Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

Postcolonial Pacific Writing

In this major new interdisciplinary study, Michelle Keown examines representations of the body in the work of eight of Polynesia’s most significant contemporary writers. Exploring inter-connections between postcolonial studies and disciplines including anthropology, psychoanalysis, history and medicine, Postcolonial Pacific Writing develops an innovative framework specific to the literatures and cultures of the Pacific. An introductory chapter outlining trends and developments in Pacific literature since the 1970s is followed by chapters on individual writers. These include Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel (Samoa), Epeli Hau’ofa (Tonga), Alistair Campbell (Cook Islands), and Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Alan Duff (Aotearoa New Zealand). The book examines the cultural and literary affiliations between these writers, while also demonstrating the very different results of their ongoing relationships with colonial forces in their representations of the corporeal. Drawing on examples and contexts as wide-ranging as Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon and contemporary gang culture, Postcolonial Pacific Writing is a thoroughly researched and rigorous exploration of an intriguing field of study. Michelle Keown is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Stirling. She has published widely on Maori and Pacific writing.

Postcolonial literatures Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include: 1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction Seeing with a third eye Brenda Cooper 2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen Edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry Making style Denise deCaires Narain 4 African Literature, Animism and Politics Caroline Rooney 5 Caribbean-English Passages Intertextuality in a postcolonial tradition Tabias Döring 6 Islands in History and Representation Edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7 Civility and Empire Literature and culture in British India, 1821–1921 Anindyo Roy

8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939 ‘A Hot Place, Belonging to Us’ Evelyn O’Callaghan 9 Postcolonial Pacific Writing Representations of the body Michelle Keown 10 Writing Woman, Writing Place Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction Sue Kossew Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies A materialist critique Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction Seeing with a third eye Brenda Cooper The Postcolonial Jane Austen Edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry Making style Denise deCaires Narain Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris Edited by Andrew Bundy

Postcolonial Pacific Writing Representations of the body

Michelle Keown

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Michelle Keown All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or herafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Keown, Michelle, 1972– Postcolonial Pacific writing : representations of the body / Michelle Keown. p. cm. – (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Pacific Island literature (English)–History and criticism. 2. Islands of the Pacific–Intellectual life–20th century. 3. Polynesia–Intellectual life–20th century. 4. Oceania–Intellectual life–20th century. 5. Postcolonialism–Islands of the Pacific. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. 7. Postcolonialism–Polynesia. 8. Postcolonialism–Oceania. 9. Body, Human, in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR9645.K46 2005 820.9⬘99⬘0904–dc22 20040111958

ISBN 0-203-50679-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57250-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-29957-8 (Print Edition)

This book is dedicated to my parents, Paul and Robin Keown

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

xi xiii 1

Postcolonial dystopias: race, allegory and the Polynesian body in the writing of Albert Wendt

16

‘Gauguin is dead’: Sia Figiel and the Polynesian female body

38

Purifying the abject body: satire and scatology in Epeli Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends

61

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: mental illness and postcoloniality

84

Remoulding the body politic: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

102

Disease, colonialism and the national ‘body’: Witi Ihimaera’s The Dream Swimmer

127

Language and the corporeal: Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes

149

The narcissistic body: Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors

170

Conclusion: reinscribing the Polynesian body

191

Notes Bibliography Index

199 213 229

Figures

2.1 5.1 6.1 8.1 8.2

Map of the Pacific Islands The Malu (Samoan female tattoo) Carved wooden panels of Te Arawa workmanship Photograph of Rua Kenana Nig Heke (still image from Once Were Warriors) Photograph of Noah (showing Maori male tattoo)

xv 59 124 140 183 187

Acknowledgements

This book has emerged from the experience, in Michael King’s words, of ‘being Pakeha’ during the Maori Renaissance of the 1970s. During my childhood, my parents were both secondary school teachers, and I was privileged to accompany them on a number of live-in marae trips during the 1970s and 1980s. My early experiences triggered a lifelong interest in, and respect for, Maori language and culture, and I was fortunate enough to study the Maori language throughout my school years and my undergraduate years at Waikato University. Many thanks to Pari Kana, Kingi Turner and Aroha Yates-Smith for their teaching and support. Heartfelt thanks also to Ralph Crane, who supervised my Master’s thesis on Maori literature, and to Rod Edmond, who supervised my PhD on indigenous Pacific writing, after my initial focus on Maori literature broadened to encompass other Polynesian writers of the Pacific. Rod Edmond and Lyn Innes at the University of Kent (UK) both offered invaluable advice on earlier drafts of chapters included in this book, and Rod Edmond has also offered vital assistance in the final editing stages. Thanks also to my editors at Routledge, Liz Thompson, Kate Parker and Amrit Bangard. I also wish to express my immense gratitude to Joe Bray and Mark Houlahan, who read the manuscript in its entirety, and to Ken Arvidson, Emma Bainbridge, David Callahan, Fiona Chalamanda, Rana Dayoub, Brian Dillon, Felicity Dunworth, Corinne Fowler, Eugene McNulty, Kirstine Moffat, Lindsey Moore, Stuart Murray, Stephen Penn, James Procter, Catherine Richardson and Catherine Silverstone, who offered helpful advice on particular chapters. I’m grateful to various friends and colleagues at the University of Stirling (Bethan Benwell, John Drakakis, Adrian Hunter, Robert Miles, Mark Nixon, Angela Smith, Rory Watson) for advice and support during the editing process. Thanks also to graduate students John Masterton and Upala Sen, as well as undergraduate students at Stirling, who have offered thought-provoking perspectives on Pacific texts I have taught during the last three years. I’m very grateful to University of Waikato English Department and IT staff for vital space and support during the final stages of preparing the manuscript, and to the William Georgetti Scholarship Trust and the Commonwealth

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Acknowledgements

Scholarship Commission in the UK for funding during the early stages of this project. Earlier versions of material included in the Patricia Grace chapter were published previously in New Literatures Review 38 (2002): 87–100 and in Christian Mair (ed.) (2003) The Politics of English as a World Language, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 419–29; and sections of the chapter on Sia Figiel were previously published in an article in SPAN 48/49 (1999): 91–107. Many thanks to Paul Sharrad (NLR), Christian Mair and Margriet Goldie (Rodopi), and Ralph Crane (SPAN) for permission to include the revised material here. Thanks also to Robin Scholes for permission to include still images from Once Were Warriors (1994); to the Alexander Turnbull Library for permission to include images from their ‘Timeframes’ database; and to Paul Chamberlain at Southern Reprints for permission to reproduce an illustration from Carl Marquardt’s The Tattooing of Both Sexes in Samoa (1899; distributed by [email protected]). Many thanks to cartographer Max Oulton for permission to reproduce his map of the Pacific Islands. I wish to acknowledge those writers, featured in this book, whom I was fortunate enough to meet (and, in most cases, to interview) during the course of my research. These include Patricia Grace, Alistair Campbell, Epeli Hau’ofa, Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera and Sia Figiel. Kia ora koutou katoa. Heartfelt thanks also to Red Haua (Ngati Porou) for advice on Maori carving and moko, and to Paul Sharrad for help with bibliographical research on Albert Wendt. Finally, thanks most of all to my partner Jonathan Wild, and to my parents (Paul and Robin Keown), grandparents (Clem and Mona Randall), and siblings (Dallas, Hayley, Natasha) for their love and support over the years, and for their assistance with the arduous task of proofreading.

Figure 1 Map of the Pacific Islands, by Max Oulton, Geography Department, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Introduction

This book offers an introduction to the contemporary postcolonial literatures of the Pacific through a focus on eight of its most renowned writers, examining the various ways in which these writers negotiate a central preoccupation in Pacific indigenous literature in English: the representation of the indigenous body. Rather than attempting to undertake a survey of the entire corpus of indigenous Pacific literatures, which have emerged from a large and diverse range of cultures spread across the vast Pacific Ocean, I have chosen to focus upon the South Pacific region, and more specifically upon a group of Maori and Pacific Island writers situated within the geographical and conceptual category of Polynesia. These include Samoan writers Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel; Tongan writer Epeli Hau’ofa;1 Cook Island writer Alistair Te Ariki Campbell; and New Zealand Maori writers Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Alan Duff. From a geographical point of view, Polynesia comprises a vast area – known as the ‘Polynesian Triangle’ – extending from Hawai‘i in the north, to New Zealand in the south-west, and Easter Island in the east. As a conceptual category ‘Polynesia’ did not yet exist when European explorers such as Captain James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville first visited the Pacific region. It was French navigator Jules-Sebastien-César Dumont d’Urville who, in 1832, introduced a systematized distinction between Polynesian and Melanesian races on the basis of skin colour (B. Douglas 1999: 65).2 Such divisions ranked Polynesians (and Micronesians) as ‘racially, morally and politically superior’ to Melanesians and Australian Aborigines (ibid.: 65), and in European literature which appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Polynesian cultures (and bodies) were persistently stereotyped as ‘paradisiacal’, ‘gorgeous’, ‘fertile’ and ‘idyllic’, while Melanesian islands were represented as ‘fetid’, ‘decaying’, and ‘hellish’ (Kjellgren 1993: 99; see also Hau’ofa 1975: 286; Hereniko 1999a; Teaiwa and Kabutaulaka 2000: 30). Since the late 1760s, when European explorers first brought reports of Tahiti and other Pacific Islands back to the metropolitan centres, Polynesia – above other regions within the Pacific – has proved to be of particular fascination to European

2

Introduction

travellers and writers (B. Smith 1985: 1; Edmond 1997a: 16). The putative physical beauty of Polynesians – and in particular Tahitians – led eighteenth-century explorers such as Bougainville and Joseph Banks to draw parallels between Tahitian culture and classical Greek culture, and the region became figured, in romantic terms, as a South Seas Eden inhabited by noble savages untouched by the corruptions of the ‘civilized’ European world (B. Smith 1985: 42).3 Described by Bougainville as ‘la Nouvelle Cythère’, Tahiti was also accorded a reputation as a sexual paradise, and as Bernard Smith points out, the island ‘became notorious throughout Europe in the popular mind as a land of free-love’ (ibid.: 47). Such stereotypes have fired the imaginations of generations of European artists and writers,4 and these idealized constructions have persisted into the contemporary era, fuelled (as Rob Wilson notes) by media and touristindustry representations of the Pacific as a timeless paradise within which Western desires and fantasies may be played out: [The] New Pacific . . . threatens to remain . . . a strategic and commercial space where European, American, and Asian desires – to use these tourist sites for pleasure zones, for journeys of regression and redemption, for phallocratic bodily bliss, for temporary release into excess and leisure, for landscapes of Edenic wilderness and ecological purity – are still being played out at the expense of a globally worked-over and troped-upon native culture. (1999: 10) The writings of European missionaries, who came to the Pacific in increasing numbers following the establishment of the London Missionary Society in Tahiti in 1795, were to generate a second set of stereotypes focusing upon the Polynesian body. Nineteenth-century European missionary accounts of the South Pacific perpetuated the sexualization of Polynesian cultures, but they also represented Polynesian peoples as ignoble, savage heathens – who indulged in ‘abhorrent social practices such as cannibalism, infanticide and tattooing’ – in order to justify native conversion to Christianity (Edmond 1997a: 9; I.C. Campbell 1980: 57; Pearson 1984: 27). New Zealand Maori, in particular, were represented as hostile and aggressive in spite of their putative beauty and nobility. This reputation had its origins in a series of misunderstandings and violent conflicts between Maori tribes and European explorers,5 as well as eyewitness reports of inter-tribal warfare and cannibalism from European missionaries and travellers.6 Such ideologies were to influence early colonial policy in New Zealand, although, as increasing numbers of Maori perished during the nineteenth century,7 the popular currency of neo-Darwinist ‘fatal impact’ theory8 prompted a refiguration of the Maori people as ‘noble savages’ facing certain extinction (Sinclair 1986: 203). Further, in spite of the continuing circulation of representations of the Maori as a

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3

fierce warrior culture9 – consolidated when Maori inflicted a series of humiliating defeats upon their European opponents during a series of land wars in the 1860s – the Maori physique was frequently described as sensuous and neo-Grecian,10 spawning a tradition of idealized literary constructions of the Maori body (particularly the Maori female body).11 In recent decades, changes brought about by large-scale post-war urbanization of Maori – who, until the 1950s, had remained largely within rural and coastal village communities – have triggered new variants of the established ‘noble/ignoble savage’ stereotypes. On the one hand, recent government statistics, which indicate that Maori are disproportionately represented among the unemployed, criminal and socio-economically deprived sectors of New Zealand society, have precipitated negative constructions of Maori as a violent, benefit-dependent underclass. On the other hand, Pakeha 12 anxieties about colonial injustices against Maori – and the inimical socio-economic consequences of these injustices – have fostered defensively idealistic representations of New Zealand racerelations in which Maori and Pakeha dwell harmoniously in an antipodean utopian ‘godzone’.13 The Maori writers described in this book, like their Pacific Island counterparts, set out to challenge these established stereotypes. The differing political and cross-cultural circumstances which distinguish New Zealand from its Pacific Island neighbours, however, have ensured that the two groups of writers discussed in this book address the issue of representing the Polynesian body in discrete and distinctive ways. While most Pacific Island cultures, for example, have been subject to European colonial or neo-colonial incursion in some form, the process of post-war decolonization, which saw a variety of Pacific island cultures gain independence from the European imperialist centres, has left countries such as Western Samoa, the Cook Islands and Fiji (all of which feature in the work of the writers discussed in this book) free of the direct European hegemony which characterizes the current political situation in New Zealand. Nevertheless, evidence of a continuing neo-colonialism in the Pacific Island region is manifest in the work of the Pacific Island writers featured in this book. New Zealand, like Australia and the United States, has itself operated as a colonialist force within its sphere of influence, and the legacy of Western colonial incursion into the Pacific is evident in the heavy dependence of certain Pacific Island cultures upon foreign aid from their Western neighbours. In addition, a high proportion of Pacific Islanders currently emigrate to these countries in order to find work and to send remittances back, primarily in order to support relatives in the islands, but also to maintain oversized local bureaucracies originally established by colonial administrations. The acronym ‘MIRAB’ – conflating ‘migration, remittances, aid and bureaucracy’ – was coined as a label for Pacific Island cultures characterized by these conditions.14 The sociopolitical dynamics of MIRAB societies are explored in some detail in the

4

Introduction

writing of Epeli Hau’ofa, who has lived and worked within a variety of Polynesian and Melanesian cultures. Hau’ofa examines, within a pan-Pacific framework, the problems attendant upon foreign aid and continuing neocolonial activity in the Pacific region. Wendt and Figiel explore similar issues with specific reference to Western Samoa, over which New Zealand maintained colonial jurisdiction from 1914 to 1962. A sense of a shared experience of colonialism and neo-colonialism among Pacific Island cultures has intensified in recent decades, particularly since the founding of the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva, Fiji, in 1968, and the subsequent establishment of satellite campuses in various Pacific Island countries (Va’ai 1999a: 24–7). The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw the emergence of an indigenous Pacific creative writing tradition. This was headed by Albert Wendt – a senior and founding figure in Pacific literature and literary criticism15 – and fostered through the establishment of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) at USP in 1972, as well as through the activities of other local organizations within various Pacific Island cultures (Arvidson 1975; Simms 1986; Sharrad 1993, 2003; Tawake 2000; Subramani 2001).16 The SPCAS founded the journal MANA (edited by Cook Islander Marjorie Crocombe) in 1973: the title was selected because the word ‘mana’ – a multivalent term which carries connotations of power, psychic force and sociopolitical influence – existed in almost all Polynesian and many Melanesian languages, and therefore encapsulated the SPCAS’s intention to bring together writers from throughout the Pacific region (Va’ai 1999a: 27–8). The early 1970s also saw the emergence of the philosophy of the ‘Pacific Way’, a movement which – as Sina Va’ai points out – recognized ‘the commonality in developmental problems that required a unity in cooperation’ in order to combat ‘a common foe, the colonial powers’ (1999a: 32–3). As Va’ai suggests, the movement also assumed a Pacific Island ‘ideological brotherhood’ and a set of ‘cultural principles and practices’ which united Pacific Island nations (1999a: 33, 35). These sentiments were critiqued by Albert Wendt17 and by Epeli Hau’ofa,18 who identified the ‘Pacific Way’ movement as a ‘shallow ideology that was swept away by the rising tide of regional disunity of the 1980s’ (Hau’ofa 1998: 394). During this period, the regionalist ideologies of the ‘Pacific Way’ movement were opposed and eroded by the nationalist and ethnic fundamentalist ideologies which ultimately helped to precipitate the 1987 Fijian coup. As Ton Otto and Nicholas Thomas suggest, when championed by indigenous elites, ‘tradition can function as a political instrument for both liberation and repression’ (1997: 7, my italics; see also Lawson 1997). In spite of these socio-political schisms, however, the concept of a regional Pacific identity has persisted – albeit in a modified form – in recent Pacific cultural theory. In a series of seminal essays published throughout the 1990s, Hau’ofa himself has advocated the notion of an

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5

‘Oceanic’ identity which recognizes and protects unique local forms and traditions, as well as fostering a dynamic regional ethic in response to the pressures of global capitalism and cultural imperialism (Hau’ofa 1993, 1994, 1998: 392–3). His arguments have been taken up (and in some cases, critiqued) by a number of Pacific writers and scholars, and as Director of the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture at the University of the South Pacific, Hau’ofa has been able to put his regionalist theories into practice by fostering links between writers and artists from across the Pacific region (Keown 2001; Sinivaiana-Gabbard 2001; Subramani 2001; see also Edmond and Smith 2003). The dawning of the ‘Pacific Way’ movement coincided with the advent of the ‘Maori Renaissance’, a New Zealand-based movement which developed in response to widespread concern about the effects of post-war developments in Maori society, as well as the inimical socio-economic effects of more than a century of Pakeha hegemony. In the 1950s and 1960s increasing numbers of Maori began to leave their rural tribal communities in order to seek employment and other opportunities in the Pakeha-dominated urban centres. By the 1970s, concern over the attendant loss of traditional values and cultural practices, documented evidence of a huge reduction in the numbers of indigenes speaking Maori as a first language,19 and general dissatisfaction over political and socioeconomic disparities between Maori and Pakeha, precipitated a pan-Maori objective mounted in order to address these issues. Urban Maori began to establish supra-tribal Maori organizations in order to replace the traditional infrastructures of the dwindling rural communities, while political activists petitioned parliament for the establishment of courses in Maori language and culture in schools. Activist groups also advocated the concept of biculturalism in New Zealand society as an alternative to integration, which many Maori viewed as a thinly disguised contemporary version of the colonialist policy of assimilation (King 1985: 104). From this cultural milieu emerged writers such as Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace, the first Maori fiction writers to have their books published in English.20 While Ihimaera and Grace’s early writing was dominated by a nostalgic affection for a rapidly disappearing rural communalism, their later writing (like the work of other Maori writers published since the mid-1980s) has become more overtly politicized and anticolonialist, focusing more closely on the urban environments and attendant socio-economic problems which have become a reality for many contemporary Maori. While the political issues addressed by Maori (as an indigenous minority culture living within a settler colony) set them apart from many of their Pacific Island counterparts,21 since the 1970s there has been a constant exchange of ideas between Maori and Pacific Islander writers, who have met periodically at conferences and other literary events in addition to reading one another’s work.22 The dialogical relationship between Maori and other Pacific Island writers is also reflected in university syllabi in the South

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Pacific region. Albert Wendt, for example, has spent the past fifteen years as Professor of English Literature at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where Pacific texts are taught alongside works by Maori writers. Undergraduate courses featuring New Zealand and Pacific literatures are also offered at the University of Otago, the University of Canterbury and Victoria University of Wellington, while the School of Maori and Pacific Development at the University of Waikato offers courses featuring Maori and Pacific literature and performing arts. Further afield, the Pacific Writing Forum at the University of the South Pacific has established strong links with Pacific Island and Maori writers, and the University of Guam offers undergraduate courses featuring the work of Maori and Pacific Island writers.23 Indeed, there are documented historical, linguistic and cultural affinities between Maori and other Polynesian cultures which justify the grouping together of writers from this region. Various academic studies and fieldwork projects have established linguistic and archaeological links between Maori and other Polynesian cultures in countries such as Samoa, Tonga, Hawai‘i and the Cook Islands (Krupa 1982; Crowley 1992; Edmond 1997a). It is widely held that Polynesian culture originated in the central Pacific islands of Tonga, Samoa, Uvea and Futuna, and that during the last two millennia there were a series of migrations eastwards to the Cook, Society and Marquesas Islands, followed by a second wave of migrations to Hawai‘i in the north, Easter Island in the east, and New Zealand in the south-west (King 1997: 14). Carbon dating has proved that the New Zealand landfall was made by the thirteenth century AD (King 2003: 18), and some Maori historians date the arrival as early as AD 800 (Walker 1990: 24).24 Demographic developments in New Zealand in the post-war period have consolidated links between Maori and other Polynesians. The New Zealand economy was rapidly industrialized in the period following the Second World War, and thousands of Pacific Islanders, particularly Polynesians, were invited into the country to offset an industrial labour shortage, and were channelled mainly into semi-skilled and unskilled employment in the manufacturing sector (Macpherson 1992; 1997). Many of these migrants applied for permanent residency in New Zealand, precipitating chain migration patterns. Although New Zealand’s immigrant policy has subsequently tightened25 and socio-economic conditions for Pacific Island immigrants have worsened,26 at the time of the 2001 Census 1 in 16 (or 231,801) people in New Zealand were of Pacific Island ethnicity, with Polynesians making up the vast majority of those numbers.27 As a consequence of these developments, intersections between Maori and other Polynesian cultural traditions are increasingly evident in the work of New Zealand-based Polynesian artists, writers and musicians (Thomas 1996). In a publication accompanying a 1990 exhibition of Polynesian migrant art which toured New Zealand (curated by Maori New

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Zealander Rangihiroa Panoho), for example, several artists featured in the exhibition made reference to shared Polynesian ‘motifs’ and a community of New Zealand-based Polynesian artists (Panoho 1990; Thomas 1996). References to a pan-Polynesian community also appear in the lyrics of hiphop artists such as King Kapisi (born in Samoa and raised in New Zealand) and Sheelahroc (a New Zealand female rap group which originally comprised eight members of various ethnicities: Maori, Samoan, Niuean and Japanese). In the literary arena, Auckland University Press has recently released Whetu Moana: An Anthology of Polynesian Poetry (2003), edited by Albert Wendt, Robert Sullivan and Reina Whaitiri. The anthology includes the work of poets from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Hawai‘i, Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and Rotuma, but the editors have deliberately arranged the poets by alphabetical order of surname rather than by country. This was in order to ‘juxtapose the poetries of the Pacific to generate views of culture that are both common and strange, to see Polynesian poetry through a prism creating many coloured bands’ (2003: 3). This sense of a common ancestral heritage among Polynesian cultures is elsewhere evident in shared linguistic and mythological references which appear in the work of writers such as Albert Wendt and Patricia Grace, both of whom invoke the pan-Polynesian myth-cycle focusing upon the demi-god Maui. Wendt’s 1992 novel Black Rainbow explores racial and historical affinities between Maori and Pacific Islander Polynesians within a futuristic dystopian framework in which New Zealand-based Polynesians are ‘reordinarinized’ or reprogrammed with Europeanized identities. In a recent interview, Patricia Grace has expressed an awareness of the relationship between Maori and other Polynesian cultures in terms of shared historical and mythological narratives: The link between us is always there: the link we have with Pacific Island Polynesian people. . . . [We] . . . refer to them as our older brothers and sisters. Our stories all say that we came from Hawaiki. So we have this history that links us. We call them our older brothers and sisters to honour the fact that we came from them. Languages are similar. The stories are all similar. (DeLoughery and Hall 1999: 14)28 In view of these affiliations and associations, the publication of a booklength study of contemporary Polynesian writers seems timely, particularly given that many of these writers are attracting increasing international attention and acclaim. Keri Hulme’s novel The Bone People (1983; discussed in Chapter 5) won the Booker Prize in 1985, and more recently, Sia Figiel’s novel Where We Once Belonged (1996a; discussed in Chapter 2) won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in the SouthEast Asia and South Pacific Region. Her compatriot Albert Wendt’s novel Ola (1991) was chosen as best book for the Asia-Pacific region in 1992.

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Patricia Grace’s latest novel, Dogside Story (2001), won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize for 2001. The script for Lee Tamahori’s internationally acclaimed film Once Were Warriors (1994) was adapted from Alan Duff’s novel of the same name (published in 1990), while the film version of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987), released internationally in 2003, has received several audience awards at film festivals in North America and Europe. Several texts by Grace have recently been relaunched by the Women’s Press, while the University of Hawai‘i Press relaunched texts by Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau’ofa in their 1994 Talanoa: Pacific Writers series, and Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Uncle’s Story (2000a) has recently been added to the series. In spite of these achievements, however, within the field of postcolonial studies – and particularly within the realm of academic publishing – Pacific literatures have received far less critical attention to date than the literatures (and diasporas) of other designated ‘postcolonial’ regions such as Africa, Asia and the Caribbean (and, to a lesser degree, Australia and Canada). To take a recent example, Robert Young’s attempt, in his latest monograph, to redefine postcolonialism as ‘tricontinentalism’ – encompassing Latin America (including the Caribbean), Africa and Asia – appears to exclude the Pacific Islands, as well as Australia and New Zealand, entirely from the equation (2001: 4).29 This omission seems more puzzling when it becomes clear that Young is positing tricontinentalism as an alternative to terms such as ‘Third World’ or ‘the non-Western’, suggesting that postcolonial discourse ‘as a political discourse’ has emerged predominantly from these three southern continents in response to the political and economic hegemony of countries located in the northern hemisphere (ibid.: 4–6). Young goes some way towards justifying his omission of the Pacific region by drawing attention to the problematic status of Australia and New Zealand as settler colonies (with indigenous populations) which are simultaneously colonial and postcolonial (ibid.: 20), but with the exception of French Polynesia and Hawai‘i, this paradigm does not extend to the Pacific Islands region which – like the ‘three continents’ that Young identifies – has its own strong tradition of anti-colonial writing (some of which will be discussed in this book). Young is not alone in neglecting the Pacific Islands and New Zealand; a survey of recent books on postcolonial literature, theory and criticism by Bart Moore-Gilbert et al. (1997); Ania Loomba (1998); Dennis Walder (1998); Ato Quayson (2000) and Jahan Ramazani (2001) reveals few (if any) references to New Zealand, and almost no references to the Pacific Islands. As Graham Huggan notes, academic publishing corporations in the United Kingdom and the United States have created a ‘postcolonial industry’ which seems to privilege ‘a handful of famous writers (Achebe, Naipaul, Rushdie)’ and which has devoted considerable ‘time and attention to its three celebrity critics (Bhabha, Said, Spivak)’ (2001: 4; see also Krishnaswamy 1995: 143; Sharrad 2003). In discussing this ‘apparent hier-

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archy of postcolonial writers/thinkers’, Huggan invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, arguing that postcolonial writers and theorists ‘operate within an overarching, if historically shifting, field of cultural production’ in which various ‘agents of legitimation’ such as writers, booksellers, publishers, reviewers and individual readers contend ‘in the struggle to validate particular writers’. As particular writers and thinkers are ‘consecrated’ by these legitimating forces, they and their work become highly marketable commodities, inevitably creating an imbalance in the level of critical and commercial attention given to those writers and thinkers who have not gained an equivalent level of endorsement and exposure (2001: 5). Such inequalities have affected Maori and Pacific Islander writers who, until recently, have had to rely mainly upon local or regional publishing and distribution bases. The neglect of Maori and Pacific Island writing within the international postcolonial publishing industry is, no doubt, the product of a variety of factors. The geographical isolation of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands from the major international publishing houses and markets; and the fact that among Britain’s post-colonial post-war immigrant populations there is no significant Polynesian representation (although there is a growing Polynesian diaspora in the USA), have arguably played a role here.30 The relative marginalization of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands within the global political arena has also had some impact. As Epeli Hau’ofa argues, recent terminology used by international organizations (such as the United Nations) vis-à-vis the so-called ‘Asia-Pacific region’ signals the way in which the Pacific Islands have effectively become subsumed by Asia, which has proved of increasing strategic importance to its Western neighbours in the post-war period (1998: 396–7). As indicated above, however, Maori and Pacific Island writers have received an increasing amount of international attention in the past fifteen years in spite of these handicaps, and publishers like the University of Hawai‘i Press and The Women’s Press, as well as online distributors such as Amazon.com, have made the work of these writers available to a wider global readership. Further, the publication in 1999 of the pathbreaking anthology Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (and released by the North American publisher Rowman and Littlefield), signalled a burgeoning interest in indigenous Pacific literary theory and criticism in North America in particular. Hereniko and Wilson’s collection of articles and interviews anthologizes a variety of Maori and Pacific Island writers and theorists, responding to a growing interest, among indigenous academics and writers of the Pacific region, in theorizing indigenous Pacific writing with reference to local and regional models and traditions, rather than relying upon external frameworks and terminologies. In his essay ‘Representations of Cultural Identities’, for example, co-editor Vilsoni Hereniko theorizes Pacific cultures and creative art forms with reference

10

Introduction

to Pacific philosophies and cosmogonies, invoking the Rotuman phrase ‘ao to-ou ta’ – the new time – as an alternative to the term ‘postcolonial’ (1999a: 148). Selina Tusitala Marsh, also anthologized in the collection, similarly looks to develop a ‘specifically Polynesian feminist critique’ by invoking the conceptual framework of ‘mana tama‘ita‘i’, a phrase which combines ‘mana’, a term used across the Pacific ‘to refer to issues of power and respect’ (as noted above), and ‘tama‘ita‘i’, a ‘nonexclusive31 Samoan word used to refer to a woman’ (1999: 338). Within New Zealand, Maori writer Witi Ihimaera has discussed his intention to foster a new generation of Maori and Pacific Islander writers, students and critics who will develop literary theories based upon local indigenous precepts rather than imported theoretical models (Ihimaera et al. 1996: 17). In writing this book, I have taken a dialogical approach to the analysis of my chosen texts, taking account of indigenous theories and forms developed by Pacific writers and intellectuals, as well as the work of a range of other postcolonial theorists (including, in particular, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Abdul R. JanMohamed, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, bell hooks and Robert Young). Further, in exploring theories relevant to an analysis of the body, my arguments take account of interdisciplinary links between postcolonial studies and other fields such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, and medicine. Various postcolonial critics have debated the ethics of bringing so-called ‘Western’ or ‘Eurocentric’ theoretical models to bear upon indigenous literatures and cultures (see, for example, Hutcheon 1989; Slemon and Tiffin 1989; Hall 1996: 255; Nkosi 1998; Sharrad 1999; Young 2001). However, it is worth noting that many of the writers discussed in this book respond directly to European discourses within their work, and while individuals such as Witi Ihimaera (1998a) and Patricia Grace (Keown 2000a: 61) have expressed some resistance to European theory, other Pacific intellectuals such as Albert Wendt and Selina Tusitala Marsh take a different view. Marsh, for example, argues that it is possible to ‘indigenize’ European theory, and that it is ‘senseless’ to completely reject European theoretical models simply because of their cultural origins (1999: 341).32 In a similar vein, Wendt has indicated that the Western education experienced by many Pacific Islanders, coupled with the high level of emigration to Western metropolitan centres, problematizes notions of indigenous cultural and literary purity and authenticity (1995b: 3–4; Wendt et al. 2003: 2). He openly acknowledges and celebrates European literary and theoretical influences upon his own work (1998), but also suggests that certain literary styles and techniques (such as postmodern pastiche and metafiction) in indigenous Pacific literatures are not, as some critics might suggest, simply appropriated from European culture, but are also rooted in the structures of Polynesian oral history and narrative (1995b: 4–5; Ellis 1997: 83–4; see also Sharrad 2003: 29). In categorizing the texts and writers discussed in this book as ‘postcolo-

Introduction

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nial’, I am aware of the various debates regarding the validity and valency of this term which have raged within (and outside) postcolonial studies as a discipline in recent years (see, for example, Ahmad 1992; Shohat 1993; Moore-Gilbert et al. 1997; San Juan 1998; Lazarus 1999; Quayson 2000; Young 2001). I do not wish to revisit these arguments at length here; suffice to say that I am using the postcolonial as a conceptual category in order to examine the ways in which my selected writers, in Bart MooreGilbert et al.’s terms, mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination – economic cultural and political – between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which . . . continue to be apparent in the present era of neocolonialism. (1997: 12) Such a definition allows for a consideration of colonialism and its various permutations and effects in the Pacific within a diachronic framework, acknowledging that in spite of the varying political conditions within the contemporary cultures of the Pacific – some remain European or US colonies; some are settler colonies; some are independent states; some are self-governing in free association – the history of colonialism in the Pacific has, as Robert Young puts it, helped to ‘[determine] the configurations and power structures’ of these various cultures as they exist today (2001: 4). Throughout the book, however, I frequently use the term ‘indigenous’33 instead of ‘postcolonial’, particularly when referring to specific writers and cultural contexts, reserving the term ‘postcolonial’ mainly for discussions of wider theoretical issues.34 Further, the terms ‘European’ and ‘Western’ are often used synonymously, but where appropriate they are also used in order to distinguish between Europe as a geographical region, and other so-called ‘First World’ countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States. Notwithstanding the various cultural affinities and points of intersection between the Maori and Pacific Island writers I have chosen to discuss in this book, the text naturally divides itself into two distinct parts, beginning with the Pacific Island writers Wendt, Figiel and Hau’ofa. Alistair Campbell is a liminal figure, identifying himself primarily as a New Zealand writer in spite of his Cook Island ancestry and birth, and the chapter focusing on his work functions as a transition to the second half of the book, which examines the work of four Maori writers: Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Alan Duff. The book will demonstrate that although my selected writers share a focus upon the indigenous body as a medium for exploring issues relating to colonialism, inter-racial

12

Introduction

conflict and psycho-social malaise, the continuing cultural subordination of Maori to the Pakeha settler culture in New Zealand has produced rather different somatic inflections in the work of the Maori writers I discuss, as opposed to the work of their Pacific Islander counterparts. The four Maori writers, for example, deploy the diseased Polynesian body as an allegory for the ravages of (neo)colonialism, exploring ways in which Maori may alter their often circumscribed status within New Zealand society. Conversely, Wendt and Figiel in particular – as citizens of a decolonized Pacific nation now facing a new wave of cultural imperialism through global media and capitalist networks – have engaged more specifically with European representations of the Polynesian body, and with the displaced bodies of members of the Samoan diaspora. Hau’ofa’s fiction similarly investigates colonialism in the contemporary Pacific as a largely external force, in spite of its local permutations. His work – like Wendt’s and Figiel’s – also offers a critical response to the failures and corruptions of the post-independence era which is not evident in the work of the four Maori writers, who are more concerned with the continuing material and psychological hardships faced by Maori since colonization. Alistair Campbell shares with his Maori compatriots a more specific engagement with the psycho-social problems faced by Polynesians living within a Europeandominated society, yet his writing is largely devoid of the political energies which motivate Hulme, Ihimaera, Grace and Duff, all of whom investigate and project ways in which to overcome inter-racial inequalities within New Zealand society. These four writers’ explorations of the indigenous body are therefore informed by an underlying ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ structure which explores the pathology of the damaged colonized body while simultaneously seeking to cure the social ills which have reduced it to this debilitated condition. The book begins with a discussion of a variety of fictional and non-fictional material by Albert Wendt, whose writing directly addresses the relationship between Maori and other Polynesian cultures as described above. Chapter 1 opens with an analysis of Wendt’s exploration of the fetishization of the Polynesian body in various European discourses, before moving on to examine his critique of various social pathologies through the figure of the diseased or degraded human body. Much of his early writing represents bodily corruption or dysfunction as a symbol of political corruption, in a manner reminiscent of the work of a number of West African post-independence writers of the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Wendt’s 1992 novel Black Rainbow, a futuristic dystopian narrative in which claims of indigeneity and awareness of New Zealand’s colonial history are denied and repressed through enforced State psychological reprogramming. The narrator of the novel resists these dehumanizing processes by ‘rediscovering’ his Polynesian ancestry and defiantly asserting the materiality of his own body, reinflecting issues of race and identity explored in Wendt’s earlier fiction.

Introduction

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Chapter 2 examines the work of Wendt’s compatriot Sia Figiel, who takes up Wendt’s commitment to debunking Western myths centred upon the Polynesian body – in this case, the Polynesian female body – as well as exploring the ways in which domestic violence, global media networks and Western education affect the psychological (and physical) health of Western Samoan girls and women. Chapter 3 focuses upon Epeli Hau’ofa’s comi-satiric novel Kisses in the Nederends (1987), examining the way in which Hau’ofa deploys the diseased body as a medium for exploring questions of class, race, and gender, both within the Pacific and within a wider global framework. By making a fistulated anus the subject of his novel, Hau’ofa sets out to liberate the body from the limitations of various discourses and social taboos, and his sustained critique of Western theories on indigenous bodies and cultures aligns him with Wendt and Figiel. The chapter considers Hau’ofa’s earthy, ribald humour alongside the work of other European and postcolonial scatologists, suggesting, through an application of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection as catharsis, that Hau’ofa challenges and transforms linguistically and socially enforced exclusionist dialectics. Chapter 4, which examines the work of Cook Islands-born but New Zealand-based writer Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, marks the transition from Pacific Islander to New Zealand Polynesian writers. Campbell’s novel The Frigate Bird (1989), a semi-autobiographical exploration of the corticovisceral problems faced by a child of mixed race, is examined alongside a variety of postmodernist and psychoanalytic theories focusing upon psychosis and ego-fragmentation. The chapter considers Campbell’s subjective response to the problem of psychosis within a wider cross-cultural framework, exploring mental illness as a by-product of the colonial process. Campbell’s association between psycho-social and corporeal disease as a consequence of continuing neo-colonial pressures is consistent with the work of the Maori writers who are discussed in the four remaining chapters in the book. Chapter 5, for example, analyses Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) in terms of Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the relationship between violence and nationalism, suggesting that the domestic abuse and somatic dysfunction at the centre of Hulme’s narrative may be read as an allegory for wider cross-cultural conflicts which the narrative attempts to resolve through interpreting violence as a necessary step in the move towards a new post-imperial nationalist vision. Ihimaera’s novel The Dream Swimmer (1997), analysed in Chapter 6, is also considered in terms of Fanon’s paradigm; however, while Hulme projects cross-cultural harmony and co-operation as a solution to New Zealand’s inter-racial disharmony, Ihimaera appears to advocate a separatist Maori nationalism which is to rival – or even to supersede – Pakeha nationalism. Ihimaera’s novel also represents the diseased Maori body as an index of the socio-economic subordination of Maori culture to Pakeha culture since colonization,

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examining various Maori religious and political leaders who have attempted to salvage and restore the damaged Maori ‘body’ since colonization. Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998), analysed in Chapter 7, also makes connections between corporeal and inter-racial disharmony, exploring in particular the cortico-visceral effects of grief and violent trauma. The novel’s projective energies, however, are located in its narrative and linguistic strategies, which challenge phallogocentric models of race and gender through invoking Maori approaches to artistic construction and oral expression. The novel’s juxtaposition of various interpretative codes is analysed with reference to the psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Chapter 8 focuses upon Alan Duff, a writer whose racial politics appear to be far removed from those of the other Maori writers discussed in this book. Through a psychoanalytic reading of his controversial first novel Once Were Warriors (1990), however, I will suggest that Duff’s narrative, like the work of his Maori compatriots, deploys corporeal symbolism as a means by which to sketch out solutions to Maori socio-economic problems. Duff’s uncompromising representation of Maori as a violent, benefit-dependent underclass is accompanied by a projective optimism, advocating a future in which Maori become stronger, healthier, more ‘successful’ New Zealand citizens. His idealism therefore aligns his work with the writing of Hulme and Ihimaera in particular, who also project solutions to the psycho-social malaise which afflicts many contemporary Maori. The final chapter returns to the theme of socio-somatic regeneration which informs the work of many of the writers discussed in this book, exploring the resurgence of traditional tattooing practices across certain parts of Polynesia as a metaphor for the rise of indigenous Pacific literatures in English. The process of tattooing itself ‘narrativizes’ the body by inscribing it with a culturally specific graphic code, documenting the tattooed individual’s commitment to his or her culture. In addition, as Albert Wendt has pointed out, the survival and perpetuation of traditional tattooing practices in contemporary Oceania serve as a visual record of indigenous resistance to cultural imperialism, given that European missionaries across Polynesia attempted to eradicate the practice. As Wendt notes, the Samoan tattoo, the tatau, has survived ‘over a century’ of attempts to ‘erase it’ (1996: 23), while within New Zealand, the recent resurgence of the moko (Maori tattoo) represents one aspect of the cultural efflorescence which has developed out of the Maori Renaissance of the 1970s. In this sense, I argue, the moko revival approximates the process of colonial impact and concomitant cultural attrition, followed by decolonization and/or cultural resurgence, which is inscribed ‘indelibly’ in the work of the Maori and other Pacific writers described in this book. There is a Maori pepeha (saying or proverb) that runs as follows: ‘Ahakoa whati te manga, e takoto ana ano te kohiwi’. Literally, this trans-

Introduction

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lates as ‘although the branch is broken off, the trunk remains’, indicating that the loss of a branch will not destroy a tree whose trunk consists of solid heartwood. Metaphorically, the proverb implies that ‘[m]isfortunes will not ruin an individual or group if the foundations are strong’ (Mead and Grove 2003: 14). While the indigenous literatures of the Pacific should not be viewed merely as a reaction to (or against) the experience of colonization or cultural imperialism, this pepeha, in its focus on resilience and new growth emerging from structural or corporeal damage, seems an appropriate metaphor for the socio-political dynamics which inform the work of those writers discussed in this book, as well as the work of the many other indigenous writers and artists spread across Te-MoanaNui-a¯-Kiwa: the great Ocean of the Pacific.

1

Postcolonial dystopias Race, allegory and the Polynesian body in the writing of Albert Wendt

In embarking on this study of indigenous Pacific writing, it seems appropriate to begin with the work of Albert Wendt, the most prolific and influential indigenous writer of the wider Pacific region. As a founding member of the publication committee for MANA (a Pacific literary periodical established in 1973), Wendt has played a central role in the emergence of Oceanic literature in English, and he has edited several important collections of Pacific writing. His own creative writing also offers the most sustained exploration of the metaphorical properties of the human body as a medium for exploring the dynamics of colonialism and independence in the Pacific region. This chapter investigates the way in which Wendt uses corporeal symbolism in order to interrogate European constructions of the Polynesian body, and to explore the corruptions and complexities of post-imperial Oceania. Wendt was born in Western Samoa in 1939. He completed his secondary and tertiary education in New Zealand (on a Western Samoan government scholarship), and after an initial return to Western Samoa where he became Principal of Samoa College, he moved on to teach literature, first at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, and subsequently at Auckland University, New Zealand, where he was appointed Professor of English in 1988. In 2004, he took up the prestigious Citizens’ Chair at the University of Hawai‘i. Wendt’s creative writing teaching involvements in Samoa and Fiji, together with pivotal critical essays such as ‘Towards a New Oceania’ (1976a), helped to shape the development of early Oceanic writing in English. As noted above, he has also edited a number of important Pacific literary anthologies including Lali: A Pacific Anthology (1980), Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980 (1995b) and Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2003; co-edited with Robert Sullivan and Reina Whaitiri). In addition to publishing a considerable body of critical and theoretical writing, Wendt has produced a large corpus of literary material, from short fiction pieces and poetry published in magazines in the 1950s through to his most recent works, a novel entitled The Mango’s Kiss (2003a), and a verse-play, The Songmaker’s Chair (2003b). Much of

Postcolonial dystopias: Albert Wendt

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Wendt’s early fiction and poetry – including his first short-story collection, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974); novels Pouliuli (1977) and Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979); and selected poems in his anthology Inside Us the Dead (1976b) – explores the effects of colonialism and independence upon Western Samoan political and social history.1 While Wendt is critical of many of the socio-political changes brought about by European colonial incursion into Samoa and the wider Pacific, his early fiction and poetry, like the post-independence writing of literary predecessors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi and V.S. Naipaul,2 also satirizes the corruptions of the post-independence Samoan élite. From the beginning, Wendt has avoided constructing polarized oppositions between colonizer-asaggressor and colonized-as-victim, offering instead a nuanced analysis of colonialism and its after-effects. For example, he has problematized arguments made by ethnic fundamentalists regarding the putative cultural ‘purity’ of pre-contact Oceanic cultures, pointing out that certain social problems were evident in Samoa prior to the arrival of Europeans: ‘[c]ontrary to the utterances of our elite groups, our pre-papalagi cultures were not perfect or beyond reproach. No culture is perfect or sacred even today’ (1976c: 8). Further, Wendt has also argued that postcolonial writing should not reject European aesthetic and ideological traditions in a spurious search for cultural authenticity, but rather should celebrate the syncretic character of postcolonial cultures and the ‘indigenization’ of European forms: Colonialism, by shattering the world of the traditional artist, also broke open the way for a new type of artist who is not bound by traditional styles and attitudes and conventions, who explores his own individuality, experiments freely and expresses his own values and ideas, his own mana3 unfettered by accepted convention. (Wendt 1981: 5; see also 1995b: 3) In keeping with these arguments, much of Wendt’s writing has ranged beyond the immediate Samoan socio-political sphere, examining various points of intersection between Samoan and other cultures, particularly those located within the South Pacific. An analysis of the social networks explored in these texts reveals a central philosophical preoccupation in Wendt’s work: the often fraught relationships between individuals and social systems, from the disaffected young men rebelling against the social limitations of the fa’a Samoa (Samoan way of life) in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, to the cultural affiliations and racial tensions between various indigenous Pacific cultures in Sons for the Return Home (1973), and the alienation and racial prejudice experienced by expatriate Samoans in the short story ‘Robocop in Long Bay’ (2002) and the novel Ola (1991). Wendt’s engagement with the pressures facing social outsiders and nonconformists has been motivated partly by his own experience of exile

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Postcolonial dystopias: Albert Wendt

since his early student days in New Zealand. In his early autobiographical writings, for example, he often celebrates the condition of exile as artistically liberating, describing himself as a ‘permanent outsider’ even to his country of birth (1977: 153) and positioning himself as what Abdul R. JanMohamed would term a ‘specular border intellectual’, one who ‘[participates] in the new culture yet [stands] on its border . . . neither motivated by nostalgia for some lost or abandoned culture nor at home in this or any other culture’ (1992: 102). Wendt’s early views on exile were inflected by the existentialist writings of Albert Camus, a figure whom he has identified as a major influence on his early writing in particular (1992b: 49; Ellis 1997: 88). Many of the central characters in Wendt’s early fiction are neo-Camusian outsiders, variously tortured, marginalized and rebellious individuals who react against what Subramani has termed Wendt’s ‘fallen epic world’ (1992: 118). Wendt reconfigures Camus’s philosophical theories within a Samoan or Pacific context: in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, for example, the absurd is located within a postindependence Samoa ruled by a corrupt political élite, while in Sons for the Return Home, the myth of Sisyphus is linked with a Maori legend detailing the futile attempts of the demi-god Maui to gain immortality by crawling into the vagina of the death-goddess, Hine-nui-te-Po (Keown 2002; Sharrad 2003). In both Sons and Leaves, Wendt’s vision of the absurd finds symbolic expression in the eerie desolation of the lava fields which he ‘rediscovered’ during a visit back to the Samoan island of Savai’i in 1962.4 While Wendt’s early writing is thus preoccupied with social fragmentation and individual isolation, much of his more recent work, as Wendt himself has pointed out, contains a stronger focus on ‘community’, ‘sharing’ and ‘cooperation’ (Sarti 1998a: 208). His early explorations of exile and existentialism as metaphorical conditions have transmuted into a closer attention to the specific experiences of Samoan diasporic communities located within New Zealand in particular. The cultural specificity of his work circumvents the ‘excessive figurative flexibility’ of the figure of migrancy which Revathi Krishnaswamy critiques in the recent work of postcolonial writers and thinkers such as Salman Rushdie and Edward Said (1995: 128; see also Brah 1996; Procter 2003: 204; Sharrad 2003: 12). The social issues and pathologies which Wendt analyses in his writing are frequently mediated through the human body as metaphor. Wendt’s use of corporeal symbolism, as I will demonstrate below, falls into two broad categories. On the one hand, he offers an extended interrogation of European constructions of the Polynesian body, and on the other, he uses the human body as a vehicle for presenting new conceptualizations of the position of Samoans and other Polynesians within contemporary Oceania.

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The European legacy Throughout his literary career Wendt has communicated an awareness of the way in which indigenous Pacific bodies – particularly the ‘Polynesian body’ – have, within European discourse and popular culture, become subject to a collection of totalizing stereotypes. He targets European adventure novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) as bastions of a large corpus of European literature which has, since the arrival of the first Europeans in the Pacific, served to create and perpetuate a powerful network of stereotypes about Pacific peoples (Wendt 1995a: 28; see also Pearson 1984). In an oft-quoted section of an essay on Pacific discourse, Wendt refutes some of the ‘myths’, established by this tradition, which ‘linger on’ in contemporary representations of Polynesian peoples (1995a: 28): There was no Fall, no sun-tanned Noble Savages existing in South Seas paradises, no Golden Age, except in Hollywood films, in the insanely romantic literature and art by outsiders about the Pacific, in the breathless sermons of our elite vampires. . . . Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and film-makers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists. . . . Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham’s puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener’s rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. (1976a: 52–3; 58) Wendt’s critique draws attention to the synchronic function of the racial stereotype, which operates, as Homi Bhabha observes, as a fixed, dehistoricized ‘form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’ and which therefore recurs in ‘changing historical and discursive conjunctures’ (1994a: 66; see also Goldie 1989: 150). Wendt’s analysis of the stereotyping of Polynesian peoples extends not only to literary and artistic material, but also to non-fiction and academic texts such as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), one of the most controversial and widely circulated anthropological texts of the twentieth century. A student and disciple of the American anthropologist Franz Boas, Mead undertook nine months of field work in Ta’u (in American Samoa) in 1925, and advanced her findings as evidence for the putative primacy of cultural determinism in the emotional development of

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Postcolonial dystopias: Albert Wendt

adolescent girls, who formed the focus of her study. Mead argued that the ‘general casualness’ of Samoan society, where ‘love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement, are all matters of weeks’ and where casual pre-marital sex is accepted and encouraged as a ‘natural, pleasurable’ activity (1943: 162), constituted a relaxed environment in which Samoan adolescents experienced none of the transitional difficulties which American teenagers endured as they emerged into adult life. Mead’s methodology, as outlined in the introduction to her text, was an early example of what came to be known as ethnographic synecdoche, a practice whereby a cultural ‘whole’ is putatively apprehended through attending closely to ‘one or more of its parts’ (Clifford 1988: 31).5 Mead claims, for example, that ‘because one girl’s life was so much like another’s’ in ‘an uncomplex, uniform culture like Samoa’, she therefore felt ‘justified in generalizing’ about Samoan culture in its entirety even though she interviewed only fifty girls in three small neighbouring villages (1943: 16). Further, the language which Mead uses in discussing the sexual behaviour of Samoans often betrays what Said terms an ‘unconscious positivity’ (or set of constitutive preconceptions) inflected by earlier European constructions of the Pacific as a sexual and environmental paradise (Said 1995: 206). The opening lines of the second chapter of her book, entitled ‘A day in Samoa’, encapsulate this dynamic: As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place. Cocks crow, negligently, and a shrill-voiced bird cries from the breadfruit trees. The insistent roar of the reef seems muted to an undertone for the sounds of a waking village. (Mead 1943: 19) Mead’s writing here bears the hallmarks of Orientalist6 discourse: she purports to present an ‘objective’ anthropological study of Samoan culture, and yet her sensuous rhetoric suggests that her project is latently informed by essentialist theories on the sexual behaviour of nonEuropean peoples (Bhabha 1994a: 71–2; Said 1995). Wendt suggests that the enormous popularity of Mead’s book – which has been published in sixteen languages and, according to Wendt, ‘became the best-selling of all anthropological works’ – is largely due to Mead’s ‘delectable portrayal of free love without guilt under the . . . swaying palms’, which serves to satisfy fantasies of desire among Europeans – and even Polynesians themselves – searching for ‘El Dorado’, the golden paradise (1983: 10–11). Wendt reveals that when he first encountered Mead’s text as a trainee

Postcolonial dystopias: Albert Wendt

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teacher in the ‘puritanical New Zealand of the 1950s’, he found himself wanting to believe in Mead’s alluring rhetoric,7 but he also reports that his own early representations of Samoan society advanced a perspective which differed radically from Mead’s idealized vision: Later, even before I left training college, when I started writing seriously about Samoa, I realised the Samoa I was creating out of my childhood storehouse of images and memories was one contrary to Mead’s attractive but superficial stereotyped paradise. It is a Samoa with all the emotions, problems, hopes, and so on, common to all humanity. (1983: 11) As he developed as a writer, Wendt therefore came to reject Mead’s representation of Samoan society, and his views on her work are advanced in detail in a review article in which he analyses Mead’s text alongside a newly-published book by New Zealand-born anthropologist Derek Freeman, entitled Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983).8 Freeman’s book – the product of more than forty years of research both within and outside Samoa – meticulously analyses and rejects Mead’s major claims about Samoan social practice, not least her assertion that Samoan society is sexually permissive. As Wendt notes, in order to discredit Mead’s romanticized vision of Samoa, Freeman documents ‘the darker side’ of Samoan culture, arguing that contrary to Mead’s claims, Samoan society is afflicted with high rates of assault, manslaughter and rape, coupled with high levels of psychological disturbance and stress-related illness. These social problems are attributed to the authoritarian nature of Samoan society, ‘where . . . elders rate obedience from the young as an unquestioned virtue’ (Wendt 1983: 14). Wendt largely endorses Freeman’s view of Samoan society, but argues that in his eagerness to prove that chastity and female virginity are highly valued in Samoa, Freeman ‘accepts too readily the evidence of our elders, the guardians of our public morality, who, if they are really human, often break, clandestinely, the very standards they set up’ (ibid.: 14). Wendt concludes, therefore, that in their respective analyses of Samoan sexual behaviour, Mead errs ‘far too much on the side of free love and promiscuity’, while Freeman ‘errs on the side of sexual purity, strictness, and abstinence’ (ibid.: 14; see also Oswalt 1986: 101; Clifford 1986: 102–3). In his analysis of the Mead–Freeman controversy, James Clifford notes that in spite of their differing conclusions, both Mead and Freeman ‘configure the other as a morally charged alter ego’, and suggests that the pair ‘form a kind of diptych, whose opposing panels signify a recurrent Western ambivalence about the “primitive”’ (1986: 102–3). Wendt’s novel The Mango’s Kiss (2003a) takes Clifford’s argument a step further: here, aspects of Mead and Freeman are conflated, as Mark Houlahan

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notes, into a ‘single, sex-obsessed researcher’, Professor Freemeade (2003: E9). While Wendt’s own writing – both fiction and non-fiction – offers a more circumspect (and less polarized) analysis of Samoan society than is evident in the work of Mead and Freeman, his ideological stance has much in common with Freeman’s, in that he challenges or inverts wellestablished European stereotypes of Polynesia as a Pacific idyll inhabited by ingenuous, lascivious ‘natives’ whose putatively hedonistic behaviour functions as a projection of what Robert Young terms ‘the sexual economy of [colonial] desire’ (Young 1995: 90). The protagonist in Wendt’s first novel Sons for the Return Home (1973), for example, becomes a vehicle for Wendt’s exploration of two central and related practices in European constructions of the Pacific: first, the aestheticization or idealization of the Pacific island environment, and second, the sexualization of the Polynesian body (Sua’ali’i 2000: 94). After spending a large proportion of his childhood and youth in New Zealand, the protagonist in Wendt’s novel returns to Samoa (his country of birth), and he initially views Samoan culture through the eyes of an outsider, discovering some surprising and shocking truths which militate against the stereotypical constructions of Polynesia which he has encountered in films or books. His experiences of Western Samoan life also contrast with the idealized and nostalgic descriptions of Samoa which his mother has communicated to him throughout his childhood in New Zealand. Yet as he steps off the aeroplane in Samoa, the physical environment initially appears to endorse cinematic images of the Pacific, ostensibly confirming the narrator’s aesthetic ideal which until now has existed ‘only in fairytale or dream’ (1973: 171): ‘Beyond the airstrip, and reminiscent of backdrops in a Technicolor [sic] movie of the South Seas, palm trees rolled up to foothills; and beyond them stretched the high volcanic range, greener than anything he had ever seen’ (ibid.: 171). Here, the narrator’s perceptions of Samoa betray an ‘unconscious positivity’ filtered through cinematic constructions of the Pacific. These popular culture representations function in terms analogous to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal, taking precedence over the physical environment itself, which becomes merely ‘reminiscent’ of the play of images (1988a: 167). The narrator arrives in Samoa seeking a timeless Pacific paradise, but he is immediately confronted with the dynamic, material realities of the culture itself. He finds that while the flora and fauna in Samoa are lush and vivid, the constant heat and humidity also encourage the proliferation of insect pests which spoil the illusion of the tropical paradise, and his numerous mosquito bites, irritated by the heat and constant scratching, soon ‘burst’ into ‘weeping sores’ (1973: 175). In addition to suffering personal physical discomfort, the narrator is also upset by the ‘noise and smell’ of Samoan people, and is particularly dis-

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turbed by the ‘rudimentary standards of sanitation and hygiene’ in the village where he and his family return to live (ibid.: 176–7). The Samoan people, too, are physically different from the ‘sun-tanned noble savages’ of the Technicolor films; the Polynesian bodies he is confronted with are imperfect specimens: Most of the children were spotted with sores. . . . Many children looked under-nourished, there were serious imbalances in their diet. He was shocked by the condition of the few people who had filiariasis – bloated legs and arms spotted with ugly sores. There was little tuberculosis and leprosy, and he was thankful for that. Few rules of cleanliness were observed in preparing food. (ibid.: 177) These observations are consistent with other descriptions of Samoan culture and the Samoan environment elsewhere in Wendt’s work: his short story ‘The Cross of Soot’, for example, depicts a sore-spotted young boy nonchalantly scraping breadfruit by a stream brimming with human faeces; the child appears oblivious to the smell, the swarming flies, and the spectacle of a pig ‘noisily eating pieces of excrement on the edge of the water’ (1974: 14). Further, in his poem ‘Months of it’, Wendt describes Samoan villagers in the grip of a severe drought: the rural environment becomes a parched desert, and the villagers – at the mercy of the ‘cannibal sun’ – are skeletal, parched with thirst, flies crawling into their ‘gasping mouths’ (1976b: 36–7). Similar conceptualizations of the Samoan climate appear in ‘Heat’, a more recent short story in which Samoan villagers are again oppressed by an enervating and ‘tenacious’ heat wave (1999: 305). Wendt’s descriptions of village life are clearly at odds with the idyllic depiction of village life as advanced in Mead’s Coming of Age, or in the countless film and tourist brochure images of Samoa which represent the country as a paradisical oasis. In Sons for the Return Home, the protagonist’s propensity to assess Samoan culture in terms of film representations is significant. As Roger Robinson argues, while the myth of the South Seas paradise has its origins in eighteenth-century travel narratives, it has become a modern cliché ‘only through the lush trivia of Rodgers and Hammerstein, James Michener and Pan-Am’ (1980: 284). Robinson also suggests that the myth ‘may really go no further back than Rest & Recreation fantasies of the Second World War American forces’ (ibid.: 284). While this second claim is reductive in its exclusion of other discourses, Robinson is correct in identifying the role of the modern media in perpetuating neo-romantic stereotypes of the Pacific. Wendt himself has elsewhere drawn attention to the way in which the film and tourist industries peddle established neoromantic myths of a Polynesian utopia populated by ‘nubile maidens and

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noble warriors’ (1983: 11; 1977: 154; see also Thaman 1993; Sua’ali’i 2000). Robinson’s allusion to the ‘Rest and Recreation’ fantasies of the American soldiers also draws attention to the strategies of desire located within the cross-cultural encounter. As Bhabha suggests, within colonial discourse ‘the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power’. For this reason, he argues, the exercise of colonial power ‘demands an articulation’ of ‘racial and sexual’ forms of difference (1994a: 67). Bhabha’s analysis identifies the corporeal criteria upon which the construction of otherness often depends within the colonial context, and it also exposes the relationship between sexual desire and the desire for systemic domination. Such strategies are manifest in the recurring European fantasies about Polynesian sexuality which Wendt satirizes throughout his writing. In Sons for the Return Home, for example, the protagonist is harassed at a party by a white man who claims that the protagonist’s Pakeha girlfriend is attracted to Pacific Islander men ‘because coconuts [islanders] are supposed to be big where we fellows should be big’ (1973: 124). The protagonist interprets the man’s behaviour as a manifestation of a white inferiority complex about penis size: It was all so familiar. . . . The type of New Zealand man he’d always disliked, attempting to prove his masculinity in public; the rugby player and surfie who, suffering from fear of his own inadequacies as a male, believed the racist myth of black virility. . . . The whole history of the Pakeha had been cursed with this fear, and the Maoris and other minority groups had to pay for it. All pakeha women who went out with Polynesians and blacks were considered nymphomaniacs after the super-sized whang. Conversely, all pakeha men who took out Polynesian women were after the expert fuck. (Wendt 1973: 125) Wendt has elsewhere described the fetishization of the Polynesian as ‘amoral phallus’ as a manifestation of European ‘fantasies’ of desire; he argues that these stereotypes of sexually licentious, ‘exotic’ natives are more revealing of European ‘hang-ups’ about their own bodies than they are about actual Pacific cultures (1976a: 54, 58). The particular ‘hang-ups’ described above appear to centre on the physical threat posited by the Polynesian male in particular. As Terry Goldie notes in his analysis of representations of the indigene in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian literatures, sexuality and violence are particularly common ‘indigenous archetypes’: ‘They are poles of attraction and repulsion, temptation by the dusky maiden and fear of the demonic violence of the fiendish warrior’

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(1989: 15; see also Beets 2000: 24). Wendt’s assertions also bear some resemblance to Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic theorization of racial stereotypes regarding Negro sexuality. Fanon argues: Every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potential. The civilized white man retains an irrational longing for unusual eras of sexual licence, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, or unrepressed incest. In one way these fantasies respond to Freud’s life instinct. Projecting his own desires on to the Negro, the white man behaves ‘as if’ the Negro really had them. (Fanon 1970: 117) Wendt’s discussion of palagi9 preconceptions about Polynesian sexuality points towards a similar psychological process. His analysis of European discourse about the Pacific as discussed above therefore appears based upon two founding principles. First, he deploys a Fanon-esque line of reasoning whereby the body of the Pacific ‘other’ is recognized as the object of European sexual obsessions and desires, and second, he argues that the romantic fantasy of the South Seas ‘Utopia’ is perpetuated in literary texts, films and tourist brochures which construct the Pacific as an environmental paradise as well as a sexual playground. However, while much of Wendt’s writing stands in opposition to these stereotypes, a closer examination of his work reveals that at times he also endorses these stereotypes in order to create particular literary effects. In Sons for the Return Home, for example, the narrator at times seems to subscribe to those European stereotypes about Polynesians which serve to idealize their physiognomy and to represent their way(s) of life as a positive alternative to the putative spiritual ‘deadness’ of modern Western culture(s). At one point, he aestheticizes the bodies of his fellow Samoans in terms of classical mythology and art forms,10 describing them as ideals of physical beauty despite the obvious ravages of disease. He likens his compatriots to ‘figures in Greek sculpture’ and argues that they live ‘primarily through the flesh’, surmising that [it] was a sign of spiritual and emotional health that . . . unlike Westerners (and Samoans like himself), they hadn’t learnt to spurn things of the flesh; that good living was eating, drinking, laughing, screaming, weeping, fucking, dying: an orchestra of emotions transmitted through the flesh. (1973: 177–8) According to the narrator’s affectionate description, the native-born and bred Samoans appear to embody Dionysian fleshly ideals which are now, putatively, unavailable to Westerners and exiles such as the narrator

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himself. The binarisms which the narrator falls back upon here are not unlike those which characterized the négritude movement pioneered by black francophone intellectuals in the 1930s: an opposition is established between Polynesian ‘irrationalism’ and sensuality, on the one hand, and European rationalism and Puritanism, on the other. This approach seems more in keeping with the European nostalgia, as Fanon puts it, for eras of ‘orgiastic licence’ which are perceived to be lost to European society. Given that the narrator has been educated in New Zealand, perhaps this is Wendt’s point, but it is difficult to detect any sense of irony in this passage, in spite of the fact that Wendt’s own comments regarding European stereotypes of the Polynesian body might suggest that the narrator’s views are not to be equated with his own. Similar ambivalences are encountered elsewhere in Wendt’s work: in his semi-autobiographical poetry sequence ‘Inside Us the Dead’, for example, Wendt approvingly describes his grandfather as a handsome man with ‘Thick polynesian lips shaped/for wine, whisky/and fierce infidelities’, thereby implying that aggressive sexuality and promiscuity are central constituents of Polynesian masculinity (1976b: 11). As Roger Robinson suggests, while Wendt examines critically the myths of the South Seas paradise, he also ‘makes attractive those aspects of Samoan life-style [sic] which indeed appeal to human fantasising’ (1980: 284). Wendt’s approach to Samoan female sexuality is similarly complex. Women featured in his early novels and stories are frequently beaten, sexually abused and emotionally degraded by Samoan men, and these practices are often represented as endemic to the traditional gender dynamics of Western Samoa. In Wendt’s second novel Pouliuli ([1977] 1987a), for example, the protagonist Faleasa Osovae recalls his first successful sexual encounter with his wife Felefele. Finding Felefele sexually inexperienced and initially unattractive, he finally becomes aroused by sexually degrading and ‘violating’ her: While he was using her he realised that she was enjoying it all – the humiliation, the pain and the bleeding, his stabbing flesh – and, on realising this, he discovered that his need for her was greater, more binding, than his need for any other women he had known. (‘Real power is when you can dominate and use others’, he remembered his father saying.) . . . As Faleasa thought of his parents he wept, knowing that he too had been born out of violence: his father, he was sure now, had destroyed his mother. ‘Only the powerful have the right to survive’ – his father’s voice rang in his head. (ibid.: 122) Here, violence against women is presented as a recurring and normalized social practice: Faleasa is merely re-enacting what he has learned from his father. Similar episodes involving the sexual debasement of

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women occur elsewhere in Wendt’s work: in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, Tauilopepe (one of the central characters) sexually degrades his mistress, Moa, who is represented as desiring her own ‘humiliation’ (1979: 147),11 while the narrator in Wendt’s short story ‘Captain Full’ seduces then publicly rejects a girl in order to prove his ‘manhood’ (1974). Similarly, the narrator in the story ‘Pint Sized Devil on a Thoroughbred’ speaks admiringly of his uncle Pili, a confidence-trickster who assures him that women are gullible, innately adulterous, and should be beaten and discarded by male lovers because ‘they love being kicked out’ (1974: 55). In his article on Mead and Freeman, Wendt argues that the oppression of Samoan women is endemic to Samoan society, asserting that Samoan men have always treated women ‘as second-class citizens to be used and dominated’ (1983: 14). He holds that violence against women – particularly rape and other forms of sexual assault – may be interpreted as ‘institutionalised bravado and machismo’ performed by Samoan men in order to earn the respect of other males (1983: 14). Wendt has claimed more recently that his uncompromising descriptions of sexual violence are intended specifically as criticisms of Samoan male attitudes to women, exposing established social ills which he has targeted elsewhere in his writing (1976c: 8; 1998). By this analysis, Wendt’s focus upon the degradation of women serves not only to dispel Orientalist fantasies about Samoan sexuality, but also to refute the claim that colonialism is entirely responsible for contemporary social problems in colonized cultures. Nevertheless, it is also true that much of Wendt’s fiction – particularly his early writing – also celebrates male virility, rendering his approach to the relationship between gender and sexuality more contradictory and more complex than it might first appear. As Paul Sharrad notes, Wendt’s early writing often ‘collaborates with status quo attitudes to gender insofar as it renders characters more or less sympathetic according to how they conform to gender roles’ (2003: 138). Much of Wendt’s more recent fiction, however, shows evidence of a shift in his approach to gender politics: the most notable example is his 1991 novel Ola, a metafictional text in which an unnamed male ‘author’ reconstructs the life story of a Samoan woman named Olamaiileoti Farou Monroe. In his Foreword, the ‘author’ acknowledges the potential difficulties associated with a male attempting to represent female subjectivity, and admits that his accounts of Ola’s sexual experiences are inevitably coloured by his male perspective. This disclaimer posits the process of narration, in Michael Awkward’s terms, as a ‘male feminist [act]’: the narrator identifies the ‘writing self’ as ‘biologically male’ in order to emphasize the desire ‘not to be ideologically male’ (Awkward 1995: 43). In keeping with this objective, the ensuing narrative constructs Ola as an assertive, independent, irreverent individual with a shrewd awareness of European discursive stereotypes surrounding Polynesian female sexuality. In one

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particular episode, for example, Ola recounts her affair with a middleaged New Zealand poet: For Mr John Velvetine . . . I was merely his first Noble Savage Cunt; he was fucking Gauguin’s earth-brown maidens, Margaret Mead’s freeloving Samoans, Melville’s Typee, R. L. Stevenson’s housemaids, and most exhilaratingly noble of all, he was ‘buggering Jean Jacques Rousseau without having to use some masturbating academic’s vaseline’ (his proud boast). (Wendt 1991: 48) Wendt’s authorial voice can be detected behind the heavy irony in this passage, and the episode is neatly concluded with a symbolic emasculation as Ola wakes one morning and resolves to terminate her brief affair with Velvetine: Sunday morning. I woke gasping. . . . Opened my eyes and recognised Mr Poet for what he was: a short, blubbery, middle-aged man who was going bald. . . . ‘YOUR PEN IS A WILT AND NEEDS NEW INK AND A GOOD WASH,’ I printed on a sheet of paper. . . . With one quick thrust of my erect forefinger, I made a hole in the paper, reached down daintily and shoved his slack pen . . . through the hole, smoothed down the edges of my note over his bush, and hurried out of his flat. (ibid.: 48) In this passage, the archetypal dialectic between the passive, supine Polynesian maiden and the virile Western male is reconfigured: phallic power is symbolically transferred to Ola, reversing the process by which, as Robert Young suggests, ‘the orthodox hierarchy of gender is confirmed and reaffirmed at the level of race’ (1995: 111; see also Van Trigt 2000: 110).

