Manuhiri, Fānau: Pasifika Write Connections

Dear Arita: Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell is a kaumātua of the Pasifika writing scene in Aotearoa: he has been publishing his poetry since the 1950s and has produced a huge corpus of poetic and fictional texts since then. His father, Jock Campbell, was a Pākehā New Zealander from Dunedin, and his mother, Teu Bosini, was from Tongareva. Campbell was born in Rarotonga, but after he and his siblings were orphaned as children, he moved to New Zealand, where he was raised in orphanages. The autobiography he wrote in 1984, Island to Island, opens with the phone call by which he became reconnected with his relatives from the Cook Islands.6 Although his connection to his own family was disrupted by his distance from them for many years, he remained an active part of the Māori writing scene while it became established. He spent time with Māori writers, wrote about Māori topics, and was the only writer who is not (New Zealand) Māori to be included in Ihimaera and Long’s 1982 anthology Into the World of Light.7 In his 2006 master of arts thesis “Savaiki Regained: Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s Poetics,”8 Māori poet Robert Sullivan argues that treatments of Campbell’s poetry have often tended toward Eurocentrism and have failed to acknowledge or explore the Polynesian dimension of his writing.

As well as writing about his Cook Island background, Campbell’s collections have ranged over a number of Māori topics, including a long sequence on Te Rauparaha and, in 2001, a collection titled Maori Battalion: A Poetic Sequence.9 The book is structured around the four main campaigns of the famous World War II Twenty-eighth Māori Battalion—Greece, Crete, North Africa, and Italy. Each section includes poems written from a range of perspectives: some from the view of specific individuals, some narrating events, and some outlining the emotional landscape of war. Māori deities and ideas, such as Tū, Reinga, and Māui, are named in the poems, and because these figures and ideas appear elsewhere in the Pacific, these references could be an articulation of a particular Māori-centric space but could also be an articulation of Pacific connection. Maori Battalion is a memorial as well as poetic project and opens with a black-and-white photograph of a young man in military uniform and the caption “Stuart Alexander Maireriki Campbell.” Two pages later is a dedication:

To the Memory of my Brother

Private 446853

Stuart Alexander Maireriki Campbell

28 (Maori) Battalion

Killed in Action

11 April 194510

The dedication is a marker of very specific grief but is also an important intervention into the dominant ways of memorializing the Māori battalion as a Māori-only (and I mean New Zealand Māori here) organization, whereas in reality, a number of Pacific soldiers fought in that battalion, most often as members of D Company. Unlike the Pacific soldiers in the Twenty-eighth who signed up while living outside of Aotearoa or while at boarding school in New Zealand, Stuart signed up as a young man based in New Zealand.

Each poem in the book is numbered, and poem 68, in the “Italy” section, is titled “Letter from Stuart Maireriki.”11 The poem is written as a letter from Stuart to Alistair himself after Stuart has been killed. It opens by naming the writer and recipient of the letter and disorienting (or affirming) the reader by using their Cook Island names: “Dear Arita—Tuati here” (when transliterated, “Arita” is rendered “Alistair,” and “Tuati” is “Stuart”). Naming and language matter for Campbell, who writes about his own acquisition of English once he arrives in New Zealand: “the price was high—the loss of my mother tongue, Penrhyn Maori, which I’ve since come to regret.”12 In death, then, Tuati returns to his originary home, including his originary linguistic home, and thereby reverses the process of loss not only for himself but also for Alistair. In this letter from the grave, Stuart regains his Cook Island name “Tuati,” and from the perspective of his brother, who has gone to be with his relatives on the other side, Alistair has the opportunity to experience himself as a Pacific man by being named as one: “Arita.” Furthermore, both men recall being known by their Māori names in childhood, when they lived with their mother’s family, and so Stuart’s death imaginatively enables Campbell to move back in time but also to reverse the process of migration to New Zealand. Later in the poem, this return home takes another step:

Dear Grandfather Bosini

he wept and called for me, his Maireriki ,

his “Little Flower,” when he heard that I had been

killed in Italy.

