty as a Maori was something I had to fight for” (120), give an embattled sense of holding on to Mori cultural specificity in an otherwise hostile Pakeha environment. This contrasts vividly with Tom’s upbeat, positive, and optimistic narrative in The Return. The two parts of The Rope of Man display the two diverging aspects of the Mori relationship with Pakeha and New Zealand that Ihimaera delineates in the Watkin and Hill interviews. The distinct drives for recognition of past wrongs, greater autonomy through Mori sovereignty, and Mori participation on national and international levels, as well as ease with cross-cultural mixing – all are kept separate in The Rope of Man. In their contradictory stances, Tangi and The Return play out, in a literary context, the cultural counterpoints and struggles that Clifford draws attention to in the visual context of the museum. In a slightly different formulation of Clifford’s call to understand culture as deploying “both tradition and modernity, authenticity and hybridity,” Robertson, in his essay on glocalization, clarifies the repercussions of his term: [The question is not one] of either homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both of these two tendencies have become features of life across much of the late-twentieth-century world. In this perspective the problem becomes that of spelling out the ways in which homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies are mutually implicative.82

In its movement from the deeply local Tangi to the global The Return, The Rope of Man neither aims nor claims to resolve the impact of the cross-cultural Pakeha and global interaction and influence on Mori culture. Instead, each of the novel’s two parts presents both versions of Pieterse’s culture 1 and culture 2: Tangi clings to the remnants of a perceived homogeneous, pre-con82

Robertson, “Glocalization,” 27.

152

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



tact cultural wholeness, and The Return embodies a heterogeneous, globalized version of Moritanga that is comfortable with its change.  Clifford, Taking indigenous modernity as the starting point for this chapter has

served to set in motion a dialogue, perceived as natural and long-standing, between Mori and a range of Western terms that are often thought to be external or alien to Mori culture. Hybridity, diaspora, transculturation, and glocalization, terms that Ihimaera employs in defending his novel Sky Dancer, presuppose modernity, in that they are all based on the possibility of cultural change and exchange. By defining modernity as a process rather than a product, of which current corporate globalization and cosmopolitan migrancy are arguably the latest expression, culture is understood as caught up in moving social, economic, and political configurations. This shifts the definition of a culture from what it looks like to how it maintains its shape. In the global world order, there are no longer clear markers of what is or is not Mori. This makes it more difficult, and indeed more necessary, for Mori to police boundaries to ensure that their culture maintains a shape that they approve of. At the same time as it becomes less evident for an outsider to define and locate examples of authorized Mori culture, increased Mori agency and an agility with globally available strategies, including trademarks, patenting, and intellectual-property law, ensure their own cultural welfare. Production practices in the film Whale Rider, negotiations of Mori change in The Uncle’s Story, and the cosmopolitan metro Mori of The Return exemplify Mori transculturation. While there continues to be strong criticism in New Zealand directed at government policy that does not acknowledge full Mori sovereignty, on the cultural front at least, biculturalism has had a very real impact. Tribe-based companies such as Ngai Tahu Corporation, the Wi Pere Trust, and the partnership that owns Tohu Wines, along with national bodies controlling arts funding, copyright, and intellectual property rights such as Toi Mori and Toi Iho, the Maori Made Trademark, deploy non-culturalist strategies in order to maintain and develop across-the-board Mori success. In his bicultural consultancy business in partnership with Haare Williams, Ihimaera has also capitalized on the contemporary national and international desire to negotiate through channels approved by Mori. The last decade in particular has seen the negotiation of how Mori culture is to be presented and represented in-



The Local and the Global

153

creasingly taking place in corporate boardrooms, in law courts, and by local, national, and multinational business partnerships, as well as in the more traditional meeting forum of the hui and on marae. Globalization is resulting in Mori culture branching out, becoming potentially disarticulated from its place of origin, and is using other languages to do so. It may still be found in Rotorua tourist sites or Whale Rider tours in Whangara, but is also increasingly national, such as on Mori T V , in tribal property and commercial investments, and international, as aspects of Mori culture appear in overseas mediascapes, technoscapes, and financescapes that are not directly, or not obviously, connected to the indigenous culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. A similar disarticulation from the national scene is evident in literature. Ihimaera’s international version of the novel The Whale Rider, in which colloquialisms and Mori phrases are reworded to better fit the expectations of an international readership of the early 2000s, is one such example.83 Similarly, the non-exclusivist narrative voice of The Uncle’s Story translates both Mori language and cultural conceptions of the warrior ethos and indigenous selfgovernance into the contexts of the Vietnam War and Canadian First-Nations sovereignty. Such “embeddedness in a glocal yet discrete Maori literary discourse”84 immerses readers in a local Mori world that has little interest in national race relations or mainstream Pakeha New Zealand. A similar breaking-away from the expected Mori insistence on their special relationship with the nation is apparent in Ihimaera’s ambassadorial promotion of New Zealand tourism through the film Whale Rider. In his speech at the film’s New York premiere, the author calls attention to his country’s cinematic plasticity: New Zealand is, of course, Middle Earth of Lord of the Rings. Tom Cruise will turn it into medieval China in his forthcoming movie, The Last Samurai. We are whoever you want to find. A place of adventure. A place of discovery. A place of culture. [. . . ] Come down to New Zealand. There are great riches there in that lighthouse at the end of the world. And do enjoy Whale Rider.85

83

See esp. Eckstein, “Think Local Sell Global: Magical Realism, The Whale Rider, and the Market.” 84 Riemenschneider, “Contemporary Maori Cultural Practice,” 151. 85 Ihimaera, handwritten draft speech for Whale Rider premiere, New York (2003), A2004/20.

154

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Such flexibility with how Mori relate to the nation – inconceivable in the early Mori-renaissance phase – supports the argument of several cultural and literary critics, including Bhabha and Bakhtin, Casanova and Bourdieu, During, Muecke, and Clifford, Welsch, Pieterse, and Robertson, for the potential insertion of the local in the international, the global, the transcultural. Despite the apparent natural evolution of Mori culture in response to modern and modernizing pressures, Mori and Pakeha commentators have difficulty in deciding how to interpret the growing Mori interest in delocalization that global capitalism and increased mobility facilitate. In particular, there is wariness towards the national tendency to imagine a singular, homogeneous Mori position vis-à-vis cultural articulation and its globalization,86 and criticism that Mori structures such as runanga are merely accommodating and simulating Western models.87 A similar concern is apparent in literary commentary. Evans’s critique of recent Mori fiction, which he finds caters to a predominantly Western readership, is representative of deep-seated expectations that postcolonial literature ought to depict its difference through structure, language, and subject-matter. This debate is well worked over by critics such as Huggan, English, and Casanova, who argue that minority writers are conditioned by the mainstream publishing industry. However, Ihimaera’s apparent keenness to change his stance to fit his reader’s and audience’s changing demands does not necessarily signal the reduction of cultural specificity to a non-differentiated ‘Other’ managed by global publishing and entertainment. Rather, Mori modernity places the complex processes of cultural translation in Mori hands so that Mori reap the benefits of the West’s interest in indigenous cultures by knowingly deploying certain aspects of its culture, while withholding others.88 

86

See, for example, Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism, ed. Maria Bargh (Wellington: Huia, 2007); Liu et al., New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations; Spoonley, Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa– New Zealand. 87 See Interview with Annette Sykes, “Blunting the System: The Personal Is the Political,” in Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism, 115–23. 88 For a more detailed investigation of how minorities might wish to display or withhold their cultures, see Muecke, “Aboriginal Literature and the Repressive Hypothesis,” Southerly 48.4 (1988): 405–18.

4 Ambivalent Indigeneity

Indigenous Postcolonialism

I

HIMAERA’S LITERARY VOICE

is by no means consistent throughout his extensive output, in its changing styles, content, and genres. In depictions of Mori culture, he alternates between a Romantic lyrical voice, concerned with capturing the subjective ‘heart’ of being Mori, and a brusque, authoritative tone which enacts the antagonism of embattled race relations. His representation of cultural change and the impact of external influences, both past and present, similarly shifts between a positive stance indicating Moritanga’s ability to embrace modernity and a negative position in which modernity figures as mere loss of tradition. These opposing attitudes were already evident in the 1970s, in the break between his lyrical trilogy and The New Net Goes Fishing. With The Matriarch, readers discovered conflicting ideologies within the same text, which caused interpretative difficulties. In The Rope of Man, both sides are present in the two parts of Tangi and its sequel The Return. In one particularly complex piece of authorial positioning in Whanau II, Ihimaera’s description of nineteenth-century Waituhi illustrates his contradictory styles and stances. As in the earlier novel of 1974, the story

156

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



is carried by an omniscient narrator who is certainly Mori and has close knowledge of Waituhi, a fact which encourages the reader to align the narrator with the author: The land was rich and fertile, in pleasing contrast to the barren Wharerata Ranges which enclosed the Bay. You descended from the ranges and obtained a splendid panoramic view of the lowland and the glittering blue-green sea curving like a sickle toward the harbour. The plain was intersected by three rivers which struck their serpentine course through handsome clumps of kahikatea and puriri forests and beside numerous wheat cultivations and groves of peach and other varieties of English fruit trees. The botanical intertwining of foreign flora with native flora was indicative of the blending that was taking place among Maori and Pakeha. Traders with blue eyes married Maori wives and had their half-caste children. Captains of seafaring ships soon found that Maori were setting up their own fleets once they acquired the technology. Maori were very quick to learn and take on the agricultural skills that would enable them to grow crops and fruits to sell in the growing market centres of Wellington and Auckland. When the evangelists from the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches began to seek flocks, they found amenable and docile sheep who wished to come to God [. . . ] In the ebb and flow of Maori and Pakeha relationships some of the Maori tribes of Poverty Bay accommodated the Pakeha more than others. The situation was not cut and dried. Within Ngati Porou, Rongowhakaata, Te Aitanga a Mahaki and Te Whanau a Kai there were some Maori settlements which became known as rebellious or unfriendly, and those which were considered to be loyalist or friendly: domesticated, acculturated, absorbed into a Western ethos. It was not unexpected that the loyalist settlements were those who unwittingly abetted the missionaries in obtaining Maori souls for the Christian God. [. . . ] the Pakeha used the Bible as a sword to split the people.1

The beginning of this passage, with its focus on natural features and farming, is typical of Ihimaera’s frequent descriptions of the landscape of his home region, consistently described in the pastoral convention of a tamed and peaceful rural landscape. The depiction of Ihimaera’s home area is infused with the same sentimentality and Romanticism as that recounted by Tama in Tangi and The Matriarch. Yet, in contrast to the sympathetic narrator, Tama, in earlier works, in the above passage the distanced, quasi-objective narrator produces a trace of irony in the slightly pompous “splendid panorama,” “glit1

Ihimaera, Whanau II (Auckland: Reed, 2004): 62. Further page references are in the main text.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

157

tering blue-green sea,” and “serpentine” rivers, as if Ihimaera were self-conscious about the landscape convention. However, the sentences that follow undercut this potential distance. In particular, Mori and Pakeha botanical and genealogical “intertwining” and “blending” recall Ihimaera’s depiction of the painted meeting house, Rongopai, an iconic moment in The Matriarch (189– 93), which is repeated in the same reverent, lyrical tone in Whanau II (174– 77). For example, the line above, “Traders with blue eyes married Maori wives and had their half-caste children,” echoes description of the panels at Rongopai which feature figures “with blue eyes and short hair parted in the European way” (The Matriarch 192) and “Hine Hakirirangi, [who] wears a pretty European dress with a hint of a Victorian bustle, and holds a red rose to her lips” (Whanau II 175). The emphasis on Mori adaptability to encroaching European modernity accords with Muecke’s indigenous modernity; mid-nineteenth-century Te Whanau A Kai retain their land and culture while prospering from the colonial impact. Ihimaera similarly emphasizes Mori choice in the final sentence of the first paragraph, in which Mori “wished” to adopt Christianity. However, the paragraph’s positive tenor falters with the expression “amenable and docile sheep,” which, although positive in church rhetoric, must, for most readers familiar with the deleterious effect of colonial missionary proselytizing on indigenous peoples, convey a sense of foreboding. By contrast, the second paragraph changes tone to take an explicitly oppositional stance towards colonial British settlement, placing Mori in the role of “unwitting” victims, whose accommodating good-will is translated as naive in the face of a scheming colonial power. Ihimaera’s complete change of viewpoint contradicts his previous paragraph’s insistence on Mori modernity, so that the agricultural technology, quickly learnt skills, and profit from a new market economy here have negative overtones, with Mori “domesticated, acculturated, absorbed into a Western ethos.” Further, the embittered final statement, “the Pakeha used the Bible as a sword to split the people” is puzzling in a novel that otherwise paints a positive picture of the importance of faith in Waituhi, from Riripeti’s charismatic leadership in the Ringatu tradition to Bulibasha’s devout family-centred Mormonism. The matriarch’s and Bulibasha’s cameo appearances in this novel point readers back to The Matriarch, The Dream Swimmer, and Bulibasha, in which religion plays a crucial, binding role in maintaining whnau solidarity in the face of external threats, including the colonial land grab, the 1918 ’flu epidemic, and mid-twentieth-century urban drift.

158

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Ihimaera’s lack of thematic clarity or a controlling artistic or cultural vision may be read as illustrative of the changing positions that Mori have had to assume in order to ensure their cultural survival in the face of European and Pakeha domination: the above passage enacts the multiple discourses of Mori self-description and thereby reflects the complexities of Ihimaera’s local community. However, the author’s changing voice has led to bafflement and some criticism over the course of his forty-year writing career. As discussed in previous chapters, commentators have looked to centralize Mori experience in work that is not, or not solely, Maori, such as Waituhi, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and Sky Dancer, and have also argued for a cohesive and singular sense of Moritanga in work that is fragmented and ambivalent, as in The Matriarch and Dear Miss Mansfield. While such readings do not do justice to the complexity of Ihimaera’s conceptions of Mori culture and literature, such an urge to synthesize and homogenize Ihimaera’s oeuvre is characteristic of the labelling reflex of nationalism and of the separatist writingback motivation of early postcolonial literature. The interpretative difficulties that Ihimaera’s work presents are symptomatic of a larger postcolonial predicament, concerned with debates such as the extent to which postcolonial literature is (or ought to be) fundamentally different from ‘mainstream’ writing, the minority writer’s intended audience, the writer’s relationship to the mainstream reader, and the right of the critic to label and interpret. The contradictions and discrepancies in Ihimaera’s position register this unease and indecision, in that he is sure neither about what role to assume as native informant or as literary creator, nor about the role he wants the nonMori reader to assume, as cultural outsider or as a member of a confraternity with the writer. This is evident in the tone of voice in the above passage from Whanau II, which swings from an ease with Western perspectives of landscape, hybridity, and economic modernity in the first paragraph to a seemingly self-conscious position-taking that sets the postcolonial minority against Western influence. In opposition to the first paragraph, which invites the nonMori reader to identify with colonial Waituhi’s cultural change, the antagonism of the second part excludes the reader, placing him or her on the side of colonial complicity in opposition to the narrator’s indignation at Mori victimization. Whereas the non-Mori reader can picture the scene of the strongly visual first paragraph, he or she can only rely on the narrator to decipher the claims to Mori subjugation and domestication by colonization and Christianity. Ihimaera’s second paragraph voices a reluctance to relinquish control of access to his text and its meaning. His move from a descriptive voice to



Ambivalent Indigeneity

159

one that interprets on his reader’s behalf reminds non-Mori readers of historical colonial guilt, which has the uncanny effect of making the Pakeha reader – who is familiar with the legacy-of-guilt argument – feel doubly guilty for having unproblematically accepted, or even identified with, the cultural blending described in benign and positive language in the preceding paragraph. Here, Ihimaera’s authoritative tone upholds a tacit hierarchical relationship between writer and reader, one which assumes that only Mori hold the key to describe, teach, and interpret their culture. The non-Mori reader’s and critic’s attempt to engage with the postcolonial predicament of similarity or difference through Ihimaera’s work is stymied by blocking devices through which the writer refuses negotiation in his text and with his reader. Ihimaera’s unprecedented rewritings in fact narrow the interpretative scope of these texts. The original collection of short stories and first two novels largely left interpretation up to the reader. Tangi was praised for plunging the reader into the disorientating immediacy of grief, while structurally describing key elements of Mori culture in its cyclical storytelling and segues between oratory, chant, and song. Whanau was popular for its clever switching of narrative perspective to give flashes of insight into members of a community without trying to synthesize or fill in the background, gaps, and disjunctures of their polyphony. By contrast, in his rewritings, Ihimaera’s interpolation of an overt politicizing of race relations dampens the immediacy and intensity praised in the earlier work: death loses its mystery and disorientation now that the tangi ritual is explained, and the characters’ attitudes in Whanau are contextualized by the social and cultural history that has shaped them. The above passage from Whanau II demonstrates this change in style, in the way in which the narrator’s description of loyalist tribes as “domesticated, acculturated, absorbed into a Western ethos” and his charge that “the Pakeha used the Bible as a sword to split the people” take the place of plot and characterization to carry the story. Such insertions prompt Ihimaera’s editor to caution him for potentially alienating his Pakeha readership,2 and lead reviewers to cautiously intimate the rewritten texts’ new stridency.3

2

Gillian Kootstra, Letter from Reed Publishing and accompanying edited MS “Whanau II,” A2004/20. 3 Boniface, “Unfinished Business,” E12; Prentice, “Weighed by the Burden of Souls,” The Listener (7 August 2004): 46–47; Wattie, “From Tama to Tom.”

160

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



In a more radical example of the same kind of interpretative blocking device, Ihimaera’s account of the fall of Ngatapa p during the New Zealand land wars attacks the Pakeha reader for implied collusion in colonial wrongdoing.4 The accusatory tone that addresses the Pakeha reader as “you Pakeha,” in The Matriarch physically confronts the audience in the event’s reenactment in the play Woman Far Walking: The wind starts to howl. A bullroarer increases the tension. T I R I and T I L L Y advance to the very apron of the stage, as close to the audience as they can get. TIRI (to audience): It is 5 January 1869. Your Pākehā soldiers took our fortress this morning. They found only the wounded, fourteen men, sixty-six women, the rest children. T I L L Y : We should have known that you would have no mercy. Kill us if you will but know this, Pharaoh, after us will come others. Ka whawhai tonu mātou, ake, ake, ake!5

In another rendition of the same event, in Whanau II the elder does not hold back on the gruesome details of the “massacre” in telling the story to his small grandchild: “Let the boy see [... ] Don’t sanitise the history” (98). Pakeha readers, sensitive to bicultural etiquette, must accept Ihimaera’s reclamation of a forgotten moment in the history of race relations, as well as his anger – as much for the historical bias that effaced it from history as for the atrocity itself – as a gesture of both grief and aggrievedness. In such aggressive moments in his fiction, Ihimaera imposes his tribe’s local perspective on their history so that there is little room for the reader to interpret and translate the text according to his or her own structures of meaning. That Ihimaera should employ the antagonistic writing of race relations more than twenty years after the abrupt and difficult period of Mori sovereignty and renaissance indicates a non-resolution of those demands. Certainly, as Ihimaera stresses in the Hill and Watkin interviews, the grievance process contains a necessary separating-out of Mori needs from the Pakeha mainstream. New Zealand’s unique institutionalized biculturalism, which encourages the nationalist form and function of Mori literature, appears to be at odds with the symbiotic relationship that Ihimaera also identifies in Mori and Pakeha cultures crossing over, a cultural mixing that facilitates confidence in 4

Ihimaera, The Matriarch, 177–78; The Clio Legacy, libretto MS, A1997/12; Woman Far Walking, 43–44; Whanau II, 97–100. 5 Ihimaera, Woman Far Walking, 43–44.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

161

transculturation and globalization, and in cultural and literary commercialization. The way in which Ihimaera’s passage from Whanau II backs away from this type of openness indicates a certain reluctance to give up on the separatist facet of Mori specificity. A certain conflict of interest inherent in the term and label ‘indigenous’ may help explain the constant wavering between voices and positions that confuses expectations of a clear-cut stance on the part of the Mori writer towards Mori culture, the function of Mori fiction, and his relationship to the non-Mori reader. The terminologies of indigeneity and of nationalism share many features, and indeed the question of fiction’s form, content, and function here applied to Ihimaera is equally pertinent in broader debates over national literatures. The etymology of the term ‘indigenous’ situates the native as naturally coming from and belonging to the land. While the claim to first occupancy is apparently clear, the meaning and value of that original belonging in relation to the land and to other occupants in contemporary nationstates is contested. In New Zealand, the Pakeha claim to indigeneity as a means of separating their identity from that of their British colonial forebears is refuted by Mori who consider their earlier arrival an exclusive prerequisite to the indigenous title. The debate over the Pakeha right to call themselves indigeneous was fiercely contested following Michael King’s books Being Pakeha and Being Pakeha Now in the 1980s and 1990s, with the issue of civil rights mixed with a sense of belonging to the land recast as strong disagreement with the government’s Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004. Representative of the strong views about Crown or Mori ownership of public beaches, Ranginui Walker’s condescending public letter to the Prime Minister claims seniority in order to nullify the government’s authority: “I have been here a thousand years. You arrived only yesterday.”6 Far from being a solely subjective and affective sense of cultural importance, the rights of nativeness are also acknowledged in politico-legal frameworks in several settler societies. In New Zealand, the recognition in 1975 (amended in 1985) of the Treaty of Waitangi as founding document set in place a constitutional charter of Mori–Pakeha race relations that informs and guides the bicultural state. In 1993, Canadian First Nations sought recourse in the United Nations to draft a declaration of indigenous peoples’ rights. The 1992 Mabo decision in Australia is similarly heralded as an important step in 6

Walker, “Dear Crown; An open letter to Helen, Bill, Richard, Peter, Jeanette and Jim,” The Listener (4 October 2003): 34.

162

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



official recognition and ongoing negotiation for Aborigines. On a pan-indigenous level, the 2000 United Nations “Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples” compiles some founding concepts by which to understand indigeneity. Paramount among these principles is the importance of collective ownership and the centrality of land as essential for the fostering of indigenous heritage. Continuity of land, language, and cultural heritage gives indigenous peoples the right to self-determination, “to maintain and develop their own cultures and knowledge systems, and forms of social organization.”7 The above national and international legal conceptions of indigeneity all seem to suggest that land and culture are inextricable. The assumed bind between native peoples and place is highlighted in Clifford’s documenting of a U S Court rejection of the Mashpee Indian claim for recognition and restitution of tribal lands, on the grounds that they could not prove continuous ownership.8 The court’s decision suggests that indigeneity must be connected to continuous occupancy of the land, a premise that casts into doubt the possibility of being simultaneously indigenous and diasporic. In fact, the metaphor of the home fire, in native guardianship of sacred and tribal ground, is also a prerequisite for Mori submissions to the Waitangi Tribunal, as the maintenance of an unbroken tie to the land dually recognizes the existence of Mori ownership and – or, rather, in spite of – the forced exile from that land by colonial displacement, urbanization, and fragmentation due to Pakeha integrative politics. Thus, although Mori may be interested in extending their culture to engage in the postmodern choice of globalization, this cannot replace maintaining a discourse of domination and marginalization necessary for each tribe’s recognition in the eyes of the law. The special place of indigenous peoples relies on retaining the memory of colonization as the hinge between pre-contact traditions and the modernity of urban, national, and global attachments. The above extract from Whanau II exemplifies Ihimaera’s alternating and contradictory stances: in the first paragraph embracing indigenous modernity, and in the second paragraph reminding readers of alienation from the land and loss of cultural identity through colonization. The way in which the text 7

United Nations, “Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples” (2000), http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf (accessed 26 March 2007). 8 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988): 284.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

163

retreats from the confidence in modernization and hybridity expressed in the first paragraph indicates a feeling of threat, a fear that embracing cross-cultural exchange might mean sacrificing the principles of specificity that have been so hard-won. Ihimaera’s rewriting and updating of his 1970s fiction to accommodate to the 2000s with their continued yet exacerbated confrontational Mori–Pakeha race relations is a reminder of the precepts that underpin Mori claims to rights and recognition. In effect, his rewrites support an ongoing need for Mori fiction of the 2000s to emulate the forms, functions, and subjects of Mori writing of the 1970s. This is not to contend that indigenous writing is locked into an intensely traditional and local-specific mode. Indeed, along with Ihimaera, the Mori writers Kelly Ana Morey, Paula Morris, Alice Tawhai, and James George have written fiction acclaimed for their international allure. Nevertheless, these younger writers share with Ihimaera a vacillating determination to also abide by the tropes of earlier Mori fiction as well as to explore new ways of writing. In particular, Morris’s second novel, Hibiscus Coast (2005), swings between Shanghai and Auckland, while the young Mori-Chinese protagonist, intent on living a metropolitan life-style, refuses to analyze her family history in terms of minority identity politics. By contrast, the short story “Rangatira,” inspired by the same research that led Morris to write Hibiscus Coast,9 revisits a colonial moment in which Mori are evicted from ancestral lands. Movement back and forth between Mori and international centres goes against the grain of Bourdieu’s and Casanova’s theories of literary evolution, which are based on trends in literary development noticed across at least twohundred years, throughout Europe, and in several languages. According to their model, Mori literature would be expected to open out from its earlier local specificity catering to a predominantly national book market, to adopt aspects of literary ‘universality’, concerned with aesthetics rather than politics, and registering difference stylistically rather than in its content. While these attributes are certainly applicable to some fiction by the aforementioned Mori writers, their simultaneous deference in other novels and short stories to key cultural indicators, including colonial and urban dispossession, and recourse to tribal land and Mori spirituality, suggests that the binary expectations of local / global, specific/ universal, and difference/ similarity remain an either–or option for many Mori writers. The usual liberal pluralist re9

Paula Morris, author’s note in The Best New Zealand Fiction 2, ed. Fiona Kidman (Auckland: Vintage, 2005): 236–37.