Corrupting the body politic: social and physiological pathologies in Wendt’s writing Perhaps in part as a reaction against the aestheticization and idealization of the Polynesian body in much European discourse, Wendt’s fiction often explores social pathologies through the figure of the diseased or degraded human body. Much of his early writing represents bodily corruption or dysfunction as a metaphor for political corruption, in a manner reminiscent of the work of a number of West African postindependence writers of the 1960s and 1970s. As C.L. Innes notes, in the work of writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Wole Soyinka and Kofi Awoonor produced during this period, ‘a

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preoccupation with political corruption and consumer capitalism is mediated through images of the consumption of food, eating, bodily decay, and defecation’ (1995: 1). Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1968), for example, figures the body as a locus for the corruptions of consumer capitalism, focusing specifically upon the excesses of the Ghanaian post-independence élite as evidenced in the last years of Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency. Obesity becomes an index of conspicuous consumption in the novel, and as Innes notes, the protagonist’s temporary denial of food at one point in the narrative ‘allows release from cycle [sic] of desire, consumption, waste’ (Innes 1995: 7). Equivalent analogies between consumption and corruption are found in novels such as Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross (1982), where ‘the corrupt and wealthy are not merely well-fed, but grotesquely fat and flabby’ (Innes 1995: 7). Similar strategies are apparent in numerous references to obese, malodorous politicians and members of the urban élite in Wendt’s early writing in particular. In Inside Us the Dead, for example, the poem ‘What You Do Now, Brother’ describes the indigenous Samoan post-independence élite as ‘vampire men and bitches/ [who] continue . . . to feed on the gut/of your dream’, while the speaker in ‘Why Can’t They Stop’ attacks Samoan politicians and neo-traditionalists, asking ‘why/can’t/ they/stop/breaking/wind’ (1976b: 48, 45). Images of conspicuous consumption also appear in Wendt’s early novels: in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, for example, an avaricious civil servant is described as an obese mimic man who ‘looks all the time like he is looking for a toilet or bit of bush to shit in’ (1979: 161), and the changes brought about in Samoa by consumer capitalism are encapsulated in the image of an ancient bathing pool defiled by human excrement and commercial waste (ibid.: 332). Of Wendt’s early fiction, Pouliuli offers perhaps the most extended metaphorical exploration of conspicuous consumption. Set within the fictional Samoan village of Malaelua, the narrative focuses upon the decline into madness of Faleasa Osovae, a powerful elderly matai and the most respected ali’i within the village.12 Faleasa is disgusted by the political corruption, elitism and power-mongering he sees around him, describing avaricious and scheming individuals such as Filemoni, the worldly village pastor, and Malaga, the corrupt village parliamentary representative, as obese individuals ‘trapped in their excreta and stench’ ([1977] 1987a: 14). This equation between corpulence and moral corruption in Wendt’s writing is significant given that a generous figure was traditionally viewed as a positive sign of prosperity in pre-contact Samoa: Wendt alludes to this tradition in Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, where a well-rounded female figure is described approvingly as ‘fleshmeat for the gods’ (1974: 112; see also Pollock 1999).

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In Pouliuli, the consumption of food becomes a central focus for Wendt’s critique of social and corporeal corruption. As the novel opens, for example, Faleasa finds himself nauseated by the ‘self-destroying ritual’ and cycle of consumption and excretion which regulates his and his fellow villagers’ lives ([1977] 1987a: 12). His disgust finds expression in periodic bouts of vomiting, wilful acts which serve as a deliberate rejection of a social code in which the consumption of food serves an important ritualistic function. As head of his family, and in recognition of his ali’i status, Faleasa is served specially prepared foods which are presented to him by various members of his family, particularly the women. Faleasa disrupts these ritualistic occasions by alternately refusing and regurgitating his food, as well as throwing his plates and foodmats onto the ground in front of the family fale (house) in order to maximize his family’s embarrassment. As Lilian R. Furst notes, disorderly eating in literary texts is frequently posited as a ‘vehicle for self-assertion’ or ‘as a rebellion against a dominant ethos’ (1992: 5; see also Medeiros 1992). Faleasa’s behaviour in Pouliuli bears some resemblance to the behaviour of disorderly eaters in other postcolonial texts such as Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), where the refusal or regurgitation of food functions as a rejection of an unacceptable social order. Extending the metaphorical properties of consumption and ingestion in the text, Faleasa figures his family and fellow-villagers as cannibals who have steadily consumed his ‘old carcass’ with their constant demands on his time, energy and resources ([1977] 1987a: 6). Lear-like, he relinquishes his chiefly authority (Houlahan 2002), conferring his title upon one of his sons in an attempt to transform himself from ‘cannibal meat’ into a ‘free angel’ ([1977] 1987a: 16). Significantly, the cannibalism imagery in the text is associated not only with post-independence avarice and selfishness, but also with the pre-colonial past as recorded in the Samoan oral tradition. For example, while Faleasa takes comfort in ‘prepapalagi’ cosmogony as an alternative to the torment of his present existence, imagining himself engulfed by the Pouliuli or primal darkness encoded in Samoan mythology, it is implied that many of the ‘cannibalistic’ social rituals and demands which he finds so restricting have their origins in that pre-colonial world. As he becomes increasingly isolated from his family, Faleasa is tormented by childhood memories of an old man who informed him that the pre-literate past is a ‘brutal nightmare swamp’ in which a ‘cannibal’ collective memory is rooted (ibid.: 104; 105). The old man, who appears simultaneously as a madman and as a mystic, posits the written word brought to Samoans by the palagi missionaries as a release from the ‘irrational madness of their vain and violent blood’, turning the people’s attention to the ‘humane light of the word’ (ibid.: 104–5). Wendt chooses not to provide definitive answers to the complex philosophical questions raised by the old man’s pronounce-

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ments, and Faleasa’s descent into actual madness at the conclusion of the narrative is ambiguous: it is not clear whether his insanity is a blessed release from a society corrupted by contact with the palagi, a punishment for withdrawal from social responsibility, or an unfathomable journey into an existential void beyond social ritual. Such an approach is in keeping with Wendt’s nuanced engagement with the complexities of colonialism and its legacy in the Pacific: as Paul Sharrad notes, Wendt’s ambivalent treatment of Samoa’s pre-colonial past sets his work apart from ‘those oppositional “negritude” protest writings, found throughout the Pacific and Africa during the decolonization period, which romanticized indigenous traditions as a corrective counter to colonial denigration’ (2003: 117). Wendt returns to corporeal images of conspicuous consumption within a postmodernist framework in his 1992 novel Black Rainbow. The narrative takes place within New Zealand, but depicts a futuristic totalitarian state ruled by a tribunal which maintains control over its citizens through strict social conditioning and surveillance. The novel is vibrantly intertextual and resounds with echoes of dystopian literary predecessors such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but it also draws upon more recent postmodern dystopic narratives such as Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982; based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)). Wendt’s citizens, like Huxley’s, are conditioned to believe they are dwelling within a utopian society, and are constantly bombarded with State propaganda and images of the benign face of their ‘President’ (a literary successor to Orwell’s Goldstein).13 Citizens are also subjected to a process of ‘dehistorying’ to render them acquiescent to codes of behaviour prescribed by the Tribunal, and dissidents are forced to undergo psychological reprogramming – known as ‘reordinarinisation’ – and are assigned new identities before they are released back into the system. Though set in some unspecified period in the future, Wendt’s novel is also, clearly, about the perils of contemporary postmodernity, in its focus on the ‘commodification’ and ‘depthlessness’ of a new type of technocratic society (Jameson 1991: 63). Wendt’s writing has always contained putatively ‘postmodern’ attributes such as magic realism, pastiche and metafictional qualities – techniques which, he argues, can be traced back to indigenous Pacific oral, artistic and philosophical traditions (1995b: 4–5; Ellis 1994) – but the more widespread use of these devices in recent novels such as Ola and Black Rainbow has troubled critics more accustomed to the gritty realism of earlier works such as Leaves of the Banyan Tree and Pouliuli (Coogan 1992; Eggleton 1992; Nerney 1992). Such reactions, perhaps, point towards a Western critical assumption that Wendt’s experimentation with postmodernist literary techniques does not accord with what is expected of a ‘serious’ or ‘politically committed’ postcolonial

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writer. Writer and theorist bell hooks has commented on such attitudes with reference to her own writing: Using myself as an example, that creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility, work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative, is constantly rejected by editors and publishers. It does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell. (1994: 426) Wendt has expressed similar sentiments in his discussion of negative critical responses to Black Rainbow within New Zealand in particular, arguing that ‘there is little respect for fantasy or science fiction writing in New Zealand’, and that critics have overlooked the political import of Black Rainbow and have misunderstood the allegorical significance of many of the intertextual references and episodes in the narrative (Ellis 1997: 85). A careful consideration of the allegorical aspects of Black Rainbow does indeed reveal that the postmodernist ‘playfulness’ of the narrative is accompanied by the ‘serious’ and historicized engagement with racerelations politics which is widely evident in his earlier work (see also Ellis 1994; DeLoughery 1999; Sharrad 2003: 205). The Tribunal’s ‘reordinarinisation’ procedure, for example, is conceptualized as a latter-day colonial assimilation policy which serves to disavow racial/cultural difference and to obscure the historical and continuing dispossession of the indigenous Maori people. The narrator of the novel, Eric Mailei Foster, discovers that he is descended from the Tangata Moni, ‘true people’ of mixed Maori and Pacific Island descent who possess a natural resistance to the ‘reordinarinisation’ process.14 The narrator is befriended by a group of Tangata Moni streetkids who tell him about his country’s suppressed colonial history and help him to mount a resistance against the Tribunal’s oppressive régime. In establishing the Tangata Moni as a resistant subculture, Wendt is careful not to establish absolute racial binaries: it is revealed that the Tangata Moni are also descended from rebel Pakeha/palagi who were opposed to reordinarinisation and who intermarried with Polynesian dissidents (1992a: 158). It appears that the Polynesian ancestry is crucial, however, in the natural resistance of the Tangata Moni to the reordinarinisation process, and a core 10 per cent of this ‘rebel breed’ is entirely immune to the reprogramming procedure (ibid.: 223). As is the case with Faleasa Osovae in Pouliuli, the narrator’s insurgency is expressed most vividly through the medium of his own body. In a society where bodily functions and biological urges are strictly regulated – sensual pleasures may only be indulged in designated ‘Therapeutic Zones’ where

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citizens choose from a range of simulated ‘fantasies’, for example – the narrator defiantly reasserts his autonomy by embarking on a series of ‘real’ (and therefore forbidden) sexual encounters, and reconfirms the materiality of his own body by making constant references to non-visual impressions and sensations (particularly those relating to smell, taste and touch) and to bodily functions such as ingestion and evacuation. Further, as is the case in Pouliuli, disorderly eating or the personal regulation of dietary habits also functions as a powerful form of resistance against the Tribunal’s repressive social code. In a society whose economy is driven by the production and consumption of red meat, the narrator’s decision to become vegetarian emerges as an expression of his incipient resistance to the Tribunal’s prescriptive models of social behaviour, and earns him the disapproval of Tribunal members (ibid.: 26). His vegetarianism can also be interpreted within a broader socio-historical context: given that the export of meat to the imperial ‘mother country’ was a mainstay of the New Zealand colonial economy (following the advent of refrigeration), the narrator’s observation, and his refusal to eat meat, clearly has an additional anti-colonial resonance here.15 While the narrator cites an allergy to meat as the reason for his avoidance, it is implied that there is an ethical dimension to his abstention:16 on a number of occasions, the narrator draws attention to the fact that much of the land on which livestock is cultivated was, historically, expropriated from the indigenous Maori people. Further, the narrator posits the consumption of meat cultivated on Maori land as a form of cannibalism, with the dispossessed tribes ‘turned into grass and meat’ (ibid.: 36), and he is affronted when a Tribunal member jokingly justifies the seizure of Maori land by referring to the Maori as ‘savages’ and ‘meateaters’ who were duly eaten by other ‘meateaters’ (ibid.: 16). Here, Wendt (like Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace, discussed in Chapters 6 and 7) inverts the cannibalism motif historically conferred upon Maori by Europeans, figuring the colonizing culture as predator and Maori as an endangered species. The cannibalism motif reappears later in the novel when Aeto, one of the Tangata Moni streetkids, recounts an allegorical narrative in which he is enticed into the luxury home of a wealthy middle-class Pakeha couple. The couple is obsessed with the preparation and consumption of gourmet food – particularly red meat – and their house is a shrine to consumer capitalism, with furniture shaped to resemble ovens and chopping blocks, paintings of food on the walls, and culinary documentaries and advertisements playing on multiple television screens in the bedroom (ibid.: 162–3). Aeto, initially invited into the couple’s home for a meal, becomes a long-term and pampered house-guest, and his previously ‘basic and precarious’ diet as a street-dweller is superseded by a ‘separate and compulsive existence’ as he is fed copious amounts of rich, expensive food (ibid.: 164). Aeto rapidly becomes grossly obese, embodying one of the ‘obscene’ transpolitical forms which Baudrillard

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identifies as characteristic of western societies and affluent cultures (1988b). Horrified by this metamorphosis (and by what it signifies), Aeto begins to resist the cycle of overconsumption forced upon him by the couple, secretly vomiting up his food after meals. Significantly, he wards off his hunger and distress by reciting an incantation, taught to him by his mother, in which the President and his twelve counterparts worldwide are described as ‘ever-hungry cannibals who feed on our dreams and shit out our bones which they sell as manure’ (1992a: 170). The words anticipate what is to come: as committed disciples of the President and his capitalist empire, Aeto’s hosts are fattening him up as the ultimate consumer delicacy, planning to roast and eat him when he reaches the appropriate degree of corpulence.17 Within this context, Aeto’s bulimic habits function as a rejection of the capitalist consumer goods and ideologies which are being literally and metaphorically rammed down his throat. Aeto’s rebellion is reminiscent of Faleasa’s disorderly eating in Pouliuli, and also bears some resemblance to the behaviour of Nyasha in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) set in 1960s colonial Rhodesia. Daughter of Babamukuru, an autocratic Anglophile headmaster, Nyasha develops anorexic and bulimic behavioural patterns as a reaction against her neocolonial education and her father’s repressive authority. Her vomiting serves as a rejection, as Derek Wright notes, of ‘alienating colonial educational values and a nutritionless diet of elitist English tastes and manners’ (1995: 13). While Aeto’s bulimia serves a similar allegorical function, his denial is also a survival mechanism which links his situation with that of his Maori compatriots: like the Maori and the livestock cultivated on Maori land, he is being ‘fattened up’ for consumption by predatory Pakeha. Aeto’s narrative is an apt demonstration of the intersection of postmodernist and postcolonial codes in Wendt’s writing. The tale is flagrantly metafictional and ‘magic realist’ – ending with Aeto’s spectacular escape from his room, which has been transformed into a Hansel-andGretel-style oven – and yet it also serves as a pointed allegory of New Zealand race relations since the early colonial period. When considered alongside other interrogations of history as discourse throughout Wendt’s narrative,18 Aeto’s story – which is represented neither as pure ‘history’ nor pure ‘fiction’ – emerges through the multiple ‘lenses of language’ which Stephen Slemon locates within postcolonial allegory, bringing the ‘provisional, discursive nature of history into the structure and narrative mode of the text so that it becomes approachable only in an act of reading that foregrounds its secondary or conditional nature, its link to fictionality’ (1988: 160). To adapt Slemon’s formula in order to account for the dialectic between postmodernism and postcolonialism in Wendt’s novel, it could be argued that the postmodernist elements and techniques which dominate the ‘surface’ of Wendt’s narrative point, allegorically, towards another level of signification in which the fragmenta-

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tion, deterritorialization, and denial of historicity and cultural difference which are commonly associated with postmodernity are exposed to critique (During 1985: 368; see also Hutcheon 1989). In this sense, the postmodernist aspects of Wendt’s text are paradoxically both incompatible with, and intimately bound up with, the text’s ‘postcolonial’ drive towards reasserting identity-through-difference. To put it another way, the book grapples, as Paul Sharrad notes, with the ‘postmodern dilemma that if everything is a construct of textual surfaces, then identity politics and minority claims to authority are undermined’ (2003: 206), and yet it does not deny that such ‘minority’ political imperatives have had a palpable impact upon New Zealand’s cultural politics in the late twentieth century. Maori activist Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty (1984), a landmark polemical text advocating Maori socio-political self-determination, is cited as an inspiration to the Tangata Moni streetkids in Wendt’s novel (1992a.: 158), and indeed, the very title of Wendt’s narrative is taken from a series of lithographs, produced by Maori artist Ralph Hotere, which protested against French nuclear testing in the Pacific as a form of late twentieth-century imperialist incursion. As Paul Sharrad shrewdly observes, Hotere also provides a ‘useful point of reference’ for an analysis of Wendt’s aesthetics in that parallel to Wendt, he is a contemporary experimental artist who, while frequently alluding to Maori traditions, uses materials such as corrugated iron and fluorescent lights, refusing to be contained in expectations of traditional ‘native crafts’ such as carving or painting myth motifs. (2003: 207; see also DeLoughery 1999) This analogy helps to illuminate Wendt’s complex engagement with the postmodern in Black Rainbow. At a political level, the novel critiques the commodity fetishism and ‘affectlessness’ associated with late capitalist ‘Western’ postmodernity (During 1985: 368). Aesthetically, however, the novel celebrates ‘international’ postmodernist literary techniques such as pastiche and metafiction, incorporating numerous intertextual references to popular culture narratives (including detective fiction, science fiction, and film), as well as playful anagrammatic references to New Zealand (and international) writers and texts. Further, Wendt’s claim that putatively European or international ‘postmodernist’ literary techniques can also be traced back to pre-contact Polynesian oral cultures draws attention to the way in which his work blends or counterpoints ‘outside’ literary and ideological influences with local motifs and traditions. In this sense, as June Ellis notes, Wendt’s is a ‘postmodernism of resistance’ rather than a mere adaptation (or straightforward critique) of European postmodernist forms and motifs (Ellis 1994). As I have suggested, the human body is posited as a locus of this

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‘postmodernism of resistance’ in Black Rainbow, and the narrator’s defiant reclamation of his Polynesian ancestry and his right to assert his individuality in the face of the Tribunal’s dehistoricized model of monocultural conformity reinflects issues of race and identity explored in Wendt’s earlier fiction. The penultimate chapter of the narrative, where the narrator is placed on trial for his insurgency, engages directly with the ‘New Zealand racist attitudes’ which Wendt explored in Sons for the Return Home and Ola, as the narrator is subjected to racist jibes by spectators at the trial (Sharrad 2003: 212; Wendt 1992a: 254–5). The trial scene also allegorizes topical debates within New Zealand regarding racial ‘authenticity’ and legitimacy. One of the jury members, a self-obsessed intellectual named Cantos Head, is a caricature of Karl Stead, a literary scholar and former Professor at Auckland University (DeLoughery 1999; Sharrad 2003).19 In 1985, Stead had questioned Keri Hulme’s right to call herself a Maori writer (given her one-eighth proportion of Maori blood) and had implied that Wendt’s succession to his Chair at Auckland in 1988 was due to questions of ‘political correctness’ rather than Wendt’s academic credentials (Stead 1985; Sharrad 2003: 212; see also Edmond 1994). These details feed into the trial scene in Black Rainbow, where Cantos Head accuses the narrator of ‘inverse racism’ and questions his right to call himself Tangata Moni given his mixed blood (Wendt 1992a: 254). While Wendt’s exploration of the human body as a cultural symbol in Black Rainbow – and in other New Zealand-based texts such as Sons for the Return Home and Ola – is therefore clearly rooted in the race-relations politics which he has encountered within New Zealand as a student and academic, elsewhere in his writing, as I have demonstrated, he also probes other metaphorical properties of the human body within a wider Pacific context. These metaphorical properties vary significantly depending on the context in which they appear. Much of Wendt’s early writing, like that of ‘postcolonial’ predecessors such as Achebe, Ngugi and Naipaul, posits corpulent bodies as symbols of post-independence political and economic corruption. In Black Rainbow and Ola, however, a focus on the body and its functions can also serve positive ends, serving to challenge dominant ideologies and social codes. Similarly, in Sons for the Return Home, the disease-ridden Samoan bodies which the narrator encounters on his return to Samoa serve to underscore socio-economic disparities within post-imperial Oceania, but other ‘disfigured’ individuals who appear in Wendt’s early work are located more positively within a Polynesian mythopoeic tradition. These mythopoeic characters serve as modern manifestations of the mischievous demigod Maui (who was born a disfigured ‘clot of blood’ but went on to perform various heroic and subversive feats) and his Samoan counterpart, Pili (a demigod and trickster who was born as a lizard but later achieved full human form).20 Such versatility ensures that Wendt’s deployment of the human body as a cultural symbol cannot be reduced to a single (or simple)

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formula. While he engages with European discursive constructions of Pacific peoples, his corporeal symbolism is also firmly rooted within Polynesian and Pacific narratives and ideologies, and thus represents a unique contribution to postcolonial debates on race and identity. As I will demonstrate in the chapters which follow, Wendt’s multifaceted exploration of the symbolic properties of the ‘Polynesian body’ has set a powerful precedent for his fellow Oceanic writers.

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‘Gauguin is dead’ Sia Figiel and the Polynesian female body

The work of Samoan writer Sia Figiel, one of the newest and most incisive voices in contemporary Oceanic literature, clearly bears witness to Wendt’s influence within the field of Pacific writing. Like Wendt, Figiel has engaged with the complex effects of colonization, independence and migration upon the socio-political dynamics of Samoan culture, and she shares her compatriot’s interest in existentialism and the corruptions of consumer capitalism. Figiel’s writing differs from Wendt’s, however, in its specific focus on Samoan female subjectivity, and she has pointed out that she developed her own particular style and subject matter ‘specifically because of what was missing’ from Wendt’s work (Subramani 1996: 129; my italics). This chapter explores three particular preoccupations in Figiel’s writing: the obsession with Samoan or Polynesian (female) sexuality within European discourse; the internal gender politics of Samoan society; and the influence of Western education, media and consumer capitalism upon young Samoan women. Born in Western Samoa in 1967 to a Samoan mother and a Polish-American father, Figiel was educated in Western Samoa, New Zealand and the United States, taking a BA in History at Whitworth College (USA), and she began to write after joining a creative writing group in Berlin, where she was working during the early 1990s. Figiel’s first novel Where We Once Belonged (1996a) won the 1997 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Asia-Pacific region, and further publications include a novella, The Girl in the Moon Circle (1996b), To a Young Artist in Contemplation (1998), a collection comprising short stories, poems and autobiographical fragments, and another novel, They Who Do Not Grieve (1999). In addition to being Samoa’s first female novelist, Figiel is an experienced performance poet, has held numerous writerin-residence positions in Europe and the Pacific, and is also a painter whose work is influenced by both Samoan and Western artistic traditions. As noted above, Figiel’s writing takes as its primary focus the lives of Western Samoan girls and women, an area of experience which is largely absent from previous Pacific indigenous writing,1 as Figiel herself has pointed out. In an early interview with Subramani, Figiel asserts that her writing style and choice of subject matter have evolved in response to the

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gender imbalance in previous Pacific indigenous writing, pointing out that when she began reading Samoan and Pacific literature, she ‘did not see [herself] as a young woman reflected in any of that literature’ (Subramani 1996: 130). New Zealand-born Samoan scholar Selina Tusitala Marsh has also noted the phallocentric bias in much indigenous writing and criticism of the Pacific region; she discusses, by way of example, Albert Wendt’s privileging of indigenous male experience in his attack upon Western representations of Pacific Islanders as ‘amoral phallus, the lackey, the comic and lazy and happy-go-lucky fuzzy-haired boy’ (Wendt 1976a: 54). Marsh argues that Wendt’s rhetoric serves to suppress the voices and experiences of Pacific women: As Pacific Islands women, we need our own voices to be asserted, heard, and heeded. For the colonizers also prescribed roles for us as the sexual servant, the dusky maiden, the exotic native, the innocent savage, the “happy-go-lucky fuzzy-haired” girl. We must not consent to our own abasement, or invisibility. (1999: 343) Figiel’s fiction texts – and much of her poetry – address these concerns, exploring in particular the experiences of Samoan girls and young women. In discussing the role that postcolonial writers outside the Pacific have had upon her artistic vision, she cites Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as particular sources of inspiration for her literary explorations of the experiences of young women, arguing that both authors ‘write brilliantly about women – girls particularly’ (Subramani 1996: 130). As is the case in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), the main narrators or protagonists in Figiel’s first two prose fiction narratives are adolescent girls: Where We Once Belonged is based on the experiences of 13-year-old Alofa Filiga, while The Girl in the Moon Circle focuses upon the ‘coming of age’ of a 10-year-old named Samoana Pili, who – like Alofa – shares with her female peers the pressures which come with adolescent bodily changes such as the onset of menstruation. They Who Do Not Grieve contains two main narrators, who are again young women: one is the same Alofa who appears in Where We Once Belonged (now in her mid-teens and living in New Zealand), and the second is 21-year-old Malu, whose grandmother Lalolagi was the best friend of Alofa’s grandmother Tausi. The novel explores the experiences of three generations of Samoan women, but again, the primary focus is upon the social pressures faced by young women in Samoan society. In Where We Once Belonged and The Girl in the Moon Circle in particular, Figiel deploys spoken language as a means by which to construct and linguistically embody her female characters. Both texts capture an adolescent demotic, a style which Figiel developed deliberately in order to lend verisimilitude to her representation of childhood consciousness. Figiel has

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pointed out that her texts are ‘deliberately written for performance’, and the rhythms of oral narration are central to the structure of her narratives. Figiel reveals that the language used in The Girl in the Moon Circle in particular was crafted in order to give her text ‘that energy that is charcteristic [sic] of the way young people speak’ (Subramani 1996: 121): I am especially thrilled when Pacific Islanders come up to me and say things like, ‘Ei! That character is like me’ or ‘That’s just how I would want to write about it!’. . . Before I wrote The Girl, I spent nine months listening to the way 10-year-old girls talk. . . . And I was certain that I wanted to use the vernacular. I did not want to be confined to the conventionalities of formal language. (ibid.: 124–5) The Girl in the Moon Circle is particularly effective in capturing the immediacy of oral narration, with staccato sentences and recurring words and phrases which evoke the patterns of speech as a performative act inflected by the rhythms of the body (Griffin 1993: 26). Samoana’s dominant narrative perspective emerges through the punchy rhythms of juvenile discourse, featuring short sentences punctuated with slang and passages of untranslated Samoan. In the following example, Samoana discusses the popularity of particular conversation topics within her circle of female friends: When we run out of gossip. Or rather story-telling as Tupu says it is. We look at each other’s arms or legs and feet. And tell the stories of our scars. How we got them. Who inflicted them. . . . Everyone says Talalelei has the worst. Since she doesn’t even have her leg with her. Because her leg is swimming around in some shark’s stomach. . . . Tupu says OK. OK. We all know that. I’m talking about people with scars. Real. You know. Stuff that’s visible. Obvious. Stuff that’s here on land. On the actual person’s body. (1996b: 52) This passage, which blends reported speech with first-person narration, is characteristic of Samoana’s narrative style throughout the text. The use of the present tense and the absence of speech marks in sections of direct speech create a sense of oral immediacy and also serve to emphasize Samoana’s narrative authority. In Where We Once Belonged, conversely, Figiel makes more frequent use of speech marks and of the past tense, creating a more retrospective narrative style in contrast to the oral immediacy of The Girl in the Moon Circle. Yet the energy and rhythms of adolescent interaction are still pervasive in the novel, as in passages such as the following, where Alofa Filiga banters with her friends: ‘Ei! Why do you think palagis put flowers in their houses? Aren’t there enough flowers outside to look at?’ . . . ‘Ei! Do you think he has any

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ice-cream in the ice-box?’ Moa whispered. ‘It’s not like he’s gonna notice if we take one or two scoops out, e?’ ‘He doesn’t have any icecream, you two.’ Lili’s voice flew from her mouth like cricket balls, hitting us both on the faces. She stood there on the steps of the house, hands full of clothes, dripping wet. (1996a: 8) Here Alofa’s narrative voice mingles with the direct speech of her friends; the vernacular style is consistent throughout the extract, and is particularly evident in the phonetic transcription of the exclamation/tag ‘ei/e’. In both narratives, Figiel therefore engenders or ‘embodies’ her adolescent subjects through the skilful representation of juvenile linguistic registers. The success of Figiel’s linguistic strategies may in part be measured by the popularity of her fiction among young Polynesians both in Samoa and in South Auckland, New Zealand, where she has performed to audiences of high school children. These teenagers have responded in particular to Figiel’s linguistic irreverence, noting with a mixture of shock and approbation her liberal use of Samoan and English expletives, and identifying with her use of the colloquial phonological system (known as the ‘speakerly “k” dialect’) in sections where Samoan phrases or sentences are incorporated, rather than the formalized ‘t’ dialect which is often privileged as a written standard.2 As Selina Tusitala Marsh points out, Figiel’s use of the ‘k’ dialect makes her work more relevant to Samoan teenagers, and also draws attention to the privileging of oral modes in her writing (1997: 5). Figiel herself has pointed out that there is a political dimension to her use of the Samoan vernacular: she is motivated not only by a personal desire to ‘capture people speaking in the vernacular – in their own language which is often very grassroots level [sic]’, but also by a belief that ‘it is important for Samoans and other Pacific people to realize that their language is being prioritized in an English context’ (1998: 101). Notably, Figiel identifies the Samoan oral tradition – and in particular the circle metaphor central to that tradition – as an organizing principle behind the patterns of narration within her work: The circle is a powerful metaphor that exists both physically and metaphysically in Samoan culture. It is a philosophical concept that is the ‘centre’ of our being as Samoans and as Pacific Islanders. It is in our architecture, our social structure, our traditional calendar, our poetic and musical compositions. The Girl is composed the same as . . . where we once belonged. I was . . . experimenting with the idea of the ula or lei or flower necklace as a working metaphor for the composition. In Samoan poetry (solo) or specifically in singing (pesepesega), we call it suifefiloi [sic] – the weaving or the threading of many different songs/tunes to make one long long song. . . . In The Girl, the book begins with a song and ends with a song – thus closing the circle. One

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Figiel’s arguments linking the structure of her narratives with patterns and motifs in Samoan oratory are also applicable to They Who Do Not Grieve which, like the previous two texts, features a series of interwoven short narrative fragments. The book is divided into three main sections, with Malu as the main narrator in the first and final sections – thereby describing a circular narrative pattern – and Alofa narrating the second section. In all three of Figiel’s prose fiction texts, the su’ifefiloi pattern also extends beyond the personal experiences shared by each of the young female narrators, as they also thread together the stories of other girls and women in their respective families and communities. Further, in the first two books in particular, the circle metaphor becomes representative of Samoan adolescent storytelling circles. The multivocalic structure of these narratives mimetically represents the groups of friends to which the two narrators belong, (re)enacting the circulation of gossip and anecdotes within the adolescent community. Figiel’s use of narrative perspective, particularly in her first two books, is similarly multifaceted. Her adolescent narrators are never the sole sources of authority in their respective narratives: throughout both texts the narrative perspective oscillates between naïve and knowing personas, and at times a more mature voice replaces the juvenile registers of the adolescent narrators, particularly in descriptive sections. Through these alternating perspectives, Figiel imparts poignancy and irony to the manner in which Samoana and Alofa, who both undergo a painful ‘coming of age’, gradually become aware of the various social constraints upon the female body in contemporary Samoan society.

Sexual imperialism Throughout these two texts, female sexuality is problematized with particular reference to the European literary and intellectual legacy in the Pacific. European writers and artists (such as R.L. Stevenson, Herman Melville and Paul Gauguin) and academics and anthropologists (such as Ernest Beaglehole, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman) are critiqued at various points throughout the two narratives, almost always with reference to their representations of Polynesian female sexuality. Figiel’s satire emerges predominantly via the omniscient and ‘knowing’ narrative perspective which offers acerbic observations on European discursive representations of the Pacific. In Where We Once Belonged in particular, Figiel – like Wendt before her – presents a cynical view of the West’s long obsession with Polynesian sexuality, whether it be the romantic representation of Polynesia as a sexual paradise

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for European male philanderers (as, for example, in the writings of Pierre Loti or John Hawkesworth), or the puritanical view – found most commonly in European missionary discourse – of Pacific Islanders as sexually licentious and indolent reprobates (Edmond 1997a: 99). Like Wendt, Figiel argues that these attitudes, which characterized race-relations politics in the nineteenth century in particular, are still extant in contemporary Western society, epitomized in the tourist industry, which exploits European (mis)conceptions of the Pacific as a tropical paradise (1998: 38, 155–7). In Where We Once Belonged, an explicit link between tourism and voyeurism is made by Siniva, a young nihilist who rails at tourists in Apia: ‘Go back to where you came from, you fucking ghosts! Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!’… Palagis were confused when they heard such words – most of them were . . . shocked that someone recognized them doing what they usually did: Peeping-Tomming for a past, an illusion long dead, long buried in museums of their own making. (1996a: 187) Figiel’s neologistic verbal construction, ‘Peeping-Tomming’, may be an ironic reference to Herman Melville, whose protagonist Tommo in the novel Typee (1846) is the vehicle for ‘A Peep at Polynesian Life’, as the novel is subtitled. By this analysis, Tommo’s European successors are further ‘peeping Tom[mo]s’ who have come to the Pacific in search of a European literary construct, a sexual paradise which doesn’t exist. As Figiel asserts in her autobiographical fragment ‘A Writer’s Story’, Tommo’s Marquesan paramour, Fayaway, is a literary ‘figment’ who has helped to fire the imaginations of modern-day tourists in search of ‘Polynesian babes’ (1998: 100–1). Another attack on the exploitative commercialization of the Western stake in Samoan history in Where We Once Belonged is made in the description of the Tusitala Hotel (in Apia), a tangible reminder of both the Western colonial and literary legacy in Samoa, and the advent of the newer cultural imperialist tourist industry: Tusitala was the name nineteenth century Samoans gave the tuberculosis stricken Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who once lived in the biggest house in the whole of Samoa and had servants to cook for him, and to sing to him, and to make him and Fanny ‘paradise happy’, and wiped his sick arse, too . . . and hers, too, whenever it was needed. Tusitala means ‘writer of stories’ in English, or ‘a Japanese-owned hotel’ . . . depending on who’s doing the translation or defining. (1996a: 88) This reference to Stevenson’s search for a ‘paradise’ is rather disingenuous, given Stevenson’s own vehement criticism of the evils of imperialism

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in Samoa; much of his South Pacific writing belies rather than perpetuates European stereotypes about the Pacific.3 (A much more sympathetic representation of Stevenson is evident in Wendt’s novel The Mango’s Kiss (2003a), where the writer appears under the pseudonym Stenson.) Most notable in this quotation, however, is the inference that the Stevenson hotel is a monument to European imperialism, and tourism here becomes a synecdoche for the spreading tentacles of global capitalism. The excerpt raises echoes of Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree, where Pepe, one of the young Camusian rebels, reaches equivalent conclusions about the relationship between tourism and capitalism. In a bitter testament written before his death from tuberculosis, Pepe targets tourism as a governmentadministered enterprise, lamenting the fact that Samoa will become ‘like Hawaii and Tahiti and all the other tourist centres which are tropical paradises in the posters but which are con-men paradises for stripping tourists naked’ (1979: 189). In Where We Once Belonged, the history of European incursion into Samoa is also etched upon the bodies of the Western Samoans themselves, most visibly in the progeny of cross-cultural sexual liaisons. One of the residents of Apia traces his lineage back to Heinrich Spinoza, who lived in Samoa during the period of German colonial administration prior to the First World War: ‘He never caused anyone pain’ was the logic they gave to justify the goodness of that old man, Heinrich . . . if you can call impregnating his wife sixteen times (plus three other women from the Yacht Club, plus two house-girls) ecstasy – on his wife’s part that is. . . . He was a true lover of Samoa – Deutsche Samoa – who loved its women as much as he loved the weather. . . . Mista Sipinoso was truly in love with his Samoan wife, Fayawayaway [sic], but he just couldn’t keep his pants buttoned when it came to other women. (1996a: 81–2) In this excerpt, Heinrich Spinoza is cast as the archetypal ‘virile’ Western male who comes to Polynesia in search of sexual gratification, staking his claim to the territory by burdening his island lovers with a ‘hybrid agglomeration’ of offspring, to invoke Count Gobineau’s phrase (1853–55; quoted in Young 1995: 103).4 Figiel’s heavy irony in this extract culminates in another allusion to Fayaway in Melville’s Typee; the literary Fayaway, like Heinrich’s wife, is treated callously by her Western lover, who abandons her to return to his own country. Unlike Tommo, however, Heinrich guarantees himself a perpetual metonymic presence in his island paradise through his plethora of descendants. Having satirized European sexual imperialism, Figiel then proceeds to undercut the phallocentric colonial fantasy: Heinrich Spinoza is ironically juxtaposed with a modern-day Westerner in Samoa, an Australian bank clerk named Mr Brown who belies the myth of the testosterone-charged

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Western male who comes to the Pacific in order to make sexual conquests. Although Mr Brown makes sexual overtures towards Alofa’s friend Lili, he is impotent, reduced to a weeping and pathetic caricature who can only give pleasure rather than receive it: ‘Mr Brown loved a lot with his fingers and tongue, not his penis. . . . His penis was dead,’ (1996a: 109; 111). As was the case with Loti’s protagonist in Le Mariage de Loti (1880), Mr Brown eventually returns to his metropolitan home, leaving his ‘island beauty’ behind in Samoa, but he departs solely because he cannot give her children, thereby deflating the myth of the virile European spreading his seed in the colonial garden. As Figiel herself points out, Brown is ‘disarmed or disempowered completely’ through his impotency (1998: 100).5 Figiel effects a further inversion by interpolating an episode where Alofa and her friends find a pornographic magazine in Mr Brown’s kitchen cupboard. The incident parodies the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European practice of sending images of the sexualized Polynesian body back to the metropolitan male audience (Beets 2000), as the Polynesian girls usurp the (white) male gaze by viewing erotic representations of their European counterparts: The women in the magazine were very happy-looking. . . . Some were smiling a lot. Others looked like they wanted to pick fights. Some were touching their breasts with the tips of their claws. . . . Some were touching their vaginas with the tips of their claws. . . . Some wore bras without panties. Others wore panties without bras. Some of the panties had holes in the crotch. Others had panties with such thin material that anyone could see all their hair. (1996a: 11) Here, Figiel deftly inverts the process through which the ‘exotic’ beauty of the ‘Polynesian woman’ is presented in a way which renders her ‘other to both white males and white females’ (Sua’ali’i 2000: 95). Alofa is inadvertently sexually aroused by the images of the ‘othered’ white women, but her sexual inexperience at this point in the narrative ensures that she is utterly confused about what is happening to her body. However, there are other symbolic resonances in the excerpt which range beyond Alofa’s yetlimited field of understanding. The transfigurement of the scopophilic impulse in this extract, for example, transposes the Victorian obsession with miscegenation into the arena of modern consumer culture: in Mr Brown’s case, mass-produced images of naked white women replace the ‘imported’ British brides which missionaries and colonists requested in order to stave off the temptation to initiate sexual relationships with ‘native’ women (Edmond 1997a: 99). Consumer capitalism here is represented as a sterilizing influence, reducing women to commodified and fetishized images, sex-kittens with painted ‘claws’. In Mr Brown’s case, of course, the gratification he gains from his two-dimensional ‘kitchen

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cupboard’ white women fails to prevent him from making sexual overtures towards Lili, fruitless though they be. Figiel’s ironization of the sexual stereotypes and typologies that characterized nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial theories also extends to the work of Western anthropologists. As is the case in Wendt’s writing, Margaret Mead comes under particular attack for her claims for Samoan sexual freedom as advanced in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). In Where We Once Belonged, Mead’s theories, and Derek Freeman’s 1983 refutation of these theories,6 are caricatured via Alofa’s naïve perspective. Alofa and her classmates are shown an article from Time magazine focusing on the ‘Mead–Freeman controversy’, and a bemused Alofa elicits the following explanation of the affair from another student: Mead was a palagi woman who wrote a book on Samoan girls doing ‘it’ a lot . . . and they were loving and loved ‘it’ too. Freeman was a palagi man who said that Mead, the palagi woman, was wrong about Samoan girls doing ‘it’ a lot . . . and that Samoans are jealous, hateful, murderous people who do not know how to do ‘it’. (1996a: 204) This adolescent perspective on the Mead–Freeman controversy comically reduces the anthropological debate to a petty argument which centres upon the European obsession with the sexuality of non-Europeans. Another mischievous reference to the Mead–Freeman debate is made earlier in the novel, where two Samoan brothers are named after Freeman, the ‘palagi who interviewed them on sex, status, and domestic violence, and some other white woman who lived on Tau sixty or so odd years ago’ (ibid.: 68). Ironically, given Mead’s and Freeman’s focus upon heterosexuality, the boys eventually ‘come out’ as trans-sexuals: ‘Freeman (Pagoka-ua-faasaolokoiga) and Derek (Keleki) both turned out to be fa’afafige [trans-sexuals]. Keleki returned from Hawai’i with breast implants, and Pagoka-ua-faasaolokoiga leads a life of sin in Apia with sailors and unhappily or happily married men’ (ibid.: 68). Here, Freeman’s name is comically (and subversively) indigenized and transformed, translated into Samoan first through literal translation (‘Pagokaua-faasaolokoiga’ means ‘Man/prisoner who has been freed’), and second through phonetic adaptation (‘Keleki’ being the closest approximation to ‘Derek’ in Samoan phonology). Freeman’s and Derek’s transgressive sexuality contrasts with the heterosexual paradise constructed in the writings of Loti, Joseph Banks and many other Europeans who visited the Pacific. The terms of sexual exchange are nebulous here: gone are the nubile, naïve and yet sexually proficient Polynesian maidens of European fantasy; now the maritime consumer is presented with a cross-gendered alternative. The episode functions as ethnographic satire (Huggan 2001: 44), lampooning Mead’s earnest claims for well-adjusted heterosexual Samoan

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adolescents in Coming of Age in Samoa, and is perhaps closer to Gauguin’s paintings of Tahitians, which, as Rod Edmond points out, betray a fascination with androgyny and sexual ambivalence (1997a: 252). Both Gauguin’s Noa Noa (1919) and Melville’s Typee contain homoerotic episodes, and other Westerners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (including the Boston historian Henry Adams and the French writer Victor Segalen) remarked upon the androgynous appearance of certain Polynesian peoples (Edmond 1997a: 257). Nevertheless, as Robert Young points out, patterns of cross-cultural encounter in European discourse are predominantly gendered in terms of sexual relations between European males and colonized native women (1995: 108), and this is the tradition which Figiel satirizes in Where We Once Belonged. Albert Wendt takes the joke further in his novel The Mango’s Kiss (2003a), where American anthropologist Freemeade – whose name clearly conflates those of Mead and Freeman – initiates sexual relations with local fa’afafine while undertaking fieldwork in a Samoan village. Figiel’s critique of Mead’s legacy is extended in They Who Do Not Grieve in a short section narrated by Mrs Winterson, the wife of a wealthy American businessman, who employs Malu as a domestic. Mrs Winterson studied Mead’s Coming of Age in her ‘Anthro 101’ classes in an American college back in the 1960s, and she recalls ‘dreaming’ about ‘[that] free-loving island . . . [with] its inhabitants doing the nasty from evening till dawn under coconut palms with no worry in the world whatsoever’ (1999: 22). It is implied that the sexual fantasies which Mead’s alluring vision inspired in Mrs Winterson during her student days also helped, years later, to entice her to Samoa with her husband Charles. Significantly, in Figiel’s poem ‘Wow! In Many Parts’, Mead and Freeman are represented as bastions of the Pacific tourist industry: Mead’s Coming of Age is described as a ‘little tour guide book’ which has ‘dictated the way the entire travelling world thinks’, while Freeman is dismissed (again with heavy irony) as a ‘knightinshiningarmour travel agent turned tourist’ who refuted Mead’s arguments ‘basically out of disappointment’ that Mead’s ‘paradise’ was a mere myth (1998: 155–7).

Battered bodies: physical and psychological abuse in Figiel’s narratives Figiel invokes Western discursive constructions of the Pacific not only for satirical purposes, but also in order to make a serious comment on the status of young women in contemporary Western Samoa. Attitudes towards female sexuality expressed by characters in her texts are often radically opposed to the stereotypes found in much European Pacific discourse. Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa gains particular ironic significance in this context. Mead’s commentary on the apparently uninhibited sexual behaviour of Samoan adolescent girls perpetuated Orientalist myths as established by writers such as Melville and Pierre Loti, who emphasized

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the early sexual maturation of Polynesian girls. The male protagonists in both Typee and Le Mariage de Loti have sexual relations with ‘willing’ girls who are barely past puberty, and in Noa Noa, Gauguin also implies that his adolescent lover has a sexual maturity well beyond her years. Figiel’s adolescent girls, on the other hand, offer an entirely different perspective on Polynesian codes of morality. Where Melville and Loti’s paramours were both accessible and acquiescent, and where Gauguin was allegedly invited to take a young girl for his own pleasure, Figiel’s adolescent girls live in a society where female chastity is strictly enforced. In direct opposition to Mead’s claims for sexual freedom, Figiel’s narratives emphasize the fact that Western Samoan girls are expected to be chaste, industrious, clean and godly. Alofa, for example, frequently expresses her frustration at the importance placed upon maintaining a respectable public image. She and her friends are irritated by the fact that a bullying girl named Makaoleafi is venerated by the adults of Malaefou because she presents a façade of accomplished virtuosity in public while misbehaving with impunity in secret. However, the inherent fragility of public respectability is rendered manifest in an episode where Alofa’s friend Moa plants a stolen pornographic magazine (purloined from Mr Brown) in Afi’s schoolbag. The magazine is soon discovered, and Afi’s immediate fall from grace is accompanied by a beating so severe that she is forced to remain home from school for two days while her wounds heal. When she returns to face her peers, her head is shaved in order to draw further public attention to her humiliation. Experiments with sexuality, it would seem, are the worst possible offences a girl can commit. Alofa herself, for example, is apprehended at a local beach, about to embark on her first sexual experience with Lealofi, the pastor’s son. Alofa is beaten so brutally by her father that her facial wounds take two weeks to heal, and then she too is sent to school with a shaved head as an advertisement of her ‘shame’ (Keown 1999: 100). In both narratives, Figiel constructs a code of morality regulated by a sexual double standard. In Where We Once Belonged, for example, Alofa – prior to her own abortive sexual encounter – stumbles upon her father having sex with her schoolteacher (Mrs Samasoni), and the punitive violence which ensues after Alofa’s ‘affair’ is discovered is represented as a form of reverse retribution for her father’s adultery: Filiga . . . shouted that he was going to kill me. . . . Iopu and Filisi and Saufoi tore him away from my body. He was sweating . . . his eyes red like fire . . . his eyes not meeting mine . . . afraid, somehow, to meet mine. As if I was the punisher and he the punished . . . and he knew it . . . and I knew it. . . . By beating me he was beating himself. . . . Beating Mrs Samasoni. Beating the memory of that bridge-umbrella rainy day when I saw him naked – completely naked. . . . Filiga . . . hated me for being like him. (1996a: 215–16)

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The association between sexuality, guilt and betrayal made here is reminiscent of Wendt’s early fiction. Wendt’s harrowing descriptions of female sexual debasement form a backdrop to Alofa’s witnessing of the ‘primal scene’ between Mrs Samasoni and her father, who verbally abuses the schoolteacher as she is engaged in fellatio. Figiel therefore takes up Wendt’s interest in the relationship between gender, sexuality and violence, exploring more closely the negative effects of sexual degradation upon the female psyche. Her narratives are peppered with episodes where men entice or force women and girls into performing sexual acts. While men are the instigators, it is primarily the women who suffer the physical and psychological consequences of these actions, whether they take the form of beatings, ostracism or unwanted pregnancies. In Where We Once Belonged, for example, Filifili – the most intelligent girl in the village – falls pregnant and becomes mentally ill after being forced into having an abortion. She too was coerced into sex by a local youth, but her family, anxious to avoid a scandal, invent a more ‘palatable’ reason for the illness, conveniently labelling her insane rather than accosting the youth himself. Filifili’s is not an isolated experience: throughout Where We Once Belonged, Figiel constructs a recurring pattern of abuse and ill-treatment of women, focusing in particular upon Alofa’s immediate family. Alofa’s mother Pisa, for example, falls pregnant to Filiga, unaware of the fact that he is still married to his second wife Logo. Filiga subsequently evicts Logo without warning in order to make way for Pisa and the new baby, and Logo’s despair and anger are directed not at Filiga who knowingly instigated the extra-marital affair, but rather at Pisa, who, when she fell pregnant, was completely unaware that Filiga already had a wife and children. The newly established Pisa is mocked and beaten by Filiga’s female relatives – especially Filiga’s mother Tausi – and she is constantly and unfavourably measured against the ousted Logo. The gender of her child is viewed as further grounds for mistreatment, and Pisa herself believes she is ‘cursed, just like her mother, to bear girls’ (ibid.: 104). Alofa’s family story suggests that Western Samoan women collude in their own oppression, as Pisa is made to suffer particularly at the hands of her new female in-laws for Filiga’s sexual transgressions. Further, instead of feeling pity for her illegitimate daughter, Pisa uses Alofa as a scapegoat for her own misery, bringing her up to believe she is ‘ugly’ (ibid.: 149). The women in Figiel’s novel therefore perpetuate the repetitive cycle which bell hooks describes in her analysis of domestic violence in Afro-American/black communities. She interprets female violence, both against other women and against children, as a consequence of ‘community acceptance of male violence against women’, arguing that the ‘deeply internalized pain and self-rejection’ which results from male abuse ‘informs the aggression inflicted on the mirror image – other black women’ (hooks 1992: 42). In Where We Once Belonged, Alofa’s family is represented as a microcosm for a wider community which functions

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precisely in these terms. Alofa’s account suggests that transgressive women who fail in their domestic tasks or challenge patriarchal authority are consistently beaten, castigated and ostracized, often by other women within the community who visit their own frustrations and aggressive impulses upon the bodies of their sisters. A similar pattern emerges in They Who Do Not Grieve, where Malu, who is also an illegitimate child, is repeatedly beaten and verbally abused by her grandmother Lalolagi. Malu assumes that Lalolagi’s mistreatment of her stems from her sense of shame at her nowdeceased daughter’s sexual indiscretion, but as the narrative progresses, the circular pattern of woman-against-woman abuse widens as it is revealed that Lalolagi began an affair with a married man in her youth. Betrayed by her jealous friend Tausi, Lalolagi had her ear cut off as punishment for her sexual misdemeanour, and she was disowned by her mother and ostracized by other villagers. When Lalolagi, years later, throws boiling water at Malu during an argument and permanently scars her face, the incident appears as a lamentable echo of her own disfigurement. In these narratives, Figiel therefore confronts Margaret Mead’s romanticist representation of the sexually permissive and trouble-free ‘coming of age’ for Samoan girls with a contrastingly bleak view of the circumscription of women in contemporary Western Samoa. This aspect of her work has earned her criticism from compatriots who have asked why she doesn’t write positively about Western Samoan society (Subramani 1996: 124). When Where We Once Belonged was first published, many adult Samoan women reacted violently against the novel; as Jill Holt reports, ‘One burnt the book, and another castigated Figiel for her “lack of respect”’ (1997: 48). Reviewers of the novel have also emphasized Figiel’s uncompromising perspective on violence in Samoa: Sarah Hunter describes the novel as the ‘Samoan Once Were Warriors’ (1996–97: 7),7 while Tina Shaw reads the text as a fictional validation of Derek Freeman’s attack upon Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, arguing that Freeman ‘would approve’ of Figiel’s dystopic vision (1996–97: 30). Yet these assessments of Figiel’s work are too narrow: while Figiel does suggest that Western Samoan ideologies and social practices can serve to constrain and oppress Western Samoan girls and women, her fiction also celebrates female friendship, teenage camaraderie, and the folk humour associated with the Western Samoan oral tradition. Further, the women in Figiel’s texts are not represented purely as helpless victims of the social structures which circumscribe them; her narratives also explore various sources of empowerment which are open to girls and women both within and outside Samoan society. Some of these choices are made available through contact between Samoa and the West, particularly New Zealand, with which Samoa has maintained close links since independence in 1962.

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The pull of the West: education, religion, politics The 1962 Treaty of Friendship established between the newly independent Samoa and New Zealand committed New Zealand to offering Samoa technical and administrative assistance. Within the educational sector, support has been offered in the form of government scholarships to New Zealand schools and universities, and many young Samoans (including Albert Wendt) have studied in New Zealand under this scheme. In all three of her fiction narratives, Figiel explores the positive and negative effects of a New Zealand education upon the personal goals and ideologies of young Samoan women. In Where We Once Belonged and The Girl in the Moon Circle, New Zealandeducated Samoan women return home with revolutionary ideas about female subjectivity. In Where We Once Belonged, for example, a young woman named Siniva returns from New Zealand transformed almost beyond recognition, both physically and ideologically. The first from her village to obtain a government scholarship, Siniva was originally described as ‘the most beautiful woman in Malaefou’, but when she returns in 1972 with an MA in history, no one recognizes her: She was fat, wore an afro, wore no bra . . . and you could easily see her nipples through the Jimmy [sic] Hendrix T-shirt she was wearing. Sandles [sic]. Peace earrings. Yin-Yang rings. And a cap with a picture of a burning American flag and ‘Get out of Vietnam’ scribbled under it. (1996a: 185) Siniva’s rebellion operates on two levels here, subverting Samoan standards of female decorum and also advertising her protest against American foreign policy during the Vietnam War. Alofa likens Siniva to a ‘hippy’ or a ‘bum’ (ibid.: 185), voicing the predominant views of her fellow villagers. The emphasis placed upon Siniva’s apparent lack of modesty is of particular significance, and Alofa’s disapproving tone implies that Siniva has adopted some dubious morals from the palagi in New Zealand. The reactions of Alofa and the other villagers serve to reconfigure European discursive constructions of Polynesian sexuality: now, it is the palagi or Europeans who ‘indecently’ expose their bodies, while the Western Samoans maintain an almost puritanical code of personal conduct. Siniva’s visible nipples are offensive, taken as a sign of casual (European) attitudes to sex and the body.8 Malama Meleisea suggests that the representation of palagi as ‘godless and immoral’ is a common strategy in Western Samoan society, arguing that it reflects a form of defensive cultural insularity which developed in response to European incursion into Western Samoa from the nineteenth century (1987b: 143). The villagers’ reaction to Siniva’s attire in Where We Once Belonged therefore draws attention to this popular association between European culture and sexual immorality.