Having renamed himself from “Stuart,” the legal name under which he was listed in the army and therefore the name under which he died, “Tuati” (and with him, “Arita,” ever the writer and reader of the letter) reaches back a generation beyond their mother to their “Grandfather Bosini,” who names him a third name: “Maireriki.” This third name, which is one of Stuart’s middle names, is not a transliteration but a name from within the cultural context of the island. Alistair does not receive a parallel name of this kind in this poem. The layering of names “Alistair–Stuart,” “Arita–Tuati,” and finally “Maireriki” suggests a series of cultural contexts in which, if “Maireriki” is a name associated with originary family and place, and “Alistair” and “Stuart” are associated with public lives, “Tuati” and “Arita” are in between these two. These are linguistically in-between names because they are transliterations, but they are also cultural in-betweens because they are neither the names “Grandfather Bosini” uses nor the names the army would recognize.

In this opening of the poem, the two names—the two brothers—stand side by side and are connected on the page by a single dash that both joins and separates them. Throughout the poem, the connection between the two is negotiated, and even though the poem is ostensibly about the experiences of “Tuati,” the voice of the poem keeps directly addressing the recipient, “Arita”: “As you know,” “as you know,” “don’t ask me,” “would you believe it,” “I thought you’d like to know,” “you once told,” “can you imagine,” “did you know,” “to my family, to you,” “your girl,” “I knew you.” For the reader, this repeated direct address emphasizes the sense of reading over some-one’s shoulder—the poem doesn’t mean me when it says “you”—and yet because the implied “you” of the poem (“Arita”) is also the writer of the poem, Campbell becomes the ever-present writer–recipient of the letter. Indeed, Campbell’s place in the poem is complicated. This is a somewhat biographical poem of his brother whose life story he offers through the conceit of a poetic autobiography through the further formal conceit of a letter. Yet to some extent, this is autobiographical: Campbell is writing to himself (“Dear Arita”), and yet not exactly to himself but to himself as his brother might have seen him and also—particularly given the use of the name “Arita”—as his mother’s relatives would know him. This is a poem written by Alistair to and about Arita: ultimately, Campbell addresses his Cook Islander self from which he was distanced by his migration to Aotearoa. However, he is able to address his Cook Islander self because he is looking through the eyes of his dead brother, who is, at least on one level, writing about the Māori Battalion in a book about the Māori Battalion.

Near the middle of the poem, far from his own greeting to Arita at one end and the farewell given to him by Grandfather Bosini at the other, Tuati recalls his position in the Twenty-eighth:

D company

was my whanau. They called me Sam, and

accepted me, although I was an Islander.

This short reference to the place of Pacific soldiers in the Māori Battalion is primarily about connection, but this is neither homogenizing nor complete. Tuati expresses his sense of connection with his peers in Māori terms—“whanau”—and recognizes the ways in which this connection was reciprocated. First, because names have such significance in this poem (and Polynesian cultures), it seems important that the men from his company “called [him] Sam.” This is the only English name in the whole poem, and the tone of the phrase does not indicate whether this name was detested, tolerated, or enjoyed. Was he misnamed because they did not know his name? Does this misnaming show an inability to really know him because he is “an Islander”? Or, if in each relationship and each space in his life, he acquires a different and appropriate name, does “Sam,” as his name in that particular space, emphasize his subjectivity as a soldier and, specifically, as part of the whānau of D Company? The relationship does not end with a name, however, but also includes “acceptance.” Of course, this “acceptance” is conditional—“although I was an Islander”—and yet an earlier comment that he “did win . . . some good-natured ribbing” from his “mates” leaves open whether this was understood by Tuati as a derogatory or a humorous exchange.

In his 2007 collection Just Poetry, Campbell returns to imagined correspondence from his brother, and “Tuati” writes to “Arita” from the grave at the “Faenza Military Cemetery”13 once more. The poem again begins “Dear Arita,” but the name “Tuati” does not appear until the very end of the letter–poem. The names of the two brothers are separated this time by the body of the poem, and before the final sign-off, Tuati makes a more final farewell to his brother: “My dear poetic brother, goodbye. / Tuati.” As if Tuati had continued to mature while buried at Faenza, his voice in this poem is older and more reflective. The earlier poem is more focused on Tuati’s experiences in the Battalion and his immediate environment, whereas this later poem runs through a series of memories about, as the poem’s title suggests, “A Childhood in the Islands.” The poem recites names and places and narrates specific memories of events and relationships both boys experienced while growing up. The speaker of the poem doesn’t address the reader–recipient as often as the previous poem, until “Tuati” directly comments to “Arita” near the middle of the poem,

You were the bad apple—no, that’s too

strong. You were naughty, into every

bit of mischief going. I suppose there

has to be a touch of wickedness in any

family of kids to balance an excess

of goodness . . .