164

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



placement of such binaries by a both–and structure appears redundant in the Mori situation: these writers’ oeuvre contains both positions, but they are mutually exclusive. The continuation of the early styles and subjects of Mori literature indicates that there are unvoiced protocols that define appropriate subjects and stances for Mori writers, a cultural self-censoring that may come from both writers and editors of anthologies. As discussed in the first chapter, biculturalism is a concerted effort to retain unelidable differences between Mori and Pakeha, a focus on specificity and cultural uniqueness that persists in Mori fiction. Institutionalized biculturalism, no less than the U N -sanctioned guidelines for indigenous protection, defines its boundaries by assigned cultural parameters. In the kaupapa introduction to Te Ao Mārama 3, Ihimaera cites the important role of cultural “custodians”: “they must always question us if we are moving too far from the centre or taking the tikanga into places where it does not fit, where it is being used unappropriately or without mana.”10 Such agreement with the need for pre-defined and policed boundaries implies that anything outside these cultural parameters risks being seen as transgression, in terms both of what can be produced (and by whom) and of how this may be interpreted outside the community. Indeed, Ihimaera refers to protocols of authorization when he speaks of his constant reference to Mori kaupapa when he is writing, an act that requires prayers and guidance as he works in constant danger of transgressing against Mori acceptability.11 Although he is vague about what kind of transgression he means, Pearson suggests one possibility in the issue of exposing Mori knowledge of a sacred nature to a general reading public.12 King describes another kind of sacredness in Being Pakeha when he recalls tension between his historical fact-finding ambition and some Mori families’ reluctance to speak badly of their ancestors and past.13 Citing Donna Awatere’s definition of Mori, During confirms that it is not possible for Mori to describe their ancestors or tribal history negatively, because “the relation between the past and the present is a matter of preserving the mana of one’s ancestors.”14 An indication that a similar sense of duty is applicable to 10

Ihimaera et al., Te Ao Mārama 3, 15. Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 176–77; Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 292, 296. 12 Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 175. 13 King, Being Pakeha: An Encounter with New Zealand and the Maori Renaissance (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985: 153. 14 During, “What Was the West?” 764. 11



Ambivalent Indigeneity

165

Mori literature was made clear in the indignation from some quarters over Duff’s severe criticism of Mori Romantic traditionalism, especially the portrayal in Once Were Warriors of the unsavoury protagonist, Jake Heke, as the modern-day embodiment of a history of slaves and barbarism. The constant return to the early colonial period is one key theme in Mori writing which might be considered in terms of transgression. While Ihimaera experiments with different genres, such as science fiction or opera, or with mimesis, as when he blurs fantasy, dream, and myth, he does not experiment with narrative perspective or realism in his depiction of Mori impoverishment and victimization at the hands of rapacious British colonials and Pakeha: The Dream Swimmer, Woman Far Walking, and Whanau II reproduce the stance which first appeared in The New Net Goes Fishing and The Matriarch. As Ihimaera states with regard to Whanau II, he considered it his job to write “a documentary novel” to balance the history books.15 Describing the ongoing importance of politically motivated writing, Ihimaera says that although he recognizes “that equity and justice are being achieved, there’s still work like Whanau II where I still like to sock it to the Pakeha.”16 Ihimaera’s perspective on, for example, East-Coast historical figures, such as Te Kooti, and events, particularly the Ngatapa massacre, is unchanged and largely unchallenged by Pakeha commentators and reviewers. To question Ihimaera’s militancy, or to suggest that there are perhaps other ways for Mori to write colonial history than as rectifying historiography, would be to disturb a keystone of the modern Mori–Pakeha relationship, one that is in fact inscribed in the bicultural state, based on an acknowledged Pakeha fault as the source of historical and contemporary Mori marginalization. While Pakeha critics have refrained from questioning Mori writers’ reluctance to look at historical Mori–Pakeha relationships differently, the Australian example of Helen Demidenko’s novel The Hand That Signed the Paper demonstrates how an unexpected perspective in a literary work can spark important debates on contemporary cultural issues.17 In The Demidenko Debate, 15

Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand. Ralph Crane, “Writing Maori: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Island 110 (Spring 2007): online. 17 The novel describes with abject sympathy Ukrainian peasants working in Hitler’s death squads in Jewish extermination camps. The book was immediately and spectacularly denounced as antisemitic by the Australian media. This charge, extended to the author herself, as a descendant of Ukrainian immigrants to Australia, stemmed from the novel’s lack of revisionist guilt to modify the characters’ lack of remorse. The 16

166

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Andrew Riemer’s view of the role of fiction would seem to dispute Ihimaera’s sense of duty in writing a documentary novel. Riemer’s analysis of the negative reception of Demidenko’s book reveals that, in dealing with writing by and about disadvantaged minority groups, the reading public is deeply uneasy about applying a postmodern ‘anything goes’ approach that accepts unusual, unconventional or unsavoury perspectives. In response to these somewhat rigid expectations, Riemer finds that the pressure to be representative results in minority writers’ tendency to impose self-censorship, “at times more rigorous[ly] than communal standards would demand.”18 In the debate over responsibility to the public, which may be community-based or national, or responsibility to literature, Riemer opts to support artistic freedom over political exigencies: It is as vitally important for contemporary writers to offend against the pieties of our time as for them to be at the cutting edge of morally and politically commendable preoccupations. A healthy and robust culture must tolerate the Helen Darvilles of the world, and anyone else who might hold uncomfortable and unpleasant views about Jews, about women, about Aborigines, about gays and indeed about any conceivable subject – and we should even be prepared to shower them with prizes and distinctions. All that counts in the long run is the achievement of their work, that difficult-to-define yet readily perceptible quality of the imagination which rarely has much to do with a writer’s beliefs and obsessions or with the demands of ideologies.19

Certainly, this is not to claim that, in the Mori context, writers ought to refrain from describing victimization and marginalization in the style familiar to Mori literature. Indeed, the search for the truth is a shared feature of exiled, minority, and indigenous peoples, and the desire to hold onto cultural memory is a key component of their identities. Clearly, Mori writers must be able to draw on all elements of their culture and its history. However, Riemer’s persistent centralizing of literary considerations of style and mode argues that the writer’s choice of perspective, such as choosing to address the ravages of the debate on ethics attracted extensive media coverage because it won two top Australian literary prizes, which led to questioning about the politics of selection for literary prizes. A further layer of controversy occurred the following year, when Demidenko was found out to have faked her Ukrainian identity (she was, in fact, an Anglo-Australian named Helen Darville). 18 Andrew Riemer, The Demidenko Debate (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1996): 222. 19 Riemer, The Demidenko Debate, 272–73.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

167

colonial past, must be motivated by the fiction he or she wishes to create with it, and not, primarily, by a desire to record, as Ihimaera does, a documentary or “failed” history.20 The primacy of fiction allows Riemer to save The Hand That Signed the Paper from perfunctory dismissal due to its offensive nature, and to accept certain valuable features that Demidenko /Darville’s standpoint reveals. Her novel is a provocative, and at times poignant, study of highly relevant issues in contemporary, multicultural Australia, concerned with the legacy of historical guilt, and the democratic liberal conviction that people are agents of their own choice rather than conditioned by social and cultural pressures. In Demidenko’s transgression of protocols dictating appropriate perspectives and the authority to write, the debate surrounding her novel points to some of the generative energies that literature may inspire. As Anthony Julius, in Transgressions: The Offences of Art, reminds his readers, transgression is almost always assigned a positive value in art because it privileges openness and hybridity over convention.21 Demidenko was severely criticized in the media for several kinds of transgression – her ‘politically incorrect’ perspective, her fake identity, her plagiarism of sources. From a literary rather than a moral perspective, however, concerned with generating meaning non-mimetically, The Hand That Signed the Paper accords with Kristeva’s claim for literature as a vehicle for escaping prohibition: this “transgression” of linguistic, logical and social codes within the carnivalesque only exists and succeeds, of course, because it accepts another law. Dialogism is not “freedom to say everything,” it is a dramatic “banter” (Lautréamont), an other imperative.22

In an exaggerated version of Ihimaera’s challenge to strait-laced expectations of reverence towards Mori culture in Sky Dancer, Demidenko’s grotesque parody and masquerade of minority identity and suffering mocks national literary and cultural values. Indeed, Australia has a history of literary debate generated by writers deriding the institution of truth-value by faking or assuming identities and positions, perhaps most self-consciously and consistent-

20

Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002): 20–21. 22 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 41. 21

168

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



ly by Peter Carey.23 By contrast with the open Australian questioning of the relationship between author and text, and text and reality, the situation in New Zealand literary circles is characterized by a dearth of debate.24 Wevers and Williams trace the causes and consequences of a national lack of contentious writing and commentary, questioning the desirability of a literature that corresponds to rather than upsets national and bicultural imperatives. Their argument suggests that a lack of transgression is as prevalent in critical discourse as in the fiction itself: Isn’t New Zealand’s contemporary literary scene remarkably tame and homogenous? Isn’t there a lack of tension and range in the art scene, a beige middle ground where everyone dutifully practises their art form, failing to infuriate anyone, and the policy makers tread a comfortable path to common goals?25

23

Apart from Demidenko, key debates include the Ern Malley hoax and the Aborigine B. Wongar, who was discovered to be Sretan Božić, a Yugoslav anthropologist immigrant to Australia. While Peter Carey in My Life as a Fake parodied the Malley affair to great effect, echoes of Wongar appear in revelations of the (unintentional) inauthenticity of Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal heritage. Australian literary criticism on passing includes Who’s Who: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crisis in Australian Literature, ed. Maggie Nolan & Carrie Dawson (Brisbane: U of Queensland P , 2004); Sneja Gunew, “Culture, Gender and the Author-Function: ‘Wongar’s Walg’,” Southern Review 20 (November 1987): 261–70; Gunew & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Questions of Multiculturalism” (1986), in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 193–202; Mudrooroo, “Tell Them You’re Indian,” in Race Matters, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw & Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997): 259–68. Amidst a dearth of trans-Tasman scholarship, Chris Prentice’s essays endeavour to open the debate in New Zealand: “Grounding Post-Colonial Fictions: Cultural Constituencies, Cultural Credentials and Uncanny Questions of Authority,” S P A N (October 1993): 100–12, and “Questions of PostColonial Representation: Cultural Credentials on Trial,” in Remembering Representation, ed. Howard McNaughton (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1993): 7–21. 24 Stead is a key exception to the trend to avoid polemics. Although there are relevant and valid points to his criticism, including that of Mori fiction, his tendency to go into attack mode has provoked reactive and equally impassioned defences, from Pakeha as well as Mori writers and literary critics. 25 Wevers & Williams, “Going Mad Without Noticing: Cultural Policy in a Small Country,” Landfall 204 (November 2002): 15.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

169

These critics claim that in order to infuse some dynamism into New Zealand letters “We need to argue.”26 However, this becomes problematic when the object of that critique is Mori. Bicultural politeness corroborates with the U N “Principles and Guidelines” for the treatment of indigenous artists, writers and performers, which promotes “encourage[ment] of public support for the[ir] development and recognition,” and contributes to “greater public understanding and respect.”27 Literary critique of Mori writing appears to follow a similar charter. While, in the unsettled period of newly instated biculturalism in the 1980s, the early novels The Matriarch and the bone people sparked intense literary and cultural debate, little recent work has prompted such interest. Indeed, Bhabha’s and Bourdieu’s understanding of culture and literature as produced from friction is opposed to the New Zealand understanding of biculturalism as based on respect for deep cultural differences, which has created a literary environment in which Mori and Pakeha writers and commentators do not really engage with each other. The politeness expected of Pakeha towards Mori cultural expression, aided by the postcolonial reading frame which privileges minority expression and has little to say about reader response or textual aesthetics, precludes debate, replacing potentially vigorous discussions of literary influence and value with due consideration of the cultural politics present beyond the text. If the tame literary scene contributes to the way in which contemporary Mori writing appears to escape critical engagement, the less mannerly media have fewer qualms about voicing protest, albeit in feigning an objective stance by often reporting on impoliteness from foreigners rather than from 26

Wevers & Williams, “Going Mad Without Noticing,” 17. The following clauses of the subsection “Artists, Writers and Performers” propose: [Clause] 41. Artists, writers and performers should refrain from incorporating elements of indigenous heritage, particularly those of a sacred character, into their works without the prior, free and informed consent of the traditional owners. [Clause] 42. Artists, writers and performers should support the full artistic and cultural development of indigenous peoples, and encourage public support for the development and greater recognition of indigenous artists, writers and performers. [Clause] 43. Artists, writers and performers should contribute, through their individual works and professional organizations, to the greater public understanding and respect for the indigenous heritage associated with the country in which they live as well as with the international community as a whole. — “Principles and Guidelines,” np. 27

170

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Pakeha. In their introduction to a collection of essays on culturalisms, Brydon, Williams, and James Meffan give two examples to query the role of politeness in unequivocal acceptance of cultural practices. At the 2004 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australians complained about New Zealanders spontaneously performing the haka whenever their compatriots won medals. During a trip to New Zealand, the English travel writer Jenny Diski expressed indignation at the aggressiveness of the traditional Mori welcome to visitors. Confronted with these challenges to appropriate cultural use, Mori defended their cultural practices and turned the criticism back on the critics, claiming cultural insensitivity. In a literary example of a similar foreign criticism and Mori reaction (mentioned earlier), Paula Morris strongly criticizes Christina Thompson’s Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All as a naive, negatively stereotyping, and incomplete view of Mori past and present. Defending her work and her perspective, as a foreigner married to a Mori, Thompson argues I’m not pretending to be an authority. It’s funny – the sense that I have a responsibility to depict the whole truth, when I’m just trying to tell two people’s story. [. . . ] When foreigners write about you, people feel there is a kind of trespass going on.28

Thompson, whose book occupies a tricky intersection between historical text and personal memoir, articulates different conceptions and functions of text, but ultimately defends the subjectiveness of writing. Thompson’s alleged insensitivity and Morris’s defensiveness enact the kind of debate and discussion that Brydon, Meffan, and Williams advocate as constitutive of cultural exchange: To be impolite is to be able to register scepticism or irritation in an encounter with unfamiliar codes or with codes whose values are questioned – but it is an exchange and as such valuable. Somewhere between the emollient advocacy of unqualified admiration for the other and the diatribes of hatred [. . . ] lies at least the possibility of productive cultural encounter and exchange.29

The editors’ advocacy of open engagement with the difficulties of cultural difference is not necessarily at odds with minority self-regulation and reluctance 28

Thompson, quoted in Paula Morris, “Lost in Translation,” The Listener (23 August 2008): 24, 26. 29 Diana Brydon, James Meffan & Mark Williams, “Introduction” to Culturalisms (special issue, New Literatures Review 45–46, 2009): 15.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

171

to accept outside input. Rather, the essays in the collection do not intend to denigrate New Zealand biculturalism or Australian and Canadian multiculturalisms, but to promote awareness of their pitfalls. Wevers and Williams, along with the editors of and contributors to Culturalisms, all demonstrate a willingness to engage and to argue, a position based on confidence rather than fear of transgression, of saying the wrong thing. This stance, although valid in the academic frame of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship, is not immune to criticism. Even though some postcolonial commentators are themselves from cultures labelled minorities, or whose long careers confirm their deep commitment to their nation’s cultures, the postcolonial predicament of presumed unequal power-relations between Western academic subject and minority object is never far from the surface. Edward Said provides an eloquent instance of the pervasive difficulty of dealing with cross-cultural interpretation and criticism in the postcolonial field. Despite his long career as commentator, spokesman, and supporter of minority causes, the eminent critic was still vulnerable to the subaltern charge of collapsing difference in the service of mainstream academic hegemony.30 In “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Said considers the peculiarities of his seminal text’s reception within and criticism from various fields and disciplines. He asks whether in identifying and working through anti-dominant critiques, subaltern groups – women, blacks, and so on – can resolve the dilemma of autonomous fields of experience and knowledge that are created as a consequence. A double kind of possessive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding insider by virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature), and second, being an excluding insider by virtue of method (only marxists, antiorientalists, feminists can write about economics, Orientalism, women’s literature).31

Robert Spencer, also drawing on Said’s reconsideration of Orientalism, diagnoses the passivity of Western critics towards minority critique as a fear of misrepresenting. In embracing Derridian poststructuralism, Spivak’s destabilizing of subaltern subjectivity, and the tenets of Orientalism which effectively

30

Said, “The Politics of Knowledge” (1991), in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 372–85. 31 Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985), in Reflections on Exile, 215.

172

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



founded postcolonial theory, critics have become wary of taking any kind of position: many of us have been spooked into silence by the suspicion that, in making seemingly authoritative statements about the world, we actually end up helping to impose power (especially colonial power) over the world. The violent and unjust consequences of speaking over others have caused many esteemed and thinkers to exchange the garrulousness of power for a reticent, risk-free silence.32

New Zealand institutionalized biculturalism and the U N “Principles and Guidelines” propose the very option that Said and Spencer contest, privileging indigenous “autonomous fields of experience and knowledge” and “possessive exclusivism” – terms that are not construed as a dilemma which needs fixing, but as something positive which needs protecting. Whereas Said defends the need for “counter-knowledges”33 that (re)define contexts in ways that move the debate forward and Spencer argues that globalization makes communication between all constituencies even more important,34 Stanley Fish is less optimistic about the ability to argue on a level playing field. For Fish, the task of critiquing minority cultural expression without contradicting or offending that minority perspective is simply impossible. In “Boutique Multiculturalism,” Fish turns the question of assuming a critical posture towards other cultures into a critique of facile liberalism. He postulates that notions of multiculturalism, heterogeneity, and polyphony fail because they do not accept that beliefs can be fundamental. Instead, ‘boutique multiculturalism’ is thinly disguised liberal universalism, which favours tolerance over the vigorous debate that, although unlikely to be resolved, needs to be conducted loud and clear. For Fish, failing to confront ethnic or racial difference is an unacceptable lassitude: do you really show respect for a view by tolerating it, as you might tolerate the buzzing of a fly? Or do you show respect when you take it seriously enough to oppose it, root and branch?35 32

Robert Spencer, “The Price of Silence,” in Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions, ed. Clara A.B. Joseph & Janet Wilson (Cross / Cultures 85; Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2006): 17–18. 33 Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 215. 34 Spencer, “The Price of Silence,” 32–33. 35 Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23.2 (Winter 1997): 388.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

173

Wevers’ and Williams’s challenge to New Zealand letters, the Culturalisms introduction, and Riemer’s, Said’s, Spencer’s, and Fish’s arguments all reveal a perhaps irresoluble incoherence between culture-centred demands, which support indigenous and minority sovereignty based on fundamental differences, and literary demands, which privilege critique and, through this, multiplicity of interpretation. For Riemer, Said, and Spencer, literary and intellectual work has greater potential import than the risk of transgressing cultural etiquette: interpreting, comparing, criticizing, and judging are necessary in the expectation that different perspectives might offer valid and valuable insights. This position is frustrated, however, by Fish’s insistence on the existence of deep moral convictions that cannot tolerate such interrogation. In another example of humanist liberalism painting itself into a corner, Anthony Julius also outlines limits to artistic representation – even in transgressive art – when faced with events such as the Holocaust that, in violating fundamental human taboos, seem beyond question.36 Ihimaera’s frequent rewriting of the Ngatapa massacre, always in a melodramatic, indignant, and emotional tone, is one such moment that precludes debate. A trump card in an arsenal of examples of colonial barbarity towards Mori as innocents and victims, Ihimaera’s challenge to his readers or audience to refute his stance has thus far gone unanswered. Ihimaera appears to concur with Fish and Julius in his unwavering support for Mori sovereignty and the precepts of cultural difference, as evident in the ‘auctorial’ authority of his literature of race relations. He likens himself to the traditional elders of his early stories, in “The Whale” and The Whale Rider, whose attachment to tradition looks dated in the changing modern world: “I think I’m going to be one of those old whales that I sometimes write about, perhaps trying to draw the parameters too closely to what is Maori and what isn’t.”37 Elsewhere, he defines himself as “an old essentialist”: 38 My job is to reinforce the structures of power and meaning for the Maori body politic. [. . . ] I consider myself to be a Maori seeking sovereignty of both person and nation. Oppression is a historically-associated condition

36

Julius, “The End of Transgressive Art,” in Transgressions, 186–221. Evidence of the continued relevance of Julius’s argument appears in the charges of antisemitism towards Yann Martel, for his 2010 novel Beatrice and Virgil. 37 Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 176. 38 Ihimaera, email to Margaret Meklin.

174

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



which Maori have managed to escape from though, of course, the primary structures of power are still Pakeha.39 I’ve always worked from a sense of advocacy about my people at a sense of time in our history. I will always choose a Maori over a Pakeha under any circumstances if it is a matter of advocacy for Maori people. Call that biased, but my perception of history has taught me otherwise in regard to the wellbeing of our people.40

Ihimaera’s unequivocal declaration brooks no argument, as he quite clearly asserts his cultural registration over and above literary considerations, thereby siding with an essentialist and exclusivist view of indigeneity. However, this position marks only one aspect of his consideration of cultural identity through fiction. At the other end of the spectrum, he also supports transculturation and diaspora.

Indigenous Diaspora The ongoing indigenous insistence on cultural differentiation and exclusivism is somewhat at odds with the trend in postcolonial studies over the past decade to move away from community-centred analyses and instead to focus on movement and interaction. The revised second edition of The Postcolonial Studies Reader (2005), includes new sections on diaspora and globalization, and recent conferences and essay collections, such as Rerouting the Postcolonial (2010), are increasingly concerned with mapping how global human movement and its attendant cultural theories fit into postcolonial studies. One reason for this shifting emphasis is surely the importance – perhaps even the predominance – of a number of significant migrant writers based in Western centres, including Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Yann Martel, and Rohinton Mistry, many of whom ßare also active cultural commentators. Indeed, Rushdie’s critical writings have consistently conceived of identity-formation as played out in movement between constituencies. As his character in Shame famously puts it, the immigrant is “a translated man ... borne across.”41 The way that these writers have made their homes in the U K , the U S A , and Canada, and in the English lan39

Ihimaera, email to Margaret Meklin. Sam Cruickshank, “Rockin’ Rangatira: Professor Witi Ihimaera,” Te Kukupa: The Messenger (6 August 2003). 41 Rushdie, Shame (1983; London: Vintage, 1989): 24. 40



Ambivalent Indigeneity

175

guage, challenges the expectation that fiction comes from ex-colonies while criticism belongs in and to the West,42 a notion equally dispelled by eminent critics of non-European backgrounds working in Western universities, including Aijaz Ahmad, Bhabha, Gunew, Gassan Hage, Spivak, and the late Said. Similarly, the postcolonial university ‘circuit’ of fellowships, funding, and guest lectureships ensures international support for writers who circulate between their home and overseas institutions. Recent New Zealand examples are Robert Sullivan, currently at the University of Hawai‘i, and Ihimaera himself, who in 2007 was invited to the University of Tasmania as Distinguished Visitor and in 2008 for a residency at the Binger Institute in Amsterdam. Questions of movement might seem less relevant to indigenous peoples writing from their original locations than to migrant, exile, and refugee communities working between two or more cultural centres. However, the way in which indigenous writing has also espoused the themes and jargon of cultural movement stymies any expectation of a split in postcolonial studies brought about by seemingly different imperatives of movement or rootedness. As explored in the previous chapter in connection with The Return, Ihimaera’s interest in transculturation would appear to be at odds with the emphasis on locality and specificity for indigenous recognition and rights, in which Mori literature has played such an influential part. On the other hand, such modes of Mori modernity have been enabled and encouraged by New Zealand’s national biculturalism, Treaty Charter, and the Waitangi Tribunal, all developed to ensure that Mori profit from their intellectual and cultural property on local, regional, national, and international levels. The diasporic, transcultural metropolitan Mori of The Return stakes a claim for Mori as equally implicated in the sea-change of restructuring in 1980s New Zealand that was responsible for the nation’s increasingly international outlook. Indeed, in this novel, Ihimaera’s Mori protagonist, Tama/ Tom, joins his own international trajectory to that of other New Zealanders, both Pakeha and Mori: New Zealanders are taking their place in their own land and throughout the world. Wherever we meet, we cry, sing and chant our songs through a hostile universe and, when we gather together, it is like a tribe around a campfire telling our stories of the iwi to each other. We are a great diaspora of brilliant innovative young minds whom New Zealand has educated and raised. To what purpose, if not for us to go back out into the world with all our entre42

Bahri, Native Intelligence, 5–7; Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 4; Mukherjee, “Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?” 1–9.

176

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



preneurial skills, the same skills that brought all our forebears to New Zealand in the first place? (321)

From the vantage of current New Zealand biculturalism, predicated on ineluctable differences between indigenous Mori and later settlers, Ihimaera’s blending “we” is problematic. It suggests that the transculturation brought about by a common nationality, education, life-style, and, most importantly, the sharing of collective narratives in “our songs” and “our stories” has subsumed the longstanding differences of history. This suggests an intimacy in Mori–Pakeha relations, a long-term relationship and mutual understanding that contradicts the bicultural emphasis on difference and distance. By joining the discovery and arrival stories of Mori waka and colonial ships to New Zealand, the narrator anticipates and dispels criticism that Mori are necessarily bound to their indigenous location and therefore out of the loop of diasporic networking and voyaging. The implication of return in Ihimaera’s “go[ing] back out into the world” joins Mori to the analogous Pakeha enactment of foundational voyages from Great Britain in the quasi-institutional ‘overseas experience’ of many young New Zealanders. However, Ihimaera’s position in the above passage is uncertain, as he shifts from the third-person “they” of the first sentence to the first-person “we” of the second. The first sentence reveals a slight hesitancy in the collapsing of Mori and Pakeha foci into an undifferentiated New Zealand “we,” a subconscious distancing device that goes against the novel’s emphatic insistence that Mori are as mobile and as au fait with globalization as Pakeha. In the above passage, the image of New Zealanders meeting up around the world calls to mind the bar scene in London at the novel’s beginning, which might equally be described as “a tribe around a campfire telling our stories of the iwi to each other.” Here, Tom is asserting that Mori can retain their deep connection to tribal land and traditions and also maintain an international metropolitan life-style. The opening chapters of The Return exemplify a diasporic community of the kind that Appadurai labels ‘ethnoscape’. Tom and the young New Zealanders he meets in the London bar are adept at fitting in to their foreign environment; they have good jobs and social networks, and interact with the locals. Nevertheless, their tendency to gravitate towards fellow New Zealanders, to talk of current events and signal moments from their home culture rather than – or in comparison with – London, illustrates the strategies of diasporic communities which retain and promote their home cultures abroad. Ihimaera’s novel also enacts another key feature of diaspora,



Ambivalent Indigeneity

177

that of nostalgia or yearning for return. Tom describes his love for his homeland in fighting terminology, of having “a country to live for and to die for,” while his girlfriend puts it in the more plangent terms of “palpable” longing: “you New Zealanders wear your hearts on your sleeves. You people cry over your country even in pubs and bars” (180). The young New Zealanders describe their wish to return in equally emotional language: “I do feel the distance keenly and yearn for the time when I am able to return. A trip now and then usually keeps the ache under control” (181). Ihimaera’s vocabulary is inscribed in the rhetoric of divorce and displacement, characteristic of the exiled and persecuted peoples to which the term ‘diaspora’ is usually attached, such as Jews, Armenians, Irish, and Africans. It would appear inappropriate to align modern-day New Zealanders in London with such communities, especially as Ihimaera’s characters choose to go overseas, and can afford to return at will. Nevertheless, Ihimaera’s formulation is typical of a change in the meaning of the term ‘diaspora’ and its widened application. In a comprehensive survey of the way in which ‘diaspora’ is applied to a range of contemporary situations over the last decade, the editors of Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain note the term’s shifting meaning in the 1990s from a strict binary structure to that of a discursive, aleatory hybridity.43 The etymological sense of forced dispersion or ‘a scattering’ in its GraecoHebraic origins, which maintains a sense of cultural continuity through a strongly imagined connection to a lost homeland, gives way to postmodern fragmentation, in which diaspora is emblematic of an “interstitial configuration” that refuses “the univocal evocation of identity maintenance.”44 While these French sociologists inscribe this new trend in the terminology of deconstruction, postmodernism, and cultural studies, this latter sense also connects with postcolonialism’s shifting bias, and the delocalization proposed by theorists of globalization and transculturation. Robertson’s use of “world space,” or the local as a micro-manifestation of the global, means that ‘home’ is no longer inevitably fused to locality: Where, in other words, is home in the late-twentieth century? [. . . ] in the present situation of global complexity, the idea of home has to be divorced 43

William Berthomière & Christine Chivallon, Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain, ed. Berthomière & Chivallon (Paris: Karthala & Pessac: M S H A , 2006): 16–17. 44 Berthomière & Chivallon, Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain, “le recours à l’évocation univoque du maintien identitaire,” 17. (My tr.)