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A similar scenario unfolds in The Girl in the Moon Circle, where another New Zealand-educated rebel, Siala, shocks her compatriots by wearing a Woodstock T-shirt without a bra, and shorts which expose her legs.9 Siala’s behaviour is roundly condemned by her fellow villagers, but Samoana and her friends are fascinated as well as horrified by Siala’s blatant nonconformism, noting in particular her disregard for authority: The new Siala was the complete opposite of the old. Breaking all the rules. Who smoked not only cigarettes but cow shit. Who didn’t go to church. Who believed in ghosts. Who had sex with old men. . . . Because of the experience she said. Because sex is beautiful. She said. . . . And our parents were lying by telling us it wasn’t. And that they really didn’t care about us but their own images. . . . Image girls. She’d say. That is so much more important than you. . . . You are objects only. Trophies to be beheld. This is my daughter. Virginal. Angelical. Clean. See? (1996b: 10–11) In her insistence that Samoan women should take control over their own bodies, Siala here becomes an avatar of the satirical, worldly narrator who surfaces at various points in the narrative. Siala’s pronouncements emphasize the putatively repressive nature of the European missionary legacy, implying that the Christians who arrived in the nineteenth century helped to foster a puritanical society which crushes female sexuality and freedom of expression. It is significant that Siala, like Siniva, chooses radical and anti-establishment Western ideologies and symbols with which to identify: such appropriations indicate a knowing and subversive process of selection rather than indiscriminate mimicry. Siniva and Siala become vehicles for a complicated intersection of discourses, pointing towards a deliberately ambivalent assessment of the European legacy in Western Samoa. For example, while Siniva and Siala’s ‘enlightenment’ is at times viewed positively by the adolescent narrators, the two girls offset one another in their assessments of the radical views offered by the Western-educated rebels. In The Girl in the Moon Circle, Samoana sympathizes with Siala’s feminist objectives, but she ultimately falls back upon the familiar, distancing herself from Siala’s views. Siala’s claim that Western Samoan girls are objectified and denied subjectivity is dismissed on the basis of cultural relativism: [Even] though there was a bit of truth in what [Siala] said about us being trophies I believed still that my parents saw us more than just that [sic]. That they tried to instill in us their values – what made them tick – in the best way they could. . . . And suddenly I felt sad for Siala. . . . Because it seemed like everything Siala did was like a machine . . . scrutinizing everything – pessimistic about everything. Analysing everything to death as if it was a science project. (1996b: 11)

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Samoana’s observations suggest that Siala has reached an irresolvable position, dissatisfied with the present situation but aware that for now it is impossible to establish an alternative social code. Samoana concludes that by distancing herself from current codes of morality, Siala has therefore reached an existentialist position, ‘not living . . . [but] rather existing’ (ibid.: 12); she is comfortable neither in palagi nor in Western Samoan society. Significantly, after shocking everyone in Malaefou with her views, Siala voluntarily flees the village, never to return: her activism is thus rendered ineffective through its own extremism. By juxtaposing Siala’s polemic with Samoana’s more sympathetic perspective on Samoan social structures, Figiel avoids the methodological trap which Françoise Lionnet describes in her analysis of Bessie Head’s prose fiction: [Head] is well aware of the all too easy copout of representing the third world woman as the monolithic “victim” of both universal patriarchy and specific black male exploitation. She prefers, instead, to give us some insights into the social configurations of power that drive women to make desperate decisions when they are trapped in deadend situations. (1995: 123) Such an analysis is appropriate to The Girl in the Moon Circle, which similarly explores the various ways in which Samoan women respond to social constraints without imposing a definitive judgement on the origin(s) of those constraints. Siala’s and Samoana’s opposing views, for example, are accorded equal status within the structures of Figiel’s narrative. The relationship between Alofa and Siniva in Where We Once Belonged may be interpreted in similar terms, although Alofa’s reasoning develops in reverse: unlike Samoana, Alofa is initially sceptical of Siniva’s iconoclastic philosophies, but after her own experiences of domestic violence and illtreatment by men, she begins to identify more closely with Siniva’s views. Siniva’s oppositional arguments are more far-reaching than Siala’s: rather than focusing specifically upon the marginalization and physical repression of Western Samoan women, Siniva is more concerned with the way in which Christianity and European consumer culture have bastardized Western Samoan culture. Her analysis of the negative influence of European culture upon Samoan society is accorded considerable authority within the overall structure of the narrative – she shares with the anonymous ‘knowing’ narrator a deep disgust for the growth of consumer capitalism in Western Samoa – but her anti-Western defiance eventually descends into despair as her views are ignored or condemned by other villagers. Siniva decides to end her life, and Alofa, who reads Siniva’s suicide note, is shocked and moved by her assertions. Bruised by her recent encounters with domestic violence and public humiliation, Alofa toys with the idea of following Siniva’s lead:

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Sia Figiel: Polynesian female body After reading Siniva’s thoughts I am silenced. Alone. For the first time I am alone. . . . I am ‘I’ in its totality – ‘I’ without ‘we’. . . . What if there is truth in her observations? Like so many before Siniva, should I too pour kerosene over my body and run towards the sea? Should I too put a rope around my neck and hang from a breadfruit tree, drink weed-killer or eat wild berries?10 (1996a: 236)

Here, Alofa’s sense of alienation from her community galvanizes her towards Siniva’s existentialist individualism, but the ending of Figiel’s novel suggests that Alofa (unlike Siniva) will not choose suicide: she walks from Siniva’s grave back to Malaefou, towards ‘the new gathering place where “we” once belonged’ (ibid.: 236). Alofa’s decision to return to her community points towards a possible reconciliation, but this concluding sentence is ambiguous: it is not clear whether Alofa will use her new insight in order to effect change, or whether she will passively perpetuate the social structures by which she, Siniva, and many other women have been victimized. This open ending renders Figiel vulnerable to the charge which bell hooks makes against many contemporary black women writers (such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison), who represent black women ‘being wild in resistance, confronting barriers that impede selfactualization’ but rarely define the ‘new “self”’ which emerges from this resistance (1992: 50). While it may be argued that Figiel similarly offers no definitive answers to the problems she identifies, the fact that Alofa is palpably moved by Siniva’s testament suggests that her awareness may well develop into a future activism. Further, the radical views found within Figiel’s texts may also be interpreted as a direct challenge to her Samoan female readers. As Samoan scholar Annemarie Tupuola points out, fa’a Samoa values prohibit young women from rebelling against established codes of conduct and from speaking or writing publicly on ‘topics relating to the human body and sexuality’ (2000: 64), and by this analysis Figiel herself, as well as her fictional rebels, is taking considerable risks in writing (or speaking) openly about such matters. Further, Figiel’s deployment of perpetually shifting narrative perspectives ensures that Siniva’s and Siala’s existentialist positions both invoke and deny the assumptions which Chandra Talpade Mohanty locates within stereotypical representations of the ‘third world woman’ as an individual who ‘leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)’ (1988: 65).11 Figiel’s narratives do indeed explore the lives of sexually constrained, tradition-bound women, but the philosophies of her Western-educated rebels draw attention to the existence of more complicated, syncretic female ideologies and identities which challenge the essentializing generalizations Mohanty attacks. Siniva’s and Siala’s voices release radical and subversive

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energies within their respective narratives, and their refusal to become reintegrated into Samoan society may be viewed as a strategy of empowerment. Their stories draw attention to the multicontextuality of Figiel’s ‘radical resistance’ (hooks 1992: 47), confirming that the oppression of Samoan women should be considered not merely in terms either of white hegemony or of restrictive indigenous social practice, but rather in terms of a complex dialectical exchange between a variety of cultural systems. These kinds of intersections and confluences are developed even further in Figiel’s latest novel They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), which focuses more closely on the experiences of expatriate Samoan women. Alofa’s move to New Zealand frees her from various customary social restrictions: she has more time to herself, gets a part-time job, and begins a sexual relationship with fellow Samoan Panapa, an artist. While liberated to some degree from the watchful gaze of her elders, Alofa nevertheless encounters new constraints in New Zealand: she suffers racism from white New Zealanders, and is evicted by her aunt Fue, who married a white man in order to establish a ‘better’ life for herself in New Zealand and is furious when Alofa refuses to follow suit (ibid.: 197). Although Fue appears satisfied with her new palagi lifestyle, Alofa’s Aunt Lassie, who takes Alofa in after she is evicted, suggests that Fue’s situation is not as ideal as it appears: Fue (who now calls herself ‘Viv’) has estranged herself from her other New Zealand-based Samoan relatives, and her husband is on to his tenth extra-marital affair (ibid.: 200). Again, however, Figiel is careful not to present a singular assessment of the pressures faced by expatriate Samoan women: Alofa, unlike her aunt, is emotionally strengthened by her sexual experiences in New Zealand, and her decision to break off her liaison with Panapa is not motivated by a sense of disillusionment but rather by a new-found determination to foster her own independence. Perhaps more so than in the earlier narratives, Figiel’s exploration of female subjectivity in her latest novel is tinged with a ‘fundamentally optimistic undercurrent’ which critic Gabriele Griffin also finds in the work of Grace Nichols, whom Figiel has named as a strong influence on her writing (Griffin 1993: 32; Figiel 1998: 99). Significantly, Figiel has pointed out that the inspiration for her latest novel came from a quote from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’: ‘We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind’ (1969: 462). Figiel indicates that the line gave her the strength to keep writing at a time when she was ‘terrified’ about the impact upon her family of the controversy surrounding Where We Once Belonged (Gee 2002: 1), but the quotation also serves as a manifesto for the two female narrators in the novel, who find an inner strength which sustains them through their personal difficulties. This resilience and diversity of experience among Figiel’s female characters place her work beyond the homogenizing imperatives of what Gayatri Spivak calls a ‘UN-style universalist feminism’ which represents ‘third world’ women as a victimized ‘collectivity’ (1999: 361). In Spivak’s terms, Figiel’s careful attention to the ‘subject-constitution’ of her

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‘social and gendered agents’ ensures that her writing is not open to the type of ‘sanctioned ignorance’ which Figiel satirizes in her poem ‘What they’ve been asking . . . (so far) . . .’, where Western scholars ask her questions which suggest they are attempting to co-opt her into a stereotypical definition of the ‘third world’ (woman) writer (Spivak 1999: 164; Figiel 1998: 14–15). In her interview with Subramani, Figiel points out that she has deliberately avoided any kind of definitive judgement on the position of Samoan women in her writing: I have a lot of friends . . . who are serious feminists and have the tendency of being exclusive in their view of the world. . . . I [however] have a rather inclusive view of things – one that takes into consideration the whole. . . . I didn’t want to be limited because of some ideological dogma or belief. . . . I believe in the freedom of the imagination to explore all possibilities. (1996: 128–9) In investigating the various ‘possibilities’ or choices open to contemporary Samoan women, all three of Figiel’s prose fiction texts explore, in some detail, the effects of the commodification of the body within consumer culture upon the self-image and lifestyle choices of young Samoan women. In Where We Once Belonged (1996a), for example, a younger Alofa and her two friends Lili and Moa model themselves on the central female characters in the 1970s American television series Charlie’s Angels. The girls aspire to the apparent bodily perfections of ‘Kelly’, ‘Sabrina’ and ‘Jill’, privileging sanitized ‘Western’ ideals of beauty over the Samoan physique. When Alofa visits Apia, she oils her hair and dons her only pair of well-worn jeans in a vain attempt to maintain her ‘American’ persona, while her friends iron their hair in order to make it look more Westernized, and lather themselves with Wella Apple Shampoo because television advertisements have convinced them that it will make them ‘clean-clean always’ (ibid.: 3). Figiel’s humorous descriptions of the girls’ desperate attempts to Europeanize their bodies are tinged with her usual satirical irony. The history of European religious incursion into Western Samoa repeats itself as farce in the form of consumer capitalism, and in The Girl in the Moon Circle, the new god Mammon is epitomized in Taiwan-produced images of Christ, described by Samoana as ‘a plastic blue eyed sad faced anonymous someone [drawn] in the image of some palagi who wanted to be famous’ (1996b: 112). The mass-produced ‘Taiwan Jesus’ here corresponds with Deleuze and Guattari’s identification of Christ as the ‘average ordinary White Man’ and bodily ideal against which non-European cultures are measured and found wanting according to the Eurocentric aesthetic conventions which dominate Christian iconography (1988: 178). The iconic status of the Taiwan Jesus here is also reminiscent of the symbolic position

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occupied by the ‘blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned’ baby dolls in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Claudia, the narrator of the novel, rejects the dolls which ‘all the world had agreed . . . was what every girl child treasured’, instinctively realizing, as Susan Willis notes, that the dolls are ‘reified’ symbols of ‘white domination’ (1990: 174). Claudia expresses a similar revulsion towards the celebrated child-actress Shirley Temple, identifying the baby dolls and the ‘dimpled’, blue-eyed media darling as comparable cultural commodities (Morrison 1990: 12–13, 16). In Samoana’s case, however, her recognition of the inauthenticity of mass-produced manufactured goods does not extend to the media icons to which she aspires: she, like Alofa, is seduced by the two-dimensional images and ideals with which she is confronted daily. Nevertheless, Figiel’s vacillating narrative perspective raises questions about the relationship between appropriation and subversion. The commercialization of American and European subculture has – particularly since the 1950s – served a double function, masking its capitalist objectives behind a persuasive promotion of media icons, clothing and other ‘teenage’ commodities as a forum for adolescent rebellion against mainstream ideologies. Angela McRobbie claims, however, that teenage appropriation of commercialized youth culture can still be subversive in that the commodities adopted by a teenage ‘subcultural group’ may gain additional ‘connotations’ which subvert their original function or purpose. These objects then come ‘to represent an oppositional ideology linked to the subculture or youth grouping in question’, advertising the group’s ‘disaffection from the wider society’ (1982: 267). While McRobbie’s arguments are appropriate to white American and European youth subculture, her theories raise different implications when applied to Figiel’s representation of Samoan youth culture. Alofa, Samoana and their peers betray less of a dissatisfaction with ‘wider’ Samoan society than an indiscriminate, media-instigated desire for a way of life completely different from their own. These appropriations become – in Homi Bhabha’s terms – much more ‘menac[ing]’ (1994a: 86) when accompanied with a first-hand knowledge of Western society and ideologies, as is the case with individuals such as Siniva and Siala. Unsurprisingly, it is Siniva and Siala who are best equipped to identify the teenagers’ mimicry as a symptom of a wider process of cultural imperialism whereby Samoan material culture is threatened by the encroachment of global capitalism. Alofa and her friends are blithely unaware of the means of production which lurk behind the airbrushed images to which they aspire. In They Who Do Not Grieve, the older narrators, Malu and Alofa, are more worldly-wise and discriminating in their assessment of Western consumerist ideals of beauty. Both young women are convinced that their bodies conform neither to Samoan nor to Western ideals of beauty, but both eventually come to reject these restrictive paradigms. Malu, for example, is self-conscious about her height (she is over six feet tall), her darker-than-average skin and scarred face, her ‘thick, short, fuzzy hair’

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and her ‘papaya-shaped body’, all of which earn her ridicule from other villagers (1999: 50–1). She also believes that she fails to match up to ideals of beauty marketed in films, television and the print media, but argues that while ‘everyone else went about starving to be someone else’s idea of beauty, I hugged my huge-dark body to myself’, celebrating ‘the beauty I alone knew’ (ibid.: 52). Alofa, on the other hand, experiences an intensification of anxiety about her body when she moves to New Zealand, telling Panapa that while the Polynesian male body is celebrated on ‘billboards everywhere’ in the form of ‘[w]arrior-rugby machine guys’, she feels excised from the public domain and is bombarded with weight-loss advertisements and media images of ‘white, blonde-haired, skinny woman-girlnymph[s]’ (ibid.: 193–4). However, Alofa’s relationship with Panapa allows her to transcend these fears about her body-image, as he teaches her to appreciate her perceived physical defects as positive attributes of a ‘big and beautiful Island woman’ (ibid.: 195), alluding to pre-colonial Polynesian standards of female beauty by which a well-rounded figure was considered more attractive than a slim one (Pollock 1999). A similar strategy is evident in Figiel’s poetry sequence ‘Songs of the Fat Brown Woman’ (1998: 5–8), which is dedicated to Grace Nichols and explores many of the motifs from Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984) within a Pacific context. Like Nichols’s fat black woman, Figiel’s fat brown woman celebrates her generous figure in a flagrant rejection of commercialized Western models of beauty, combating images of ‘miss universe on tee vee’ by defiantly adding ‘more coconut cream to the saka’ (1998: 7). The final poem in the sequence describes the fat brown woman’s huge feet, on which ‘no shoe’ will fit: the poem clearly alludes to the Cinderella fairy tale, but rejects any notion of the woman as an ugly sister, instead celebrating the fact that nothing can ‘contain’ or ‘constrain’ the woman’s feet, which are firmly grounded within ‘the fat blue Pacific’ (1988: 8). Such strategies serve to recover the Samoan female body from the realm of ‘pure representation’ often allocated to the non-Western other within European colonial discourse (Mohanram 1999: 20). Figiel’s Samoan women are ultimately positioned neither as passive objects of colonial desire, nor as the inverse of Western ideals of beauty, but rather as agents located within specific spatio-temporal realities. They Who Do Not Grieve extends this space-identity vector by representing the tattooed Samoan female body as a ‘message board . . . inscribed through place’ (Mohanram 1999: 200). The novel traces the Samoan tattoo back to its ancient origins, describing the myth in which the Siamese twins Taema and Tilafaiga, the ‘original guardians or goddesses of the tattoo’, brought the tattoo to Samoa from Fiji, and detailing various tattooing patterns which commonly feature in the Samoan female tattoo. These motifs, which include the centipede (atualoa), fish (i’a), starfish (‘aveau) and the spear (tao), are drawn from Samoan material culture and the natural environment, recording the reciprocal patterns by which, as

Figure 2.1 The Malu (Samoan female tattoo), from Carl Marquardt’s The Tattooing of Both Sexes in Samoa (1996 [1899]). Copyright Paul Chamberlain, Southern Reprints ([email protected]).

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Radhika Mohanram notes, ‘[the] body is inscribed through place as the place is through the body’ (1999: 200). ‘Malu’ – the word which denotes the female tattoo – also operates as a verb meaning ‘to protect’ or ‘to shelter’; these translations are in keeping with the traditional function of the Samoan tattoo as a form of clothing which protected the body against supernatural forces and prepared it for adulthood and service to the community (Wendt 1996: 16; Edmond 1997a: 71). The malu is also the term for a specific design – an elongated diamond or lozenge shape – which is tattooed on the soft depression behind the knee. Figure 2.1, reproduced from Carl Marquardt’s The Tattooing of Both Sexes in Samoa (1899), depicts the malu design, as well as a range of other common motifs including the gogo (tern), vae’ali (wooden headrest), ‘alu‘alu (jellyfish) and fetu (star), which are tattooed on the front and back of the thighs. The malu (like the Samoan male tattoo, the pe’a) is considered to be a badge of strength and endurance: the ritual – which is undertaken at (or shortly after) puberty and involves the staining of the skin with pigment tapped in with a chisel – is extremely painful, and those who do not complete the ritual are considered cowardly (Wendt 1996: 26; see also Gell 1993; Thomas 2002: 10–11). In Figiel’s novel, Malu (named after the tattoo) and Alofa both carry completed tattoos, and these epidermal inscriptions function as a graphic code recording a ‘coming of age’ much more complex and painful than Mead’s text, and the cultural stereotypes it helped to generate, have allowed for. Taken together, Figiel’s texts offer an incisive inquiry into the authority of bodily representation, from the early European travel narratives to the media myths of modern consumer culture. Her deployment of adolescent female narrators allows for a poignant and sensitive exploration of contemporary social problems, locating her narratives firmly within a context of contemporary Western Samoan values and cultural practices, while her oscillating narrative perspective allows for a more penetrating and diachronic frame of reference which engages critically with the European discursive legacy in the Pacific. Figiel’s own experiences both within and outside Western Samoa, as she herself points out, have given her the inspiration, freedom and flexibility which form the basis of her skilful and multifaceted exploration of adolescent female subjectivity in contemporary Western Samoa (Subramani 1996: 130). While she shares many of her compatriot Wendt’s ideological preoccupations, her narrative technique and use of perspective are innovative and iconoclastic, expressing the concerns of young Samoan women with a depth of perception largely lacking in previous indigenous Pacific writing. Figiel has herself become a role model for young Samoan women, mainly due to the subject matter in her work, but also as a result of her lively performances at her various readings and school visits. As Selina Tusitala Marsh reports, until they met Figiel, many young Polynesians ‘didn’t know Polynesians could even write “proper” books’ (1997: 5). Figiel’s texts have convinced them otherwise.

3

Purifying the abject body Satire and scatology in Epeli Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends

Epeli Hau’ofa’s writing, like Figiel’s and Wendt’s, is centrally concerned with the socio-political problems which have followed colonialism and independence in the Pacific region, and he similarly critiques stereotypical representations of indigenous bodies and cultures within European discourse. Hau’ofa differs from Wendt and Figiel, however, in his unique comi-satirical approach to representing the indigenous body. In his novel Kisses in the Nederends (1987) – the primary focus of discussion in this chapter – Hau’ofa sets out to metaphorically liberate the indigenous body from the limitations of various discourses and social taboos, and the comic resolution of the novel points towards possible solutions for worldwide problems of discrimination and social exclusion. This chapter investigates the influence of Hau’ofa’s anthropological training upon his representation of indigenous bodies and cultures, also evaluating his corporeal humour with reference to the relationship between satire and scatology in European and postcolonial literary traditions. Hau’ofa, like Wendt, is a senior figure in Pacific literature, and he shares with his Samoan counterpart a multifaceted education and employment history. Born in Papua New Guinea in 1939 to Tongan missionary parents, Hau’ofa attended primary and secondary school in Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Fiji and Australia, subsequently pursuing his tertiary education at the University of New England (Australia), McGill University (Montreal), and the Australian National University, where he graduated with a PhD in Social Anthropology. Since completing his tertiary education, Hau’ofa has held a variety of employment positions, including an academic post at the University of Papua New Guinea, a position as Deputy Private Secretary to the King of Tonga, and a chair in Sociology at the University of the South Pacific, where he is now Professor and Director of the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture. In addition to publishing several non-fiction works focusing upon political, economic and cultural issues in the Pacific, Hau’ofa has produced two prose fiction texts: a novel entitled Kisses in the Nederends (1987) and a short story collection, Tales of the Tikongs (1983). Both texts, which are set on fictional Pacific Islands, draw upon Hau’ofa’s wide experience of

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Pacific cultures, and provide a vehicle for a number of comi-satirical observations regarding political corruption and economic development issues in the Pacific. Hau’ofa has attributed many of these social ills to the cumulative effects of colonialism and global capitalism within the Pacific region: To me the most unfortunate things that colonialism, Christianity and international capitalism have done to the Pacific Islands have been, first, the transformation of hither-to [sic] self-sufficient, proudly independent people into wards of rich and powerful countries; and, secondly, as a consequence of forced dependence, the compulsion on people of necessity to compromise their integrity and to use all manner of trickery in order to survive in an economic and political world over which they have no meaningful control. . . . I have recently noticed [this trend] in some sections of urban communities in the islands. Among island elites, on the other hand, the necessary compromise of integrity in order to secure foreign aid has wounded many souls. It makes people bitter and resentful and ultimately turns them cynical. (1990: 49) Here, Hau’ofa explores the inimical effects of (neo)colonialism at various levels, not only identifying the way in which powerful Western nations have perpetuated patterns of economic dependency within small Pacific nations, but also, like Wendt, drawing attention to the political and economic corruption which has developed among island elites and urban communities in the post-independence period. While Hau’ofa explores and satirizes many of these issues in his two prose fiction texts, focusing in particular upon political corruption and foreign aid dependency, he is nevertheless somewhat unusual among postcolonial writers in his strategy of examining these issues through an exuberantly comic lens. As Rod Edmond notes, ‘[colonial] and post-colonial themes of tradition and change, social disintegration and individual displacement, social mobility and cultural exile have not, understandably enough, produced much serious comic writing’ (1990: 143). Hau’ofa, however, successfully counterbalances the ‘serious’ or satirical elements of his writing with an overlay of earthy, ribald and slapstick humour. Both of Hau’ofa’s fictional texts draw upon Tongan storytelling practices, where criticism of individuals and institutions is never expressed directly, but is instead communicated through humorous stories which satirize the target of criticism by means of comic allegory. These Tongan ‘tall tales’ are shared in storytelling circles not unlike those described in Figiel’s narratives; each individual attempts to outdo the previous orator by infusing his/her narrative with increasingly exaggerated and ribald plot embellishments (Keown 2001: 73). These practices can be related to

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Hau’ofa’s own comi-satiric methods: his fiction serves to caricature and comically transform the targets of his satire, and he uses cleverly suggestive pseudonyms and adds hilarious plot contortions in order to embellish the framework of the original story or scenario. In Tales of the Tikongs, set on a fictional Pacific island named Tiko, Tongan ‘tall tale’ conventions are evident in both the structure and narrative style of the text. Recounted by a unnamed narrator whose ‘deadpan’ observations are frequently interrupted by interjections from Manu1 (a cheeky young man who delivers blistering criticisms of the effects of neocolonialism in his country), the collection comprises a series of interlinked narratives which satirize foreign aid dependency and various forms of political and economic corruption through exaggerated comi-satiric scenarios (Edmond 1990: 143). As is also the case in much of Wendt’s early writing, religious elitism forms a particularly prominent satiric target in Hau’ofa’s collection. The story ‘Bopeep’s Bells’, for example, takes the form of a tall tale about a pastor who dupes his parishioners into donating large amounts of money to his personal funds by hypnotizing them with a special tune played on church bells. The pastor calls himself ‘His Holiness Bopeep Dr Tumu’, selecting the name ‘Bopeep’ not because of its evocation of his pastoral duties, but because it phonetically approximates ‘Beepee, the famous South Pacific word that meant godliness in commerce’ (1983: 79). Other stories in Tales of the Tikongs explore various forms of worldliness among the clergy, public servants, and foreign development experts through similarly humorous and exaggerated situations. In ‘The Second Coming’, for example, the colonial history of Tiko repeats itself as farce in the misadventures of Sailosi Atiu, Director of ‘the Bureau for the Preservation of Traditional Culture and Essential Indigenous Personality’, whose pompous British predecessor (Mr Eric Hobsworth-Smith) returns as his new deputy under a post-independence foreign aid scheme (ibid.: 48). By the end of the narrative, Hobsworth-Smith, who has ‘shaved his handlebar moustache, softened his stiff upper lip somewhat, and donned the Tikong national dress instead of his standard safari shirt, Bengali shorts, and knee-length socks’ (ibid.: 53) has nevertheless effectively regained his former status, exposing the ironic (and sinister) significance of the story’s title. If Hobsworth-Smith is the representative of a ‘second coming’ of imperialism, he is also a kind of antichrist, heralding the failure of Tiko’s independence ideals. A similar scenario unfolds in ‘The Tower of Babel’, which details the sinister machinations of ‘Alvin (Sharky) Lowe’, an Australian development loans consultant with ‘experience in handling natives’ who cons impoverished Tikong fishermen into obtaining expensive fishing equipment from international firms who grant him generous sales commissions (ibid.: 23). Kisses in the Nederends, like Tales of the Tikongs, satirizes various Pacific individuals, institutions and ideologies under the veil of comic allegory, but the novel extends upon the political agenda evident in the

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earlier text by metaphorically sketching out a means by which some of the problems of the contemporary Pacific might be addressed. Written out of Hau’ofa’s personal experience of illness, the novel uses the diseased body as a forum for exploring questions of class, race and gender within a global context. Set on a fictional Pacific Island named Tipota,2 the novel traces the painful adventures of Oilei Bomboki, a former heavyweight boxing champion and successful landowner who wakes one morning with a ‘pain in the arse’ and spends months finding a cure for his fistulated, ulcerous anus which, as Edmond suggests, becomes the focus of the novel’s action, ‘[swelling] to fill the whole work’ (1990: 146). Hau’ofa has widely acknowledged the autobiographical nature of Kisses in the Nederends, revealing that his own experiences of illness have informed the basic elements of the novel’s ‘substance and structure’ (Subramani 1999: 39). Hau’ofa was himself afflicted with a chronically fistulated anus from 1981 to 1985. He reports that his experience was intensely humiliating as well as painful, but that he was also able to appreciate the absurd humour of his situation, and he has suggested that the ability to laugh ‘in the midst of suffering’ is a common and endearing feature of Pacific Island societies (ibid.: 42). Throughout his illness, Hau’ofa visited a variety of ‘alternative’ healers who attempted by various means to cure his affliction. Eventually, he gained financial assistance enabling him to have a successful operation performed in New Zealand, and he now boasts an elaborate scar ‘that looks like a Polynesian face tattoo’ (ibid.: 41). Oilei’s medical misadventures in the novel bear a strong resemblance to Hau’ofa’s experiences. In his search for relief, Oilei (like Hau’ofa) visits various local practitioners of natural and traditional medicine, and endures a string of bizarre and unsuccessful treatments, including acupuncture, exorcism, and various herbal remedies involving leafchewing and rump-steaming rituals. Each failed treatment exceeds the previous one in its hilarious and explosive consequences, as Oilei (often inadvertently) showers and blasts his aspiring healers with a constant flow of farts, blood, pus and invective. Oilei eventually travels to New Zealand for an operation, but here the novel departs from autobiography and launches into a series of hilariously improbable events which bring the novel to its conclusion. Oilei’s pulverized anus is replaced with the anus of a white woman, but his body violently rejects the organ, which is catapulted across the operating room and caught cricket-style by the surgeon’s medical assistant. As a last resort, Oilei is sent to a newly established clinic of alternative medicine, the Whakapohane Clinic,3 where his body is persuaded to accept the new anus thanks to the ministrations of Babu Vivekanand, a guru who saves Oilei’s life by placing his nose inside Oilei’s new anus for almost twenty-four hours a day, and who subsequently reconverts Oilei to his ‘Third Millennium’ philosophy of love and respect for the anus.4 The ecstatic and rehabilitated Oilei then joins his mentor and

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other converts in a chain of love and acceptance, each person placing his or her nose inside the anus of the person in front, according new meaning to the phrase which ends the novel: ‘Kiss my arse!’ While the conclusion of the novel evinces Hau’ofa’s professed intention to indulge in ‘undiluted earthy humour’ (Subramani 1999: 50), Babu Vivekanand’s philosophy – and its part in Oilei’s recovery – is also significant in terms of Hau’ofa’s own theories regarding taboo and discrimination. Babu Vivekanand’s philosophy suggests that an holistic acceptance of the human body can be extended in order to embrace all classes and races of people. It is a means by which to overcome prejudice and discrimination, as the guru himself points out: All parts of the human body are of equal value. . . . The anus is the most maligned, most unjustly loathed and abused part of the body. When people behave atrociously they are called arseholes. It is extremely reprehensible to compare the innocent anus with the dregs of society. . . . The great teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, once told his disciples to behave toward the least members of society as they behaved toward him. We must behave likewise toward our anuses. . . . It is only when you are able to lovingly and respectfully kiss your own anus, and those of your fellow human beings, that you will know you have purified yourself of all obscenities and prejudices. (1987: 100–1) Taken at face value, Babu’s earnest pronouncements on the importance of revering one’s anus appear ludicrous, but the ethical issues he raises are accorded considerable authority within the final sections of Hau’ofa’s narrative. The guru’s holistic vision, for example, is manifested both physically and symbolically in Oilei’s anal transplant which takes place at the end of the novel. Hau’ofa has said of Oilei’s operation that he wanted to depict in a few brutal clear lines, the fundamental issues of racism and sexism, by uniting in a single stroke black and white and male and female. And what better place for that unity to be forged than in the newly purified and glorified world of the anus. (Subramani 1999: 48) The comic resolution of the novel, like Babu’s philosophy, therefore works towards possible solutions to global problems through reconciling extremes and collapsing distinctions of race and gender, thereby transcending binary systems of exclusion or discrimination. The novel’s conclusion may also be interpreted in terms of Hau’ofa’s own philosophies about addressing some of the socio-political problems within the Pacific region. Indeed, Hau’ofa himself argues that Oilei’s

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ailment is a metaphor for the social ills of the contemporary Pacific, and that his acceptance of the Third Millennium philosophy implies that the solution to contemporary problems in the Pacific must be ‘global’ rather than local in nature: [O]ur economy, society, culture, and indeed our very existence are not fenced in by our national boundaries. We are inextricably part of larger entities: the Pacific region and, more importantly, the world economy. The solutions to all the major problems in our islands lie in regional and ultimately in wider international cooperation. . . . Oilei’s search for the ultimate solution to his problem reflects those thoughts quite closely. He tries local dottores [traditional healers], an acupuncturist, and medical officers, to no avail. Then he goes regional (to a New Zealand hospital, that is) too late. But he is at last healed by the world Third Millennium Movement. (ibid.: 46) Hau’ofa’s arguments suggest that his novel may therefore be read on several allegorical levels; the central issue of bodily taboo is deployed as a metaphor for wider regional and finally global issues of conflict and discrimination. The novel is iconoclastic in its privileging of the anus as a means by which global problems may be resolved. By making Oilei’s rear end the focus of his novel, as Hau’ofa points out, he explodes existing literary conventions, social ideologies and systems of classification: [A]s far as I knew very little sustained writing had been devoted to that part of the body. . . . I first sounded out the idea of using the anus as a metaphor on my Tongan friends. They were highly amused, horrified, and disgusted. And when I said specifically that I was going to use it as a metaphor for love, beauty, and purity, and that I was going to use it as a way of turning society upside down and inside out and giving it a thorough cleaning, they could not believe their ears. And when I floated the idea of a new philosophy of kissing the anus they roared and concluded that I was completely out of my mind. (ibid.: 43–4; 47) Hau’ofa’s strategy of using earthy and corporeal humour as a means of ‘turning society upside down and inside out’ has prompted some critics to evaluate the novel in terms of Rabelaisian humour and the carnivalesque. Rod Edmond, for example, has interpreted Hau’ofa’s novel within the context of Rabelaisian grotesque realism, arguing that Hau’ofa’s ‘insistent comic preoccupation with what Bakhtin calls “the material bodily lower stratum”, in particular with bodily orifices’, ‘fits perfectly the category of grotesque realism’ which Bakhtin observed in Rabelais (Edmond 1990: 144–5). As Edmond points out, grotesque realism ‘necessarily involves

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exaggerated images of the human body, especially of those parts which are open to the outside world – the mouth, nose, breasts, belly, genitals and buttocks’ (ibid.: 145); such elements, he suggests, abound in Hau’ofa’s novel. Edmond therefore interprets Kisses in the Nederends as Hau’ofa’s ‘unique contribution to the Rabelaisian grotesque’ (ibid.: 146). He draws an analogy between the historical circumstances associated with the French Renaissance, and those connected with post-war decolonization in the Pacific, arguing that both are transitional epochs which naturally lend themselves to the comic potentialities of the grotesque realist genre (ibid.: 150–1). Arlene Griffen has also evaluated Kisses in the Nederends in terms of Bakhtin’s theories, claiming that ‘Hau’ofa’s serio-comicgrotesque approach reinforces the validity and vitality of the culture of folk humour and the principle of laughter as an antidote to monologic discourses and practices’ (1997: 169). Griffen’s argument, however, draws attention to a methodological problem inherent within certain applications of Bakhtin’s theory of the comi-grotesque. According to Bakhtin’s analysis, the Rabelaisian satiric practice operates within a binary framework, using oppositional strategies – in particular the scatological – in order to invert dominant ideologies and subvert authority. The body becomes the focus of resistance and subversion; it becomes the territory upon which comic or satirical dialogue takes place. But as Veronica Kelly and Dorothea Von Mücke note, instead of altering these binary power structures, the Rabelaisian body (via Bakhtin) can become ‘the locus of a new essentialism’, where the classical hierarchy is inverted ‘to celebrate the people’s body as an unproblematic antidote to bourgeois subjectivity’ (1994: 6–7). From a formal point of view, then, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque model is unable to offer a method by which to transcend binary power structures; the carnival ritual itself – upon which Bakhtin’s theory is predicated – is a temporary and regulated inversion of the established social hierarchy, sanctioned with the tacit understanding that hierarchical order will be reinstated. Bakhtin’s theory therefore locates the carnivalesque mode, in Foucauldian terms, within a dialectical social model in which power inscribes – and therefore sanctions – its own (temporary) resistance or subversion. Hau’ofa’s corporeal humour, however, is not easily subsumed within this binary paradigm: he aims not to invert social structures, but rather to transform and transcend them. Like his fictional character Babu Vivekanand, Hau’ofa suggests that if it is possible to overcome systems of division within the body itself, then it is also possible to overcome systems of segregation within and between societies, thereby rejecting binary and exclusionist frames of reference: Why should we continue to be ashamed of some parts of the body and not others? Why should we continue to loathe references to our organs of procreation and elimination and not to other organs? Such

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Purifying the abject body: Epeli Hau’ofa questions led to other questions about social and cultural institutions that I started to explore in the novel. . . . And I seriously said to myself that if we give our organs of procreation and elimination the same consideration that we give the other parts of our bodies, we would eventually eradicate most of the obscene expressions in language and therefore in thought. . . . Oilei’s search for a cure for his physical ailment is also a quest for purifying himself of violence and obscenity in language. Having attained his goal he invites everyone to kiss his arse. It is a joyous statement of the end of hatred and a declaration of love for all humankind. (Subramani 1999: 50)

Characteristically, social criticism and humour are interwoven in this passage, and it seems likely that Oilei’s invitation to ‘kiss my arse’, though here identified as a euphoric expression of the desire to transcend discriminatory practices, also represents a form of carnivalesque inversion. Nevertheless, Hau’ofa’s statements point towards a transcendence of the class distinctions upon which Bakhtin’s theories are predicated, and, indeed, his global frame of reference demands a methodological approach which moves beyond European social and political structures and into a wider cross-cultural framework. His anthropological training, and his experiences of dwelling within and observing various colonial and post-colonial cultures of the Pacific, have led him to consider systems of social exclusion between as well as within cultures. As he has pointed out, although he is no longer a ‘professional academic anthropologist’, his interest in ‘social and cultural’ institutions, including belief systems and social taboos, is strongly informed by his training in ethnography and anthropology. He argues that writers (such as himself) who ‘[concern]’ themselves with ‘“society, culture and human systems”’ are essentially ethnographers who ‘observe analytically the minutiae of actual behavior and arrange them into connected social and cultural patterns’ (Subramani 1999: 52). In analysing Hau’ofa’s approach to the indigenous body, it therefore seems appropriate (given Hau’ofa’s professional background) to consider Kisses in the Nederends within an anthropological/ethnographic context, recognizing, on the one hand, that Oilei’s bodily affliction is represented as a metaphor for tensions between and across cultures, and, on the other, demonstrating that the comic resolution of the novel seeks to transcend the binary oppositions upon which much ethnographic, anthropological and colonial discourse has historically been based (Clifford 1988: 34; Huggan 2001: 46). Hau’ofa is concerned not only with the material circumstances of social organization; he also uses the issue of bodily taboo as a forum for questioning semiotic systems within and across various cultures and academic disciplines. In speaking of his anthropological training, Hau’ofa has pointed out

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that his novel is in part a response to English anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966), which explores the relationship between the body and social taboo across a variety of cultures (Keown 2001: 72–3). In view of this, the arguments which follow are divided into two main sections, beginning with an analysis of Douglas’s text as a focus for discussing bodily taboo within anthropology and ethnography, and moving into an analysis of Hau’ofa’s corporeal humour within the context of the scatological in European and postcolonial literary traditions. The chapter ends with a reassessment of Hau’ofa’s comic utopianism in terms of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the relationship between art, abjectivism and catharsis.

Purity and danger: ethnographic excrementalism In Purity and Danger (1966), Douglas argues, in accordance with Hau’ofa’s own assertions, that physical taboos metaphorically represent social boundaries and systems of segregation. These taboos often centre around bodily orifices which, as the margin between the inside and outside of the body, are liminal spaces that represent a threat to established social divisions, also producing waste products that similarly threaten corporeal and social order. Douglas points out that what we classify as ‘dirt’ does not automatically have this value; it is ‘the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter’ which assigns dirt a negative aspect (ibid.: 35). Dirt and bodily waste are threatening because they have the power to ‘confuse or contradict our cherished classifications’ (ibid.: 36), and because they are transitional and therefore essentially ‘undefinable’ (ibid.: 96). Douglas acknowledges that attitudes towards bodily margins and the waste products they produce differ across cultures, but she notes that in a large proportion of the cultures she has examined, waste products emitted from the anal and genital area – those concerned with ‘the bodily functions of digestion and procreation’ – are viewed as particularly hazardous or repellent (ibid.: 125). In order to account for this phenomenon, she explains genital taboos, on the one hand, in terms of the way in which sexual behaviour is regulated in a given society. In societies where lines of descent are strictly controlled, for example, genital taboos are strongly apparent, and genital orifices are viewed as dangerous margins across which sexual fluids are exchanged (ibid.: 157–8). In her analysis of anal and excremental taboos, on the other hand, Douglas makes a fundamental distinction between Western and ‘primitive’ cultures, arguing that ‘primitive’ cultures view pollution as religious sacrilege, while in Western cultures, attitudes to dirt and bodily waste products have become secularized and are associated predominantly with sanitary conventions: [P]rimitive culture is pollution prone and ours is not. With us pollution is a matter of aesthetics, hygiene or etiquette, which only

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Purifying the abject body: Epeli Hau’ofa becomes grave in so far as it may create social embarrassment. The sanctions are social sanctions, contempt, ostracism, gossip, perhaps even police action. But in another large group of human societies the effects of pollution are much more wide ranging. A grave pollution is a religious offence. (ibid.: 73)

In her analysis of the religious implications of excremental pollution among ‘primitive’ cultures, Douglas discusses, by way of example, the various divisions of Hindu society which are organized, she suggests, according to a hierarchical bodily structure which separates productive mental faculties from excretory functions. ‘The whole system’, she argues, ‘represents a body in which by the division of labour the head does the thinking and praying and the most despised parts carry away waste matter’ (ibid.: 123). In other ‘primitive’ cultures, Douglas asserts, excrement is condemned because it is viewed as unproductive and is associated with death and decay. Here she cites the example of the Nyakyusa people (based north of Lake Nyasa, Malawi), who reputedly associate excrement and other bodily waste products with madness and death (ibid.: 176). Douglas also discusses psychoanalytic approaches to the social valency of excrement, pointing out that high-profile psychoanalysts such as Norman Brown and R. Bettelheim have argued that ‘primitive’ cultures are preserved in an ‘infant’ state and therefore indulge all ‘the fantastic wishes of infantile narcissism . . . in unsublimated form’ (quoted from N. Brown 1959: 298–9). By this neo-Freudian analysis, ‘primitive’ cultures, putatively fixed in the anal-erotic stage of psychological development, are seen to ‘revel in excremental magic’ as a means by which to fulfil infantile ‘desires’ (Douglas 1966: 117–18; see also Freud 1925: 215). Arguments which associated non-Europeans with excremental or animal states of development can also be traced back to late nineteenth-century medical discourse, where new discoveries about the transfer of diseases through contact with excrement were used to support the colonial ‘civilizing’ mission, and colonized peoples were frequently associated with dirt, excrement and disorder (Spurr 1993; Anderson 1995). Tracing the origins of these ideologies back even further, Kenan Malik points out that theories linking unregulated excremental behaviour with social and racial underdevelopment in the colonies had their origins in the social structures of the European imperial centres. In post-industrial Britain, for example, members of the lower classes located in overcrowded urban environments were held responsible for the accumulation of excremental waste in public areas (Handy 1995: 112; Malik 1996: 82). These various medical, psychoanalytic and social theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inform the various excremental distinctions and classifications which Douglas explores in her text. In fact,

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Douglas rejects the association between libidinal excrementalism and the native ‘other’, arguing that far from being associated with ‘the themes of infantile erotic fantasy’, excremental rites in ‘primitive’ cultures indicate that excrement and other bodily exuviae are to be ‘avoided’, their use ‘condemned’ (1966: 118). Yet in spite of her attempt to thoroughly and objectively document the variety of attitudes to bodily taboos across cultures, Douglas’s basic distinction between ‘primitive’ and Western attitudes to bodily functions is essentializing and problematic. She includes a vast and diverse variety of non-Western cultures or religious groups – from Hindu to Islamic, Yoruban to Tikopian – within the ‘primitive’ category, and her claim that taboos in these cultures are religious-based while Western taboos have become secularized does not take account of the fact that many colonized cultures have been systematically Christianized. Similarly, Douglas does not acknowledge the possibility that in the post-war era, with its global movements of people, capital and technology, bodily taboos may have developed or transmuted as a result of a variety of crosscultural influences. As is the case with Margaret Mead’s research, Douglas’s methodology reductively represents European or Western culture as a baseline against which other non-Western cultures are measured, functioning according to an established ethnographic discursive paradigm by which, as James Clifford notes, the non-Western Other is characteristically ‘[prefigured] . . . in a temporally distinct, but locatable, space (earlier) within an assumed progress of Western history’ (1986: 101–2; see also Mohanty 1988). Kisses in the Nederends explores, within an ethnographic framework, methods by which to overcome such binary systems of classification and exclusion. Nevertheless, Hau’ofa’s reaction to Douglas’s text is not entirely oppositional, and her theory of bodily taboo as an index to systems of social stratification is central to the way in which Hau’ofa analyses taboo in his novel. In Chapter 8, for example, Hau’ofa playfully takes up Douglas’s discussion of the psychoanalytic theory of ‘primitive’ libidinal excrementalism. In this chapter, Oilei’s wife Makarita, concerned about Oilei’s conversion to Babu Vivekanand’s anus-gazing philosophy, arranges a consultation with Dr Sigmund Benjamin Zimmerman, the Austrian director of a local mental hospital. Zimmerman, in keeping with the legacy of his celebrated namesake, offers a Freudian interpretation of Babu’s philosophy, declaring Oilei to be suffering from the Oedipus complex and ‘anal fixation of an indeterminate form’ (1987: 114). The tension builds as Zimmerman insists upon the Oedipal theory even after Oilei repeatedly warns him that direct reference to one’s mother is forbidden in Tipotan culture. When Zimmerman states bluntly that Oilei as a child ‘hated [his] father and wanted to kill him so that [he] could have sex with [his] mother’, Oilei is immediately – though temporarily – cured of his new philosophy, and he seizes Zimmerman by the collar and informs him that ‘if ever again I hear you utter the word “mother”, I will

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personally kick your fucking arse all the way back to Vienna’ (ibid.: 114). Hau’ofa’s satire is double-edged here. On one hand, Zimmerman’s indiscriminate application of the Oedipus theory draws attention to the way in which psychoanalytic theory is often used to assert so-called universal ‘truths’ about human nature. On the other hand, his anal-fixation theory raises echoes of Douglas’s analysis of the psychoanalytic association between primitivism and coprophilia, supporting the argument that psychoanalytic theories have also been invoked in order to construct reductive or pejorative distinctions between Western and non-Western cultures. The most vivid refiguration of Douglas’s body–society index is found in the mid-section of Hau’ofa’s novel, where Oilei’s affliction is conceptualized in pseudo-ethnographic terms as a manifestation of a war between opposing tribes within his body. The body-war allegory appears in the form of a dream-narrative recounted by Seru Draunikau, one of the traditional healers whom Oilei consults in his desperate search for a cure. In Seru’s dream, Oilei’s body is inhabited by small creatures called ‘tuktuks’ who live within autonomous tribal communities. These communities are divided into two separate tribal confederations which inhabit two distinct areas of the human body: the ‘Uppertuks’ or ‘brain tribes’ live in the zones above the solar plexus, and the ‘Lowertuks’ occupy the anal and genital regions. The two tribal confederations are ranked according to their specific locations, with the brain tribes paramount, and the tribes in the anal/genital region in a subordinate position: It was the brain tribes who invented the ranking system, claiming that since they were the only ones who could see, hear and smell things outside their body-world because of their commanding proximity to its major apertures, and that since they lived in the loftiest territories, far above the muck in the abdomen and the filth in the anal region, they were the best and cleanest tuktuks of all. They also believed that they were the cleverest since they had the good sense to live in the best part of the body-world. Uppertuks said that the worst, nastiest, dirtiest, smelliest, vilest and generally the most beastly tuktuks were those who occupied the largely swampy territories of the arse. The most degenerate, horny, porno-brained, disgustingly obscene, perverted and generally the most licentiously abandoned and loathsome were tuktuks who lived in the genital region. (ibid.: 86) There are several possible interpretations of the allegorical significance of this episode. On one level, the excerpt can be read as a response to Douglas’s figuration of Hindu philosophy in terms of bodily metaphors – with the lowest in the social hierarchy being associated with excremental activity – and her claim that sexual taboos express anxieties about regulat-

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ing sexual behaviour. Indeed, Babu Vivekanand, who is given an account of Seru’s narrative, likens prejudice towards the anus to discrimination against untouchables in India, praising Mahatma Gandhi for ‘[launching] India on a new road by calling the untouchables “children of God” and giving them equal rights’, and arguing that ‘we’ must follow suit by learning to revere the ‘hitherto lowly anus’ (ibid.: 101). Considering Seru’s narrative with reference to other philosophical traditions, the Uppertuk–Lowertuk binarism may also be interpreted as an allegory for the classical model of the psyche which splits the soul into two opposing faculties, one rational and reasonable, and the other passionate and desire-driven. According to this model, the Uppertuk tribes inhabit the ‘rational’ and ‘reasoning’ areas of the body, while the Lowertuks occupy the regions of the body associated with the satisfaction of bodily appetites and sensual desires. By extension, this section of the novel can also be read as a colonial allegory, with the Uppertuks as the ‘rational’ European subject and the Lowertuks as the irrational, libidinal colonial Other. In fact, the interaction between the Uppertuk and Lowertuk tribes is specifically located within the context of Western economic imperialism. The Uppertuks are particularly fond of a variety of cheese called liebfraufromage, which is manufactured from the milk of moose-like creatures (called nambawan ninongs) found only within the anal region of the body-world, and the Uppertuks are therefore forced to travel to the anal regions and trade with the Lowertuk tribes, whom they consider to be ‘far beneath them in intelligence and in physical and moral cleanliness’ (ibid.: 87). Conflict within the body-world is brought about when the economic relations between the two tribal communities transmute from symbiotic exchange to capitalist exploitation: a chief named Bongotuk from one of the brain tribes discovers a cache of explosives in the sacred burial ground of the Lowertuks, and he uses these weapons to realize his ambition to become paramount chief of the brain tribes and to monopolize the ninong and liebfraufromage trade. He mounts an attack on the Lowertuk tribes, forcing them to serve his capitalist interests: In time Bongotuk subjugated the anal and genital tuktuks, forced them into breeding nambawan ninongs and manufacturing more liebfraufromage, levying a seventy per cent tax in kind on all that they produced. Bongotuk also subjugated all the other tribes of the Lowertuk territories and was set on conquering the rest of the body-world. At the home front, Bongotuk’s tribe had formed the ruling class of the new paramountcy and had reduced all the other tribes to the rank of carriers in the ninong trade. (ibid.: 90) Seru argues that Bongotuk’s greed has created conflict in both upper and lower regions of the body: his tyrannical reign has produced ‘civil war’ in

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Oilei’s brain, while a Lowertuk ‘guerrilla campaign against foreign domination’ has resulted in an Uppertuk bombing campaign in the anal region in an attempt to quash the rebellion (ibid.: 90). This, Seru argues, is creating the pain in Oilei’s anal region, while the civil war in his brain manifests itself in the form of severe headaches. Seru’s solution to Oilei’s affliction is to bring an end to the body-war, thereby re-establishing bodily harmony. It is significant, however, that Seru’s explanation for Oilei’s illness – and his attempt to re-establish Oilei’s bodily equilibrium – is unsuccessful in alleviating his symptoms. As discussed above, Seru’s solution is merely to re-establish a system of segregation which Babu Vivekanand’s holistic philosophy rejects: as the guru himself points out, Oilei’s problem ‘is rooted in the inherent human tendency to isolate and then divide manifestations of the One Infinite, in this instance the human body, into different parts and assign to each of them different values’ (ibid.: 99). Seru’s body-war allegory, according to Babu Vivekanand, merely reproduces or reaffirms various forms of discrimination within and across societies, and the re-establishment of normal trading relations between the tuktuk body-tribes is therefore an imperfect solution to Oilei’s problem. This reading of the body-war episode explicitly links bodily taboos with other forms of social discrimination. The episode also advances Hau’ofa’s theory that particular forms of discrimination or social segregation are encapsulated and reproduced within language itself. The Uppertuks, for example, have devised a range of offensive epithets which they apply to the Lowertuks: Uppertuks called Lowertuks arseholes, arselickers, buggers, bums, bullshitters, cocksuckers, cunts, fart faces, fuckwits, fucking this, fucking that, greedy guts, shitheads, turds, wankers and other luridly offensive expressions. They characterised the mental and moral capacities of Lowertuks as piss weak and shit awful and their achievements as cockups. Lowertuk tattooists, cave painters, bone carvers, nose-flute players, chanters and rain dancers were referred to as arty farty bullshit artists and poofters. In the department of invective, Lowertuks were at a distinct disadvantage. They could not use the words Uppertuks had invented for them because that would only demean their surroundings, of which they were extremely fond and proud. And since not one of them had ever been to the brain lands they knew next to nothing about life in the lofty region. All they could say of the Uppertuks were that they were dunderheads, thickheads, dummkopf, dumdum, bird-brained, nitwit, numbskull, scatterbrained, stupid, boofy, gormless, and other similarly inoffensive expressions. (ibid.: 87–8) In this extract, unequal relations of power are maintained through linguistic discrimination. The Lowertuks, like Caliban in The Tempest, are only

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able to offer a limited retaliation: knowing nothing of the culture of the colonizing Uppertuks, they can only ‘learn to curse’ within the parameters of the conquerer’s language, which, in its Lacanian linguistic enforcement of established oppositions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ regions of the body, offers them few opportunities to retaliate. While this section of Kisses is clearly a satirical exploration of the ethnographic divisions explored and established in Douglas’s Purity and Danger, it is also productive to consider the body-war episode alongside another significant intertext, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).5 Such a comparison widens the discursive field in order to include eighteenthcentury ethnography, which – as discussed in the Introduction to this book – first established (within European discourse on the Pacific) the typologies and social/racial divisions which Hau’ofa critiques. The eighteenth century is often discussed as a period in which imperialist expansion and subsequent developments in racial theory established the oppositions upon which much Western anthropology and ethnography are based (Malik 1996: 81). The new interest in non-European cultures was reflected in the plethora of travel narratives and ethnographic tracts which were produced throughout the eighteenth century, and these texts themselves influenced the way in which the native ‘Other’ was constructed and understood in Enlightenment Europe. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is an early example of the fictional travel narrative, while as Edmond points out, ‘the later eighteenth-century voyages of Bougainville, Cook and others coincided with this new kind of interest in primitive cultures, and the published accounts of their Pacific voyages and the specimens – including human specimens – that they returned with contributed hugely to this interest’ (1997a: 7–8). As James Sambrook suggests, Captain James Cook in particular was valorized as an Enlightenment hero, whose voyages were undertaken ‘not to plunder and destroy, but in order to spread the benefits of civilization . . . and to enlarge the store of human knowledge’ (1986: 198). Gulliver’s Travels was published during this era of exploration and fascination with the non-European Other. At a superficial level, Gulliver may be viewed as the archetypal eighteenth-century adventurer, sailing to ‘exotic’ lands and encountering various unusual beings which he describes in minute ethnographic detail, demonstrating an eighteenthcentury fascination with racial categorization and rigorous scientific method. The novel also explores an eighteenth-century obsession with the fashioning of a European self defined against the racial ‘Other’: Gulliver is constantly (re)categorizing and (re)inventing himself in relation to the various ‘natives’ he meets during his travels. However, Gulliver’s adventures are a grotesque parody of the putatively noble civilizing enterprise of the eighteenth-century explorer. Instead of spreading the benefits of Western civilization, Gulliver becomes a bitter misanthrope, at odds with his own society and with himself. His attempts to introduce Western

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‘civilized’ ideas to the societies he encounters early in the novel end up making him look ridiculous,6 and by the end of the novel, he has rejected most of the ideologies and values which have informed his own sense of cultural identity. The eighteenth-century valorization of the rational European subject is thus subjected to irony and criticism, and Gulliver is forced to confront the irrational in human nature.7 Gulliver’s Travels also satirizes the neoplatonist theory of the divided psyche: the ‘reason over passions’ dialectic is central to section four of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver makes his voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Like Hau’ofa’s Uppertuks and Lowertuks, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms ostensibly represent two sides of human nature: the Houyhnhnms stand for the rational, reasonable aspect of the human psyche, while the Yahoos represent the irrational, bestial element. Similarly, the relationship between the two groups may be considered in terms of Rabelaisian inversion: the Houyhnhnms – who bear the shape of animals – are imbued with rational faculties, while the Yahoos – who closely resemble Gulliver in their physiognomy – are irrational and animal-like in their behaviour. To begin with, Gulliver represents this distinction between ‘rational’ Houyhnhmn and ‘irrational’ Yahoo as an objective reality. As the narrative progresses, however, Gulliver’s prejudice against the Yahoos deepens as a result of the disturbingly intense antipathy which the Houyhnhnms – with whom Gulliver wishes to identify himself – display towards their less powerful compatriots. While the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are normally viewed as representing extremes of human nature, they can also be read within the self–other paradigm which developed in eighteenth-century imperialist discourse. Indeed, Gulliver’s face-to-face meeting with a ‘domesticated’ Yahoo is described specifically in terms of the cross-cultural encounter between the European explorer and the native Other: The Beast and I were brought close together; and our Countenances diligently compared, both by Master and Servant, who thereupon repeated several Times the Word Yahoo. My Horror and Astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable Animal, a perfect human Figure; the Face of it indeed was flat and broad, the Nose depressed, the Lips large, and the Mouth wide: But these Differences are common to all savage Nations, where the Lineaments of the Countenance are distorted by the natives suffering their Infants to lie grovelling on the Earth, or by carrying them on their Backs, nuzzling with their Face against the Mother’s Shoulders. (1986: 232) Gulliver’s encounter with the Yahoo points towards an eighteenth-century preoccupation with categorizing the racial Other in terms of contempor-

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ary scientific theories, and Gulliver enumerates the Yahoo’s attributes with an ambivalent mixture of curiosity and disgust, evincing the conflicting patterns of identification and disavowal which Homi Bhabha locates within the colonial specular encounter (1994a: 44, 91).8 Gulliver’s description of the facial features of the Yahoos figures them as pseudonegroid in appearance. This contrasts with Crusoe’s description of Friday in Robinson Crusoe, where much is made of Friday’s pseudoEuropean features – the aquiline nose in particular – thereby constructing him as a ‘noble savage’, a suitable candidate for the European civilizing mission. In Swift’s narrative, however, the Yahoos are putatively incapable of achieving any measure of civilization; they lack the facility for language, and are therefore relegated to a purely animal existence. The Houyhnhnms treat them as such, domesticating them and training them to perform menial tasks. As is the case with the Uppertuks in Hau’ofa’s narrative, the Houyhnhnms use language as means by which to consolidate their sense of superiority over the Yahoos: the very name ‘Yahoo’ becomes a sign of the abject in the Houyhnhnm world-view; it is used in the form of a suffix in order to denote all that is offensive, evil and irksome (1986: 282). As if prefiguring the parameters within which certain Freudian psychoanalysts have situated European and non-European cultures, the Yahoos are also identified by their allegedly unusual excretory habits, which Gulliver describes as threatening and disorderly. He recounts with disgust an episode where, following a confrontation between himself and a male Yahoo, a large number of the creatures defecate upon him from the branches of a tree. Gulliver is also informed of a social ritual where Yahoo leaders select a personal assistant whose duty is ‘to lick his Master’s Feet and Posteriors’, and who, after being discharged from office, is then shat upon by other members of the ‘Herd’ (ibid.: 267). Significantly, Norman Brown evaluates the Yahoos’ cloacal habits in terms of primitive libidinal excrementalism, deploying the same arguments he uses to describe the habits of ‘primitive’ peoples in claiming that ‘Excrement to the Yahoos is no mere waste product but a magic instrument for selfexpression and aggression’ (1959: 190). While Brown’s analysis post-dates Swift’s novel by more than two centuries, his arguments are based in part upon the racial theories developed and circulated during the eighteenth century. As is the case in Hau’ofa’s novel, the discursive polarization of the two ‘communities’ in Gulliver’s Travels begins to break down. While Gulliver initially tries to distance himself from the Yahoos, the unquestionable physical resemblance he bears to these creatures (as evident in the quotation discussed above) suggests that Swift is also locating this ‘otherness’ within the so-called ‘rational’ European culture(s) of which Gulliver is a representative. Indeed, by the time he returns to Britain, Gulliver has begun to designate members of his own culture (including his own family)

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as Yahoos. By this point, Gulliver’s perspective on human nature has become grotesquely distorted, and it is clearly a mistake to equate Gulliver with Swift himself, or to suggest that Swift views human nature in terms of either extreme offered by the Houyhnhnm–Yahoo dialectic. While Gulliver fails to reconcile the two extremes and recognize that the human psyche is neither pure animality nor pure rationality, Swift’s own comments on the novel in his private correspondence suggest that the narrative exposes the need for a more balanced perspective on human nature: I tell you . . . that I do not hate Mankind, it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable Animals, and are Angry for being disappointed. I have always rejected that Definition and made another of my own. . . . I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale [a rational animal]; and to show it should be only rationis capax [capable of reason]. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy . . . [the] whole building of my Travells is erected. (Swift 1963: 118, 103; cited in Turner 1986: xxv) Swift’s statements suggest that Gulliver’s extreme behaviour towards the end of the novel draws attention to the limitations of ontologies which disavow putatively ‘intolerable’ aspects of human instincts and behaviour. As is the case with Hau’ofa’s body-world allegory in Kisses in the Nederends, Swift uses a dichotomizing allegorical model (the Houyhnhnm–Yahoo dialectic) to critique such binaristic and divisive systems of social classification. Swift’s satirical vision, however, clearly lacks the irrepressible optimism of Hau’ofa’s comic utopianism: the ending of Gulliver’s Travels is characteristically dark and cynical in contrast to the joyous conclusion of Hau’ofa’s novel.

Hau’ofa and excremental (post)colonialism Indeed, Hau’ofa’s comi-satirical approach to the dynamics of division and exclusion appears all the more unique when examined alongside the work of twentieth-century ‘postcolonial’ scatologists. As discussed in Chapter 1, postcolonial satire frequently invokes the scatological as a means by which to express criticism of failed independence ideals, targeting ‘new’ elitism and political corruption in particular with recourse to excremental metaphors. In texts such as Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1968), excremental imagery abounds as a symbol of political corruption in post-independence Ghana; the novel is populated with corpulent and gluttonous politicians and senior officials who exploit ‘the power of a whole people to fill their own paunches’ (1969: 191). The ubiquitous presence of dirt and excrement as a trope of political corruption is also a

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feature of Wole Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters (1965), which focuses upon urban intrigue in post-independence Nigeria. Near the beginning of the novel, for example, the narrator describes a newspaper office situated in a Lagos slum-district, which is identified as a locus and symbol of the worst corruptions of post-independence Nigerian society: Every loud city has its slums, and Isale-Eko symbolised the victory of the modern African capital over European nations in this one aspect of civilisation. . . . [There] was hop-scotch to be played among garbage heaps, and the faint-hearted found their retreat cut off by the slop from housewives’ basins. Independent Viewpoint owned a large building in the slum; the paper itself was a party organ, its location meant easy patronage of local thugs, and Isale-Eko was rich spawning ground. . . . [Outside the] window . . . [the] wall dropped sheer onto a canal which led water into the lagoon. This water was stagnant, clogged, and huge turds floated in decomposing rings, bobbing against the wall. (1996: 72) Having noted the proximity of the sewage pond to the newspaper office, a journalist named Sagoe asks Mathias, an Independent Viewpoint employee, how he puts up with the stench, and is told ‘everybody dey say first time. But make you look me now, I just dey grow fat for the smell’ (ibid.: 72). Mathias’s blithe comments suggest that an immunity to the odour of excrement also represents a blindness to political corruption. Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends is not altogether removed from such paradigms: Oilei’s affliction, for example, can be considered in part as a metaphor for failed development ideals in the Pacific, drawing attention to the way in which colonial systems of exclusion have been reproduced in post-independence Oceania. This aspect of Hau’ofa’s writing also aligns him with other indigenous Pacific writers such as Wendt and Figiel, both of whom use excremental imagery in their fiction in order to critique political and economic corruption.9 However, Hau’ofa is unique in his strategy of invoking the most powerful satiric trope only to disarm it, thereby undermining the epistemologies which have traditionally rendered excrementalism an effective means of critiquing socio-economic problems. While Oilei begins with a bodily affliction which repels almost all who come into contact with him, the novel moves towards an acceptance of, rather than a disgust for, the body and its functions. Hau’ofa’s views on the relationship between language and taboo are crucial to an understanding of this process of reconciliation. Hau’ofa has identified himself as a product of a diversity of cultures, and his approach to taboo is influenced by his experiences within and across these cultures. He points out that the English language, with its ‘global

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distribution’, is a rich source of ‘obscene’ expressions which are used by members of all kinds of cultures. It therefore becomes a nexus within which attitudes to the body intersect, thereby transcending cultural boundaries: In my lifetime I have spoken seven Pacific languages including English. Four of these are Melanesian, which contain relatively few profane and obscene expressions. Two western Polynesian languages, Tongan and Fijian, are rich in such expressions. But the most opulent of all is English, which, probably because of its global distribution, is forever spawning the most lurid profanities and obscenities. . . . Most of the profanities and obscenities in Kisses have been lifted straight from drinking places in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s and from English language books and films. . . . I did not consciously resort to profanities and obscenities to reflect aspects of certain Pacific or any other cultures as such. But since most of human behavior is culturally determined, my work must necessarily reflect my very mixed background. (Subramani 1999: 49–50) As Hau’ofa here points out, his use of English-language ‘obscenities’ in his novel therefore serves as an index of bodily and other taboos across a wide variety of cultures. This theory problematizes Mary Douglas’s opposition between Western and non-Western attitudes to bodily taboo, suggesting that if bodily orifices and waste matter challenge and erode borders within cultures, then they must also erode borders across cultures. Indeed, the universality of defecation, a process which is vital to the survival of human beings regardless of race, caste or class, itself lends scatological humour a universal valency; this appears to be Hau’ofa’s point in his discussion of the English language – with its massive global distribution – as a linguistic repository for various cultural taboos throughout the world. Hau’ofa’s arguments suggest that given the global exchange of ideologies and cultural practices in today’s world, overcoming taboo and other forms of discrimination has less to do with identifying differences in religious or social practice; it is, rather, concerned with examining the function of language as a linguistic manifestation of these exclusionist paradigms. The eradication of taboo as a form of discrimination against certain parts of the body, and the eradication of other systems of discrimination and exclusion, must come about through changing one’s attitude to the use of language itself, in order to overcome rather than reinforce these distinctions. As Hau’ofa points out: There is a fundamental difference between the anus and the arse: the former is part of nature, the latter a cultural distortion of nature. Since we cannot destroy nature without destroying ourselves, we

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merely consign aspects of it that we dread and loathe to the edges of our collective mind, where they remain to haunt us into violence in deed and in language. . . . Kisses is really about a process of purification; the whole story of Oilei’s quest for physical and later spiritual cure builds up to the ultimate state of purity. (ibid.: 51–2) Here, Hau’ofa identifies the role of language in enforcing oppositions between ‘the body’ as a palpable, physical entity and the ‘body’ as a discursive construct; offensive corporeal epithets (such as those described above in the excerpts from Kisses and Gulliver’s Travels) are therefore understood, in line with Douglas’s observations, as an expression of anxiety about maintaining social distinctions. Hau’ofa’s solution is to use language and art as a means of overcoming such dehumanizing oppositions, and his belief in the purifying power of art may be illuminated, finally, through a brief consideration of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjectivism as catharsis. Kristeva, like Hau’ofa, suggests that bodily taboos may be transcended through confronting the most despised products or parts of the body – she terms these ‘the abject’ – and transforming them through the power of language and art. She begins, like Douglas and Hau’ofa, with the principle that the abject is a threat to bodily and social order because it threatens the subject’s belief in a system of borders between inside and outside, self and other: The body’s inside . . . shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s “own and clean self” but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents. Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking its “own and clean self.” (Kristeva 1982: 53) Further, Kristeva also argues – again in accordance with Douglas – that the abject is controlled or sublimated through religious ritual, law, and other social practices (ibid.: 16). She holds that in modern Western societies, art has taken over the function of sublimating the abject by aestheticizing the body and decentring its organicism. However, she also argues that certain works of art, including literature, can perform the opposite function, voicing the abject and thereby transforming it. She theorizes her argument in terms of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, suggesting that by articulating and immersing itself in the abject, the work of art rearticulates and purifies the abject through transformative mimesis:

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Purifying the abject body: Epeli Hau’ofa To Platonic death, which owned, so to speak, the state of purity, Aristotle opposed the act of poetic purification – in itself an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it. The abject, mimed through sound and meaning, is repeated. Getting rid of it is out of the question – the final Platonic lesson has been understood, one does not get rid of the impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second time, and differently from the original impurity. (ibid.: 28)

Kristeva therefore interprets Aristotelian catharsis as a means by which art may purify the abject by confronting it, digesting it, and purging or excreting it forth in a reconstituted form. Kristeva identifies James Joyce as an example of an artist who is able to speak the abject, targeting Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses (1922) as an illustration of this process. In this monologue, Kristeva suggests, the abject appears as the desublimation of the maternal principle, figuring the subject’s return to the maternal bowels – a journey which, according to poststructuralist psychoanalysis, is forbidden under the laws of the symbolic order (ibid.: 22). Hau’ofa’s writing, however, produces a rather different manifestation of abjectivism as catharsis, seeking (through language itself) to purify and transcend linguistically and socially enforced exclusionist dialectics. Hau’ofa’s anthropological training has placed him in an ideal position from which to negotiate issues of taboo and various forms of discrimination from an ethnographic perspective, recognizing that bodily taboos are imbricated in particular social and cultural ideologies. By tracing Hau’ofa’s ideological influences back to the eighteenth century and through the work of various colonial and postcolonial satirists, ethnographers and literary theorists, the historical and academic traditions which inform his unique philosophy are illuminated. This allows an evaluation of his work both in terms of literary scatology as a metaphor for failed (economic) development, and in terms of ‘scientific’, psychoanalytic and ethnographic approaches to scatology as an index of social and racial ideologies. As I have suggested, however, an examination of the historical and ideological factors which inform Hau’ofa’s comic vision also draws attention to the way in which Hau’ofa’s writing confounds existing models of the comi-satiric genre. Fredric Jameson states, vis-à-vis Robert C. Elliott, that satire and utopianism are counter-implicated: ‘All satire, [Elliott] taught us, necessarily carries a utopian frame of reference within itself; all utopias, no matter how serene or disembodied, are driven secretly by the satirist’s rage at a fallen reality’ (1986: 80). While the first part of Jameson’s statement may be true of Hau’ofa’s work, the second needs qualification: Kisses in the Nederends eschews any sense of nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ or ‘fallen reality’ in favour of an iconoclastic, future ‘reality’ which transcends existing ontological models. In practical terms,

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of course, such a vision is difficult to implement, and in recent years Hau’ofa has moved away from fiction in his creative endeavours, preferring non-fiction writing as a more direct and effective form of social intervention (Keown 2001: 79). Nevertheless, his own statements about the personal experiences and convictions which prompted him to write his novel indicate a Kristevan belief in the power of art as cathartic rearticulation; Kisses in the Nederends at once confronts, purifies and transcends the abject body.