After this, Tuati coerces Arita in his act of memory by starting a series of memories with the word “remember,” a word that both prompts a memory (do you remember?) and commands it (remember this). Although the latter poem ostensibly deals with different subject matter, the effect is the same in that both men (poet–recipient and brother–imagined writer) are returned through memory to Penrhyn (Tongareva) and to relationships with their mother and grandfather. Not only is the effect of the war reversed but so, too, is the period of time spent in the orphanage and growing up in New Zealand. Of course, one outcome of this imagined return to Penrhyn and implied departure from New Zealand is that Campbell’s engagement with Aotearoa is also diminished. Perhaps this is the result of Campbell’s own journey into deeper understanding of his Cook Islander side, but perhaps it is also a result of his understanding of (New Zealand) Māori ideas of returning to Hawaiki on death. Campbell passed away in 2009, a significant star not only in the constellations of Pacific and Cook Islands writing but also in the writing of Aotearoa.

te ariki

Alice Te Punga Somerville

go now, e te ariki,

to your mates, your beloved, your blood

let those hands which held all those pens

magicked a thousand thousand words

lie still and empty at last

spend no more nights dreaming of an infancy in the sun go back home

with no return ticket this time

your mother has been waiting for you

go the way your friends have gone;

the tracks may still be warm from hone’s recent journey:

you’ve been one of us on these rugged frozen isles

since arriving with a luggage tag on your small boy’s jacket all those years ago;

you and your brother fighting alongside us

since before we can remember,

one in the 28th, the other on pages;

the least we can do is loan you a pathway home

no longer perch on the edge of these cliffs with an eye on the tide:

follow sand to water,

leave us behind,

go

alistair te ariki campbell:

firsts and firsts

accomplishments

and now you’ve breathed your last

“Not Exotic Anymore”: Karlo Mila

We have read Mila’s first collection Dream Fish Floating in Victoria University of Wellington’s introductory New Zealand Literature and Theatre course since it was published in 2005. Students love the text: it is a pleasure to prove wrong the students who think they hate poetry, and Mila’s gentle, forceful language and images broach issues of politics, love, families, the body, and culture in ways in which first-year students—no matter what their age—are invested as they start to navigate their way around university. The theme of the course is “cultural encounters,” and in a settler nation-state like Aotearoa New Zealand, most of the encounters explored both in the course and in the texts of the course include Pākehā as one of the encounterers. However, in the section “Wero,” the colonial context of New Zealand, and the Palangi (Pākehā) community, are held in a different relationship with Pasifika and Māori elements of the poetry.

Māori have many places in Dream Fish Floating. The first section, “Tuakana,” takes the Māori form of a pan-Polynesian word that denotes an older sibling of the same gender as the speaker. The “Tuakana” section comprises four poems dedicated to four writers, and in this way, Mila begins her first book with the elaboration of a literary genealogy. None of these writers is Māori—the poems (in order) are written for Sia Figiel, Albert Wendt, John Pule, and Alice Walker—and yet Mila uses a Māori term to conceptualize their position as elder siblings. Mila’s knowledge of a specific tribal saying from the Waikato region is demonstrated and extended in the poem “He piko he taniwha.” In perhaps her most well known poem, “Eating Dark Chocolate While Watching Paul Holmes’ Apology,” Mila reflects on the use of the word Holmes used to describe Kofi Annan—“Darkie”—in her own childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.14 She replies to Holmes’s apology by pointing out a compromised coming of age, and while recollecting the shape of New Zealand–based racism at age six, she remembers being relieved that “no one called me manu off playschool or darkie”: a Māori-named doll on a daytime kid’s show “manu” is turned into racist mocking on the school playground. The slippage is between racist slurs: to be “manu” in this school was to be “darkie.”15