178

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



analytically from the idea of locality. There may well be groups and categories which equate the two, but [. . . ] [w]e must be careful not to remain in thrall to the old and rather well established view that cultures are organically binding and sharply bounded.45

In a similar call for postnationalist flexibility, Appadurai sees the end to patriotism: as diasporic communities are held together by the idea rather than the reality of a nation: i.e. the imagined community; essentialist concepts such as blood and land are redundant. This inspires Appadurai to posit an idealist postnational, multicentred model for identity based on the chaos theory of flux and contingency.46 The place of indigeneity is problematic in the globalized diasporic model. If Clifford’s Mashpee Indians are successful in the second sense of diaspora, according to Robertson’s and Appadurai’s criteria, then that is at the expense of the former, more restricted, and wholly negative sense of exile, which recognizes that forced migrancy nonetheless keeps the home fires burning in the collective imaginary. The Waitangi Tribunal’s prerequisite of an unbroken tie to the land as a way of validating hap or subtribe claims for recognition indicates that the form of diaspora applicable to Mori is that of exile, with its connotation of domination and marginalization. This causes some confusion in Ihimaera’s employment of diaspora as chosen internationalism in The Return, since the rhetoric of loss and homecoming, in the language of longing employed by Tom and the young New Zealanders in London, belies the author’s positive approach to globalization discourse. His seeming lack of control over his term’s meaning, like the slippage from third to first person, suggests that, although Ihimaera reflexively employs generalizations such as ‘New Zealander’ and ‘diaspora’, there is perhaps a limit to this. For Ihimaera, indigeneity and diaspora, although not mutually exclusive, remain in problematic tension with an implied hierarchy, as the notion of home takes precedence over that of global non-attachment. New Zealanders are encouraged to “go back out into the world with all our entrepreneurial skills,” yet are also expected to return – or at least to use a language of nostalgia that shows that they would like to. In its physical moving back and forth between cultures and cultural spaces, travelling problematizes, or at least challenges, the rootedness of Mori culture. Ihimaera resolves this potential tension by claiming, in The Return, that 45 46

Robertson, “Glocalization,” 39. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 166–69.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

179

all New Zealanders, like the migratory birds, the godwits, eventually return home. This generalization surely does not always hold true, but the Mori tenet “born a Maori, die a Maori and be buried by his people,” an affirmation Ihimaera evokes in instances when his cultural registration is under pressure, asserts a groundedness that overrides the disruptions of travel.47 Such a configuration of diaspora as a culturally bounded movement prompts Clifford to offer some indigenous manifestations of diasporic identity. In the Berthomière and Chivallon collection, Clifford extends the notion of ‘travelling in dwelling’/‘dwelling in travelling’ in his earlier text Routes to a context of indigenous diaspora. Unlike the aspect of displacement inherent in the exilic sense of the term ‘diaspora’, indigenous attachments to the land “begin and end with dwelling, lives rooted, profoundly, in one place.”48 Clifford’s formulation, which echoes Ihimaera’s stress on Maoriness at birth and death, does not preclude the possibility of indigenous migrancy. Clifford describes a spectrum of social practices, along a continuum from stasis to movement, which deploy traditional structures such as kinship to ensure that indigenous people living outside tribal areas do not empty out the rural hearths, but, rather, extend those territories.49 In the context of the Native Alaskan Yup’ik, which is equally applicable to Mori, the anthropologist recognizes that indigenous identity includes multiple possibilities, with the individual attaching his or her identity differently, depending on the context: as an individual, as part of a hap, as situated in tribal affiliation, as Mori, as pan-indigenous, as a New Zealander: for Clifford, “there is no linear, zero-sum relation between rural and urban, old and new, social performances or scales of affiliation.”50 The anthropologist thus argues for a compartmentalized, complex, and flexible indigenous identity, one that stresses rather than avoids tension and complexity on both individual and community levels. Mori cultural analogies include the images of the rope of man and the spiral, both motifs that maintain connection and continuity, and to which Ihimaera frequently alludes in The Return.

47

Mark Amery, “Stepping Out: Witi Ihimaera’s New Direction,” Quote / Unquote

20 (February 1995): 14; Katherine Findlay, “Heralding the New Tribe,” Mana 9 (Winter 1995): 76. 48

Clifford, “Indigenous Diasporas,” in Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain,

50. 49 50

Clifford, “Indigenous Diasporas,” 59. “Indigenous Diasporas,” 60.

180

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Clifford’s citing of Albert Wendt, Epeli Hau’ofa, and Teresia Teaiwa’s studies of Pacific voyaging in Routes and “Indigenous Diasporas” points to one sense of diaspora that could pertain to Mori. Indeed, in several articles, both Hau’ofa and Wendt argue for a long history of inter-island movement and exchange across the Pacific.51 This translocality makes networks of greater and lesser blocs of pan-Pacific entities (linguistic, national, ethnic, economic), with constantly changing dynamics. Far from perceiving island communities as isolated from European or American-centred commercial patterns of global movement, the notion of Pacific diaspora argues for a history of contact. Yet, Mori reluctance to include Pacific Islanders in their cultural and social configuration of bicultural New Zealand52 indicates another problematic incompatibility in the terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘diaspora’. The dualism inherent in biculturalism, which places Mori in the position of indigenous, original hosts, sets Pacific Islanders on the other side of an undifferentiated non-Mori Other, as immigrants and overstayers rather than as relatives and guests.53 Mori literature, intent on describing and defining its own life-world, similarly excludes its relationships with the Pacific, an absence which is all the more striking because of the ever-increasing presence of Pasifika in other 51

Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 27–38, and “The Ocean In Us,” in Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific ed. David Hanlon & Geoffrey M. White (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 113–32; Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” in Inside Out: 399–412; and “Towards a New Oceania,” Mana Review 1.1 (January 1976): 49–60. 52 Leaders of the Mori Party, Tariana Turia and Peter Sharples, specifically addressed this situation in a 2007 move to reach out to Pacific peoples as allies for the Mori Party. The Mori Party called for limits on immigration from Great Britain, Europe, the Americas, and Australia, as this was unfairly diluting the “browning-up” of New Zealand. Dan Eaton, “Maori call for migrant cutback,” Dominion Post (26 February 2007): 1. 53 The language of host and guest is useful in the postcolonial context, although it has so far found little favour in New Zealand discussion, with the exception of Jo Smith, “Post-Cultural Hospitality: Settler–Native–Migrant Encounters,” Arena 28 (2007): 65–86. Applying Derrida’s considerable work on the topic to the context of French postcolonial immigration and citizenship, Mireille Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2001) remains a definitive study.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

181

branches of Mori arts.54 Certainly, Sullivan’s poetry, particularly Star Waka, is an important contribution, as is his collaboration with Pacific poets and writers, including Wendt. However, it is telling that although Pacific anthologies often include Mori work, such as in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, Mori collections rarely include Pacific writers. Evans notes, for example, that the Rarotongan-New Zealand writer Alistair Campbell, despite his significant writing about both Polynesians and Mori, “has had nowhere comfortable to ‘fit’.”55 Similarly, in Mori fiction there is little evidence of Mori characters and their life-styles interacting with those of their Pacific cousins, even though a significant number of short stories collected in Te Ao Mārama and Huia Short Stories, as well as several of Ihimaera’s novels, are set in urban Auckland, where Mori and Pasifika communities intermix. In a comparable silence, Mori fiction rarely engages with the experiences of other New Zealand immigrant groups of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though parallels might be drawn in terms of cultural and social marginalization. Alice Tawhai’s collection Luminous (2007), published by Huia, is a key exception, in which modern, urban, working-class New Zealand, of the style common in the Mori fiction collected in Huia Short Stories, is amplified through her use of immigrant characters as narrators, including Chinese, Samoan, Polish, Japanese, and Indian. Although Huia does to an extent support non-Mori writers, notably the Pacific-inflected poetry of the Tongan-Samoan-Pakeha writer Karlo Mila, the Huia Short Stories series is reserved only for writers of Mori descent, and there has yet to be a story from this series that contains a recognizably Pacific-islands character. Writing from other minorities remains a little-documented aspect of New Zealand literature, and Mori lack of differentiation in this regard accords with the broader national silence in the arts towards its immigrant communities.56 Although 54

Examples include: visual media such as the “Panui Pasifika” programme on the Mori Television Station, the animated series Bro Town, films No. 2, by the Fijian playwright Toa Frazer, and Sione’s Wedding, by the Naked Samoans; performance, such as the new All Blacks’ haka or Auckland’s “Soifua” Mori and Polynesian cultural tourism and entertainment company; magazines such as First Pacific: A PasifikAsia Lifewriting Journal; in Mori–Pacific Island music such as “Nesian Mystik” and “Sheelahroc.” 55 Evans, “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’,” 27. 56 For critique of the lack of critical engagement with or encouragement of immigrant experience and writing, see Nina Nola, “Exploring Disallowed Territory: Intro-

182

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Ihimaera’s fiction appears typical in this regard, outside his fiction the Mori writer is positive about potential cultural transformations brought about by immigrant difference. However, he is firm about the state’s bicultural responsibility to privilege Mori: I don’t look at immigrants [. . . ] as threatening unless they begin to influence national power structures so that they are malignant to Maori. What Maori have to make sure of is that they have the power to prevent this.57

While biculturalism privileges the Mori–Pakeha relationship, offering a structure through which Mori can voice their concerns, other minorities outside of this legitimated forum remain in the background. Another surprising omission is the scarcity of other indigenous peoples in Mori fiction, although the four stories in the 2009 Huia may indicate that this is changing. In agreement with the U N ’s identifying of common features of indigeneity, Mori share many cultural, social, and political similarities with Australian Aborigine, U S -Amerindian, and Canadian First-Nations and Inuit indigenous groups. However, for Alice Te Punga Somerville, interest in defining comparative indigenous methodologies comes up against key tenets of indigeneity that problematize cross-cultural interaction by emphasizing singularity: “How do you find things you ‘share’ when the basis of your connection is your insistence on uniqueness.”58 For Te Punga Somerville, centering the shared experience of colonialism may form a foundation of interindigenous connection. Taking a similarly cross-cultural approach that attaches the local to the global rather than to the nation, in an Aboriginal context, Mudrooroo advocates the collective strength of ‘pan-Indigenality’: “If you are an Indigenous person, then you have to connect up with other Indigeducing the Multicultural Subject into New Zealand Literature,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker & Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2000): 203–17; David Pearson, “Crossing Ethnic Thresholds: Multiculturalisms in Comparative Perspective,” in Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa–New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley, Cluny Macpherson & David Pearson (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1996): 247–66; Christina Stachurski, Reading Pakeha? Fiction and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand (Cross / Cultures 109; Amsterdam & New York, Rodopi, 2009): 173–76; Livia Käthe Wittmann, “Postmodern Ethnicity or Utopian Di-ethnia? Women’s Multilingual / Multicultural Writing in Aotearoa / New Zealand,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (March 2002): 101–20. 57 Ihimaera, email to Meklin. 58 Te Punga Somerville, “The Lingering War Captain: Maori Texts, Indigenous Contexts,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 24.2 (2007): 20.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

183

nous people across the world. Nations within nations.”59 Calling for regional solidarity, Édouard Glissant, in his analysis of Caribbean imaginative belonging, stresses the fact that the constraints of national isolation must be overcome by forging links with neighbours and with communities which share some of the nation’s cultural components. In propounding the “multi-relation” of common Antillean histories of movement, colonization, and interaction that cross island borders, Glissant warns that “The Caribbean Sea is not an American lake. It is the estuary of the Americas.”60 Similarly, in a geographically centred version of Fanon’s psycho-affective equilibrium that recalls Glissant’s island imagery, Edward Kamau Brathwaite describes the landscape of the Caribbean archipelago as “geo-psyche”: the islands share the tops of a submerged chain of mountains, providing a regional connectedness that overrides the colonial carving-up of the Caribbean.61 Despite such advocacy of regional or international indigenous interconnectedness, Ihimaera’s recounting of his experiences in Canada in The Uncle’s Story remains one of the few explorations of ‘pan-Indigenality’ in Mori fiction. Indeed, in The Trowenna Sea (2009), an historical novel about a group of Mori prisoners transferred to Tasmania, Ihimaera passes up the opportunity to draw close connections with and parallels between the disenfranchised Mori and the Aboriginal Trowennans. Indeed, the first Aborigine is not sighted until half-way into the book,62 the only description of Aboriginal lived culture is introduced by a whiteman gone bush (376), and the first contact between Mori and Aborigine is a mystic communion of dead souls (377–81). Instead, the novel focuses on relationships and negotiations between Mori and colonial Europeans. In the 500-page novel, only fifteen pages directly bring together Mori and Aborigine, in one meeting with a small group of exiled Trowennans. In a nod of recognition to Mudrooroo’s important early 59

Mudrooroo, The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997): 209. 60 “La mer des Antilles n’est pas le lac des États-Unis. C’est l’estuaire des Amériques” (Glissant, Le discours antillais, 249). Tr. by J. Michael Dash in Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, sel., tr. & intro. Dash (Caraf Books; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1989): 139. 61 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “History, the Caribbean Writer and X/Self,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross / Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990): 27. 62 Ihimaera, The Trowenna Sea (Auckland: Penguin, 2009): 268. Further page references are in the main text.

184

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



postcolonial novel Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Ihimaera’s (historical) Mori hero, Hohepa Te Umuroa, meets Mudrooroo’s (historical) protagonist, Trucanini. In this passage, the Mori convict acts as facilitator between the mistrustful Aboriginal group and the missionaries and medic with whom Hohepa is travelling. Although Hohepa is both moved and angered by the Aborigines’ testimonials, the passage ends with him powerless to help the exiled natives: instead, he saves the life of the white doctor. Ihimaera’s tentative and sketchy use of Mudooroo’s ‘pan-Indigenality’ is resoundingly negative, as Hohepa only identifies with Aborigines in terms of shared indigenous persecution. Whereas Aborigines are described as “surviving remnants of a nation’s dead” (392), Ihimaera’s ubiquitous ropeof-man motif in this novel binds Mori with the white settlers whose future is assured in Van Diemen’s Land. By contrast with the lack of indigenous relationships, Mori literature’s engagement with the postcolonial interest in diaspora, transculturation, and globalization expresses a preference for describing Mori–Western interaction rather than exploring the regional attachments which might anchor Mori in the Pacific or with other indigenous peoples. Recent novels that attach Mori to foreign urban centres include the New Orleans of Paula Morris’s Queen of Beauty and Shanghai in her Hibiscus Coast, London in Kelly Ana Morey’s Grace is Gone, and Italy and Greece for the historical attachment of the Maori Battalion in World War Two in James George’s Hummingbird. Significantly, the Mori location of each of these novels consists of only a temporary trip home to family or tribal ground for protagonists who make their livelihoods elsewhere. Thus, Mori diaspora is portrayed contrastively rather than as integral to the local Mori community of each novel’s setting. Diaspora as difference and distance rather than indigenous continuity is also revealed in the titles of Tangi and The Return. The funeral wake is a temporary event and thus Tangi marks a brief caesura in Tama’s life in Wellington. Similarly, while the later novel documents another of Tama/ Tom’s returns to Waituhi, this, too, is a short break that, thanks to technology and communication, does not even disrupt the steady structure of his London life. While Tom in The Return and the younger Tama in Tangi successfully negotiate the dual Mori–urban, Mori–international responsibilities of their chosen paths within the time-frame of each novel’s setting, the reader is less convinced that these characters offer a general blueprint for a sustainable future in which Mori retain distinctive features of their cultural attachment while being simultaneously mobile. Bill Pearson’s 1982 response to Tangi



Ambivalent Indigeneity

185

first questions the viability of Ihimaera’s early fiction as a potentially redemptive template for Mori culture negotiating between urban centres and rural hap. The critic acknowledges the dramatic effect of Tama’s pledge to return to Waituhi after his father’s death to protect and provide for his mother and sisters. However, he finds that Ihimaera’s voice is neither convinced nor convincing, as Tama’s work-skills are located in a Wellington office, not on the family farm, and, with much of the whnau already dispersed, he will be hardpressed to cope on his own.63 In a prescient hypothesis, Pearson wonders whether Tama’s future is “to return to meet the challenge of the city, spiritually refreshed by the sense of whanaungatanga.”64 Contrasted with the intensely emotional portrayal of Moritanga in Tangi, the mature Tom’s more pragmatic expression of his Mori culture in The Return gives the impression that Pearson’s urban alternative is feasible. Indeed, Tama/ Tom’s siblings have resolved the lack of continuity criticized in the earlier novel, as they take on the family farm and support their mother, aided by Tom’s financial support and Mahana Wine’s business success. The impoverished Mori enclave of the earlier novel, peopled with the elderly and children, is now thriving. This, combined with Tom’s ability to organize his workload in order to return to Waituhi when necessary, allows the protagonist to proudly claim, as in the prequel, that he belongs to the iwi and that Waituhi and its marae remain “the place of the heart, the centre of my universe” (219). However, a similar criticism to that expressed by Pearson might be levelled at the utopian conclusion to The Return. Tom, like Ihimaera, belongs to a pivotal generation of Mori who were born in the pre-urban shift of rural communities in which tradition still dominated social structure, but who were educated, and today predominantly live, in urban national and international settings. Ihimaera first describes this crossing over as “to stride both worlds” in his 1973 Tangi, repeating the same scene in The Return as “to straddle” Pakeha and Mori cultural expectations (203). Just as Pearson notes a schism between the rural and the urban in the earlier work, a contemporary equivalent is apparent in the generation-gap between Tom/ Ihimaera and their children. Although Tom unequivocally declares that his heart belongs in Waituhi, it is unlikely that his children would make the same claim, as they grew up in a mixed marriage in a predominantly Pakeha cultural frame, and later chose international life-styles. Tom’s contact with his children, by telephone, is sporadic and 63 64

Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 172. “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 172.

186

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



rushed, as they go about their own lives travelling and working overseas. Even though Tom depicts this as an exciting, positive, irrefutably modern way of living, the repercussions of such individualism for Moritanga are unclear, as there is no sign that these young adults possess any sense of responsibility to their Mori whnau or Waituhi. Although Tom confidently declares that New Zealanders return like the godwits, and actually pleads with his son on the phone to visit his grandmother in Waituhi before she dies, this younger generation’s connection with place is tenuous because emotional and nostalgic rather than direct and continuous. Just as Pearson asks of the earlier Tama’s pledge to return, “who will he marry?”65 a similar question can be asked of Tom’s children: with their father living in London and their grandmother gone, whom will they visit? One can only imagine that Tom’s sisters’ children, brought up in Waituhi, are more likely candidates to carry on Mori cultural practices, both traditional, such as maintaining the meeting house, marae rituals, and prioritizing the family, and modern, such as in land claims, corporatization, and trust funds. Yet this is not certain, either, as the national trend for young people to travel and work abroad may lead them away in turn, as it did Tama. Ihimaera’s fiction to date centres on a Mori protagonist of his own hinge generation, and on story-lines that negotiate contemporary Moritanga informed by and situated in relation to history and the traditions of a past that is still in living memory. The absence of fully urban settings or young Mori characters with no recourse to a rural, tribal marae may hint at the limits of globalization, hybridization, and diaspora discourses as an expression of indigenous identity. Indeed, Ihimaera’s enthusiastic embracing of diaspora in The Return threatens a deep sense of rootedness in the land and with traditional Mori community that, for older generations, are keystones to their identity. On a personal level, Ihimaera expresses a sense of changing obligations to Moritanga when he compares his own stance, which he calls “essentialist,” with his children’s ambitions: it’s appropriate for me and my generation to take a more essentialist position on [Mori identity] than it would be for my daughters, because they live in a different reality. My daughters don’t come from Waituhi, they’ve always lived in Wellington, so they don’t have the same sort of historical imperative I feel, to put things right.66 65 66

Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 172. Shepheard, “The Storyteller,” 54.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

187

Ihimaera’s daughters are still Mori, but what this cultural registration means to them is different from their father’s understanding of his rights and duties as Mori. Ihimaera’s own family illustrates the generational shift from indigeneity as necessarily rooted in tradition and place, to a less circumscribed identity which Clifford calls indigenous diaspora. This contests one of the principal ideologies on which Mori sovereignty and the renaissance are founded, and on which the U N “Principles and Guidelines” charter is based: namely, that a person who is born Mori (indigenous) possesses an innate, genealogically determined cultural identity. To claim that there is a facet of Mori identity that escapes this rubric challenges the culture-centred basis of contemporary New Zealand’s biculturalism. It is contentious to claim that one chooses to be Mori, or that Mori is one compartmentalized aspect of a composite, plural identity that, as Clifford’s indigenous diaspora suggests, is potentially in tension with other aspects. However, the opportunities for detachment that globalization offers show the mechanism of this choice at work. With its presuppositions of movement that challenge cultural homogeneity and community responsibility in favour of multiplicity and individual free choice, globalization calls into question the assumption of cultural patriotism on which minority and indigenous identity depends. Ihimaera’s emphasis in The Return on professional and economic diaspora, moving for work and money, illustrates a facet of Mori identity that is not culturally defined or controlled. For the young, undifferentiated, entrepreneurial New Zealanders of The Return, the link to home is potentially insecure, as are the cultural foundations which foster a notion of home in the first place. The generation-gap is evident, for example, in a comparison of Ihimaera’s own international career and that of the majority of younger Mori. In 1986, Ihimaera’s New York experience prompts his claim of being Mori in the world. He interprets New York signs by calling on the cultural reference points, the whales and meeting-house patterns, with which he was surrounded during his childhood in rural Waituhi. Furthermore, his diplomatic role from 1972 to 1990 meant that he was consciously representing Mori and New Zealand during his travels, a role that extends to his status as celebrated national writer and that is evident, for example, in his publicity promotion for New Zealand tourism in his Whale Rider premiere speech. Ihimaera’s representative role stands in contrast to the vast majority of Mori and Pakeha who have moved to London, Sydney, and major cities in the U S A for purposes of study or work.

188

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



In London, the New Zealand Embassy’s Ngati Ranana Mori cultural group and urban marae centre welcomes Mori, Pakeha, and non-New Zealanders to participate in Mori cultural events and kapa haka. This ‘tribe’ is not based on whakapapa or a kaupapa intent on promulgating Moritanga as a whole way of living. Ngati Ranana’s function as one part of its members’ identities contrasts with the extensive infrastructure proposed by the Ngai Tahu Corporation – in effect, a privatized version of the social state – which offers everything the culture needs to survive and prosper, from underwriting housing loans to providing tertiary-education scholarships, from distributing learning media and books to creating work opportunities. In other words, Mori individuals can choose Ngai Tahu as a service provider. Distance again introduces the fact that for many Mori, both in New Zealand and overseas, their Moritanga is just one facet of the complex, multiple, composite layers which make up their personal identity. Both Ngati Ranana and Ngai Tahu, in different ways, reflect the success of the Mori-renaissance reclamation of traditional foundations on which to base newly traditional ways of being Mori: the former offers a compartmentalized and the latter a corporatized version of Mori culture. Both are indicative of the very real break that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century, which changed the direction in which Mori identity has developed. Whereas Ihimaera can claim to have been born a Mori because of the time and place of his generation, an ‘innate’ indigeneity based on a secure sense of turangawaewae that he may carry with him all over the world, this is not necessarily the case for post-urban-drift Mori. For many, self-identification is not so much a case of being born and brought up Mori as of (re)discovering Mori ancestry as an adult: Ngai Tahu advertises its services and Ngati Ranana is, for many Mori members, their first contact with the culture.

Eidolon and Ambivalence Both of the passages from Whanau II and The Return discussed above betray an uncertainty in Ihimaera’s stance: the terms ‘indigeneity’ and ‘diaspora’ not only lack the scope to account fully for Ihimaera’s vision of Moritanga, but also work against each other. In the extract from Whanau II, consecutive paragraphs register sudden shifts in the narrator’s stance towards his subjectmatter and his reader, while in The Return the same ambivalence is registered between consecutive sentences. Ihimaera’s oeuvre demonstrates an array of such inconsistencies that upset attempts to classify and contain his Mori



Ambivalent Indigeneity

189

voice. Ihimaera alludes to his shifting positionality with the image of the eidolon, which he defines as a projection of himself which both is and is not real: you make something and you put it there and it isn’t you, but it’s you [. . . ] my grandmother used to make this image of herself and send it out, which was different to the sort of person that she really was for us.67

Like his grandmother, Ihimaera is proud to be told, “Witi you don’t really exist, you’re just a concept.”68 The term ‘eidolon’ itself enacts its own fluidity: the concept is traceable to Plato, but Ihimaera equally describes it as a kind of hologram from Star Wars69 or, in an indigenous analogy, the trickster figure of Maui,70 or Tawhiri Matea, the wind, with which one elder described the writer: “We cannot grasp you because you are everywhere.”71 Eidolon’s notion of refracted reality is also applicable to Ihimaera’s different guises as author, narrator, and characters of his own texts. Eva Rask Knudsen’s study of the writer’s position in The Matriarch draws on studies by other European postcolonialists whose interpretations demonstrate several layers of eidolon at work in that novel. In a blurring of fact and fiction, Armando Jannetta posits that, for Ihimaera, “life and writing develop into an identical act,”72 while the text itself is a stitching-together of myths and histories that are not of Ihimaera’s invention but, rather, his writing of Mori oral narratives. For Joanne Tompkins, the way Ihimaera embodies plural perspectives makes the novelist a storyteller who “step[s] behind the tattooed face’ to inhabit the stories of his ancestors.73 By way of summary, Knudsen cites Jacqueline Bardolph’s observation that Ihimaera juxtaposes “various styles, modes and storytelling conventions – whether complementary or contradictory – as though it were impossible to narrate the history of his people, from their origins to the present, with one voice.”74 To register a gap between the ‘real’ Ihimaera and his authorship is to acknowledge and accept the plurality of his positions. By contrast with these European critics, many of Ihimaera’s Pakeha and Mori commentators attempt to collapse his fiction into the writ67

Ellis, “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 179. “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 180. 69 “ ‘ The Singing Word’,” 179. 70 Ihimaera, e-mail to Meklin; Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral, 61. 71 Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 296. 72 Jannetta, quoted in Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral, 340. 73 Joanne Tompkins, quoted in Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral, 339. 74 Bardolph, quoted in Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral, 339. 68

190

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



er’s own identity, a tendency exacerbated by Ihimaera’s central role in New Zealand letters, his editorial work, and the public knowledge of much of his personal life-style and background. The reception of Waituhi, Bilbrough’s critique of Sky Dancer, and several reviewers’ uncertainty about how to understand Ihimaera’s rewrites illustrate the confusion created when the author does not correspond to bicultural and postcolonial expectations. Indeed, each of these chapters has begun by describing the impact of bicultural biases on shaping the reception and perception of Ihimaera’s oeuvre: in New Zealand, Ihimaera’s identity and that of his fiction are one and the same, a fact that his own insistence on his eidolon character has done little to dispel. In a chapter entitled “Staged Marginalities,” Graham Huggan examines the common charge that minority identity, as described in ethnographic fiction, is staged and contrived rather than natural. The argument, perhaps most infamously played out in Karl Stead’s attack on Hulme’s Mori identity and the Maoriness she portrays in the bone people, replicates in a postcolonial literary context the same long-running dispute over the inventedness or naturalness of identities, particularly those of nation and tradition. Huggan’s position with regard to staged ethnicity is contentious, but one facet of his argument applicable to Ihimaera’s chameleon-like eidolon is his claim that all identities contain performative elements.75 He cites Judith Butler on the performativity of the gendered body, which constitutes meaning through corporeal signs and various acts that makes gender “always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.”76 Drawing on Hanif Kureishi’s work, Huggan reads postcolonial minority expression as also a matter of “doing.” In a similar signalling of cultural versions of cross-dressing and fetishes, Perry, in his chapter “Antipodean Camp,” describes instances of New Zealand “‘camping it up’,” fabricating performance of marginality while simultaneously signalling awareness of that act.77 Ihimaera’s regular self-contradiction gestures towards this kind of performance and awareness, in that the eidolon principle acknowledges that positioning is about projecting, an act that Perry conveys as “the style is the meaning.”78 As Ihimaera’s kaupapa affirms his committed engagement with many different aspects of Moritanga and its artistic expression, the staged nature of 75

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 95, fn 277. Judith Butler, quoted in Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 95. 77 Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 6. 78 Hyperreality and Global Culture, 6. 76