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Alistair Te Ariki Campbell Mental illness and postcoloniality

This chapter, in its focus on the work of poet, novelist and playwright Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, marks a transition between the Pacific Islander writers already discussed in this book and the Maori writers yet to be considered. Campbell was born in the Cook Islands in 1925, but after being orphaned at the age of 8, he migrated to New Zealand and did not return to his country of birth until well into his adult life. The Cook Islands therefore emerge in his writing largely as an ‘imaginary homeland’ which contrasts with the detailed representations of island life in the writing of Wendt, Figiel and Hau’ofa. Campbell is a product of a cross-cultural marriage: his mother, Teu, was a Cook Islander from Tongareva (one of the northern Cook Islands more commonly known by its European name, Penrhyn Island), and his father, John Archibald Campbell, was a Pakeha trader. Campbell’s Polynesian heritage is clearly evident in his physiognomy, and this was to create severe psychological problems as the young Campbell, growing up in an orphanage in Dunedin – a particularly Pakehadominated area of New Zealand – attempted to pass himself off as a Pakeha in order to fit in with his peers. As Campbell reports, racism was ‘rife’ in 1930s New Zealand, and in spite of his best efforts to conceal his Polynesian ancestry, he was ‘brutally exposed’ by a white boy who called him ‘“Nigger”’ (Sarti 1998b: 16). Despite such personal difficulties, Campbell proved to be highly successful in his educational and vocational endeavours: he was a top scholar at Otago Boys’ High School, and published Mine Eyes Dazzle (1950), his first poetry collection, while studying at Victoria University College, Wellington. As he matured into adulthood, however, his sublimation of his Cook Island ancestry contributed to the onset of an increasingly debilitating series of emotional crises which eventually culminated in psychosis in the early 1960s. Campbell argues that it was only by coming to terms with his Polynesian roots that he was able to overcome his problems with mental illness: for the first half of my life I denied my Polynesian heritage, and recognized only my European side. I was divided; and this was to land me in a psychiatric hospital. I came right when I recognized what had

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been troubling me, and with recognition came understanding and forgiveness. (Sarti 1998b: 14) One of the ways in which Campbell came to terms with his Polynesian heritage was through his writing. Campbell’s early poems contain few clues as to his Cook Island ancestry and are located largely within a European poetic tradition, influenced by Campbell’s university training in Latin and the Greek classical tradition, as well as his interest in modern poets such as W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot (Robinson 1996: viii). During his battle with a manic-depressive psychosis in the early 1960s, however, Campbell discovered that writing about his Cook Island ancestry – and his psychological problems – served as a form of narrative therapy. Several of his plays, novels and poetical works written during and shortly after this period function both as fictionalized accounts of his experiences of mental illness, and as an exploration of his attempts to confront his sublimated past. His 1960 poem ‘Forgiveness’ expresses a desire to ‘make . . . peace’ with his ancestors (1996: 36), while the poem ‘Against Te Rauparaha’ (from his 1963 collection Sanctuary of Spirits) was written shortly after he was discharged from Porirua psychiatric hospital, and explores issues of psychological disturbance and violent death. At the time the poem was written, Campbell and his second wife Meg had recently moved to Pukerua Bay and were living in a house overlooking neighbouring Kapiti Island, the stronghold from which Te Rauparaha, the infamously ruthless Ngati Toa warrior chief, was ‘able to crush all the tribes in the region’ in the 1820s and 1830s (Sarti 1998b: 17). Campbell’s fascination with Te Rauparaha stemmed in part from his developing interest in exploring his own Polynesian ancestry, but also from a horrified fascination with Te Rauparaha’s reputed ruthless violence. Campbell reports that in his vulnerable state, he felt haunted by the ‘old chief’ whom he imagined to be ‘lurking outside my bedroom window, waiting for the opportunity to do me harm’ (ibid.: 17). Campbell’s attendant fear of ‘identifying with [Te Rauparaha], and perhaps losing control of myself and harming those close to me’ is given voice in the poem, which ends with the desperate plea ‘Madman, leave me alone!’ (ibid.: 17; Campbell 1996: 53). Themes of possession and ego-fragmentation explored in this poetry sequence are also evident in dramatic works produced during the early 1970s. Campbell’s radio play The Suicide (1974a), for example, features two characters (Adam and Jonesy) who represent two sides of the same individual personality. A similar scenario develops in the expressionist play When the Bough Breaks (1974b),1 where the entire action of the play takes place within the tortured mind of the main character, Kate, during her incarceration in a mental hospital. Again, the various other characters in the play are mental projections rather than autonomous individuals.

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Perhaps the most overtly autobiographical creative exploration of Campbell’s battle with mental illness appears in his first novel The Frigate Bird (1989), the first of a trilogy detailing the experiences of a manicdepressive young man of mixed Cook Islander and Pakeha ancestry. The narrative is based in part on diary entries Campbell made during his first visit back to Penrhyn Island in 1976. Campbell reports that the voyage out to his homeland coincided with one of his most severe bouts of mental illness, and that the diary kept during this period was a ‘life-line’ which preserved the remnants of his sanity (Sarti 1998b: 17). He later used material from the diary, and from three short narratives based on his experiences at the Porirua psychiatric hospital in New Zealand, as a basis for The Frigate Bird’s narrative structure (Campbell 1999). While Campbell’s vision is intensely subjective, it is also possible to situate his first novel within a wider cross-cultural framework: in cultural ‘borderlands’, where the identities of non-Western, marginalized or oppressed subjects are subsumed or repressed by a dominant culture, mental illness can develop as a symptom of psychosocial dis-ease (Anzaldúa 1987; Hicks 1991). As Janet Wirth-Cauchon points out, in such contexts ‘fragments of the suppressed identities [of circumscribed individuals] remain’ and may manifest themselves in ‘symptomatic traces or hauntings, preserved in muted form in the psyches or bodies of border subjects’ (2000: 144). Campbell’s novel dramatizes these kinds of tensions in a manner which aligns him with other postcolonial writers (such as Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Marge Piercy) who have explored the relationship between mental illness and social marginalization. More specifically, Campbell’s novel locates the crisis of identity within the palpable existence of the physical (non-white) body itself, located within what Frantz Fanon terms the ‘racial-epidermal schema’ (1970: 79). It is the brown body of the narrator, a body which signals his racial ‘difference’ within the white-dominated society in which he spent his formative years, which is posited as the source and locus of his psychological problems. In view of these issues, the analysis which follows is divided into two main sections, beginning with an evaluation of the way in which Campbell’s novel explores the mind–body dialectic, representing the afflicted body as a manifestation of psychosocial problems associated with minority identities, before moving into a more detailed discussion of the novel’s exploration of psychosis and ego-fragmentation with reference to postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories on specular identification and ego-construction. The chapter concludes with a discussion of various connections between Campbell’s psycho-corporeal vision, and the work of the Maori writers who are discussed later in this book.

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The body–mind dialectic Throughout The Frigate Bird, several references are made to the narrator’s childhood circumstances, which match Campbell’s own biographical details almost exactly, but the narrative focuses mainly upon a fixed period in the narrator’s adult life, detailing his return to Penrhyn Island in order to visit relatives, and exploring his concurrent struggle with a manic-depressive illness. It appears – as was the case with Campbell – that the narrator’s psychological problems began with the death of his parents and his emigration to New Zealand, where he attended school and then university before the onset of his manic-depressive psychosis. Through flashbacks which offer glimpses of his childhood, and through accounts of his journeys to the Cook Islands and his incarceration in a New Zealand mental hospital, the narrator’s mixed cultural heritage and his resulting identity crisis are shown to have laid the foundations for his present psychotic condition. The opening section of the novel, however, focuses specifically upon the physical symptoms which accompany the narrator’s mental illness, describing various psycho-somatic afflictions and palpable side-effects precipitated by the strong medication he takes as treatment for his condition. The early pages of the novel, which focus upon the narrator’s journey from New Zealand to Rarotonga, describe in some detail the way in which his mental condition affects his bodily functions. The confusion and upheaval of travel seem to exacerbate his mental anguish, which is described in vivid phenomenological terms. After enduring a ‘nightmare’ flight to Rarotonga, the narrator boards a boat bound for Penrhyn Island, and the pitching and rolling of the ship triggers a sense of acute disorientation which manifests itself in a variety of bodily symptoms. The narrator reports a loss of appetite, accompanied by a dry and constricted throat. He suffers from constipation and experiences waves of prickly heat. At times, he hears buzzing in his ears, and his motor functions are affected: ‘My movements are jerky and uncoordinated. . . . Lunatics have to be deliberate in their movements because of their extreme confusion. Every movement must be thought out before it’s carried out’ (1989: 29). He also becomes hypersensitive to the vicissitudes of his internal organs, which appear to malfunction during moments of panic or crisis. He experiences hallucinations involving fluids ‘seeping’ from his stomach to his mouth; nerves twitching and exploding within his brain; and rising heat and pressure throughout his body (ibid.: 5–7). These descriptions of the narrator’s unusual bodily sensations – presumably based at least in part upon Campbell’s own experiences – are in keeping with medical accounts of the perceptual changes which are often brought about by manic-depressive and other mental illnesses. As Louis Sass reveals, symptoms include ‘various kinds of delusions and hallucinations’, often involving a ‘destabilized’ or ‘radically transformed’ sense of time and space as

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well as visions of bodily dismemberment, transmutation and fragmentation (1994: 14). The narrator’s sense of bodily disharmony and fragmentation gains further significance when considered in terms of the problems of identification which have triggered his mental breakdown. After returning from the Cook Islands, the narrator is admitted to a mental hospital, and during a conversation with his psychiatrist, the narrator reveals that he is wracked with guilt for feeling ashamed of his Cook Island heritage after arriving in New Zealand as a child. He battles constantly with unresolved feelings for his mother, revealing that he was ‘ashamed of her because of her colour’ and that he resented her ‘for dying young and leaving my sister and me in the lurch’ (1989: 62). His paranoia about his rejection of his maternal heritage therefore adds to his mental torture and its psychosomatic manifestations. At one stage, for example, the narrator’s concerns about his perceived treachery are expressed in terms of atrophy of the brain: ‘There is only one unpardonable sin, and that is to reject one’s ancestors . . . I remembered my sister telling me . . . I was ashamed of my mother because of her colour, and I felt my mind shrinking to the size of a walnut’ (ibid.: 38). The correspondence between the narrator’s ontological anxieties and his psychosomatic afflictions is not coincidental: these physical sensations may be interpreted as a direct manifestation of the narrator’s deep-seated anxieties about his bodily appearance, particularly the ostensible evidence of his Cook Island ancestry. The narrator’s psychiatrist, who counsels him during his stay at the mental hospital, attempts to allay the narrator’s feelings of guilt, suggesting that his denial of his maternal heritage was a necessary egopreservation mechanism: You’d been shattered by the death of your parents, and you were terribly insecure and vulnerable. In white New Zealand, you wanted to be accepted as one of the crowd. What kid doesn’t? And, after all, you were only eight. So you denied the one thing that made you different – the colour that you derived from your mother. (ibid.: 62) The psychiatrist therefore attributes the narrator’s problems to a combination of grief and acute cultural alienation experienced during childhood. The young narrator, forced to adapt to ‘white’ New Zealand culture, was suddenly made aware of his racial difference; his sense of shame about his cultural background therefore originated with his entry into Pakeha New Zealand society. In Black Skin, White Masks (first published in French as Peau Noire, Masques Blancs in 1952), Frantz Fanon has discussed this form of neurosis, describing the reactions of Negro children to initial contact with European culture. Drawing upon his experience as a psychiatrist, he argues

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that ‘[a] normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world’ (1970: 101–2), suggesting that it is only through this contact that the Negro child becomes aware and ashamed of his blackness: ‘The Negro is unaware of it as long as his existence is limited to his own environment; but the first encounter with the white man oppresses him with the whole weight of his blackness’ (ibid.: 106). Awareness of racial difference is therefore brought about by a heightened awareness of the body itself: the physique, the facial features, and in particular, the colour of the skin. Fanon suggests that the black subject’s awareness of his racial difference leads to a sense of self-estrangement and self-objectification. Significantly, he figures this mental division in terms of bodily mutilation and dismemberment: completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? (ibid.: 79) The ontological schism Fanon describes is here conceptualized in Lacanian specular terms;2 the black subject learns to recognize himself as (an)Other, thereby distancing himself from his blackness. This is an enabling framework within which to consider the narrator’s identity crisis in The Frigate Bird. Impelled to alienate himself from his maternal heritage, the narrator has also learned to objectify himself by denying his ‘blackness’, thus (in Fanon’s terms) reproducing the binarisms of the colonial specular encounter.

The specular encounter Homi Bhabha’s theories on the colonial specular encounter offer additional insights into the ontological dilemma which troubles the narrator in The Frigate Bird. Adapting Lacan’s mirror-stage model to a cross-cultural context, Bhabha argues that the colonial gaze serves to impose an illusory division between colonizer and colonized; the psychological strategies of racism which involve the projection of the white man’s desire and hatred onto the colonized Other ‘[turn] on the idea of man as his alienated image; not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity’ (1994a: 44). Bhabha suggests that these conflicting impulses of identification and disavowal give rise to a fundamental ambivalence in colonial discursive constructions of the colonized Other, revealing that ‘post-Enlightenment man’ is ‘tethered to, not confronted by, his alienated image’ (ibid.: 44, 91). He conceptualizes

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this ‘overlap’ between colonizer and colonized in spatial terms as an ‘elliptical in-between, where the shadow of the other falls upon the self’ (1994a: 60). The conflicting patterns of identification and disavowal which Bhabha locates within colonial discourse approximate the ontological schisms experienced by the narrator in The Frigate Bird. Representing both colonizer and colonized in his racial composition, the narrator is simultaneously ‘self’ and ‘other’, but his liminal (‘in-between’) position appears incompatible with the polarized racial oppositions explored in Campbell’s novel. The narrator is both personally alienated by his dual heritage, and also treated as an ‘other’ by members of both cultures. During his visit to the Cook Islands, for example, he is told by a local girl ‘You don’t look Saku [Penrhyn Islander]. You look papa’a [European]’ (1989: 42). In New Zealand, however, he is labelled by others as Maori or part-Maori; such observations similarly identify him as a representative of a ‘minority’ culture (ibid.: 121). During the narrator’s stay in Rarotonga, two Cook Island girls inscribe his window with a message which reads ‘Penrhyn man what are you?’ (ibid.: 43), unwittingly capturing his crisis of identification. The narrator’s liminal status therefore marks him as an outsider in both Cook Island and New Zealand society. His New Zealand education has alienated him from his Cook Island heritage: most of what he knows about Cook Islands culture he remembers from his early childhood, his reading, and his return visits as an adult to Rarotonga and Penrhyn Island; and during his early visits to Penrhyn Island, he is often embarrassed by his lack of local knowledge, describing island customs from an outsider’s perspective. At one stage, for example, he finds a lizard on his ceiling and recalls that ‘[they] say that to the Polynesian the lizard is a symbol of death’ (ibid.: 31). Similarly, when a large frigate bird hits his window he reflects that ‘I had read somewhere that the dead sometimes appeared in the form of birds to admonish the living’ (ibid.: 39), but he is unsure how to ‘read’ the incident as he is completely out of touch with his Cook Island heritage. He is also ‘appalled by [his] ignorance’ of the Cook Island Maori language (ibid.: 31). By being forced to adapt to Pakeha society, the narrator has, in Lacanian terms, entered the law of the (white) father, adopting its structures and ideologies at the expense of his Cook Island heritage. Significantly, he consistently invokes classical rather than Polynesian mythology as a point of reference, drawing further attention to the enduring impact of his Western education. On the boat, for example, a wellbuilt but diminutive crewman with curly hair is labelled ‘the short-legged Apollo’ (ibid.: 34), while a bull-necked fellow inmate at the psychiatric hospital is dubbed ‘The Minotaur’ (ibid.: 67). The narrative style of the novel is also significant in terms of the narrator’s problems of identification and his attendant feelings of selfestrangement. As discussed above, Campbell has pointed out that substantial sections of the novel are based on material written as a form of

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narrative therapy during his own struggle with mental illness, and this is evident in the self-reflexive style of the narration. As he recounts his experiences, the narrator often appears to be addressing a listener or reader who, in some cases, appears to be himself. A description of a walk along the beach in Rarotonga, for example, reads thus: ‘And do you know, old Mind – sad Mind – I found it soothing simply to pick my way barefoot over the water-smooth seal-brown rocks’ (ibid.: 33). At other times, he appears to address an educated listener likely to make moral or evaluative judgements of his behaviour, particularly when it comes to sexual matters: ‘You realise, of course, why I babble on about such irrelevancies as this young girl. Sex has little to do with it. She’s a necessary distraction’ (ibid.: 29). Most of the time, however, his second-person addresses are made in the style of tag questions which a skilled orator might make in order to ensure his/her audience is following the narrative: ‘Last night I had a strange and terrifying experience. I could sense the Giant Toad – have I mentioned him to you? No? Well, I could sense him stirring’ (ibid.: 6). These embellishments create a sense of multicontextuality; the novel may be read simultaneously as a first-person narrative, a talking cure, and a private diary record of the narrator’s experiences. The self-reflexive elements of the narrative may also be interpreted specifically in terms of the narrator’s self-estrangement; he is able to address himself as though he is speaking to a separate and autonomous individual. Further, the subjective, expressionistic nature of the narrative places the novel in alignment with several of Campbell’s plays, particularly his radio play The Suicide (1974a), where (as discussed above) the two characters in the drama represent two sides of the same individual personality. The characters – named Adam Jones and Jonesy – engage in dialogue with one another, analysing and working through the mental anguish which Adam Jones/Jonesy suffers. Similarly, the narrator in The Frigate Bird appears to address himself at key moments in the narrative in an attempt to re-establish relative mental equilibrium. While the narrative may therefore be interpreted as a form of ‘talking cure’ for the narrator (as Campbell’s fictional counterpart), the narrator also seeks a more active cure for his condition by returning to his country of birth and attempting to ‘rediscover’ or come to terms with his Cook Island heritage. New Zealand and the Cook Islands are specifically gendered spaces in the novel; the narrator’s ‘motherland’ becomes more than a nominal designation, as he associates his country of birth specifically with his Polynesian parent. Similarly, New Zealand society is directly associated with his paternal ancestry. By returning to the islands, the narrator therefore hopes to alleviate his mental anguish by rediscovering his maternal heritage and re-establishing contact with his remaining relatives. This situation seems to invite a psychoanalytic reading: the narrator’s drug-befuddled, surrealist journey home within the womb-like (and claustrophobic) ship’s cabin appears as a return to the maternal symbolic,

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representing a search for the lost object. This desire is apparently realized when – during this initial return home – the narrator meets Tia, a Cook Island woman also suffering from mental illness. The narrator is immediately struck by Tia’s strong resemblance to his mother, and subsequently discovers that he and Tia are distant cousins. He views her as a reincarnation of his mother, and therefore experiences a sense of guilt and embarrassment when he finds himself sexually attracted to her: ‘I knew that love, sexual love, between us was taboo, because of our close relationship. Was she not, after all, the reincarnation of my mother?’ (1989: 93). These anxieties are played out in a dream-phantasy where Tia actually becomes the narrator’s mother:3 [Tia] was my mother. And her little boy was me. That was my dream. She was at the hospital clinic, waiting for a prescription. I was playing near by, and she kept a close eye on me all the time, calling me back if I strayed too far. I reached for a ball that had rolled under a prickly pear and pricked my finger. She came running when I yelled, picked me up and comforted me, and when I held up my sore finger she kissed it better. (ibid.: 28) The psychoanalytic implications of the narrator’s dream are clearly apparent; in this Oedipal fantasy Tia becomes an object for the narrator’s unresolved guilt associated with his mother, and his feelings for Tia oscillate between desire, guilt, and a tendency to idealize her as an embodiment of goodness and purity. In Sidewinder (1991) – the second novel of the trilogy – the pair eventually marry, but the union fails to cure the narrator’s mental illness. His attempts to overcome his feelings of guilt for rejecting his mother are unsuccessful, and the marriage is doomed to unhappiness as the narrator descends further into psychosis. From a metaphorical point of view, the doomed marriage – which is also a childless marriage – also represents the impossibility of returning to or accessing an ‘authentic’ or ‘pure’ pre-colonial identity. As Fanon suggests, the colonial encounter irrevocably alters the ontological position of the colonized subject and thereby creates an enduring crisis of dislocation: I wanted to be typically Negro – it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white – that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me . . . my shoulders slipped out of the framework of the world, my feet could no longer feel the touch of the ground. Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. (1970: 94, 97–8)

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The narrator in Campbell’s novel is constantly confronted with such difficulties, and yet his mental illness, although debilitating, allows him to escape the oppressive binarisms of his social and corporeal existence. Within this context, the territory of the mind becomes a refuge from the irreconcilable dialectic between the ‘motherland’ and the ‘fatherland’, representing – to refigure one of Bhabha’s paradigms – a third space, an inner topography positioned between (or beyond) the antithetical geographical spaces to which the narrator’s parents belong. The narrator conceptualizes his inner world as a labyrinth, suggesting that his illness represents a return – or a withdrawal – to a kind of mythic space: ‘It’s a state of mind. You can get trapped in it, sometimes permanently’ (1989: 75). Nevertheless, although it may be argued that the narrator’s descent into mental illness marks a withdrawal from restrictive binarisms into a psychological third dimension, the very nature of his illness appears to indicate an inability to come to terms with his liminal position. The manic-depressive condition is itself marked by an oscillation between two extremes of emotion – euphoria and utter despondency – which structurally approximates the narrator’s extreme parameters of identification. The narrator’s own description of his illness communicates an awareness of this condition: I was . . . suffering from severe and unpredictable changes of mood. One moment I was in a state of exaltation, declaring to a startled orderly I was a blazing genius, and the next, sinking to such despair I even envied the bent old man who used to potter about in the cemetery next door, because I imagined he was free from mental torture. (ibid.: 60) As the narrator’s illness worsens, these emotional vacillations are accompanied by acute paranoid psychosis. This particular aspect of his illness – and the delusional form it takes – further obfuscate the boundaries between the narrator’s subjective phantasies and the external or material ‘realities’ he attempts to describe. In particular, the narrator’s psychosis is characterized by acute feelings of persecution at the hands of a sinister and intriguing character named Sidewinder, whom he ‘meets’ during his term in the New Zealand psychiatric hospital. Sidewinder is a nickname that the narrator initially confers upon a fellow patient named Dai Williams. The appellation is deemed appropriate both ‘because of his habit of sidling up to you, as if he’s about to sell you a dirty postcard’ (ibid.: 81), and because Williams also happens to be decidedly serpentine in appearance: He was a strange-looking fellow. He had a long neck and a small narrow head, with fine brown hair slicked back with hair oil so that the scalp showed through. His eyes were his most distinctive features.

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Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: mental illness They were grey and dead-looking except when he was excited, and then they glowed in a way that I found unnerving. I never saw them blink. His body was long and thin and apparently boneless. He seemed to glide along, his small head swivelling from side to side as if looking – well – for prey. (ibid.: 82)

The narrator claims that Sidewinder is a cunning pickpocket who enjoys victimizing other patients, and he describes in detail his fellow patient’s devious exploits; however, it soon becomes clear that Sidewinder’s tricks are in fact delusions within the narrator’s mind. When Dai Williams is murdered by another patient, ‘Sidewinder’ remains as a demonic apparition who returns at various points in order to terrorize the narrator. At some stages he dwells within the narrator’s mind, while at other times he is externalized, rather like Sello in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), or the ghostly quartet who pursue the protagonist in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger (1978). He often functions as an antipodean Mephistopheles, tempting the narrator by offering him unlimited power in exchange for his soul. At times, Sidewinder seems to be an incarnation of Satan himself, often appearing as a monstrous snake conceptualized, in biblical terms, as the archetype of evil. In one dramatic episode, for example, he transforms himself into a waterspout after being ridiculed by the narrator. This vignette is notable not only for its biblical imagery but also for its undercurrent of threatening sexuality: Before my horrified eyes, Sidewinder began to swell and grow enormously, his clothes burst apart . . . and he became a huge writhing sea serpent covered in bright-green scales. Then he swayed away from the ship like a dancer, and swayed back, all the time spinning with increasing speed until he’d become a massive column reaching to the sky. The ship gave a sudden lurch. . . . Someone, who sounded like my grandfather, shouted ‘Waterspout!’ and above the screaming wind, which tore at my hair and ripped my clothes, I heard Sidewinder’s wild laughter. (1989: 133) Owing to the subjective nature of the narrative, such events remain ambiguous, on the one hand, represented by the narrator as demonic manifestations and, on the other, possible to dismiss as delusional misreadings of natural events and forces. The narrator’s account is consistently matter-offact in style, although he does at times admit the possibility that he may be experiencing paranoid delusions. This proves a source of anxiety, as he realizes that he cannot distinguish accurately between reality and fantasy.4 Sidewinder’s multivalent status in the text therefore raises a number of questions of interpretation.5 Is he to be apprehended as the narrator’s

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dark double, resembling the doppelgänger figures in Dickens’s novels? Why does he take the form of a serpent, and what does this reveal about the narrator’s educational or religious background? Should Sidewinder be read, for example, in biblical terms as a demon who must be exorcized in order to restore the narrator’s peace of mind? Alternatively, should he be interpreted in magic realist terms, or in terms of Cook Island beliefs in the spirit world and the return of the deceased in spirit form? The narrator’s long-deceased grandfather, for example, also ‘appears’ to him at various points during the narrative. Unlike the grandfather-apparition, however, Sidewinder appears to have a particularly intimate relationship with the narrator, being privy to his innermost thoughts and with an uncanny knack of manifesting himself when the narrator is at his most vulnerable. He continually offers ‘deals’ whereby the narrator is invited to forfeit his soul in exchange for a resolution of his problems, and the narrative follows a series of symbolic victories of good over evil as Sidewinder’s fiendish schemes are repeatedly thwarted. The psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein offer a useful framework within which to consider the narrator’s relationship with Sidewinder. Klein is renowned for her theories on the childhood ‘paranoid-schizoid’ phase, a model which she used as a basis for the interpretation of adult schizoid psychoses. Klein argues that in the pre-Oedipal stage, the infant oscillates indiscriminately between opposing emotions, fluctuating violently between love and hate, envy and guilt, persecutory anxiety and idealization. Further, in this early phase the infant tends to project these opposing emotions onto the nearest object, which Klein identifies as the mother: Projection . . . implies that there is a capacity in the child to attribute to other people around him feelings of various kinds, predominantly love and hate. I have formed the view that love and hate towards the mother are bound up with the very young infant’s capacity to project all his emotions on to her, thereby making her into a good as well as dangerous object. (1959: 293) Through this strategy, anxieties and negative emotions are therefore externalized; the ego’s strategy is to ‘deflect (project) internal dangers (primarily the activity of the death instinct) into the external world’. This externalization of negative emotions serves to relieve anxiety, and is used as a defence to some degree throughout adult life as well as during infancy (1984: 31). As the infant develops a clearer sense of his/her own autonomous identity in relation to objects and beings in the outside world, Klein suggests, s/he is able to reconcile these opposing extremes of emotion, learning to control and synthesize positive and negative emotions rather than

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indiscriminately projecting them onto others: ‘[s]uch advance in the capacity to synthesize is proof that the splitting processes . . . have diminished and that integration of the ego in depth has come about’ (ibid.: 47).6 Klein’s theories on adult psychosis are particularly relevant to the narrator’s condition in The Frigate Bird. Klein argues that the symptoms of adult schizoid psychoses reproduce the conditions of the infant paranoidschizoid position: with adult paranoid-schizoids, for example, fear and guilt are projected onto other individuals or objects rather than being successfully resolved within the individual psyche: anxiety and guilt increase the need to externalize (project) bad figures and to internalize (introject) good ones; to attach desires, love, feelings of guilt, and reparative tendencies to some objects, and hate and anxiety to others; to find representatives for internal figures in the external world. (1984: 50) While it is immediately apparent that Klein’s theories can illuminate the relationship between the narrator and Sidewinder, with Sidewinder posited as a negative object upon which the narrator projects his feelings of guilt, aggression and anxiety, it is possible to push the analysis further in order to interpret their relationship in terms of the narrator’s problems of racial identification. Significantly, while Klein’s original contributions to psychoanalysis were made largely in the 1950s and 1960s, her theories have been adapted in recent years by analysts attempting to account for the politics of racism within a psychoanalytic framework. Stephen Frosh, for example, identifies racism as a form of regression to the paranoidschizoid phase, arguing that it represents an inability to accept the complexities, schisms and oppositions within modern, multicultural societies (1989: 233). In terms akin to Bhabha’s arguments regarding the complex psychological processes which tether the colonial ‘Self’ to the colonized ‘Other’, Frosh identifies the Kleinian process of projection as a primary strategy deployed by the racist: The most familiar psychoanalytic explanation of racism is as projection: the expulsion of disturbing or painful feelings from inside oneself onto the socially legitimized target of another. . . . The prejudiced person needs her or his hated object in order to survive; indeed, the oppressed group is a product of the racist’s need. (ibid.: 234) By this analysis, the machinations of racism not only represent a desire to reinforce difference; they also involve a transference of negative emotions from the racist subject onto the objectified Other.

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Fanon has similarly discussed racism – in particular ‘negrophobia’, as he calls it – in terms of projection, arguing in pseudo-Kleinian terms that the racist’s strategy is to project negative emotions onto the Negro, the object of racial discrimination. However, he takes Klein’s paradigm a step further by arguing that the colonized Negro – in this case, the Antillean Negro – also adopts these strategies, introjecting the colonizer’s conceptualization of the Negro as an embodiment of the dark side of human nature: In Europe the Negro has one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul. . . . Hence there is no reason to be surprised when an Antillean exposed to waking-dream therapy relives the same fantasies as a European. . . . In the society of the Antilles, where the myths are identical with those of the society of Dijon or Nice, the young Negro, identifying himself with the civilizing power, will make the nigger the scapegoat of his moral life. (1970: 135, 138) Klein’s theories – and their various transmutations in cross-cultural contexts – provide an enabling theoretical framework within which to consider the narrator’s manic-depressive condition in The Frigate Bird. From his early days in New Zealand society, the narrator frequently relies upon projective strategies. As Pakeha society and the Pakeha education system teach him that his Cook Island heritage is something to be ashamed of, he attempts to externalize his ‘blackness’, projecting his shame onto his mother, who represents his ‘dark side’. This denial or excision of his Cook Island heritage is a defence mechanism which allays his anxieties about being integrated into white New Zealand society; it represents an act of ‘depersonalization’ whereby, as Richard Wollheim suggests, an individual ‘wishes to rid himself of some part of his psychology that he can no longer tolerate’ (1984: 271). Wollheim links this strategy with manic psychosis, which is also characterized by denial of negative or threatening elements (ibid.: 211). He also establishes a similar correlation between depressive and reparative psychological impulses, suggesting that the emotional counterpart of the manic phase is the depressive phase, where feelings of guilt and the need to make reparation for the projection of negative emotions come to the fore (ibid.: 211). The narrator in Campbell’s novel oscillates between these extremes: at some points, he feels in control of his emotions and believes he has overcome his problems, while at other times he is wracked with guilt for denying his dual heritage and ‘forgetting’ his ancestors. The oscillating patterns of the narrator’s manicdepressive illness also, therefore, approximate the problems of identification resulting from his cross-cultural ancestry. In constantly adjusting and reassessing his racial allegiances, the narrator is fighting a constant internal battle against himself, and no amount of projection can

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resolve the irreconcilable extremes of his racial composition. His cultural schizophrenia is simultaneously projected and introjected, internalized and externalized, in a perpetual and destructive dialectic. Klein’s theories also shed light upon the narrator’s relationship with certain characters in the novel, particularly Sidewinder and Tia, whose communications with the narrator are characterized by extremes of projective identification. Tia becomes the object of the narrator’s need to make reparation for his repudiation of his own mother and her racial background, while Sidewinder, privy to the narrator’s most private thoughts, appears to embody the narrator’s need to externalize his negative emotions. As Wollheim suggests: [the paranoiac] finds himself surrounded by others – that is, those into whom he has projected his unwanted dispositions – of whom the phantasies that he entertains force him to believe that they have some very special knowledge of him. They know his most painful secrets, and they have come by this knowledge just as he might have been expected to come by it: not inferentially, not by testimony, but by immediate access. (1984: 274) In addition to Sidewinder, there are several other characters in the novel who also become a focus for the narrator’s persecution complex: these include characters who appear to be following him, strangers who seem to recognize him as a familiar acquaintance, and individuals who behave aggressively towards him without apparent provocation.7 It is Sidewinder, however, who tends to manifest himself at moments when the narrator is at his most vulnerable, and Campbell himself has pointed out that the narrator and Sidewinder are ‘two parts of the same identity’ (1999). As discussed earlier, this doppelgänger structure is reminiscent of the strategies of characterization in Campbell’s radio play The Suicide, where one identity is represented by two characters, and the narrator’s hallucinations are redolent of the mental tortures suffered by Kate in the expressionist play When the Bough Breaks, which also focuses upon psychological projection and egoradiation within the context of mental illness (McNaughton 1974b). It is important, however, to recognize that Sidewinder’s function in The Frigate Bird is also informed by Campbell’s beliefs regarding the Polynesian spirit world. Campbell himself has located Sidewinder’s supernatural powers within the context of Cook Island spirituality: for me, spiritual life is based in the islands. Islanders accept spirituality as part of their lives; that’s what made them. . . . I’ve always been conscious of what I think of as a demonic world; in the Islands, people are aware of all sorts of threatening forces around them – and I think that’s . . . [partly] what is behind [Sidewinder’s] character. (1999)

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Campbell’s exploration of his Cook Island heritage in his writing has consistently been accompanied by an awareness of the importance of the spirit world to Polynesian peoples: poetry collections such as Sanctuary of Spirits (1963) and Soul Traps (1985), and his latest novel Fantasy with Witches (1998), draw extensively upon Polynesian mythology and cosmogony, while the second and third novels in his trilogy (Sidewinder (1991) and Tia (1993)) extend and develop the magic realist elements of The Frigate Bird. In all three novels, however, classical mythology is accorded equal authority as a means of categorizing and classifying the narrator’s impressions of various people and phenomena. Campbell has suggested that myths and legends ‘[go] deep’ into the heart of any given culture, and that mythopoeic elements in all cultures are therefore useful as a means by which to explore interior worlds and emotions (1999). From this point of view, the use of mythology and spiritualism in The Frigate Bird represents another facet of Campbell’s subjectivist vision; these modes are additional tools which allow Campbell to develop and extend the narrator’s psychological spectrum. Campbell’s cultural dualism – or, in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s terms, his ‘specular border intellectual’ status – has allowed him, like Wendt, the freedom to experiment with different ideologies and systems of representation in order to explore, artistically, his own personal dilemma (JanMohamed 1992: 102). His exploration of mental illness, however, can also be situated more specifically within a New Zealand literary tradition. Campbell’s semi-autobiographical exploration of mental illness invites a comparison with Janet Frame, his contemporary: like many of Frame’s fictional characters (and Frame herself), the narrator is an artist-figure, and he is rescued from potentially damaging electro-convulsive therapy after his literary talents become apparent. Frame, of course, was rescued from having a lobotomy performed when psychiatric staff were informed of the publication of her first short-story collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories (1952). Campbell’s exploration of mental illness within a specifically cross-cultural context also bears some resemblance to Sue McCauley’s novel Other Halves (1982), which describes a relationship between a Maori teenage boy (Tug) and an older Pakeha woman (Liz) who meet in a psychiatric institution. The two characters are brought together by their experiences of trauma and economic hardship – Liz has lost a child and is effectively impoverished following a separation from her husband, while Tug is a homeless delinquent – but their relationship vacillates wildly between attraction and repulsion, and at times the rebellious Tug is posited as a kind of alter ego for the more conservative Liz. Their relationship dramatizes the complex psychological processes of identification and disavowal which Bhabha locates within the colonial specular encounter and which also inflect the narrator’s internal conflict in The Frigate Bird. Psychoanalytic theory has often been criticized for its ahistoricism and its lack of proof and grounding in the material world (Christian 1990;

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Watkins 2001), but the arguments of postcolonial psychoanalytic theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon, considered with reference to a specific socio-historical context such as the one described in Campbell’s writings, suggest that mental illness in (post)colonized non-Western peoples frequently demonstrates a particularly poignant convergence of material and psychological realms, pointing towards an enduring interdependence between psycho-social and corporeal identities. Further, Campbell’s exploration of mental illness both as a result of the narrator’s personal or family difficulties, and as a consequence of his experiences of racial discrimination, draws attention to the way in which postcolonial literatures – in Fredric Jameson’s terms – frequently counterimplicate individual and collective energies through an interplay between subjective or psychological factors, and socio-political or material factors. As Jameson suggests in his controversial essay ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’: When a psychic structure is objectively determined by economic and political relationships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a baleful and crippling residual effect. (1986: 76) While Jameson’s methodology in this particular essay is deeply flawed in its failure to acknowledge the significant differences between various so-called ‘Third World’ societies and literatures, his identification of the interplay between the subjective and the collective sheds light upon the postcolonial energies of Campbell’s texts, and of the work of the Maori writers who will follow in this book. As I have suggested, Campbell’s psycho-corporeal vision represents a bridge between the Pacific Island writers already discussed – whose writing maintains a clear identificatory distinction between their countries of birth and New Zealand as a neo-colonial metropolitan centre – and the Maori writers who are yet to be discussed. New Zealand’s status as a settler colony ensures that for Maori at least, the colonial process is ongoing, and this realization has prompted contemporary Maori writers to develop a cultural politics rather different from that of their Pacific Islander counterparts, who – while recognizing that Pacific Islanders are inextricably dependent upon New Zealand and other Western countries for economic aid, employment, and consumer products – have demonstrated a stronger sense of freedom and independence from Western influences. Their explorations of indigeneity engage more specifically with Western representations of the Polynesian body in art, popular culture, literature and academic discourse, rather than (or in addition to) the material facts of the contemporary cross-cultural encounter. Even Albert Wendt, who spent a

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large proportion of his youth and adult life in New Zealand, has managed to maintain a certain detachment in his observations about living as a member of a minority culture in a European-dominated society. Campbell, however, while born as a Pacific Islander, was nevertheless absorbed into Pakeha–Maori cultural politics very early in his life, perhaps in part as a consequence of the close genealogical links between Cook Island and New Zealand Maori. As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, his association between psychosocial and corporeal malaise as a consequence of continuing neo-colonial pressures is also central to the work of many prominent contemporary Maori writers.

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Remoulding the body politic Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

Where Alistair Campbell’s writing explores cortico-visceral dysfunction largely at a personal or microcosmic level, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) – the primary focus of discussion in this chapter – investigates pyscho-social dysfunction as an expression of a broader cross-cultural disharmony within New Zealand society. This chapter considers the novel’s movement from sublimated colonial violence to public resolution and socio-somatic regeneration with particular reference to Frantz Fanon’s influential discussion of cultural and political nationalism in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), arguing that a new post-imperial nationalist imperative emerges from the suffering and conflict which afflicts the three central characters in Hulme’s text. Since winning the 1985 Booker McConnell prize for The Bone People (1983), Keri Hulme has become one of New Zealand’s most internationally renowned literary figures. In addition to her novel, Hulme has produced a short story collection, Te Kaihau/The Windeater (1986b) and three volumes of poetry, The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (1982), Lost Possessions (1985), and Strands (1992), but the majority of critical commentaries on Hulme have engaged specifically with her prize-winning novel. Much critical attention has also been focused upon the author herself, from studies analysing the autobiographical elements of The Bone People (particularly the correspondences between Hulme and her fictional counterpart Kerewin Holmes),1 to arguments over Hulme’s status as a ‘Maori’ writer, given her mere one-eighth proportion of Maori blood and her ostensibly European physiognomy.2 Hulme’s dilemma is the inverse of Alistair Campbell’s: while choosing to identify herself as Maori, she has throughout her life been labelled as Pakeha on the basis of her physical appearance, and these personal experiences inflect her exploration of the disparity between specular and biologically determined (or elective) identities in a wide selection of her writing. In The Bone People, for example, Hulme’s fictional counterpart Kerewin Holmes – whose physical description and genealogy (a mix of Maori, Orkney Scots and English ancestry) match Hulme’s almost exactly, as do her verbal dexterity and creative energies – expresses frustration at the fact that she feels compelled, upon

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meeting strangers unaware of her Maori blood, to ‘whip out a certified copy of her whakapapa [genealogy]’ in order to prove her indigenous ancestry (1986a: 112). Similarly, in Hulme’s short story ‘He Tauware Kawa, He Kawa Tauware’, a young woman named Allison feels compelled to assert her Maori ancestry given that ‘she’s one of the blue-eyed whiteblond kind of Maori’ (1986b: 92).3 In her autobiographical poem ‘Ends and Beginnings’, Hulme advances the theory that identity is asserted through actions and choices, rather than passively claimed through genealogy. The speaker invokes and enacts her mixed Maori and European ancestry through various daily rituals, such as making kits for kaimoana (seafood) ‘the way my tipuna did’, and panning for gold ‘as the miners did’ (1982: 52), eschewing biological essentialism and focusing upon cultural identity as a fluid and performative phenomenon. Hulme’s interest in specular identities and biological syncreticity represents one facet of a wider preoccupation with the human body as a cultural symbol in her work. Across a range of her writing, Hulme represents damaged, disfigured and diseased bodies as symbols of personal or cultural dysfunction,4 and in The Bone People, in particular, she also explores the healing of damaged bodies as a metaphor for transcending or overcoming these personal and social evils. My reading of The Bone People is specifically concerned with what Rod Edmond describes as the novel’s ‘deep structure’ of wounding and healing (1993: 278), exploring the way in which the human body becomes a metaphoric locus for particular developmental phases in the structural trajectory of the narrative, which moves from an initial state of cultural disharmony and inter-racial conflict towards the development of an harmonious, multi-ethnic nationalist discourse. The bodies of the three central characters – Kerewin Holmes, Joe Gillayley and Simon Peter Gillayley – are initially posited as palimpsests upon which are inscribed the sublimated violence of New Zealand’s colonial and pre-colonial past. During the course of the narrative, however, these three characters (and their bodies) undergo cathartic experiences of violence and suffering which result in the eventual establishment of a new, regenerated collectivity. Graham Huggan rightly points out that many critical interpretations of The Bone People have focused primarily upon establishing or refuting the text’s status as a ‘Maori’ or ‘New Zealand’ novel at the expense of a consideration of ‘its wider implications as a post-colonial text’ (1989: 31). He also argues that the interventions of critics such as Anne Maxwell, while attentive to the novel’s ‘wider implications’, are nevertheless ‘weakened’ by ‘an insistence on the need for post-colonial literatures/cultures to develop their own nationalist discourse, a discourse which . . . risk[s] espousing precisely the same essentialist notions as imperial/colonial selfproclamation’ (Huggan 1989: 32; Maxwell 1987). I would argue, however, that it is possible to evaluate the novel’s implications as a ‘postcolonial’ text, and to attend to its locatedness within the nationalist cultural politics

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which inflected New Zealand society in the early-to-mid-1980s, without recourse to essentializing notions of cultural or national identity. Frantz Fanon’s influential discussion of cultural and political nationalism in The Wretched of the Earth (first published in French as Les Damnés de la Terre in 1961) provides a useful context in which to situate such an analysis. In particular, Fanon’s discussion of the relationship between revolutionary violence and cultural nationalism offers a foundation for the argument that, on an allegorical level, violence and bodily suffering in The Bone People function as necessary steps in the process of projective liberation and regeneration which the novel sketches out. Motivated and informed by the nationalist struggles of various African nations – particularly Algeria, whose war of liberation was in process when Les Damnés de la Terre was published – Fanon examines the relationship between violence and nationalism on two distinct but interrelated levels, establishing links between political and cultural (or artistic) nationalist objectives. It should, of course, be acknowledged that in his desire to establish a general decolonizing paradigm for cultures colonized by European nations, Fanon does not attend in any detail to the considerable variations in cultural and political circumstances across these colonies (Bhabha 1994b: 115; Young 2001: 276), but this ‘deliberately universalized level of analysis’ renders his arguments applicable to a wide range of (post-)colonial contexts across the globe and can therefore be considered an advantage as well as a weakness (Young 2001: 281).5 In first of all analysing the political realities of ‘the colonial process’, Fanon argues that the experience of colonization is characterized by a ubiquitous atmosphere of violence which takes different forms at particular stages of a nation’s colonial history. The early stages of colonization, he argues, are characterized by military violence and physical repression, but this eventually transmutes into a more insidious neo-colonial capitalist order in which the colonized, required by the ‘bourgeoisie’ to represent both consumer base and labour force, is kept in his/her subordinate position by a more subtly oppressive, metaphysically violent class regime (1967: 51). Fanon suggests that during both phases, the atmosphere of violence which taints even the most ostensibly peaceful of colonialcapitalist regimes infects the sensibility of the colonized individual who, subconsciously or overtly, wishes to liberate him/herself. These frustrations first manifest themselves in ‘auto-destructive’ violent acts committed by colonized individuals against members of their own race (ibid.: 42), but these are eventually replaced by a more constructive political activism. In this third decolonizing phase, violence becomes a cathartic experience through which the colonizer is evicted and a new national identity may be established. The Manichean social structures and discourses of the colonial period are replaced by a unified post-colonized national identity which ‘introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny and of a collective history’ (ibid.: 73).

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The second strand of Fanon’s argument concerns the relationship between national culture and post-colonial liberation. He suggests that works of art and the philosophies of ‘native intellectuals’ may express or prefigure the achievement of this political liberation, and identifies three phases in the development of a national culture, which correspond to the three phases in the political trajectory of national liberation as described above. During the first phase, the native intellectual ‘gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power’, looking to Europe for sources of creative inspiration and mimicking the styles, techniques and ideologies of artists in ‘the mother country’ (ibid.: 178–9). This passive, assimilationist phase eventually gives way to a second phase in which, Fanon claims: the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. . . . But since the native . . . only has exterior relations with his people, he is content to recall their life only. Past happenings . . . will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed aestheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies. Sometimes this literature of just-before-the-battle is dominated by humour and by allegory; but often too it is symptomatic of a period of distress and difficulty, where death is experienced, and disgust too. (ibid.: 179) This second artistic phase therefore corresponds with the narcissistic violence of the first and second phases of political development described above, where the colonized individual’s violent energies are initially directed inwards and against his/her compatriots. Eventually, however, the native artist-intellectual then moves into a third ‘fighting phase’, when s/he becomes ‘an awakener of the people’ and ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’ (ibid.: 179). In order to effect a ‘new reality’, the ‘native intellectual’ must avoid clutching at the ‘mummified fragments’ (ibid.: 180) of pre-colonial traditions and cultural practices and instead engage with contemporary realities, joining ‘the people’ in a dynamic movement towards a new, post-colonial order (ibid.: 183). Truly revolutionary literature must therefore be ‘forward-looking’ and dynamic rather than nostalgic and retrospective, and must relinquish its privileged position of detachment from, and/or romanticization of, the people (ibid.: 186).6 While the socio-political dynamics which informed Fanon’s original analysis differ considerably from those described in Hulme’s The Bone People, Fanon’s theory of national liberation achieved through revolutionary violence is nevertheless a useful model against which to evaluate the projective energies of Hulme’s novel. Violence is central to Hulme’s redemptive vision, and the novel itself enacts Fanon’s theory of the

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function of art as a means by which to promote and precipitate national ‘liberation’, albeit with some fundamental differences, two of which demand particular consideration here. First, as a European settler colony New Zealand is not (and almost certainly never will be) ‘decolonized’ as Algeria and certain other former European colonies have been decolonized. Indeed, these political realities underpin the tensions which Hulme’s novel explores and attempts to mitigate. Any sense of ‘national liberation’ in Hulme’s novel is therefore expressed at a metaphorical rather than politically material level, although the novel’s ideological revolution is brought about through the violent suffering and conflict of the three central characters, thereby fusing the material and idealist levels of the narrative via the somatic. Second, where Fanon’s model advocates the establishment of a national identity or culture based on a common racial heritage and forged through the process of decolonization, Hulme’s novel advocates the establishment of a multi-ethnic national identity which eschews unitary nationalist models in favour of a multifaceted, syncretic mélange of identities, histories and traditions. Hulme’s vision is encapsulated in the clay tricephalos which Kerewin moulds (towards the end of the novel) in order to represent the intertwined identities of the three principal characters in the novel, locating her nationalist vision even beyond the biculturalist model which dominated New Zealand race-relations politics in the early 1980s, and anticipating the multi-ethnic or multicultural ethos which has gained increasing currency since the early 1990s. Such an approach is in keeping with Hulme’s professed resistance to essentializing notions of cultural identity, as discussed above, and is evident at the conclusion of the narrative in spite of the novel’s emphasis upon the putatively redemptive capabilities of Maori communalism as an alternative to late capitalist ‘Western’ or ‘Pakeha’ individualism. In spite of the disparities between Fanon’s unitary nationalist model and Hulme’s multifaceted paradigm, the novel’s treatment of violence and bodily suffering as a means by which liberation and accord may be achieved parallels Fanon’s own arguments regarding the transformative power of violence. The novel moves through the three symbolic phases Fanon describes, beginning with a period of sublimation, repression and symbolic assimilation, progressing through a phase of self-disgust, narcissistic violence and introspection or retrospection, and finally – through the apocalyptically violent experience of Simon Gillayley’s final beating – projecting and establishing a new, dynamic post-imperial nationalist imperative. The fact that Hulme’s new social reality comes at the expense of the health of an innocent child, rather than through the violent expulsion of an invading colonizing culture (as in Fanon’s original analysis), clearly presents a methodological and moral dilemma within this context. I would suggest, however, that while Simon’s position as sacrificial victim is a profoundly disturbing aspect of Hulme’s text, also serving

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to complicate my Fanonian reading of Hulme’s novel, when his suffering is considered with reference to Maori mythological intertexts detailing similar patterns of suffering and reconciliation, it is still possible to argue that his pain is pivotal to the regenerative trajectory established in Hulme’s text. In establishing a broader context in which to situate these arguments, the chapter will demonstrate that the various material and symbolic acts of violence described during the course of the narrative correspond with particular developmental phases in the (multi)national vision Hulme advances. This double trajectory is supplemented by other strands of the narrative which follow similarly dynamic patterns, creating a multilayered polyphony emerging from the novel’s somatic baseline. The pattern of wounding and healing also functions in terms of Kerewin’s artistic/ creative phases, for example, and changes in her psyche are, in turn, mirrored in various architectural phases and changes of geographical location in the novel. These various symbolic layers, united by the novel’s prevailing somatic framework, represent an interlocking network of schemata somewhat akin, for example, to the symbolic patterns in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which Joyce himself describes as ‘an epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body’ in which every aspect of the narrative is ‘interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole’ (1975: 271). Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) also presents a comparable model: here, the bodily contours and vicissitudes of Saleem Sinai, born on the day in which India achieved its independence, are systematically connected with topographical and political developments within the newly independent nation. In order to chart the particular phases of socio-somatic, artistic and architectural development in Hulme’s novel, the discussion which follows is divided into three sections which correspond to the three phases in Fanon’s nationalist model.

Phase one: sublimation; wounding; assimilation; the tower The relationship between the three central characters in Hulme’s novel explores at a personal, microcosmic level the larger national issues which the narrative symbolically encodes. Kerewin, a wealthy part-Maori woman who has chosen to withdraw from all social contact, establishes a friendship with Joe (a Maori factory worker) and his European foster-son Simon after the boy stumbles into Kerewin’s isolated beach retreat nursing a wounded foot. The abusive relationship between Joe and Simon, of which Kerewin gradually becomes aware as the novel progresses, is the central material element around which the novel’s symbolic framework is arranged. In the earlier sections of the novel, Joe’s violent abuse of Simon is initially kept private; Simon’s suffering is hinted at, but never identified

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explicitly. I would argue, like Merata Mita, that the hidden or suppressed violence which characterizes Joe and Simon’s relationship points towards the sublimated violence of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial past, which must be overtly acknowledged and interrogated before healing may occur (Mita 1984: 5). As long as Simon’s suffering remains concealed, an atmosphere of menace and malaise pervades the novel, drawing attention to the discursive interplay between the surface narrative detailing the relationship between the three central characters, and the colonial ‘primal scene’ which their personal sufferings metaphorically represent. Certain violent incidents and images in the early section of the novel – including, for example, Kerewin’s regular killings of various small creatures, particularly fish and shellfish; her unexpected post-prandial vision of bleeding sheep carcasses (1986a: 29); and a painting, saturated with red paint and violently oppressive energies, which she produces during one of Simon’s visits (ibid.: 73) – therefore prefigure or metonymically evoke larger incidences of violence which must be uncovered and expunged before the healing process may begin. Such techniques are widely evident across a range of Hulme’s writing, which – as Otto Heim notes with reference to Roman Jakobson’s theories on metaphor and metonymy – frequently interweaves both metonymic and metaphoric aspects of language in plots which ‘revolve around a hidden violence’ (Heim 1998: 94). Narratives such as ‘A Tally of the Souls of Sheep’ (in Te Kaihau/The Windeater), represented as a film script which details the mysterious disappearance of two children on holiday with their parents, counterpoint the metonymic aspects of the narrative – the syntagmatic, sequential and ‘primarily realist’ arrangement of events – with ‘an invasion’ of metaphoric ‘figures of similarity and substitution’ which create an undercurrent of tension and foreboding (ibid.: 94–5). The children’s unexplained disappearance, which occurs near the end of the narrative, is prefigured by manifold images of violence, maiming and death, many of which centre upon the mother savaging cuts of meat while preparing family meals. Other stories in Te Kaihau encode explicit incidences of domestic violence and dysfunction: in ‘The Cicadas of Summer’, a young girl expresses her sublimated grief (following the death of her mother and nervous collapse of her father) through the torture and killing of hundreds of cicadas, while in ‘Kiteflying Party at Doctors’ Point’, a psychotic university lecturer is involved in a freak accident which triggers memories of an infanticide. Recurring references to death, predation and intense red hues build up to the climactic revelation of the ‘terrible gush of blood’ which ensued from the slain infant (1986b: 158) in a manner which echoes the imagistic presentiments of violence in the early sections of The Bone People. At the beginning of Hulme’s novel, all three characters are introduced as wounded beings, although the origins of their sufferings are often not revealed until later in the novel, if at all. Mute Simon’s terrible scars – the

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result of Joe’s brutal beatings – remain hidden initially, but we also learn later in the novel that Simon was already scarred when Joe first met him (1986a: 328). Joe’s spindly legs are the legacy of a childhood polio attack; personal tragedies have etched scar-like lines upon his face (ibid.: 300), and he bears a scar across his chest which we later discover was inflicted by his cousin Piri during an argument over Joe’s disciplinary methods (ibid.: 286). Kerewin herself has scar-like markings across her neck (ibid.: 30, 179), but her initial wounds are predominantly internal and psychological rather than openly manifest, although described in somatic terms: she makes reference, for example, to her ‘gangrenous soul’ (ibid.: 167), and describes herself as ‘gutted by the sense of my own uselessness’ (ibid.: 261). Kerewin’s psychological wounds are in part attributed to a family conflict which has left her estranged from her relatives (ibid.: 90), but she also expresses a sense of alienation from her Maori cultural heritage, arguing that ‘the best part of me has got lost in the way I live’ (ibid.: 61–2). While Kerewin’s familial rift has contributed to this crisis of identification, her pejorative reference to her current lifestyle is later supplemented by details of her material circumstances, which, in turn, point towards broader historical and inter-racial problems which form the basis of the cultural malaise explored in the novel. Having won a lottery and invested the money intelligently, Kerewin has effectively retired from society, maintaining a hermit-like existence in her stone tower, an isolated retreat which she builds on a remote tract of land on the west coast of the South Island.7 Her abundant riches allow her to furnish the tower on a grand scale and leave her free to exercise her creative talents and to indulge her solitary ambitions and interests. The house becomes an intellectual and artistic retreat not unlike W.B. Yeats’s tower at Thoor Ballylee, where he would ‘pace upon the battlements’, ‘send imagination forth’ and ‘call/Images and memories /From ruin or from ancient trees’ (1950: 219). Kerewin similarly views her tower – at least initially – as a creative and visionary space in which she can realize ‘the future of her knowing hands’ (1986a: 7). The tower, as Anne Maxwell notes, symbolizes a modernist artistic ‘elitism and freedom’ (1987: 27) which Kerewin later comes to reject; her retreat soon becomes a sterile prison as her financial success appears to bring a curse upon her, blasting her artistic talent: ‘Through poverty . . . I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land. . . . Now my skill is dead’ (1986a: 261). Kerewin interprets her loss of artistic inspiration as a form of punishment for her withdrawal from social responsibility; her observations regarding her loss of contact with her Maori heritage also imply a kind of symbolic assimilation or absorption into Pakeha materialist culture which is brought about by her financial circumstances. She suffers from what Aijaz Ahmad terms ‘capitalist alienation’, a condition characterized by ‘the individuation and personalisation of libidinal energies, the

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loss of access to “concrete” experience, and the consequent experience of self as [an] isolated, alienated entity incapable of real, organic connection with any collectivity’ (1987: 13). As Mark Williams notes, Kerewin’s anxieties represent one facet of a broader critique in the novel of a postindustrialized world ‘in which the old “natural” bonds between humans, and between humans and things, have been replaced by the “artificial” bonds of money and machinery’ (1990: 93). Joe Gillayley expresses a similar sense of social alienation, although his material circumstances are entirely different from Kerewin’s. He conveys to Kerewin a belief that his Maoritanga (Maori-ness) has ‘got lost’ in the way he lives (1986a: 62), and suggests, in retrospect, that his own psychological problems have their basis in his work-oriented lifestyle, which has channelled his productive energies into a blind pursuit of ‘Pakeha’ materialist ideals (ibid.: 324). Both characters therefore appear to be suffering from what Ruth Brown would term a ‘psychic malaise’ specifically associated with late capitalist Western culture (1996: 14; see also Hanson 1989). Brown, however, has criticized Hulme for representing Maori communalism and spirituality as an unproblematic ‘palliative’ to the individualist energies of Western capitalism, suggesting that such polarized constructions are simplistic, reductive, and, more importantly, constitute an idealistic smokescreen which obscures and fails to alleviate the socio-economic deprivation of many contemporary Maori: Maori . . . are unemployed and imprisoned in disproportionately large numbers, the main victims of poverty, deprivation and social polarisation. Rather than remedying this situation, the valorisation of Maori culture may have colluded with it, by providing in art a holism that material life is seen to lack. In a country where all commodities, including time, nature and people are subjected to the doctrines of rationalisation, user-pays and cost-effectiveness, a holistic Maori approach is not a part of everyday life, but is a valuable cultural export. (1996: 14) Brown’s criticisms are incisive and provocative, and it is worth noting that Hulme has argued elsewhere that Maori committed to traditional communal values are ‘never bitten deeply by the spiritual loneliness that seems to deaden the heart of so many Pakeha’ (Hulme 1981: 294), suggesting that Brown’s observations on the polarized opposition between Maori ‘spirituality’ and Pakeha ‘materialism’ have some relevance here. However, as a creative writer, Hulme is under no obligation to offer a ‘realistic’ documentary of New Zealand society. It is also worth observing that Brown’s arguments (which extend an earlier critique of The Bone People published in 1989) post-date the radical deregulation of the New Zealand economy, imposed by the Labour government elected in 1984,

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which ultimately served to widen the socio-economic divide between Maori and Pakeha. Mark Williams rightly points out that the rapturous contemporary reception which The Bone People enjoyed within New Zealand reflected a general optimism which existed – within middle-class Pakeha culture at least – in the mid-1980s, before Labour’s economic reforms (including welfare benefit cuts and the privatization of public services) began to erode the media myth of a ‘truly South Pacific Eden’ populated by ‘brown and white faces celebrating . . . a common destiny and identity’ (1990: 85). Hulme’s novel was published at a time when the biculturalist imperatives which emerged from the Maori Renaissance were just beginning to transmute into more radical claims for Maori sovereignty and separate development. Donna Awatere’s landmark polemical tract, Maori Sovereignty (1984), gave voice to this new imperative, and later novels of the 1980s, such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch and Patricia Grace’s Potiki (both published in 1986), are clearly inflected by the sovereignty agenda (see also Sharrad 2003: 206). Even with these circumstances in view, a closer analysis of The Bone People, with particular reference to Joe’s personal circumstances, nevertheless reveals an attention to many of the socio-economic problems which Brown invokes, thereby counterbalancing the novel’s idealism with a certain degree of pragmatic social realism. For example, Joe’s failure to realize his vocational ideals (first, to become a seminarian and then a teacher) are attributed, in part, to his internalization of Pakeha racist attitudes about Maori educational under-achievement: he describes himself bitterly as ‘a typical hori [Maori] after all, made to work on the chain, or be a factory hand, not try for high places’ (1986a: 230). Further, a comment to the effect that his own violent and dysfunctional family background is replaying itself in his relationship with Simon (ibid.: 226) points towards a tacit acknowledgement in the novel of the socio-economic subordination of many Maori within New Zealand society. Hulme has elsewhere identified the prevalence of violence, drugabuse, unemployment and health problems among Maori as indicators that Maori remain at a distinct socio-economic disadvantage in New Zealand society (1981: 294). Considered in these terms, Joe’s violent impulses function (at least in part) as expressions of his disempowerment, which, by extension, also evokes the collective disempowerment of his fellow indigenes. Further, the manner in which the resentment generated by Joe’s frustrated ambitions is vented upon Simon – who, in spite of his obvious European ancestry,8 is accepted and raised as Joe’s own son – enacts the narcissistic pattern of violence which Fanon describes as a consequence of (neo-)colonial repression. By beating his own son, Joe battles ‘against himself’ as an expression of frustrated disempowerment, and in wounding Simon’s body, Joe also damages himself, as Kerewin notes while observing Joe bathing Simon:

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Remoulding the body politic: Keri Hulme That curious impersonal property sense parents display over their young children’s bodies . . . check this, examine that, peer here, clean there, all as though it’s an extension of their own body they’re handling. . . . Hell, the brat is positively chewed looking. . . . He’ll carry his scars for life. Yet he doesn’t seem concerned. He flinches occasionally but not away from his father’s ministrations, from the touch of water . . . and the weird thing is, it’s Joe who sucks his breath in each time, as though it was him that was hurting. (1986a: 197–8)

This passage captures the ambiguity at the core of Joe’s relationship with his son: while confirming Simon’s vulnerability and dependence upon his father, the physical disparity between father and son also allows Joe to exercise a repressive authority over his child, thereby wielding a power denied to him within public society. He admits to Kerewin a desire to dominate and mould Simon ‘so I could show myself, “You’ve made him what he is, even if you didn’t breed him”’ (ibid.: 381). Joe’s abuse of Simon therefore, in Fanon’s terms, appears to enact his frustrated desire for freedom from his psychological and material oppressions, but the failure of this ‘auto-destructive’ violence to precipitate change ensures its endless repeatability, just as Joe appears perpetually constrained by the ‘unchanging order’ of racial stereotypes upon which his disempowerment is predicated (see Bhabha 1994a: 66). The ethical framework Hulme establishes in the novel suggests that in order for healing to occur, Joe must learn to rechannel his violent energies and to expunge his narcissistic aggressions; both he and Kerewin must develop a sense of social responsibility which takes them beyond their personal frustrations and painful memories. Hulme suggests, in an interview with Shona Smith, that the novel is predicated upon the argument that ‘[you] cannot be . . . a total isolate and you have a responsibility as a communal person to be a constructive force rather than a destructive force’ (1985: 27). Hulme is careful to locate blame for Joe’s condition – and by extension, the plight of the Maori people – not just with the Pakeha, but also with the Maori people themselves. Near the end of the novel, for example, Tiaki Mira – the kaumatua (wise old man) who rescues Joe from a half-hearted suicide attempt – suggests that the Maori people descended into conflict prior to the arrival of the colonizers (1986a: 364).9 In a similar vein, Joe remarks to himself that ‘as a race, we like fighting’ (ibid.: 338). His comment, though flippant, is significant within the novel’s redemptive framework, which requires that Joe be represented as both disempowered victim and culpable aggressor. Past and present acts of violence, as well as conflicts and errors of judgement, must be exposed and examined before healing and resolution may occur.

