When Romeo Met Tusi: Disconnections

Romeo and Tusi

Oscar Kightley and Erolia Ifopo collaborated on Romeo and Tusi, a play developed for performance in 1997 (Christchurch) and rerun as part of the New Zealand Festival (Wellington) in 2000.8 (Māori) Anaru and (Samoan) Tusi are selected to perform opposite one another in their high school show of Romeo and Juliet and, through this device, manage to simultaneously occupy their own roles in the Heke and Aiu families, respectively, as well as in the Montagues and Capulets. The play is humorous and draws heavily from the structure as well as the characters of Shakespeare’s play. The use of humor as a theatrical mode and clowning as a form of social commentary in which actors are able to critique authority with full immunity granted by the theatrical space have a long history in the Pacific.9 In Sāmoa, this clowning theater takes the specific form of fale aitu (literally, “house of spirits”10), about which Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard writes,

Scripted clowning, that is, the songs and comedy sketches, provides the only public arena in Samoan society which traditionally allows for overt criticism of figures and institutions of authority.11

Although Romeo and Tusi, and Once Were Samoans, discussed later, are highly entertaining and can feel like a comedy, variety show, or cabaret, the fale aitu overlays not only a theatrical model but also a political weight. The hilarious dialogue and larger-than-life caricatures are underpinned by a highly stylized politics of critique that enables exploration of a serious social issue. Rather than the humor detracting from—or even softening—any “overt criticism of figures and institutions of authority,” humor itself can be evidence that such criticism is implicit in the text.

In the opening scene of Romeo and Tusi, Tusi Aiu and Anaru Heke meet at Bingo (Housie). Ruby, who is a Puck figure throughout, opens the play with words that echo exactly the opening words of Romeo and Juliet, until the line “be you a human, cat or mousie” is introduced to rhyme with “Housie.” The first scene sets up the mutual prejudice between the families but also introduces the main argument of the play: that physical proximity and shared experiences of Māori and Pasifika communities, along with shared whakapapa and cultural background, have the capacity to override or ameliorate disconnections. Despite the dialogue, which reinforces difference, Anaru and Tusi share the lived experience of attending Housie with their mothers at the same venue to participate in the same activity. This contradiction, in which the separation and disconnection suggested by the dialogue is undermined visually and narratively by close proximity and shared experiences and thereby the many connections of the characters, is a device used to great effect throughout the rest of the play.

Anaru and Tusi meet when their mothers win at Housie at the same time. Mrs. Heke and Mrs. Aiu both send their child to check on the numbers, and in the first encounter that follows, the two youth humorously reproduce European stereotypes of the region (historical–romantic and contemporary–derisive) as they describe each other. Anaru mishears Tusi and calls her “Tootsie,” claiming, “Tootsie it must mean beautiful Polynesian Princess with frizzy hair,” while Tusi replies, “Anaru it must mean Gentle Maori Warrior with big juicy lips.” Anaru and Tusi foreground the two major modes of colonial representation of Indigenous people in the Pacific. Anaru refers to the feminized, sexualized Dusky Maiden when he describes a “beautiful Polynesian Princess with frizzy hair,” and in turn, Tusi acknowledges the construct of the noble savage: “Gentle Maori Warrior.” Their familiarity with these two images emphasizes not only the economy of stereotypes underpinning the play (which the Māori and Samoan mothers will attempt to reinforce) but also the broader context of hegemonic representation within which the play itself circulates. Furthermore, Tusi is familiar with Anaru’s name and hears (then pronounces) it correctly the first time, whereas Anaru is less familiar with Tusi’s name. This imbalance of familiarity quietly echoes the broader situation in that Pasifika writers engage with the question of Māori–Pasifka connections far more than Māori writers do.

When Anaru and Tusi are assigned their roles in the school production of Romeo and Juliet, they describe each other again in these contemporary racist terms, although still humorously reversing their connotations:

ANARU: Look at her hair, it’s the finest of wool.