Ambivalent Indigeneity

191

eidolon entails that each change of context requires a change of position. Throughout his career, this has created an inconsistency of argument that Ihimaera does not seem uncomfortable with, and which, indeed, corroborates the writer’s insistence on the plurivocality of Mori cultural expression. For example, Pearson cites personal communication with Ihimaera in the 1970s to explain that the writer “had originally written the stories [Pounamu, Pounamu] with the aim of a wider audience and was a little disappointed” that the book was predominantly sold to schools.79 In 1998, Ihimaera excuses that same early work for not being complex enough for some critics, on the grounds that he wrote it expressly for the education market.80 Ihimaera’s stance towards the Mori language in Mori fiction in English is also ambivalent. In his introduction to Into the World of Light, an anthology which does not include a glossary of Mori terms, Ihimaera claims: “to expect all Maori writing in Maori to appear with English translation would be to fail to understand what is happening to New Zealand’s no longer monolingual literature.”81 In a 2003 newspaper interview about his rewriting The Whale Rider for an international edition, in which most of the Mori language and some New Zealand-specific cultural concepts are translated or changed, Ihimaera states his aim to “remov[e] barriers of understanding.”82 While the time-lag between these two stances might explain the apparent about-face, this is a less tenable argument in response to a more recent contradiction. By way of setting the scene for the outward-looking Mori culture expressed in The Uncle’s Story, the novel begins with a marae wedding for Michael’s sister and her casino-owning Texan boyfriend. The same scenario structures the story-line Ihimaera wrote for the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s 2006 production, The Wedding. In both cases, the American link is part of Ihimaera’s interest in expressing Mori and New Zealand openness to the world. Ihimaera’s opening-night speech for The Wedding voices this vision: From the very beginning we wanted to create a production that was stubbornly populist, indigenous, contemporary, that would be fun as well as Romantic and artistic and typically kiwi – a metaphor for this great wonder-

79

Pearson, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” 168. Williams, “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” 281–82. 81 Ihimaera, Into the World of Light, 4–5. 82 Boniface, “Unfinished Business,” E12. 80

192

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



ful squabbling multicultural and postcolonial tribal family of ours trying to find our future together down here at the bottom of the world.83

In stark contrast to this positive reading of cross-cultural relationships, Ihimaera takes the opposite view at the Canadian Indigenous Peoples’ conference. In an aside during his speech decrying the “burden” of the white mainstream on indigenous culture and its arts, and promoting alternative indigenous networks, Ihimaera recounts his feeling of concern at seeing his daughter with a rich Texan boyfriend, when he would rather she marry a Mori and stay at home.84 It is difficult to know how to respond to such an anecdote, delivered as a confessional, personal story and thereby expected to be heartfelt and serious. The notion of eidolon, however, projecting something that “isn’t you, but it’s you,” offers a way of understanding Ihimaera’s viewpoint not as a problematic contradiction in his own identity, but one tailored to fit each context. Throughout his career, similar contradictions abound across interviews, articles, and fiction, often by way of anecdote to demonstrate both personal and general points about Mori culture. The anecdote, an important feature of Mori oratory, is an ambivalent form of simile, one that blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction each time it is adapted to fit the everchanging current context. The effortless way in which Ihimaera shuttles between biography and fiction creates confusion over which stance – if any – is the original or real one, and certainly compounds the tendency for critics and readers to identify the writer closely with his fiction. In fact, Ihimaera’s fictional Waituhi is so well known in New Zealand that readers may easily confuse fiction for reality. Ihimaera tells how his nonagenarian father complains that some people seem surprised to see him: as the subject of Tangi, they assume that he is dead.85 This fuzziness works equally in reverse: one of his daughters summarizes his novels as “yet another of Daddy’s autobiographies masquerading as fiction.”86 Ihimaera relates being berated by one of his aunts for changing her name in

83

Ihimaera, Handwritten draft speech for The Wedding premiere, Wellington (2006), A2006/12. 84 Ihimaera, Interview and speech, Canadian First People’s Arts Conference, 24–27 September 1998. Conference Proceedings C D - R O M , A2002/39. 85 Ihimaera, personal communication. 86 Sharrad, “Listening to One’s Ancestors: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 8 (1992): 99.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

193

his portrayal of her in Whanau: she wanted everybody to recognize her.87 In Growing Up Maori, a collection of biographies, edited by Ihimaera, that includes many prominent Mori politicians, artists, and sports stars, his father’s story of his childhood and family essentially covers the main characters and historical events of The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer.88 In a Fulbright Alumni speech, Ihimaera recounts meeting young New Zealanders in a pub in London with a French friend, Jacques, whose comment, “Hélas, being a New Zealander is such an exquisite dilemma,” is also put into the mouth of Tama’s French girlfriend in the aforementioned pub scene in The Return.89 These examples suggest that Ihimaera’s kaupapa to “be a witness to my times”90 is intensely personal, drawing on his life experience as in many ways illustrative of the Mori world he writes about. In acknowledgements or author’s notes, the author expressly draws attention to real events that play a decisive role in his novels: The Uncle’s Story re-works his experience at a Canadian First People’s conference, Whanau II is inspired by Te Whanau A Kai’s Tribunal claim, and the closing sequence of The Rope of Man reformulates a B B C interview Ihimaera took part in. A close study from a Mori viewpoint of the interaction between fiction and non-fiction, through devices such as the anecdote, would shed welcome light on Ihimaera’s technique, which suggests an apparent lack of hierarchy in attributing truth-value and claiming originality, not to speak of distinguishing between pasts. Anecdote may be seen as a smaller-scale version of his later rewriting of early novels and short stories. Both kinds of reformulation, which are unexpected in the European literary tradition, may be coherent within a Mori cultural frame. Ihimaera’s constant recycling of his own fiction, and of his life experiences and those of his friends and family, into his fiction may be one way of contextualizing evidence of plagiarism in The Trowenna Sea. A literary magpie, Ihimaera has always borrowed liberally from both his own fiction and his life, as well as from those of others, often verbatim and only sometimes acknowledged. Certainly, this is not problematic when it pertains to his own words, and one can only guess whether or not his friends and family accept his use of 87

Ihimaera, Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand. Growing Up Maori, ed. Ihimaera (Auckland: Tandem, 1998): 64–71. 89 Ihimaera, “New Zealand Dreams, Pacific Destinies”; The Rope of Man, 180. 90 Findlay, “Heralding the New Tribe,” 77; Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand. 88

194

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



their life experiences for his own ends. Although literary borrowings run up against the shady question of plagiarism, debate about the acceptability of artistic copying tends to focus on moral rights rather than on legal definitions of breach of copyright.91 In effect, it is the author’s and critics’ response to the copying that attributes a positive image of generative intertextuality or a negative image of deviousness or lack of skill. Whereas Ihimaera defended his use of encyclopedia excerpts in The Matriarch as a political, decolonizing strategy, he took the opposite stance with regard to The Trowenna Sea, apologizing and making efforts to redeem “the mana and the integrity of the book.”92 This change of approach mirrors that, cited earlier, of changing the Mori and New Zealand-specific vocabulary in The Whale Rider. Ihimaera’s apologetic stance is also one familiar position amidst a range of equally sincere stances he takes in describing his role as a Mori writer. The writer’s shifting stances and the long international history of intertextuality together validate The Trowenna Sea as a typical Ihimaera text, part of a continuing recycling of the author’s life and life work. Indeed, throughout the novel, images and symbols, such as the pounamu land, the mackerel sky, and the rope of man, along with narrative structures, such as the elder recounting tribal history to her mokopuna or grandchild, and the heightening effect of tragic-opera citations, are familiar from earlier Ihimaera fiction. The story-line from Ihimaera’s 1991 libretto The Clio Legacy, women’s narratives of the long sea journey from the U K to New Zealand, is similarly aired afresh in the novel (64–69), and the matriarch, Riripeti Mahana, also makes a cameo appearance (505). Ihimaera’s own comment, “if you are born a Maori you die a Maori,” becomes a speech by the kuia during the ceremony to repatriate Hohepa’s remains to his Whanganui iwi (494). In addition to over fifty resources Ihimaera cites as research material for The Trowenna Sea (which includes those texts from which he plagiarizes), the meeting of Trucanini and Hohepa also asks readers to consider the Mori historical novel alongside Mudrooroo’s Aborigine perspective of the period. The Trowenna Sea, a novel based on history and real geographical locations rather than a wholly 91

In a discussion of possible outcomes for an eventual court case against Helen Darville for plagiarism in The Hand That Signed the Paper, Mathew Rimmer usefully considers the differing interpretations of plagiarism in literary, legal, and media contexts. Rimmer, “The Demidenko Affair: Copyright law, plagiarism and ridicule,” Media & Arts Law Review (September 2000): 159–76. 92 Ihimaera, quoted in Guy Somerset, “The Incredible Likeness of Being,” The Listener (14 November 2009): 19.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

195

imagined world, just like those novels centred on the real place Waituhi, unavoidably consists of a great deal of recycled material from multiple sources. The difference between The Trowenna Sea and Waituhi novels is that Ihimaera can borrow freely from family and tribal history without public accusations of unfair copying. Another facet of eidolon, present in the idea of constantly shifting perspectives and contexts, is the ludic sense of shiftiness in the unreliable author, narrator, and character. The short story “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” (2005), exemplifies the performative, mask-like projective eidolon of Ihimaera’s fiction and identity.93 In the opening pages of “Meeting Elizabeth Costello,” the narrator aggressively reiterates postcolonial issues of displacement and marginalization, taking sides against a white Australian writer, Elizabeth Costello, whose Australian voice he brushes off as synonymous with the canonical English tradition.94 The reader is unsure about how to react to the character’s overt posturing, an uncertainty compounded by the suspected eidolon presence of the writer himself, as the Mori narrator, Wicked Ihimaera, might just also be the author, who shares this nickname.95 The narrator’s conference lecture spins through the range of postcolonial angles that have become the staple of analyzing indigeneity, speaking in impassioned clichés which are brought to a resounding finale: “When will we stop exhibiting all the classic symptoms of the Divided Self? Only when we stop feeding off the white breast” (293). Both characterization and plot feel suspiciously too neat and, indeed, the whole story is thrown into question at the end when Elizabeth Costello is revealed to be a man in drag:

93

On another level of recycling, the story was first anthologized in The Best New Zealand Fiction 2 before appearing in Ihimaera’s own short-story collection Ask the Posts of the House (2007), in which three stories were previously published and the others were reworked for the collection from Ihimaera’s notes for various abandoned projects. Author’s notes, in Ask the Posts of the House (Auckland: Reed, 2007): 295– 307. It is interesting to note that most of Ihimaera’s books contain an author’s note, each of which contextualizes the story’s genesis, time, and place of writing, as well as acknowledging sources. The author’s notes give a strong feeling that Ihimaera wants to communicate with the reader: to both explain his life in writing and his writing in life. 94 Ihimaera, “Meeting Elizabeth Costello,” in Ask the Posts of the House, 284–86. Further page references are in the main text. 95 The nickname “Wicked” Ihimaera is used by both Ihimaera and friends in letters and emails in Ihimaera’s archives.

196

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



In the mirror is reflected the image of somebody who appears to be Elizabeth Costello. But is it? Whoever it is, is putting a wig on their head and slipping into female drag. There’s more to our Elizabeth than meets the eye. At that moment, the whole history of western literature suddenly clicks into place. Why had [Wicked] never seen it before? Appalling and chilling though it is, it all starts to make sense to him. (294)

The story’s final lines add another level of interpretative difficulty for the reader, who, from the outset, seeks in the story the point of connection with J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello. While in Coetzee’s book the questions that the eponymous protagonist grapples with, and fails to resolve, are concerned with aestheticism, the art of fiction, and the value of the novel form as social commentary, in Ihimaera’s story the questions seem to remain on the level of identity – which Wicked appears to have answered with postcolonial theory. Yet the final lines obscure the apparently emphatic message. The text’s final ambiguity holds up a quite literal mirror to identity, the distorted reflection of which recalls the final section of Coetzee’s novel, on the harm done by literary clichés to the writer’s individuality.96 Ihimaera’s short story suggests the need to question postcolonial clichés on several levels. Perry’s cultural-studies framework sheds light on how to approach “Meeting Elizabeth Costello,” in his description of a Japanese television car advertisement which “play[s] with the frame” of the audience’s expectations of advertising clichés.97 The apparently inverted gender roles – the woman in the couple is behind the wheel rather than the man – segues into ambiguous gender roles when it is revealed that the ‘man’ is also a crossdressing woman.98 The parallels with Ihimaera’s short story are evident, as is 96

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (New York: Viking, 2003):

206–209. 97

Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 86. In a way, Coetzee was writing in drag, and playing with the contexts of fiction and fact, in his original presentation of the persona of Elizabeth Costello, in The Lives of Animals (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999), a curious and enthralling composite text in which Coetzee, himself a consummate novelist-as-public-lecturer, delivers two (real) Tanner Lectures at Princeton that recount, as fictions, events and arguments about animal rights generated by the consummate novelist-as-public-lecturer Elizabeth Costello. The content of these ‘lectures’ is then explored in detail by five philosophers, including the animal-ethics theorist Peter Singer. The narrational slippage between 98



Ambivalent Indigeneity

197

the relevance of Perry’s analysis, in its emphasis, like Ihimaera’s eidolon, on performativity and the changeability of identity: [the commercial] not only insinuates that each role consists of a repertoire of gestures rather than the manifestation of an essence. It also implies that their actual allocation is arbitrary and interchangeable, so that either party could have played the other part, or played the same part another way.99

What is striking here is how clearly a role’s signification resides in the eyes of the beholder rather than the actor, an arbitrariness that is revealed by the speed with which the boundaries and meanings of one role change as soon as the viewer’s frame is shifted. Throughout Ihimaera’s story, the postcolonial reader has no difficulty accepting the validity of Wicked’s oppositional stance in order to confront Costello’s haughty claim that there is no such thing as indigenous literature (284). In the instant in which she is revealed to be a man in drag, however, that oppositionality is subverted, as her (his) provocative antagonism becomes one of a repertoire of gestures: Costello is playing a game with Ihimaera the character, and Ihimaera the author is playing a game with the reader. Perry’s multiple interpretations of the car advertisement might equally fit an analysis of Ihimaera’s short story. If the reader believes that Wicked seriously supports his impassioned plea for the total divorce of indigenous literature from the Western canon, then the story propagates the Mori challenge and subversion of English literature. If, on the other hand, the reader doubts the sincerity of either the narrator or the main character, or both, then the ironic distance this generates turns the story into a symbolic challenge to postcolonial pigeonholing that expects such a show of protest. Or, to take Perry’s reading of Barthes, Wicked Ihimaera does not play the Mori, or copy him, but only signifies Mori, “and hence acts as a sign of pure difference,”100 a ghostly figure, in Deleuze’s terms that, like the eidolon, is only as solid as the immediate context which constructs him. Finally, though, Perry finds that the advertisement’s most plausible interpretation is as a joke rather than as serious commentary: “it might be read as a ‘pleasurable’ contempo-

Coetzee and Costello is uncanny, and Coetzee also allows Costello to crop up in other novels by him apart from Elizabeth Costello, in which the two “Lectures” become chapters (or “Lessons”) 3 and 4. 99 Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 86–89. 100 Hyperreality and Global Culture, 91.

198

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



rary articulation of the enduring tensions between socially distinct subject positions and the discrete readings which they sanction.”101 To interpret some Mori fiction, such as “Meeting Elizabeth Costello,” but also Sky Dancer, as fun and playful as opposed to containing a core of serious socio-political truth does not mean that such fiction is less important, or that Ihimaera’s eidolon trickster side is any less valuable for the exploration of a full range of Mori cultural expression. As Perry points out, humour can reveal enduring tensions because it occupies a liminal site that breaks down the possibility of discrete readings. Indeed, the humour in Ihimaera’s fiction is a severely under-explored element of his oeuvre. As the writer says, by way of explaining the impulse behind his novel Bulibasha, New Zealand literature has a history of taking itself seriously: I was sick of reading novels that were always tragic or depressing. New Zealand fiction can be very myopic, always dealing with its buttonhole! I wanted this book to be humorous, to have some fun. I think New Zealanders have lost a sense of fun.102

Perry labels acts that mark their difference from reality as exotic, which is not, as it is for Huggan, a sign of the indigenous moving towards a westernized view of itself but, rather, an important position that registers distinct and difficult difference. Thus the exotic is “positioned somewhere between inscrutability and condescension along one axis, and between delight and apprehension on another.”103 This neatly summarizes the available reading positions for “Meeting Elizabeth Costello.” The story’s final sentences are inscrutable, which leads to apprehension in the reader, who no longer knows how to interpret Elizabeth’s stance, and so, by extension, cannot remain convinced that Wicked’s militancy is not deflated by this revelation. On a pan-textual level, the Pakeha reader and commentator register the same sense of apprehension in categorizing parts of Ihimaera’s work as irony, parody or satire, such as Wicked’s confrontational anti-imperialism, or the farcical episodes with the Mori kuia in Sky Dancer: to insist that these characters are not to be taken seriously risks condescension, and this carries echoes of the negative stereotypes of Mori as happy-go-lucky and lacking a sense of social responsibility, characterizations that have not been recorded in New Zealand since Mori sovereignty and the renaissance. 101

Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 91. Amery, “Stepping Out: Witi Ihimaera’s New Direction,” 13. 103 Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 91. 102



Ambivalent Indigeneity

199

As with most satiral fiction, the author’s ambivalent narrative stance indicates the presence of a critique. As an oblique satire of postcolonial – here indigenous – rhetoric, “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” subverts the more radical, separatist expression of Mori sovereignty. While in Whanau II and at the Canadian First-Peoples’ conference, for example, Ihimaera is serious about indigenous rights to vocalize special specificity, “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” slyly – or perhaps shyly – criticizes such a position: the figure of Elizabeth suggests other forms of alterity that choose to remain hidden. The ridiculing of over-inflated seriousness is also directed at Pakeha reading positions, playing on the sincerity with which the sensitive postcolonial reader approaches any minority text expressing a painful battle for recognition. Mark Williams suggests that such acting has been around a long time, citing a Mori ‘war party’ visit to England in the late 1800s in which the Mori exploit English assumptions about native savagery: “[Mori] perform the stereotypical expectations of Maori behaviour to amuse themselves and to mock those who would imprison them in an atavistic fantasy.”104 In another, contemporary, context connected with the fervent but changeable Mori relation to whales, whaling, and ecology, Chris Prentice also suggests a possible non-seriousness in the way Mori support cultural claims by adopting or discarding Western values to suit.105 Ihimaera’s eidolon shape-changing allows him to alternate between positions towards his Mori subject and Mori and Pakeha/Western readership, often in many more complex and contradictory ways than Mori and New Zealand literary commentary has accounted for. Perry’s comment on the audience’s response to the ambiguous postures in the Japanese car commercial may be applied to the reader’s response to “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” and, at a remove, to Ihimaera’s ambiguous, ambivalent multi-positionality: a reading which approaches them solely in terms of their articulation of, and continuity with, extant local meanings, can achieve closure only by (over) emphasizing either their matter-of-factness or their ineffable mystery. It is, however, just because they tack back and forth between the(ir) exotic and the(ir) familiar, with a concomitant making of new meanings, that they make claims on our attention.106

104

Williams, “On the Beach,” 341. Prentice, “Transcultures and the Right Use of Whales,” 96. 106 Perry, Hyperreality and Global Culture, 91. 105

200

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Ihimaera’s eidolon challenges the reification of his fiction and his role as representative of a singular, comprehensive Mori world-view. Similarly, the image of the cross-dressing actors in the Japanese car commercial pose questions about reality and fiction. The advertisement looks like a fancy-dress play; however, the fact that this non-Western culture has very different notions about masculinity and femininity from those in the West, and the long history of Japanese blurring of fantasy role play and reality in such expression as cosplay and visual kei, troubles such a neat resolution. The limits of acceptability of Ihimaera’s borrowing are similarly contingent on perspective and culturally conditioned notions of acceptability. Throughout his career, Ihimaera has constantly plagiarized himself and others, tacking back and forth between original and recycled ideas and expression, offering a repertoire of possibilities rather than one cohesive, well-researched, and well-integrated life-world.  An analysis of transnational and diasporic postcolonial communities reveals the unique, if not problematic, position that indigenous literature occupies in the larger postcolonial category and its theory, by noticing other contemporaneous practices of identity and cultural formation. An emphasis on movement and adaptability in the world of migration and diasporic dual- or multinationality deconstructs the local and the foreign to reveal that they are not binary or mutually exclusive. This leads Chelva Kanaganayakam to argue, in the context of South-East Asian origins and identity, that it is neither necessary nor desirable to draw one’s boundaries around a single and singularly conceived community or nation, as “the diasporic writer is one for whom belonging and citizenship occupy different spaces.”107 Such configurations of issues of minority culture, identity, and belonging are, however, problematized by indigenous groundedness in the etymological ‘natios’ of nation and native, literally ‘born into’ the land. Certainly, Mori writers’ ongoing (re) writing of the themes, styles, and perspectives common to Mori fiction of the early bicultural period suggests a unique place for indigenous literature in the broad category of postcolonial fiction and theory.

107

Kanaganayakam, “Configuring a Typology for South Asian Short Fiction,” in Tropes and Territories: Postcolonial Short Fiction, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queens U P , 2007): 56–57.



Ambivalent Indigeneity

201

Uncertainty about how to read Ihimaera’s work such as “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” and The Rope of Man betrays a common expectation, on the part of both Mori and Pakeha, that culture and identity are anchored to place and discrete from other aspects of society, particularly economics. This is most evident in the difficulty of interpreting the growing Mori interest in corporatization and delocalization that global capitalism and increased movement facilitate. The same concern is apparent in literary commentary. Evans’s critique of Mori fiction of the early 2000s, which, he finds, caters to a predominantly Western readership, is (as I have already indicated) representative of deep-seated expectations that postcolonial literature ought to depict its cultural difference through structure, language, and subject-matter. This debate is well worked over by critics such as Huggan, English, and Casanova, who argue that minority writers are conditioned by the mainstream publishing industry which shapes postcolonial literature for a global market. Contradicting such a view, the deep-seated ideology of indigeneity, which may underlie Mori writers’ sense of obligation to foster the inherently nationalist tropes of cultural groundedness, indicates that the parameters of Mori fiction remain, to a certain extent, tied to cultural and group prerogatives rather than purely aesthetic and individual motivations. In response to the pervasiveness of a rather rigid concept of Mori culture (and thus its literature as well) as singular and identifiable in recent configurations of New Zealand society, Hal Levine argues for the recognition of cultural plurality: all people have ways of life and sets of experiences that are variable, changeable and dynamic [. . . ]. The non-essentialist view of culture, which emphasises its multiple sources and increasing fluidity, helps to counter the idea that it is something owned and controlled.108

While the sociologist’s focus on the individual is problematic in public and official conceptions of culture which require identifiable parameters, his emphasis on fluidity might apply to Mori fiction. His description of culture as something that cannot be owned and controlled accepts the non-representational nature of an individual identity. This legitimates Ihimaera’s eidolon persona, evident in his literature’s vacillating position towards Mori culture as alternately hermetic or open to influence. Work such as the conflicting two parts of The Rope of Man and the satirical “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” implies that not even Wicked / Witi Ihimaera owns and controls Mori expres108

Hal Levine, “Moving Beyond Cultural Essentialism,” 115.

202

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



sion and interpretation, which at every moment threaten to escape with each new, surprising, and unpredictable turn. In the author’s shifting, contradictory positions in his fiction and in public interviews, which are nonetheless each projected as truthful and heartfelt, Ihimaera suggests that the only authenticity for Mori culture and its literary expression is the here and now, wherever and whatever that might be. In a literary equivalent to Levine’s reservations, Huggan queries Western reluctance to allow indigenous writers the liberty to detach their cultures from a singular, representative stance: “Why the critical hesitation to see indigenous writing in terms of a multiplicity of speakers, a complex tracery of shifting personae, identities and subject positions?”109 Huggan’s question challenges the Western notion of singularity of identity, a point also made by several Caribbean writers and theorists. As Patrick Chamoiseau puts it, unicité, or a singularity, permanence, and fixity of culture and identity, is a Western construct, which applies neither to the identity nor to the creative vision of the Caribbean.110 Wilson Harris, too, advocates the creoleness of creative, racial, and ethnic mixing. Shying away from what he calls the “consolidation” of West Indian identity, Harris challenges the need to channel identity into simplified homogeneous or hierarchical categories through an exclusionist approach to roots, tradition, and artistic influences.111 In his eidolon persona, already present in Mori tradition as the trickster figure Maui or Tawhiri Matea, Ihimaera embodies Huggan’s shifting personae, identities, and subject-positions, advocating, in effect, the ungraspable, generative creativity of Harris’s subjective imagination. One proviso that mediates support for concepts of plurality, creolity, diaspora, and transculturation is the failure of such terms to account accurately for the very real imbalance of power that remains an issue for many, if not most, minorities. The need for postcolonial studies to remain vigilant to struggle and resistance, yet also to incorporate new directions for the discipline, lies at the heart of Rerouting the Postcolonial, an important collection which

109

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 175. Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard folio, 1997): 212. 111 Wilson Harris, “Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization” (1998), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. A.J.M. Bundy (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 248–60; “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination” (1973), in Harris, Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966– 1981, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (1971; Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1981): 57–67. 110



203

Ambivalent Indigeneity

brings together many of postcolonialism’s pioneering and leading scholars. As the editors note, the essays seek to reconnect (and reroute) the ethical and the political with the aesthetic in the context of a recent ‘turn to the affective’ in cultural criticism as well as a new strand of affirmative utopianism associated with spatiality, mobility and the imaginary.112

Many of the essays are critical, or at least wary, of the language of globalization and cosmopolitanism, which are challenged by communities, perspectives, and literatures that register difference from and often even indifference to such theories’ expected outcomes. Belief in the maintenance of an element of social purpose in postcolonial literature acknowledges the ongoing need for writing back in indigenous fiction. Indeed, other indigenous literatures in English show the same propensity as Mori fiction to shuttle between writing that continually recalls their cultural and artistic differences, and that which is not evidently indigenous. Although Mudrooroo is critical of factual depictions of aboriginality, which he calls “lifestories,”113 and even shrugs off expectations to write about aboriginality,114 key texts by Aboriginal writers, such as Kim Scott’s Benang, continue to make strong socio-political points through literature. In Canadian First-Nations fiction, Eden Robinson’s acclaimed first collection of short stories, Traplines, does not display its indigeneity. While this was marked as a departure in Canadian indigenous fiction, her first novel, Monkey Beach, returns to contemporary socio-political issues facing the Haisla community. Ihimaera’s alternation between local indigenous and global diasporic positions is thus perhaps typical rather than exceptional. In its concept of shifting selfhood(s), his eidolon persona plays out contemporary uncertainties about both individual and tribal attachment(s) to community, nation, and the world. 