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Phase two: introspection; auto-destructive narcissism; illness; Moerangi With Kerewin’s discovery of the abusive relationship between Joe and Simon, the novel moves into its second phase, which takes place almost exclusively at Kerewin’s coastal retreat at Moerangi, where the three spend a week’s holiday together. Having discovered the full extent of the abuse shortly before the holiday begins, Kerewin is undecided as to which course of action she should take over the issue. Her failure to act delays the eventual process of healing and regeneration, and precipitates the build-up of tension which culminates in the final savage beating of Simon in which she herself colludes. The claustrophobically small hut which the three characters share while at Moerangi adds to the atmosphere of tension during this second phase. As is the case with the first section of the novel, precursors and metonymic echoes of violence also appear in this second phase. Kerewin’s inability to take any decisive action over the abuse, for example, is mirrored in a dramatic episode where Simon accidentally embeds a hook deep in his thumb during a fishing expedition at Moerangi. Simon and Joe are upset and angered by Kerewin’s decision not to help with the painful hook extraction process, but she justifies her absence by claiming a squeamish inability to witness the suffering of other beings. This episode parallels her ambivalent attitude towards Simon’s beatings: she condemns the abuse and pities Simon’s suffering, but chooses not to intervene in any direct way, finding a compromise by ordering Joe to ask her permission before beating Simon again. Significantly, when Simon wakes screaming after a nightmare in the early hours of the morning following the fishing accident, Kerewin fears that people staying in nearby baches (beach huts) may hear the cries and attempt to intervene, but hopes that they will adhere to ‘the good old NZ tradition of Don’t Interfere’ (1986a: 225). It is no coincidence that, at this moment, Kerewin realizes that by hiding the abusive relationship from outsiders she is ‘aiding and abetting the concealment of a criminal offence’ (ibid.: 225). From her first discovery of the abuse, it is implied, Kerewin is complicit in the violence in which she eventually participates. During this second phase, the partially acknowledged violence at the core of Joe and Simon’s problematic relationship begins to affect Kerewin’s behaviour in an increasingly adverse manner, manifesting itself in a series of violent nightmares and open displays of aggression. As Fanon suggests, situations of violent conflict – such as colonial war, for example – permeate the subconscious of those who dwell within that environment, creating a ‘pathology of atmosphere’; he suggests ‘it is not necessary to be wounded by a bullet in order to suffer from the fact of war’ (1967: 234, 235). The ‘pathology of atmosphere’ which permeates the second phase of Hulme’s narrative begins to infect Kerewin’s subconscious in these

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terms. At Moerangi, for example, Kerewin experiences a symbolic nightmare-phantasy involving a jaw abscess which creates ‘pus-extended’ ridges in her gums:10 [S]he had taken a razor-blade and attempted, using the mirror as a guide, to . . . open the outlet the abscess had made for itself in her jaw. She wasn’t successful. The next moment . . . her two front teeth had changed to soft bloodstreaked stumps. The enamel all ground off, the spongy nerve and bone centre exposed. . . . And then the teeth resolved themselves closer. Her six front teeth loomed astonishingly white. But small yellowish holes of decay sat like ulcers near her gums. (1986a: 186) The three phases of the dream appear to manifest, allegorically, Kerewin’s ambivalent attitude towards Simon’s abuse, symbolizing on the one hand her hamfisted attempts – made without the help of the wider community and hence unsuccessful – to relieve the build-up of tension generated by Joe’s violent secret, and yet, on the other, expressing her reluctance to dig too deeply into the problem for fear of ‘exposing’ her vulnerable core or irrevocably damaging her relationship with the Gillayleys. Hulme uses dreams as indices of sublimated violence elsewhere in her writing: her extended prose poem Lost Possessions (1985), for example, details the bizarre kidnapping, incarceration and slow starvation of a university lecturer named Harrod Wittie, whose bodily discomfort triggers memories of childhood physical abuse at the hands of his father. Wittie is tortured by dreams, involving diseased, decaying and mummified bodies, which are in turn traced back to the memory of his discovery of a rotting sheep’s carcass on his father’s sheep farm. Wittie’s account of his ordeal, apparently jotted down on scraps of paper given to him by his captors, is ultimately represented as a possible hoax or publicity stunt, but the symbolic resonance of Wittie’s dream is redolent of Kerewin’s vision of decaying teeth in The Bone People, similarly pointing towards sublimated or partially acknowledged acts of violence and physical abuse. The intense build-up of violent tension in the second phase of Hulme’s novel is also evident in Kerewin’s conscious behaviour: after an accidental meeting with her estranged brother at Moerangi, for example, Kerewin retires to the bach and plays ‘brutal and discordant’ music on her guitar (1986a: 239). The chapter in which this episode occurs is entitled ‘Ka Tata Te Po’ (‘Night is Near’), heralding the intensification of negative energy which culminates in the chapter ‘Nightfall’, where the final savage beating takes place. Simon himself senses the increased tension at Moerangi, resolving to precipitate the fight on the beach in which Kerewin deploys her aikido skills in order to reduce Joe to a gasping, bleeding huddle. Simon views physical combat as a means by which to expunge negative energies:

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All morning the feeling had grown, start a fight and stop the illwill between his father and Kerewin. Get rid of the anger round the woman, stop the rift with blows, with pain, then pity, then repair, then good humour again. It works that way . . . it always did. (ibid.: 192) Simon’s reasoning is partially accurate: the fight between Kerewin and Joe triggers an immediate release of violent pressure, but the reprieve is only temporary, just as Simon’s repeated beatings, while ‘relieving’ a certain degree of localized tension, do not address the underlying problems which precipitate Joe’s aggression.11 Violence breeds violence in a repetitive and destructive narcissistic cycle, as Simon’s recurrent beatings merely serve to exacerbate symptoms of his autism and to intensify his own passive-aggressive behavioural patterns. Significantly, Kerewin herself is felled by intense belly-pain immediately after her martial victory; the pain heralds the arrival of the stomach tumour which eventually almost kills her, further advancing the novel’s analysis of misdirected violence as a destructive force. Joe later observes that Kerewin’s physical affliction may be punishment for ‘misusing knowledge’ (ibid.: 200); had he a greater degree of personal insight at this stage of the narrative, he might well have substituted ‘misusing power’ or ‘misusing physical strength’ as more likely sources of the malaise which dogs the three characters. Yet, in spite of her periodic flashes of aggression towards Joe and Simon during the second phase of the narrative, Kerewin’s violent energies are primarily directed inwards, manifesting themselves in an intense, narcissistic self-disgust which intensifies into thoughts of suicide. Her narcissistic hatred is expressed most vividly in episodes where she examines her body and enumerates its deficiencies. During a drunken pub visit, for example, she lingers in front of the mirror in the women’s lavatories, noting with disgust her little piggy eyes in a large piggy face, swivelling down all your lazygutted blubberarse length . . . what good in you? . . . “I don’t want to die, but I don’t know why I live. So what’s my reason for living?” she asks the mirror image. “Estranged from my family, bereft of my art, hollow of soul, I am a rock in the desert . . . of no benefit to anything or anyone. Flaking, parched, cracked . . . so why am I? . . . I do have a wish for dying,” she said slowly. “A deepheld wish for dying.” (ibid.: 289) According to this logic, Kerewin’s stomach tumour may be regarded as psycho-somatic, a symptom not only of her destructive narcissism but also of the general pathological atmosphere of the novel’s second phase. Fanon describes psycho-somatic disorders in similar terms, enumerating

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various bodily afflictions (including stomach ulcers) which commonly develop during times of personal or political conflict (1967: 235). Significantly, Fanon argues that these psycho-somatic disorders represent an attempt to escape from the external factors which trigger them: This pathology is considered as a means whereby the organism . . . adapts itself to the conflict it is faced with, the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure. [T]he organism . . . resolves the conflict by unsatisfactory, but on the whole economical means [, choosing] the lesser evil in order to avoid catastrophe. (ibid.: 234) Viewed in these terms, Kerewin’s belly-pain is therefore both a symptom of and an escape from the internal and external problems she fails to address. Her physical affliction is a by-product of her narcissism, which in itself prevents her from engaging with and publicly resolving the problem of the violent abuse. Structurally, her narcissism parallels the ‘autodestructive’ energies and ‘self-disgust’ which Fanon locates in the second phase of his nationalist model: Kerewin’s self-hatred and obsessive selfexamination thus represent the rhetoric of ‘just before the battle’. Kerewin’s strategies of self-estrangement may also be interpreted in terms of the problems of racial identification as described in the preceding chapter: like Campbell’s narrator in The Frigate Bird, Kerewin embodies the tensions of the cross-cultural colonial encounter, representing – in her racially mixed genealogy – both colonial Self and indigenous Other (or vice versa). This ontological schism informs her narcissistic self-pity and self-destructiveness, which intensify as the narrative progresses. As is pointed out in the opening pages of the novel, pairings of any form – particularly those which enact or maintain the Manichean ‘delirium’ Fanon locates within the colonial dialectic (1970: 130) – are inimical to the triple or multiple strands of identification which the novel eventually celebrates (Hulme 1986a: 4). Kerewin’s relationship with Joe and Simon, however, begins to undermine this narcissistic dialectic, setting in motion her own process of healing even as it draws her into the destructive pattern of violence and abuse in which she colludes. Shortly before the final beating, Joe reveals that he and Simon aim to convince her ‘to throw your lot back in with humanity again’ (ibid.: 263). Soon afterwards, when Kerewin returns to her tower after visiting Joe and Simon, she reflects that after the ‘warmth and company of the Gillayleys’, her tower seems ‘as cold and ascetical as a tombstone. Me silent dank grave [sic]’ (ibid.: 272). She concludes from this impression that even her home is ‘turning against’ her (ibid.: 272), but the observation also draws attention to Joe’s and Simon’s redemptive capabilities. The violent energies in the novel also advance this vision, as the final savage beating of Simon – in which, crucially, Kerewin overtly col-

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ludes – precipitates the sequence of events which ultimately results in collective healing and reconciliation.

Phase three: catharsis; healing; tricephalos; rebuilding of Kerewin’s house The final beating, while represented as shocking, traumatic and damnable, is also a catalyst for change, releasing the cathartic energies which eventually bring about the novel’s regenerative resolution. With his usual nihilistic logic, Simon helps to precipitate the ordeal by kicking in the ‘amber belly’ of Kerewin’s guitar, goading her into sanctioning the apocalyptic thrashing after ‘beating’ Simon with ‘words’ over the telephone (1986a: 307). Having thus been directly implicated in the beating, Kerewin initially appears to descend further into narcissistic self-pity, refusing treatment for her growing tumour and retreating to Moerangi, where she expects to die for her sins. Having finally assumed the burden of guilt and responsibility, however, Kerewin sets in motion a process whereby, following a purgatorial period of physical and psychological suffering, she is redeemed through a new sense of social responsibility and engagement with the collective. The final, apocalyptic beating makes public the hidden violence of the past and allows the three wounded beings to reach out to others, establishing new communal patterns of identification. The event of the beating therefore precipitates change at all levels of the narrative: it makes the abuse public and therefore necessitates the (temporary) separation of the three; it sets in motion their private experiences of sickness or suffering and subsequent recovery (Kerewin’s tumour, for example, becomes palpable for the first time on the morning following the beating); it releases and renews Kerewin’s creative energies as she begins to mould a tricephalos featuring their three faces; and it prompts her to destroy and (temporarily) abandon her tower, and to retreat to Moerangi, where she endures the worst ravages of her purgatorial illness. During the transitional phase immediately following the final beating, the solitary sufferings of the three characters represent a necessary step in the process towards resolution and reconciliation. Kerewin and Joe are eventually healed by strangers who aid them in their respective convalescences, while Simon slowly recovers from his horrific injuries in hospital and is subsequently placed in foster care. It is clear throughout the novel that Simon bears no grudges for the abuse he endures, and his repeated attempts to escape foster care in order to return to Kerewin’s tower indicate that his personal happiness is dependent upon being reunited with Joe and Kerewin. In spite of opposition from the authorities, Simon’s dogged determination and Kerewin’s decision to give Joe and Simon ‘her name’ effect the reconciliation and secure the companionship which Simon so desperately desires.

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Simon’s ability to forgive Joe and Kerewin for damaging him, and the way in which the reconciliation of the three is represented as an inevitable and desirable outcome, has left critics such as C.K. Stead with a sense of unease about the novel. Stead draws an analogy between The Bone People and Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, ‘a work which also presents extreme violence against a child, yet demands sympathy and understanding for the man who commits it’, and argues that ‘the line between charity and imaginative complicity is very fine indeed’ (1985: 108), implying that the novel justifies and excuses violence. However, such a reading conflates the novel’s realist and allegorical aspects, oversimplifying Hulme’s paradoxical approach to violence.12 As I have suggested, at a realist level Simon’s final beating is horrendous and deplorable, but structurally and allegorically it is pivotal to the eventual process of reconciliation. In fact, the paradox at the core of this equation is also central to the structure and symbolic function of the novel as a whole. One of the primary tropes through which the novel’s paradoxical structure emerges is the mythical figure of the phoenix, which, in its reputed ability to recreate itself from the ashes of self-immolation, symbolizes the way in which life and hope may spring forth from death and destruction. A direct association between the phoenix and the triunity between Kerewin, Joe and Simon is made when Kerewin completes a tricephalos which moulds clay representations of Kerewin’s, Joe’s and Simon’s heads and faces back to back, linked through their entwined hair. As she prepares a fire in which to solidify and preserve her creation, Kerewin likens herself to a phoenix ‘laying its egg’ (1986a: 320), suggesting that the tricephalos is the last work she will ever produce; however, her invocation of the phoenix pattern of death and rebirth also prefigures the way in which she, Joe and Simon will be reborn from the ashes of their old selves. Other references to paradox appear elsewhere in the novel: during a drunken reverie in which she contemplates the mysteries of ontology, for example, Kerewin describes human existence in antinomic terms as ‘The rainbow end. The phoenix helix. The joyful Nothing. The living abyss’ (ibid.: 299). Hulme’s use of paradox as a formal feature in the novel also has its basis in Maori cosmogony, particularly as observed within the structural patterns of Maori art. Allan Hanson describes the way in which Maori art makes widespread use of reflective symmetry, broken by elements of asymmetry, arguing that this aesthetic dialectic conveys the fundamental quality of Maori ontology, which records an ‘ambivalent tension’ between union and separation (1983: 215). Hanson asserts that this paradoxical relationship between unity and disharmony or separation is central to Maori mythology – recounting, by way of example, the myth of Ranginui and Papatuanuku, the sky-father and earth-mother whose loving embrace had to be separated in order for life on earth to flourish – and suggests that the dialectic is also evident in Maori love songs focusing upon the separation of lovers, as well as attitudes to male and female sex organs (ibid.: 216).13

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This ambivalence between unity and disharmony is also central to the redemptive energies of The Bone People. Separation and suffering are opposed and yet necessary to the novel’s integrative resolution, and during his trip to the wilderness, Joe invokes this paradoxical equation as he offers opposing but equally valid readings of the violent, cathartic process by which the novel eventually resolves conflict: Kerewin said at Moerangi, “Suffering is undignified.” Suffering ennobles, I said, but I smiled to show her that I thought that was really bullshit. . . . And she said, “Sometimes, the dross is burnt off your character,” and moodily added, “but the scars that result from burning can be a worse exchange.” (1986a: 348) In a similar vein, during a drunken reverie Kerewin asks herself the question ‘does the warring self survive body dissolution?’ (ibid.: 299). Both quotations draw attention to the phoenix-like pattern of somatic suffering in the novel, where healing and regeneration spring from the burnt, battered, disintegrating body: Kerewin, Joe and Simon are physically separated and made to suffer, but their cortico-visceral anguish also brings about the harmony and reconciliation of the novel’s conclusion. In accounting for Simon’s bodily suffering and recovery in particular, many critics have drawn analogies with the suffering of Christ: both figures are phoenix-like martyrs who, with their resurrection from suffering and persecution, become redeemers of humankind (S. Smith 1984; Dale 1985; Henke 1992). In this context, Simon’s scars may be interpreted as stigmata, testament both to his suffering and to his patient endurance. They also ‘read’ as a narrative of past wrongs; Simon’s body maps out and inscribes the systemic violence of (neo)colonialism, as well as his own personal sufferings.14 Given the Maori cosmogonic patterns which underpin the narrative, however, it is perhaps more productive to consider Simon’s scarred and suffering body in terms of Maori attitudes to marking the body, reading his scars as a form of ‘tattoo’ which, in figuring the phoenix-pattern of new life emerging from suffering and violence, also inscribes the paradoxical patternings as described above. Alfred Gell describes the practice of tattooing in Polynesia as effecting a transition from childhood to adulthood; he conceptualizes the ritual in Foucauldian terms as ‘a species of political gesture which marked the body, tortured it, ceremonially prepared it for war and sexuality, and which made it emit signs’ (1993: 3). Rod Edmond similarly describes the tattooed Polynesian body as a cultural signifier, identifying the importance of tattooing as a rite de passage from childhood innocence to adult knowledge and maturity (1997a: 71). Here, the painful experience of tattooing is interpreted positively as a transitional step in the movement towards (adult) maturity and responsibility, providing a context in which

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to evaluate the projective energies of Hulme’s novel. In fact, a well-known Maori myth associated with the tattooing process represents a significant intertext for Hulme’s novel in its allegorization of suffering and bodily marking as necessary phases in the journey towards regeneration and reconciliation. According to the myth, Mataora, a mortal man, marries Niwareka, a beautiful woman who comes to him from Te Po (the Maori underworld or afterlife). When Mataora beats his wife after an argument, she punishes him by returning to the underworld, to which the contrite Mataora travels in order to beg forgiveness. During his search for Niwareka, Mataora learns the art of permanent tattooing, a previously unknown practice among the denizens of Te Ao Marama (the World of Light, the terrestrial world), where tattooing merely involved the application of paint to the surface of the body. Mataora is tattooed according to this new and extremely painful procedure, and after his ordeal he is rewarded with the return of his wife, who accompanies him back to the outside world, bringing with her the newly acquired ‘feminine’ skill of weaving (Gell 1993: 255). As Gell notes: ‘The mechanics of the reconciliation of Mataora and Niwareka are paradoxical; in order to be brought together harmoniously, they must be separated and marked’ (ibid.: 256). He also suggests that Mataora’s tattooing represents ‘a death within death, which permits Mataora to return to life’ (ibid.: 255). Like Hanson, therefore, Gell also locates separation and conflict at the heart of Maori cosmogony, suggesting that progress and differentiation are brought about ‘through a series of conflicts of an essentially degenerative kind’ (ibid.: 242). Gell’s arguments, and the Mataora–Niwareka myth, are useful analogies for the function of suffering and bodily marking in The Bone People. Like Mataora and Niwareka, Simon, Kerewin and Joe are separated and marked before they may be reconciled; Kerewin and Joe in particular appear as Mataora-figures who make their respective Orphic journeys and are maimed and scarred before being reconciled with Simon, the child they have loved, abused and lost. Simon’s ‘crosshatch of open weals and scars’ (1986a: 151), once exposed and publicly acknowledged, also functions in terms analogous to Gell’s and Edmond’s descriptions of tattooing as a transitional ritual: in Simon’s case, they represent a symbolic rite de passage from (neo)colonial conflict to post-imperial resolution. Simon’s narrative of suffering is therefore also a narrative of regeneration, and his scar-tattoos point towards a new cultural maturity which emerges from suffering and pain. As Hulme herself points out, Simon, Kerewin and Joe remain ‘damaged people’ at the end of the narrative, but hope emerges from their suffering: There has been criticism . . . that [the novel] has a sort of happy ending, a kind of fairy-tale ending. I emphatically don’t think it has. You have got some very damaged people there who remain damaged,

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but they do have one enormous hope – that they will not only dwell with one another easily on the land but . . . others will be enabled to do so too. (Alley 1992: 149–50) The fourth section of the novel, which describes the isolation, suffering and marking of the three characters respectively, may therefore be considered as an extended allegorization of the Mataora–Niwareka myth. Indeed, Maori mythology or ‘spirituality’ is represented as central to the healing and regeneration of Joe and Kerewin in particular, whose psychological problems are to some degree resolved through a heightened and historicized awareness of their Maori heritage. After recovering from her illness, for example, Kerewin experiences a dream-vision in which Maori ancestral voices inspire her to rebuild the Maori hall at Moerangi. Joe, on the other hand, is rescued from his half-hearted suicide attempt by the kaumatua, who introduces him to the mauri or Maori life force which allegedly dwells within the land itself. Critics such as Ruth Brown (1989), Lawrence Jones (1987) and C.K. Stead (1985) have found this section of the novel ‘willed’ and ‘unconvincing’, arguing that Hulme’s representation of a mythical ‘return to source’ is a spurious and unrealistic solution to the material problems described earlier in the narrative. Brown is particularly sceptical about the episode in which the kaumatua, having healed Joe after his drunken cliff fall, passes on to Joe his ‘spiritual inheritance’ in the form of a mauriora, a ‘small figure representing the secret and mysterious life principle’ (1989: 253). The kaumatua tells Joe that he and other Maori must ‘look after the precious matters which are our heritage, and wait, and hope’ (Hulme 1986a: 371). Brown argues that the kaumatua’s ‘wait and see’ approach is no solution to the material, socioeconomic problems of modern New Zealand society, and that (as noted above) Hulme’s optimistic vision has not been substantiated in the years following the publication of The Bone People (1996: 14). However, once again it is worth observing that fiction writers are under no obligation to observe or anticipate ‘objective’ social realities. Further, when considered in terms of Fanon’s model of cultural nationalism, the fourth section of the novel appears not as an end in itself, but merely as the final stage in the novel’s overall movement towards a new and dynamic intercultural vision. Joe’s sojourn with the kaumatua does enact an Orphic journey to the wellspring of Maori ‘spirituality’ and cultural tradition, but it is a temporary state: having accepted from the dying kaumatua the mantle of responsibility for the spirit of the land, Joe is released from his promise by the earthquake which buries the canoe in which the mauriora was first brought to Aotearoa. Joe manages to find the mauriora and he carries it away with him, but as soon as he returns ‘home’ to Kerewin and Simon the mauriora suddenly becomes impossibly heavy, and he places it upon the earth into which it sinks, thereby indicating

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symbolically that Joe’s responsibility lies not with past traditions but rather with present realities. As he tells himself after the earthquake, ‘[Y]ou’re whole and healed and flourishing, and you’re released from any promise you gave; you’ve a future now, not an immurement in dank swamp country’ (1986a: 384). Rod Edmond suggests that this section of the narrative invokes but subsequently rejects a return to a static traditional past, thereby indicating that ‘[continuity] is the life-stream of culture but its flow carries one away from the source’ (1993: 287). Such an assessment is consistent with Fanon’s analysis of the importance of a sense of historical continuity in the formation of a post-colonial nationalist identity: the ‘native intellectual’ must examine his/her cultural roots in order to foster a sense of collective engagement, but subsequently s/he must leave aside the ‘mummified fragments’ of (lost) past traditions in order to forge a new ontological vision (1967: 180). The phoenix-pattern which recurs throughout the novel reinforces such an argument, emphasizing the process by which new and dynamic energies emerge from the ashes of old systems and identities. The phoenix-pattern of building old from new, central to the corticovisceral energies of the narrative, is also paralleled in the various architectural phases of the novel, establishing a metonymic equation between somatic, cultural and architectural processes of reconstruction. The most extended architectural metaphor in the novel is of course Kerewin’s tower, which (as noted above) moves through a number of phases and is imbued with a variety of associations. The eventual destruction of the tower prefigures Kerewin’s rejection of her erstwhile solitary lifestyle, and could also be interpreted as a rejection of the ‘imported’ European modernist high culture which the tower in part represents (and which Fanon’s model would target as a feature of the ‘assimilationist’ phase of national artistic development). However, the rebuilding of Kerewin’s residence is central to the process of physical and ontological reconstruction which the novel sketches out. The initial schism between individual and communal energies, as represented in the tower’s original function as a monastic retreat, is reconciled and transcended in the new building: Kerewin decides upon ‘a shell-shape, a regular spiral of rooms expanding around the decapitated Tower . . . privacy, apartness, but all connected and all part of the whole’ (1986a: 434). The manner in which Kerewin’s new architectural vision combines both individual and communal spatial dimensions again demonstrates the novel’s paradoxical energies; the new building emerges phoenix-like from the ashes of the old tower, simultaneously resurrecting and refiguring its privatized, compartmentalized contours. Similarly, the spiral – an image which runs throughout the novel and which informs the structures of Kerewin’s new dwelling – is another figure through which the novel incorporates ambivalent energies, particularly those central to Maori philosophy. According to Maori cosmogony, the spiral represents the structure of

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time, which is conceptualized as a spiralling rather than linear process, paradoxically located simultaneously in past, present and future. In Potiki (Grace 1986), Maori oral history is described specifically in terms of a ‘reciprocity’ between inner and outer ‘reaches’ of the spiral, encoding the philosophy that ‘all time is a now-time, centred in the being’ (ibid.: 39). In his novel The Dream Swimmer (1997, discussed in Chapter 6), Ihimaera also describes history and narrative in terms of a spiralling dialectic, encapsulated in the phrase ‘Te torino whakahaere, whakamuri’ (ibid.: 413) – glossed elsewhere as ‘[at] the same time as the spiral is going out, it is returning. At the same time as it is going forward, it is going back’ (ibid.: 149). Figure 5.1 depicts spiral patterns in carved panels of Te Arawa workmanship. The spiral motifs (takarangi) surrounding the carved figures are based upon the unfurling of native fern fronds (pitau), clearly demonstrating the spiralling ebb-and-flow patterns described above: as the eye reaches the centre of the spiral, it is drawn back outwards again as the spiral loops back on itself. Hulme has suggested that the temporal paradox encoded in the spiral is also encapsulated in the grammar of the Maori language itself, in which the terms for past and future are also prepositions which invert ‘Western’ conceptualizations of the structure of time: ‘Our word for the past is mua, the time’s in front of you. And the word for the future is muri, time’s behind you and you go backwards into the future’ (Peek 1990: 9). Hulme’s novel inscribes this paradoxical conceptualization of Maori time in which beginnings become endings and vice versa in an endless spiralling rhythm. The prologue to the novel is entitled ‘The End at the Beginning’, while the novel concludes with the phrase ‘Te Mutunga – Ranei Te Take’ (The End – or the Beginning), turning the narrative back upon itself in the same spiralling pattern. Joe uses similar rhetoric at the beginning of the novel, linking the spiralling cycle with the process of architectural construction: ‘New marae from the old marae, a beginning from the end’ (1986a: 3). His phrase ostensibly prefigures the reconstruction of the Maori hall at Moerangi: Kerewin undertakes the project with the assistance of other Maori at Moerangi, combining the ‘new’ building materials with the gateposts from the ‘old’ marae (ibid.: 432). Joe’s observation also applies, however, to Kerewin’s tower, which similarly engenders a new home from the older building, phoenix-fashion. The tower, the location of Kerewin’s first contact with Simon and Joe, becomes a symbolic lodestone within the narrative, drawing all three characters back together after their individual transformative experiences. The reconstructed tower is therefore a central figure in the novel’s movement towards regeneration and reconstruction. The construction of the new tower from the ashes of the old is also an acknowledgement of the perpetual dialectic between past and present, old and new, as encapsulated in the image of the spiral. This analysis problematizes Ruth Brown’s argument that the novel valorizes Maori communalism, tradition and holism as

Figure 5.1 Carved wooden panels of Te Arawa worksmanship, c.1890s. ‘Timeframes’ database, reference number 1/2-022909-F, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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a solution to Pakeha late capitalist individualism and fragmentation; the paradoxical structures which are woven into every level of the narrative suggest that Hulme’s vision is predicated not on an ‘either–or’ equation but rather a syncretic ‘both’ and/or ‘all’. The triunity of the tricephalos, like the communo-individuality of the new tower and the historicocontemporary vision of the final section of the novel, symbolizes the postimperial cultural multiplicity upon which the novel’s new nationalist vision is based. With this in view, it is significant that the reconciliation which ostensibly unites Kerewin, Joe and Simon as the ‘heart and muscles and mind’ (ibid.: 4) of a new post-imperial ‘body’, avoids effecting this fusion through a conventional romantic ending whereby Kerewin and Joe marry and become ‘one flesh’ through consummation. Like the tricephalos, Kerewin, Joe and Simon represent three bodies in one, a pseudo-family unit or terrestrial trinity which avoids biologically essentialist models of national and historical continuity. As Marjorie Howes points out, concepts of nationhood often ‘accord gender, sexuality, genealogy and family structures the status of natural, essential and stable entities in order to confer a similar status on nationality through comparison’ (1996: 104). Such expectations are confounded at every turn in Hulme’s novel: defying conventional models of sexuality, for example, Kerewin describes herself as mannish and sexually neuter (1986a: 21, 266), and Joe, who entertains the prospect of a sexual relationship with Kerewin, eventually learns to renounce his desire for her (ibid.: 266). Joe himself has crossed sexual boundaries, experimenting at one stage with homosexuality (ibid.: 175), and Simon – with his long blond hair and fine skin – is described as an androgynous figure (ibid.: 244, 85). The disparate backgrounds of the three central characters similarly undermine biologically essentialist nationalist models: the genealogies and family circumstances of each of the three central characters are examined during the course of the narrative, but these details are only important in that they establish the diverse and manifold cultural tissues which are woven into the new national unity, symbolized in the tricephalos. Like the phoenix, Kerewin, Joe and Simon are reborn from the ashes of their past selves; this ‘immaculate conception’ therefore prevents any narrowing of the novel’s vision to the personal, nuclear family unit, locating hope within a wider social context, and integrating diversity and difference into a vision of unity and strength: They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are the instruments of change. (ibid.: 4)

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Hulme’s nationalist vision, while similar in structure to Fanon’s model, therefore differs in its rejection of monolithic conceptions of national or ethnic identity. Her model of racial reconciliation, of unity through difference, is also markedly different from the segregationist nationalist model invoked by Witi Ihimaera, who will be discussed in the next chapter. In fact, the recent work of all three of the Maori writers yet to be examined in this book suggests – as Ruth Brown has argued in more general terms – that Hulme’s concomitant vision is not shared by many contemporary Maori, who identify the concept of a collective and racially integrative national identity as a thinly disguised adaptation of colonial assimilation policies. While Hulme’s novel seeks to establish a new nationalism through the power of art, the work of the three Maori writers yet to be discussed in this book is grounded more firmly in the material inequalities which Fanon interprets as a condition of (neo)colonialism, suggesting that Maori and Pakeha are still located either side of the Manichean dialectic between colonizer and colonized which Hulme’s novel sought, imaginatively, to deconstruct and transform.

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Disease, colonialism and the national ‘body’ Witi Ihimaera’s The Dream Swimmer

This chapter focuses primarily upon Witi Ihimaera’s 1997 novel The Dream Swimmer, which, like Hulme’s The Bone People, represents the diseased body as a metaphor for cross-cultural conflict. Where Hulme advocates a bicultural or multicultural national identity, however, Ihimaera advances a separatist model, arguing for the establishment of a ‘Maori nation’ which is to rival or supersede the socio-political structures and ideologies of the Pakeha ‘majority’ culture. Ihimaera’s arguments in The Dream Swimmer are closely related to his recent political views, which have transmuted from an earlier bicultural or inclusive position not unlike Hulme’s, into a more radical and separatist stance. This chapter analyses Ihimaera’s representation of European disease – in particular, the ‘Spanish influenza’ pandemic of 1918 – as an allegory for colonial incursion, and as a catalyst for Maori millennialist and nationalist movements of the twentieth century. Witi Ihimaera was born in Gisborne in 1944, and is of Te Aitanga-aMahaki, Rongowhakaata and Ngati Porou iwi (tribal) descent, with close affiliations to Tuhoe, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Ngati Kahungunu and Ngai Tamanuhiri. Ihimaera’s short story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972) and his novel Tangi (1973a), the first book-length fiction publications by a Maori writer to appear in New Zealand, inaugurated his prolific career as writer and anthologist. During the past three decades Ihimaera has held a variety of literary fellowships, has served as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is currently Associate Professor of English at Auckland University. In spite of his literary prominence and his leading role in supporting and publishing the work of other Maori writers and artists, Ihimaera has resisted attempts to position him as a ‘foundational’ figure in Maori literature, pointing out that his early publications were predated and influenced by the work of individuals such as Hone Tuwhare – whose first poetry collection, No Ordinary Sun, was published in 1964 – and Patricia Grace, whose short fiction pieces he had read in the literary journal Landfall and Te Ao Hou (‘The New World’, a government publication launched in 1952).1 Ihimaera’s early fiction – like much of the writing published

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in Te Ao Hou in the 1950s and 1960s2 – was inflected by his professed objective to record a rural, marae-based way of life which was fast disappearing due to the effects of post-war urbanization (Beavis 1971: 53; see also Arvidson 1991, 1992). However, the cultural politics which emerged from the Maori Renaissance in the 1970s were to have an increasing impact on Ihimaera’s writing. In a 1982 lecture on Maori literature and culture, Ihimaera suggested that the writing of the early 1970s – his own included – was on the whole a depoliticized and nostalgic view of a rural, communal lifestyle now lost to many contemporary urbanized Maori; he described his own early texts – including Pounamu, Pounamu and Tangi, as well as his 1974 novel Whanau – as ‘tender, unabashedly lyrical evocations of a world that once was’ (1982: 50). In the mid-1970s, Ihimaera decided to place a ten-year embargo on his own work in order to allow other Maori writers to express the tougher ‘political reality’ of the times, and his next novel The Matriarch (1986) reflected the changes which had taken place in his own political thinking: instead of perpetuating his earlier vision of biculturalism and the enrichment of Pakeha culture through an attentiveness to Maori culture (1973b: 4; 1980: 78), the novel communicates a polemical account of Maori resistance to Pakeha hegemony throughout Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial and postcolonial history, and is full of ‘angry rhetoric against the colonizers’ (M. Williams 1994: 698). In The Dream Swimmer – the sequel to The Matriarch – Ihimaera embellishes and extends the political content in his earlier novel, advocating Maori sovereignty and the establishment of a ‘Maori nation’ which is to rival, or even to supersede, Pakeha nationalism. The Dream Swimmer closely resembles its predecessor in terms of its narrative substance and structure. In The Matriarch, Ihimaera reconstructs a Maori world before colonization, examines the effects of contact with Europeans in the colonial period, and traces the process and effects of post-war rural-to-urban migration patterns which radically altered the socio-political structures of Maori society. Within this broad sweep of history, Ihimaera examines the role of several prominent Maori leaders including Ringatu prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, parliamentarian Wi Pere Halbert, and the eponymous Matriarch, the granddaughter of Wi Pere Halbert and the grandmother of the main narrator, Tamatea Mahana. The close relationship between Tamatea and the Matriarch – also known as Riripeti or Artemis – frames and contextualizes the wider historical narrative, and the narrator’s ‘family’ story, set in contemporary times, forms a pivot around which the various historical events and personalities are grouped. As is also the case in The Dream Swimmer, much of the narrative is related in the first person by Tamatea, who makes connections between different discourses and events, but many other voices and registers are woven into the novel: a third-person narrative voice provides expository commentaries and evaluative judgements (sometimes switching to second person in order to address the

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reader directly), and various ‘witnesses’ (some of whom are ‘real’ and some fictional) offer perspectives on key events. The Matriarch’s multiple narrative layers are linked through the central preoccupations of the novel: first, the devastating socio-economic effects of colonization upon the Maori people; second, the way in which various Maori leaders and activists have attempted to claim back alienated cultural and environmental resources which should have been protected under the terms of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi; and third, the need to counter Pakeha discursive constructions of landmark historical events (such as the land wars of the 1860s) and figures (such as Te Kooti) with a ‘Maori’ historical perspective. The Matriarch is one of a number of revisionist historical novels which appeared in the mid-to-late 1980s, bearing witness to a widespread interest in (re)examining New Zealand’s colonial history in the lead-up to the sesquicentenary in 1990 (Williams 1990: 205). Ian Wedde’s novel Symmes Hole (1986), a rewriting of Moby Dick which challenged monocultural constructions of New Zealand identity, and Maurice Shadbolt’s novel Season of the Jew (1986), which (like The Matriarch) explored the New Zealand wars of the 1860s, both appeared in the same year as Ihimaera’s novel, while C.K. Stead’s later novel The Singing Whakapapa (1994) returned to the inter-tribal musket wars and missionary endeavours in the decades immediately preceding the signing of the Treaty. As Mark Williams notes, these texts reflected ‘a general interest in reevaluating New Zealand’s past in anti-colonial terms’, an objective which also found expression in two landmark historical studies produced in the late 1980s: Claudia Orange’s The Treaty of Waitangi (1987) and James Belich’s The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986) (Williams 1990: 204; see also Sharrad 2003: 182–3). Ihimaera’s revisionist approach to Aotearoa New Zealand’s post-contact history in The Matriarch included the incorporation and quotation of material from various historical sources, and Ihimaera’s unacknowledged quotation (and in some cases, partial rewriting) of verbatim passages from some of these sources earned him widespread criticism (Williams 1990: 128–9; Stead 1989), prompting a more systematic declaration of sources in his author’s note which accompanied the sequel. The historical span in The Dream Swimmer is similar to the one which structures the narrative in The Matriarch, although Ihimaera describes the contemporary Maori world in greater detail in the sequel, focusing upon urban social problems and Maori leaders who have become the secularized ‘prophets’ of the modern urbanized Maori world. Continuing the focus on prominent historical Maori leaders, in the sequel Ihimaera recounts the story of Te Kooti’s successor,3 the Ringatu prophet Rua Kenana (1869–1937), who established a religious community on Maungapohatu in the Urewera Mountains in the early part of the twentieth century.4 The central characters within Tamatea’s family narrative are essentially the same, but Ihimaera changes the focus slightly, detailing a

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bitter and protracted power struggle between the Matriarch and Tamatea’s mother Tiana, an enigmatic figure with mysterious origins and supernatural powers. This section of the narrative is structured around a central family mystery, unravelling the origins of an apparent curse which afflicts Tamatea’s wider family with an array of bodily ailments. The puzzle is solved when Tamatea discovers that his family and the Matriarch quarrelled violently over her inheritance. In her will, Riripeti left everything to Tamatea, who was her chosen successor to the leadership of the wider family, the religious community of the Ringatu faith, and the local committee campaigning for justice over Maori–Pakeha land issues. The family, however, successfully contested the will, depriving Tamatea of his inheritance and distributing the wealth among themselves, thereby incurring the wrath of the ancient Maori gods. This divine anger manifests itself on the bodies of the offenders in the form of various fatal diseases and debilitating ailments. While these afflictions are therefore represented as the product of internal conflict within Maori society, Ihimaera also deploys the diseased body as a metaphor for the ravaging effects of colonialism. Some of the most arresting historiographical material in The Dream Swimmer is concerned with New Zealand’s experience of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic (particularly the experiences of Maori victims of the virus), and Ihimaera represents the incident both as a form of bacteriological colonialism and as a means by which to explore continuing cross-cultural conflict between Maori and Pakeha. He uses the incident as a lens through which to examine the way in which Maori have been physically and emotionally debilitated since the early colonial period. He also explores the way in which the pandemic and other socio-political crises in Maori society have produced charismatic Maori leaders who have sought to salve and rebuild Maori bodies and communities. The 1918 pandemic, for example, is represented as a trigger for the rise of Maori nationalism under Rua Kenana, who established himself as a faith healer as well as a political leader. Ihimaera represents Kenana’s religious movement as a model for later nationalist and millennialist Maori movements, and he ends his novel with a vision of Maori sovereignty which – as I have suggested above – resembles Hulme’s in its projective optimism, but differs in its more radical separatism. The discussion of The Dream Swimmer which follows is divided into three sections, beginning with an analysis of Ihimaera’s treatment of disease – the 1918 pandemic in particular – as an allegory for colonialism, with reference to colonial discourse on pathology, and focusing in particular upon the social Darwinism which dominated late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century racial theory in New Zealand. This is followed by a discussion of Ihimaera’s representation of Maori millennialist movements – particularly Rua Kenana’s adaptation of the Ringatu faith – as a means by which particular Maori religious leaders sought to heal Maori bodies

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and to unite Maori in a concerted struggle for sovereignty. The chapter ends with an evaluation of Ihimaera’s vision of contemporary Maori culture and Maori nationalism, identifying some of the potential problems attendant upon his application of post-Maori-Renaissance models of Maori nationalism and/or Maori sovereignty to earlier, less monolithic politico-religious movements.

Disease as a colonial metaphor The relationship between colonialism and disease has featured prominently in South Pacific discourse from the early days of European travel into the region. As Rod Edmond suggests, while the Pacific was on the one hand commonly represented by European writers, artists and philosophers as a utopian South Seas paradise, ‘a counter-discourse of the diseased Pacific began almost simultaneously’ (1997a: 194). Geographically remote from Europe and other densely populated mainland areas, Pacific Islanders lacked immunity to the wide variety of European diseases carried by European visitors who arrived in increasing numbers from the eighteenth century onwards, and in many cases native populations were decimated by various European diseases following their first contact with Europeans (Walker 1990: 80). Edmond describes this phenomenon with particular reference to Captain James Cook’s observations on his return to the Pacific after initial forays into the area in the early 1770s: The legible evidence of western diseases on blemished native bodies haunted writing about the Pacific from the early moments of contact. Wherever Cook returned he found signs of his previous landfall on the inhabitants’ skin. Not only did the cycle of infection and reinfection produced by his many landfalls in the course of three voyages threaten the good order of his ships, but its physical symptoms were a palpable sign of the contaminating power of European civilisation. They rebuked the explorer for his intrusion and contradicted the purity of his intentions. (1997b: 78) As Edmond argues, the metaphoric link between the diseased colonized body and the depredations of colonialism became a familiar trope in nineteenth-century Pacific discourse. This association, which soon developed into a widespread belief that Pacific populations were doomed, had its basis in contemporary social Darwinist theories. The decline or extinction of Maori and Pacific Islanders was represented as an inevitable outcome of contact with the ‘superior’ or more ‘advanced’ European peoples. In New Zealand, respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza

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– less visible but no less deadly than the various skin diseases which ravaged many indigenous Pacific populations – have played a central role in the radical depopulation of New Zealand Maori since the arrival of the Europeans. Ranginui Walker argues that the devastating effects of European diseases – and the high numbers of Maori deaths in wars fought with muskets brought by the Europeans as trade goods – had almost halved the Maori population even at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1990: 80), though Michael King argues that the ‘real population plunge’ came around the middle of the nineteenth century, after the Treaty expedited a rapid increase in the numbers of Pakeha settlers coming to New Zealand (2003: 150). By the 1890s, Walker claims, further epidemics and the losses suffered in the land wars of the 1860s had reduced the Maori population to around 45,000 (1990: 81). Keith Sinclair indicates that the Maori population reached its nadir, 42,000, in 1896 (2000: 201),5 and Geoffrey Rice notes that as late as 1937 Maori death rates from influenza and pneumonia were four and five times higher than those of Pakeha New Zealanders (1988: 104). As was the case with other Pacific Island countries, these population figures, coupled with the influence of neo-Darwinist theories of extinction, encouraged a widespread belief that the Maori race would not last beyond the early twentieth century. As Sinclair points out, this attitude persisted even after the 1901 census revealed that the Maori population was rising, and as late as 1919 the Minister of Health reported that Maori ‘were dying out or “being absorbed into the white population”’ (1986: 203). Such arguments conveniently justified the expropriation of land and other resources from the Maori people at a time when they were becoming increasingly reluctant to part with such commodities. Edmond identifies this practice as a pan-Pacific phenomenon, pointing out that while the fatal impact theory was adopted by Romanticists in order to critique the imperialist project, conversely social Darwinist theories were also interpreted as a justification for colonial expansion (1997a: 14–15). The 1918 influenza pandemic, with its high death rate and its highly visible and alarming symptoms,6 produced a particularly vivid manifestation of the radical contrast between Pakeha and Maori levels of susceptibility to respiratory disease. Recent reassessments of the effects of the pandemic measure the Maori death rate at four-and-a-half times higher than the non-Maori death rate: 5,516 to 1,200 (King 2003: 334). While the numbers of Maori killed in this epidemic were not as high as the mortality figures for measles and whooping cough epidemics in the nineteenth century, the effects were devastating because, unusually, many of the victims were healthy adults rather than the young or elderly. An estimated 51 per cent of the deaths from the epidemic occurred in the age group 15–39 years; the epidemic therefore seriously reduced natural inter-census Maori population increase (Rice 1988: 122).

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Ihimaera explores the 1918 influenza crisis in detail in The Dream Swimmer, perhaps due in part to the fact that the pandemic still features prominently in Maori oral history and is still commonly used as a marker for dating key events (Rice 1988: 102).7 Ihimaera traces the effects of the pandemic in the Gisborne/Poverty Bay region, representing the area as a microcosm for the rest of Maori society. Having consulted various historical records of the effects of the pandemic in the Gisborne area,8 Ihimaera incorporates Maori experiences of the pandemic into Tamatea’s fictional family narrative. Riripeti sets up a hospital at Waituhi for Maori patients after being refused assistance by the hospital administration in Gisborne, and she becomes a vehicle for Ihimaera’s criticism of Pakeha mismanagement of the crisis, and also for his view of the epidemic as a form of bacteriological colonialism. Riripeti lays the blame for the pandemic squarely at the feet of the Pakeha, arguing that the virus ‘comes from your battlefields of Europe’ (1997: 36), and a local doctor who refuses treatment is attacked by Riripeti with a combination of Ringatu rhetoric and ironic neo-Darwinist demographic pragmatism: ‘You, Pharaoh, you could not kill us in your last war. Is this the way you hope to accomplish it now? Is this the pillow for our death?’ (ibid.: 37). Riripeti therefore views the pandemic as the latest wave in the colonization process; she describes the imperialist project as a form of cannibalism which consumes Maori bodies and souls, arguing that the Pakeha ‘has no other purpose in life except to eat the land and eat the people’ (ibid.: 176). In a similar vein, a few pages later Ihimaera makes reference to a waiata (song) in which Te Kooti also describes colonization in alimentary terms: All the Maori kaingas [villages] throughout the land are being swarmed over, and the land is becoming like a broken biscuit from the attack of the white locusts. . . . I am a bird flying hither and thither in the forest, pursued by him who wishes to eat up the land and eat up the people. (ibid.: 179) Te Kooti’s rhetoric, like Riripeti’s, inverts the popular myth of cannibalism often attached to non-Western cultures by European imperialist cultures: in this case the colonizer, not the colonized, has a taste for blood.9 Just as the Pakeha swallow up land and resources, so they consume the bodies of the Maori people. Disease becomes another facet of this atavistic process whereby Maori bodies are devoured and debilitated in a Darwinian danse macabre. This social Darwinist view of illness is merely one of several perspectives on disease in The Dream Swimmer. Many Maori described in the novel view the 1918 pandemic as a curse; infected bodies are interpreted as lost souls

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possessed by demonic forces. This is a more traditional view of illness, based on pre-European Maori cosmology. As historian Judith Binney points out, ‘Inexplicable sickness, mate Maori, is often attributed to evil forces living in the human body; their extraction, possible only by faith in the healer, is a major part of the role of a tohunga [priest/medicine man]’ (Binney et al. 1979: 25). In a pseudo-documentary style which characterizes his account of key historical events in The Dream Swimmer, Ihimaera produces a ‘witness’ – Arihia Tamatea, a woman from Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki – who supports Binney’s assertions. In a ‘transcript’ of a recording of Tamatea speaking at a New Zealand Maori Women’s Welfare League conference in 1956, she describes her experience of the pandemic as follows: I was fifteen when my father came back from the war, and he had the high fever. Then his skin got all, how you say, scaly and he look like a . . . a . . . serpent. . . . He turned black before our very eyes. The peoples all blamed my father when the mate spread. Even when the what you call truth come out, the peoples still blamed him [sic]. They said my father bit them, poisoned them with his fangs.10 (1997: 81) Arihia Tamatea’s testimony expresses a fear of Maori contaminating Maori; by her analysis, the affliction has little to do with the colonizing culture. This view of illness is evident within the sections of the narrative set during the present day, as Tamatea Mahana’s family is plagued with a retributive cycle of diseases. The novel enacts Tamatea’s search for the source of this apparent curse which plucks down his family members one by one: Tamatea’s uncle Alexis is struck blind, his aunt Circe dies of cancer, his cousin Raina develops an ultimately fatal drug addiction, Tamatea’s youngest sister Pani sustains severe brain damage, while his father Te Ariki falls prey to prostate cancer. As the dramatic action unfolds, it becomes apparent that Tamatea’s family members have brought these diseases upon themselves; in defying Riripeti’s wishes, they have offended and incurred the wrath of the ancient Maori gods. Still another view of illness among Maori in the novel figures the influenza pandemic as a manifestation of the wrath of the Pakeha God. Many Maori, realizing that various potentially deadly diseases were brought to New Zealand by the Europeans, and yet observing that the Europeans were more immune to these maladies, came to believe that these afflictions were visited upon Maori by the white man’s god as a punishment for impiety or for a failure to recognize the new god’s omnipotence. In support of this view, Ihimaera includes a ‘transcript’ of a radio interview with Tamihana Florsheim Ellis, tribal historian, who argues that the fact that influenza victims turned pango (black), the ‘colour of sin’,

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was taken as a sign that the virus was a manifestation of divine anger (ibid.: 80). As well as examining Maori perspectives on disease, Ihimaera also discusses the reactions of Pakeha to the 1918 pandemic, exploring in particular the way in which Maori became the focus of Pakeha fears regarding transmission of the virus. Knowledge of the high death rate among Maori led to a widespread belief among Pakeha that Maori were highly contagious carriers of the virus, and Rice cites a number of cases across the country where Maori were prevented from entering densely populated urban areas during the pandemic. Maori were barred from towns, public places and public transport, forced to observe a temporary form of apartheid (Rice 1988: 117–18). Ihimaera interweaves these historical details into his novel, interpolating an episode where Riripeti, on her way to Gisborne hospital, is stopped at a barrier which has been erected outside the town. A ‘witness’ named Jack St. John Colbert reports that the checkpoint was established mainly in order to prevent Maori from entering Pakeha urban areas, arguing that ‘the filthy conditions of Maori pas’ gave them licence to ‘stop every Maori travelling into the township’ (1997: 82). Colbert’s attitude appears representative of Pakeha views at the time: Rice reports a widespread belief that Maori sanitary conditions were appalling and therefore provided an ideal environment in which the virus could proliferate: The influenza epidemic drew more Pakeha observers to the Maori settlements at one time than ever before, and their impressions are often quite revealing. Most visitors were shocked by the conditions they found, describing Maori houses as ‘hovels’, ‘shacks’, or ‘slum shanties’, and were severely critical of their dirty conditions; ‘filth’ used in this context was usually a euphemism for untreated sewage or decaying rubbish. . . . Most of the Maori population in 1918 were still living in traditional-style dwellings, and these particularly offended the eyes of visiting relief workers. (1988: 105) In their preoccupation with Maori hygiene practices during the 1918 pandemic, many of these workers overlooked the fact that Pakeha urban and rural areas were also afflicted with serious hygiene problems. Rice indicates, for example, that although Pakeha drew attention to the fact that few Maori settlements had piped water supplies or flush toilets, ‘[few] Pakeha homes in rural areas had flush toilets or piped water in 1918; nor did some of the older “slum” houses of the larger cities’ (Rice 1988: 105). Linda Bryder also notes that the influenza virus was not selective with regard to housing and sanitary standards (1982: 97; see also Pool 1973: 4). Maori living conditions were not the only target of criticism during the 1918 pandemic: the way in which Maori disposed of their dead also

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became a focus of public hysteria. The tangihanga ceremony – which involved large numbers of Maori gathering to pay respects to deceased who lay in exposed coffins – was denounced as a health hazard, and on 7 November 1918 the Minister of Health instructed district health officers to ban tangi ceremonies and to issue instructions that all influenza victims were to be buried as soon as possible. Pakeha funerals, on the other hand, were allowed to continue as usual (Rice 1988: 117). The controversy surrounding the tangi ceremony is played out in Ihimaera’s fictional narrative. Riripeti defies the government ban on tangihanga, allowing ceremonies at Waituhi to continue as according to custom. After hearing of Riripeti’s decision to ignore the edict, a doctor arrives from Gisborne, ostensibly in order to ‘inspect’ Riripeti’s infirmary. Having undertaken a perfunctory tour of the establishment, the doctor has it burned down immediately in spite of the fact that the hospital is clearly sanitary and well administered; in addition, Riripeti is arrested and imprisoned for two months as punishment for her ‘transgressive’ behaviour. The doctor’s action against the small community of Waituhi is represented as one facet of a larger, aggressive colonial agenda. Ihimaera dramatizes the incident by deploying Old Testament imagery and phraseology; the conflagration is compared to the pillar of fire seen in the desert by the Israelites, and from the ashes of this fire will emerge, phoenix-like, an ever-more-determined Maori resistance to Pakeha hegemony: And it came to pass that the Israelites saw a great fire in the sky. Aue! The Ship of God had been set aflame by Pharaoh. . . . And lo, when Riripeti was released and set free among the people, she would not bow down to Pharaoh. She would not give herself up unto him as a slave. Instead, she rose from the ashes like a holy dove. (1997: 89) Pakeha fears about the transmission of diseases from Maori to Pakeha – dramatized so vividly in government policy on the tangi ceremony during the 1918 pandemic – undoubtedly had their roots in nineteenth-century European discourse on disease in the Pacific. Edmond argues that concepts of degeneration and extinction ‘originated in Europe’s contact with other cultures and were then deflected back from east to west’, and reveals that the ‘apparent decline towards extinction’ of Polynesian cultures ‘repeatedly prompted the fear of a re-enactment of this process in the west’. Edmond asserts that in late nineteenth-century Pacific discourse, this paranoia was ‘frequently expressed in terms of the infection or contamination of western bodies’, and he invokes Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject body as a means by which to theorize this obsession with corporeal contamination:

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[Kristeva] argues that the maintenance of the symbolic order, which I shall take as referring to both the individual psyche and the social system, depends on a delimitation of the ‘clean and proper’ body. The abject body challenges this order, attesting to its provisional nature and demonstrating the impossibility of a clear division between the clean and the unclean, order and disorder. This body in revolt is something the symbolic order can neither accept nor deny. Its most horrifying manifestation is the corpse, which is almost universally surrounded by taboos and rituals to prevent contamination of the living. (1997a: 202) While Edmond invokes Kristeva’s theories as a means by which to analyse European reactions to leprosy in Hawai‘i, Kristeva’s opposition between abject and socially acceptable bodies is also a useful model against which to measure attitudes to the 1918 pandemic. Pakeha fears about the Maori tangi ceremony demonstrated the symbolic associations between death and the abject which Kristeva describes, and I would add to Edmond’s analysis another implication of Kristeva’s theory of the abject: if abjection breaks down the very symbolic structures of language and society, then it must also erase culturally constructed barriers between races. Disease, death and putrefaction reduce all bodies to the same organic matter, and the prospect of the stripping of identity and the erosion of cultural barriers is unnerving. Kristeva debates these issues: How can I be without border? . . . In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. . . . Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is . . . not lack of cleanliness of health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite. (1982: 4) By Kristeva’s analysis, it is not dirt, excrement and disease that are feared, but rather what they signify. Death and disease are indiscriminate, striking down colonizer and colonized arbitrarily; death flagrantly erodes the boundaries between colonizer and colonized, undermining the imperialist project itself which relies on maintaining concepts of racial and cultural difference. Alterity is revealed to be a cultural construct; disease, death and the abject reduce the plethora of humanity to the same indistinct, organic mass. If there is no alterity, there can be no Self; hence abjection

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threatens ontology itself. Kristeva’s theory is not unlike Mary Douglas’s analysis of dirt and pollution – as described in Chapter 3 – as a threat to culturally constructed boundaries and ordered systems. Joel Kovel also analyses disease in terms of socially constructed attitudes to dirt and pollution, suggesting that critical moments in public health, such as an outbreak of plague, for example, desublimate latent paranoia regarding the relationship between dirt and disease (1970: 169). The 1918 influenza pandemic, with its high death rate and highly visible effects upon the bodies of its victims, created an ideal environment within which such latent fears could surface. The higher mortality rate for Maori made them an obvious target for Pakeha fears about contagion; ‘filthy’ pa¯ conditions were interpreted as the perfect environment in which the virus could flourish. As the virus attacked and destroyed the body, blackening the skin and reducing Maori and Pakeha alike to the same debilitated condition, it became, as Kristeva suggests in relation to leprosy, ‘inscribed within the logical conception of impurity . . .: intermixture, erasing of differences, threat to identity’ (1982: 101). The 1918 pandemic mocked racial distinctions and revealed to the Pakeha the anarchic potential of disease: while the colonizer’s objective is to take from the colonized only what is useful, the transmission of disease is an exchange which cannot be regulated. While the Pakeha therefore looked to sanitation and hygiene standards as indices to the vicissitudes of the pandemic, despairing Maori interpreted the virus as a manifestation of divine anger. Throughout New Zealand’s colonial and post-colonial history, the tendency to attribute disease and misfortune to divine causes has aided the ascendancy of a number of Maori religious leaders, who have claimed an ability to rebuild and strengthen the Maori body, as well as expressing a commitment to redeeming the Maori soul. In The Dream Swimmer Ihimaera argues that in addition to their religious ministrations, Maori religious leaders – in particular Rua Kenana, who features prominently in the novel – also sought to foster a unified Maori nationalist ‘body’ in order to combat the encroachment of the Pakeha. A virologist in the novel gives voice to this perspective, suggesting that the 1918 epidemic ‘became a catalyst for the Maori sovereignty movement’ (1997: 79).

Healing bodies and souls: the role of millennialist leaders While Ihimaera identifies the 1918 pandemic as a particularly prominent historical moment in which an association was made between somatic, spiritual and social ills, Binney indicates that from the early colonial days, concern about the high level of susceptibility among Maori to European diseases gave rise to a succession of religious cults, predecessors of Rua Kenana’s millennialist movement (Binney et al. 1979: 25). From the 1840s in particular, Maori concern about the encroachment of the Pakeha and

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an awareness of the continuing decline of the Maori population through sickness and warfare resulted in an overt synthesis of Maori and European religious ideologies, as religious leaders sought to protect and strengthen Maori bodies by adopting the faith of the healthy and prosperous Pakeha, and by claiming the ‘traditional’ ability to heal the sick (Binney 1993: 157). These syncretized religious movements of the early colonial period represented a form of religious Darwinism which developed among Maori in response to the ravages of colonialism and disease: many Maori now believed that the power of the Christian god was greater than the mana of the Maori gods, just as the bodies of the colonizers appeared more robust than those of the Maori people themselves (1993: 153). Like many other nineteenth-century religious leaders, Ringatu prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki – whose exploits during the land wars of the 1860s are described in The Matriarch – drew a direct parallel between the oppression of the Maori and the persecution of the Israelites in Egypt; he promised Maori that they would be delivered from their colonial ‘masters’ (Binney 1993: 158–9). Like his predecessors, Te Kooti also sought to salve Maori bodies as well as Maori souls; his role as leader of the Ringatu people included a practical function as tribal healer (Binney 1993: 181). Rua Kenana, Te Kooti’s successor to the leadership of the Tuhoe Ringatu, was also a faith healer. Ihimaera’s account of Rua’s life in The Dream Swimmer continues the epic story of the Ringatu people begun in The Matriarch, and Rua’s healing powers are described in the novel as proof of his power and authority (1997: 135). Like many of his predecessors, Rua believed that illness was a manifestation of a curse inflicted by the ancient gods; afflictions could only be cured by negating the power of the pre-European deities and establishing a new order through faith and ritual (Binney et al. 1979: 132). He became known as the ‘Mihaia Hou’ – ‘The New Messiah’ – and from 1906 his claims to ‘strange and mystic origins’, and his assertion that he was the brother of Christ (and son of Te Kooti), began to attract increasing attention from the New Zealand print media (Binney et al. 1979: 15). Figure 6.1, a famous photograph of Rua taken by James McDonald, is clearly posed in a way which suggests a visionary and messianic quality. This is one of a number of photographs of Rua taken in 1908, the year in which the building of Rua’s community at Maungapohatu was completed. In The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer, Ihimaera intimates that Maori faith healers and prophets such as Te Kooti and Rua Kenana aimed not merely to heal physical and spiritual wounds: they were also concerned with establishing a process whereby the Maori communal ‘body’, damaged by the colonization process, could be restored and strengthened through a pan-Maori nationalist initiative. Ihimaera represents Rua Kenana in particular as the founding father of a Maori nationalist ethos. Ihimaera’s account of Rua’s life and teachings is largely based on material found in Judith Binney, Gillian Chaplin and Craig Wallace’s Mihaia (1979), a

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Figure 6.1 Photograph of Rua Kenana, taken by James Ingram McDonald in 1908. ‘Timeframes’ database, reference number 1/2-01968-F, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

detailed biography of Rua Kenana. In consulting this text, it becomes apparent that Ihimaera has deployed his source material selectively, privileging certain perspectives on events to the exclusion of others in order to emphasize Rua’s putatively nationalist objectives. In constructing Rua as a radical nationalist committed to the routing of the Pakeha, for example, Ihimaera omits aspects of his philosophy which indicated his desire for accord between Maori and Pakeha. He represents Rua’s community at Maungapohatu as ‘a bastion of Maoridom against the

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Pakeha’ (1997: 139), emphasizing the separatist elements of his philosophy, and focusing upon the similarities between Rua’s followers and the oppressed Israelites. Binney et al., however, point out that many of Rua’s practical objectives were based upon observations he made while working for the Pakeha; they suggest that Maungapohatu was designed as a selfsufficient community which would ultimately prepare its denizens for survival in a Pakeha-dominated society (1979: 22, 24). Further, as Binney recounts, after speaking with the Premier (Sir Joseph Ward) in 1908, Rua was reported to have relinquished his plans for a separate Maori government. Following this meeting – known as the ‘Ceremony of Union’ – Rua adopted the maxim ‘Kotahi te Ture mo nga Iwi e Rua’ (‘one law for both peoples’), indicating his commitment to a bicultural New Zealand (1979: 37–8). Ihimaera, however, constructs the prophet as a separatist committed to ‘Maori nationalism’ (1997: 138). In representing Rua as a popular Maori nationalist leader, Ihimaera downplays the considerable and widespread Maori resistance to the prophet which existed at the time. He briefly mentions the hostility of Gisborne Maori towards Rua, but it becomes clear that this opposition is mentioned primarily in order to draw attention to his rivalry with Tamatea’s grandmother Riripeti for the leadership of the Ringatu people. Ihimaera emphasizes Rua’s failure to impress Gisborne Maori in order to enhance Riripeti’s mana, suggesting that she has the greater claim to leadership due to her descent from Te Kooti; Rua, conversely, is from the Tuhoe tribe and is therefore an outsider. Apart from this reference, however, Ihimaera tends to underplay the fact that Rua’s interests were restricted to the Tuhoe tribe; he represents the prophet as a nationalist icon representing the interests of all Maori, claiming that he has spent his life striving ‘to gather the Children of Israel and bring them as one nation in the lands upon the mountains of Israel’ (ibid.: 147). Similarly, as he concludes his account of Rua’s life and works, Ihimaera suggests that the death of the prophet was a loss mourned by all Maori, asking ‘[w]ho will lead us now to the Promised Land?’ (ibid.: 147). Such pronouncements serve to obscure the contradictory or ambivalent elements of Rua’s philosophies and his reputation with non-Tuhoe Maori, constructing him as a Maori Moses seeking to deliver his people from Pharaoh’s oppressive yoke. In addition, Ihimaera also amplifies Pakeha animosity towards Rua at various points,11 and at times he privileges Pakeha accounts of Rua’s activities over Maori versions12 – a practice somewhat at odds with his stated objectives with regard to The Matriarch, where he aimed to present Maori perspectives on New Zealand history in order to challenge Pakeha master narratives (1991: 53). In both novels, however, Ihimaera is governed by a relativist approach to history: he has suggested that history is less to do with agreed, universalized ‘facts’ than with individual or tribal perspectives on historical events, and he also points out that Maori historical discourse often blurs the boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’:

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Disease and the nation: Witi Ihimaera [There] is no such thing as History. Rather there are many histories and, even within the Maori framework, this is acknowledged. Each iwi, each hapu has a different, or, rather, tribal approach to their histories which are more parallel observations having parallel facts and parallel perceptions on the same factual events. These are further informed by the holistic frameworks of the unreal as well as the real. (ibid.: 53–4)

Ihimaera’s assertions also draw attention to the distinction between historiography, on the one hand, and historical fiction, on the other: while Ihimaera’s biographical vignettes are based on certain historical ‘facts’ and records, as a writer of fiction he is under no obligation to adhere rigidly to ‘received’ accounts of historical events. In The Dream Swimmer, Rua Kenana must therefore be read simultaneously as an historical figure and as a fictional construction deployed in order to underscore Ihimaera’s nationalist polemic. In his blend of fact and ‘fiction’, Ihimaera advances the double agenda which Stuart Murray locates at the core of postcolonial nationalist discourses: The need to write history is one that unites both postcoloniality and nationalism. The former wishes to correct the false image created by the warped logic of the colonial process. The latter seeks to provide mythologies to strengthen the sense of a collective self. Clearly, the two can, and do, combine. (Murray 1997: 10) According to Murray’s analysis, Ihimaera’s work is clearly a synthesis of postcolonial and nationalist readings of history: it seeks both to challenge Pakeha representations of the Maori, and to establish a context for the emergence of a Maori (collective) nationalism. The Dream Swimmer is also a synthesis of Pakeha and Maori historical discourses, frequently engaging with written sources, but also making use of oral testimonies, unpublished memoirs, radio interviews, and personal communications. While Ihimaera has often adjusted his factual sources and has also presented fictionalized accounts in a factual format, in using these different modes he accords equivalent authority to a variety of forms of historical discourse. Thus, he describes, for example, a linear progression of Maori leaders through history, and yet he also evokes the ancient Maori view of history as a spiralling and circular phenomenon (as discussed in the previous chapter on Hulme) encapsulated in the recurring phrase ‘Te torino whakahaere, whakamuri’, which is translated thus: ‘At the same time as the spiral is going in, it is going out. At the same time as the spiral is going forward, it is returning’ (1997: 413–14).