TUSI: Look at his lips they’re the thickest of rubber.

ANARU: She’s more finer than the juiciest porkbone.

TUSI: He looks even better than a KFC quarter pack.

The humor here relies on two layers of knowledge: whereas the first exchange clearly mobilizes European stereotypes (“hair [of] finest wool,” “lips [of] thickest rubber”), the second exchange engages food (“juiciest porkbone,” “KFC quarter pack”) stereotypically linked to the respective communities. For the humor to work in these moments of the play, the audience needs to possess the appropriate knowledge to get not only the Pākehā but also the Māori–Pasifika jokes. To this end, the racist slurs engaged in the play are simultaneously wrapped up in the broader racist conceptualizations of the settler nation-state (“hair [of] finest wool,” “lips [of] thickest rubber”) at the same time as they center the experiences of Māori and Pasifika communities (“porkbone,” “KFC”) and humor.

Romeo and Tusi draws a lot of humor from the protestations of difference despite the relational and spatial proximity played out in the narrative and on stage. The play suggests that parents and children have divergent perspectives on this subject, and generational difference underpins a conversation with his mother in which Anaru brings together the shared experience and shared whakapapa of Māori and Pasifika people:

MRS. HEKE: Son life is sweet. All you have to do is keep your nose clean, and don’t hang out with those stinky islanders, ka pai.

ANARU: Mum, don’t be like that. Some of my mates at school are Islanders.

MRS. HEKE: Do they go to school? I thought they only went to church for a gossip. Bloody cheeky those Pacific Islanders.

ANARU: Mum, we’re all Pacific Islanders. Aotearoa is an island in the Pacific.

MRS. HEKE: Yeah it was an island of kumara and kaimoana now it’s more like chop suey and taro. I mean look at them, always at Housie, Aue. They virtually live here.

ANARU: You only know that because we virtually live here too.

This generational difference is in turn tied to specific spaces, and school provides Anaru with the opportunity to spend time with “Islanders” and thereby reject his mother’s views on the basis of his lived experience. Mrs. Heke’s claims of difference and separation are undermined by her knowledge of Pasifika cultural practice (“church,” “chop suey and taro”) as well as shared Māori and Pasifika presence in the leisure space of Housie. Furthermore, the close physical proximity of the families at Housie is repeated in their place of residence. The Hekes are aware that the Aius live next door:

MRS. HEKE: The zoo . . . she wants a blimmin zoo she can check out the Samoans house, now that’s a blimmin zoo, she can watch them for free.

Meanwhile, the Aiu family knows their neighbors are the Hekes:

TUSI: I bet the Hekes next door have heaps of money.

MRS. AIU: And that Jake Heke is probably spending it all at the pub . . .

Despite this close proximity and prior knowledge of each other’s families, Anaru and Tusi are meeting each other for the first time because Tusi has been away at boarding school.

After meeting up in the park one day, they realize they both live on the same street (Sorry Avenue) and start to walk home together. As they get closer to home, they discuss their families and recognize that they have similar experiences at home:

ANARU: My Mum keeps dissing our neighbours.

TUSI: My Mum keeps dissing our neighbours.

ANARU: Dad says they keep stealing our clothes off the washing line.

TUSI: Mum says our neighbours can’t even blow their noses properly.

They laugh.

When they approach their houses, they both realize they have fallen in love with someone from the wrong house:

TUSI AND ANARU: Well this is my house.

ANARU: That’s the Aiu’s house.

TUSI: That’s the Heke’s house.

ANARU: Dad would kill me if he caught me talking to you.

TUSI: Mum would do the same then she’d kill herself.

Continuing the pattern set at Housie, the very things that keep them apart are in fact experienced similarly. Anaru and Tusi repeat the line “my Mum keeps dissing our neighbours” then provide different examples of a similar kind of stereotyping. Significantly, the moment of revelation is shared as well: they announce their respective homes at exactly the same time. The mutuality of the prejudice itself becomes connective, and they decide to keep seeing each other regardless of the expected reactions from home.