112

“General Introduction” to Rerouting the Postcolonial, 2. Mudrooroo, The Indigenous Literature of Australia, 180. 114 Mudrooroo, “Tell Them You’re Indian,” 263–64. 113

Conclusion —— Composite Identity and Literature

I

HIMAERA’S CONSTANTLY CHANGING

and often surprising fiction shifts between alternate positions, marked, at one end of the spectrum, by his highly respected and respectful Mori traditionalism in the tropes of indigenous difference and, at the other extreme, by his experimentation with genre and internationalism. Ihimaera’s shifting eidolon relationship with Mori culture, as illustrated by the positions he takes with respect to indigeneity and diaspora, serves as a model for an understanding of Mori cultural identity and its artistic expression as multiple and composite. By virtue of his respected status and role as spokesman and ambassador for Moritanga, Ihimaera’s fiction is equally well received by a Mori, New Zealand, and international public, each identifying with different aspects of his work. The reception and interpretation of the film Whale Rider illustrates the plurality of responses that Ihimaera’s work generates. Several magazine articles following in the wake of the film’s success focus on a Mori emphasis, centering on Ihimaera’s East-Coast whakapapa and whnau, and also the significant contribution to both Mori sovereignty and renaissance in the political-activist and

206

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



acting career of Rawiri Paratene, who played the elder, Koro, in the film.1 On a national level, the film’s success prompted articles featuring the unique New Zealand scenery – for example, in an Air New Zealand magazine article promoting East-Coast tourism with the heading “Whalerider Country.”2 The film was also employed as illustrative of unique features of the national character. The striking photograph on the cover of The Listener to celebrate the national magazine’s sixty-fifth anniversary sums up the strong emphasis on cultural identity that persists in New Zealand. Beneath the heading “Nation Far Walking” – a reference to Ihimaera’s play Woman Far Walking – Keisha Castle– Hughes, the Mori schoolgirl plucked from the classroom by Whale Rider’s talent scouts, dances in a paddock with a famed rugby player, the ex-All Black Colin Meads. According to the journalist, the cover symbolizes a picture of the New Zealand that has been written about in this magazine over the years: the rugged land, its people, their cultures, passions and stories. These two – in their differences, but also their similarities – represent the past, future and, as the coming pages display, the shaping of our country.3

The article is written firmly in the tropes of cultural nationalism. On an international level, the professional Mori actor Cliff Curtis, who in Whale Rider plays Paikea’s German-based Mori artist father, Porourangi, comes closest to representing Ihimaera’s world-savvy metro Mori. The actor’s career has been predominantly overseas, playing roles for brown minorities, including Colombians, Mexicans, Arabs, and a Chechen. Ihimaera also accentuates the film’s international reach, recounting how the film has proven inspirational for young women around the world: I just enjoy the fact that the film is now in the Middle East. [. . . ] In Israel all of these people were just watching this movie about a young girl who could have been an Arab girl. It was a great honour to receive recently a transcript of a speech of a young woman in American Samoa who was inspired to go into politics from the movie because Pai’s story was her story.4

1

Philip Matthews, “Rawiri Paratene,” The Listener (7 February 2004): 12–13; Shepheard, “Making Waves,” 80–87. 2 Tim Wilson, “Whalerider Country,” Air New Zealand (nd): 35–43, A2004/37. 3 Tim Watkin, “Nation Far Walking,” The Listener (10 July 2004): 10. 4 Ihimaera, interview with Kim Hill, National Radio.



Conclusion: Composite Identity and Literature

207

Together these interpretations reflect valid aspects of modern Moritanga, on local, national, and international levels. In their careers, from Paratene’s role as respected elder, Castle–Hughes as a model of bicultural upbringing and education, to Curtis’s professional internationalism, Whale Rider’s actors embody facets of Moritanga that are traditionalist, nationalist, and transnationalist. Even so, as demonstrated throughout the present book, these categories are socially constructed and based on general characteristics of similarity that are constantly (in)formed by corresponding difference: they are not discrete entities, but permeable and interactive. Like Ihimaera, each of these Mori assumes different positions in different situations, registering a dialectical slide, rather than a solid crossingover, from indigenous to diasporic, local to global. Thus, the long-time Mori-rights campaigner Paratene recounts casting opportunities in London and Los Angeles, and a recent job in Australia playing the role of an Amerindian,5 the rural schoolgirl, Castle–Hughes, now auditions in Los Angeles, and the expatriate Curtis welcomes his role in Whale Rider as a rare opportunity to spend some time at home and support New Zealand-made films. Their ease with various expressions of their Moritanga supports Clifford’s view of a complex and flexible indigenous identity, which calls on family, tribal, national, and international networks of belonging, depending on the context. Composite identity equally relates to the complex nature of a literary work, made evident by multiple interpretative strategies, as illustrated by the different Mori, national, and international receptions of Whale Rider. That the film was embraced by all audiences suggests different ways of seeing, a pluralism likewise manifest in Ihimaera’s original and international versions of his novel The Whale Rider. The earlier edition epitomizes biculturalism, with its Mori language, New Zealand idioms, Mori myth, local history, and national issues of the 1980s. It supports the case for Mori literature as defined by culture-specific innovations in its unique style and structure as well as its story-line. On the other hand, Caro’s film and Ihimaera’s modified international edition translate the local elements for a non-local audience. As Paratene puts it with regard to the film, “the Maori parts of the story are too foreign for Americans. [... ] Americans related to the spiritual things, those things that were universal.”6 In promoting the film overseas, Ihimaera draws 5 6

Matthews, “Rawiri Paratene,” 12. Matthews, “Rawiri Paratene,” 12.

208

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



attention to these universal aspects, especially the young heroine’s inspirational determination to overcome adversity. The coexistence of the two written editions, and the film’s diverse interpretations by Mori, New Zealand, and international audiences, takes away the essentialist, either–or argument that renders contradictory Ihimaera’s alternate stances defending either traditionalism or cultural openness. As he puts it in The Return, in connection with Tom’s autobiography, The book had been successful in the U K and New Zealand, making the bestseller lists in both countries – but for different reasons. New Zealanders loved the first half about my growing up in Aotearoa. British readers preferred the second half about my life as an international television correspondent and anchorman. (251)

Here, Ihimaera points to the peculiar ability of fiction to speak to multiple audiences, a point which equally brings to mind Said’s claim regarding the worldliness of the text, generating multiple readings contingent on changing times and analytical modes. Ihimaera recycles, rewrites, and comments on Mori culture and literature in different ways to suit different audiences, supporting Mori sovereignty, biculturalism, all-inclusive nationalism, and globalization. To accept that Ihimaera’s fiction speaks on different levels to different readerships recalls Rushdie’s claim, with regard to writing Midnight’s Children, that he tried to create images and symbols which have different resonances for Indian and Western readers. In particular, Rushdie calls attention to influences of Indian traditions on the novel which are generally overlooked by Western literary criticism, including mythology, oral narratives, history, and approach to family.7 In a Mori context, Chadwick Allen similarly enumerates different interpretations of and responses to Mori cultural expression on the part of Mori and cultural outsiders. His methodology invites us to read particular literary and activist texts as responses to the multiple motivations for their creation and, potentially, as co-creators of the multiple contexts of their reception – local, national, and global – rather than to focus on their conformity or lack of conformity to a given set of standards.8

7

Rushdie, “Lecture,” Kunapipi (1985): 6–9. Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2002): 12. 8



Conclusion: Composite Identity and Literature

209

The plurality of interpretation that Allen finds in Mori cultural displays9 and Te Ao Hou fiction10 challenges New Zealand’s standard reading of Mori cultural and literary expression. Similarly, the range of Ihimaera’s international literary influences, in such work as Waituhi, The Matriarch, and Sky Dancer, and techniques of Mori modernity, in The Uncle’s Story and The Return, challenges the systematic culture-centred interpretation of his work. The emphasis on sovereignty and renaissance aspects of Ihimaera’s fiction suggests that the shape attributed to Mori fiction comes more from the reader than from limitations and biases in the texts themselves. Indeed, the author’s eidolon persona and constant experimentation reveal an imaginary that is difficult to contain through expectations of bicultural difference or a definable Maoriness. The text analyses throughout Striding Both Worlds flesh out both sides of the nationalist–internationalist (perceived) dichotomy by emphasizing features that Mori culture and literature share with others. The distance of an historical and international viewpoint illuminates aspects of cross-culturality masked by the metonymic function of Maoriness in New Zealand, which imagines Mori cultural expression, as well as an individual’s identity, as constructed out of Mori values and traditions that are profoundly different from those of Pakeha. Rather, the journey from the 1973 Tangi to its 2005 sequel, The Return, from the nationalism of this book’s first chapter to the globalization and indigenous diaspora of the last, embodies the broad parameters of Mori literature. Tangi’s mystic, lyrical voice, recourse to myth, and unique structure incarnate the nationalistic features of a Mori imaginary expounded by the Mori renaissance push for cultural specificity and recognition in the 1970s and 1980s. At the opposite end of the scale, The Return is equally a product of its times, promoting an outward-looking sense of Mori culture made possible by the major shift in the national framework over the past thirty years. Nonetheless, the opposing halves of The Rope of Man intimate that national and international biases cohabit with difficulty. Globalization and diaspora challenge the very foundational precepts of the nation based on cohesion, solidity, unity, and singularity of belonging. In contemporary New Zealand, reading practices, heavily indebted to national, bicultural, and postcolonial optics, diminish the value – and in some cases even challenge the validity 9

Allen, Blood Narrative, 12–14. Blood Narrative, 54–56.

10

210

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



– of an international, cross-cultural approach to Mori fiction. However, increasing doubt from commentators in the social sciences that biculturalism can provide adequate frameworks within which to account for all contemporary socio-cultural interaction perhaps signals the closing stages of this period. Similarly, a new generation of Mori writers, such as Morris, Morey, George, and Tawhai, is offering fiction that is both outward-looking and international in scope and subject-matter, a trend paralleled in Pakeha fiction, which increasingly chooses not to display its New Zealandness. The past ten years or so have involved a shift in New Zealand’s relationship to its fiction as literary nationalism mellows into a more permeable frontier featuring transnational interaction. While certainly marking an end to a developmental phase in New Zealand, this change sits comfortably within Casanova’s account of a quasi-international trend in literary development for “literary legitimacy,”11 one that is, nonetheless, always vigorously contested.12 Her proposition that contestation is always at work in any sort of cultural or artistic change is played out in the Mori reluctance to relax the boundaries that define Mori cultural expression, in the backlash against Pakeha claims to indigeneity, in criticism of Pakeha who write about Mori or direct Mori films, and it is apparent in Ihimaera’s wavering between adopting a Mori voice speaking for Moritanga, enacting the well-known tropes of a literature of race relations, and a voice that does not display a Mori identity but is interested in different, perhaps international, subject-matter and genres. A similar contestation is at work on the national level, in the debate over the impact of creative-writing courses on the form of New Zealand literature.13

11

Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 11. The World Republic of Letters, 58. 13 The debate was led by Evans in a series of articles from 2001–2004 criticizing new New Zealand writing issuing from creative-writing schools in Auckland and Wellington. In particular, he criticizes a trend in fiction involved in postmodern play and with an eye on the international, so that New Zealandness is superficial rather than fully imagined. “The Baby Factory,” The Listener (16 August 2003): 50–53; “Great Expectations,” Landfall 202 (November 2001): 173–77; “Spectacular Babies: The Globalisation of New Zealand Fiction,” Kite 22 (May 2002): 4–14. New Zealand writers and critics who argue against Evans include Bill Manhire, Tim Corballis and Chris Price, and Damien Wilkins, “True Tales from the Fiction Workshop,” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 20–32. 12



Conclusion: Composite Identity and Literature

211

Ihimaera’s shifting positions towards Mori writing and Mori identity, and the New Zealand reluctance to place equal emphasis on Mori and Western aesthetic and cultural influences in his work, reveal the difficulty – perhaps even impossibility – of simultaneously addressing the disparate aims of Mori, national, postcolonial, and global demands for literature. Indeed, these discourses often appear theoretically incompatible: Mori sovereignty precludes ‘one-nation’ nationalism; the postcolonial privileging of the minority writer works against the reader-centred understanding of world literature as pure entertainment; diaspora and globalization contradict indigenous and national specificity. Faced with the difficulty of interpreting Ihimaera’s oeuvre through these persuasive but contradictory theoretical perspectives, the technique of translation is useful, in that it illuminates these tensions rather than attempting to supplant one by another. Clifford’s concept of cross-cultural translation identifies a process that simultaneously keeps in view essentialist and anti-essentialist elements, such as tradition and modernity, authenticity and hybridity, roots and routes. Peter Shand’s study of translating Mori motifs and designs from a local cultural environment to an international commercial context is equally applicable to fiction. He acknowledges that translation involves notions of “fidelity and licence [...] creat[ing] an antagonistic but not irreconcilable tension.”14 For Shand, translation is a kind of appropriation, but one which understands that detaching the object from its original context does not displace or replace that original meaning, which remains intact in its original cultural setting. Instead, translation adds another meaning, a copy that may exist side by side with the original. From this perspective, Ihimaera’s technique of recontextualizing key events in different texts, and of resituating the texts themselves in the process of rewriting, even, perhaps, his extensive borrowing, are all forms of translation. Contrary to a fear that Ihimaera’s more recent, internationally oriented fiction risks eclipsing his earlier Mori-nationalist fiction, his change of context simply draws attention to a potential conflict of interest between the local and the global, the Mori and the international. Like the polystyrene and fibreglass waka of Whale Rider, which confidently displays its departure from traditional practices, standing, quite literally, alongside a real waka on the Ngati Konohi marae, Ihimaera’s Whanau II and The Rope of Man sit on the bookshelf alongside Whanau and Tangi. The manner in which translation multi14

Shand, “Scenes from the Colonial Catwalk,” 56.

212

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



plies signification rather than replaces it means that Ihimaera’s internationalized edition of The Whale Rider, and his more expansive authorial explanation in Whanau II and The Rope of Man, do not compromise the original texts. In contrast to the argument that sees the cultural autonomy of Moritanga selling out to globalized commercial interests, Ihimaera’s internationally oriented and non-Mori work stands alongside – separate from but part of – his oeuvre. Together they display the range of Mori fiction in English; Mori-specific, bicultural, postcolonial, international, with each interpretative strategy nonetheless subject to permutation and translation inherent in the potential of fiction to cross cultures, readerships, and languages. By way of concluding his analysis of indigenous diaspora, Clifford insists on a non-exclusionary conception of indigeneity at the same time as he acknowledges the inherent tension that holds apart indigenous cultural specificity. The designation ‘Mori’ has currency as defining a culture, an identity, and a literature. Yet, as illustrated in Ihimaera’s careers as advocate of Mori culture, diplomat, national figurehead, kaumtua and rangatira, businessman, and author of fiction, the scope of Maoriness, and indeed its strength, is best defined not by an inward-looking culture intent on fixing boundaries of belonging, but by its outward-looking capacity to interact with and be influenced by other cultures and literatures. Ihimaera demonstrates that Moritanga is neither homogeneous nor singular, but is defined by diversity in composite elements that, in their very contradiction, constantly challenge and extend the boundaries of Mori cultural identity and the genres of Mori literature. In his literary imaginary inspired by Mori cultural concepts and non-traditional genres including science-fiction literature, ballet, opera, and screenplays, Ihimaera’s writing runs the gamut from essentialist notions of indigeneity to experimental internationalism. Clifford’s conclusion here applies: We struggle for language to represent the fuzzy, and dynamic, edges of the “indigenous” today without imposing reductive, backward-looking criteria of authenticity. Likewise, in the closing pages of Global Diasporas (1997), Robin Cohen properly declines to offer a sharp or exclusivist definition of his central term. Instead, he adopts Wittgenstein’s metaphor of separate, partially entwined definitional strands, making up the fibres of a polythetic “rope.”15

It is fitting, at the end of a book which inscribes Mori fiction in an international, historical, and interdisciplinary field of cross-cultural interaction which 15

Clifford, “Indigenous Diasporas,” 62.



Conclusion: Composite Identity and Literature

213

reveals continuity, similarity, and translatability, that Te Taura Tangata, the rope of man, one of Ihimaera’s key metaphors for a Mori world-view, is, ultimately, also shared. 

Works Cited

N O T E : All periodical cuttings and archival materials are from the J.C. Beaglehole Room Archives, Victoria University of Wellington.

Witi Ihimaera: Primary Sources Published Ask the Posts of the House (Auckland: Reed, 2007). Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies (Auckland: Penguin, 1994). “Dead of Night,” in Are Angels OK? ed. Bill Manhire (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2006): 135–95. Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (Auckland: Viking, 1989). “Dio Mi Potevi (The White Man is my Burden),” in Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica, ed. Keteri Akiwenzie–Damm (Wellington: Huia & Wiarton Ontario: Kegedonce Press, 2003): 95–96. The Dream Swimmer (Auckland: Penguin, 1997). “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception,” Turnbull Library Record 15.1 (Winter 1982): 45–55. The Matriarch (Auckland: Secker & Warburg, 1986). “Meeting Elizabeth Costello,” in The Best New Zealand Fiction 2, ed. Fiona Kidman (Auckland: Vintage, 2005): 109–19. The New Net Goes Fishing (Auckland: Heinemann, 1977). Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Auckland: Secker & Warburg, 1995). Pounamu, Pounamu (Auckland: Heinemann, 1972). Pounamu, Pounamu (Auckland: Reed, 2nd ed. 2003). The Rope of Man (Auckland: Reed, 2005). “Skulls and Cannibals,” Manoa 9.1 (1997): 90. Sky Dancer (Auckland: Penguin, 2003). Tangi and Whanau (1973; 1974; Auckland: Secker & Warburg, 1996).

216

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



The Trowenna Sea (Auckland: Penguin, 2009). The Uncle’s Story (Auckland: Penguin, 2000). “Waiata Aroha,” in Best Mates: Gay Writing in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Peter Wells & Rex Pilgrim (Auckland: Reed, 1997): 176–83. The Whale Rider (Auckland: Heinemann, 1987). The Whale Rider: International Edition (Auckland: Reed, 2003). Whanau II (Auckland: Reed, 2004). “Why I Write,” World Literature Written in English 14.1 (1975): 117–19. “Witi Ihimaera,” in As Fair as New Zealand to Me: New Zealand Writers in Katherine Mansfield’s Menton (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2000): 101–105. Woman Far Walking (Wellington: Huia, 2000).

(Co-)Edited Works Growing Up Maori (Auckland: Tandem, 1998). Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing, vol. 2: He Whakataatanga o te Ao – Regaining Aotearoa (Auckland: Reed, 1993). Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing, vol. 3: The Flowering (Auckland: Reed, 1993). Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing, vol. 4: The Path of the Wind (Auckland: Reed, 1994). Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing, vol. 5: Te Tōrino – The Spiral (Auckland: Reed, 1996). & D.S. Long. Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing (Auckland: Heinemann, 1982). & D.S. Long, Irihapeti Ramsden & Haare Williams. Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing 1: Te Whakahuatanga o te Ao – Reflections of Reality (Auckland: Reed, 1992).

Unpublished and Miscellaneous “Performing English: Creative Teaching and Writing Practices – Four Views of the Classroom.” End-of-semester seminar, reflection and refreshment, Department of English (Auckland University, 24 October 2003). Departmental e-mail to Stephen Turner, A2006/21. “The Clio Legacy,” libretto, MS 1991, A1997/12 [box titled ‘Back papers, Clio Legacy etc.’]. E-mail to Margaret Meklin (9 August 2003), A2006/12 [box titled ‘The Ballet, The Rope of Man’]. “Galileo,” libretto, MS 1999. Handwritten draft response to Norman Bilbrough’s review of Sky Dancer (2003), A2006/21. Handwritten draft speech for The Wedding première, Wellington (2006), A2006/12.



Works Cited

217

Handwritten draft speech for Whale Rider première New York (2003), A2004/20. Interview and speech, Canadian First People’s Arts Conference, 24–27 September 1998. Conference Proceedings C D - R O M , A2002/39 [box titled ‘The Whale Rider film script 4 plus other papers’]. “New Zealand Dreams, Pacific Destinies,” Fulbright Alumni Public Lecture (National Library, 2 November 2005): http://www.fulbright.org.nz/news/releases /051102-nzdreams.html. “Opera Brief for Waituhi: The Life of the Village,” MS 1984, A1994/02. “Tanz der Schwäne,” libretto, MS 1993. “Waituhi: The Life of the Village,” annotated libretto, MS 1984, Archives Waituhi, A1994/02. Associate producer, Whale Rider, dir. & screenplay Niki Caro (South Pacific Pictures / Apollomedia / Pandora Film, N Z / Germany 2002; 101 min.). Original concept and narrative, The Wedding (Royal New Zealand Ballet, 2006; programme).

General Works Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–87 (London: Heinemann, 1988): 27–31. ——. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2002). Amery, Mark. “Stepping Out: Witi Ihimaera’s New Direction,” Quote / Unquote 20 (February 1995): 12–15. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Ansley, Bruce. “A Wealth of Talent,” The Listener (6 March 2004): 16-18. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Ashcroft, Bill. “Transnation,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Christina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 72–85. ——, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (London & New York: Routledge, 1989). ——, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995; London & New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2005). Arvidson, Ken. “Aspects of Contemporary Māori Writing in English,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Mark Williams & Graham McGregor (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 117–28. Bahri, Deepika. Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003).

218

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). Bardolph, Jacqueline. “Les ‘enfants’ de Rushdie: Quel réalisme, quelle magie?” in Le Réalisme merveilleux, ed. Xavier Garnier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998): 19–34. Bargh, Maria, ed. Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism (Wellington: Huia, 2007). ——. Interview with Annette Sykes, “Blunting the System: The Personal Is the Political,” in Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism, 115-23. Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iversen, ed. Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1994). Baudrillard, Jean. “The Global and the Universal,” in Baudrillard West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 23–35. Baughan, Blanche. The Finest Walk in the World (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1923). Berthomière, William, & Christine Chivallon, ed. Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain (Paris: Karthala & Pessac: M S H A , 2006). Beston, John, & Alex Calder. “The Matriarch: Two Responses,” Landfall 161 (March 1986): 79–86. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bilbrough, Norman. “If a Hen Crows, Wring Its Neck,” The Listener (13 December 2003): 57. [Review of Sky Dancer.] Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789, 1794; London: Blackie & Son, nd). Boehmer, Elleke. “A Postcolonial Aesthetic: Repeating upon the present,” in ReRouting the Postcolonial, 170–81. Boniface, Linley. “Unfinished Business,” Dominion Post (20 September 2003): E12. A2004/20 [box titled ‘Whanau II, Plus Miscellaneous 2003–2004 Papers’]. Borell, Belinda. “Living in the City Ain’t So Bad: Cultural Identity for Young Maori in South Auckland,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, ed. James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh & Teresa Teaiwa (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 191–206. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. & intro. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia U P , 1993). Brasch, Charles. “The Silent Land,” in A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–50, ed. Allen Curnow, 133. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “History, the Caribbean Writer and X/Self,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes– Jelinek (Cross / Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990): 23–46. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Brown, Ruth. “Maori Spirituality as Pakeha Construct,” Meanjin 48.2 (1989): 252–88.



Works Cited

219

Brydon, Diana. “Cracking Imaginaries: Studying the global from Canadian Space,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Christina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 105–17. ——. “Introduction” to Culturalisms (New Literatures Review 45–46, 2009): 1–21. ——, James Meffan & Mark Williams, ed. Culturalisms (special issue of New Literatures Review 45–46, 2009). Butcher, Margot. “What is Maori? Who is Pakeha?” North and South (August 2003): 37–47. Cabourg, Jean, ed. Guide des opéras de Verdi: Livrets, analyses, discographies (Paris: Fayard, 1999). Caffin, Elizabeth. “A Fictional Performance,” The Listener (16 August 1986): 52. [Review of The Matriarch.] ——. “K.M. Curios,” The Listener (26 August 1989): 66. [Review of Dear Miss Mansfield.] Calder, Alex, & Stephen Turner. “Introduction” to Settlement Studies (Special Issue, Journal of New Zealand Literature 20, 2002): 7–17. ——, & John Beston, “The Matriarch, Two Responses,” Landfall 161 (1986), 79–86. Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake (Milsons Point, N S W : Vintage, 2004). Caro, Niki, dir. Whale Rider, screenplay Niki Caro from The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, associate producer Witi Ihimaera (South Pacific Pictures / Apollomedia / Pandora Film, N Z / Germany 2002; 101 min.). Carpentier, Alejo. “Cervantes en el alba de hoy” (Alcalá de Henares, 4 April 1978, on the occasion of receiving the Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Prize), in Los pasos recobrados: Ensayos de teoría y crítica literaria, ed. Alexis Márquez Rodríguez & Araceli García–Carranza (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2003): 284–302. ——. The Lost Steps, tr. Harriet de Onís (Los pasos perdidos, 1953; tr. 1956; London: Minerva, 1991). ——. “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana” (1964), in Carpentier, Los pasos recobrados: Ensayos de teoría y crítica literaria, ed. Alexis Márquez Rodríguez & Araceli García–Carranza (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2003): 119–43. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (La République Mondiale des lettres, 1999; Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2004). Chamberlin, Edward J. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories: Finding Common Ground (2003; Manchester: Carcanet, 2006). Chamoiseau, Patrick. Écrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard folio, 1997). Chandra, Vikram. Red Earth and Pouring Rain (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Chekhov, Anton. “Sleepy Head” in The Best Known Works of Anton Chekhov (1906; Whitefish M T : Kessinger, 2005): 316–20.

220

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Clifford, James. “Indigenous Diasporas,” in Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain, ed. William Berthomière & Christine Chivallon (Paris: Karthala & Pessac: M S H A , 2006): 49–64. ——. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). ——. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1997). Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (New York: Viking, 2003). ——. Foe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). ——. The Lives of Animals, ed. & intro. Amy Gutmann, with essays by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger & Barbara Smuts (University Center for Human Values Series; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999). Commons, Jeremy. “Waituhi,” Opera Australia (Sydney) 83 (November 1984): 15, A1994/02. [Review.] Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, ed. & intro. Paul O’Prey (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). Cooper, Michael.“Sign of the Times,” The Listener (October 11–17 2008): 59. Corballis, Tim, & Chris Price. “Writing that Matters: Two Views of the Place of Politics in Literature,” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 49–67. Corballis, Richard, & Simon Garrett. Introducing Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984). Cowley, Joy. “the bone people,” The Listener (12 May 1984): 60. [Review.] Cowlishaw, Gillian, & Barry Morris, ed. Race Matters (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997). Crane, Ralph. “Writing Maori: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Island 110 (Spring 2007), www.islandsmag.com/110/interview.html (accessed 10 October 2010). Cruickshank, Sam. “Rockin’ Rangatira: Professor Witi Ihimaera,” Te Kukupa: The Messenger (6 August 2003), np. A 2006/21 Cresswell, Richard. “Waituhi,” Salient (24 September 1984): 14. A1994/02 [2 boxes titled ‘Waituhi the Opera’] [Review.] Curnow, Allen. “House and Land” (1941), in Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941–1997 (Auckland, Auckland U P , 1997): 234. ——. Look Back Harder: Critical Essays, ed. Peter Simpson (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1987). ——, ed. A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–50 (Christchurch: Caxton, 1951). ——, ed. The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). Curnow, Wystan, ed. Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Heinemann, 1973). Davis, Geoffrey V., & Hena Maes–Jelinek, ed. Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English (Cross / Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990).



Works Cited

221

Deane, Seamus, ed. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Field Day (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1990). Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe (1719; London: David Campbell, 1992). Demidenko, Helen. The Hand That Signed the Paper (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1994). Docker, John, & Gerhard Fischer, ed. Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2000). Dowling, David. “Historiography in Some Recent New Zealand Fiction,” Australia and New Zealand Studies in Canada 2 (Fall 1989): 37–62. Dowling, Peter. “Maori writer takes on three cultures,” Asahi Evening News (24 December 1995): 6, A2004/20. Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem, 1990). During, Simon. “Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation After All?” Postcolonial Studies 1.1 (1998): 31–47. ——. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39.3 (September 1985): 366– 80. ——. “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits,” A N D 1 (1983): 75–92. ——. “What Was the West?” Meanjin 48.4 (Summer 1989): 759–66. Durix, Jean–Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1998). ——. “Time in Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 1 (1983): 101–11. ——, ed. The Global and the Particular in the English-Speaking World (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002). Dvorak, Marta, & W.H. New, ed. Tropes and Territories: Postcolonial Short Fiction (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queens U P , 2007). Eaton, Dan. “Maori call for migrant cutback,” Dominion Post (26 February 2007): 1. Eckstein, Lars. “Think Local Sell Global: Magical Realism, The Whale Rider, and the Market,” in Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English, ed. Rainer Emig & Oliver Lindner (Cross / Cultures 127, A S N E L Papers 16; Amsterdam & New York, 2010): 93–107. Ellis, Juniper. “ ‘ The Singing Word’: Ihimaera interviewed by Juniper Ellis,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 169–82. English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2005). Evans, Patrick. “The Baby Factory,” The Listener (16 August 2003): 50–53. ——. “Great Expectations,” Landfall 202 (November 2001): 173–77. ——. The Long Forgetting: Post-Colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2007).