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Nationalism and the modern urbanized ‘body’ Ihimaera’s deployment of the spiral image as a figure for Maori approaches to history is central to his representation of prominent Maori politico-religious leaders from the early colonial days in Aotearoa to the present day. History is shown to repeat and double back upon itself, as within Tamatea’s family narrative, Riripeti – endowed with supernatural powers – is represented as a successor to Wi Pere Halbert as leader of TeWhanau-a¯-Kai (the people of Waituhi, near Gisborne), and as successor to Te Kooti within the Rongowhakaata tribe (thereby becoming Rua’s rival for the leadership of the Ringatu faith). Riripeti, in turn, selects Tamatea’s father Te Ariki – her first-born son – to succeed her as leader of TeWhanau-a¯-Kai. Similarly, Tamatea (as Te Ariki’s first-born son) then succeeds his father as leader of the Waituhi people, and he is also named as Riripeti’s chosen successor for the leadership of the Ringatu people. Riripeti, whose character dominates both The Matriarch and The Dream Swimmer, is represented as the embodiment of the objectives of the Maori sovereignty and millennialist movements. A friend of Tamatea’s, for example, places her at the centre of a collection of politico-religious icons throughout Maori post-contact history: Riripeti wasn’t the first and nor . . . the last. You only have to think of Te Atua Wera in the Bay of Islands who, in the first days of contact with the Pakeha, promised his followers they would not be killed by bullets from Pakeha guns. Te Ua Haumene was another one; his followers called themselves Tiu, Jews, and saw victory over the Pakeha being achieved by divine intervention. . . . Te Whiti o Rongomai founded the famous marae at Parihaka as the New Jerusalem. Then there was King Tawhiao, Te Maiharoa, Himiona Te Orinui and Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana. Te Kooti, of course, and after him Te Matenga Tamati and the Mihaia, Rua Kenana. Riripeti is in the same mould. (1997: 39–40) Ihimaera’s authorial voice later intervenes in order to elucidate the spiralling pattern which informs his multilayered representation of Maori politico-religious activism: In our tradition life takes the novelist and forces him or her to accept the tribal, holistic, exponential and organic nature of our narratives. In our tradition one story stimulates recollection of another and another and another. For us, there can never be only one story or one ending. All tribal cultures know that the one great truth to our narratives is that they do not end. They go on and on, an unending spiral going forward and returning in a balance of constant tension. (ibid.: 313)

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Ihimaera traces his continuum of Maori religious leaders into contemporary times, describing, for example, the philosophies of Chris or ‘Kara’ Campbell – leader of the East Coast Rastafarian movement from the 1970s until his death in 1990 – who preached that Jah/Christ would come to Aotearoa in order to deliver the Maori people from their white oppressors (ibid.: 39).13 Campbell’s Rastafarianism combined the liberationist philosophies of the earlier millennialist movements with post-war drugs- and gang-culture.14 Ihimaera uses the more negative and destructive elements of the Rastafarian movement as a focus for considering the problems faced by contemporary urbanized Maori bereft of any sense of connection to traditional values and tribal community networks, and unable (or unwilling) to adapt themselves to Pakeha socio-political structures. In spite of his objective to represent the Maori sovereignty movement as a united front, Ihimaera does recognize and acknowledge that during the process of post-war urbanization out of which the Maori Renaissance and subsequent panMaori political activism has evolved, some Maori have failed to become part of the new politically militant body, and instead have become its diseased and amputated limbs. Ill at ease in the Pakeha urban setting, Ihimaera implies, many young Maori have turned to gang culture in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find a sense of cohesion to replace the communal ‘body’ of Maori village society. Instead of healing sick bodies, these gangs destroy healthy bodies by initiating members into hard drugs and gang warfare. Tamatea’s niece, Raina, becomes a focus for Ihimaera’s exploration of urban gang culture. Raina is adopted by a gang – affiliated to the East Coast Rastafarians – who use her body during communal sex sessions, pumping her veins full of illegal drugs in order to ensure her continued dependence upon the gang organization. Although her broken body is rescued from the gang headquarters by relatives, she is beyond redemption, and dies of a drug overdose shortly after her return to the family fold. In the final pages of his novel, however, Ihimaera chooses to focus on the more positive developments in the contemporary Maori world. From the fragmentation of the Maori body politic produced by the experience and impact of colonization, he suggests, has developed a new collective purpose which will carry the Maori people towards a new millennium and a new political reality: Riripeti, I think, would have found much to excite her in the developments among the iwi Maori in the last decade. Since the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal and the great 1990 year of Protest, particularly, she would have marvelled at the transformations that have taken place in New Zealand and in Maoridom. The vigorous thrust of Te Puni Kokiri, the establishment of iwi and runanga systems of management, and of kohanga reo would have had her cheering. . . . As far as land claims are concerned, the Crown has now settled not only with Tainui but also the $120 million Kai Tahu claim. Taranaki is

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next, and other claimants are pushing ahead with their own litigation. Our claim will probably be negotiated soon, but not by any once and future king, some young Te Kooti, able to pull the sword from the stone. No, the claim will be negotiated by the runanga, the collective energy of the iwi . . . it is they who will take the iwi into the promised land of Canaan. (1997: 417) The old world of visionary leaders and religious miracles has disappeared, then, but according to Ihimaera, it has been replaced by a new political reality which is attuned to the socio-economic structures of the Pakeha world. Ihimaera asserts the immediate practical need to fight for change from within the Pakeha system: The entire fabric of New Zealand governance has reached warp speed as Maori men and women connect into the power sources of the Pakeha and, thus empowered, establish a different set of systems for the nation. . . . They are pushing through to the forefront of New Zealand politics, banking, government, health, business, media, education and the arts, opening the doors to Maori from the inside. At government, runanga and iwi levels, the signs have arrived that sovereignty draws near. (ibid.: 417) The final sentence in this passage invites a debate about what Ihimaera is envisaging when he invokes the term ‘Maori sovereignty’. Is ‘sovereignty’ here used in the sense of ‘tino rangatiratanga’ or unmitigated political power? Is he claiming that Maori will eventually govern the whole of New Zealand, or merely Maori affairs? When he asserts that Maori are currently establishing ‘a different set of systems for the nation’ does he refer to ‘the Maori nation’ as opposed to the ‘Pakeha nation’, or is he implying that there is after all only one nation, which must be governed either by Maori or by Pakeha? These are weighty questions which are not addressed directly in the novel. However, there are clues within this passage – in particular, the reference to ‘government, runanga and iwi levels’ of administration – which suggest that Ihimaera is projecting Maori selfdetermination at various socio-political levels, rather than anticipating a central Maori government which is to determine all Maori and Pakeha affairs (or, potentially, to expel the colonizing culture altogether). The question, then, is to what degree these different levels of administration are seen to represent separate iwi/tribal interests rather than (or in addition to) an overarching ‘Maori nationalist’ objective. Ihimaera’s representation of Rua Kenana as a Maori nationalist icon could imply that there exists an inalienable pan-Maori identity which has endured throughout Maori pre- and post-contact history, but (as discussed above) this

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would serve to obscure the many (and often bitter) rifts and conflicts of interest between different tribes and individuals. The term ‘Maori nationalism’ suggests a unification of purpose perhaps more applicable to postwar Maori society, where the rural–urban drift gave rise to a sense of a ‘common’ identity which was further developed through the establishment of supra-tribal marae, the growth of political and cultural activist groups, and greater involvement of Maori in the media and government (King 1985: 11; see also M. Williams 1997: 34). But even with this in view, many contemporary Maori still define themselves in terms of iwi (tribal) rather than pan-Maori identity: Mark Williams argues, for example, that recent government policy on Maori land issues – in particular the 1995 ‘fiscal envelope’ scheme, where large tracts of public land were returned to certain iwi by the government – has encouraged Maori to reassert their iwi affiliations (1997: 34). The recent implementation of the ‘marae justice’ scheme, whereby young offenders are judged and disciplined by representatives from their own iwi, is perhaps another case in point. Powhiri Rika-Heke has similarly argued that for many modern Maori, iwi affiliations still take precedence over notions of a pan-Maori identity: The situation in Aotearoa is that we, as indigenous peoples, are only Maori to outsiders or to ourselves when we can’t be bothered to differentiate and explain our differences. Amongst ourselves we talk of Ngapuhi, Ngati Hine, Te Aupouri, Te Rarawa, Ngati Kahu, Whakatohea, Ngati Porou, Kai Tahu or whatever other nation group is being referred to. As you can see it would be inconvenient to individually list the many different nations which make up the indigenous population of Aotearoa. (1997: 171–2) Rika-Heke’s and Williams’s observations therefore problematize arguments for a unifying pan-Maori nationalist discourse, at least in the sense that it can be dated back to the early post-contact period. Yet Ihimaera’s representation of Rua Kenana as a pan-Maori nationalist leader gains structural significance when considered in terms of Fanon’s model of nationalism as described in the previous chapter, particularly with reference to Fanon’s argument that postcolonial nationalism is founded upon the concept of a new national community united through a sense of shared history and/or ethnicity. Notably, in the opening pages of The Dream Swimmer, Wi Pere Halbert informs Riripeti of her status as the Ringatu leader destined to ‘drive the Pakeha back into the sea’ (1997: 16), and this mantra is then repeated throughout the novel, suggesting a continuing determination among Maori to expel the colonizing race (see also Awatere 1984). The statement gains further significance when considered alongside the novel’s treatment of European diseases as an attack

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upon the collective ‘body’ of the Maori people. In his exploration of somatic symbolism within nationalist discourse, Richard Koenigsberg suggests that nationalism is often figured as a communal project which establishes a symbolic link between the nation and the body. He interprets nationalism as a form of ‘shared’ narcissism, where the nation is figured as a body which must be tended and protected from disease and corruption (1977: 10). Within this paradigm, a colonizing culture becomes an invading organism which threatens the ‘health’ of the defending ‘body’, and which therefore must be expelled. Koenigsberg cites, by way of example, the words of Sri Aurobindo, who depicted India’s resistance to British rule as ‘the instinctive protest of Nature against the malady that was eating its way into the national system and threatened to corrupt its blood and disturb the soundness of its organs’ (Mukherjee and Mukherjee 1964: 356; cited in Koenigsberg 1977: 13–14). According to Koenigsberg’s model, the Ringatu mantra, ‘drive the Pakeha into the sea’, and Riripeti’s description of the influenza pandemic as a form of bacteriological colonialism, therefore communicate a desire to purge Aotearoa of the colonizer, the corrupt and unwelcome invader, in order to re-establish the ‘narcissistic goodness’ and health of the Maori nation. This analysis appears to push the novel towards a Fanonian model of ‘national liberation’. However, Ihimaera’s discussion of the varying objectives and levels of political participation within contemporary Maori society at the conclusion of his narrative suggests that while the projected expulsion of the colonizing culture is located within the ‘deep structure’ of the novel, it is not overtly advocated at a material level by the conclusion of the narrative. I have suggested, therefore, that as is the case with Hulme’s The Bone People, a reading of The Dream Swimmer’s somatic symbolism sheds light upon the inter-racial conflict which the text inscribes and seeks to mitigate. The Dream Swimmer is permeated with images and metaphors of pathology, from the social Darwinism which informed Pakeha readings of Maori susceptibility to European diseases, through the hysteria surrounding the 1918 pandemic, to the representation of the Maori people as a unified social ‘body’ under siege by the colonizing culture. Koenigsberg’s paradigm, whereby the ‘nation’ can only become itself by purging its unwanted ‘foreign bodies’, is not unlike Kristeva’s analysis of the abject, where the ‘clean and proper body’ is separated and protected from the unclean, and impurities are voided and distanced from the austere body. Such rhetoric appears to have informed not only the Ringatu (and Old Testament) doctrines upon which Ihimaera’s nationalist arguments are in part based, but also the Pakeha hysteria surrounding the 1918 pandemic, where ‘unclean’ Maori bodies were targeted as the source of disease and corruption. Ihimaera’s vision of two cultures at war with one another is therefore also a vision of a body at war with itself, a body which locates its sickness on either or both sides of the colonial dialectic, depending on

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which point of view is given precedence. Cultural pathology is also central to the novel that will be discussed in the next chapter. Like The Dream Swimmer, Patricia Grace’s Baby No Eyes (1998) identifies a public health scandal as a metaphor for the continuing oppression of the Maori people. The radical qualities of Grace’s narrative, however, are located not within its political predictions, but rather within its revolutionary approach to language itself as a cultural repository and as a means of public expression and self-determination.

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Language and the corporeal Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes

Patricia Grace’s novel Baby No-Eyes (1998), the main focus of discussion in this chapter, was inspired by a controversial incident involving the mutilation of a miscarried Maori child in a New Zealand hospital. As is the case with Ihimaera’s representation of the 1918 influenza pandemic in The Dream Swimmer, Grace interprets the incident as an index of various forms of cultural desecration and appropriation which have followed European colonial incursion into Aotearoa New Zealand. Like Ihimaera, Grace also investigates various forms of Maori resistance to Pakeha cultural and political hegemony, but she engages more specifically with the way in which resistance may be mounted through the manipulation of language itself as a constitutive mode of representation. This chapter investigates the way in which Grace challenges Pakeha cultural and linguistic hegemony by invoking Maori mythological narratives and attitudes to artistic construction, and by using Maori grammatical patterns in order to disrupt the univocal authority of the English language. Patricia Grace, like Witi Ihimaera, is a founding figure in New Zealand Maori literature. Born in Wellington in 1937 (of Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Toa and Te Ati Awa descent),1 Grace began to write for publication during her mid-twenties while employed as a primary school teacher in North Auckland. Individual short stories published in Te Ao Hou and the New Zealand Listener were followed by her short story collection Waiariki and Other Stories (1975), the first book-length fiction publication by a Maori woman writer. Her first novel, Mutuwhenua, was published in 1978, followed by a second collection of short stories, The Dream Sleepers, in 1980. Other publications include four short story collections: Electric City and Other Stories (1987), Selected Stories (1991), Collected Stories (1994a) and The Sky People (1994b); four novels: Potiki (1986), Cousins (1992), Baby No-Eyes (1998) and Dogside Story (2001); and several children’s books. Grace’s literary trajectory has followed a similar pattern to Ihimaera’s. While her early writing is characterized by a nostalgic affection for a rapidly disappearing rural communalism – as well as an intention to instil in non-Maori readers a greater understanding of Maori cultural concepts (Grace 1978a: 80) – the ideological shift triggered by the Maori

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Renaissance is evident in the more overtly polemical tone of her writing from the mid-1980s onwards. Grace’s writing has always contained an element of protest against Pakeha socio-political hegemony – stories such as ‘A Way of Talking’ and ‘Parade’ in Waiariki, for example, engage with issues of racial stereotyping which are widely evident throughout her later fiction – but her second novel Potiki records the more direct engagement with Maori land rights and self-determination issues which has characterized much of her writing since the mid-1980s. Potiki focuses upon the resilience of a small rural Maori community which resists the increasingly ruthless attempts made by Pakeha developers to purchase their tribal land, and as Grace has pointed out, the conflict in the narrative is partly based upon two high-profile disputes over Maori land at Bastion Point and Raglan (in the North Island), as well as events which occurred within Grace’s own community (Tausky 1991; Keown 2000a). Grace’s subsequent novel Cousins also engages with Maori land rights issues, focusing in detail upon the 1975 Maori Land March, a high-profile protest in which participants walked from Te Hapua (in the far north of the North Island) to Parliament in Wellington to petition for an end to further sales of Maori land.2 Similarly, her next novel Baby No-Eyes responds to more recent developments in Maori land rights issues: a large section of the narrative details a land dispute, involving a protest occupation of a municipal garden, which is partly based upon the 1995 Moutoa Gardens dispute in Wanganui (see Keown 2000a). Her 2001 novel, Dogside Story, anticipates current debates over Maori foreshore and seabed rights in its focus on a coastal Maori community’s attempts to safely accommodate visitors wishing to see in the new millennium sunrise at Gisborne. The Maori word for land – ‘whenua’ – also includes ‘placenta’ among its denotative meanings, documenting an intimate link between body and land which is recorded both in the traditional Maori custom of burying a child’s afterbirth on tribal land, and within Maori mythology, which figures the land as Papatuanuku, the earth-goddess whose body must be nurtured and treated with respect (Walker 1990; Keown 2000b). These connections are invoked in Potiki in order to underscore the determination of the Maori community to retain their land, and are also evident in references to the whare whakairo – the carved meeting house which forms the focal point in traditional Maori tribal communities – as an ancestral body anchoring the community to the land (Melbourne 1991; Arvidson 1991; Keown 1998). In Baby No-Eyes – the main focus of discussion in this chapter – the symbolic link between bodies and land is again evoked, this time in a vivid refiguration of a topical incident involving the mutilation of a foetus. In the novel, the incident occurs following a car accident in which a young Maori man (Shane) is killed, while his pregnant wife Te Paania survives the collision but miscarries after being rushed to hospital. As Te Paania lies unconscious after her ordeal, her baby is thrown into a

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Wastecare disposal bin by staff and retrieved (with reluctance) after Maori relatives come to claim the body. Hospital staff insist on performing an autopsy while the family waits; when the body is finally returned, the child’s eyes are missing. The horrified family members then request that the eyes be restored, and after further delays the eyes are returned without explanation or apology in a small food jar inside a supermarket carrier bag. This grisly incident is based on an event that occurred at a New Zealand hospital in 1991, and in her author’s note, Grace draws attention to the factual basis of her narrative.3 Grace uses the incident as a focus for considering differences between Maori and Pakeha attitudes to death and the body: the Pakeha hospital staff in the novel, for example, describe and treat the child’s body with clinical detachment,4 while the Maori characters are horrified and grieved by the mutilation, particularly in view of the fact that the head is considered to be tapu (sacred) in Maori culture.5 Te Paania, her lawyer friend Mahaki and other family members become convinced that the conduct of the hospital staff is based upon a racist disregard for Maori people and their culture. The hospital’s failure to understand Maori attitudes to health and the body is represented as a microcosmic sample of a wider cultural hegemony, and Baby’s mutilation generates a web of associations that extends through the various levels of the narrative. Mahaki, for example, associates Baby’s mutilation with recent legal cases he has investigated regarding the desecration of indigenous burial grounds by scientists and archaeologists wishing to excavate grave sites. He argues that like the tribal remains which have been exploited by researchers, Baby’s body has been treated as a ‘free resource’ (1998: 188), and Baby’s relatives also suspect that the hospital staff removed the child’s eyes for experimental or profit-making purposes (ibid.: 84). In discussing her novel, Grace herself makes connections between these various manifestations of cultural appropriation, suggesting that ‘what happened to the baby happened for the same reason that land is taken, or cultural items, or indigenous knowledge. It’s a new area of colonisation.’ She draws particular attention to the activities of the USbased Human Genome Diversity Project, which has ‘mapped’ the DNA of remote indigenous communities with a view to ‘patenting (thereby “owning”) rare cell types’, and points out that this research will not benefit these ‘dying communities’ but rather ‘researchers, pharmaceutical companies and people of wealthy nations’ (Keown 2000a: 57). The link between corporeal and cultural desecration made here raises echoes of Witi Ihimaera’s poem ‘Skulls and Cannibals’, where the irreverent treatment of the bones of a Maori woman accidentally uncovered by Pakeha construction workers is described as a symbolic rape or cultural violation (1996: 219–21). The manner in which Baby’s mutilation symbolizes the circumscription of her entire culture is also reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), where the tree-pattern of whip scars on Sethe’s back

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narrativizes the suffering and subjection of her fellow enslaved AfroAmericans. In Baby No-Eyes, the allegorization of recent political and scientific developments (as described above) ostensibly represents the main locus of the novel’s critique of Pakeha cultural hegemony; however, the novel’s political resonance is located as much in its narrative and linguistic strategies as in its socio-political context. As is also the case in Potiki and Cousins, for example, Baby No-Eyes features a polyphonic narrative structure which approximates the patterns of Maori whaikorero or speechmaking, in which different orators take turns to offer individual perspectives on a topic of discussion. There are four narrators in the novel, including Te Paania herself, her second child Tawera, her mother Kura, and Mahaki, a Maori lawyer and friend of the family. Each narrator gives an account of Baby’s mutilation and its aftermath in his/her own distinctive idiom, offering different perspectives on the shared trauma of the event. As I will demonstrate below, the novel enacts a process of collective enunciation, as well as exploring the cortico-visceral effects of grief and violent trauma. Of the four narrators, Tawera in particular develops a special bond with his deceased sister, and the intimacy of their relationship leads him to a number of startling realizations at the end of the novel. This sibling relationship becomes a locus for the novel’s interrelated discourses on body, language and identity. In view of this, the discussion of the novel which follows is divided into three main sections, beginning with an account of Tawera and Baby’s ‘friendship’ within the context of psychoanalytic theories on the relationship between body-image and identity construction; second, investigating the way in which Grace challenges phallogocentric models of gender through invoking Maori mythological narratives and attitudes to artistic construction; and, finally, analysing Grace’s unconventional narrative strategies as a form of revolutionary linguistic practice, with reference to the psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

In the beginning: psychoanalysis, the body, and identityformation Tawera, the issue of a brief but amicable relationship between Te Paania and a colleague named Greg, is conceived partly in order to salve his mother’s pain over the loss of her daughter. Tawera first learns of his older sister’s existence as he dwells in a Kristevan semiotic space, communicating with his mother minutes after he is born: ‘I want you to know you’re not an only child. . . . You have a sister four years and five days older than you’ [my mother said]. ‘Now I see her,’ I said, ‘Shot. Two holes in her head.’ ‘You mean she has no eyes,’ my

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mother said. ‘You mean her eyes were stolen.’ So, I made a mistake about the bullet holes. (1998: 19) In this exchange, an image of the disfigured child is transferred from mother to infant, although Tawera mistakenly assumes that Baby’s empty eye-sockets are bullet wounds. From this moment of flawed insight, Tawera produces a mental identikit of Baby; she becomes a companion who grows alongside him, always remaining four years his senior. Baby’s role in the novel invites a variety of interpretations, and throughout the narrative she appears variously as a figment of Tawera’s imagination, a literary device, and a palpable spiritual entity that inhabits Tawera’s body. She functions as a floating signifier, shifting chameleon-like between different roles as the text progresses, rather like the eponymous anti-heroine in Morrison’s Beloved. Like Baby, Beloved manifests herself variously as a palpable physical presence, a phantasmagoric ‘poltergeist’ figure, and a private companion for a surviving sibling. In the early sections of the novel, Tawera’s interactions with his deceased sister imply that she is an internalized phantasy figure or ‘imaginary friend’ which child psychologists identify as a common psychological manifestation during a child’s normal ego-development (Davidson and Fay 1972). At certain moments in the narrative Baby does appear as a mutable phantasy figure within Tawera’s mind, and his mental imago takes account of her mutilation in various ways. On most occasions he envisages her as a child normal in every respect apart from her missing eyes. His imagination runs wild, however, when it comes to visualizing what has happened to those eyes. When Tawera learns, for example, that Baby was buried with her eyes wrapped in a silk scarf around her midriff, he develops a detailed mental image of her ‘stomach eyes’, and appears to incorporate Baby’s mutilation into a model of gender based upon the constitutive power of the phallus. Tawera envisages Baby’s ‘eyes’ positioned either side of her belly button, which has become ‘a little bit of wrinkled forehead between these eyes’, and figures her torso as ‘an elephant face’ missing ‘one very important piece’: the trunk (1998: 74). Tawera suggests a possible solution to this problem: If you had a raho [penis] like mine, that would’ve been the elephant’s trunk which flops down over its mouth like a long nose. . . .’ ‘What’s raho?’ she said. I pulled my own pants down and put her hand on my raho, let her give it a good pull. (ibid.: 76). This exchange appears to enact a Freudo-Lacanian Oedipal moment, as Tawera perceives his phantasy-sister’s ‘castration’ and seeks to empower her by ‘lending’ her the phallus. The Maori word ‘raho’ is crucial here: it

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refers not just to the penis but also to the testicles, which serve as a substitute for Baby’s missing eyeballs. Tawera’s genitals therefore not only fill in a perceived biological ‘gap’; his raho also gives Baby a vicarious specular identity; as she acknowledges: ‘“I have you to be my eyes”’ (ibid.: 75). While Tawera’s fantasy might appear to represent the feminine as the passivized ‘inscriptional space’ of a ‘masculine signifying act’ (Butler 1993: 39), it soon becomes evident that the relationship between Tawera and Baby is symbiotic: while he bestows the phallus upon her, it is only together that they form a complete unit. Both children have elements to contribute to the ‘elephant game’, as he later explains to his mother: Baby has ‘stomach eyes and no trunk’, while Tawera has ‘a trunk and no eyes’ (in his torso region, at least) (1998: 77). Further, as the narrative progresses, Tawera’s conceptualization of his sister’s damaged body changes radically, and the concluding sections of the novel re-evaluate the construction of sexual difference by asserting the social and symbolic power of the womb and the female genitalia. In the interim period, however, Tawera’s ruminations upon Baby’s mutilation become increasingly dark and threatening. He compares her empty eye sockets to holes burned through wood with a ‘red-hot poker’ (ibid.: 80) and experiences periodic violent nightmares which distort and exaggerate Baby’s wounds (ibid.: 174). Tawera’s mental torture appears – at least in part – due to an internalized sense of guilt arising from the acknowledgement that he survived while his sister did not (ibid.: 134). He attempts to purge his guilty feelings by claiming that his sister is churlish and jealous of him, and this ‘jealousy’ often manifests itself violently: as he argues and battles with Baby in his mind, Tawera begins to suffer a series of injuries, stumbling in the street, tripping on the stairs, falling over in his room and bruising himself. His visible injuries are a concern to his mother, who notices a row of bruises along his arm and is unconvinced by Tawera’s claims that his wounds are accidental (ibid.: 193). Tawera’s mysterious ‘injuries’ appear consistent with the observations of child psychologist Atle Dyregrov, who notes that children often attempt to ameliorate parental grief by manifesting ‘bodily complaints’ which divert parental attention from the pain of bereavement (1990: 21, 24). Given that Tawera is a fictional character, however, it is of course spurious to read him as a ‘test case’ for theories of child psychology, although Grace has, throughout her fiction, always been particularly skilful in her construction of the inner life of child characters.6 As I will demonstrate further below, although Tawera is vividly characterized, he is in many ways an emblematic figure within Grace’s text, arguably becoming a fictional counterpart of the author herself as the novel draws to a close. Further, while Baby does appear predominantly as Tawera’s ‘imaginary friend’, at certain points in the narrative she is as ‘real’ to Te Paania7 and Gran Kura as she is to Tawera, and cannot, therefore, be interpreted

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merely as a phantasy-figure within Tawera’s mind. As she sickens and approaches death, for example, Gran Kura recognizes that Tawera is becoming increasingly exhausted by his duties as custodian of Baby’s wairua (spiritual essence), and she offers to take Baby with her on her post-death journey to Te Po, the afterlife.8 Although Tawera is reluctant to part with Baby, he agrees to Kura’s proposition, and at Kura’s funeral he envisages the pair of them travelling to Te Reinga at the northern tip of the North Island and jumping into the sea, presumably making their journey back to Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland (1998: 288). In this episode, Baby’s persona may be evaluated within the context of traditional Maori beliefs in relation to the supernatural. Post-death narration is used in both Potiki and Cousins, where dead children communicate with family members and/or the reader, and Baby similarly functions as a spiritual presence, an essence which is transferred between various living family members. As Baby herself puts it, she was sent ‘back’ to the material world for a time in order to ease Te Paania’s pain (ibid.: 222). Grace, like Ihimaera and Hulme, allows for a flexible interpretation of ontological categories, suggesting that a belief in spirits and spiritual transference is still a valid component of Maori cosmogony. Aged 13 when Kura dies, Tawera feels the loss of his companion keenly; years after Baby’s departure, he is still left with a terrifying ‘inner space’, an absence or imbalance which he attempts to redress by indulging his childhood passion for art and painting (ibid.: 292). It is through Tawera’s role as an artist, and his observations in the epilogue of the novel, that the symbolic elements of Grace’s text are fully realized.

The maternal body as a constitutive signifier: Ma¯ori mythology, Ma¯ori art, and the reconfiguration of subjectivity Maori artist figures are highly significant throughout Grace’s fiction. Her most extended exploration of the role of the artist is found in Potiki, which opens with an account of a master carver who, as he approaches death, passes on his skills to a young boy within his tribe. The carver is the link between past and present; he produces carvings of tribal ancestors which are placed within the whare whakairo, the carved meeting house which forms the focal point in the community. He is the vehicle for a force beyond himself, master not of his materials nor of what he creates but only of ‘the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree’ (1986: 7). The master carver’s creative role is paralleled by women in the novel who weave and construct tukutuku or lattice-work panels for the whare whakairo: they, too, fulfil a significant creative function within Maori society. A detailed reading of Grace’s novel suggests that the weavers and the carver metaphorically represent the role of the Maori writer, who also (as

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indicated in Grace’s own early statements about her responsibilities) becomes a spokesperson for his/her culture and weaves together various cultural tissues or strands in order to create new structures and meanings (Grace 1978a: 80–3). In Baby No-Eyes, Tawera performs a similar role to the carver and weavers in Potiki. Even as a young child, he is a keen artist, absorbed in painting pictures of his family and producing works of art for his relatives. The epilogue of the novel is narrated by an older Tawera who is about to begin a university degree in order to develop his skills as an artist (1998: 291). Until this moment, all artwork he has produced is incomplete, imperfect: [E]ach of these sketches, drawings, paintings, holds a missing piece, a section of paper that is blank. . . . In each one, space pushes itself outward, and . . . brings the eye towards it. Or on closed eyes it imprints on the retina, a patch that is dark and trembling, the size and shape of an egg. (ibid.: 292) This ‘space’, to which Tawera frequently refers throughout the novel, is multivalent and becomes an important symbolic figure within the narrative. In terms of space as void or absence, the word represents both the lonely emptiness Tawera experiences when Baby leaves, and also Baby’s empty eye sockets, tangible reminders of her mutilation. The metaphor also extends into other spatial dimensions, however, which are illuminated through a consideration of Maori mythology. First, as Tawera himself points out, the ‘space’ represents Te Kore, which translates as ‘the void’ or ‘the nothing’; it is the vacuum that – according to Maori mythology – existed before life began (ibid.: 293). As Ranginui Walker observes, although Te Kore ‘signified space’, it also ‘contained in its vastness the seeds of the universe and was therefore a state of potential’ (1990: 11). Te Kore is thus a paradoxical state, representing both lifelessness or lack, and also the potential for life and growth. This paradox is central to Tawera’s artistic development and the novel’s referential framework, as I will demonstrate further below. A second mythological intertext9 for Grace’s novel is the Maui mythcycle: like Albert Wendt, Grace invokes the exploits of the mischievous demi-god Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga as a cosmogonic framework for her narratives. In Potiki, for example, one of the central characters (named Toko) is modelled on Maui, and the novel allegorizes a number of the Mauimyths, including Maui’s abortive journey into the womb of the deathgoddess Hine-nui-te-Po.10 Baby No-Eyes is also implicitly informed by this myth; the womb is identified as an originary and vital entity in the novel, and the ‘space’ Tawera refers to also connotes the womb of Hine-nui-tePo, which – like Te Kore – paradoxically represents both life and death, being the nurturing space in which life begins, and also the death-trap

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where Maui perished in his quest for immortality. The egg-shaped ‘space’ Tawera identifies therefore signifies emptiness or lack but also presence and potential; it is the lifeless void but also the space from which life begins, and it represents both the birth canal and the death passage, Te Whare o Aitua. 11 Initially, Tawera attempts unsuccessfully to fill this void or ‘space’ which invades his paintings. One night, however, he finds the answer to his dilemma in an alleyway, where he catches sight of two words inscribed on a door in red marker pen: ‘Try Opposite’ (1998: 293). Inspired by the cryptic message, he returns home to try again: [N]ow, instead of trying to shrink the egg of space, I begin to enlarge it. Instead of ending with that little unbreachable gap I begin with it . . . pushing my drawing further and further to the outskirts. I persist . . . until one night everything’s gone, fallen from the edges of the paper. Spaze. Te Kore, the nothing.12 (ibid.: 293) In his moment of enlightenment, Tawera realizes that ‘spaze’ is not, after all, a breach in nature which must be filled. Instead it is an allencompassing space which embraces the realms of life and death, terra firma and underworld. Tawera’s epiphanic experience effects a reorientation of meaning that may also be interpreted, in Judith Butler’s terms, as a repositioning of the signifier. Butler argues that because the phallus itself can be represented and understood in many different forms – so that, for example, an arm, a pen, a nose, or a sword may represent the phallus – then it is possible to reposition that signifier to express a female constitutive authority. The synecdochal function of ‘phallic’ objects, she argues, allows for the repositioning of the ‘centre of control’, allowing other phenomena, including female body parts, to assume the phallic function (1993: 89). Towards the end of Baby No-Eyes, Tawera as the artist-figure effects a comparable process of resignification. With the Maui myth-cycle functioning as a subtext, the female body is reconceptualized not as the inverse or consequence of the male specular image (Irigaray 1984); instead it becomes the originary source of meaning, displacing the phallus as privileged signifier. Tawera’s (phallic) pen and paintbrush, for example, are figured as mere conduits through which a more powerful female reality is articulated, as he is motivated, by a force beyond himself, to render his sister ‘visible’. Baby No-eyes becomes ‘Sister Seen’ (1998: 294), her wounds raw and open but triumphantly emblematic: I squeeze fresh paint on to a saucer, lift a dob of it onto a fine brush and reach, breaching space with a drop of red. . . . I begin to work the drop . . . adding colour, moulding it out . . . and stretching it outwards

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Notable in this description are the open mouth and arms, the bursting, outward movement, and the lack of containment in Tawera’s new, epiphanic representation of his late sister. Although Tawera’s painting still acknowledges the horror of Baby’s mutilation, the threatening, gaping red wounds in Tawera’s earlier dreams have been replaced by a celebration of the open female body, pointing towards the nurturing, fertile space of the womb. The eye is drawn both into and away from the painting in an ebb and flow of expressive energy. If Baby’s lack is to become presence, then that reinterpreted ‘space’ evokes the omnipresence of Hine-nui-te-Po, the death goddess through whose toothed vagina all must pass on the way to the underworld. In this way the female body – particularly the womb itself – is equated with the ‘spaze’ which orders existence. The female body is also central to the structural framework of the novel, as the narrative opens and concludes within the nurturing space of the womb. At the beginning of the narrative, for example, Tawera describes himself rolling, kicking and bumping along inside his mother’s womb as she ‘lap laps’ along the wet road in her rubber jandals13 and subsequently takes a bus ride, allowing Tawera to relax, safe inside his mother’s body as she takes a nap: ‘I went slow, slow swimming, hi-aa heiaa, hi-aa hei-aa, then curled myself and went to sleep too, karm, karm’ (ibid.: 9–10). Thus Tawera’s earliest sensations filter into his amniotic sanctuary as he flips and swims, tadpole-like, within his mother’s body. Similarly, at the end of the novel, following his recognition of the benign, absorbing power of the womb of space, Tawera rediscovers the rhythms and pulses of the maternal body: as he anticipates all that he has yet to learn, he imagines himself in a womb-like space once again, ‘bumping along, or lap lapping, or karm karm or on a roll, hi-aa hei-aa’ (ibid.: 294). In unlocking the secrets of the void Tawera rediscovers calm (‘karm’) and recaptures the movements and sensations of the maternal/mythical body without, Maui-like, returning to the maternal body: he imagines himself with a tadpole-like ‘tail’ which is still shrinking, indicating his growing maturity and autonomy (ibid.: 294).

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Art and the semiotic: linguistic deterritorialization and the ‘third space’ Grace’s symbolist strategies can be further illuminated through a consideration of Julia Kristeva’s theories on motherhood and language. The ‘space/spaze’ Tawera invokes resembles Kristeva’s semiotic ‘space’, the pre-linguistic ‘chora’ in which the child experiences complete physical fusion with the maternal body. Kristeva points out that this union between mother and child is experienced through sensation and rhythm rather than language; and suggests that the child’s first attempts at speech following the trauma of birth are ‘vocal and muscular contractions’ which ‘make up for the absence of intrauterine life components’ (1980: 281–2). Kristeva’s ‘contractions’ appear in Grace’s text as the repeating phrase ‘hi-aa hei-aa’, which has no fixed denotative meaning in itself but nevertheless evokes the child’s movements and sensations within the womb, expressing the jouissance of the mother–child union. The onomatopoeic ‘lap-lap’ of Te Paania’s jandals becomes a similarly evocative representation of the rhythmic, pre-linguistic lines of communication between mother and child in pregnancy, expressing not only sound but also movement and sensation. Kristeva attributes to certain expressive art forms the ability to evoke the semiotic by occupying an intermediary space that challenges the binary, rationalized significatory structures of the symbolic. She claims that performative or visual forms such as music, art, drama and theatre inhabit a liminal ‘third space’, positioned between the semiotic and the symbolic, which ‘represents the flow of jouissance into language’ (1984: 79–80). Tawera’s artwork appears to function in similar terms. In his infancy as an artist, Tawera is only able to express sensations of bereavement and emptiness, identifying the absence of the maternal womb, or the lost object. But as he matures he is able to reinterpret that yawning space not as an absence but rather as a joyful and vital presence, and as a source of expressive energy. His paintbrush is transformed into a conduit for a force beyond himself; it becomes a medium for the non-verbal communication of images, movements and energies. It is also possible to extend Kristeva’s paradigm into a more fundamental level of Grace’s text in order to account for her use of language as an expression of the semiotic. Kristeva claims that certain verbal art forms, poetry in particular, are also able to express the semiotic by disrupting ‘lexical, syntactic and semantic’ levels of signification (1984: 103). She suggests that it is more difficult for a ‘syntactical’ narrative form such as the novel to convey the semiotic, but claims that novelists such as James Joyce have escaped this paradigm by radically challenging novelistic and linguistic conventions, releasing semiotic energies and drives which militate against the laws of the symbolic. Texts such as Ulysses (1922) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) feature a polyphony of voices and

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sensations, expressing semiotic or non-linguistic modes of communication such as ‘colour, sound and gesture, which enter the text as a transgression of the coded boundaries of syntax, grammar and sexual identity’ (A.-M. Smith 1998: 53). Similar strategies and effects are found in abundance in Grace’s multilayered narrative. Many sections of the novel – particularly those narrated by adults – convey syntagmatic (or ‘syntactical’) patterns of signification. However, Grace is also particularly skilful in capturing the rhythms of the language of children, whom Kristeva herself has described as closer to the semiotic in their frequent use of non-lexical forms of communication such as wordless singing (Kristeva 1993; A.-M. Smith 1998). In Grace’s novel, Tawera’s narrative sequences are full of semiotic irruptions, particularly at the beginning of the novel where, in Joycean fashion, he describes his first memories and perceptions. Unlike Joyce’s ‘young artist’, however, Tawera forms memories even before he has left the womb (1998: 7). The entire prologue is infused with sounds, colours, smells, textures, and sensations of heat and cold, as Tawera describes his pregnant mother taking him for a ‘walk’ down a suburban street and making a subsequent bus trip into town. He describes every sensation, from the sound of his mother’s jandals flicking up rain, to the vibrant colours of the flower gardens and his mother’s clothing; the smell of diesel, petrol and rubber; the ‘staticky’ upholstery on the bus; the hot coffee and food his mother ingests; and even his own sinuous ‘tadpole’ movements, as he turns inside his mother’s womb (ibid.: 9–10). The following paragraph – which describes the walk down the street – is characteristic of this style; it carries the reader back and forth between image, colour, sound and sensation: We could see in the brightening light that here the gardens were all colour coded . . . white purple pink, pink white blue, white cream lilac, colour code, colour code, colour code. Lap, lap, lap. . . . Over the clipped green lawns were mats of kowhai flowers and scatterings of old grapefruit and mandarins. Piled on top of it all were browning camellia heads – down every frontage, coagulated. So much it made you want to heave, throw up, chundalucka, technicolour yawn. . . . Could’ve brought on a nosebleed. (ibid.: 8) The repetitive rhythms and sensory details in this passage draw the reader beyond the text and into the corporeal realm. In a similar manner, Tawera’s childhood conversations with Baby seem to evoke this semiotic world, not least because Baby lacks sight, or vision, which – according to Lacan’s mirror-phase paradigm – precipitates the moment of entry into the symbolic. Tawera therefore interprets the world for his sister by means of the language of sensation. He describes the appearance of a tree, for example, by charting its dimensions, the feel of its bark, the arm-span cir-

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cumference of its trunk. On a number of occasions, he explains colour through sound and sensation (ibid.: 135, 190), and when describing the colours in a stained glass window, he is forced to reconceptualize the way in which he distinguishes between various hues, continually recontextualizing and elucidating visual images with reference to other senses: ‘Diagonally, here to here, there’s a wavy yellow strip, like a flowing river. Yellow is touching a number two hair shave with the palm of your hand. On the top side of the yellow river . . . are diamonds in a dark blue sky. . . . Dark blue is when you pull down your bottom eyelids and let hard, cold wind blow on your soft eye meat.’ ‘What colour are the diamonds?’ ‘No-colour, see-through . . . It’s a hand on any cat’s purr. . . . Red is someone blowing a long sound on a conch before the dancing begins.’ (ibid.: 139) Having developed these alternative significatory codes during his childhood conversations with Baby, Tawera maintains his semiotic skills even after Baby leaves him. In the epilogue, for example, he continues to re-negotiate and re-adjust the boundaries of meaning and signification, locating meaning not just in words or abstract concepts but in corporeal sensations, thereby remaining suspended between semiotic and symbolic worlds. He goes out to ‘read’ faces and objects, looking for words and signs to ‘come talking into me’ (ibid.: 292–3). Inhabiting this liminal space, Tawera learns to interpret signs with both outer and inner vision, and his references to egg shapes and inner ‘space’ (ibid.: 294) again trigger Joycean multiple associations with the womb, with conception, with Tawera’s existence as a ‘tadpole’ embryo, with Baby’s disfigurement, with Hine-nui-te-Po, and with the emptiness within Tawera left by Baby’s absence. Grace’s skill is in evoking these associations semiotically: the reader is constantly compelled to make associative leaps between words, images and concepts, and Grace’s linguistic strategies consistently draw the reader’s attention back to the body as a sensory, physical entity, and to memory as vehicle for the evocation of bodily experiences. As Kristeva suggests, the semiotic in language leads the subject to ‘discover himself as subject of a body that is pulverized, dismembered, and refashioned according to the polylogue’s bursts of instinctual drive-rhythm’ (1980: 186). Kristeva’s assertions are borne out in Grace’s novel, which begins with images of violence, maiming, mutilation and fragmentation; yet by the end of the novel Tawera’s epiphanic vision shapes those images into a ‘refashioned’ and infinite entity: the womb of the death-goddess, and its connection with the ‘spaze’ within Te Kore. Rather like growth rings within a tree, the word begins on a surface, syntactic level, but subsequently fragments and reaches back through multiple layers of memory and experience to a primal state, its echoes

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radiating back and forth between the manifold layers of sensation and experience. This concentric model also encapsulates the way in which Grace views the act of storytelling, which – as is the case in her other polyphonic narratives – is specifically linked with Maori perspectives on history and oral narrative. As Roimata – one of the narrators in Potiki – points out during a description of Maori community narratives, history is viewed not as a linear process but rather as a spiralling phenomenon: [A]lthough the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings . . . each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined. (1986: 41) In Baby No-Eyes, this view of time is evoked not only through the semiotic pulses within Tawera’s language, but also through the concentric patterns of the multilayered narrative, which leaps back and forth between key temporal moments and perspectives. Te Paania’s narrative, for example, is interwoven with a network of other personal testimonies that she transcribes from audio tapes. These ‘stories’ include oral historical testimonies as recorded by her mother Kura, as well as various taped communications between members of Mahaki’s iwi and the local council recorded during a protracted dispute over the ownership of tribal land. As Te Paania immerses herself in these various narratives, she invokes the circle metaphor, describing herself as being at the ‘centre’ of this activity with all the different aspects of her life radiating out in ‘ever-widening circles’ about her (1998: 176). This is a pattern of ebb and flow: Te Paania visualizes the various components of her individual and community existence spiralling outwards from her, yet the different layers of narrative, and the different voices which weave together that interlocking web of stories, reverberate through those concentric circles and back to the centre again. Grace’s approach to narrative therefore offers an alternative method of understanding memory, time, and indeed narrative itself: instead of emerging as a linear thread, each section of the narrative operates within a spiralling structure, constantly returning back to its source and pulsing outwards again. Grace’s incorporation of oral narrative patterns, and more specifically her use of Maori language and grammatical patterns in her writing, can also be considered in terms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s discussion of bilingualism and polylingualism as potentially subversive practices. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), Deleuze and Guattari describe the liminal status of the ‘minor’ writer, one who uses the language of a

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dominant culture or class but ‘deterritorialises’ that majority language in a politically enabling and subversive manner. They argue that the ‘minor’ writer, writing in a ‘major’ language, can still ‘make strange’ or defamiliarize that language by allowing the ‘minor’ language – particularly its grammatical or conceptual categories – to infiltrate the syntax of the ‘major’ language (ibid.: 26). The ‘minority’ language therefore ‘inhabits’ or ‘occupies’ the dominant language, undermining any sense of univocal authority. As a ‘minority’ Maori writer using the English language,14 and in her incorporation of Maori language and grammatical patterns into her narrative, Grace exposes what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘points of nonculture . . ., linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play’ (ibid.: 26–7).15 Grace’s linguistic strategies are particularly significant given the current status of the Maori language within New Zealand society. In the 1970s, when Grace’s early publications first appeared, a landmark language survey revealed that while most Maori still spoke their native language in the early decades of the twentieth century, a huge reduction in speakers had taken place by the time the survey was undertaken: most native speakers were over thirty years of age, and only around 2 per cent of children were growing up speaking Maori as a first language (McRae 1991: 2; Waite 1992). Since the establishment of Ko¯hanga Reo (Maori language ‘nests’ for those below school age) and Kura Kaupapa Maori (Maori language primary and secondary schools) from the late 1970s, the number of young children speaking Maori has increased, but it is not clear at this stage whether or not Maori will survive far into this century as a vernacular language. At the very least the grammar of the language is changing significantly due to the influence or transference of English grammatical structures across to Maori. A child of her times,16 Grace grew up speaking English as her first language, but she reveals that she has incorporated Maori words and phrases into her ‘English sentences’ ever since her childhood (1999: 72). This practice of code-switching between English and Maori is apparent throughout Grace’s fiction, and is used as a marker of cultural identity particularly among middle-aged or older characters, in keeping with the demographic profile of Maori speakers in the post-war period. While Grace’s early publications included glossaries and contextual translation of Maori words and phrases, from the publication of Potiki Grace has made far fewer concessions for non-Maorispeaking readers, and has recently argued that writers from ‘small population cultures’ should not have to ‘other’ their language and culture by providing glossaries and other explanatory information for readers (1999: 71–2). Grace’s arguments point towards the ‘deterritorialising’ strategies which Deleuze and Guattari discuss, according Maori (and other ‘small

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population’ languages) an authoritative semiotic status that serves to challenge the global dominance of English. In Baby No-Eyes, Grace’s ‘deterritorialisation’ strategies move well beyond the practice of codeswitching or code-mixing, which at its most basic level may be described as switches between languages within a single paragraph, sentence or phrase (Saville-Troike 1989: 59). The real gaps and fissures are found where Grace transfers Maori grammatical and conceptual codes across into the syntax of English, creating syncretic ‘Third World’ zones where the two languages meet and overlap. The speech of Mahaki’s grandfather offers a particularly striking example of this process. The old man’s first language is Maori, therefore his English is ‘invaded’ and to some extent ordered by Maori grammatical structures. The following example is representative: There was this old man Hori who talk to me about Anapuke. Well that hill, that Anapuke, you don’t hardly talk about. It’s from the far, old times, when there’s only the Maori. . . . You go there it’s trouble . . . and it’s far. Far to us childrens. (1998: 151) The syntactical ‘errors’ in this passage may be accounted for by examining some basic rules of Maori grammar. Tense or mood, for example, is expressed in Maori not through modification to the verb itself but rather through the choice of preceding verbal particle. Thus s/he goes is ‘kei te haere ia’ (particle marking present tense {kei te} + verb {haere} + pronoun {ia}), while s/he went is ‘I haere ia’ (particle marking past tense {i} + verb {haere} + pronoun {ia}). This grammatical rule may account for the fact that verbal inflections for person, number and tense are lost in the old man’s speech (hence, for example, ‘who talk’ in the first sentence, ‘there’s only’ in the third, ‘it’s trouble’ in the fourth, and so on), although it could also be argued that such ‘errors’ are characteristic of the speech of those for whom English is a second language, whatever their cultural background. More specifically, and particularly within the context of Maori oral narrative, verbal particles marking particular tenses are often replaced by the non-specific verbal particle ‘ka’, which precedes the verb but has no specific tense value in itself, merely marking the phrase in which it occurs as verbal (Harlow 1989: 202). Tense is judged from context; therefore if a speaker begins a story in the past tense (I + verb), s/he can subsequently mark all subsequent verbs with ‘ka’ with the tacit understanding that the past tense is being expressed. This may account for the fact that all the old man’s verbs except the first ‘was’ are in the present tense in the above extract, although it is clear from the context that he is speaking of past events. In addition, the old man omits the pronoun ‘it’ from the end of his

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second sentence; while one could argue that this represents a change of tack partway through the sentence and is therefore a ‘mistake’ which might be made by a first-language English speaker, a more likely explanation is that this ‘error’ comes about because the grammar of Maori (particularly in narrative) permits omission of pronouns. For example, within the context of a story about a girl who has been named (or referred to) earlier in the narrative (or in an earlier clause), in a later sentence or clause a verbal phrase such as ‘she went’ can be reduced from ‘ka haere ia’ (verbal particle + verb + pronoun) to ‘ka haere’ (verbal particle + verb). This phrase – which translates directly as ‘went’ – would be an unusual truncation in English if it was to appear as a complete sentence in its own right. In Maori, however, this is a common construction. According to this analysis, the second sentence in the above quotation may be read not as a strangely constructed English sentence, but rather as a direct translation from Maori. A further example of grammatical transference occurs in the old man’s expression of mass and count nouns, which are not differentiated in Maori. For example, ‘a book’ and ‘some food’ would be expressed using the same indefinite article ‘he’ (as in ‘he pukapuka’ and ‘he kai’), although in English ‘book’ is a count noun and ‘food’ is a mass noun. In the novel, the old man demonstrates this practice when he expresses his suspicion that bioprospectors are desecrating a burial site on his ancestral land so that they can become famous ‘for putting a Maori in a sheep or rising a Maori up from a dust’ (1998: 186). Here the count noun ‘sheep’ and the mass noun ‘dust’ are both preceded by the indefinite article, indicating the old man’s recourse to Maori grammatical patterns. Te Paania’s grandfather makes a similar ‘mistake’ as he speaks to Te Paania about her dreams and fantasies that Baby is still with her. The grandfather accounts for Baby’s posthumous presence by arguing that she must remain for a time ‘so we know she’s a mokopuna, not a rubbish, not a kai’ (ibid.: 83). Here, Mahaki’s grandfather marks the mass noun ‘rubbish’ with the indefinite article, as he did with the mass noun ‘dust’. The last phrase ‘not a kai’, which translates literally as ‘not a food’, is the same kind of construction. At times, Mahaki’s grandfather’s speech also mimics the rhythms of Maori oratory, which, rather like the biblical language of the Old Testament, makes frequent use of repetition for rhetorical purposes. During an impassioned speech to council staff investigating a land claim, for example, he switches into this repetitive style: I come from the ground I tell you. . . . I come from the ground and the heavens. I come from the ground and the heavens in the most most faraway place. I come from the ground and the heavens in the longest longest time ago. (ibid.: 156)

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As Mahaki observes, the old man’s oration is lost on the council workers, who are mystified by his syntax (ibid.: 156). In this exchange, Grace produces an estrangement effect: the old man’s speech is not intelligible to the council representatives, although both parties are speaking the same language. These various strategies therefore demarcate a linguistic ‘Third World zone’ within Grace’s text, creating a separate expressive mode that blends Maori and English vocabulary and grammatical patterns. This practice also contributes to the corporeal rhythms of the text: at one stage, for example, Te Paania listens to a transcript where Mahaki’s grandfather discusses his concerns about the possible desecration of his ancestral burial site at Anapuke (which translates as ‘cave hill’): he fears the Pakeha will ‘take spirit from blood, cut our dust, murder our dust because a wheua, a toto, a hupe, a makawe is all’ (ibid.: 186). The old man code-switches into Maori here, and his words are not immediately translated; instead they are interpolated between passages of dialogue across the pages which follow, as Te Paania speaks to Mahaki and his partner Dave with the words on the tape echoing in her mind. Te Paania translates and articulates separately each of the four Maori words – meaning ‘bone’, ‘blood’, ‘mucus’ and ‘hair’ – and her translations become a commentary on Mahaki’s statements as well as a reference back to the taped monologue. The translated words are thus strewn through the text just as the old man fears the body parts of the ancestors – reduced mainly to ‘dust’ – will be disturbed, scattered and desecrated. Grace’s linguistic strategies therefore release a double layer of meaning which again serves to estrange readers unfamiliar with the Maori language. The strategy also enacts a form of double articulation, as the oral transcript is translated and ‘replayed’ to Te Paania (and the reader) as the narrative progresses, interweaving oral and written modes of expression. The intersection between written expression and oral enunciation occurs at various moments throughout the novel, shifting the narrative mode from what often appears to be conventional first-person ‘written’ narration into the realm of oral immediacy. Chapter 7, for example, forms a section of Kura’s share of the narrative, and most of the chapter (which recounts her role in the recovery of Baby’s body) is conveyed through first-person narration. Part way through the chapter, however, Kura suddenly switches to second-person narration, addressing not the reader, but members of her own family, pointing out that she ‘kept watch by Te Paania until you, her family, arrived’, and that ‘[y]ou all agreed it was my job to see to Baby’ (ibid.: 59). In the chapter which follows, it becomes clear that these words are being (or have been) spoken at the joint funeral ceremony for Baby and her father Shane, again creating a sense of double – or in this case triple – articulation. Te Paania reports and repeats the very words Kura uses (or has used) when describing a Pakeha doctor’s clinical attitude to Baby’s death, thereby creating a Chinese-box effect and drawing the reader’s attention back to the previous chapter, in which

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Kura quoted the doctor’s dehumanizing references to Baby as ‘body’ and ‘corpse’ (ibid.: 61). Kura’s narrative seems therefore to exist in three dimensions: first, there are the words on the page itself (initially in first person); second, there is the immediacy of oral articulation as Kura’s mode of address shifts to second person; and finally, Te Paania’s repetition ten pages later recreates a separate arena of immediate articulation as the words are spoken to the funeral congregation. The narrative structure of the novel therefore mimetically represents the Maori ritual of whaikorero, where different orators speak in turn on the marae. The clue to these strategies is given early in the novel, where Tawera reveals that the various ‘stories’ in the novel represent a collective enunciation. When Tawera asks his mother about what happened to Baby, she tells him that she, Gran Kura, Mahaki and Tawera must all tell Baby’s story ‘in our different ways’ (ibid.: 19). Tawera agrees enthusiastically, and the various narrators then recount their own version(s) of Baby’s story in the chapters which follow. This exchange between Tawera and his mother is therefore a key to the text in its entirety, which not only mimics the tradition of whaikorero but also points towards Maori attitudes to history as a dynamic process which is – as Ihimaera has also pointed out – articulated and rearticulated from various individual and tribal perspectives. In Grace’s novel, each speaker transforms shared knowledge of basic historical details into an individual narrative; Grace therefore moves beyond Bakhtinian polyphony and towards Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that ‘minor literature’ performs a ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ which represents the interests of the ‘minor’ writer’s own culture (1986: 18). Through its network of linguistic strategies, the novel becomes a performative and communal enunciative act (see also Durix 1997: 284). While Grace’s text therefore enacts this ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’, Grace also assigns each ‘speaker’ in her text a particular linguistic style, and she has often been praised for her ability to create for the reader the impression of separate and distinctive ‘voices’ in her writing (Robinson 1993). Thus the speech of the elderly is peppered with transferred grammatical patterns from Maori, and Te Paania’s language is full of violent imagery reflecting her traumatic experiences, while her second child Tawera’s language is semiotized, colourful, rhythmic, yet at other times full of teenage colloquialisms (1998: 8, 9, 251). Tawera – as archetypal artist-figure and therefore also a fictional counterpart of Grace herself – has a special status within the polylingualism of Grace’s text; he is bilingual and therefore able to access all levels of enunciation within the text: symbolic, semiotic, artistic, written and oral. Grace’s skilful interweaving of Maori linguistic and mythical codes into the narrative structure of Baby No-Eyes therefore enacts the artistic process as described in the prologue of Potiki; however, Grace moves beyond the pre-European context in which the traditional Maori artist created

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his/her work by juxtaposing ancient Maori myth, language and ritual with events in contemporary New Zealand society. The narrative interweaves a complex and mutable network of significatory codes, releasing subtextual energies and patterns of meaning which cannot easily be produced by other cultural documents or media such as parliamentary or court records, newspapers and textbooks: these are, as Kristeva would claim, modes of expression governed by the symbolic code. Grace’s writing effects a reterritorialization of language; her text becomes transgressive through its linguistic disruption, and the fissures between the lines transform a reading of the text into a complex and politically charged interpretive act. The semiotic infuses Grace’s text, reaching back through memory to evoke the raw, pulsating mass of the body itself, and disrupting the syntactic authority of the English language, thereby releasing ripples and reverberations of meaning which militate against any sense of unitary, centralized (or phallic) representative authority. Grace’s text is therefore the exception to the rule established by Kristeva, who argues that the subversive energies of the semiotic and the practical manifestations of political activism are almost always mutually exclusive: The ramification of capitalist society makes it almost impossible for the signifying process to attack material and social obstacles, objective constraints, oppressive entities, and institutions directly. As a consequence, the signifying process comes to the fore in the matrix of enunciation, and, through it, radiates toward the other components of the space of production. (1984: 105) In Grace’s text, the signifying process enacts both a direct and subtextual attack upon material and social obstacles: in her exploration of recent political and cultural developments in New Zealand race-relations politics, for example, Grace critiques these obstacles directly; however, one must look to Grace’s linguistic craft in order to locate the political fulcrum of her work, as Elisabeth Köster suggests in her evaluation of Potiki: Silence has become a strategy of social domination, as silence engenders silence. Rather than echoing the legacy of colonialism through self-negation, the Maori must assert their ability as creators. . . . Potiki . . . posits that social change must be stimulated through questioning the authority of colonial discourse and producing testaments to resistance. (1993: 93) Baby No-Eyes, like Potiki, is a testament to resistance. If silence is complicity, Grace seeks to end the silence and to challenge the grammatical and social structures that have enforced that silence. The semiotic, manifested

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in Grace’s corporeal lingualism, becomes a fundamental and powerful weapon, a site of resistance, an expression of political awareness and anger; Grace’s semiotized language reaches beyond the text, engaging with the symbolic structures whose function is to repress its representative and constitutive power.

8

The narcissistic body: Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors

At first glance, the writing of Alan Duff, whose outspoken views on contemporary Maori affairs have repeatedly courted controversy, seems far removed from that of the other Maori writers discussed in this book. Through a psychoanalytic reading of Duff’s début novel Once Were Warriors (1990), however, this chapter will demonstrate that although Duff has argued elsewhere that Maori must stop ‘blaming’ their socio-economic problems on the Pakeha colonizing culture, the novel acknowledges that race-related social divisions precipitate and exacerbate problems of identification for those from minority cultures. This chapter analyses the way in which domestic dysfunction, violence and substance abuse are explored in the novel as symptoms of a wider cultural malaise within Maori society, demonstrating that as is the case with the other Maori texts discussed in this book, Duff’s novel is also informed by an underlying ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ paradigm. Duff’s Once Were Warriors made an immediate impact upon the New Zealand literary scene upon its release in 1990. The novel advanced a grim, uncompromising representation of Maori as a violent, debased and despairing socio-economic underclass, enacting an angry refutation of the idealized representation of Maori–Pakeha race relations promulgated during the 1990 sesquicentennial celebrations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.1 Once Were Warriors quickly became a bestseller, also inspiring Tamahori’s 1994 film adaptation, and is the first in a trilogy which also includes What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (1996) – also released as a film in 2001 – and Jake’s Long Shadow (2002). Other novels include One Night Out Stealing (1991), which depicts the exploits of two petty criminals; State Ward (1994b), which details the experiences of a 13-year-old boy incarcerated in a young offenders’ institution; Both Sides of the Moon (1998b), a semi-autobiographical novel exploring the dysfunctional family life of a boy growing up in Rotorua; and Szabad (2001), set in 1950s’ Budapest during the Hungarian revolution. No doubt boosted by the phenomenal international success of the film version of Once Were Warriors, Duff’s first novel remains his best known and most successful. Duff’s provocative and controversial views on Maori affairs – widely

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publicized in his journalism,2 his polemical text Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (1993), and in many of his novels – have earned him the opprobrium of a large proportion of the Maori community as well as many Pakeha liberals, and he has described himself as ‘the most hated Maori in New Zealand’ (Rampell 1994: 46). Central to Duff’s philosophy is the argument that socio-economically deprived Maori must take individual responsibility for improving their position in society, rather than holding the government and the Pakeha colonizing culture responsible for reducing Maori to this condition. Until the majority of Maori change their attitudes from defeatism and welfare dependency to a ‘self-improvement’ policy, Duff argues, they will remain disadvantaged: We have been colonised and we have been oppressed. I couldn’t agree more. And our land was stolen from us in many cases. But I’m saying nothing, but nothing, is going to change that situation, we’ve got to take advantage of the education system. . . . I’ve always said it’s easier to lie down and cry and to articulate and make eloquent everything that’s wrong with you, and it’s a lot harder to stand up, and . . . make an internal vow to yourself to do something about it. (Rampell 1994: 46) Duff’s autobiography Out of the Mist and Steam (1999a) reveals the extent to which his ‘self-help’ views are based on his own experiences. Born in Rotorua in 1950 to a Pakeha father (scientist Gowan Duff) and a Maori mother (Kuia Hinau, of Ngati Rangitihi and Ngati Tuwharetoa descent), Duff writes of a childhood blighted by domestic violence. His parents separated when he was just 10 years old, and after he was sent to live with Maori relatives, Duff subsequently drifted into delinquency, ending up in a boys’ home and then a borstal institution by the age of 15. While working in London in the late 1970s, he became involved with an East End crime syndicate, and was jailed in 1980 for forging signatures on cheques and bank cards. On his return to New Zealand following his release, however, Duff transformed his lifestyle, turning away from crime, becoming one of New Zealand’s most successful writers, and initiating a ‘books in homes’ scheme which has seen over a million books distributed to underprivileged youngsters within New Zealand. Duff has offered his own success story as a model for other Maori, but his radical formula for solving Maori socio-economic problems clearly sets him apart from the vast majority of other Maori writers, academics and politicians3 who focus upon the continuing effects of institutionalized racism and subscribe to the view that until Maori are granted political and/or cultural autonomy, they will remain oppressed and disadvantaged. Early in his career, Duff distanced himself from the Maori literary establishment, describing the work of renowned writers such as Ihimaera and Grace as ‘idealised’ and

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‘sentimental’.4 For his part, Ihimaera has publicly denied the validity of Duff’s perspective on Maori affairs, arguing that Duff’s politics are ‘Pakeha-based’ and ‘negative’, and claiming that Duff attempts to change Maori attitudes ‘without having a real kaupapa or Maori centre or base to work from’ (Amery 1995: 14). Ihimaera also wrote the Foreword to Educating Jake: Pathways to Empowerment (1998), a robust critique of Duff’s views on Maori affairs written by Maori Education lecturer Andrew Eruera Vercoe. Ihimaera describes Vercoe’s text as ‘an antidote to all the victimblaming, Maori-bashing Duff stuff’ (1998b: ix). In addition to alienating Maori writers and academics, Duff has also earned the criticism of certain Pakeha literary pundits, who attack Duff both for his idiosyncratic writing style,5 and for his political views, which have been denounced as damaging both in terms of their alleged appeal to white racists (Cox 1993), and in their apparent valorization of the Pakeha middle-class lifestyle (Thompson 1994). Duff’s views on Maori violence have also sparked controversy, and his own comments on the subject are at times contradictory. On the one hand, he has recognized that violent behaviour is socially determined, targeting domestic violence as a repetitive and destructive cycle (1999a: 158),6 and yet on the other hand, he has suggested that Maori have a natural predilection for violence, being born of ‘warrior’ stock. In Out of the Mist and Steam, he writes of ‘Maori warrior genes’ (1999a: 207), and in an interview with Vilsoni Hereniko, he argues that the ‘warrior pride’ which characterized preEuropean Maori society has become ‘misplaced’ and misdirected into domestic and alcohol-induced violence (1995: 332). This contradiction is central to Duff’s vision in Once Were Warriors, but I would nevertheless argue that the novel enacts a complex and dialectical exploration of the nature–nurture debate, complicating the essentializing distinctions Duff has made elsewhere in his writing. The novel explores the devastating psychological effects of domestic violence and dysfunction, but it also examines the way in which race-related social divisions precipitate and exacerbate problems of identification for those from minority cultures, suggesting that contrary to Duff’s claims elsewhere, Maori socioeconomic problems are the product of historical as well as contemporary social evils. The discussion of Once Were Warriors which follows is divided into three main sections, beginning with an analysis of the pathological narcissistic7 behaviour of Jake Heke (one of the central characters) in terms of psychoanalytic theories of the relationship between ego development and psychopathology, before moving into a more general analysis of the way in which domestic dysfunction, violence and substance abuse are explored in the novel as symptoms of a wider cultural malaise. The third section of the chapter examines some of the most significant differences between Duff’s novel and the film version of Once Were Warriors,8 using the representation of tattooing and contemporary gang-culture in the two versions as a focus

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for considering some of the ways in which the film undercuts the grim, visceral realism of Duff’s novel. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of the two other novels in the Once Were Warriors trilogy. Once Were Warriors is set within a state-house suburb named Pine Block in Two Lakes (a direct translation of the name of Duff’s home town, Rotorua). The Pine Block community comprises working-class, mainly unemployed Maori locked into a cycle of decline: the parents expend their time and (benefit) money drinking, smoking and brawling, while their neglected children loiter in the streets. Pine Block is represented as a ghetto into which the Pakeha of Two Lakes would never dream of intruding (1994a: 56), and the fact that Duff’s Maori characters are almost exclusively working class, while Pakeha characters in the novel are generally described as middle class or affluent, has drawn criticism from commentators such as Christina Thompson, who reads this polarized distinction as a symptom of Duff’s tendency to conflate issues of culture and class (1994: 404). I would argue, however, that the novel’s apparent failure to address or acknowledge the complexities of Maori–Pakeha socio-economic stratification emerges largely as a manifestation of the limited perceptions of Duff’s fictional characters, rather than as a consequence of a shortfall in the author’s understanding of class dynamics. The novel’s dominant narrative mode, free indirect discourse, alternates with another omniscient voice which often – but not always – appears to express Duff’s own views, and any informed analysis of the novel must take account of the subtle irony often released at the interface between these various perspectives. The omniscient narrative voice, for example, is represented predominantly in Standard English and frequently emerges in expository sections of the narrative, often making subjective evaluations of the behaviour of particular characters. The omniscient narrative voice is accorded a vocabulary and command of Standard English which is lacking in the majority of the Pine Block residents, serving (by contrast) to emphasize their limited opportunities and achievements in education and employment: as one resident observes, it’s ‘hard to find words when you’re a Pine Blocker’ (1994a: 182). The dialogue and free indirect discourse of the Pine Block residents emerges as a distinctive urban Maori dialect which is nevertheless strongly inflected by Black and working-class American English dialect features. Critics have noted similarities between Duff’s style and the writing of American writers such as Hubert Selby and William Faulkner (Harding 1992; Macdonald 1991). Duff himself acknowledges Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), with its ‘stream of consciousness style, devoid of conventional punctuation and spelling’, as a major influence on his own vernacular style (1999a: 211). As Bruce Harding notes, Selby’s influence is evident in ‘the compounding of words typical of oral delivery’ (as in ‘Gonna buy me lotsa Chinese’ on page 16 of Duff’s novel); the use of

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block capitals for the ‘angrier vocal outbursts’ (such as ‘MAKE WAY FOR THE KING AND HIS MIGHTY WANKAHS’ on p. 75 of Duff’s novel); and the ‘borrowing of transcripted spellings’ (including ‘mutha’ and ‘ovah and ovah’ from Selby’s Requiem for a Dream (1978)) (Harding 1992: 148). Duff blends these borrowed techniques with dialect features more specifically associated with Maori English: examples include changes in pronunciation such as ‘shet’ for ‘shit’ and ‘fullas’ for ‘fellows’, and vocabulary borrowed from Black American culture but now popular with Maori (including ‘honkies’ for Pakeha, ‘gats’ for guitars, and ‘yeow’ for ‘yes’). The Pine Block idiom is most concentrated in the speech and free indirect thought of male characters, who are also often more liberal in their use of expletives. The prevalence of the word ‘fuck’ and its derivatives often serves to emphasize the linguistic and socio-economic deprivation of the Pine Blockers, manifesting their deep-seated anger and frustration. The following excerpt, relating the thoughts of Pine Block resident Jake Heke, is representative: A bus’d pulled alongside him as he headed up his street and Jake’d waved it to fuck off, he wasn’t no fuckin bus-catcher. . . . Dooly’d give a man a lift to town, the pub. . . . But I ain’t fuckin walkin, no way; not on a Friday night, everyone going to town for late shopping and going past a man saying, Hasn’t he got his own car yet? Fuckem. (1994a: 52) The connection between economic and linguistic poverty established in this passage gains further significance when it is revealed that Jake – like most of his fellow Pine-Blockers – also lacks even a rudimentary grasp of his ancestral language. During an argument at a party, Jake’s wife Beth – one of the central characters, who arguably serves as a vehicle for Duff’s own views – targets the failure of Pine Blockers to speak Maori as a form of cultural poverty marking their separation from the proud traditions of their ancestors (ibid.: 28). In identifying the schism between ‘traditional’ Maori society and the urban dislocation of Pine Block, Beth repeatedly asserts that the Pine Block residents are complicit in their own degradation, and criticizes them for their ‘accept[ance]’ of their low socioeconomic status (ibid.: 8). In spite of her cynicism and self-disgust assumed on behalf of her fellow Maori, however, Beth Heke also expresses the inverse of her (and Duff’s) own arguments, invoking the Maori warrior motif which pervades the novel in order to illustrate the way in which Maori have been culturally denigrated by the Pakeha colonizing culture: We used to be a race of warriors. . . . And we used to war all the time, us Maoris. Against each other. . . . We were savages. But warriors, eh. It’s very important to remember that. . . . Because, you see, it was what we lost when you, the white audience out there, defeated us. Con-

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quered us. Took our land, our mana [pride, power], left us with nothing. But the warriors thing got handed down, see. Well, sort of handed down; in a mixed-up sense it did. It was more toughness that got handed down. (ibid.: 47) Duff’s contradictory philosophy on Maori violence – here expressed obliquely through Beth’s troubled ruminations, which take the form of a direct address to the novel’s Pakeha readership – resembles the paradox at the heart of Hulme’s The Bone People (1983), where Joe Gillayley’s violent behaviour appears both as the product of the colonial legacy and also as a blameworthy individual act. Duff differs from Hulme in his assertion that violence is innate to the Maori psyche, but his Maori characters, like Joe, are nevertheless represented as both victims and aggressors. Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than in the character of Jake Heke: while he celebrates the ‘toughness’ Beth identifies above as an essential element of his personality, his aggression covers an underlying vulnerability rooted in a childhood blighted by abuse and neglect.