In “Wero,” rather than being the topic of the poetry, the Māori material provides the frame. In this section, Mila adds a further tuakana: Papa Sean, a teacher in Palmerston North for whom she names two poems. Although wero is most often translated as “challenge,” which may appear from an outside perspective to be negative, the wero is an important part of Māori protocol by which the encounter between tāngata whenua and manuhiri is moderated. The whole process is geared to articulating connection and intentions to ultimately establish and negotiate relationships between the two groups. At the point of the wero, the manuhiri have two options: continue, and thereby follow further processes by which the relationship can be negotiated and by which, although maintaining distinctiveness, manuhiri are incorporated into the home community, or refuse the challenge and thereby set themselves in opposition to the tāngata whenua and, ultimately, maintain separation. Significantly, the section is not clear about whether it is the wero itself or the response to a wero (or series of wero) issued elsewhere. Is Mila challenging the reader? Is Mila challenging herself? Is Mila describing a challenge issued by tāngata whenua? Is the wero directed toward Mila alone, or Mila and the reader, or only the reader? Mila refuses to unambiguously “answer” the wero within the space of the section: in this way, “Wero” is an open and productive challenge in and of itself rather than a description of a choice or, indeed, a resolution of that choice.

All of the poems in “Wero” describe Mila’s connection with Māori, which she has explained as an outcome of being raised in the small provincial city of Palmerston North; if she had been raised in Auckland, perhaps she would have a stronger sense of being Tongan but a less strong sense of being manuhiri. Indeed, the first poem of the section foregrounds not only her position but others in relation to tāngata whenua. Three poems about the pine tree on the top of Maungakiekie (One Tree Hill) in Auckland—“Manuhiri,” “On One Tree Hill Falling,” and “Poroporoaki”—supply an opportunity to reflect on her own complicity with colonialism as well as the multiple structures of resistance one can identify once one pays attention to complexity rather than oversimplification. Other poems in the section explore unexpected as well as taken-for-granted connections between Mila and tāngata whenua in terms of physical objects, personal relationships, and specific spaces. For the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on “Manuhiri,” the first of what I call the “Maungakiekie poems.”

“Manuhiri” logically responds to—makes visible, acknowledges, depends on—tāngata whenua that have necessarily come first (or else they wouldn’t be manuhiri), and this acknowledges another realm of precedent—even if unwritten—to set beside Mila’s literary “tuakana.” Who exactly “manuhiri” refers to is ambiguous; it could be everyone in the Manawatū other than Rangitāne (acknowledged tāngata whenua), Pākehā, tauiwi,16 the New Zealand state, the reader, or Mila herself. Any of these is possible, and each of these produces a new way of reading the remainder of the poem:

in the Manawatu

pine needles stitch together

a patchwork of green pastures

The first imagery of the poem slips between the natural environment (“pine needles”) and domestic handiwork (“needles stitch together / a patchwork”). The trees are named as “pines,” which are an introduced species and become a metaphor for manuhiri over the course of the three poems. In this poem, Mila takes advantage of the pun on “pine needles” to balance the metaphor for settler agricultural colonialism (“pine”) with reference to settler domestic space. This produces a sense of complete domination: women and men, inside and outside, are teamed in the same task. The industriousness valued by the machinery of colonialism (and its attendant Protestant work ethic) manages to exert architectural control over the landscape: on one level, the flat pastoral fields of the Manawatū are nicely captured in the metaphor of a green patchwork quilt; on another, a quilt might remind one of covering, concealing, hiding, and perhaps warming. Comparing the process of pastoralization to a patchwork quilt ironically links the sense of colonial accomplishment to a sense of comfort and warmth.