222

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



——. “On Originality: No Earth Tones,” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 68–84. ——. “ ‘ Pakeha-style biculturalism’ and the Maori writer,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 24.1 (2006): 11–35. ——. “Spectacular Babies: The Globalisation of New Zealand Fiction,” Kite 22 (May 2002): 4–14. Falcinelli, Sylviane. “Aïda: Commentaire,” in Guide des opéras de Verdi: Livrets, analyses, discographies, ed. Jean Cabourg (Paris: Fayard, 1999): 1041. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson, ed. Global Modernities (Theory, Culture & Society) (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995). ——, & Scott Lash, ed. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (Thousand Oaks C A : Sage, 1999). Fee, Margery. “Why C.K. Stead Didn’t Like Keri Hulme’s the bone people: Who Can Write as Other?” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (1989): 11–32. Feneyrou, Laurent, ed. Musique et dramaturgie: Esthétique de la représentation au X X e siècle (Série Esthétique; Paris: Panthéon–Sorbonne, 2002). Findlay, Katherine. “Heralding the New Tribe,” Mana 9 (Winter 1995): 74–81. Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23.2 (Winter 1997): 378–95. Fox, Alistair. The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction (Dunedin: Otago U P , 2008). Froude Durix, Carole. “Point Counterpoint: Both Sides of the Broad Road in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and Witi Ihimaera’s ‘This Life is Weary’,” in The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. Paulette Michel & Michel Dupuis (Sydney: Dangaroo, 2001): 175–86. George, James. Hummingbird (Wellington: Huia, 2003). Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1990). Glage, Liselotte. “Rewriting or Writing Back? Witi Ihimaera’s Dear Miss Mansfield,” in Crabtracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English, ed. Gordon Collier & Frank Schulze–Engler (Cross / Cultures 59, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 321–29. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, sel., tr. & intro. J. Michael Dash (Caraf Books; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1989). ——. Le discours antillais (1981; Paris: Gallimard / folio Essais, 1985). Goodwin, Ken L., & Wolfgang Zach, ed. Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter) National Dimensions of Literatures in English (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996). Grace, Patricia. Tu (Auckland: Penguin, 2004).



Works Cited

223

Grace, Victoria, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons, ed. Baudrillard West of the Dateline (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003). Griffiths, Gareth. “Culture and Identity: Politics and Writing in Some Recent PostColonial Texts,” in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Anna Rutherford (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1992): 436–43. Gunew, Sneja. “Culture, Gender and the Author-Function: ‘Wongar’s Walg’,” Southern Review 20 (November 1987): 201–208. Hampton, Timothy. “Introduction: Baroques,” Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 1–9. Hanson, Allan. “The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and its Logic,” American Anthropologist 91.4 (December 1989): 890–902. Harris, Wilson. “Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization” (1998), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. A.J.M. Bundy (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 248–60. ——. Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). ——. “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination” (1973), in Harris, Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966–1981, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (1971; Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1981): 57–67. Hau’ofa, Epeli. “The Ocean In Us,” in Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific ed. David Hanlon & Geoffrey M. White (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 113-32. ——. “Our Sea of Islands,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 27–38. Heim, Otto. “To Be True One Must Find One’s Kaupapa,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 19.2 (Spring 1997): 57–75. ——. Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1998). Hereniko, Vilsoni. “Representations of Cultural Identities,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 137–66. ——, & Rob Wilson, ed. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Hill, Kim. Interview with Witi Ihimaera, National Radio (12 June 2004). Audiocassette recording, A2006/21. Horrocks, Roger. “The Invention of New Zealand,” A N D (1983): 9–30. Huggan, Graham. “Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization and the Post-Colonial Text,” Kunapipi 11.1 (1989): 27–40. ——. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Huia Short Stories 1995 (Wellington: Huia, 1995). Huia Short Stories 1997 (Wellington: Huia, 1997).

224

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Huia Short Stories 3 (Wellington: Huia, 1999). Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 4 (Wellington: Huia, 2001). Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 5 (Wellington: Huia, 2003). Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 6 (Wellington: Huia, 2005). Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 7 (Wellington: Huia, 2007). Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 8 (Wellington: Huia, 2009). Hulme, Keri. the bone people (1983, rev. 1985; London: Macmillan–Picador, 1986). Hulme, Peter. “The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iversen (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1994): 72–88. Isernhagen, Hartwig. “Why Novels? Why Short Stories? A Note on the Use of Genres in the Works of Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.2 (1993): 34–37. James, Trevor. “Lost our Birthright Forever? The Maori Writer’s Re-Invention of New Zealand,” S P A N 24 (April 1987): 107–21. Jannetta, Armando E. “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 12.2 (1990): 17–28. Joseph, Clara A.B. & Janet Wilson, ed. Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions (Cross / Cultures 86; Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2006). Julius, Anthony. Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002). Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “Appeasing an Embittered History: Critical Practice Reconsidered,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken L. Goodwin & Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 55–61. ——. “Configuring a Typology for South Asian Short Fiction,” in Tropes and Territories: Postcolonial Short Fiction, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queens U P , 2007): 51–61. Keown, Michelle. Postcolonial Pacific Writing (London & New York: Routledge, 2005). Kiberd, Declan. “Modern Ireland: Postcolonial or European?” in Not on Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism, ed. Stuart Murray (Exeter: U . of Exeter P , 1997): 81–100. Kidman, Fiona, ed. The Best New Zealand Fiction 2 (Auckland: Vintage, 2005). King, Michael. Being Pakeha: An Encounter with New Zealand and the Maori Renaissance (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985). ——. “A Magnificent New Zealand-Baroque Near-Success,” Metro 6 (1986): 170. [Review of The Matriarch.] ——. Te Ao Hurihuri: The World Moves On: Aspects of Maoritanga (Wellington: Hicks Smith & Sons, 1975). Knox, Elizabeth. The Vintner’s Luck (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1998).



Works Cited

225

Knudsen, Eva Rask. The Circle and the Spiral: Australian Aborigine and New Zealand Maori Literature (Cross / Cultures 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). Kolig, Erich, & Hermann Mückler, ed. Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific (Hamburg: L I T , 2002). Kootstra, Gillian. Letter from Reed Publishing and accompanying edited MS “Whanau II,” A2004/20. Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986): 34–61. Lamb, Jonathan. “The Idea of Utopia in the European Settlement of New Zealand,” in Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas & Hilary Ericksen (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 1999): 79–97. ——. “Metamorphosis and Settlement,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002): 18–38. ——. “The New Zealand Sublime,” Meanjin 49.1 (Summer 1990): 667–75. ——. “Problems of Originality: or, Beware of Pakeha baring Guilts,” Landfall 40.3 (September 1986): 352–58. Laplantine, François, & Alexis Nouss. Le métissage (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999). Leitch, Vincent B., William E. Cain, Laurie Finke & Barbara Johnson, ed. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001). Levine, Hal. “Moving Beyond Cultural Essentialism,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, ed. James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh & Teresa Teaiwa (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 69–87. Liu, James H., Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh & Teresa Teaiwa, ed. New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005). Lynch, Deidre, & William B. Warner, ed. Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1996). McIntosh, Tracey. “Maori Identities: Fixed, Fluid, Forced,” in New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, ed. James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh & Teresa Teaiwa (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 38–51. McNaughton, Howard, ed. Remembering Representation (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1993). ——, & John Newton, ed. Figuring the Pacific: Aotearoa and Pacific Cultural Studies (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2005). Manai, Franco, & Kirsten Hanna. “The Italian Myth of Galileo in New Zealand Opera,” European Studies 21 (2005): 263–76. Mancini, Roland. “Le vérisme existe-t-il ?” in L’Avant-scène opéra: Leoncavallo, Mascagni (Paris: Opérette Musique Éditions, 1983): 4–13.

226

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



——, & Jacques Rouveroux. “Paillasse,” in Roland Mancini & Jacques Rouveroux, Fayard Guide de l’opéra (Paris: Fayard, 1995): 886. Manhire, Bill. Spectacular Babies (Auckland: Flamingo, 2001). ——, ed. Mutes and Earthquakes (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1997). Mansfield, Katherine. Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1985). Martel, Yann. Beatrice and Virgil (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place,” in Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray & Jim McGuigan (London: Edward Arnold, 1993): 232–41. Originally published in Marxism Today 38 (June 1991): 24–29. Matthews, Philip. “Rawiri Paratene,” The Listener (7 February 2004): 12–13. Maguire, Marian. The Labours of Herakles as a New Zealand Pioneer, with essays by Elizabeth Rankin and Patrick O’Sullivan (Christchurch: PaperGraphica, 2008). ——. The Odyssey of Captain Cook: lithographs, with an essay by Anna Smith (Christchurch: PaperGraphica, 2005). Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1994). Mila, Karlo. Dream Fish Floating (Wellington: Huia, 2005). ——. A Well-Written Body (Wellington: Huia, 2008). Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). Milza, Pierre. Verdi et son temps (Paris: Perrin, 2001). Mitcalfe, Barry. “Pounamu, Pounamu,” New Zealand Book World 6 (1973): 15. [Review.] Mittelman, James H. The Globalisation Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Moeka’a, Moana. “Writer rides into Rarotonga from New Zealand,” Cook Island News Daily (7 July 2003). A2004/20. Morey, Kelly Ana. Grace is Gone (Auckland: Penguin, 2004). Morris, Paula. Hibiscus Coast (Auckland: Penguin, 2005). ——. “Lost in Translation,” The Listener (23 August 2008): 24–26. ——. Queen of Beauty (Auckland: Penguin, 2002). ——. “Rangatira,” in The Best New Zealand Fiction 2, ed. Fiona Kidman (Auckland: Vintage, 2005): 169–80. Mudrooroo. Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983). ——. The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997). ——. “Tell Them You’re Indian,” in Race Matters, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw & Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997): 259–68.



Works Cited

227

Muecke, Stephen. “Aboriginal Literature and the Repressive Hypothesis,” Southerly 48.4 (1988): 405–18. ——. Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2004). Mukherjee, Arun P. “Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (Autumn 1990): 1–9. Murray, Stuart. “Long After the Dialectic: Ihimaera, Stead, Sullivan,” S P A N 38 (1994): 125–31. ——, ed. Not on Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism (Exeter: U of Exeter P , 1997). Neale, Emma, ed. Creative Juices: New Writing (Auckland: Flamingo, 2002). Neumann, Klaus, Nicholas Thomas & Hilary Ericksen, ed. Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 1999). Newman, Judie. “The Ballistic Bard: Intertextuality and Postcolonial Fiction,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken L. Goodwin & Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 95–102. Newton, John. “Colonialism Above the Snowline: Baughan, Ruskin and the South Island Myth,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.2 (1999): 85–96. Nola, Nina. “Exploring Disallowed Territory: Introducing the Multicultural Subject into New Zealand Literature,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker & Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2000): 203–17. Nolan, Maggie, & Carrie Dawson, ed. Who’s Who: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crisis in Australian Literature (Brisbane: U of Queensland P , 2004). O’Connor, Tom. Tides of Kawhia (Auckland: Reed, 2004). Ojinmah, Umelo. Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision (Dunedin: U of Otago P , 1993). Oppenheim, R.S. “Pounamu, Pounamu,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 84.4 (December 1975): 506–507. [Review.] Orbell, Margaret. Contemporary Maori Fiction (Wellington: Reed, 1970). ——. Hawaiki: A New Approach to Maori Tradition (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1985). Orr, Bridget. “The Maori House of Fiction,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidre Lynch & William B. Warner (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1996): 73–95. O’Sullivan, Vincent. “ ‘ Finding the Pattern, Solving the Problem’: Katherine Mansfield: The New Zealand European” (1988), in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margins, ed. Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State U P , 1994): 9–24. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Restless Hybrids” (1995), in The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt & Ziauddin Sardar (London & New York: Continuum, 2002): 166-175.

228

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Pearson, Bill. Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays (Auckland: Heinemann, 1974). ——. “The Maori and Literature: 1938–65” (1969), in Essays on New Zealand Literature, ed. Wystan Curnow (Auckland: Heinemann, 1973): 99–138. ——. “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace,” in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story, ed. Cherry Hankin (Auckland: Heinemann, 1982): 166–84. Pearson, David. “Crossing Ethnic Thresholds: Multiculturalisms in Comparative Perspective,” in Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa–New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley, Cluny Macpherson & David Pearson (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1996): 247–66. Perry, Nick. Hyperreality and Global Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). ——. “On Forging Identities,” in Baudrillard West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 102–15. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Globalization as Hybridization,” in Global Modernities (Theory, Culture & Society), ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995): 45–68. Pinney, Christopher. “Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002): 125–61. Pirie, Mark, ed. New Zealand Writing: The NeXt Wave (Dunedin: U of Otago P, 1998). Pope, Quentin, ed. Kowhai Gold: An Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Verse (London: J.M. Dent, 1930). Prentice, Chris. “Grounding Post-Colonial Fictions: Cultural Constituencies, Cultural Credentials and Uncanny Questions of Authority,” S P A N (October 1993): 100–12. ——. “Nationalism vs. Internationalism? Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch and Critical Abjection,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken L. Goodwin & Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 549–55. ——. “On the Beach? The Question of the Local in New Zealand Cultural Studies,” in On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, ed. Anna Smith & Lydia Wevers (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2004): 111–29. ——. “Questions of Post-Colonial Representation: Cultural Credentials on Trial,” in Remembering Representation, ed. Howard McNaughton (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1993): 7–21. ——. “Riding the Whale? Postcolonialism and Globalization in Whale Rider,” in Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions, ed. Clara A.B. Joseph & Janet Wilson (Cross / Cultures 85; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 247–67. ——. “Transcultures and the Right Use of Whales,” in Baudrillard West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 80–101. ——. “Weighed by the Burden of Souls,“ The Listener (7 August 2004): 46–47. [Review of Whanau II.]



Works Cited

229

——. “What Was the Maori Renaissance?” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 85–108. Rakete, Hiria. “Waituhi,” unknown magazine, n.d., n. pag., A1994/02. [Review.] Reed, A.W., comp. Concise Maori Dictionary (Auckland: Reed, 6th ed. 2001). Rhodes, H. Winston. “Tangi,” Landfall 108 (December 1973): 348–51. [Review.] ——. “Whanau,” Landfall 114 (June 1975): 161–64. [Review.] Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea (1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). Riemenschneider, Dieter. “Contemporary Maori Cultural Practice: From Biculturalism Towards a Glocal Culture,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 18–19 (2000– 2001): 130–60. Riemer, Andrew. The Demidenko Debate (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1996). Rimmer, Matthew. “The Demidenko Affair: Copyright law, plagiarism and ridicule,” Media & Arts Law Review (September 2000): 159–76. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities (Theory, Culture & Society), ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1995): 25–44. Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). ——. Traplines (Toronto: Vintage, 1998). Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2001). Rushdie, Salman. “ ‘ Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (1983), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 61–70. ——. “Is Nothing Sacred?” (1990), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 415–29. ——. “Lecture,” Kunapipi (1985): 1–19. ——. Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 1995). ——. Shame (1983; London: Vintage, 1989). Rutherford, Anna. “Introduction: The Essential Heterogeneity of Being,” in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Rutherford (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1992): iii–ix. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993). ——. “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985), in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 198–215. ——. “The Politics of Knowledge” (1991), in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993): 372–85. ——. The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1983). Salmond, Anne. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2003). ——. Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (Auckland: Viking 1991). Sargeson, Frank. The Stories of Frank Sargeson (1964; Auckland: Penguin, 1982).

230

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Schneider, Elisabeth. “Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov,” Modern Language Notes 50.6 (June 1935): 394–97. Scott, Kim. Benang: From the Heart (Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). Shand, Peter. “Scenes from the Colonial Catwalk,” Cultural Analysis 3 (2002): 47–88. Sharp, Iain. “New Heights,” Dominion Post (nd). A2006/21. [Review of Sky Dancer.] Sharrad, Paul. “Listening to One’s Ancestors: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 8 (1992): 97–105. ——. “Re-Viewing Reviewing: Thoughts on Pacific Poetry and Hybridity,” Kunapipi 27.2 (2005): 206–12. ——. “Wrestling with the Angel: Pacific Criticism and Harry Dansey’s Te Raukura,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 319–36. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias” (1818), in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972): 580. Shepheard, Nicola. “Making Waves,” North and South (February 2003): 80–87. A2004/20. [On the filming of Whale Rider.] ——. “The Storyteller,” North and South (November 2003): 46–57. Simms, Norman. “Maori Literature in English: Prose Writers, Part Two: Witi Ihimaera,” Pacific Quarterly Moana 3 (1978): 336–48. Simpson, Rebecca. “It’s a Great Month to be Maori,” More (September 1984): 41–42. A1994/02. Smith, Anna, & Lydia Wevers, ed. On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2004). Smith, Jo. “Post-Cultural Hospitality: Settler–Native-Migrant Encounters,” Arena 28 (2007): 65-86. Somerset, Guy. “The Incredible Likeness of Being” The Listener (14 November 2009): 15–19. Sorrenson, Keith. “[Maori Wars] Section I I I : The Effects of the Wars on the Maori People,” in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A.H. McClintock (Wellington: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1966), vol. 2: 483–87. Spencer, Robert. “The Price of Silence,” in Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions, ed. Clara A.B. Joseph & Janet Wilson (Cross / Cultures 86; Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2006): 17–52. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, & Sneja Gunew. “Questions of Multiculturalism” (1986), in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 193–202. Spoonley, Paul, Cluny Macpherson & David Pearson, ed. Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa–New Zealand (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1996). Stachurski, Christina. Reading Pakeha? Fiction and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand (Cross / Cultures 109; Amsterdam & New York, Rodopi, 2009).



Works Cited

231

Stafford, Jane, & Mark Williams. “Fashioned Intimacies: Maoriland and Colonial Modernity,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 31–48. ——. Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914 (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2006). ——. “Victorian Poetry and the Indigenous Poet: Apirana Ngata’s ‘A Scene from the Past’,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 39.1 (2004): 29–41. Stead, C.K. Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1989). ——. “From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in Recent New Zealand Poetry” (1979), in Stead, In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1981): 139–59. ——. “Ihimaera: Old Wounds and Ancient Evils” (1986), in Stead, Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1989): 189–95. ——. “Keri Hulme’s the bone people and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 16.4 (October 1985): 101–108. ——, ed. The Faber and Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). ——, & Keri Hulme. “Two Views of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse,” Landfall 155 (1985): 289–305. Sullivan, Robert. “The English Moko: Exploring a Spiral,” in Figuring the Pacific: Aotearoa and Pacific Cultural Studies, ed. Howard McNaughton & John Newton (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2005): 12–28. ——. Star Waka (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1999). Tawhai, Alice. Festival of Miracles (Wellington: Huia, 2005). ——. Luminous (Wellington: Huia, 2007). Taylor, Lindis. Review of Clio Legacy, A1997/12. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. “The Lingering War Captain: Maori Texts, Indigenous Contexts,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 24.2 (2007): 20–41. Thiesse, Anne–Marie. La Création des identités nationales: Europe X V I I e – X X e siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1999). Thompson, Christina, Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). Thomson, J.M. “Para Matchitt’s Design for an Opera,” Art New Zealand 33 (Summer 1984): 22–23. A1994/02. Tompkins, Joanne. “ ‘ It all Depends on what Story you Hear’: Historiographic Metafiction and Colin Johnson’s Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the End of the World and Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch,” Modern Fiction Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990): 483–98. Turner, Stephen. “Being Colonial / Colonial Being,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002): 39–66.

232

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



——. “Settlement as Forgetting,” in Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas & Hilary Ericksen (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 1999): 20–38. Tuwhare, Hone. No Ordinary SunError! Bookmark not defined. (Auckland: Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1964). United Nations. “Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples” (2000), http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf (accessed 26 March 2007). Van Meijl, Toon. “Culture and Crisis in Maori Society,” in Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific, ed. Erich Kolig & Hermann Mückler (Hamburg: L I T , 2002): 47–71. Walker, Ranginui. “Dear Crown; An open letter to Helen, Bill, Richard, Peter, Jeanette and Jim,” The Listener (4 October 2003): 34-35. ——. Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990). ——. Nga Pepa a Ranginui: The Walker Papers (Auckland: Penguin, 1996). Watkin, Tim. “The Homecoming,” The Listener (26 June 2004): 18–23. ——. “Nation Far Walking,” The Listener (10 July 2004): 10-11. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P , 1979). Wattie, Nelson. “From Tama to Tom,” Dominion Post (26 November 2005). A2006 /12 Webster, Steven. Patrons of Maori Culture: Power, Theory and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance (Dunedin: U of Otago P , 1998). Wedde, Ian. How to be Nowhere: Essays and Texts 1971–1994 (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1995). ——. “The Isle of Poplars: Does Landscape Exist?” in Wedde, How to be Nowhere: Essays and Texts, 1971–1994 (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1995): 262–72. ——. Symmes Hole (Auckland: Penguin, 1986). ——, & Harvey McQueen, ed. The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Auckland: Penguin, 1985). Weill, Kurt. “Quelle voie pour l’opéra?” in Musique et dramaturgie: Esthétique de la représentation au X X e siècle, ed. Laurent Feneyrou (Série Esthétique; Paris: Panthéon–Sorbonne, 2002): 190–94. Originally as “Die Oper – wohin?” Berliner Tageblatt (31 October 1929), repr. in Kurt Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, mit einem Anhang: Ausgewählte Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Stephen Hinton & Jürgen Schebera (Berlin: Henschel, 1990): 68–70. Tr. in Kim H. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 1900–1935: A Study of His Music and Writings (Ann Arbor M I : U M I Research Press / Bowker, 1979): 506–508. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Forms of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (Thousand Oaks C A : Sage, 1999): 194–213.



Works Cited

233

Wendt, Albert. Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980 (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1995). ——. “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 399–412. ——. “Towards a new Oceania,” Mana Review 1.1 (January 1976): 49–60. ——, Reina Whaitiri & Robert Sullivan, ed. Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2003). Wevers, Lydia. “Short Fiction by Maori Writers,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.2 (Spring 1993): 26–33. ——. “Talking About GenX,” in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph (Cross / Cultures 47; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2001): 379–87. ——, & Mark Williams. “Going Mad Without Noticing: Cultural Policy in a Small Country,” Landfall 204 (November 2002): 15–18. Wilkins, Damien. “Katherine Mansfield: Short Story Moderniser” (2001), in The New Zealand Edge: Heroes: Katherine Mansfield, www.nzedge.com (accessed 10 June 2006). ——. “True Tales from the Fiction Workshop,” in Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. Mark Williams (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004): 20–32. Wilkinson, Jane. “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Kunapipi 7.1 (1985): 98–110. Williams, Mark. “Interview with Witi Ihimaera,” Landfall 179 (September 1991): 281–97. ——. Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1990). ——. “The Long Maori Renaissance,” in Other Renaissances, ed. Zhou Gang, Sander Gilman & Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Palgrave, 2006): 207–26. ——. “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” Landfall 190 (Spring 1995): 315–18. [Review.] ——. “On the Beach: Witi Ihimaera, Katherine Mansfield, and the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Tropes and Territories: Postcolonial Short Fiction, ed. Marta Dvorak & W.H. New (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queens U P , 2007): 333–45. ——, ed. Writing at the Edge of the Universe (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2004). ——, & Graham McGregor, ed. Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991). Wilson, Janet, Christina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh, ed. Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (London & New York: Routledge, 2010). Wilson, Tim. “Whalerider Country,” Air New Zealand (nd): 35–43, A2004/37.

234

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Wittmann, Livia Käthe. “Postmodern Ethnicity or Utopian Di-ethnia? Women’s Multilingual / Multicultural Writing in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (March 2002): 101–20. Wordsworth, William. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (1802), in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie Finke & Barbara Johnson (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001): 648–68.