Violence and narcissism: Jake’s warrior ethic In Pine Block, traditional Maori inter-tribal warfare is replaced by fighting between gangs – a new form of ritualized violence – but also by other forms of aggression including wife-beating, sexual abuse and drunken brawling. Jake Heke, a skilful combatant as well as a regular wife-beater, is accorded enormous respect by his peers for his fighting prowess, and Duff strongly emphasizes Jake’s pride in his ‘warriorhood’ and his attendant obsession with the combative potential of other men. Nicknamed Jake ‘the Muss’ in recognition of his bulging muscles and finely tuned physique, Jake revels in his kingpin status at his local pub (McClutchy’s), a modern-day battlefield where people fall over themselves to ‘be in withim’ (1994a: 62). Jake believes that his entire reputation and self-worth depend upon the condition of his own body and the attendant recognition of his admiring peers; every public appearance therefore becomes a public display of bodily perfection. His intense self-awareness at times moves towards self-estrangement, as in the following passage, where Jake drives through town with his friend Dooly: When Jake greeted it was just a lift of his big left hand, a flick of casual greeting, the hand flopping back on the sill, and Jake mostly seeing only the size of his mit, how it never ceased to amaze him he’d been blessed with such big hands. . . . And he liked how the veins bulged up on his mit, the one on the door sill not the one rested deliberately hanging off the edge of the seat so the blood flowed down and swelled those veins. (ibid.: 55)

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Here, it is almost as if Jake’s hands have somehow become detached from his body, or as if Jake becomes a member of his own admiring audience. While examples such as these emphasize Jake’s almost comical selfobsessiveness, as the novel progresses, what first appeared as vanity and pride is eventually revealed as an extreme form of pathological narcissism. Jake’s veneer finally cracks towards the end of the novel, when he is accused of raping his daughter Grace and precipitating her subsequent suicide. It is never clear whether or not Jake committed the rape, but Grace names him in her suicide letter as a likely suspect, and Jake himself is undecided as to his guilt, allowing for the possibility that he may have committed the offence in a drunken stupor. After reading Grace’s letter, Beth accuses her husband of the rape in front of a group of his peers, and as Jake rushes towards his wife with the intention of beating her into silence, he is stopped in his tracks by a heavy punch from his friend Sonny Boy. Jake is mortified at his ‘defeat’ and attendant loss of face, and as he walks the streets after being evicted from the family home, his habitual self-aggrandizement alternates with utter despair as he attempts to convince himself that he was not responsible for Grace’s rape and suicide: Voices in Jake’s head goin: Ya did it! No, I didn’t! Ya did! No, honest, I didn’t, man! Like an adult being answered by a child. . . . Voices arguing back and forth in his mind and the child losing the argument. . . . Then o – ooooo – a hurt comin on like no hurt ever before. . . . Not even in . . . his mad bad dreams. Walkin. The streets. Of not Pine Block but . . . this place in a man’s mind his bad dreams’d often touched on, hinted at, of terrible, terrible hurt. (Like my mummy and daddy and all my uncles and aunties and cousins and friends – oh, everyone – from childhood. Don’t only not like me but hate me. . . . Just a lil kid. And they hate me.) (ibid.: 164) Here, Jake’s adult voice alternates with an earlier, childish voice as the rape accusation triggers a dawning (re)awareness of the childhood circumstances which have precipitated his psychological problems. Significantly, in What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? Jake gives a semen sample which proves his innocence on the charge of raping his daughter,9 but the conclusion of Once Were Warriors leaves the matter open in a manner which effectively underscores Jake’s dawning awareness of his failings and responsibilities. The two remaining novels in the trilogy trace Jake’s gradual rehabilitation as he comes to terms with his abusive childhood and with his role in damaging his wife and children, but Once Were Warriors offers the most sustained account of the psychological problems which necessitate this process of healing. Jake’s narcissistic behaviour in Once Were Warriors gains further significance when considered within the context of object-relations psychology.

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In terms analogous to Melanie Klein’s, Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf (1986) argue that healthy relationships with human companions or ‘selfobjects’, particularly the parents, are vital to ‘normal’ ego-development. They discuss the way in which unhealthy ego-development is perpetuated across generations, as parents who have themselves not received an adequate level of attention and care as children are consequently ‘not adequately sensitive to the needs’ of their own children, instead responding narcissistically ‘to the needs of their own insecurely established self’ (ibid.: 183; see also Frosh 1991). In a typology of narcissistic disorders, they identify exhibitionists or ‘mirror-hungry personalities’ as a particular class of narcissists whose behaviour represents an attempt to compensate for feelings of inferiority triggered by a lack of attention from self-objects during childhood: Mirror-hungry personalities thirst for self-objects whose confirming and admiring responses will nourish their famished self. They are impelled to display themselves and to evoke the attention of others, trying to counteract, however fleetingly, their inner sense of worthlessness and lack of self-esteem. (1986: 190) Such impulses appear to fuel Jake’s public displays of physical prowess, and after each brawl or beating in which he becomes involved it is notable that Jake’s feelings of omnipotence are mitigated by a vaguely expressed sense of having been wronged or hurt in some way (1994a: 72, 76). These private insecurities indicate that Jake’s exhibitionism may be interpreted, in Kohut’s terms, both as a ‘defensive structure’ and as a ‘compensatory structure’ which masks but also attempts to counterbalance a ‘primary defect’ in his ego (1977: 3). Such arguments also shed light upon Jake’s neglect of his children: his self-absorption, grounded in his neglect and abuse as a child, manifests itself in an almost total disregard for his own offspring; he allows his troubled teenage son Boogie to be taken into welfare without a murmur of dissent, and even his daughter’s suicide barely rouses him from his torpor. Thus Jake’s own narcissistic behavioural patterns are shown to contribute directly to the ruin of his own children: Boogie’s delinquency and Grace’s suicide, for example, are followed by the death of Jake’s eldest son Nig in a gang brawl. Jake’s complete self-obsession ensures that the problems of his children become ‘barely a background murmur’ (1994a: 163) in comparison with the clamour of his own physical and emotional needs. In more general terms, Jake’s narcissism also emerges as an extreme form of a widespread socio-cultural malaise in the novel: constant references are made to the way in which other Pine Block residents also neglect their children, too absorbed in their own problems or sensual pleasures to afford their children the necessary level of attention and love.10

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While Jake’s childhood neglect is represented as the primary source of his psychological problems, other reasons for his low self-esteem are also explored in the novel. Jake reveals at one point that his branch of the family is descended from a slave taken prisoner by an enemy Maori tribe in pre-European times. Though the incident occurred some five hundred years ago, as children Jake and his siblings were bullied and ostracized by other Maori in their pa,11 and Jake reveals that he developed his combat skills in order to defend himself against his peers. Jake’s situation underscores Duff’s argument that Maori social problems cannot be attributed to the impact of colonization alone, but it is nevertheless clear that Jake’s antisocial behaviour is also grounded in a deep-seated resentment of the putative socio-economic divide between Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders. Jake is envious of what he perceives as the universally comfortable middle-class existence enjoyed by Pakeha, and he is tortured with feelings of inadequacy and discomfort whenever he comes into close contact with his white compatriots. During a Friday-night drive into town with Dooly, for example, Jake’s mood immediately changes when they reach the ‘flash end’ of the main street, which is populated mainly by Pakeha shoppers (ibid.: 57). Dooly is forced to stop at a pedestrian crossing, and as Pakeha shoppers look into the car while crossing the road, Jake squirms under their gaze, feeling like ‘a monkey at a zoo’ and descending into a sullen rage (ibid.: 57). Significantly, after Jake and Dooly pass the pedestrian crossing and enter an area filled with Maori shoppers, Jake’s anger evaporates immediately, and he resumes his ritual of displaying his physical attributes to his peers. Jake’s discomfort under the gaze of his white compatriots is reminiscent of the famous passage in Black Skin White Masks in which Frantz Fanon describes the experience of being ‘dissected under white eyes’ (1970: 82) while travelling on a train. Fanon writes of the ‘third-person consciousness’ experienced by the ‘man of color’ living in ‘the white world’, arguing that ‘consciousness of the body’ becomes a ‘negating activity’ inflected by negative racial stereotypes conferred upon Negroes by Europeans (ibid.: 78). Jake’s self-estrangement functions under circumstances analogous to Fanon’s: perpetually aware of his own body, and constantly apprehending his body-image in the ‘third person’,12 Jake finds that the humiliation of being ‘dissected under white eyes’ transforms his blustering overconfidence and exhibitionism to unease and barely suppressed rage. Jake is only dimly aware of the reasons behind his discomfort, and yet he occasionally betrays an awareness of the ‘racial epidermal schema’13 which apparently marks his subordination to the dominant Pakeha culture, noting that the smartly dressed shop-window dummies at the ‘flash end’ of town display the ‘white-man features’ of the ‘white maggot shits’ who are ‘running the show’ (1994a: 56, 57, 74), while his disempowered fellow Maori dwell in suburban squalor. Beth also observes that fashion magazines, television and other media are dominated by

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‘beautiful’ white people (ibid.: 9), while representations of dark-skinned people are restricted to imported images of rap and reggae singers, and Afro-American boxers (ibid.: 10). Significantly, the novel traces a convergence between Maori and African (or Afro-American) racial stereotypes, as the Pine Blockers frequently evaluate their bodies in terms of racial stereotypes commonly attached to Negroes. Stereotypes equating blackness with physicality, sensuality and violence, for example, are invoked at various points in Duff’s novel, intersecting with similar stereotypes commonly attached to Maori. Frequently, ‘Maori’ stereotypes are invoked by Duff’s Maori characters as gestures of cultural solidarity, a phenomenon witnessed in Jake’s relief when he and Dooly reach the Maori-dominated section of the main street: Brown faces, brother, Jake saying with unnecessary force. . . . Brown and black and fat and rolly polly, hahaha! Jake laughing and pointing at all and sundry, their more casual, even untidy, style of dress, the way they walked, and talked; or stood around in groups sharing from a newspaper-wrapped parcel of fishnchips . . . a man could identify with that, these people. (And their laughter, man: rocking with it, the way (we) they do, and nemine the self-conscious I’m-in-public shit, it’s let it all hang out. Juss look atem the way they walk: that ain’t walking it’s styling. It’s rhythm. . . . Pakehas, they don’t understand it. That’s because they got no rhythm. And no, you know, passion. Or passion and violence.) (ibid.: 58–9) Here, Jake alternates between objectifying and identifying with ‘his’ people, shifting from an initial focus on their ‘rolly polly’ informality to an emphasis on their physical poise, ‘passion’, and – more disturbingly – their putative innate violence. Here, Jake seems to embrace many of the stereotypes which have historically been attributed to Maori by Europeans or Pakeha, but his references to ‘styling’ and ‘rhythm’ (a variation on the ‘white men can’t dance’ mantra) also suggest that these ‘Maori’ stereotypes have blended with those commonly attached to Afro-Americans. Fanon’s theories would suggest that such behaviour is perfectly normal in a dark-skinned person living within a white-dominated culture saturated with (often negative) stereotypes of dark-skinned races. He cites the French Antilles by way of example, pointing out that the Antillean Negro internalizes the negrophobia which pervades the French colonizing culture: The collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity; it is the result of what I shall call the unreflected imposition of a culture. Hence there is no reason to be surprised when an Antillean exposed to waking-dream therapy relives the same fantasies as a European. (1970: 135)

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A comparable situation arises in Duff’s novel, but Duff’s Maori characters are subject to a double discourse, first of all perceiving themselves in terms of the judgements of a national ‘collective unconscious’ which – according to government statistics – defines working-class Maori in terms of their indulgence in substance abuse, domestic violence and criminal behaviour; and second, drawing upon a typology of ‘black’ stereotypes that functions as a global currency filtered through popular culture. Starved of (or unaware of) positive role models from their own culture, the young people of Pine Block strongly identify with Afro-American popular-culture icons, and the young men in particular aspire to the apparent physical perfection and combative strength of Afro-American boxers. Beth Heke observes this phenomenon as she gazes at posters of black fighters on her sons’ bedroom walls, drawing a direct parallel between Afro-American and Maori combat-culture: One of the black boxers took her eye. . . . Reminds me of him, Jake. O fuckim. I hateim. But still looking at the Negro boxer and comparing to her husband, the build, the meanness of face . . . the eyes, searching for something she could see but not put her finger on; as if the fighter’s eyes were giving away something of the exact same look in her husband’s eyes, almost a hurt. . . . As if he’s saying, I’m gonna punish you, not because I’m bad but because you hurt me. (1994a: 40) Beth’s observations suggest by implication that both Maori and AfroAmericans share a history of oppression, thereby identifying a further reason for the appeal of imported black popular culture to the socioeconomically deprived young Maori of Pine Block. Her ruminations imply that the ‘warrior genes’ Duff has elsewhere described as innate to Maori culture may instead be evaluated, within a wider global context, as a product of racial as well as socio-economic disempowerment across cultures.

Gangland warriorhood The popular culture fantasies shared by members of the younger generation appear to foster among young Pine Block residents a relative sense of solidarity missing from Jake’s generation. While Jake attempts to compensate for his emotional problems by indulging in solitary narcissistic behaviour, for example, Nig and other disaffected Pine Block teenagers join a local gang called ‘The Brown Fists’, which serves as a substitute for the familial cohesion missing from Pine Block households. Yet the gang rituals and regalia14 – which ostensibly emphasize a collective (and threatening) gang solidarity – also function as a mask behind which the young Pine Blockers, like Jake, may conceal their insecurities and anxieties, as Duff implies during a description of a gang party:

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Volume. We want more VOLUME. And fuck the neighbourhood, makin it out as an act of stroppiness, or gang-power display, when truth was . . . they wanted to hide in the volume of music like they were always hidin behind their shades or in the dope and the booze and the fags; they juss wanna drown out the, you know, the upbringing. The stain of growin up a Pine Blocker. Of growin up havin to fit a role, a race role, man, and thassa fuckin truth you know it and so do I: havin to turn yaself into sumpthin ya mightn’t be. (1994a: 141) In this passage, the characteristic Pine Block idiom deployed throughout the novel blends with the more knowing, omniscient/authorial voice which expresses truths of which the gang members are only half aware. Duff here implies that the Brown Fists, for all their valorization of physical fitness, are involved (like other Pine Blockers) in a ritual of selfdestruction, pumping their bodies full of alcohol and drugs in an attempt to escape from their collective disempowerment and bleak, socially determined futures. At other points, however, Duff is less sympathetic to the reasons behind the Pine Blockers’ indulgence in substance abuse, particularly during his descriptions of the pub environment, which has become the modern ‘marae’ or ceremonial gathering place.15 As Jake and Dooly make their way to the bar during one particular drinking session, their drunken fellow patrons are described as ‘beer-bloated, mindless humanity . . . [doing] things you wouldn’t credit animals with’ (ibid.: 65). Later in the novel, Beth Heke similarly expresses both sorrow and disgust for the way in which the Maori race is ‘tearing itself apart’, the Pine Blockers abusing their own bodies and the bodies of their friends and loved ones without a thought for the future (ibid.: 122). Albert Memmi describes such behaviour as a direct result of racial oppression, suggesting – in terms analogous to Fanon’s (see Chapter 5) – that members of colonized or subordinated cultures vent their feelings of frustration and disempowerment through aggressive and self-destructive behaviour, ‘[seeking] oblivion in alcohol, in drugs and in crime’ (1968: 20–1). While Duff would be cautious in according too much weight to Memmi’s argument for racial oppression as a primary cause of social dysfunction in minority cultures, his novel strongly emphasizes the bitterness his Maori characters suffer when observing their ‘exclusion’ from the comforts apparently enjoyed by their Pakeha counterparts. In addition to Jake, Beth16 and Grace also frequently express their resentment at the apparent socio-economic disparity between Maori and Pakeha. While Duff has elsewhere asserted that Maori must take active responsibility for improving their position in society, in Once Were Warriors, Grace – who is one of the most sympathetic and intelligent Maori characters in the novel – suggests that an established racial divide separates her from her

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privileged Pakeha peers. She expresses a sense of having been ‘not deprived but robbed of a life’ (1994a: 117). She constantly compares her restrictions and frustrations with the privileged social position of the Tramberts, a wealthy Pakeha family living on land adjoining Pine Block (which is, significantly, itself established upon land which the Tramberts sold to the government). In the evenings, Grace often observes the Tramberts through their living-room window, and on the night when she commits suicide, she spends her final moments watching the family before hanging herself from a tree on their property. Grace and Jake’s bitter ruminations suggest that the novel’s exaggeration of the social disparity between Maori and Pakeha is to be interpreted – at least in part – as a product of their own limited perceptions and warped egos rather than reproducing the views of the author himself (as noted earlier in this chapter). Significantly, the Heke family’s resentment of (and aspiration to) Pakeha privilege were omitted altogether from the film script for Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors, no doubt as a result of scriptwriter Riwia Brown’s decision to emphasize and amplify the importance of Maori cultural traditions as a means by which to rehabilitate contemporary Maori.17

Aestheticizing the body: the film version of Once Were Warriors The film version of Once Were Warriors also reduces or omits many of the darker elements of Duff’s vision of contemporary working-class Maori life (see also McDonnell 1994: 3). This contrast is particularly apparent in the film’s representation of the gang members, who – in contrast to Duff’s ‘filthy’ and debased delinquents – appear sleek and well-toned, dressed in immaculate matching black leather regalia, and sporting facial tattoos featuring traditional Maori motifs. Figure 8.1, a still image from the film, depicts Nig Heke (Jake and Beth’s son), who joins the gang. Traditional moko motifs are clearly reproduced on his face, though the fact that the tattoo covers only half his face (a practice mainly reserved, in preEuropean times, for high-born women for whom no suitor of equal rank could be found), marks a certain break with tradition (Haua 2004).18 His leather and fibre vest is redolent of traditional Maori arts and crafts such as weaving and net-making. In the film, the original gang name, ‘The Brown Fists’, has been changed to ‘Toa Aotearoa’ – translating literally as ‘warriors/champions of Aotearoa’ – suggesting, along with the traditional tattoo designs, a return to a traditional (and collective) Maori warrior ethic. This culturally specific warrior ethos is contrasted with the negative, destructive warriorhood of those of Jake’s generation, who consistently sport tattoos based more on American ‘flash’ designs (such as tigers, barbed wire and scorpions) which imply a lesser degree of engagement with indigenous traditions. The film is structured in order to focus most of the violence and negativity upon Jake’s generation – particularly in the

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Figure 8.1 Nig Heke (still image from Once Were Warriors, Communicado, dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994). Image supplied by the New Zealand Film Commission.

figure of Jake himself – and as Brian McDonnell notes, the ‘machismo of the gang and their fights’ is valorized while the hubristic ‘posturing’ of Jake and his male friends is represented in a manner which invites criticism (1994: 4). Lee Tamahori, the film director, has described the gang members as utopian, ‘literally five years in the future’ (1995: 104; quoted in Armstrong 1997: 62), and reviews of the film have indicated a widespread positive response to the gang characters (McDonnell 1994: 3). Several crucial plot details are completely reworked in order to represent the gang members more positively: in the novel, for example, Nig quickly

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becomes disillusioned with his new ‘family’ after witnessing male gang members kicking a helpless woman in the face, and he is also disgusted and disturbed when his own girlfriend (also a gang member) puts herself ‘on the block’ for the sexual enjoyment of male members during a gang party. Nig is later killed during a brawl with a rival gang, and the ‘filthily dressed’ fellow gang members who attend his funeral are clearly pariah figures, regarded with ‘contempt and . . . almost a sneering pity’ by other mourners (Duff 1994a: 196). In the film version, however, gang violence against women is omitted from the script, Nig is still alive at the end of the film, and he wears his gang regalia proudly as he carries Grace’s coffin at her tangi (funeral). Other gang members are integrated into the funeral procession, and Beth tells him afterwards: ‘Your mates did you proud today’. Duff’s filthy ‘monster calling itself Gang’ (ibid.: 196) is thus sanitized and modernized for the (international) film audience, though it cannot be denied that many of the scenes of gang and domestic violence in the film still have a raw, visceral impact. A particularly notable visual contrast between book and film is evident in the representation of the gang’s tattoos. The widespread use of traditional moko designs for the gang tattoos in the film has provoked some controversy among Maori viewers, many of whom have claimed that the film appears to associate traditional tattooing practices with a violent gang ethic far removed from the original function of the moko as ‘a finely chiselled carving embodying the spiritual essence, the wairua, of the individual and of the collective whole’.19 As Barbara Sumner points out in an article on Maori moko, many contemporary Maori are concerned that the moko is ‘losing its integrity’ through the popularization and (com)modification of traditional designs (1999: 7). Such concerns have been exacerbated by the widespread appropriation and dissemination of moko designs within international advertising media and popular culture following the release of Tamahori’s film. Notable examples include designer Thierry Mugler’s use of moko-style face masks to launch his spring/summer collection in 2000; the appearance of French footballer and actor Eric Cantona, complete with moko, on the front cover of the British magazine GQ in 1998; and the Maori tattoo patterns recently acquired by singers Robbie Williams and Ben Harper. The increasing popularity of the moko as a fashion accessory has subjected moko motifs to what Graham Huggan has termed ‘the aesthetics of decontextualisation’ (2001: 16), in which ‘value, in the art or fashion market, is accelerated or enhanced’ by placing so-called ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ objects ‘in unlikely contexts’ (Appadurai 1986: 28; cited in Huggan 2001: 16). While many Maori are concerned by this trend, others argue that there is a clear distinction between the fetishization of moko in popular culture, and the ‘real power’ of Maori having the moko inscribed upon their faces by skilled ta-moko practitioners (Sumner 1999: 7). Tattoo expert Ngahuia Te Awekotuku points out that the label ‘kirituhi’ – liter-

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ally, ‘skin-writing’ – is now used in order to distinguish modern fashion tattooing from the traditional moko (Graham 2003: A3). The film version of Once Were Warriors does not engage with these debates in any detail, but in the novel, Duff explores the social function of tattoo in much greater depth, and the tattooed bodies of the gang members chart a complex intersection of European and Polynesian attitudes to the body. The gang tattoos in the novel – unlike those in the film – point towards a more syncretic process of cultural appropriation among the gang members, who mingle traditional Maori tattoo motifs with American ‘flash’ tattoo designs, and with star tattoo designs favoured by Maori borstal and prison inmates. As discussed in the chapter on Keri Hulme, tattooing in Polynesia was historically associated with the rite de passage from childhood to adulthood; tattooing was a means by which to mark this transition, and to clothe, protect and prepare the body for adult life. Among New Zealand Maori, tattoos marked out the genealogy, social rank and (in many cases) the achievements of the bearer: a warrior’s accomplishments in battle, for example, could be read in his face (Haua 2004). In European society, however, tattooing has become associated with entirely different social circumstances. As Rod Edmond points out, contemporary Western tattooing originates primarily from Captain James Cook’s voyage to Tahiti, where the crew of the Bounty began imitating the Tahitian practice of tattooing (1997a: 70). Roundly condemned by missionaries and other members of the Christian church,20 European tattooing quickly ‘became associated with lower-class white savagery’ (Edmond 1997a: 70), and therefore became popular among ‘sailors, outlaws, and members of other marginal/deviant subcultures’ (Rubin 1988: 255). This association between tattooing and nonconformism has persisted in modern Western culture, and tattooing has become closely associated with gang and criminal subculture. Arnold Rubin suggests this relationship was consolidated by the prohibition of tattooing in various areas of the United States in the 1950s, an act which forced tattooing underground, increased its appeal as an alternative, subversive practice, and triggered a proletarian tattooing ‘renaissance’ dating from the 1960s (1988: 233, 236). As Rubin points out, tattoos on highly visible parts of the body – particularly the face, hands, and neck, are still viewed as threatening and deviant in mainstream Western society, and most contemporary licensed tattooists still ‘refuse to tattoo hands or faces to avoid attracting undesirable attention to the medium or themselves’ (ibid.: 233). In Duff’s novel, the history of tattooing appears to have come full circle: the gang members’ combination of Maori tattoo motifs and American ‘flash’ designs inscribes pre-European Polynesian tattooing practices, as well as invoking the European appropriation of the technique and its subsequent development as a subversive and deviant practice, before it was then ‘borrowed back’ by contemporary Maori gangs as a sign of

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rebellious nonconformism. This intersection of cultural codes is explored in a scene towards the end of the novel, where Nig is tattooed with a traditional Maori facial design at the Brown Fist headquarters. While the ritual is intended to prove Nig’s allegiance to the gang as well as testing his manhood, Nig also associates his experience with the function of traditional Maori tattooing as an initiation into warrior culture. Like his warrior forbears, he is determined to betray no sign of his painful suffering, and the Pakeha tattooist who performs the procedure observes Nig’s stoicism with bemused admiration (1994a: 181). While Nig is proud of his achievement, however, the incident is juxtaposed with a speech made by a Maori Chief (Te Tupaea) who implies that modern tattooing is a poor substitute for traditional tattooing, which was chiselled into the skin over a period of months, thereby testing the manhood of the recipient to a far greater degree than modern needle-prick tattooing practices (ibid.: 180). Te Tupaea’s assertions are corroborated several pages later, when Nig has a nightmare involving a number of traditionally tattooed warriors who are rhythmically beating a man’s face to a pulp. Nig asks the warriors if they are his ancestors, attempting to establish solidarity by showing them his new tattoos, but they reject his overtures, telling him he is to die because he ‘no longer thinks as we do’ (ibid.: 189). Further, his ‘lightly marked’ tattoo markings are unfavourably compared with the warriors’ ‘deeply etched’ moko designs (ibid.: 189), suggesting that he and his gang comrades are bogus warriors who have betrayed the principles of traditional Maori warriorhood. Figure 8.2, depicting frontal and profile photographs of ‘Noah’ (of Ngati Raukawa descent), clearly shows the deep grooves in the skin created by traditional chisel-tattooing techniques. The moko markings ‘carved’ into Noah’s face can be compared with those on the human figures depicted in the Te Arawa carving in Chapter 5 (Figure 5.1). These carvings represent particular individuals from the Te Arawa tribe, and their own individual facial moko designs have been transferred onto the wood. Each moko design is unique, marking the individual and tribal identity of the wearer, but shared basic motifs can be identified in all three designs, even though Noah’s tribal affiliation is different from that of the figures in the Te Arawa carving. Just as Nig’s tattoos are represented as a poor substitute for traditional moko, attitudes towards the tattooing of women in Duff’s novel expose a similar disparity between pre-contact and contemporary tattooing practices. Whereas traditional Maori female tattoos marked out important details regarding a woman’s genealogy, social rank and marital status (Haua 2004), modern tattoos on Nig’s female gang associates are described as aesthetically damaging, cheapening a woman’s appearance. Nig asserts, for example, that a tattoo on a woman makes her look like a ‘slut’ (1994a: 150), and he claims that his girlfriend Tania’s tattoos detract from her natural beauty. His response seems more in keeping with ‘flash’ tattooing gender politics, where visible tattoos on women frequently elicit

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Figure 8.2 Photograph of Noah (Ngati Raukawa), taken by Benjamin Peyman between 1863 and 1897. ‘Timeframes’ database, reference number 1/2-104158-F, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

negative reactions and are often read as an advertisement of sexual promiscuity in the wearer (Sanders 1988: 223). Beth Heke, on the other hand, is inscribed with a different kind of tattoo – the facial scars which serve as a record of the repeated beatings she has received from her husband. At Nig’s funeral she is described as a ‘fine-looking woman’ whose beauty would be even more striking if ‘it wasn’t for the scars and linings of life leaving its mark on her’ (1994a: 196). This correlation between physical scarring and psychological pain evokes the preEuropean Maori tradition (practised by women in particular) of lacerating one’s skin with shark’s teeth or sharpened greenstone implements during the tangihanga (funeral) ceremony, as part of the grieving process (Haua 2004). Beth’s scar-‘tattoos’ are not self-inflicted, but this lends her a certain nobility in the palpable evidence of her suffering. Yet in spite of this implied division between self-inflicted and externally inflicted ‘wounds’, Duff also makes a direct association between physical scars as the product of violent conflict or abuse, and the way in which gang tattoos similarly signify the psychological ‘scarring’ of the Pine Blockers. During a stand-off with the Brown Fists, for instance, Jake describes the gang leader Jimmy’s tattoos as ‘a chart of his troubled childhood and early adulthood written all over him’ (ibid.: 76). From this point of view, Jimmy’s tattoos record his socio-economic deprivation and

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disempowerment, functioning as a ‘text’ which reads rather like Sethe’s tree-pattern of scars in Morrison’s Beloved (1987), or Simon’s scar-tattoos in Hulme’s The Bone People (1983). And as is the case in The Bone People, the ending of Duff’s novel suggests that physical pain and violent conflict carry within them the seeds of healing and renewal. Grace’s rape and subsequent suicide, for example, prompt Beth to leave her husband, thereby breaking the destructive cycle of domestic violence in which she has been trapped since her marriage. Beth’s family problems also prompt her to initiate the community education and rehabilitation programmes which are intended to foster a new generation of Pine Blockers with a knowledge of (and a pride in) Maori history and tradition, as well as a determination to succeed within the Pakeha world through education and self-help initiatives. Duff’s bleak social realism is thus mitigated with a sense of hopeful idealism, although ethnic fundamentalism is questioned elsewhere in the novel as a viable solution to Maori socio-economic problems. As noted earlier in the chapter, Jake’s descent from slave culture, for example, is targeted as one of the primary reasons for his low self-esteem, and Beth criticizes the way in which traditional Maori ritual and oratory was (and still is) conducted mainly by men (1994a: 120), suggesting – as does the kaumatua in Hulme’s The Bone People – that Maori society had its own social problems before the arrival of the colonizing culture.21 Since the publication of his novel, Duff has argued with increasing insistency that the way forward for Maori lies not in reviving past traditions, but in adapting to the ‘universal’ structures of the late capitalist world. Answering the criticisms of those who suggest that his philosophies are a modern adaptation of colonialist assimilation policies, Duff has argued that the values and ambitions he advocates – education, enterprise and hard work – are not Pakeha values, but have in fact been adopted by successful cultures and ethnic groups throughout the world (Hereniko 1995: 343). It is also worth noting, in Duff’s defence, that much of his fiction published since Once Were Warriors presents a less polarized dialectic between Maori and Pakeha culture than is evident in his first novel. In One Night Out Stealing, a Pakeha small-time criminal named Jube operates alongside his Maori partner Sonny, and in Jake’s Long Shadow, Alistair Trambert (son of the rich Pakeha landowner in Once Were Warriors) has descended into the same pit of apathy and welfare-dependency which characterizes the lives of the Pine Block residents. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? also widens the socio-economic range of Duff’s writing, as Beth marries Charlie Bennett, the middle-class Maori welfare officer who oversees Boogie’s rehabilitation in the boys’ home in Once Were Warriors. Although the marriage allows Beth and her children to enjoy many of the privileges Duff has previously associated with a middle-class Pakeha existence, the next novel in the trilogy (Jake’s Long Shadow) critiques the middle-class materialistic values which Duff has been accused of valorizing elsewhere in his writing. Jake’s daughter Polly, for example, gets involved in property

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speculation with her Pakeha boyfriend Simon, but he loses interest in her as she transforms into a crass ‘nouveau riche materialist’ (2002: 134). Beth herself starts to question the value of her comfortable middle-class existence and ends up having an affair with the ‘reformed’ Jake (now engaged in steady full-time employment) before deciding to remain with her new husband. This critique of middle-class values, however, is accompanied by a rather bleak social determinism: the latter two novels in Duff’s trilogy suggest that few Maori have the initiative or stamina to lift themselves beyond the working-class existence described in Once Were Warriors. Even in the early pages of What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, we learn that most Pine Blockers have returned to their old ways in spite of Beth’s earlier attempts to establish a self-help ethic in the community. Similarly, towards the end of Jake’s Long Shadow, a disillusioned Charlie Bennett views his career in Maori welfare as a colossal ‘waste of effort’ due to the apparent lack of motivation among the vast majority of Maori to improve their position in New Zealand society (2002: 216). A note of optimism is introduced in both of the later novels in the trilogy, however, in Jake’s developing friendship with Gary and Kohi Douglas, two men who belong to a closeknit Maori whanau (family). Gary and Kohi introduce Jake to the challenges of pig hunting and to ‘traditional’ Maori pursuits such as the gathering of watercress and seafood on their ancestral land. These vignettes suggest that Duff’s view of the solution to Maori social problems does involve more than a mere aspiration to the putative material privileges of Pakeha culture. The emphasis on Maori family and community values in the ‘Douglas’ sequences also establishes a line of continuity with the later sections of Once Were Warriors, where Beth in particular finds a new inner strength after re-establishing contact with her Maori relatives at Wainui Pa (her home marae). Duff’s focus on the importance of ‘healing’ contemporary Maori social ills clearly places him in some sort of alignment with other Maori writers discussed in this book. It cannot be denied that Duff’s pragmatism, and his prevailing scepticism regarding the valency of ethnic fundamentalism, stand in sharp contrast to the ideological stances of Hulme, Ihimaera and Grace. Nevertheless, when Duff’s analysis of violence and other forms of physical abuse is considered alongside psychoanalytic readings of the relationship between corporeal and psychological dysfunction, it is possible to argue that Duff’s writing demonstrates an intense and analytical engagement with the relationship between racial, socio-economic and corporeal factors. This indicates that his preoccupations are not as far removed from those of his peers as they might first appear. In Once Were Warriors in particular, Duff’s raw, uncompromising social realist stance – which contrasts so radically with the symbolist, idealist and magic realist approaches of Hulme, Ihimaera and Grace – is nevertheless predicated upon the same underlying pattern of wounding and healing, explored through a

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corporeal and racial-epidermal framework, as may be found within the work of his Maori literary predecessors. Duff’s commitment to finding practical solutions to the socio-economic problems he describes therefore suggests that in spite of his bitter, gritty social realism, he too is an idealist who seeks to nudge the wounded indigenous body towards a healthier, more positive future.

Conclusion Reinscribing the Polynesian body

In the final pages of this study, I want to focus more closely upon the tattooed Polynesian body as a means by which to draw together various threads in my argument, and to identify particular trends in recent literary and cultural theory focusing upon indigenous Pacific – particularly Polynesian – literatures and cultures. In the chapters on Alan Duff and Keri Hulme, I have suggested that the tattooed Polynesian body may be read as a cultural cipher or as an index of (post)colonial history. It is also possible, however, to push the metaphor further, interpreting the tattooed Polynesian body as a figure for the inscription of cultural identity in the literatures of the South Pacific. In an article entitled ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’ (1996), Albert Wendt discusses the practice of tattooing as a means by which to ‘clothe’ and inscribe the indigenous body with a culturally specific graphic code. Wendt focuses primarily upon the Samoan male and female tattoos (tatau and malu), but his arguments are equally applicable to other Polynesian tattoos such as the Maori moko which, like the Samoan tatau, is embraced by many contemporary Maori as a visual assertion of cultural identity. Wendt reads the social function of the tatau as twofold. It provides the tattooed individual with a social identity, and also functions as an initiation ritual testing the individual’s commitment to that society: In a deep psychological, mythological, symbolic way, tatauing is the act of printing/scripting a genealogical/spiritual/philosophical text on the blood, of testing it to see if it can bear the pain of being in a human body, of storying it, giving it human design, shape, form, identity. (ibid.: 25) Wendt interprets the tattooing process as both initiatory and votive, representing, as Alfred Gell suggests, the ‘perfect vehicle for the bodily registration of commitment’ to one’s culture (1993: 302). A variety of functions and forms of Polynesian tattooing have been discussed in this book. Alan Duff’s exploration of tattooing in Once Were

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Warriors (1990), for example, critiques the way in which, among the gang members described within the narrative, the initiatory function of a tattoo (as a test of bravery or manhood) gains precedence over the culturally specific function, thus emptying the ritual of its original meaning. A certain masochism is also palpable in the tattooing rituals of Duff’s gang warriors, pointing – in Albert Memmi’s terms – towards an established cultural nihilism born of constant racial subordination (1968: 86). Figiel’s They Who Do Not Grieve (1999) explores the function of the Samoan female tattoo, the malu, as a ritualized inscription which narrativizes and protects the female body, preparing it for the challenges of adult life. In Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983), Simon’s scar-tattoos allegorize crosscultural disharmony between Maori and Pakeha, as well as recording his own personal suffering. However, Simon’s wounded, scarred and suffering body also carries the seeds of renewal and healing within its fragile boundaries, and the trajectory of the narrative encapsulates the interdependent processes of ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ – or conflict/suffering followed by union/harmony – which Gell locates within the tattooing process as a ritualized inscription of the paradoxical structures of Maori cosmogony (1993: 256). By extension, it may also be argued that the tattooing ritual approximates the process of colonial impact and concomitant cultural attrition, followed by decolonization and/or cultural resurgence, which is inscribed ‘indelibly’ in the work of the Pacific Islander writers described in this book, and in the work of their Maori counterparts. Wendt describes the Samoan tatau in these terms, suggesting that the perpetuation of tatauing practices among modern Samoans is testament to a continuing resistance to colonial pressures since the 1830s, when missionaries first arrived in Samoa: The missionaries, especially the London Missionary Society, condemned tattooing as the “mark of the savage.” They succeeded in making their converts ashamed of it, and tried to outlaw the practice further by not allowing anyone with a tatau or malu to be a deacon and pastor. Despite over a century of trying to erase it, tatauing has endured and is very alive [sic] even in Los Angeles and Auckland, where since the Second World War Samoan communities have established themselves. The basic motifs and patterns and shape have also remained largely unchanged. (1996: 23) While contemporary New Zealand Maori are unable to claim the same degree of immunity from European hegemony as Samoans, similar sentiments have been expressed with regard to the resurgence of moko among modern Maori, many of whom wear their tattoo as an overt assertion of their Maori identity. One such individual has identified the spiralling

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designs of the moko as a symbolic inscription of her own connection to the traditional past and to posterity: ‘It’s a form of meditation, a connection with my ancestors and my mokopuna (grandchildren) of the future. I’m not doing this for me, so the pain is shared’ (Sumner 1999: 7). By these analyses, the tattooed ‘Polynesian’ body therefore functions as a testament to the resilience of Polynesian peoples, who have maintained a sense of continuity between past and present in spite of their various experiences of the allied forces of colonialism and global capitalism. The endurance of local traditions in Pacific cultures is in part due to the relatively recent nature of colonial activity in the region, and is also a consequence of the fact that many Pacific Island nations have not experienced the same degree of direct colonial control and/or economic exploitation endured by colonized cultures in certain other parts of the world. Where colonization has been more systematic – as is the case in Hawai‘i and New Zealand, for example – greater cultural attrition is evident both in the huge reduction in the numbers of indigenes speaking their native languages, and in the decline or disappearance of preEuropean cultural practices. As I have suggested, however, post-war decolonization and/or sovereignty movements across the Pacific have been accompanied in many cases by a renaissance of native languages and cultural traditions, as well as a growing sense of solidarity among Pacific Island indigenous cultures. Wendt suggests that the new indigenous Pacific literatures expressing these post-war ideologies and ambitions therefore function as analogues for the tattooing process, in that they have emerged as testament to the resistance of indigenous Pacific cultures against the forces of colonialism and ‘missionary condemnation’ (1996: 17). While Wendt’s vision of the tattooed Pacific body offers one method by which to theorize the indigenous literatures of the Pacific, other indigenous Pacific scholars and writers (some of whom were discussed in the Introduction to this book) have also attempted to develop locally based theories for Pacific literatures, similarly focusing upon historical, linguistic and cultural affinities between Pacific Island (particularly Polynesian) cultures. Selina Tusitala Marsh, for example, identifies the spiral as a potent pan-Polynesian symbol, suggesting that it parallels postcolonial and postmodern strategies of decentralization, as well as embodying Polynesian conceptions of history and narrative: The theoretical thought patterns in decentering that allow for the possibility of multiple realities, as opposed to one validated reality, parallel the artistic patterns of the spiral, a symbol used by many Polynesian peoples to holistically represent political and spiritual principles. The spiral’s structure confronts and defies the Western linear hierarchical way of thinking, urging the mind’s eye toward a center that allows for the possibility of multiple centres; it ‘looks’ back even

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Marsh’s dismissal of Western ‘thinking’ as ‘linear’ and ‘hierarchical’ is somewhat reductive, reproducing the monolithic paradigms which postcolonial theorists have attacked with reference to European theorizations of postcolonial literatures. Her emphasis upon the importance of the spiral as an index to Polynesian cosmogony, however, is borne out in the writing of Hulme, Ihimaera and Grace in particular, all of whom have deployed the spiral as a figure for Maori approaches to history and narrative. The spiral image is also evident in the structure of Sia Figiel’s narratives, which interweave multiple narrative threads to create a polyphonic whole, and indeed, the spiral is a common motif used in traditional Maori and other Polynesian tattooing, further indicating the way in which the Polynesian body was itself inscribed and encoded with core Polynesian philosophical concepts. Further, Patricia Grace’s description of the spiral pattern as analogous to a series of concentric circles widening outwards (as discussed in Chapter 7) is also a useful metaphor for the multiple conceptual and geographical frames – local, regional and international – within which I have considered the work of the writers grouped together in this book. Hau’ofa’s concept of an ‘Oceanic’ identity is also operative here; he has suggested that it is possible to develop regional as well as local or national identities within the Pacific region, in addition to maintaining an awareness of the ‘global movements of money, men and machinery’ (Subramani 1999: 46). Hau’ofa points out that Pacific Islanders share a common heritage – the great Ocean of the Pacific – and that just as the sea ‘is an open and ever-flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming’ (1998: 406). Hau’ofa’s metaphor again invokes the holism which Marsh identifies as central to Polynesian cosmogony, as well as drawing attention to the common seafaring heritage of Oceanic peoples. Albert Wendt has similarly embraced the notion of a shared Oceanic identity, describing himself as a ‘pelagic’ man (1995a: 13). As Paul Sharrad notes, the adjective ‘indicates an oceanic identity that allows for modern ideas of movement and dislocation while retaining a flexible sense of regional locatedness’ (2003: 250). Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends (1987), as I have demonstrated, takes a similarly fluid approach to networks of identification and communication within the Pacific region, spiralling outwards from a consideration of personal and local issues, to regional and finally global issues of discrimination and exploitation. Ihimaera’s use of the spiral, on the other hand, draws attention to the frameworks of the ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ which inform Maori mythology and approaches to history. Further, the narrative structure of The Dream Swimmer (1997)

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invokes the ebb and flow pattern of the winding and unwinding spiral which is also explored in Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) as a means by which to conceptualize the ‘back to the future’ philosophy which Hulme – like Grace – identifies as central to Polynesian cosmogony. Thus the spiral functions, in the works of these writers, as a cipher for pan-Polynesian myths, philosophies and oral narrative strategies, demonstrating clear cultural and historical affinities within Polynesia as well as a sense of geographical contiguity. The multiple layers and the ‘winding and unwinding’ motion of the spiral image also provide a useful framework within which to consider the intersections between European and Polynesian theories and ideologies which I have identified throughout the book, indicating that if criticism of Pacific literatures may be performed from ‘the inside out’, then these literatures may also be considered, judiciously, ‘from the outside in’. Most of the writers described in this book engage at some level with European representations of Pacific peoples, indicating – to extend Hau’ofa’s multiframe paradigm – that theoretical insularity is neither productive nor appropriate to an informed consideration of these texts. The book has offered two methods by which to explore this issue, first, identifying ways in which certain applications of European theories and ideologies – as evident in the work of Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and Mary Douglas, for example – have been satirized and subverted by the writers I have selected, and second, examining ways in which postcolonial, postmodernist, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories may be deployed productively as a way ‘into’ these texts without compromising the necessary attendant focus upon local socio-economic and cultural factors. As Marsh points out, ‘pure’ applications of Eurocentric aesthetic standards to Pacific texts have generated some rather unproductive analyses commonly characterized by an assumption that much Pacific literature is ‘simple’ and unsophisticated in style (1999: 346). Patricia Grace’s writing, in particular, has been subjected to the pejorative judgements which Marsh identifies; critics have suggested that Grace’s aesthetic energies are subordinated to her ‘political’ agenda, thereby reducing novels such as Potiki and Baby No-Eyes to mere ‘propaganda’ (Eggleton 1998; Wattie 1999; see also Hereniko 1999b). Such criticisms are based upon an underlying assumption – most notably promulgated by Fredric Jameson – that all ‘Third World’ texts are necessarily politicized ‘national allegories’ which address ‘common’ issues of colonialism and European hegemony (1986: 69). In advancing these theories, Jameson constructs an Hegelian opposition between ‘realist’ Third World and ‘modernist/postmodernist’ First World texts, suggesting that Third World texts, as the ‘new literatures’ in English, approximate an earlier (and now outmoded) phase of European literary development (ibid.: 65). Jameson dismisses these texts as ‘conventional or naive’ narratives which have ‘a freshness of information and a social interest that we

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cannot share’ (ibid.: 66), implying that the Western reader is to treat a reading of ‘Third World’ literature as a kind of anthropological experiment which reveals the mysteries of an ‘alien’ culture (ibid.: 66).1 As I have pointed out, such totalizing assumptions have been criticized by Albert Wendt, who has expressed frustration at the fact that European readers and publishers still expect him to write endless variations on his social realist epic Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), while his more recent novel Black Rainbow (1992a) – a futuristic narrative deploying postmodernist strategies such as metafiction and pastiche – has been greeted with confusion and suspicion (1998). As discussed in Chapter 1, such reactions suggest that there is a widespread belief (among Western readers and critics) that indigenous writers should not experiment with postmodernist and other avant-garde literary techniques but should rather, as Paul Sharrad puts it, ‘stick to palm trees and Third World social concerns’ (2003: 157). Lewis Nkosi has suggested that similar attitudes have been expressed by white South African critics with reference to black writing, but he argues that black writers themselves have also expressed a certain resistance to European postmodernist literary strategies and European literary theory (1998: 81). Nkosi argues that the relative aesthetic hermeticism of black writing is partly due to specific political factors, such as the enforced cultural insularity imposed by the apartheid regime, which ensured that black writers had little access to higher education until well into the 1970s (ibid.: 79). Such issues have not troubled the Maori and Pacific Island writers described in this book, many of whom have university degrees; however, there is still a certain resistance to European theory among writers such as Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera (as discussed in the Introduction). Grace is not averse to European and postcolonial literary theory being applied to her work, but she states that such theoretical models do not motivate her personally (Keown 2000a: 61). Ihimaera, on the other hand, argues that it is necessary for Maori and Pacific Island writers to develop their own regional literary theories, and he personally rejects much European theory, although he has also suggested that he and other Maori writers have been influenced by postmodernist and postcolonial literary techniques (1998a; Ihimaera et al. 1996: 15–17). Ihimaera appears to subscribe to the view – as described by postcolonial critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Barbara Christian – that European theory, however it is applied or adapted, is tainted by its enduring ‘complicity with the cultural dominants within which it inescapably exists’ (Hutcheon 1989: 150; Christian 1990; see also Nkosi 1998: 81). By focusing (as Ihimaera suggests) primarily upon indigenous forms and traditions, it is indeed possible to identify, in the work of the writers I have discussed in this book, common narrative strategies and ideological preoccupations which may be traced back to Polynesian cosmogonies and philosophies. Although the spiral is the most widespread Polynesian liter-

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ary symbol in the works discussed in this book, I have also identified other images which function as indices to specific cultures or groups of cultures. Figiel, for example, uses the Samoan su’ifefiloi pattern (where motifs, phrases and images are woven together in poetry and song) and the image of the ula or lei (flower necklace) as figures for her fictional narrative strategies, while Patricia Grace invokes traditional gender-specific Maori arts and crafts (such as carving and weaving),2 as well as the patterns of Maori oratory, as analogues for the process of constructing her fiction narratives. Grace’s, Hulme’s and Wendt’s narratives share pan-Polynesian mythological references, and, as discussed above, Polynesian tattooing practices are invoked in both Once Were Warriors and The Bone People – as well as in Wendt’s article on the Samoan tatau – as a means by which to mark the (Polynesian) body with historically and culturally specific inscriptions. While recognizing the importance of these ‘indigenous’ points of intersection between my chosen texts, however, my methodology has been consistently dialectical, spiralling outwards from the local and regional to examine international theoretical paradigms. In adapting these theories to the specific socio-economic circumstances of indigenous Pacific cultures, I have tried to avoid the methodological trap described by Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, who suggest that in much postcolonial theory ‘the mechanics of economic exploitation’ in postcolonial societies are subordinated to abstract theorizing, reducing ‘the post-colonial’ to ‘a purely textual phenomenon’ (1994: 278; see also Procter 2003: 204). I have avoided interpreting colonialism as an abstract, monolithic force from which postcolonial literatures are seen, universally, to ‘disengage’ (P. Hulme 1995: 120).3 Instead, my analysis has acknowledged the varying inflections of colonialism in the Pacific, identifying New Zealand’s status as a settler colony, in particular, as a shaping force which may be distinguished in the primacy of direct cross-cultural conflict or inequality in the work of the Maori writers I have selected, in contrast with the more detached and often ironic observations in the work of Wendt, Figiel and Hau’ofa. These socio-political differences, I have suggested, are also palpable in the contrasting ways in which the indigenous body has been represented in the work of the Maori writers I have selected, as opposed to their Pacific Islander counterparts (with the exception of Alistair Campbell, whose exploration of mental illness invites a more abstract form of theorizing in spite of his attention to racial dialectics in New Zealand and the Cook Islands). Returning once again to the image with which I began this chapter, I would conclude by suggesting that the tattooed body, inscribed with cultural specificity, functions not only as a figure for the various explorations of the ‘indigenous body’ described throughout this book, but also as a wider metaphor for the indigenous literatures of the South Pacific. Its ritualized encoding of the transition from suffering and pain to healing and

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renewal not only represents the postcolonial energies of the new indigenous literatures of this region, but also symbolizes the way in which cultures, like bodies, adapt to the various influences and experiences which they encounter. As Wendt points out in his discussion of the Samoan tatau as a metaphor for the ‘post-colonial body’: [T]he Post-Colonial Body . . . is a Body ‘becoming,’ defining itself, clearing a space for itself among and alongside other bodies, in this case alongside other literatures. By giving it a Samoan tatau, what am I doing, saying? I’m saying it is a body coming out of the Pacific. Not a body being imposed on the Pacific. It is a blend, a new development, which I consider to be in heart, spirit, and muscle, Pacific; a blend in which influences from outside (even the English language) have been indigenised, absorbed in the image of the local and national, and in turn have altered the national and local. (1996: 26) Wendt’s model encapsulates my methodology in this book, which has attempted – through a focus upon the indigenous body – to investigate ways in which indigenous writing of the South Pacific intersects with the dynamics of global capitalism, imperialism and international postcolonial theory, as well as recognizing – in accordance with critics such as Witi Ihimaera (Ihimaera et al. 1996), Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (1999), Sina Va’ai (1999a) and Paul Sharrad (2003) – that the future of criticism and theory on the literatures of this region lies in an informed sensitivity to the unique and manifold local forms, symbols, ideologies and philosophies located within the vast domain of Oceania. The Polynesian cosmogonic concepts described above – and throughout the book – serve to emphasize the fluidity and mutability of the various representations and inscriptions of indigenous bodies and cultures in the work of the writers I have analysed. Constantly spiralling inwards and outwards between local, regional, and international contexts, the indigenous literatures of the South Pacific, like the cultures from which they emerge, are in a perpetual state of adaptation and ‘becoming’. Te torino whakahaere, whakamuri.4

Notes

Introduction 1 Hau’ofa was born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan missionary parents. 2 As Viktor Krupa notes, Polynesia itself has also been divided into two distinct categories on the basis of archaeological and lexostatistical data. The dividing line passes between Samoa and Tonga in the west, and between the Cook archipelago and New Zealand in the east (1982: 7). 3 I.C. Campbell (1980) points out that although certain of Bougainville’s descriptions of Tahitians in Voyage Round the World (1772) suggest that he was indeed influenced by the ‘current Arcadian vogue’, these alternate with observations on ‘cruel warfare, human sacrifice, polygamy, and fickleness’ (1980: 49), invoking the ‘ignoble savage’ trope which will be discussed later in this chapter. Campbell argues that the reality of European encounters with Pacific Islanders often jarred with the preconceptions of the ‘armchair philosophers’, and he criticizes the tendency among some historians to represent figures such as Bougainville, Banks and Forster as uncritical purveyors of the myth of the South Seas paradise (ibid.: 47–8). 4 See Rod Edmond (1997a) and W.H. Pearson (1984) in particular for a detailed analysis of European literary and artistic representations of indigenous Pacific cultures since the 1760s. Many of these European artists and writers are discussed elsewhere in this book. 5 As Ranginui Walker notes, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was given a ‘hostile reception’ by South Island Maori, who killed four of his crew members during Tasman’s visit to New Zealand in 1642, and it was over a century before another European, James Cook, was to visit the country (1990: 78). Cook’s impression of the indigenous culture was more favourable in spite of some violent conflict between Maori and his crew, but Cook’s contemporary, Marion du Fresne, was killed by Bay of Islands Maori after a series of misunderstandings, and Julien Crozet, his second-in-command, massacred around 250 Maori in retaliation, concluding that ‘there is amongst all the animals of the creation none more ferocious and dangerous for human beings than the primitive and savage man’ (Crozet 1891; quoted in Owens 1992: 30). 6 Horrified by the ‘savagery’ of inter-tribal warfare, for example, the Reverend Henry Williams described the Maori as governed by ‘the Prince of Darkness’ (Walker 1990: 85). Artist Augustus Earle expressed similar sentiments after allegedly witnessing Maori cannibalism; as Alex Calder points out, Earle arrived in New Zealand in 1827 ‘to find heroes Homer might have written about, true noble savages who, much to Earle’s dismay, also approximate that other European invention, the cannibal’ (1993: 11). 7 Initially, these deaths came about largely as a result of lack of immunity to

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European diseases. Many more Maori died in a series of land wars, culminating in the 1860s, which resulted from increasing conflict between Maori and the European settler culture following the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. These issues are described in more detail in Chapter 6. 8 Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact (1966) offers an extended analysis of this theory, which was based on the belief that indigenous Pacific cultures would disintegrate or perish once exposed to the influences of European cultures. See Callahan (1999) for an excellent critique of Moorehead’s work. 9 Dumont d’Urville, for example, drew parallels between New Zealand Maori and the warrior-heroes of Troy (Edmond 1997a: 231). 10 Reporting on his visit to New Zealand, for example, Augustus Earle figured the Maori as “cast in beauty’s perfect mould”: the children are so fine each might serve as a model for a statue of “the Infant Hercules”: nothing can exceed the graceful and athletic forms of the men, or the rounded limbs of their young women. These possess eyes beautiful and eloquent, and a profusion of long, silky, curling hair. (1909: 205–6) 11 See W.H. Pearson (1958; 1968) for an exhaustive study of European literary representations of the Maori. Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace have both pointed out that they began to write partly in order to counter stereotypical representations of Maori (Beavis 1971: 53; Grace 1978a: 80). 12 The Maori name for Europeans, particularly European New Zealanders. 13 ‘Godzone’ is a truncated form of ‘God’s own country’, a conceptualization which is critiqued in the work of Keri Hulme and Alan Duff in particular (and is discussed in Chapters 5 and 8 of this book). See Jonathan Lamb (1999) for a more detailed account of utopianism in narratives of the history and settlement of New Zealand. 14 The structure of MIRAB societies – and their relationship with aid-granting First World countries – is described in some detail in Ray Watters’s foundational article ‘Mirab Societies and Bureaucratic Elites’ (1987). Watters discusses the concept with particular reference to the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau (dependent upon New Zealand) and Kiribati and Tuvalu (dependent upon the United Kingdom) and suggests that the term is also appropriate to Western Samoa, Tonga, and those societies which are dependent upon the United States or France (ibid.: 35). See G. Hayes (1991); Macpherson (1992; 1994; 1997); and Goss and Lindquist (2000) for further discussion of MIRAB societies in the Pacific. 15 Sina Va’ai notes that in addition to Wendt, Indo-Fijian writers Subramani and Sudesh Mishra, Rotuman writer and academic Vilsoni Hereniko and Marjorie Crocombe (founding editing of MANA) have also been instrumental in encouraging Polynesian writers (1999b: 213). 16 The University of Papua New Guinea, which opened in 1966, also developed its own vibrant creative writing tradition, fostered by Ulli and Georgina Beier (Hereniko 1999a: 145). 17 Although Wendt has supported the notion of a creative exchange of ideas between writers across the Pacific (1976a), he has also attacked generalizing models of cultural identity and ‘authenticity’ in the region (1981; 1995a; see also Va’ai 1999a: 34). 18 Hau’ofa satirizes the ‘Pacific Way’ ideology in his novel Kisses in the Nederends (1987) and in his short story collection Tales of the Tikongs (1983). Both are discussed in Chapter 3. 19 As Jane McRae points out, the Maori language was spoken universally in

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the nineteenth century and by most Maori in the early decades of the twentieth century, but by the 1970s a huge reduction in speakers had taken place. Most native speakers were over thirty years of age, and only about 2 per cent of Maori children were growing up speaking Maori as a first language (1991: 2). Ihimaera, the first Maori fiction writer to publish a book in New Zealand, has expressed a sense of unease and embarrassment at the way in which people describe him as a founding figure in New Zealand Maori literature (see Chapter 6). In spite of his disclaimers, however, Ihimaera (like Patricia Grace) has continued to be viewed as a literary pioneer and figurehead, and he has played an active role in supporting and encouraging new Maori writers. Within Polynesia, the major exception to this rule is of course the American colony of Hawai‘i. State census figures for 2000 revealed that native Hawai‘ians (as a single category) represented only 6.7 per cent of the total population (though part-native Hawaicians constituted 23 per cent of the total population), and only a minority of indigenous Hawai‘ians speak their native language, although numbers are increasing (www.hawaii.gov/dbedt\census2k/profilestate/04015.pdf, accessed 5 March 2004; Krupa 1982: 3). Wendt and Ihimaera have both indicated an awareness of each other’s first publications and have identified parallels between their work (Davidson 1978: 111; Ihimaera 1998a). Early in his career, Wendt spoke of the developing connections between Maori and other Pacific Island writers: ‘[w]e know one another’s work, and most of us know one another personally, and meet from time to time at conferences. . . . There’s a sort of Artistic Renaissance going on, which is essential to the development of our cultural independence’ (Beston and Beston 1977: 161). See Sharrad (1993), Tawake (2000), SinavaianaGabbard (2001) and Subramani (2001) for further discussion of established connections between Maori and other Pacific Island writers since the 1970s. There are, of course, other universities within the Pacific Island region (such as the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of Hawai’i, Atenisi University (Tonga) and the National University (Samoa)); and within the wider Pacific or Pacific Rim (in Australia and the USA, for example) which teach Pacific writing, but many of these programmes focus more closely on Pacific Island rather than Maori writing. The exact order and direction of the various migrations are open to dispute; Krupa, for example, suggests that Easter Island and the Cook Islands were settled before Hawai’i (1982: 2–3). Fiji, with its mix of Polynesians and Melanesians, is often included as part of Polynesia; as Krupa points out, however, linguistic evidence suggests that the ‘Polynesian-Fijian’ linguistic unity terminated during the second millennium BC (approx.), when Tonga was first settled (ibid.: 2). See Sudo (1997), Braddock (2000), Goss and Lindquist (2000) and Bedford (2003) for details of immigration restrictions imposed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, like Maori, have suffered disproportionately as a result of economic recession followed by welfare cuts and deregulation of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s (Macpherson 1992). These figures are based on the latest figures from Statistics New Zealand posted on the official government website (www.stats.govt.nz, accessed 6 March 2004). The figures reveal that half (115,017) of those registered as Pacific Islanders by ethnicity were Samoan, while the next largest groups were Cook Island Maori (52,569), Tongan (40,716), Niuean (20,148), Fijian (7,041), Tokelauan (6,204) and Tuvalu Islander (1,965). Wendt also draws associations between Maori and other Pacific Islander

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Polynesians in terms of shared mythologies and traditions, pointing out that ‘when I talk about the Pacific, the Pacific Islands, I include Aotearoa. Aotearoa is a group of islands in the South Pacific; its oldest cultural maps and fictions are Polynesian and at least 1000 years old’ (1995a: 16). I am grateful to Stuart Murray for drawing my attention to Young’s omission. Paul Sharrad also discusses the relative neglect of Pacific writing within international postcolonial studies, noting ‘the largely afrocentric and indocentric concerns of postcolonial diaspora in the transatlantic metropolises that still dominate anglophone publishing’ (2003: 32). Marsh points out that G.B. Milner’s definition (in his Samoan Dictionary, 1993: 239) ‘includes “lady, princess . . . woman . . . woman doctor . . . village maiden” depending on syntactical context’, but she also admits that the word ‘is commonly used socially to refer to an unmarried woman and therefore has exclusionary connotations for some Samoan speakers’ (1999: 353). Marsh’s arguments approximate Stuart Hall’s comments on the application of so-called ‘Eurocentric’ theories to indigenous contexts: all the key concepts in the “post-colonial”, as in the general discourse of the “posts”, are operating, as Derrida would put it, “under erasure”. They have been subjected to a . . . thorough-going critique, exposing their assumptions as a set of foundational effects. But this deconstruction does not abolish them. . . . It leaves them as the only conceptual instruments and tools with which to think about the present – but only if they are deployed in their deconstructed form. (Hall 1996: 255)

33 David Welchman Gegeo (2001) argues that ‘indigenous’ now has two meanings for Pacific Island scholars and activists: ‘First, it refers to fourth-world people such as Maori, Hawaiians, and Aborigines – people who were colonized and are still colonized in their own society; this is a political definition. Second, someone who is not of mixed blood.’ Gegeo maintains that the term ‘native’ is used for those ‘of mixed ancestry living in the place of one or other parent’ (ibid.: 183). My use of the term ‘indigenous’ incorporates Gegeo’s definition of ‘native’ but generally omits his second definition, as most of the writers I discuss are of ‘mixed blood’. 34 I also spell ‘postcolonial’ without a hyphen except when I discuss the ‘post-colonial’ as a distinct historical period following decolonization/ independence. 1 Postcolonial dystopias 1 Western Samoa was annexed by Germany in 1899 and forcibly acquired by New Zealand in 1914 on the outbreak of the First World War. Administered by New Zealand under a League of Nations mandate (from 1921) and subsequently under UN trusteeship (from 1947), Western Samoa finally achieved independence in 1962, and became known as Samoa from 1997. ‘Western Samoa’ and ‘Samoa’ are used interchangeably in this book. Wendt’s engagement with Samoan history is academic as well as literary: he wrote a thesis on the Mau independence movement in Samoa while completing an MA in history at Victoria University, Wellington. 2 Wendt cites ‘African writers’ as an influence on his work in an early interview in 1974 (Zavos 1974: 54), and in his editor’s introduction to Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980 he cites the ‘anti-colonial struggles’ in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean and India as an inspiration for many emerging Oceanic writers in the 1960s and 1970s (1995b: 2).