An additional reading of the quilt is also possible: the patchwork has been a dominant form of craft for colonial and working-class women (and, memorably, enslaved women) because it enables the patchworker to make aesthetic and practical use of fabric offcuts and ends. Additionally, the work of creating a patchwork has often been a collective exercise at which the social exchange has been as important as the product. The Manawatū is a space made up of multiple pieces: literally, the fields surrounding Palmer-ston North are put to a number of uses and so appear to be patchworked, but conceptually, the Manawatū could be understood as a conglomeration of various offcuts: remnant and small communities, working together in a deliberate pattern to produce something of value. To extend this metaphor, often a patchwork is perceived to be made up of small pieces of cloth, each of which brings memories of previously worn garments and the times and places in which they were worn. This creates a metaphor of functional multiplicity that is not undermined but cherished and perhaps sentimentalized by the previous lives and contexts of its members: a vision of multiculturalism indeed. To read this metaphor back onto the title, the manuhiri is allowed space to elaborate itself as multiple, and being in relationship with tāngata whenua does not require other pasts or identifications to be discarded. In this moment, I argue, we find something other than multiculturalism: as in Grace’s Watercress Tuna, we find that which Kai Tahu media scholar Jo Smith has described as “aspirational biculturalism.”17 This vision of multiple, nuanced manuhiri produced both by and in relationship with tāngata whenua explicitly counters the mythology touted by monoculturalists who attempt to disband the possibilities of biculturalism by claiming that it does not allow for multiculturalism.

The major features of the poem are established at this point, including the pine to which this poem and the other two Maungakiekie texts will return and which stands in for a range of things, including a commodity (New Zealand’s forestry and its invisible labor force, including a large number of Māori and Pasifika workers), a symbol of introduced species, a simultaneous symbol of the destruction of native ecosystems and land erosion, and at the same time a symbol of a positive sense of growth and regeneration. The poem continues:

oh those pines

they’re everywhere you go

The descriptive and deeply metaphoric tone shifts with the “oh” into something that sounds like a flippant comment or indulgent aside. That “those pines” are “everywhere you go” extends the poem beyond the Manawatū that the “pines” themselves border. Possibly this refers to the coverage of the pines around the Manawatū, but perhaps the more productive reading is that this is but one example of a widely spread phenomenon. The uniqueness of the Manawatū is undermined by the “pines” being “everywhere.”

This is all followed by two lines of defensive replies by a clearly demarcated “they”:

We’re not exotic anymore they argue

We have roots here too they say

The “they” of this poem could well be the trees: the trees are not exotic because they have passed a temporal line in the sand between “exotic” and “having roots.” Indeed, this is an inversion of the logic by which Te Papa argued that Daniel Maaka was not “Pacific Island” because Māori had passed a temporal distinction between “Pacific Island” and “Pacific Island in origin.” Here the remedy for being coded “exotic” is to point to the existence of “roots”: a botanical metaphor already used colloquially to express a sense of belonging to a place. Whether the response is indignant at being described as manuhiri or as “being everywhere” is ambiguous. If “they” are arguing against being manuhiri (in relationship with tāngata whenua), then claiming roots could be a defense against Māori claims of Indigeneity (which always trump those who feel “not exotic anymore”). Conversely, if “they” are speaking back to the idea of being “everywhere,” the roots provide a basis for specific identification in the face of a perceived homogeneity of white settlers “everywhere.” Furthermore, Mila’s humor in the final lines of “On One Tree Hill Falling” (“the ‘dying race’ you were supposed to commemorate / did the dirty / and lived longer”18) leaves room to recognize the pun on the word roots, which, in New Zealand at least, is a rather crass term for sex and so enables a genealogical reading as well.

Another reading hinges on a pun on the word exotic, which is a botanical term for a plant not originally from the area and, at the same time, a popular description of Pacific people. Indeed, Pacific people have been rendered “exotic” by European travelers and texts, and throughout this book, there are examples of writers responding to this kind of representation. If, indeed, the “we” is “exotic,” it is possible that the “we” (or “they”) of the poem are specifically Pasifika communities instead. In this reading of the poem, where “we’re not exotic anymore they argue” is a Pasifika response, we can imagine a doubled rejection of the term exotic: on one hand, refusing to be produced in romantic European stereotypes of the Pacific, and on the other, refusing to be understood as not belonging to the local area (Manawatū) or, indeed, to New Zealand. To read this back on the previous lines “oh those pines / they’re everywhere you go,” a comment about ubiquity could also be understood as a racist frustration about Pasifika communities being increasingly visible in New Zealand—even in the Manawatū. Furthermore, to then reread the first lines of the poem, it is possible to recognize the place of Pasifika labor (“pastures” and “stitching”) in the production of the contemporary settler nation of New Zealand.