Index

Aboriginal / Aborigine, xv, 44, 111, 114, 154, 168, 182, 183, 194, 203 aboriginality, 203 abuse, domestic, 34, 132 Achebe, Chinua, 30, 35; Things Fall Apart 12 aesthetic cross-fertilization, 56 aesthetic heterogeneity, 74 aesthetic, baroque, 79; European/Western, 54, 57, 65, 2, 92, 93, 105, 106, 119, 211; heterogeneous, 104; international, 61; Mori, xi, 2, 3, 4; Mori, Pakeha nonengagement with, 169; musical, 38, 77; of realism, 30; outdated, 63; postmodern, 63; subordinated to culture, 35 —See also: baroque, opera, Romanticism, realism aestheticism, and Coetzee, 196 aesthetics, 63; in tension with politics, 108; privileged over politics, 163; privileged over the ethnographic, 56; reconciled with ethics, 203; subordinated to culture, 27, 201; subordinated to politics, xvi; unclear stance of Ihimaera towards, 63

“Affectionate Kidnappers, The” (Ihimaera), 102, 104, 105 affiliation, chosen (Said) , 11, 96, 105, 179 See also: filiation African literature, 56 Ahmad, Aijaz, 175 Aida (Verdi), 76, 78, 82, 85 A I D S , 53, 135 alienation, 12, 57, 80, 87 All Blacks (rugby football) , 117, 181, 206 allegory, xv, 22, 48, 53, 62, 68, 75, 85 Allen, Chadwick, xv, 208, 209 ambivalence, of Ihimaera, 58, 155, 158, 161, 162, 174, 188, 189, 192, 196, 205; his concept of (Mori) culture, 158, 192, 199; his narrative focus, 188, 199; his protagonists, 84; his settings, 69; his stance as writer, xvii; towards Mori language, 191 ambivalence, of term ‘indigenous modernity’, 112 Amery, Mark, 179, 198 amnesia, cultural, 111 ancestors, Mori, 109, 112, 131, 133, 134, 164, 189

236 ancestry, Mori, x, 15, 51, 81, 149, 188; in nation-building, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 11, 29, 129, 137 Anglo-Saxon culture, affinity detected in Ihimaera’s writing, xiv, 4, 97 animism, xi, 4, 70, 128, 134 Ansley, Bruce, 121, 122 anthologies, xi, xii, 2, 16, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 42, 43, 50, 164, 181, 191 —See also: Huia Publishers, Huia Short Stories anthropology, xii, 2, 4, 44, 45, 111, 114, 145, 168, 179 anthropomorphism, 61 anti-mimeticism, 84 antisemitism, 173 Aotearoa New Zealand, significance of designation, 6 apartheid, 144, 147 —See also: South Africans Appadurai, Arjun, 9, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 176, 178 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 56, 92 arrival, as narrative topos in Ihimaera, 11, 50, 51, 69, 176 Arvidson, Ken, 3, 14, 27 Ashcroft, Bill, 58; & Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, 90 Ask the Posts of the House (Ihimaera), 195

assimilationism, x, xviii, 2, 6 Auckland Hero parade, 52 Auckland University, and Mori literature, xi Auckland, 50, 51, 142, 144, 163, 181 Australia, 41, 111, 114, 161, 165, 167, 168, 180, 182, 207, 227 authenticity, xii, xviii, 1, 4, 10, 14, 58, 62, 68, 113, 114, 118, 120, 122, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 202, 211, 212

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



autobiography, 48, 50, 140, 192, 193, 208 autonomy, cultural, xi, xiv, xviii, 23, 30, 33, 43, 44, 48, 128, 151, 152, 171, 172, 212

Awatere, Donna, 164 Bahri, Deepika, 9, 108, 125, 175 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 55–56, 59, 66–68, 73, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88, 96, 106, 154 Balibar, Étienne, 126 Bardolph, Jacqueline, 84, 85, 87, 189 Bargh, Maria, 154 baroque, xv, xvii, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 107 —See also: opera Barthes, Roland, 64, 197 Baudrillard, Jean, 69, 125, 145 Baughan, Blanche, 25 Beatrice and Virgil (Martel), 173 belonging, xiii, 21, 43, 57, 58, 65, 73, 136, 161, 183, 200, 207, 209, 212 Benang (Scott), 203 berdache tradition, 134 Berthomière, William, & Christine Chivallon, 177, 179 Beston, John, & Alex Calder, 75 Bhabha, Homi K., 57, 69, 144, 154, 169, 175

Bible, 62, 73, 75, 86, 88, 156, 157, 159 —See also: Christianity biculturalism, x, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, 6, 7, 27, 29, 35, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54, 72, 75, 76, 77, 85, 88, 89, 106, 112, 113, 122, 123, 132, 133, 138, 152, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 180, 182, 187, 190, 200, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212 —See also: binarism Bilbrough, Norman, 62, 63, 64, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 125, 190



237

Index

binarism, xiv, 7, 56, 59, 62, 97, 98, 106, 107, 111, 145, 148, 163, 177, 200 —See also: biculturalism Birds, The (Hitchcock), 62, 70 Blake, William, 12 “Bliss” (Mansfield), 104 Boehmer, Elleke, xv, xvi bone people, the (Hulme), 76, 115, 116, 169, 190 Boniface, Linley, 116, 159, 191 Borell, Belinda, 45 Boulez, Pierre, 77 Bourdieu, Pierre, xviii, 55, 56, 57, 58, 107, 137, 144, 154, 163, 169 boutique multiculturalism (Fish), 172 Božić, Sretan, aka B. Wongar, 168 Brasch, Charles, 20 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 183 Brecht, Bertolt, 38; Life of Galileo 79 Bro Town (animated T V series), 181 Brontë, Charlotte, 99, 101; Jane Eyre 92, 98

Brontë, Emily, 98 Brothers Grimm, 11 Brown, Ruth, 111 Brydon, Diana, 126; James Meffan & Mark Williams, 46, 170 Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies (Ihimaera), 68, 132, 157, 198 Butcher, Margot, xiv Butler, Judith, 190 Cabourg, Jean, 78 Caffin, Elizabeth, 75, 91, 101 Calder, Alex, 74, 85, 88; & Stephen Turner, 20 Campbell, Alistair, 181 Campion, Jane, dir. The Piano, 90, 115 Canada, xvii, 130, 132, 134, 174, 183, 192 Canadian First People’s Arts Conference, 134, 192

Cannes film festival, 141 canon, xiv, 57, 93, 97, 98, 106, 107, 195, 197

capitalism, 121, 122, 128, 139, 144, 154, 201; multinational, 140, 153 Carey, Peter, My Life as a Fake 168 Caribbean, 183, 202 Caro, Niki, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 207; dir. Whale Rider, 25, 112, 115–24, 145, 152, 153, 205, 206, 207 Carpentier, Alejo, 86, 87; The Lost Steps, 87

carving, Maori, 19, 50, 67, 112, 117, 118, 119, 120, 183 Casanova, Pascale, xvi, xvii, xviii, 7, 8, 9, 11, 30, 35, 46, 55, 56, 58, 107, 154, 163, 201, 210 Castle–Hughes, Keisha, 115, 206, 207 Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), 37, 38, 40

Cavani, Liliana, dir. Galileo, 79 centre and margin / periphery, 57, 106, 108

Chamberlin, Edward J., 10, 135 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 23, 202 Chandra, Vikram, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 85 Chant of Creation, Mori, 36 chaos theory, 178 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Troilus and Criseide, 92

Chekhov, Anton, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102; “Sleepy Head” 99, 100 child narrator, in Ihimaera, 102; in Ihimaera and Mansfield, 104 children, Mori, xii, 12, 17, 26, 101, 102, 104, 139, 156, 157, 160, 185, 186 “Child-Who-Was-Tired, The” (Mansfield), 99 Christianity, 111, 156, 157, 158 —See also: Bible

238 circularity —See: cyclicity civil-rights movement, black, reflected in Ihimaera, 9 “Clenched Fist” (Ihimaera), 9 Clifford, James, 114, 115, 118, 123, 127, 129, 131, 137, 140, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 152, 154, 162, 178, 179, 180, 187, 207, 211, 212 “Clio Legacy, The” (Ihimaera), 160, 194 Coetzee, J.M., 98, 196; Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, 196, 197; Foe, 98; The Lives of Animals, 196 Cohen, Robin, 212 colonialism, xii, xiii, xviii, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 37, 56, 58, 78, 79, 88, 90, 92, 95, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 120, 121, 123, 131, 133, 146, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 172, 173, 176, 182, 183 comedy, in Ihimaera, 69, 70 commercialization, xvii, 161 commodification, 119, 145 Commons, Jeremy, 39, 41, 45, 46, 54 communal life, Mori, xi, xii, xiii, xv, xix, 1, 2, 9, 15, 17, 22, 23, 25, 27, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 51, 52, 55, 59, 65, 66, 67, 68, 73, 116, 117, 119, 121, 128, 129, 130, 132, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 150, 158, 159, 164, 166, 169, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 200, 203 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 92 “Contemporary Kezia, A” (Ihimaera), 99, 101

“Contemporary Maori Writing: A Context” (Ihimaera & D.S. Long), 25, 26 Cook, James, 111 Cooper, Michael, 143 Corballis, Richard, & Simon Garrett, 5

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Corballis, Tim, & Chris Price, 210 corporatization, Maori, 122, 186, 201 Cowley, Joy, 76 Crane, Ralph, 47, 165 Creative New Zealand, 33, 35 creolization, 80, 92 Cresswell, Richard, 40 critics, international, 4; Mori, xi; nonMori, 3, 5; Pakeha, 2, 5, 15, 27, 65, 95, 106, 170 cross-cultural interaction, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, 8, 57, 80, 86, 96, 114, 119, 123, 126, 129, 133, 147, 151, 163, 171, 182, 192, 210, 211, 212 cross-dressing, 190, 196, 200 Cruickshank, Sam, 174 cultural politics, xvi, 5, 53, 59, 63, 65, 76, 77, 88, 123, 169 culture, American, xiv; as sign (Prentice), 145; definition of, by Pieterse, 127; Japanese, 200 Curnow, Allen, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 28, 33, 65; “House and Land” 19 Curtis, Cliff, 206, 207 cyclicity, Maori, 22; narrative, 159; of oral cultures, xi, 51 Dansey, Harry, Te Raukura, 5 Dante, Inferno , 79 Darville, Helen, aka Helen Demidenko —See: Demidenko Deane, Seamus, 10 Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (Ihimaera), 89–96, 99–105, 106, 109, 115, 158 decolonization, xvii, 7, 9, 29, 31, 194 deconstruction, 145, 146, 177 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 98 Deleuze, Gilles, 69, 197 delocalization, 142, 154, 177, 201



239

Index

Demidenko, Helen, The Hand That Signed the Paper, 90, 165, 166, 167, 168, 194 Department of Maori Affairs, 1 Depression, Great, 15, 22 Descartes, René, 79 dialogism, 59, 87 diaspora, xviii, 125, 141, 150, 152, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 184, 186, 187, 188, 202, 205, 209, 211, 212; definition of, 177 diasporism, 63, 125, 162, 175, 176, 178, 179, 200, 203, 207 difference, xiv, xvi, xvii, 6, 7, 8, 35, 47, 57, 58, 64, 91, 98, 106, 112, 121, 122, 124, 128, 129, 164, 169, 173, 174, 176, 181, 203, 206; cultural, xi, xii, xiv, xviii, 6, 7, 39, 43, 48, 57, 58, 65, 66, 73, 78, 80, 81, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 98, 105, 106, 111, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 129, 132, 135, 137, 149, 154, 159, 163, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 182, 184, 195, 197, 198, 201, 203, 205, 207, 209 Diski, Jenny, 170 dislocation, xii, 34, 39, 153, 177, 178; socio-cultural, 2, 23, 27, 144 dispossession, 31, 102, 109, 145, 162, 163, 165 divorce, in Ihimaera’s fiction, 49, 52, 177, 197

“Doll’s House, The” (Mansfield), 104 Dominica, 99 Don Carlos (Verdi), 78 Dowling, David, 75 Dowling, Peter, 94 Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (Mudrooroo), 184

Dream of the Rood, The, 4, 62, 97 Dream Swimmer, The (Ihimaera), 78, 82, 85, 157, 165, 193

dream, 28, 50, 99, 100, 101, 122, 165 Duff, Alan, Once Were Warriors 131, 165

During, Simon, 10, 64, 65, 66, 110, 111, 112, 125, 164 Durix, Jean–Pierre, vii, 4, 11, 12, 91 East Coast, setting in Ihimaera, 23, 25, 109, 113, 117, 128, 129, 135, 165, 205, 206

Eaton, Dan, 180 Eckstein, Lars, 116, 153 Eco, Umberto, 145 Eden, topos of, in Ihimaera 24, 143 education, 12, 26 eidolon, and Ihimaera, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 209 elder, Mori, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 28, 36, 71, 89, 102, 103, 119, 160, 173, 189, 194, 206, 207 elegiac, the, in Ihimaera, 12, 13, 36, 84, 105

Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (Coetzee), 196, 197 Ellis, Juniper, x, 12, 26, 31, 36, 46, 47, 49, 53, 58, 74, 82, 107, 164, 173, 189 English, James, 116, 201 epic mode, xvii, 11, 35, 61, 74, 76, 82, 84, 85, 89 epiphany, 31, 105; in Ihimaera, 104, 105; in Mansfield, 103, 104, 105 Ern Malley affair, 168 essentialism, 113, 137, 147, 173, 174, 178, 186, 201, 208, 211, 212 ethnicity, 3, 51, 52, 53, 84, 94, 126, 130, 136, 137, 139, 150, 172, 180, 190, 202 ethnography, 50, 56, 70, 87, 118, 148, 190

ethnoscapes (Appadurai), 141, 142, 147, 176

240 eurocentrism, xviii, 45, 55, 56, 87, 93, 102

Evans, Patrick, xii, xiv, 31, 32, 42, 43, 71, 72, 116, 138, 145, 146, 154, 181, 201, 210

exoticism, 56, 80, 94, 145, 198, 199 experimentalism, 4, 29, 40, 47, 64, 121, 205, 209, 212 extended family, Mori, 23 fairytales, 11, 50, 52 Falla, Manuel de, 37, 38; Nights in the Gardens of Spain 49; La Vida Breva, 38

family, Mori, vii, 23, 24, 34, 39, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 68, 71, 84, 85, 98, 99, 100, 104, 110, 112, 113, 117, 129, 130, 132, 139, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 157, 160, 163, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 207, 208 Fanon, Frantz, 29, 30, 35, 183 fantasy, xi, 4, 68, 200; in Ihimaera, xv, 47, 50, 61, 62, 68, 70, 74, 146, 165 Farrell, J.G., 97 Festival of the South Pacific, 54 fetishism, 190 filiation, 92, 96 —See also: affiliation film, American, 67, 118; in Ihimaera, xiv, 50, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77, 141, 142, 144; Mori, 210 —See also: Hollywood financescapes (Appadurai), 142, 143, 153 Findlay, Katherine, 49, 50, 52, 53, 179, 193

“Fire on Greenstone” (Ihimaera), 14 First Fleet legend, 10 First Nations, 10, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 153, 178, 179, 182, 199, 203 First Peoples —See: First Nations

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



first-person narration, 35, 176, 178 Fish, Stanley, 172, 173 focus-shifting, in literature, xvi Foe (Coetzee), 98 Force of Destiny, The (Verdi), 78 Foreshore and Seabed Act, 161 Forster, E.M., 97 Fox, Alistair, 49, 52, 78, 132 fragmentation, social, 39, 51, 71, 75, 85, 122, 129, 158, 162, 177 France, South of, 141 Frankfurt School, 108 Frazer, Toa, No. 2, 181 Freud, Sigmund, 64 Froude Durix, Carole, 91 Fulbright Alumni Public Lecture (Ihimaera), 138 Galileo (dir. Cavani), 79 Galileo (Ihimaera), 47, 79 “Gathering of the Whakapapa” (Ihimaera), 14 gender, 190, 200 Generation X (= new fiction), 43 genre, x, xi, xvi, xvii, 6, 26, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 73, 79, 85, 88, 106, 116, 155, 165, 205, 210, 212 George, James, 31, 130, 131, 163, 210; Hummingbird 184 Germany, in Mansfield, 100 Ghose, Zulfikar, 44 Ghosh, Amitav, 174 Giddens, Anthony, 125 Glage, Liselotte, 91, 92, 103 Glissant, Édouard, 23, 183 globalization, xii, 10, 30, 32, 55, 63, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 154, 161, 162, 163, 172,



174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 187, 201, 203, 207, 208, 209, 211 glocalization, xvii, 63, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 136, 151, 152, 153 godwit, as trope for return home, 179, 186 Gordimer, Nadine, 97 Grace is Gone (Morey), 184 Grace, Patricia, xi, 2, 31, 33, 130 Graham, Chris, dir. Sione’s Wedding 181 “Greenstone Patu, The” (Ihimaera), 4, 14 greenstone, in Ihimaera’s imagery, 4, 143, 194

— See also Pounamu, Pounamu Griffiths, Gareth, 107 Growing Up Maori (ed. Ihimaera), 193 Gunew, Sneja, 168, 175 Hage, Gassan, 175 haka, 39, 45, 52, 117, 128, 139, 144, 147, 170, 181, 188 Hampton, Timothy, 80 Hand That Signed the Paper, The (Demidenko), 90, 165, 167, 194 Hanson, Allan, 11, 42 Harlem Renaissance, 9 Harris, Ross, 35, 39, 41, 77 Harris, Wilson, 202; Palace of the Peacock 92 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 180 Hawaiki, 11, 86, 105, 117 Hawkes Bay, 25 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 92 hegemony, Western literary, xvi, 57, 107, 162; Pakeha political, xiii Heim, Otto, 5, 76, 77, 81 Heinemann Educational, 26 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 7, 11 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 10 heroism, 8, 11, 16, 19, 20, 70, 112, 130, 134

241

Index

heterogeneity, 74, 128, 152; cultural, 45, 65, 69, 150, 172 heteroglossia, 55, 66, 68, 73, 106, 108 Hibiscus Coast (Morris), 163, 184 Hill, Kim, 47, 149, 151, 160, 165, 167, 193, 206 Hitchcock, Alfred, The Birds 62, 70 Hohepa Te Umuroa, 184, 194 “Hole that Jack Dug, The” (Sargeson), 64, 66 Hollywood, in Ihimaera, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 118 Holocaust, 165, 173 home, 178, 187; meaning of, 177 homogeneity, cultural, 151, 154, 187, 202, 212

homophobia, 129, 130, 132, 134 homosexuality, 17, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 63, 94, 95, 113, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 166 Horrocks, Roger, 20 “House and Land” (Curnow), 19 “House with Sugarbag Windows, The” (Ihimaera), 22, 23 “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped” (Mansfield), 102 Huggan, Graham, 26, 56, 57, 92, 93, 145, 154, 175, 190, 198, 201, 202 Huia Publishers, xi, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 181 Huia Short Stories, 32, 33, 34, 41, 43, 181 Hulme, Keri, 33, 42, 98; the bone people, 76, 115, 116, 169, 190 Hulme, Peter, 98, 99, 101 Hummingbird (James George), 184 humour, in Ihimaera, 34, 71, 72, 198 hybridity, xviii, 55, 56, 67, 73, 96, 114, 115, 118, 119, 124, 145, 148, 151, 158, 163, 167, 177, 211 hyperreality, 18, 145

242

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS

“I, Ozymandias” (Ihimaera), 14, 15 identity and identity-formation, xiii, xv, xvii, xviii, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 19, 26, 30, 31, 33, 36, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 58, 59, 62, 73, 76, 95, 110, 113, 124, 128, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 149, 150, 161, 162, 166, 167, 174, 177, 178, 179, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212

112, 115, 138, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 165, 169, 189, 193, 194, 209 —“Meeting Elizabeth Costello” 195, 196, 198, 199, 201 —The New Net Goes Fishing 5, 9, 12, 14, 22, 26, 34, 47, 58, 71, 102, 112, 138, 155, 165

Ihimaera, Witi WORKS:

—“The Affectionate Kidnappers” 102, 104, 105

—Ask the Posts of the House 195 —Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies 68, 132, 157, 198 —“Clenched Fist” 9 —(with D.S. Long) “Contemporary Maori Writing: A Context” 25, 26 —“The Clio Legacy” 160, 194 —“A Contemporary Kezia” 99, 101 —Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp 89–96, 99–105, 106, 109, 115, 158 —The Dream Swimmer 78, 82, 85, 157, 165, 193 —“Fire on Greenstone” 14 —Galileo 47, 79 —“Gathering of the Whakapapa” 14 —“The Greenstone Patu” 4, 14 —(ed.) Growing Up Maori 193 —“The House with Sugarbag Windows” 22, 23 —“I, Ozymandias” 14, 15 —“The Kids Downstairs” 71 —“Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception” 2, 15, 25, 28, 36 —The Matriarch 26, 35, 36, 47, 59, 66, 70, 74–86, 87–90, 102, 106, 109,



—“New Zealand Dreams, Pacific Destinies” 193 —Nights in the Gardens of Spain 46, 47, 49–53, 59, 63, 158 —“One Summer Morning” 18 —“Opera Brief for Waituhi: The Life of the Village” 37, 39 —“Performing English” 62, 97 —Pounamu, Pounamu ix, xi, 2, 5, 6, 12, 18, 24, 102, 112, 116, 191 —The Return 17, 138, 139–52, 155, 175, 176, 178, 179, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 193, 208, 209 —The Rope of Man 32, 124, 138, 148, 150, 151, 155, 193, 201, 209, 211, 212 —Sky Dancer 47, 61–74, 97, 106, 125, 152, 158, 167, 190, 198, 209 —Tangi x, xii, 2, 3, 11, 12, 24, 32, 51, 66, 112, 116, 138, 139, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159, 184, 185, 192, 209, 211 —Tangi and Whanau ix —Tanz der Schwäne 47 —“Tent on the Home Ground” 9 —The Trowenna Sea 90, 183, 193, 194, 195

—The Uncle’s Story 124, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 150, 152, 153, 183, 191, 193, 209 —Waituhi: The Life of the Village 12, 35–41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53, 54, 59, 77, 190, 209 —The Wedding 47, 191, 192 —The Whale Rider 25, 61, 70, 73, 109– 15, 116, 118, 124, 129, 138, 153, 173,



243

Index

191, 194, 207, 212 —Whanau 2, 3, 12, 13, 35, 36, 51, 66, 72, 116, 159, 193, 211 —Whanau II 51, 59, 89, 138, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 188, 193, 199, 211, 212 —Woman Far Walking 47, 101, 160, 165, 206 —See also: Into the World of Light GENERAL TOPICS:

—aesthetics, unclear stance towards, 63 —ambivalence of, 58, 155, 158, 161, 162, 174, 188, 189, 192, 196, 205; his concept of (Mori) culture, 158, 192, 199; his narrative focus, 188, 199; his protagonists, 84; his settings, 69; his stance as writer, xvii; towards Mori language, 191 —and “selfish” writing, xvii, 46, 47, 49,

—landscape, insertion of Mori presence in, 21, 24 —militancy of characters in, 9, 74, 151, 198

—Noble Savage, in Ihimaera, 52, 53, 133

—novel by, with Pakeha protagonist and non-Maori setting, 49 —personification of landscape, 22 —references to Hollywood, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 118 —small-town setting in, 66, 67, 68 —South Africans in, 144, 146, 147 —television in, 35, 139, 140, 142, 149, 196, 208 —viticulture in, 142, 143, 144, 152 —Waituhi as author’s homeplace, 23, 138, 143, 186, 187 —“Wicked” as name of character and nickname for author, 195

59

—and black civil-rights movement, 9 —and eidolon, 189–90, 191, 192, 195, 197–99, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 209 —and opera, 35–41 —and rewriting, xvii, 50, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 99, 101, 106, 107, 138, 148, 159, 163, 173, 191, 193, 208, 211 —compared with Émile Zola, 4 —literary affinity with Anglo-Saxon culture, xiv, 4, 97 —narrative tense in, 135 —narrative voice in, 135 CONTENT AND THEME:

—divorce in, 49, 52, 177, 197 — East Coast setting, 23, 25, 109, 113, 117, 128, 129, 135, 165, 205, 206 —film in, xiv, 50, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77, 141, 142, 144

GENERIC ASPECTS: —fantasy, xv, 47, 50, 61, 62, 68, 70, 74, 146, 165 —science fiction, 61, 62, 74, 165, 212 MODE:

—comedy, 69, 70 —the elegiac, 12, 13, 36, 84, 105 —epiphany, 104, 105 —humour, 34, 71, 72, 198 —lyricism, xiv, 2, 4, 12, 14, 15, 18, 23, 31, 34, 35, 36, 104, 113, 116, 117, 155, 157, 209 —militancy of tone in, xv, 5, 36, 76, 101, 138, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 173; subdued by epiphany, 103 —nostalgia in, 21, 24, 56, 66, 117, 177, 178, 186 —parody, 69, 72, 73, 93, 95, 107, 167, 198

244 —pastiche, xiv, 63, 67, 68, 69, 75 MOTIFS AND TOPOI: —arrival, 11, 50, 51, 69, 176 —Eden, 24, 143 —greenstone in, 4, 143, 194 —return, 148 —rope of man in, 150, 179, 184, 194, 213 —spiral motif in, 150, 179

imaginary, creole, 92; indigenous, 55; Mori, xi, xvii, 8, 19, 24, 36, 102, 105, 124, 209, 212; national, 7, 8, 11, 13, 23, 136; New Zealand national, 2, 15, 18, 25, 33, 130 —See also: imagined communities imagined communities, 129, 137, 178, 190, 200, 203 inauthenticity, 145, 168 in-between condition (Bhabha), 57 indigeneity, x, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, 5, 9, 12, 20, 21, 25, 34, 39, 42, 55, 58, 63, 93, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 146, 152, 153, 154, 157, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212 indigenous diaspora (Clifford), 187 indigenous modernity, 111, 112, 113, 114, 121, 136, 157 Inferno (Dante), 79 insensitivity, cultural, 170 integrationism, 162 interdependence, cultural, xiv, 6, 138, 140 internationalism, 72, 178, 205, 207, 212 internationalization, xvii

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



inter-reference, 78, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 97, 98, 106 intertextuality, 14, 75, 79, 85, 87, 97, 194 interviews, with Ihimaera, 2, 25, 30, 36, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 107, 151, 160, 202 —See also: Ralph Crane, Juniper Ellis, Katherine Findlay, Kim Hill, Roy Murphy, Tim Watkin, Jane Wilkinson, Mark Williams, 47 Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing (ed. Ihimaera & D.S. Long), xi, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 35, 50, 138, 191 Irish Renaissance, 9 Irish writing, 10 Isernhagen, Hartwig, 4 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 174 isolationism, 29 James, Trevor, 74, 75, 86 Janáček, Leo, 37, 38 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), 92, 98 Jannetta, Armando E., 4, 14, 18, 75, 189 Julius, Anthony, 167, 173 Kanaganayakam, Chelva, 44, 45, 200 kapa haka, 54, 110 karanga, 45, 52, 82, 135, 139 kaupapa, 28, 29, 32, 41, 47, 55, 164, 188, 190, 193 Keown, Michelle, xv, 55, 138 Kiberd, Declan, 9 Kidman, Fiona, 43 “Kids Downstairs, The” (Ihimaera), 71 King, Michael, xii, xiii, 75, 161, 164 Kipling, Rudyard, 97 Knox, Elizabeth, The Vintner’s Luck, 115 Knudsen, Eva Rask, xv, 55, 189 Kootstra, Gillian, 159 Kowhai Gold (ed. Pope), 16



245

Index

Kristeva, Julia, 87, 167 Kureishi, Hanif, 190 Lamb, Jonathan, 20, 21, 42, 110 land disputes, 36, 59, 89, 131, 161, 162, 186

land, attachment to, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 31, 34, 37, 50, 51, 142, 143, 149, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 175, 176, 178, 179, 186, 194, 200, 206; colonial appropriation of, 37; Pakeha alienation from, 21; taming of, 16, 19, 20, 22 land, Pakeha mythicizing of, 20 —See also Maoriland landscape, 19, 21, 23, 27, 31, 83, 87, 136, 137, 141, 156, 158, 183; and Mori identity, in Ihimaera, 24; and Mori nationalism, 23; and national identity, 8, 23; and national indigeneity, 25; as national symbols in Austria and Hungary, 23; Mori presence in, inserted by Ihimaera, 21; Mori representation of, 23; New Zealand, as alienating, 19; Pakeha literary europeanization of, 21; Pakeha literary representation as alienating, 21; Pakeha romanticization of, 23; personification of, 22; personification of, by Ihimaera, 22; viewed nationally as Mori, 25 language, American, 9, 66, 68, 73 language, and hybridity, 96; and narrative plurality, 66; and paraphrase, 153; and polyglossia, 65, 66, 67, 68, 86; baroque style of, 85; in nation-building, 8; indigenous, 58; minority, 106; of narrative, 55 —See also: heteroglossia, multilingualism language, English, xvi, 58, 97, 175; vernacular, xv, 34, 142; and colonial

subjection, 58; as lingua franca, 65; as ‘profane’, 58 language, Mori, ambivalence of Ihimaera’s stance towards language, Mori, xiii, 13, 22, 26, 29, 31, 35, 43, 58, 82, 88, 103, 104, 110, 119, 120, 122, 137, 162, 191, 207; interspersing of, 153; Mori / English conflation, 94

—See also: translation Laplantine, François, & Alexis Nouss, 79, 80

Lazarus, Neil, 57 Leiris, Michel, 79 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 40; I Pagliacci 38

lesbianism, 52, 129, 133, 135 Levine, Hal, 45, 201, 202 Life of Galileo (Brecht), 79 linearity, Western, xi, 51, 86, 96, 151, 179 literary criticism, New Zealand, xi, xvi, 3, 4, 6, 56, 145, 208 —See also: critics Liu, McCreanor, McIntosh & Teaiwa, 46, 154

Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee), 196 London, xvii, 100, 111, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 150, 176, 178, 184, 186, 187, 188, 193, 207, 208, 221 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 61, 73, 153 Los Angeles, 139, 141, 207 Lost Steps, The (Alejo Carpentier), 87 Lotman, Yuri, 96 Lucretius, 79 Luminous (Tawhai), 181 lyricism, in Ihimaera, xiv, 2, 4, 12, 14, 15, 18, 23, 31, 34, 35, 36, 104, 113, 116, 117, 155, 157, 209 Mabo decision, 161 Macbeth (Verdi), 78