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3 ‘Mana’, as noted in the Introduction, is a multivalent Polynesian term: here, it expresses a sense of strength, charisma and creative power. 4 As Paul Sharrad notes, the lava rocks ‘represent the volcanic origin of islands and their fertility, but also mark the sterile end of life (figuring in myth as the gateway to death and located in Samoa around the point where souls travel to enter the afterlife)’ (2003: 71). 5 I am grateful to my colleague Corinne Fowler for drawing my attention to James Clifford’s arguments on ethnographic synecdoche. 6 In his book Postcolonialism, Ato Quayson argues that ‘the words “orientalism” and “orientalist” are now standard ways of designating any attitude of knowing the Third World which is actually meant to serve Western interests’ and that these terms ‘are often carelessly used as forms of censure especially in academic contexts concerned with otherness’ (2000: 4). While in broad agreement with this assessment, I would argue that my use of the term here is appropriate given that I am analysing the specific dynamics of ‘latent’ versus ‘manifest’ Orientalism which Said outlines in his original document. 7 As Wendt points out in an article focusing on Mead’s book: Self-love is a feature of all peoples. Even for a Samoan, the tendency to see one’s country through technicolor glasses is strong. And Mead’s alluring idyllic depiction of my country (especially her enticing account of free love) appealed to me . . . because I had just lived through five strict years of boarding school, and I wasn’t having much free love in the puritanical New Zealand of the 1950s. . . . I too wanted to believe – and wanted my unfortunate Kiwi friends to believe it too – that I was from Mead’s paradise. (1983: 10–11) 8 In 1998, Freeman published a second book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, which extended his critique of Mead’s research. In this text, Freeman discusses new evidence against Mead, including newly discovered correspondence between Mead and Boas; details in Mead’s field notes; and the 1987 recanting of one of her original Samoan informants. 9 Palagi (with variant spelling ‘papalagi’) is the Samoan word for Europeans. The word literally translates as ‘sky-breaker’: in traditional Samoan society, the universe was conceptualized as a dome, ending at the horizon. When the first Europeans arrived in Samoa, it was thought that they had broken through the dome of heaven and were therefore of supernatural origin. 10 Subramani notes the way in which parallels between Greek culture and the cultures of Polynesia have been made by Western writers such as Somerset Maugham and Herman Melville (1995: 23). These representations derive from the romantic stereotypes established by eighteenth-century explorers, writers and artists (as discussed in the Introduction). 11 Fijian feminist scholar Arlene Griffen describes the sado-masochistic sexual encounters between Tauilopepe and Moa as ‘some of the most disturbing passages in Pacific literature’, arguing that Leaves of the Banyan Tree is a sustainedly ‘misogynistic’ text (1988: 4; see also Durix 1981). 12 A matai is a formally elected, titled head of a Samoan extended family. An ali’i is a chief of noble birth. Faleasa’s high status is therefore doubly enhanced as he occupies both elected and hereditary positions of authority. 13 As Paul Sharrad notes, the President’s name – Joseph Starr Linn – also links him with Stalin, the ‘emergent personalised leader of state terrorism’ whose 1930s’ show trials were alluded to by Orwell in Animal Farm (Sharrad 2003: 213; Orwell 1945). 14 Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist discovers that he has been

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programmed with a succession of virtual identities by the Tribunal, due to the fact that he has repeatedly reverted back to his pre-ordinarinised identity. A Tribunal file records that his ‘original’ Tangata Moni name was Patimaori Jones, that he was born to Patricia Manaia Graceous (whose name alludes to Maori writer Patricia Grace) and an unknown father, and that he was subsequently reprogrammed as a professional assassin (under the name Supremo Jones) and then as a bank clerk (under his current name, Eric Mailei Foster). Foster’s middle name, which translates as ‘trap’ in Samoan, references the Tribunal’s determination to curb his freedom (see also Sharrad 2003). I am grateful to Rod Edmond for drawing my attention to the anti-colonial significance of the narrator’s vegetarianism. When the narrative is read carefully, it becomes apparent that the narrator’s vegetarianism is primarily an ideological weapon wielded against the Tribunal, given that he consumes lamb and bacon in private and with the Tangata Moni streetkids on two separate occasions. I am grateful to John Masterton, one of my MPhil students at Stirling, for drawing my attention to the ‘bacon’ incident. Aeto’s name translates as ‘eagle’ in Samoan. Although the eagle is a bird of prey, a collection of bird paintings which Aeto discovers in the couple’s house serves as a presentiment that he is to become the hunted rather than the hunter. Throughout the novel, the Tribunal’s suppression of historical narratives is contrasted with the importance of history and memory as indices of cultural identity as emphasized by the Tangata Moni streetkids and eventually by the narrator himself. Wendt is careful not to imply that ‘history’ represents objective truth, however, and as Paul Sharrad notes, the key quotation ‘we are what we remember, the precious rope stretching across the abyss of all that we have forgotten’ (Wendt 1992a: 178) references earlier comments which Wendt has made regarding the ‘imbrication of fiction and history’ (Sharrad 2003: 211; Wendt 1987b: 79, 82). Head’s first name is significant: Stead has published criticism on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and it is likely that Pound’s own controversial views on race and empire are being conflated with Stead’s here. I am grateful to Mark Houlahan for drawing my attention to this connection. Figures who fall into this category include Tagata (literally, ‘man’), a dwarf who appears in the novella ‘Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree’ (1974) and again in Leaves of the Banyan Tree; the diminutive con-man Pili in the story ‘Pint Size Devil on a Thoroughbred’ (1974); and Lemigao, a club-footed (and lightfingered) illegitimate who appears in Pouliuli. While these characters are undoubtedly cast as social misfits within their respective narratives, their link with the legendary subversives Maui and Pili invests them with a mythopoeic resonance.

2 ‘Gaugin is dead’: Sia Figiel and the Polynesian female body 1 Some of Figiel’s most notable female predecessors include poets Konai Helu Thaman (Tonga), Momoe Von Reiche (Samoa), Grace Mera Molisa (Vanuatu), Jully Sipolo (Solomon Islands), and playwright/academic Teresia Teaiwa (Hawai’i), all of whom have addressed women’s concerns in their work. However, as Teresia Teaiwa notes, these writers have received scant critical attention, and Pacific literature and literary theory remain male-dominated (1999: 257). 2 An example of this appears on page 16 of The Girl in the Moon Circle, where Samoana’s mother Lafi says ‘Kalofa e’ (which, in this context, expresses sym-

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pathy or pity) to her children after beating them. In the formal ‘t’ dialect, this phrase would appear as ‘Talofa e’. See in particular A Footnote to History (in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (1907)), a detailed account of Samoan affairs which, as Rod Edmond notes, ‘stood firm against the romantic chivalry to which [Stevenson] inclined and which Ballantyne and others had established as a dominant Pacific discourse’ (1997a: 171). However, Figiel’s point of reference here is likely to be Stevenson’s novella ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1893), as she has elsewhere made reference to Uma, the young Polynesian woman whom Stevenson’s protagonist Wiltshire takes as his wife in a sham wedding ceremony (1998: 101). A similar scenario is presented in ‘Above the Gully of Your Childhood’, a poem by Figiel’s compatriot Momoe Von Reiche which describes a colonial planter with a ‘weakness’ for ‘brown bosoms’ (1986). Notably, Mr Brown is recast in a potentially positive aspect in They Who Do Not Grieve: departing from the behaviour of his literary predecessors, he sends a delighted Lili a love-letter asking her to join him in Australia (1999: 159). Freeman’s later book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead (1998), postdates Figiel’s two earliest books. Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990), which will be discussed in Chapter 8, offers a similarly grim and uncompromising perspective on domestic violence. This inversion of sexual codes also features in Alistair Campbell’s The Frigate Bird (1989), where Cook Islander Maori are shocked to discover naked German tourists bathing in local rock pools, and in Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1973), where palagi women are represented as licentious and/or sexually predatory. Samoan women are generally expected to keep their legs covered, although many young women now choose not to observe this custom. Western Samoa has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world (Meleisea 1987b: 168). Both Wendt and Figiel explore youth suicide in a range of their writing. Mohanty’s commentary focuses specifically upon representations of ‘third world’ women in Western feminist discourse; however, as bell hooks points out, similar stereotypes are deployed by black women writers (1992: 58–9).

3 Purifying the abject body 1 ‘Manu’ translates as ‘bird’ in various Polynesian languages, and Manu’s cheeky, puckish behaviour in Hau’ofa’s text invites a comparison with the mischievous fantail who laughs at a crucial moment while the pan-Polynesian demi-god Maui is attempting to defeat death by crawling into the womb of the death-goddess, Hine-nui-te-Po. The bird’s laughter wakes the goddess and she closes her legs, crushing Maui between her thighs. In Tales of the Tikongs, Manu performs similarly disruptive acts, at one point shouting at a corrupt government minister and causing him to crash into a tree. 2 Kisses was written several years after Hau’ofa first came to the University of the South Pacific, and Teresia Teaiwa notes that ‘Fijian influences’ are palpable throughout the narrative, particularly in the names of the characters (1999: 256). Fiji is described in the narrative as a location distinct from the fictional Tipota (1987: 32); however, much of the satire in the novel, as Hau’ofa himself points out, is directed at certain academics and ideologues – many based at the University of the South Pacific in Suva – who supported the ‘Pacific Way’ ideology in the pre-coup years (Keown 2001: 74). 3 The whakapohane procedure is a traditional Maori insult involving the exposure of one’s buttocks to the object of contempt. Hau’ofa adds to the humorous

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implications of this analogy vis-à-vis Oilei’s cure by naming the hospital in which the clinic is located after Dun Mihaka, a Maori protester who exposed his buttocks to the Prince and Princess of Wales during their visit to New Zealand in 1983. Oilei had been temporarily converted to the ‘Third Millennium’ movement earlier in the novel but was dissuaded through the ministrations of his wife Makarita. Hau’ofa has named Jonathan Swift as one of the satirists he most admires (1990: 43). See, for example, Gulliver’s advocation of the merits of gunpowder as a military weapon during a conversation with the King of Brobdingnag in book II. Gulliver reveals the destructive properties of gunpowder to the king in the hope of ingratiating himself ‘farther into his Majesty’s Favour’ (1986: 128), but the king is horrified by the proposition, which confirms him in his belief that Gulliver is a member of ‘the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth’ (ibid.: 126). I am grateful to my colleague Joe Bray for helpful advice on this section of the chapter. Bhabha’s theories are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. In Where We Once Belonged (1996a), Figiel, like Wendt, uses scatological imagery in order to critique consumer capitalism and political corruption. The New Zealand-educated nihilist, Siniva, describes the Westernization of Samoa as a slow immersion in ‘darkness shit’ (ibid.: 233–4), and an extended description of Apia as a locus of consumer capitalism is full of imagery connecting consumer capitalism with the cloacal cycle (ibid.: 73–88).

4 Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: mental illness and postcoloniality 1 When the Bough Breaks was originally produced as a radio play in 1970, but was adapted for stage and published in Howard McNaughton’s Contemporary New Zealand Plays (1974a). 2 I refer here to Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’ in childhood ego development. 3 Significantly, Campbell has revealed that Tia ‘reminds’ him of his own mother Teu, and that he originally intended to give the character his mother’s name (Sarti 1998b: 20). 4 The narrator is mortified, for example, when a hospital orderly ‘pityingly’ reveals that contrary to the narrator’s assumptions, Dai Williams is not a compulsive pickpocket (1989: 90). Such scenarios possibly stem from Campbell’s own personal experiences: he reveals that during his tortured journey out to Penrhyn Island in 1979, for example, he became convinced that his fellow passengers were ‘demons’ who subjected him to harrowing psychological ‘assaults’ (Sarti 1998b: 19). 5 A similar figure appears in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998) (see Chapter 7). 6 Klein’s theory of subject-formation resembles Lacan’s theory on the entry of the subject into the binary structures of the symbolic. Klein, however, locates the origin of these binarisms in the pre-Oedipal stage, whereas Lacan argues that these oppositions coincide with the Oedipal phase when the child enters into society through language, the law of the father. 7 Two characters are particularly notable: the ‘short-legged Apollo’ who ‘chases’ him on a motorbike, and ‘Big Mouth’, a noisy oaf who ‘deliberately’ raises the volume of his voice when the narrator is present.

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5 Remoulding the body politic: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People 1 See, for example, Prentice (1986), Henke (1992) and Holme (1995). 2 C.K. Stead, for example, objected to the fact that The Bone People was awarded the Mobil Oil-sponsored Pegasus Award for Maori Literature, arguing that Hulme’s one-eighth proportion of Maori blood wasn’t sufficient to qualify her as a ‘Maori’ writer (1985: 103–4). Margery Fee (1989) uses Stead’s article as a basis for interrogating received notions of racial and cultural authenticity. 3 Similar tensions are explored in Hulme’s poems ‘Silence . . . on another marae’ and ‘Silence . . . overseas’ (1982: 26, 37). 4 In addition to The Bone People, Hulme’s short-story collection Te Kaihau/The Windeater (1986b) and her prose poem Lost Possessions (1985), both of which are discussed later in this chapter, offer the most extended explorations of these issues. 5 Robert Young remarks that The Wretched of the Earth ‘reads as if it constitutes a general handbook of the experience and procedures for anti-colonial revolution’, noting that it became a ‘virtual handbook for leaders in contexts as different as Malcolm X in the African-American Black Power movement of the 1960s and Steve Biko in the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa in the same period’ (2001: 280). 6 I am grateful to Lindsey Moore for valuable feedback on this chapter. 7 The nearest town is Whangaroa, a fictional location which appears to correspond to the ‘real’ community at Whataroa, near Hulme’s home at Okarito (Fee 1991: 59). 8 The later short story ‘A Drift in Dream’, published in Te Kaihau, explores Simon’s ancestry in further detail, revealing that he was born to a French mother and an Irish father. Simon’s fine blond hair and ‘seabluegreen’ eyes appear to derive from his paternal side. 9 Hulme discusses this theory in an interview with Sandi Hall, arguing that ‘the pakeha only hastened something that had already begun’ (1984: 18). 10 Gaffney (1986) also discusses this nightmare as a manifestation of Kerewin’s inner turmoil. 11 Hulme has elsewhere described violence as an ‘energy form’ which should be ‘[channelled] . . . away from harming people or places’ (Wichtel 1985: 22). 12 Otto Heim similarly cautions against conflating the ‘mythical’ and ‘material’ aspects of Hulme’s narrative (1998: 69). 13 In Maori, one of the phrases used to denote the vagina, for example, is ‘Te Whare o Aitua’ (‘the house of ill-omen’), evoking the famous mythical exploits of the demi-god Maui (see Chapter 1) who, after attempting to defeat death by crawling into the womb of the death-goddess Hine-nui-te-Po, was crushed to death by the teeth of obsidian within her vagina. The paradox here, of course, is that the womb or vagina is both the reproductive space from which new life emerges, and the site of violent death. 14 Hulme’s poem ‘Returning’ – a kind of prologue to The Bone People – advances such an interpretation; the anonymous speaker addresses an unnamed loved one thus: ‘Making the mistake of running my fingers over the braille of your scars/I now see those grotesque and bloody episodes/as pursed-mouth words’ (1982a: 23). 6 Disease, colonialism and the national ‘body’ 1 Ihimaera also names Albert Wendt and Maori woman writer J.C. Sturm (who had a collection of short stories, The Talking Cat, completed in manuscript form in the 1960s) as important literary predecessors (1998a).

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2 Some of the better-known writers publishing during this period included Arapera Hineira Blank, Rowley Habib, Rora Paki, Hirini Moko Mead and Riki Erihi. 3 Te Kooti died in 1893. According to Maori oral histories, he was born in 1814. 4 The settlement was known as ‘Hiruharama Hou’ – the ‘New Jerusalem’ (‘Hiruharama’ is a Maori phonetic approximation of ‘Jerusalem’). Maungapohatu is the sacred mountain of the Tuhoe tribe, to which Rua Kenana belonged. 5 The pre-European Maori population cannot be confirmed exactly, but it is generally estimated at around 100,000 (Rice 1988: 102). 6 This virus (known as the ‘Spanish ‘flu’) was introduced into New Zealand by troops returning from the First World War. It was a particularly virulent strain of influenza, characterized by a sudden onset and short duration, sometimes infecting and killing a person within a single day; it was highly infectious and had an enhanced tendency towards pneumonic complications which, if not treated with antibiotics, were commonly fatal (H. Wilson 1992: 1). The symptoms included ‘high fever, rapid pulse, headache, mottled skin, pains in chest and limbs, vomiting, diarrhoea and bloody sputum’ (Rice 1988: 109). 7 Ihimaera’s play Woman Far Walking (2000b) also explores the 1918 pandemic. 8 In his ‘author’s note’ at the beginning of The Dream Swimmer, Ihimaera cites various factual sources consulted during the drafting of his novel, including Rice’s Black November but also various newspapers, including The Gisborne Herald. 9 Ihimaera’s poem ‘Dinner with the Cannibal’ – written in 1990 during the sesquicentennial celebrations of the Treaty of Waitangi – effects a similar inversion. The Maori speaker of the poem is invited to dinner with the colonizer; to his surprise he discovers that he is to be the main course, and New Zealand’s entire colonial history is represented as a cannibal feast (1993: 154–5). Ihimaera’s assessments therefore invert Eurocentric models of cannibalism in which anthropophagy is associated with an oral infantilism attributed to darkskinned peoples by Europeans (Fanon 1970: 79; Kovel 1970: 66). 10 Tamatea’s English is inflected by Maori grammatical patterns. See Chapter 7 for a detailed discussion of ‘Maori English’. 11 A notable example is Ihimaera’s account of the Tohunga Suppression Act which, he implies, the Pakeha attempted to bring against Rua in order to curb his influence (1997: 139). Binney et al.’s account, however, reveals that Numia Te Raukariata – a Tuhoe chief who strongly opposed Rua – instigated these proceedings (1979: 35–6). A comparable scenario unfolds in The Matriarch, where Ihimaera describes in detail a military offensive against Te Kooti at Ngatapa but makes no mention of the fact that the attack was led by Major Ropata, a Maori general who nursed a grudge against Te Kooti (Stead 1989: 194). 12 In his account of Rua’s 1916 trial for sedition, for example, Ihimaera endorses false evidence given by District Constable Andy Grant, who claimed that Rua had dissuaded 1,400 of his followers from enlisting and had expressed his desire for the Germans to win the war so that he could be instated as King of Aotearoa. Ihimaera’s reasons for supporting this view are transparent when considered within the framework of his nationalist project: the claim that Rua wanted the Pakeha government to be overthrown and for himself to be set up as a national leader would fulfil the Mosaic prophecies regarding the ‘Promised Land’, supporting the claim that Maori political autonomy would eventually be established. 13 As is the case with the Ringatu movement, the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica anticipates a return to a homeland after deliverance from colonialist

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oppression. As Nicola Legat reveals, Rastas, like the Ringatu, also believe themselves to be descended from the oppressed Israelites (1985: 124). The similarities between Rastafarianism and the Ringatu doctrines allowed for a synthesis of Rasta and Ringatu beliefs which culminated in East Coast Rastafarianism, a movement which reached its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s. Kara Campbell, Ruatoria-based leader of the East Coast Rastafarians, was tattooed with the full facial moko of Te Kooti while in jail, and he and his followers held that Christ would eventually descend on a white horse from Mount Hikurangi, inside which the legendary black diamond of Te Kooti is said to be buried (McLeod 1988: 79). 14 The East Coast Rastafarians, heavy marijuana users, were involved in a saga of violent feuds and arson attacks which plagued Ruatoria during the 1980s. The fundamental motivation behind the conflict was the issue of land ownership: for the East Coast Rastafarians the ‘promised land’ lay within New Zealand itself; Maori Rastafarianism acknowledged its African roots but did not anticipate a return to Africa. 7 Language and the corporeal 1 Grace’s Maori bloodline is inherited from her paternal side: her mother is Pakeha. 2 By 1975, only 3 million acres remained in Maori hands. See Keown (2000a; 2000b) for a more detailed discussion of Maori land issues and their importance in Grace’s writing. 3 While Grace chooses not to name the hospital responsible for the incident, she has freely discussed her feelings of shock and outrage after learning of the event through a lawyer who was present at the hospital along with the bereaved family members, and she states that Baby No-Eyes was written in order to ‘give that baby a life’. Grace points out that in the ‘original occurrence’, the child’s eyes were not placed inside a food jar, but they were put ‘directly’ into a supermarket carrier bag by staff at the hospital (Keown 2000a: 56). 4 The doctor who is sent out to speak to the family, for example, refers to the child as a ‘body’ and a ‘corpse’, offering to ‘arrange disposal’ if the family so wishes (1998: 71). 5 After receiving the child’s eyes inside the food jar, Kura compares the conduct of the hospital staff with pre-European cannibalistic ritual where, following violent clashes between warring tribes, warriors sought to demean their foes by removing and consuming parts of their bodies (1998: 162). 6 See in particular ‘Beans’, ‘Letters From Whetu’ and ‘The Pictures’ in The Dream Sleepers (1980), and ‘Going for the Bread’ and ‘The Hills’ in Electric City (1987). 7 In the months following her miscarriage, Te Paania reports an ability to see, feel, hear and smell her baby girl (1998: 92, 132), and her communication with Baby continues until the moment of Tawera’s birth. 8 Throughout Grace’s fiction, children and the elderly frequently possess forms of spiritual insight, and they often form close bonds with one another, reflecting traditional social practices whereby children were raised by their grandparents. 9 As Nelson Wattie notes, the novel also incorporates references to the mythical demigod Tawhaki, whose mythical exploits – which include the restoration of his blind grandmother’s sight – connect with the ‘eye imagery’ in Grace’s novel (1999: 15). Significantly, another of the Tawhaki myths details the punitive blinding of one of Tawhaki’s slaves (Walker 1990: 22). 10 Toko, a young disabled boy gifted with foresight, is killed while passing

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13 14

15

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through a doorway that has been booby-trapped by arsonists. Toko identifies the door as ‘[the] toothed aperture through which all must pass’ (1998: 183), alluding to the toothed vagina of Hine-nui-te-Po in which Maui perished while trying to gain immortality. As discussed in the chapter on Keri Hulme, the phrase ‘Te Whare o Aitua’ denotes the vagina as a place of misfortune and death. The invocation of Te Kore in the novel is also a specific reference to Grace’s artistic technique: she describes herself, as she prepares to write new material, as beginning with absolutely ‘nothing’, and allowing her work to grow organically from that ‘nothingness’ (Keown 2000a: 60). Summer footwear also commonly known as ‘flip-flops’. In an early essay, Grace describes herself as ‘a person of mixed racial origin, being Maori and Pakeha both by birth and by upbringing’ (1978a: 80), but throughout her literary career, and particularly in recent years, she has chosen to identify most closely with her Maori heritage. Deleuze and Guattari’s keywords ‘major’, ‘minor’ and ‘Third World’ are Eurocentric and somewhat dated; throughout this chapter I therefore place these terms in inverted commas to indicate that I am using the terms advisedly and with specific reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments. Grace herself prefers the phrase ‘small population culture’ as an alternative to ‘minority culture’ (1999: 71–2). In 1905, the Inspector of Native Schools instructed teachers to encourage Maori children to speak English in school grounds. This injunction was rapidly translated into ‘a general prohibition of the Maori language within school precincts’ which lasted for the next five decades and ‘was in some cases enforced by corporal punishment’ (Walker 1990: 147). Grace points out that during her childhood, her Maori relatives – particularly the older ones – tended not to speak Maori in front of the children because it was generally believed at the time that it was more advantageous to speak English (Tausky 1991: 90).

8 The narcissistic body 1 Like Keri Hulme, Duff objects to the way in which New Zealand is often stereotyped as an antipodean ‘paradise’ (1999b: 6), and he criticizes the media’s ‘misrepresentation’ of race relations during the sesquicentenary year: we were inundated with this image of ourselves as one people ‘joined together, hand in hand,’ the blaring music coupled with glossy images of sweetly smiling, teary eyed Maori and grinning Pakeha types with that look of: We’re mates, the Maoris and me. (1993: vii) Duff argues that there remains a huge socio-economic disparity between Maori and Pakeha. (1998a: 230) 2 In 1991, Duff began writing a column for the Evening Post which was syndicated to eight other newspapers, and he remains one of New Zealand’s most wellknown and controversial journalists. 3 A notable exception is Maori Labour MP John Tamihere, who, in a recent speech launching a report on Maori ‘well-being’ and urban development, praised Duff’s ‘warriors not whingers’ approach to improving the socioeconomic position of Maori (2003). 4 Duff has argued that ‘[the] whites in this insular little country think that Maoris are all like Witi Ihimaera’s characters – sweet-natured and naive and incredible [sic] generous. But you go to any courthouse . . . you’ll see it’s just

Notes

5

6

7

8 9 10

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16 17

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about all Maoris there’ (Macdonald 1991: 32). Duff’s criticisms are of course questionable in view of the increasingly politicized nature of Ihimaera’s writing since the mid-1980s. Surprisingly, in view of these comments, in his autobiography Duff recalls giving Ihimaera a copy of Once Were Warriors inscribed with a message acknowledging him as ‘the first Maori novelist’ (1999a: 215). In his review of What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, for example, Peter Beatson acknowledges that Duff is ‘a powerful and meticulous literary craftsman’, but argues that Duff’s style and use of narrative viewpoint, particularly free indirect thought, are clumsy and over-infused with authorial intrusions (1997: 137–43). In Out of the Mist and Steam, Duff describes the way in which his alcoholic mother’s violent attacks upon his father, and the violence he witnessed in the homes of Maori relatives, repeated itself in his own violent behaviour during his teenage years. He emphasizes how difficult it is to ‘break the cycle’ of domestic violence (1999a: 158). I interpret narcissism not in terms of Freud’s original definition of the condition as a form of auto-erotic self-regard, but rather – as Stephen Frosh puts it – as ‘a consequence of the development of pathological (in contrast to normal) differentiation and integration of ego and super-ego structure, deriving from pathological (in contrast to normal) object relationships’ (1991: 105). Duff was originally commissioned to write the screenplay for Tamahori’s film, but following a series of disagreements over script content, he was replaced by Riwia Brown. This development establishes continuity with the film version of Once Were Warriors, where Grace is raped by Jake’s friend, known as ‘Uncle Bully’. Beth is represented more sympathetically in this respect: again, she appears to function as a mouthpiece for Duff’s own views on the subject of parenting, and consequently she appears as a critic of her own culture, condemning Pine Block parents for being too drunk to take proper care of their children (1994a: 14). A pa was traditionally a stockade or ‘fortified place’ (H. Williams 1975: 43) but here it designates a self-contained Maori community. Tim Armstrong notes that the self-estrangement or ‘racialized fracturing of the self’ which Duff’s Maori characters experience is manifested in the way in which they constantly describe themselves in the third person (as ‘a man’, ‘a girl’, ‘a woman’ and so on) (1997: 68). Fanon 1970: 79. Pine Block gang culture, with its leather regalia embossed with gang insignia, its violent initiation rituals and its distinctive linguistic idioms – all gang members call one another ‘bruthas’ and ‘sistas’, for example – is also clearly influenced by American popular culture. The social dynamics Duff describes are reminiscent of those in Maori poet Apirana Taylor’s bleakly ironic poem, ‘Sad Joke on a Marae’: ‘My name is Tu the freezing worker./Ngati D.B. is my tribe./The pub is my Marae./My fist is my taiaha./Jail is my Home’ (1979: 15). The poem records the detrimental effects of post-war urbanization: Tu is a freezing worker cut off from rural Maoridom; the pub and D.B. (Dominion Breweries beer) replace kinship links; the traditional warrior’s weapon, the taiaha, is replaced with fists; and a jail cell is substituted for ancestral land. Near the beginning of the novel, Beth observes that Maori and Pakeha have so little contact that they ‘[m]ay as well be from another country’ (1994a: 43). Brian McDonnell notes the way in which the film consciously invokes Maori images and traditions not mentioned in the novel: Grace, for example, becomes ‘a writer who utilises in her stories elements from traditional Maori oral culture’ such as the taniwha (a mythical aquatic creature), while Boogie is

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taught to use the taiaha (a weapon used by traditional Maori warriors) during his sojourn in a welfare home (1994: 4–5). The koru (spiral) surface designs which appear on Nig’s arm were also reserved mainly for women in pre-European times (Haua 2004). So claims Maori artist and teacher Te Kohatu, interviewed by Barbara Sumner for an article on Maori moko (1999: 7). Alan Governar traces the abhorrence of tattooing among the clergy back to the commandment in Leviticus 19:28 (Governar 1988: 209–10). The DouayRheims version of the Old Testament (1609) translates the edict as follows: ‘You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh, for the dead: neither shall you make in yourselves any figures or marks.’ Maori feminists debate this second issue, claiming that in pre-European times, Maori women had a much greater degree of power and autonomy, and that cross-cultural contact with the patriarchal colonizing culture altered the more balanced gender structures of traditional Maori society (Poananga 1986: 27–8).

Conclusion 1 In targeting Jameson here, I acknowledge Neil Lazarus’s point that the infamy of the ‘Third World Literature’ essay has served, in the work of some postcolonial critics, to obscure the fact that Jameson has produced ‘a far-reaching and consequential body of work stretching back to the late 1960s’ (1999: 12). 2 In her review of Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged, Marsh (a New Zealand-born Samoan) similarly deploys Samoan weaving – particularly the construction of the Samoan woven mat or ‘ie toga – as a symbol for the narrative and ideological structure of Figiel’s book (1997: 4). 3 Peter Hulme’s description of the postcolonial as a descriptive label for a ‘process [sic] of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome’ seems at once too vague and too narrow to encompass the variety of literatures and cultural contexts described in this book, in spite of Hulme’s acknowledgement that the postcolonial ‘process . . . takes many different forms’ (1995: 120). 4 As discussed in Chapter 6, this phrase – which recurs throughout Ihimaera’s The Dream Swimmer – translates as ‘[at] the same time as the spiral is going out, it is returning. At the same time as it is going forward, it is going back’ (Ihimaera 1997: 149). Ihimaera also uses the perpetual motion of the spiral as a symbol for the vicissitudes of contemporary Maori literature in English (Ihimaera et al. 1996: 15–17).

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Index

abject(ion) 13, 69, 81–3, 136–7, 147 Achebe, C. 8, 17, 28, 36 Africa 8, 31, 79, 104, 179, 202n, 209n; African writing/writers 202n; South Africa 207n; South African literature/criticism 196; West African writing/writers 12, 28 African-American(s) 49, 179–80, 207n; dialect features 173–4 Aidoo, A.A. 28 Algeria 104; Algerian war of liberation 104 ali’i (Samoan chief of noble birth) 29, 30, 203n allegory 16; comic allegory 62–3; and dreams 114; and Maori mythology 120–1, 156; (post)colonial allegory 12, 13, 32–4, 36, 66, 72–4, 78, 104–5, 118, 127, 130, 152, 192, 195 American Samoa 19 anthropology 10, 19–21, 42, 46–7, 61, 68–9, 75, 82, 196; see also Douglas, M.; Mead, M.; Freeman, D Te Ao Hou (The New World, a magazine of Maori affairs) 127–8, 149 Aotearoa 7, 108, 121, 128–9, 143–4, 146–7, 149, 182, 202n, 208n; see also New Zealand architecture 107, 122–3; Pacific architecture 41 Armah, A.K. 28, 78; The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born 78 art/artistic production 2, 14, 19, 38–9, 55, 56, 69, 74, 81–3, 99, 107, 109–10, 157, 159, 167, 210n; fine arts/ painting 19, 25, 38, 42, 100, 105, 107, 109, 115, 117, 131, 155–6, 158–9, 184, 203n, 204n; Maori art see Maori; and nationalism 104–6, 122, 126; Pacific/Polynesian art(ists) 5, 6–7, 9,

15, 17, 31, 38, 120, 193, 201n, 212n; performing arts 6 Arvidson, K. 4, 128, 150 Asia 2, 8, 9; Asia-Pacific 7, 9, 38; SouthEast Asia 7 assimilation 105–7, 109, 122; see also Pakeha Atenisi University (Tonga) 201n Auckland University Press 7 Australia 3, 8, 11, 44, 61, 63, 80, 205n; Australian aborigines 1, 202n; literature 24. Australian National University 61 autobiography 13, 18, 26, 38, 43, 64, 86, 99, 102–3, 170–1, 211n Awatere, D. 35, 111, 146; Maori Sovereignty 35, 111 Awoonor, K. 28 Bakhtin, M. 66–8, 167 Ballantyne, R.M. 19, 205n; The Coral Island 19 Banks, J. 2, 46, 199n Baudrillard, J. 22, 33–4; the hyperreal 22 Bhabha, H. 8, 10, 19, 20, 24, 90, 100, 206n; on the colonial specular encounter 77, 89–90, 96, 99; on Fanon 104; on mimicry 57; on racial stereotypes 112; on the ‘third space’ 93 biblical discourse see Christianity biculturalism (in New Zealand) 5, 106, 111, 127–8, 141; multiculturalism 96, 106, 127 Binney, J. 134, 138, 139, 141; Mihaia 139 Boas, F. 19, 42, 203n Bougainville, L. Comte de 1, 2, 75, 199n

230

Index

Brah, A. 18 Britain see United Kingdom Brown, N. 70, 77 Brown, Riwia 182, 211n Brown, Ruth 110–11, 121, 123, 126 Butler, J. 14, 154, 157 Campbell, A. Te Ariki 1, 11, 12, 13, 84–101, 102, 116, 197, 205n, 206n; The Frigate Bird 13, 86, 87, 89–91, 96–9, 116, 205n; Mine Eyes Dazzle 84; Sidewinder 92, 99; The Suicide 85, 91, 98; When the Bough Breaks 85, 98, 206n Campbell, I.C. 2, 199n Camus, A. 18; The Myth of Sisyphus 18 Canada 8, 11; Canadian literature 24; Montreal 61 cannibalism 2, 30, 33–4, 133, 151, 199n, 208n, 209n capitalism 5, 12, 33–5, 44, 57, 62–3, 73, 100, 104, 168, 193–4, 198; capitalist alienation 109; conspicuous consumption 29, 31; consumer capitalism 29, 33, 38, 45, 53, 56, 58, 206n; late capitalism 106, 110, 125, 188 Caribbean 8, 202n Christian, B. 99, 196 Christianity 2, 52–3, 56, 62, 71, 134, 139, 185; antichrist 63; biblical discourse 94, 95, 165; Jesus Christ 56, 119, 139, 144, 209n Cisneros, S. 39; The House on Mango Street 39 Clifford, J. 20, 21, 68, 71, 203n colonialism 3, 4, 8, 11–15, 16–17, 27, 31–3, 38, 43–5, 61–3, 70, 100, 104, 127, 130, 133, 136, 139, 142, 144, 147, 149, 151, 168, 170, 171, 174–5, 178–9, 191–3, 195, 197, 202n, 212n; capitalism 104; and colonial allegory/metaphor 73, 131, 133, 146–7; colonial discourse 24, 58, 68, 89–90, 130, 168; colonial policy 2, 79, 126, 132; colonial/Western education 10, 13, 16, 26, 34, 38, 51–2, 54, 61, 90, 95, 97, 171, 196, 206n; and (economic) exploitation 3, 193; neocolonialism 3, 4, 11–13, 34, 62–3, 100–1, 104, 119–20, 126; settler colonies/societies 5, 8, 11, 12, 100, 106, 132, 197, 200n; and violence/ oppression 102, 104–6, 181, 208n, 209n

comedy/humour 13, 39, 46, 50, 56, 61–9, 80, 105; and the carnivalesque 66–8; comic allegory 62–3, 65, 68–9, 78, 82; comi-satirical mode 13, 61–3, 82; grotesque realism 66–7 Cook Islands 1, 3, 6–7, 11, 13, 84–8, 90–1, 95, 97, 99, 197, 199n, 200n, 201n; Cook Islanders 4, 84, 86, 90, 92, 101, 201n, 205n; Cook Island Maori language 90; Rarotonga 87, 90–1; spirituality 95, 98 Cook, J. 1, 75, 131, 185, 199n Crocombe, M. 4, 200n Dangarembga, T. 30, 34, 86; Nervous Conditions 30, 34 decolonisation/independence 11–12, 17, 36, 104, 106, 201n, 202n; in Africa 28–9; in Ghana 29, 78; in India 107; in Nigeria 79; in the Pacific 3, 11, 16, 61–3, 67, 79, 192–3; in postcolonial literature(s) 78; in Samoa 17–18, 29–30, 36, 38, 50–1 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 10, 14, 56, 152; on ‘minor’ literature and deterritorialization 159, 162–4, 167, 210n; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 162 depopulation in the Pacific 131–2; see also social Darwinism diaspora(s) (in Pacific) see migration/migrancy disease/illness 12–14, 21, 25, 28, 34, 36, 64, 70, 72, 74, 103, 113–17, 121, 127, 130–9, 144, 146–7, 200n Douglas, M. 69–72, 75, 80–1, 138, 195; Purity and Danger 69, 75 Duff, A. 1, 8, 11, 12, 14, 170–90, 191–2, 200n, 205n, 210–12n; Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge 171; Once Were Warriors (novel) 8, 14, 50, 170, 172–3, 176, 181, 188–9, 191–2, 205n, 211n; Once Were Warriors (film) see Tamahori, L.; One Night Out Stealing 170, 188; Out of the Mist and Steam 171, 172, 211n; What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? 170, 176, 188–9, 211n Dumont d’Urville, J.S.C. 200n Earle, A. 199n, 200n Easter Island 1, 6, 201n economic aid (to Pacific nations) 3, 4, 62–3, 100, 200n Edmond, R. 2, 5, 6, 36, 43, 45, 47, 60,

Index 62–4, 66–7, 75, 103, 119–20, 122, 131–2, 136–7, 185, 199n, 200n, 204n, 205n education see colonialism eighteenth century: exploration 1–2, 75, 131, 203n; ethnography/racial theory 75, 77, 82; philosophy 76; pornography 45; scientific theories 75, 77, 82; travel narratives 23, 203n Ellis, J. 10, 18, 31–2, 35 ethnography 68–9, 71–2, 75, 82; ethnographic satire 46; ethnographic synecdoche 20, 203n exile 17–18, 25, 62; see also migration/ migrancy existentialism 17–18, 31, 38, 53–4 exotic(ism) 24, 39, 45, 75 fa’a Samoa see Samoa Fanon, F. 10, 13, 100, 102, 211n; on anthropophagy 208n; on autodestructive behaviour 111–12, 116, 181; Black Skin White Masks 88, 178; on the colonial dialectic 116, 126; on nationalism 104–7, 121–2, 126, 146–7; on negrophobia 97, 179; on political activism 104; on psychopathology 113; on psychosomatic disorders 115–16; on racial stereotyping 25, 26, 86, 88–9, 178–9; on the (colonial) specular encounter 89, 92; The Wretched of the Earth 102, 104, 207n feminism 52, 55–6: and literature 27, 203n; and race 55; and theory 10, 154, 205n, 212n; see also gender Figiel, S. 1, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 38–60, 61, 62, 79, 84, 192, 194, 197, 204–6n; on Samoan adolescence 39–42, 46, 48, 52, 57, 60; The Girl in the Moon Circle 38–41, 51–3, 56, 204n; They Who Do Not Grieve 38, 39, 42, 47, 50, 55, 57–8, 192, 205n; To a Young Artist in Contemplation 38, Where We Once Belonged 7, 38–51, 53, 55 Fiji 3, 4, 16, 58, 61, 200n, 201n, 203n, 205n; 1987 coup 4, 205n; Fijian language 80 film/television/media: film 8, 19, 22–3, 25, 35, 58, 80, 108, 182–5; television 33, 56, 58, 178–9; visual/print media 38, 57–8, 60, 111, 139, 145–6, 168, 178–9, 210n food 23; as cultural/literary symbol 30,

231

33; disorderly eating 29–30, 34; and post-independence corruption 29–30 Foucault, M. 67, 119 Frame, J. 99; The Lagoon and Other Stories 99 France 1, 35, 47, 179, 184, 200n, 207n; French Antilles 97, 179; French language 88, 104; French Polynesia 8; French Renaissance 67, nuclear testing in the Pacific 35 Freeman, D. 21–2, 27, 42, 46–7, 50, 195, 203n, 205n; Margaret Mead and Samoa 21; The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead 203n, 205n Freud, S. 25, 70–1, 77, 153; on narcissism 211n; Oedipus complex 71–2, 92, 95, 153, 206n Frosh, Stephen 96, 177, 211n Gandhi, M. 73 Gauguin, P. 28, 38, 42–3, 47–8; Noa Noa 47–8 Gell, A. 60, 119–20, 191, 192 gender 13–14, 26–8, 49, 56, 64–5, 152–4, 186; and artistic production 120; in colonial discourse 47; in Maori society 197, 212n; and misogyny 65; and nationalism 125; in Pacific literature 39; and place/space 91; and race 54, 56; in Samoa 26–7, 38; and transvestism/trans-sexuality 46; see also feminism Germany 44, 202n, 205n, 208n; German administration of Samoa 44 globalization 2, 9, 12, 13, 44, 57, 62, 64–6, 68, 71, 79–80, 100, 164, 180, 193–4, 198; global capitalism see capitalism godzone (God’s Own Country) 3, 200n Goldie, T. 19, 24 Grace, P. 1, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 111, 123, 127, 148, 149–69, 171, 189, 194, 195–7, 200n, 201n, 204n, 206n, 209–10n; Baby No-Eyes 14, 148, 149–50, 152, 156–7, 162, 164, 167, 195, 206n, 209n; Cousins 149, 150, 152, 155; Dogside Story 149, 150; The Dream Sleepers and Other Stories 149, 209n; Electric City and Other Stories 149, 209n; Potiki 111, 123, 149, 150, 152, 155–6, 162–3, 167–8, 195; Waiariki and Other Stories 149, 150 Greece: art/sculpture 25; classical culture/literature 2, 3, 85, 203n

232

Index

Halbert, W. P. 128, 143, 146 Hall, S. 10, 202n Hanson, A. 110, 118, 120 Haua, R. 182, 185–7, 212n Hau’ofa, E. 1, 4–5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 61–83, 84, 194, 195, 197, 199n, 200n, 205–6n; Kisses in the Nederends 13, 61, 63–4, 67–8, 71, 75, 78–83, 194, 200n, 205n; Tales of the Tikongs 61, 63, 200n, 205n Hawai‘i 1, 6–8, 44, 46, 137, 193, 201n, 204n; Hawai‘ian language 201n; native Hawai‘ians 201n, 202n Hawaiki (legendary homeland of Maori/Polynesians) 7, 155 Head, B. 53, 86, 94 healing: faith healing 130, 134, 138–9; healing/health as symbolic paradigm 12, 14, 64–6, 72, 103, 107–8, 112–13, 116–17, 119, 121–2, 147, 170, 176, 188–90, 192, 197; public health policy and race 135–8, 148, 151. Heim, O. 108, 207n Hereniko, V. 1, 9, 172, 188, 195, 198, 200n; Inside Out 9 Hinduism 70–2 Hine-nui-te-Pö 18, 156, 158, 161, 205n, 207n, 210n history (as discipline/archive) 10, 34, 71, 129, 133, 141–3, 162, 167, 188, 193, 194, 202n, 204n; of European colonialism 11, 12, 31–3, 44, 56; historiography 142; historiographical fiction 129–30, 134–5, 141–2; and nationalism 104, 122, 142, 146; oral history see Maori, Polynesia, Samoa hooks, b. 10, 32; on black women writers 54–5, 205n; on domestic violence 49 Huggan, G. 8–9, 46, 68, 103, 184 Hulme, K. 1, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 102–26, 127, 130, 142, 147, 155, 188, 192, 195, 200n, 207n, 210n; The Bone People 7, 13, 102–5, 108, 110–11, 114, 118–21, 127, 147, 175, 188, 192, 195, 197, 207n; Te Kaihau/The Windeater 102, 108, 207n; Lost Possessions 102, 114, 207n; The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) 102 Hulme, P. 197, 212n humour see comedy Ihimaera, W. 1, 5, 8, 10–14, 33, 111, 123, 126, 127–48, 149, 151, 155, 167,

171, 172, 189, 200n, 201n, 207–9n, 211n, 212n; The Dream Swimmer 13, 123, 127–30, 133–4, 138–9, 142–3, 146–9, 194, 208n, 212n; The Matriarch 111, 128–9, 139, 141, 143, 208n; Pounamu, Pounamu 127–8; Tangi 127–8; The Uncle’s Story 8; Whale Rider 8 imperialism 3, 11, 33, 35, 43–4, 63, 70, 73, 76, 103, 132–3, 137, 198; cultural imperalism 5, 12, 14, 15, 43, 57; postimperalism 13, 102, 106, 120, 125 India 73, 107, 202; anticolonial resistance 147 indigeneity 4, 5, 8–12, 14, 24, 63, 100, 103, 116, 146, 151, 202n et passim indigenization 17, 46, 198 influenza pandemic (1918) 127, 130–8, 147, 149, 208n intertexuality 31, 32, 35, 75, 107, 120, 156 Ireland 202n Jakobson, R. 108; metaphor and metonymy 108 Jameson, F. 31, 82, 100, 195, 212n JanMohamed, A.R. 10, 18, 99; the specular border intellectual 18, 99 Joyce, J. 82, 107, 159–61; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 159; Ulysses 82, 107, 159 Kabutaulaka, T. 1 Kenana, R. 129–30, 138–43, 145–6, 208n Keown, M. 5, 10, 18, 48, 62, 69, 83, 150–1, 205n, 209n, 210n King, M. 5, 6, 132, 146 Kiribati 200n Klein, M. 95–8, 177, 206n Koenigsberg, R. 147 Kohut, H. and Wolf, E. 177 Te Kooti 128–9, 133, 139, 141, 143, 145, 208n, 209n Te Kore (the void) 156–7, 161, 210n Kovel, J. 138, 208n Kristeva, J. 13, 14, 69, 152; on abjection 81–3, 136–8, 147; on the semiotic 152, 159–61, 168 Krupa, V. 6, 199n, 201n Lacan, J. 75, 89–90, 153; law of the father 206n; the ‘mirror phase’ 160, 206n

Index Lamb, J. 200n Landfall (New Zealand literary magazine) 127 language: and allegory 34; codeswitching/mixing 163, 164; and culture 148; demotic/vernacular language 39–42, 173–4, 181; and discrimination 13, 74–5, 77; English language 80, 163–5, 198; free indirect discourse 173–4, 211n; Maori language see Maori; Melanesian languages 4, 80; Polynesian languages 4, 6, 7, 80, 193, 205n; and psychoanalysis 152, 159–60, and signification 149, 157, 159–61, 168; and syntax 108, 159–61, 163–4, 166, 168, 202n; and taboo 79–82 Lazarus, N. 11, 212n Loti, P. 43, 45–8; Le Mariage de Loti 45, 48 Macpherson, C. 6, 200n, 201n McRae, J. 163, 200n, 201n McRobbie, A. 57; on youth (sub)culture 57 mana (as personal attribute) 4, 10, 17, 203n MANA (journal) 4, 16, 200n Manichean allegory/opposition 104, 116, 126, 147 Maori: anticolonialism 5; artists/artistic production 35, 118, 127, 145, 149, 152, 155–8, 167, 182, 197, 212n; cosmogony 118–20, 122, 155, 192; gang culture 144, 172, 175, 177, 180–88, 192; iwi/tribes 127, 141–2, 144–6, 150, 162, 178; land issues 33, 34, 130, 133, 144, 145–6, 150–1, 162, 165, 171, 175, 182, 189, 209n, 211n; language 5, 123, 149, 162–9, 174, 200n, 201n, 210n; Maori Land March (1975) 150; Maori Women’s Welfare League 134; marae (ceremonial gathering place/communal settlement) 123, 128, 143, 146, 167, 181, 189, 207n, 211n; migration patterns 5, 6, 128, 135, 144; music 118; mythology/spirituality 107, 110, 118, 120, 121, 149, 150, 152, 155–8, 167–8, 194, 209n; oral history/ culture 14, 15, 123, 133, 142, 152, 162, 164–7, 188, 197, 208n, 212n; pa (traditional fortified communal

233

settlements) 135, 138, 178, 189, 211n; philosophical tradition(s) 122–3; political activism/protest 5, 14, 35, 128, 143–7, 149, 150, 168–9, 206n; political leaders 128–30; population statistics 132, 135, 138, 139, 146, 208n; post-war urbanization 3, 5, 128, 144, 146, 174, 211n; pre-European traditions/history 2, 106, 110, 112, 125, 128, 145, 150, 172, 178, 182, 188–9; religious/millennialist leaders 14, 127, 129–131, 138–41, 143–5; Ringatu faith 128–30, 133, 139, 141, 143, 146–7, 208n, 209n; slave culture 178, 188; sovereignty/tino rangatiratanga movement(s) 35, 111, 128, 130–1, 138, 143–5, 193; tangihanga/funerals 136–7, 184, 187; warrior culture 3, 85, 132, 139, 172, 174–5, 180, 182, 185–6, 199, 200n, 209–12n; whaikörero/speechmaking 152, 167; whakairo (carving) 150, 155–6, 184, 186, 197; whare whakairo (carved meeting house) 150, 155; writers/writing 1, 6, 9, 11, 13, 36, 84, 86, 99, 100–1, 102, 103, 126, 127–8, 149, 155, 170–2, 189–90, 192, 196–7 Maori Renaissance, the 5, 14, 111, 128, 131, 144, 149–50 marae see Maori. Marquesas Islands 6; Marquesans 43 Marsh, S.T. 10, 39, 41, 60, 193–4, 195, 202n, 212n matai (titled, elected head of Samoan family) 29, 203n Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga 7, 18, 36, 156–8, 204n, 205n, 207n, 210n Maungapöhatu 129, 139–41, 208n Maxwell, A. 103, 109 Mead, M. 19–23, 27–8, 42, 46–8, 50, 60, 71, 195, 203n; Coming of Age in Samoa 19, 23, 46–7, 50; on Samoan adolescence 20, 47 medicine 10, 64, 66, 70, 87, 134, 151 Melanesia 1, 4, 80, 201n Meleisea, M. 51, 205n Melville, H. 28, 42–4, 47–8, 203n; Typee 44, 47–8 Memmi, A. 181, 192 mental illness/psychopathology 13, 49, 84–8, 91–3, 95–101, 108, 172, 197 Micronesia 1

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Index

migration/migrancy 18; MIRAB societies 3, 200n; New Zealand immigration policies 6, 201n; Pacific diaspora(s) 8, 9, 12, 18, 202n; Pacific Island out-migration 6, 9, 10, 38 missionaries 2, 14, 19, 30, 43, 45, 52, 61, 129, 185, 192, 193, 199n; London Missionary Society 2, 192 Mita, M. 108 modernism 109, 122, 195 Mohanty, C.T. 54, 71, 205n Moore-Gilbert, B. 8, 11 Moorehead, A. 200n; The Fatal Impact 200n; see also social Darwinism Morrison, T. 39, 54, 57, 151, 153, 188; Beloved 151, 153, 188; The Bluest Eye 39, 57 Murray, S. 142, 202n mythology: classical 25, 90, 99; see also Maori, Polynesia, Samoa Naipaul, V.S. 8, 17, 36 narcissism 70, 113, 115, 117, 147, 180, 211n; and psychopathology 172, 175–7, 211n; and violence 105–6, 111–12, 115–16 nationalism 4, 13, 102–7, 116, 121–2, 125–8, 142–3, 146–7, 194; Indian 147; Maori 13, 128, 130–1, 138–42, 145–6, 208n; Pakeha 3, 14, 128 National University of Samoa 201n négritude 26, 31, 92. Negro(es) 25, 77, 88–9, 92, 97, 178–80; negrophobia 97, 179 New Zealand/Aotearoa 1–14, 16, 18, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 31–6, 38, 39, 41, 50–2, 55, 58, 64, 66, 84, 86–8, 90–1, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–4, 106, 110–11, 113, 121, 127–31, 134, 138–9, 141, 144–5, 149, 151, 163, 168, 170–1, 178, 185, 189, 192–3, 197, 199–203n, 206n, 208–10n, 212n et passim; administration of Samoa 4, 202n; colonial/post-colonial history 33–4, 103, 108, 112, 128–30, 132, 134, 138, 141, 143, 149, 174, 188, 208n; economy 110; land wars of the 1860s 3, 129, 132, 200n; literature 99, 170; population figures 132; race relations 3, 13, 34, 36, 106, 130, 146–7, 168, 170, 178, 189, 197, 210n Ngugi 17, 29, 36; Devil on the Cross 29 Nichols, G. 55, 58; The Fat Black Woman’s Poems 58

Niue 7, 200n; Niueans 7, 201n Nkosi, L. 196 noble/ignoble savage tropes 2, 3, 19, 23, 28, 33, 39, 76–7, 174, 192, 199n. Oceania/Oceanic identity 4–5, 14, 16–18, 36, 79, 194, 198; Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture 5, 61; Oceanic writers/writing 16, 37, 38, 202n Oedipus myth/complex see Freud, Sigmund Orientalism 20, 27, 47, 203n Otto, T. 4 Pacific Islands 1, 3–9, 22, 32, 61–2, 64, 100, 132, 193, 201–2n; MIRAB societies see migration/migrancy; Pacific Islanders 6–7, 10, 12, 24, 32, 39–41, 43, 100–1, 131, 193–4, 199, 201–2n; philosophical traditions 10, 31, 41, 191, 194–6, 198; regionalism 4–5; sovereignty/independence movements 193; writers/writing 9–13, 84, 100, 192, 196–7, 201n Pacific Way, the 4, 5, 200n, 205n Pakeha: capitalist/materialist values 34, 106, 109–10, 125, 150, 189; colonial assimilation policies 5, 32, 126, 188; discursive representations of Maori 129, 141, 142; political/cultural hegemony 5, 12, 127–8, 133, 135–6, 138, 149–50, 152, 170–1, 174, 178–9, 208n; racial prejudice 24, 84, 111, 135, 151; relationship to Maori 3; settler culture 3, 132 Panoho, R. 7 (pa)palagi/Europeans 17, 25, 30–2, 40, 43, 46, 51, 53, 55–6, 203n Papatuanuku 150 Papua New Guinea 61, 199n, 200n, 201n paradise myth: in New Zealand 210n; in Polynesia/Pacific 1–2, 19–20, 22–3, 25–6, 44, 46, 131, 199n; in Samoa 20–21, 23, 42–43, 47, 203n; in Tahiti 2; see also utopia myth paradox 35, 118–19, 122, 125, 156, 175; in Maori mythology/cosmogony 118, 120, 122–3, 156, 192, 207n Pearson, W.H. (Bill) 2, 19, 199n, 200n philosophy 10, 73, 195; and colonialism/imperialism 131; and dissent 53–4; Hindu philosophy 72;

Index holism 74; and nationalism 105, 144; see also existentialism Pili (Samoan demigod) 36, 204n Te Pö (the Maori underworld/ afterlife) 120, 155 politics 51; and globalization 9, 33; in Maori writing 5, 12, 14, 35, 101, 127–8, 144–8, 149–50, 152, 168–9, 172, 195, 197, 211n; and nationalism 102, 104; in Pacific cultures 1, 3, 4–5, 11, 17, 61–2, 65, 119, 193, 197, 202n; in New Zealand 3, 5, 35–6, 102, 103, 106, 127–8, 130, 144–6, 168, 171, 197; in Pacific literature/criticism 9, 15, 31–2, 35, 41, 62–3, 68, 79, 193, 197; and postcoloniality/postcolonial writing 8, 11, 12, 31–2, 35–6, 78–9, 100, 104–7, 116, 163, 168, 195–6; and race 96; and religion 131, 143 Polynesia 1–7, 10, 12–14, 16, 18–20, 22, 26, 32, 35–7, 41–2, 44, 119, 136, 185, 193, 199n, 201n, et passim; cosmogony 194–6, 198; moko see tattoo(ing); music 7; mythology/spirituality 7, 10, 36, 90, 98–9, 193, 195, 197, 202n; oral tradition(s) 10, 31, 35, 195; polynesian body 2, 3, 12, 13, 16, 18, 22–6, 28, 37, 45, 58, 100, 119, 191, 193–8; polynesian female body 13, 27–8, 38, 45; polynesian languages 4, 80, 205n postcolonial(ism) 8, 10–11, 13, 16–17, 34–7, 78, 82, 84, 100, 142, 191, 193, 197, 202n, 212n; post-colonial (as historical condition) 9, 68, 104–5, 122, 128, 138, 146, 202n; postcolonial theory/criticism 8–11, 86, 100, 103, 142, 193–8, 202n, 203n, 212n; postcolonial writers/writing 1, 8–9, 17, 30–1, 36, 39, 61–2, 69, 78, 86, 100, 103, 194, 196–8, 212n postmodern(ism) 10, 13, 31–2, 34–6, 193, 195–6; and deterritorialization 35; magic realism 31, 34, 95, 99, 189; metafiction 10, 27, 31, 34–5, 196; pastiche 10, 31, 35, 196. poststructuralism 82 Procter, J. 18, 197 psychiatry 84–6, 88, 90, 93, 99 psychoanalysis 10, 13, 14, 25, 70–2, 77, 82, 86, 91–2, 95–6, 99–100, 152, 170, 172, 189, 195 psychology: child psychology 154; object relations 95–8, 176–7

235

Rabelais 66–7, 76; see also comedy/humour race 13–14, 16, 64–5, 80, 189; and gender 28; and identity 13–14, 36–7, 98, 106, 116, 126, 211n; race relations 11–14, 17, 32, 34, 36, 43, 75, 88–90, 103, 106–7, 109, 126, 137, 146–7, 197; racial prejudice/discrimination 17, 19, 24, 36, 55, 65, 70, 84, 89, 96–7, 100, 111, 150–1, 170–2, 180–1, 192, 204n; racial theories 1, 7, 24, 36, 46, 70, 75–77, 82, 86, 112, 130, 132, 137–8, 174, 178, 190, 207n racial stereotyping 19, 180; of Maori 112, 150, 179–80, 200n, 210n; of Negroes 25, 178–80; of Polynesians/Pacific Islanders 1–3, 19, 20–7, 38–9, 42–4, 46–8, 50, 60, 61, 203n; of ‘third world’ women/ women writers 54, 56, 205n; see also noble/ignoble savage tropes Rastafarianism (in New Zealand) 144, 208–9n religion/religious groups and practices 14, 51, 56, 69–71, 80, 81, 95, 129, 130, 138–9, 143–5; religious elitism/corruption 29, 63; religion and politics 131, 143; religious syncreticity 139; see also Maori Rice, G. 132–3, 135–6, 208n Ringatu faith see Maori Romanticism 2, 19, 21, 23, 25, 31, 42, 50, 105, 132, 203n, 205n Rotuma 7, 10, 200n Rushdie, S. 8, 18, 107; Midnight’s Children 107 Said, E. 8, 10, 18, 20, 203n; see also Orientalism Samoa 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16–23, 25–31, 36, 38–60, 61, 191–2, 197–8, 199–206n, 212n; fa’afafine (trans-sexuals) 46–7; fa’a Samoa (Samoan way of life) 17, 54; female sexuality 26–8, 38, 42, 46–8, 52, 54–5; German administration 44, 202n; history 4, 17, 30, 51, 56, 58; language 10, 40, 46; malu see tattoo(ing); material culture 57–9, 212n; mythology 30, 58; New Zealand administration 4, 202n; oral tradition 30, 40–2, 50; politics/political corruption 12, 17–18, 28–30, 36, 38; sexuality/sexual behaviour 20–1, 46,

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Index

Samoa – contd. 49; su’ifefiloi (sung poetry) 41–2; tatau see tattoo(ing) Sarti, A. 18, 84–6, 206n satire 17, 24, 42, 44, 47, 52, 56, 61–3, 67, 72, 75–6, 78–9, 82, 195, 200n; ethnographic satire 46; postcolonial satire 78, 82; see also comedy scatology/bodily functions 13, 29–30, 33–4, 61, 64–74, 77–82, 206n; and political corruption 78–9 Segalen, V. 47 Selby, H. 173–4; Last Exit to Brooklyn 173; Requiem for a Dream 174 semiotic, the 152, 159–62, 167–9; see also Kristeva, J semiotics (linguistics) 164 settler colonies/societies see colonialism sexuality: sexual abuse/rape 26–7, 48–9, 144, 175–6, 203n; and adolescence 119; androgyny 47, 125; asexuality 125; attitudes to promiscuity/public nudity 51, 184, 186–7, 205n; colonial desire 22, 24, 44–7, 58, 89; in colonial discourse 46; and gender 27, 49, 118, 154, 160; heterosexuality 46; homosexuality 125; as indigenous archetype 24; miscegenation 44; and nationalism 125; pornography 45–6; sexual stereotyping see racial stereotyping; sexual symbolism 94; sexual taboos/prohibitions 33, 50, 54, 69, 71–3, 91–2; trans-sexuality 46; voyeurism 45 Sharrad, P. 4, 8, 10, 18, 27, 31–2, 35–6, 111, 129, 194, 196, 198, 201n, 202n, 203n, 204n Simms, N. 4 Sinavaiana-Gabbard, C. 201n Sinclair, K. 2, 132 Smith, B. 2 Smith, V. 5 social Darwinism 2, 130–6, 139, 147 Solomon Islands 204n South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) 4 Soyinka, W. 28, 79; The Interpreters 79 space/place and identity 2, 54, 58, 60, 69, 87, 91, 93, 109, 152, 154–9, 161, 181, 198, 202n, 207n specularity/the (colonial) specular encounter 77, 86, 89–90, 92, 96, 99, 102, 103, 116, 154, 157; see also Bhabha, H. and JanMohamed, A.R.

spiral: in Maori literature/art 122–3, 142–3, 162, 192, 194–5, 198, 212n; as pan-Polynesian symbol 193–6 Spivak, G. 8, 55, 56 Stead, C.K. 36, 118, 121, 129, 204n, 207n, 208n Stevenson, R.L. 28, 42–4, 205n subjectivity: bourgeois 67; female 27, 38, 51–2, 55, 60, 155; and gender 155 Subramani 4, 5, 18, 38–40, 42, 50, 56, 60, 64, 65, 68, 80, 194, 200n, 201n, 203n suicide 53–4, 112, 115, 121, 176–7, 182, 188, 205n Sullivan, R. 7, 16 Swift, J. 75, 77–8, 206n; Gulliver’s Travels 75–8, 81, 206n symbolic, the 159–61, 167–9. taboo/tapu 13, 61, 65–6, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 79–82, 92, 137, 151 Tahiti 1–2, 44, 185; Tahitians 2, 47, 199n Tamahori, L. 8, 170, 182–4, 211n; Once Were Warriors (film) 8, 170, 182–5, 211n tattoo(ing): American ‘flash’ tattoos 182, 185–8; European/Western tattooing 185–7; gang tattoos 182, 184–8; kirituhi/skin writing 184; malu (Samoan female tattoo) 58–60, 191–2; Maori moko 14, 172, 182, 184–7, 191–4, 209n, 212n; Mataora/Niwareka myth 120; Polynesian tattooing 2, 14, 64, 119–20, 185, 191–4, 197; prison tattoos 185; tatau/pe’a (Samoan male tattoo) 14, 60, 191–2, 197–8 Tawake, S. 4, 201n Teaiwa, K. 1 Teaiwa, T. 204n, 205n ‘third world’, the 8, 53–6, 163–4, 166, 195–6, 203n, 205n, 210n, 212n Thomas, N. 4, 6–7, 60 Thompson, C. 172, 173 Tokelau 200n, 201n Tonga 1, 6, 7, 61–3, 66, 80, 199–201n, 204n; language 80; storytelling conventions 62–3. tourism 2, 19, 23, 25, 43–4, 47 travel writing 23, 60, 75; European travellers 2, 47, 131 Treaty of Waitangi 129, 132, 200n;

Index sesquicentenary of Treaty signing 170, 210n; Waitangi Tribunal 144 Tuvalu 200n, 201n Tuwhare, H. 127 United Kingdom/Britain 8, 9, 63, 70, 77, 171, 200n; British Raj 147 United States of America 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 19, 20, 23–4, 38, 47, 185, 200n, 201n; foreign policy 51; North America 8, 9; popular culture 211n; television 56; working class dialect features 173–4; writing/writers 173; youth culture 57 University of Auckland 6, 16, 36, 127 University of Canterbury 6 University of Guam 6 University of Hawai‘i 16, 201n; University of Hawai‘i Press 8, 9 University of Otago 6 University of Papua New Guinea 61, 200n, 201n University of the South Pacific 4, 5, 6, 16, 61, 205n University of Waikato 6. utopia myth: in New Zealand 3, 200n; in Pacific literature 31, 69, 78, 183; in Polynesia/South Pacific 23, 25, 131; and satire 82; see also paradise myth Va’ai, S. 4, 198, 200n Vanuatu 204n Victoria University of Wellington/ Victoria University College 6, 84, 202n Vietnam War 51 violence 2–3, 30, 81, 85, 102–6, 152, 161, 170, 172, 175, 182, 188–9, 199n, 207n, 209n; and anticolonialism/ revolution 13, 104–6; autodestructive/ narcissistic violence 104–6, 111–12, 115; and colonial oppression 104,

237

108, 113, 117, 119, 175; domestic violence 13, 14, 26–7, 48–50, 53, 107, 111, 113–18, 170–2, 175, 180, 184, 187–8, 205n, 211n; gang violence 175, 184, 211n; as indigenous archetype 24, 179; and language 68, 81; as metaphor/metonymy 107–8, 112–14, 116, 118, 154, 167, 187 Von Reiche, M. 204n, 205n Walker, R. 6, 131, 132, 150, 156, 199n, 209n, 210n warfare/warrior culture 2, 24, 58, 72–5, 104, 113, 119, 133, 144, 147, 199n; see also Maori Wendt, A. 1, 4, 6–8, 10–14, 16–37, 38–9, 42–4, 46–7, 49, 51, 60–3, 79, 84, 99–100, 156, 191–4, 196–8, 200–7n, Black Rainbow 7, 12, 31–36, 196; Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree 17, 29, 204n; Inside Us the Dead 17, 26, 29; Lali 16; Leaves of the Banyan Tree 17, 18, 27, 29, 31, 44, 196, 203n, 204n; Ola 17, 27, 31, 36; The Mango’s Kiss 16, 21, 44, 47; Nuanua 16, 202n; Pouliuli 17, 26, 29–34, 204n; ‘Robocop in Long Bay’ 17; The Songmaker’s Chair 16; Sons for the Return Home 17, 18, 22–5, 36, 205n; Whetu Moana 7, 16 Western Samoa see Samoa Whaitiri, R. 7, 16 Whale Rider (film, dir. Niki Caro) 8 Williams, M. 110–11, 128–9, 146 Wilson, R. 2, 9, 198 Wollheim, R. 97–8 Women’s Press, the 8, 9 World Wars: First World War 44, 134, 202n, 208n; Second World War 6, 23, 192 Young, R. 8, 10, 11, 22, 28, 44, 47, 104, 207n; tricontinentalism 8