The end of the poem ties the Manawatū (and the poem itself) to the pair of poems later in the section that treat Maungakiekie:

Ask that old guy on One Tree Hill

and Tane Mahuta’s laughing

This is an abrupt ending and seems to shift the focus away from the Manawatū altogether. The “old guy on One Tree Hill” is the pine about which Mila goes on to write in two other poems, and calling the tree “that old guy” gestures toward her affectionate way of writing about the tree. When we read this poem in our first-year lecture, students are often outraged that the ending of the poem doesn’t deliver a solution to what it means to be manuhiri but seems to deflect attention elsewhere. Perhaps, though, this is part of the meaning of the poem itself: just as the “pines” found in the Manawatū are elsewhere (“everywhere you go”), the possible remedies—or at least parallels—to this predicament can also be found outside. Perhaps, too, the situation described in the present poem is eternally linked to a much larger network of relations: national (“One Tree Hill”) and spiritual–cosmological (“Tane Mahuta”). The directive at the end of the poem is clearly stated—“ask”—and yet the speaker and intended recipient of this suggestion are unclear. The suggestion that the addressee should “ask that old guy on One Tree Hill” is an invitation to change perspective both spatially (from Manawatū to Auckland) and temporally because the tree on One Tree Hill has a longer history of symbolic contestation than do the trees in the Manawatū. Perhaps the “old guy” offers an example and elaboration of how to think about relationship to place over a longer period of time and is therefore an inspiration for the Manawatū trees: perhaps he is a long-standing model of how to be manuhiri. Conversely, perhaps the “old guy,” now that he is more remembered for demise than for position (the single tree on One Tree Hill was destroyed in a symbolic protest), is a cautionary tale for the Manawatū “pines” and stands in for the limits of identification with place when one is a “pine”—when one is manuhiri. Either reading points to the question of memory: the “old guy” is not just planted for the sake of memory but is also now the basis of claims about memory, including memory pertaining to the historical context of planting and to the fate of the tree itself. The irony, after all, is that an appeal to “roots” is coupled with a refusal to engage with history. Like the pieces of patchwork from early in the poem, the “old guy” is sentimentalized and fills a symbolic as well as aesthetic role. Perhaps also like the patchwork and indeed the pines—manuhiri—by which it was made, focusing on memories of the “old guy” produces amnesia about the circumstances around its planting, which means that contemporary protest focusing on the tree (wero from tāngata whenua indeed) seems to come from out of the blue.

Māori and Pasifika Write Connections

Mila and Wendt suggest two ways of imagining connections at the levels of individual relationships and community, and both formulations provide room to acknowledge Māori as tāngata whenua but also to recognize the presence of Pasifika communities in Aotearoa. Manuhiri is explicitly derived from a Māori cultural and linguistic context, whereas fānau is a provocative slippage between Māori and a Pasifika language. As indicated earlier, this chapter is merely a gesture toward the range of Pasifika voices and cannot account for the range of Pasifika writers who are creatively working through their relationship to Māori and to Aotearoa: Selina Tusitala Marsh, Tusiata Avia, and Serie Barford are three poets whose work is precocious in this regard.

The connections between Māori and Pasifika people have been explored, negotiated, shaped, and extended over many decades and in a range of creative forms. Surprisingly, given the range and vitality of texts treated in this chapter, the links between Māori and Pasifika communities find their way into little critical scholarship about Pacific literatures. This chapter and the preceding have given attention to individual Māori and Pasifika writers who articulate connections between these communities. However, all is not perfect in the relationship between Māori and Pasifika people because there is a third party involved: colonialism. As this discussion about Pasifika representation of Māori enlarges, it should leave space for the highly popular Brotown, the cartoon televised on prime time created by a group of male Pasifika creative practitioners. Brotown has been described as a Pacific Southpark: nothing is sacred, and in theory, the comedy as well as politics of such shows depends on rehashing stereotypes and taking things too far to hold them up to a kind of critique. Yet it is difficult to know whether or how to laugh at the comedic creation of a Māori character, “Jeff da Maori,” who has a perpetual running nose, talks in a stereotyped hori way, is not very bright, and lives with his many stepfathers. Is this the perspective of manuhiri, or fānau, or someone else? While we have focused on various forms of connection up to this point, the next chapter pays attention to another side of the story.