246 Mackay, Jessie, 19, 21, 22 Macpherson, James, Ossian myth, 10, 11,

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Mori–Pakeha dichotomy, 35 Mori–Pakeha relations, x, xiv, xv, 1, 5, 21 35, 48, 59, 62, 74, 76, 89, 138, 149, 151, magical realism, 4 156, 161, 163, 165, 176, 182 Maguire, Marian, vii, 16 Mori Party, 180 mainstream culture, 110 Mori Renaissance, x, xii, xiii, xvii, xviii, mainstream writing, 2, 21, 26, 91, 95, 123, 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 37, 153, 154, 158, 160, 171, 192, 201 38, 40, 44, 50, 55, 56, 71, 72, 73, 75, Malley, Ern, affair 76, 78, 88, 109, 110, 112, 116, 117, 118, —See: Ern Malley affair 120, 122, 123, 128, 154, 160, 187, 188, mana, 85, 110, 131, 164, 194 198, 205, 209 Manai, Franco, & Kirsten Hanna, 79 Mori Television Station, 181 Mancini, Roland, 40; & Jacques RouveMori writing, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, roux, 77 33, 34, 35, 41, 43, 47, 53, 57, 58, 64, Mandela, Nelson, 144 145, 163, 165, 169, 191, 211 Mander, Jane, 90 Moritanga, x, xii, xiii, xiv, xviii, 3, 14, Manhire, Bill, 47, 210 28, 31, 32, 45, 47, 50, 51, 57, 62, 69, 71, Mansfield, Katherine, 17, 90, 91, 92, 93, 72, 73, 82, 86, 111, 113, 128, 130, 139, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 140, 152, 155, 158, 185, 186, 188, 190, 104, 105, 106; epiphany in, 103, 104, 205, 207, 210, 212 Maoriland, 7, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25 105; Germany in, 100; “Bliss” 104; “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” 99; “The Maoriness, 4, 37, 50, 54, 71, 72, 74, 105, Doll’s House” 104; “How Pearl Button 139, 179, 190, 209, 212 was Kidnapped” 102; “Prelude” 103 marae, x, 24, 34, 36, 37, 66, 72, 82, 109, Mori aesthetic, xi, 2, 3, 4; Pakeha non116, 117, 119, 124, 131, 135, 136, 153, engagement with, 169 185, 186, 188, 191, 211 Maori Battalion, 130, 131, 184 marginalization, xiii, 25, 27, 33, 34, 46, Mori cultural expression, and European 52, 53, 56, 90, 93, 95, 101, 102, 109, and international influences on, 35 162, 165, 166, 178, 181, 195 Mori fiction, xi, xv, xvi, xvii, 2, 3, 5, 6, Mariette, Auguste, 78 Marriner, Craig, 31 18, 25, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 42, 43, 45, Martel, Yann, Beatrice and Virgil, 173, 49, 50, 51, 54, 77, 128 —See also: short stories 174 “Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Martinique, 23 Perception” (Ihimaera), 2, 15, 25, 28, 36 Mascagni, Pietro, Cavalleria Rusticana, Mori literature, x, xi, xv, xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 37, 38, 40 masculinity, xv, 16, 17, 18, 52, 78, 130, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 42, 43, 47, 54, 56, 58, 61, 64, 200 Masked Ball, A (Verdi), 78, 83, 85 97, 108, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 175, 180, 184, 207, 209, 212 Massey, Doreen, 128, 129 Maori Made Trademark, 152 Matchitt, Para, 40, 41, 54



Index

Matriarch, The (Ihimaera), 26, 35, 36, 47, 59, 66, 70, 74–86, 87–90, 102, 106, 109, 112, 115, 138, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 165, 169, 189, 193, 194, 209 matriarchy, 70, 71, 194 Matthews, Philip, 206, 207 Maui (trickster figure), 189, 202 McGaw, William, 30, 46 Meads, Colin, 206 mediascapes (Appadurai), 136, 140 “Meeting Elizabeth Costello” (Ihimaera), 195, 196, 198, 199, 201 Meklin, Margaret, 173, 182 metafiction, 63, 65, 81 Michaels, Eric, 44, 45 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 208 migrancy, 9, 11, 141, 152, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 194, 200, 221 Mila, Karlo, 181 militancy, ethnic, 9; literary, absence of New Zealand tradition of, 168, 169; Mori, cultural, x, 3, 6, 31, 33, 35, 163; Mori, literary, 27; Mori, subordinated to aesthetic of opera, 39; nationalist, in Fanon, 29; of characters, in Ihimaera, 9, 74, 151, 198; of tone, in Ihimaera, xv, 5, 36, 76, 101, 138, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 173; subdued by epiphany, 103; U S civil-rights, 9 Miller, J. Hillis, 69, 106 Milza, Pierre, 78 mimesis, 54, 68, 69, 73, 165 mimeticism, 67, 74, 77, 81, 88, 106, 128 mimicry (Bhabha), 69; in Ihimaera, 69 minority culture, xv, xvi, xvii, 5, 8, 9, 26, 30, 34, 39, 41, 43, 48, 49, 55, 57, 93, 106, 123, 133, 140, 146, 154, 158, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 187, 190, 199, 200, 201, 211 minority literature, 6, 56, 106, 108, 158

247 mission statement, 28 —See: kaupapa Mistry, Rohinton, 174 Mitcalfe, Barry, 4, 27 Mittelman, James H., 125 mixing, ethnic, 202; Mori–Pakeha cultural, 48, 120, 139, 149, 151, 160 modernism, xiv, 4, 14, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 114, 146 modernity, 15, 19, 32, 71, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 120, 125, 127, 129, 131, 137, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 162, 173, 175, 209, 211 Moeka’a, Moana, 112 Monkey Beach (Robinson), 203 monolingualism, 191 Morey, Kelly Ana, 163, 210; Grace is Gone 184 Mormonism, 62, 68, 157 Morris, Paula, 42, 163, 170, 184, 210; Hibiscus Coast 163, 184; Queen of Beauty 184; “Rangatira” 163 Mudrooroo, 168, 182, 183, 194, 203; Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, 184 Muecke, Stephen, 44, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 129, 131, 144, 146, 154, 157 Mukherjee, Arjun P., 93, 107, 175 multiculturalism, xv, 167, 171, 192 Murphy, Roy, 48 Murry, John Middleton, 96, 99 music theatre, 36, 38, 40, 54 music, and Ihimaera, 36, 49, 69, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85 —See also: opera My Life as a Fake (Peter Carey), 168 mysticism, 19, 22, 110, 112, 117, 183, 209 myth, xi, xv, 10, 11, 20, 25, 26, 29, 36, 51, 58, 61, 68, 71, 74, 76, 88, 97, 105,

248 111, 112, 116, 117, 120, 131, 137, 165, 189, 207, 209; in nation-building, 8 mythology, 15, 50, 58, 70, 75, 88, 208

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Ngai Tahu, 121, 122, 128, 142, 152, 188 Ngata, Apirana, 130 Ngatapa massacre, 89, 160, 165, 173 Ngati Konohi, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, Nabucco (Verdi), 76, 78, 83, 85 122, 128, 142, 211 Naipaul, V.S., 106, 174 Ngati Porou, 113, 128, 156 Naked Samoans, 181 Ngati Ranana, 188 narration, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 51, 52, 53, 63, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69 66, 68, 81, 84, 85, 87, 89, 100, 101, Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Ihi135, 142, 151, 156, 158, 159, 176, 188, maera), 46, 47, 49–53, 59, 63, 158 189, 195, 197; omniscient, 52, 151, 156; first-person, 35, 176, 178; third-person, Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Manuel de Falla), 49 176 narrative perspective No. 2 (Frazer), 181 —See: perspective, narrative Noble Savage, in Ihimaera, 52, 53, 133 nationalism, xvii, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 18, 19, Nola, Nina, 181 Nolan, Maggie, & Carrie Dawson, 168 20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 46, 49, 56, 64, 78, 106, 160, non-linearity, 85 non-mimeticism, 77, 167 201, 207, 209, 211; cultural, xiv, 6, 9, 11, 15, 16, 22, 23, 25, 30, 32, 38, 39, 55, nostalgia, in Ihimaera, 21, 24, 56, 66, 117, 106, 107, 130, 158, 161, 206, 208, 209, 177, 178, 186 novel, by Ihimaera, with Pakeha pro210, 211 tagonist and non- Mori setting, 49 nation-building, xvii, 7, 8, 11, 15, 19, 23, novels, Pakeha, with Mori characters, 43 26, 29, 31, 37, 38, 56, 109, 122, 125, 128, 137 O’Connor, Tom, Tides of Kawhia, 43 nation-state, x, 126, 129 naturalism, 4 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 95 Negritude, 30 Ojinmah, Umelo, 48, 138 Nesian Mystik (Polynesian music), 181 Olympic Games (Sydney), 170 New Guinea Highlands, 114, 127, 145 Once Were Warriors (dir. Tamahori), 115 New Net Goes Fishing, The (Ihimaera), 5, Once Were Warriors (Duff), 131, 165 Ondaatje, Michael, 106 9, 12, 14, 22, 26, 34, 47, 58, 71, 102, “One Summer Morning” (Ihimaera), 18 112, 138, 155, 165 New Orleans, 184 “Opera Brief for Waituhi: The Life of the Village” (Ihimaera), 37, 39 New York, xvii, 9, 87, 112, 113, 124, 126, opera, xii, xv, xvii, 12, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 128, 136, 141, 153, 187, 196 “New Zealand Dreams, Pacific Destinies” 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 75, (Ihimaera), 193 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, Newman, Judie, 97, 98 86, 87, 88, 102, 106, 107, 165, 194, 212; and Ihimaera, 35–41 Newton, John, 20, 21 Nga Tamatoa, 9 Oppenheim, R.S., 3, 5, 6



orality, xi, 11, 28, 36, 85, 88, 131, 189, 208

Orbell, Margaret, 2, 11 Orientalism (Said), 171, 172 Orr, Bridget, 55 Ossian myth (Macpherson), 10, 11, 21 Othello (Verdi), 49, 78, 85 overreading, 64, 65, 67 “Ozymandias” (Shelley), 14 Pacific, xi, xv, 10, 42, 44, 55, 105, 113, 130, 138, 180, 181, 184 Pagliacci, I (Leoncavallo), 38 painting, Aboriginal, 44 Pakeha– Mori relations See: Mori–Pakeha relations Pakeha, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xviii, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 58, 63, 65, 68, 71, 74, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 119, 122, 128, 129, 132, 138, 139, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175, 181, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189, 198, 199, 201, 209, 210; as identity-marker, xiv Pakeha–Mori dichotomy, 5, 6, 7 Palace of the Peacock (Harris), 92 pan-Indigenality (Mudrooroo), 182, 183, 184

Papakura, Maggie, 111 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 96, 97 Paratene, Rawiri, 206, 207 parody, in Ihimaera, 69, 72, 73, 93, 95, 107, 167, 198 Pasifika, 180, 181 passing, ethnic, 168 pastiche, in Ihimaera, xiv, 63, 67, 68, 69, 75

249

Index

pastoralism, 12, 14, 15, 24, 35, 66, 89, 100, 156 patriarchy, 68 patriotism, 22, 78, 178, 187 Pearson, Bill, 1, 2, 4, 18, 21, 76, 164, 185, 186, 191 Pearson, David, 182 Penguin Books, 28 performativity, 19, 40, 41, 45, 52, 54, 77, 79, 81, 131, 181, 190, 197 “Performing English” (Ihimaera), 62, 97 Perry, Nick, 145, 190, 196, 197, 198, 199 personification, 22 perspective, narrative, 12, 17, 21, 32, 49, 85, 95, 103, 121, 159, 160, 165, 166, 167, 170, 176, 188, 189, 195, 200 Piano, The (dir. Campion), 90, 115 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 134, 150, 151, 154 Pinney, Christopher, 80 Pirie, Mark, 43 plagiarism, 89, 90, 99, 167, 193, 194, 200

pluralism, xix, 48, 58, 64, 65, 66, 67, 74, 85, 92, 93, 150, 163, 201, 202, 205, 209

plurivocality, 66, 191 poétique, Glissantian, 23, 24 poetry, Anglo-Saxon, xiv, 4, 52, 97; Mori, xi, 2, 14, 27, 181; Pacific, 44, 181; Pakeha, 16, 20 politeness, 169, 170, 173 polyglossia, 66 Polynesian body, 55 polyphony, 49, 66, 67, 73, 75, 159, 92, 172

Pope, Quentin, ed. Kowhai Gold, 16 postcolonialism, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 23, 29, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63, 65, 69, 80, 84, 90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 102, 106, 107,

250 108, 116, 123, 125, 132, 133, 146, 154, 158, 159, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 180, 184, 190, 192, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 209, 211, 212: indigenous, v, 155 postculturalism (During), 112, 120 postmodernism, xiv, 63, 65, 71, 75, 114, 146, 148, 162, 166, 177, 210 poststructuralism, 146 Pounamu, Pounamu (Ihimaera), ix, xi, 2, 5, 6, 12, 18, 24, 102, 112, 116, 191 poverty, Maori, 19, 23, 24, 34, 40, 100, 102, 165, 185 pre-colonialism, 161, 162

“Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (Wordsworth), 12, 13 “Prelude” (Mansfield), 103 pre-modernity, 110, 122 Prentice, Chris, xiii, 8, 9, 25, 27, 32, 34, 75, 76, 84, 85, 89, 117, 123, 124, 145, 146, 159, 168, 199 pride, cultural, xii, xiii, xviii, 24, 38, 131 “Principles and Guidelines” (United Nations cultural charter), 162, 169, 172, 187

protocol, Mori cultural, 26, 29, 36, 72, 88, 118, 119, 135 provincialism, positive, 23, 25 publishing, of Mori literature, xi, 25, 26, 35, 154, 201 —See also: Heinemann Educational, Huia Publishers, Penguin Books Queen of Beauty (Morris), 184 Quicksands (Turner), 21 race relations, x, xiii, 5, 27, 29, 31, 35, 47, 48, 53, 58, 76, 84, 85, 89, 139, 153, 155, 159, 160, 161, 163, 173, 210 See also: Mori–Pakeha relations

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Rakete, Hiria, 40 Ramsden, Irihapeti, 27 “Rangatira” (Morris), 163 Rastafarianism, 85 rationality, European, 102 real fakes (Perry), 145 realism, aesthetic of, 30 realism, xi, xiv, 5, 12, 15, 16, 20, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 50, 56, 62, 66, 68, 69, 70, 77, 84, 99, 116, 165 Red Earth and Pouring Rain (Vikram Chandra), 85 renaissance, cultural, 10 —See also: Mori Renaissance resistance to novel form, among minority cultures, 106 —See also: militancy resistance, Aboriginal, 111; Mori cultural, xii; minority, 202; Pakeha cultural, xiii respect, cultural, xviii —See also: politeness Return, The (Ihimaera), 17, 138, 139–52, 155, 175, 176, 178, 179, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 193, 208, 209 return, topos of, in Ihimaera, 148 revisionism, 35, 58, 74, 75, 76, 88, 89, 165

rewriting, and Ihimaera, xvii, 50, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 99, 101, 106, 107, 138, 148, 159, 163, 173, 191, 193, 208, 211 Rhodes, H. Winston, 3, 42 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, 92, 98, 99, 101 Riemenschneider, Dieter, 132, 133, 153 Riemer, Andrew, 166, 167, 173 Rimmer, Matthew, 79, 194 Ringatu faith, 86, 111, 157 Risorgimento, 38, 75, 76 Robertson, Roland, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 134, 137, 151, 154, 177, 178



251

Index

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 98 Robinson, Eden, 98; Monkey Beach 203; Traplines 203 Romanticism, xiv, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 31, 36, 38, 56, 67, 84, 97, 100, 102, 104, 107, 155, 156, 165, 191 Rope of Man, The (Ihimaera), 32, 124, 138, 148, 150, 151, 155, 193, 201, 209, 211, 212 rope of man, trope in Ihimaera, 150, 179, 184, 194, 213 Rosello, Mireille, 180 Rotorua, 111, 153 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 11 Royal New Zealand Ballet, 191 runanga (tribal council), 122, 154 rural society, and nation-building, 8, 11; Mori, ix, xii, xv, 2, 4, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 34, 38, 66, 100, 102, 129, 132, 143, 144, 156, 179, 185, 186, 187, 207 Rushdie, Salman, 65, 66, 97, 106; Midnight’s Children 208; Shame 174 Russia, and Chekhov, 101 Russian literature, 99; nationalism, 22 Rutherford, Anna, 106 sacredness, 19, 58, 100, 105, 110, 118, 132, 162, 164, 169 —See: mana, tapu, mysticism, spirituality Said, Edward W., 88, 92, 96, 97, 105, 106, 171, 172, 175, 208 Salmond, Anne, 111 Sargeson, Frank, 15, 17, 22; “The Hole that Jack Dug” 64, 66 scapes (Appadurai), 137, 140, 144 Schaeffer, Pierre, 39 Schneider, Elisabeth, 99 Schoenberg, Arnold, 39

science fiction, in Ihimaera, 61, 62, 74, 165, 212 Scott, Kim, Benang, 203 Scottish cultural revivalism, 10 Seafarer, The, 4 “selfish” writing, of Ihimaera, xvii, 46, 47, 49, 59 self-representation, xvii, 33, 43, 80, 115 semiosphere (Lotman), 96 separatism, xii, 5, 10, 15, 27, 39, 120, 133, 138, 158, 161, 199 Seth, Vikram, 174 settlement, colonial, xii settler culture, xii, 15, 20, 93, 110, 161 sexuality, 52, 53, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135 See also cross-dressing, homophobia, homosexuality, lesbianism, transsexualism, transvestism Shadbolt, Maurice, xiii Shakespeare, William, 97 Shame (Rushdie), 174 Shand, Peter, 124, 211 Shanghai, 163, 184 Sharp, Iain, 62, 68, 72 Sharples, Peter, 180 Sharrad, Paul, 5, 6, 42, 44, 45, 192 Sheelahroc (Polynesian music), 181 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Ozymandias” 14, 15

Shepheard, Nicola, xi, 49, 50, 119, 120, 186, 206 short stories, ix, xi, xvi, 2, 14, 26, 31, 90, 195; Canadian, 203; Maori, xi, 2, 5, 17, 34, 64, 159, 163, 181, 193 —See also Huia Short Stories Shortland Street (New Zealand soap opera), 70 Sicily, culture of, and affinities with Mori culture, 37 Simms, Norman, 4, 42 Simpson, Rebecca, 40

252 simulacra (Baudrillard), 69, 145 Singer, Peter, 196 Sione’s Wedding (dir. Chris Graham), 181 Sky Dancer (Ihimaera), 47, 61–74, 97, 106, 125, 152, 158, 167, 190, 198, 209 “Sleepy Head” (Chekhov), 99, 100 small-town setting, in Ihimaera, 66, 67,

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Star Wars, 61, 189 State housing, 24 State Opera House (Wellington), 35 Stead, C.K., xiii, 42, 65, 74, 75, 84, 168, 190

stereotyping, 1, 62, 69, 71, 72, 170, 195, 196, 198, 199; in nation-building, 8 storytelling, xi, xv, 10, 51, 78, 84, 112, 68 Smetana, Bedich, 37, 38 131, 135, 159, 189 Smith, Jo, 180 sublime, Romantic, xiv, 14, 19, 102, 116 social sciences, 126, 136, 210 subversion, literary, 93, 88, 107, 197 Somerset, Guy, 194 —See also: parody Suez Canal, 78 Sorrenson, Keith, 89, 90, 194 South Africans, in Ihimaera, 144, 146, 147 Sullivan, Robert, 55, 175; Star Waka 181 sovereignty, Mori, x, xiii, xvii, xviii, 6, Sykes, Annette, 154 syncretism, 57 7, 9, 10, 15, 21, 24, 26, 27, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 75, 84, 88, Tamahori, Lee, dir. Once Were Warriors 120, 122, 128, 133, 136, 151, 152, 153, 160, 173, 187, 198, 199, 205, 208, 209, 115 tangata whenua, 22, 62 211 specificity, cultural, 212; Mori cultural, Tangi (Ihimaera), x, xii, 2, 3, 11, 12, 24, xvi, xvii, xviii, 4, 33, 34, 103, 104, 106, 32, 51, 66, 112, 116, 138, 139, 148, 150, 108, 121, 123, 128, 137, 140, 142, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159, 184, 185, 192, 209, 151, 154, 161, 163, 164, 175, 199, 209, 211 Tangi and Whanau (Ihimaera), ix 211 tangi, ix, 159 Spencer, Robert, 171, 172, 173 spiral motif, Mori, 55; in Ihimaera, 150, Tanz der Schwäne (Ihimaera), 47 tapu, 28, 110 179 spirituality, 19, 24, 71, 136, 163, 207 Tasmania, 183 —See also: sacredness tattooing, 55 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 171, 175; & Tau, Te Maire, 121 Sneja Gunew, 168 Tawhai, Alice, 163, 210; Luminous 181 Spoonley, Paul, 154; Cluny Macpherson Taylor, Apirana, 27 & David Pearson, 46 Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Maori Writing (co-ed. Ihimaera), xi, 27, 28, Springbok rugby tour, 144 Sri Lanka, 141 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 43, 50, 52, 55, Stachurski, Christina, 182 150, 164, 181 Stafford, Jane, & Mark Williams, 14, 19, Te Kooti, 76, 82, 85, 86, 89, 111, 165 Te Punga Somerville, Alice, 182 111 Star Waka (Sullivan), 181 Te Raukura (Dansey), 5



253

Index

Te Rauparaha, 43 te reo, 35 —See also: Mori language Te Whanau A Kai, 113, 143, 156, 157, 193 Teaiwa, Teresia, 180 technoscapes (Appadurai), 136, 142, 153 television, in Ihimaera, 35, 139, 140, 142, 149, 196, 208 television, Mori, 153 tense, narrative, in Ihimaera, 135 “Tent on the Home Ground” (Ihimaera), 9 terra nullius, New Zealand as, 19 Tharoor, Shashi, 97 theatricality, 81, 82 Thiesse, Anne–Marie, 8, 11, 13, 14, 23, 26, 29, 36 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 12 third-person narration, 176 Thompson, Christina, 42, 170 Thomson, J.M., 40, 54 Tides of Kawhia (O’Connor), 43 tikanga, 28, 164 Tolkien, J.R.R., Lord of the Rings 61, 73, 153

Tompkins, Joanne, 189 tourism, 25, 153, 181, 187, 206 traditionalism, 113, 165, 205, 207, 208 transculturality, 126, 127, 133, 134, 154, 175

transculturation, xvii, 86, 125, 126, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 150, 152, 161, 174, 175, 176, 177, 184, 202 transgression, 132, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 173 translation, 40, 43, 91, 99, 128, 150, 191, 211; cultural, 40, 54, 57, 95, 111, 113, 115, 118, 124, 129, 130, 131, 147, 150, 153, 154, 157, 211, 212 translocal culture, 127, 128

transnationalism, 207 transsexualism, 135 transvestism, 197 Traplines (Robinson), 203 Treaty of Waitangi, x, xiv, 48, 91, 101, 138, 161, 175 tribal society, 207; Mori, 4, 11, 12, 14, 26, 28, 34, 36, 38, 47, 51, 85, 88, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 129, 131, 134, 135, 143, 150, 153, 160, 162, 163, 164, 175, 176, 179, 184, 186, 188, 192, 194, 195, 203 Troilus and Criseide (Chaucer), 92 Trowenna Sea, The (Ihimaera), 90, 183, 193, 194, 195 Trucanini, 184, 194 Turia, Tariana, 180 Turner, Stephen, 111; Quicksands 21 Tuwhare, Hone, xi, 2 Ukrainians, in Demidenko, 165 Uncle’s Story, The (Ihimaera), 124, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 150, 152, 153, 183, 191, 193, 209 underreading, 64, 65 United Nations, 161, 162, 164, 169, 172, 182, 187 urban drift, Mori, 25, 132, 157, 188 urban society, Mori, 2, 17, 18, 23, 25, 30, 34, 51, 71, 114, 130, 132, 133, 143, 152, 157, 162, 163, 179, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188 urban violence, Mori, 31, 131 urban youth, Mori, 12, 27, 34, 72, 135, 186

urbanization, 9, 39, 162 user pays’ capitalism, 122 utu, 131

254 Van Meijl, Toon, 72 Venice, 75, 80, 85, 86, 88 Verdi, Giuseppi, 49, 38, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 106; Aida 76, 78, 82, 85; Don Carlos 78; The Force of Destiny 78; Macbeth 78; A Masked Ball 78, 83, 85; Nabucco 76, 78, 83, 85; Othello 49, 78, 85 Verga, Giovanni, 40 verismo, 37, 38, 40, 54, 87 Vida Breva, La (Manuel de Falla), 38 Vietnam War, xvii, 130, 131, 136, 153 village life, Maori, ix, 11, 12, 23, 24, 25, 36, 37, 50, 51, 69, 89, 109, 139, 143 Vintner’s Luck, The (Knox), 115 viticulture, in Ihimaera, 142, 143, 144, 152

voice, narrative, in Ihimaera, 135 Waitangi Tribunal, xiv, 48, 121, 122, 162, 175, 178, 193 Waituhi, as fictional location, ix, x, xii, xvii, 12, 23, 24, 25, 37, 38, 40, 50, 51, 66, 68, 69, 74, 80, 87, 89, 113, 124, 126, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 148, 155, 156, 157, 158, 184, 185, 186, 195; as Ihimaera’s homeplace, 23, 138, 143, 186, 187; elision of distinction between homeplace and fictional location, 192 Waituhi: The Life of the Village (Ihimaera), 12, 37–41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53, 54, 59, 77, 190, 209 waka (traditional Mori canoe), 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 128, 145, 176, 211 Walker, Ranginui, xii, 14, 130, 161 Wanderer, The, 4 warrior tradition, Mori, 4, 19, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 150, 153 Watkin, Tim, 47, 48, 149, 151, 160, 206 Watt, Ian, 96

STRIDING BOTH WORLDS



Wattie, Nelson, 146, 147, 159 Webern, Anton, 39 Webster, Steven, xii, 45 Wedde, Ian, xiii, 21, 43; & Harvey McQueen, 28 Wedding, The (Ihimaera), 47, 191, 192 Weill, Kurt, 38, 39, 40, 54 Wellington, x, 54, 85, 132, 138, 148, 149, 184

Welsch, Wolfgang, 126, 127, 129, 134, 154

Wendt, Albert, 10, 42, 55, 180, 181 West Coast, natural beauty of, 21 Wevers, Lydia, 31, 50; & Mark Williams, 168, 169 whakapapa, x, 50, 71, 96, 102, 110, 112, 116, 131, 147, 188, 205 Whale Rider (dir. Caro), 25, 112, 115–24, 145, 152, 153, 205, 206, 207 Whale Rider, The (Ihimaera), 25, 61, 70, 73, 109–15, 116, 118, 124, 129, 138, 153, 173, 191, 194, 207, 212 whale, significance for Mori, 70, 110, 112, 113, 117, 123, 128, 145, 173, 187, 199

whnau, 23, 26, 27, 34, 50, 68, 71, 102, 129, 157, 186, 205 Whanau (Ihimaera), 2, 3, 12, 13, 35, 36, 51, 66, 72, 116, 159, 193, 211 Whanau II (Ihimaera), 51, 59, 89, 138, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 188, 193, 199, 211, 212 Whangara (setting of film Whale Rider), 25, 109, 116, 117, 118, 119, 153 whenua, 26 Wi Pere Trust, 85, 143, 143, 152 “Wicked” as name of character and nickname for Ihimaera, 195 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 92, 98, 101 Wilde, Oscar, 94



255

Index

Wilkins, Damien, 94, 103, 210 Wilkinson, Jane, xi, 4, 12, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 72 Williams, Haare, 27, 152 Williams, Mark, vii, 9, 10, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 47, 58, 75, 80, 90, 91, 95, 103, 105, 113, 124, 164, 170, 171, 173, 189, 191, 199 Wilson, Tim, 206 Wittmann, Livia Käthe, 182 Woman Far Walking (Ihimaera), 47, 101, 160, 165, 206 Wongar, B., 168

Wordsworth, William, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” 12, 13 working class, 4, 11, 17, 18, 24, 34, 68, 102, 181 World War Two, 130, 136, 184 world-view, local indigenous, 127; Mori, xi, xiii, xv, xvii, 2, 6, 7, 32, 34, 103, 111, 113, 124, 126, 131, 132, 136, 200, 213 writing back, 90, 92, 93, 97, 102, 103, 106, 203 Yorkshire Moors, 99 Zola, Émile, Ihimaera compared with, 4