Underscoring the point that Māori and Pasifika communities operate according to logics of the racist nation within which they are located, the racist discourse each family reproduces about the family next door reinforces, and is reinforced by, the racist New Zealand state. The mothers in the play react to the news that their children have hooked up at school in the same way: Mrs. Heke calls immigration about the Aiu family having overstayers at their house, and Mrs. Aiu retaliates by calling the police about the Māori family having marijuana in their garden. This moment uses humor to draw attention to the historical and ongoing raiding of Māori and Pasifika homes by actors of the state.12 Indeed, the very point at which the mothers attempt to protect their families from one kind of incursion (a Māori or Pasifika person) is the moment at which they invite another, much more powerful interruption. This highlights the central role the state plays in Māori and Pasifika competition; although one might imagine, with hope, Māori and Pasifika communities resisting this divide-and-conquer strategy, in this case, the Heke and Aiu families call on the state—both its rhetoric and its enforcement agencies—to maintain the divide between them. At the same time, it is possible to imagine an alternative reading here about Mrs. Aiu and Mrs. Heke exerting their own agency vis-à-vis the state. This reading would notice that the state, in turn, is so captured by its own anxieties about Māori and Pasifika communities that the families—and in particular, these two brown women, who are theoretically the least privileged in New Zealand—are able both to apprehend its own weakness and to manipulate its power for their own purposes.

This struggle between the families lasts until the final scene, when Mrs. Aiu and Mrs. Heke have a showdown, during which the minister asks, “Why are you so prejudiced against each other?” Significantly, the two mothers respond simultaneously: “That’s because they smell! They have big families, and they eat too much.” The physical act of speaking in unison (an inverted Pentecost of sorts) emphasizes the similarities between the two families despite the dialogue itself focusing on what sets the groups apart. We have returned, then, to the central contradiction of the play: the mutual prejudice between Māori and Pasifika communities and individuals is more marked by its mutuality than by its prejudice. Tusi recognizes this contradiction and interrupts, “You see how much we have in common, and that’s just the bad things. What about the good things?” Mrs. Heke responds, “Like what?” to which Tusi replies, “You know, culture and stuff.” In this moment, Tusi repeats the twin connections of experience and whakapapa that provided the basis of Māori–Pasifika connection when Anaru articulated them to his mother back in the first scene (“Mum, we’re all Pacific Islanders. Aotearoa is an island in the Pacific . . . we virtually live here [at Housie] too”) and beyond, to Apirana Taylor’s pairing of the two in “Pa Mai,” the pairing of the two in Rongo, and so on.

The play’s final turn literally engages the audience in the discussion. Ruby, who plays Puck at the beginning of the play and sets up Anaru and Tusi as Romeo and Tusi, says, “Let’s throw it open to the audience.” The stage directions then explicitly suggest a “Ricky [sic] Lake–style talk show” in which the audience members actually engage in the discussion. This audience participation is a theater innovation that echoes other Pacific performances that have encouraged interaction and broken through the fourth wall of the performance space.13 Involving the audience blurs the boundaries between the world of the play and the real world in two ways: it brings members of the real world into the story of the play, but it also requires the audience, through its participation, to recognize that the world of the play is the real world too.

Once Were Samoans

A decade after Romeo and Tusi, in 2006 and 2007, an Auckland-based theater company, the Kila Kokonut Krew, performed Once Were Samoans in Auckland and Wellington. Once Were Samoans echoes and extends Romeo and Tusi: again, a Samoan girl (Moa) and Māori boy (Taihape) are the star-crossed lovers. Following the form of the fale aitu, the play engages humor to broker social commentary along with entertainment; is very physical; and includes singing, dance, movement, satire, and burlesque. Moa is the innocent youngest sister in the Tufifi family, which is made up of four sons and two daughters, a single mum, and a grandfather. As in Romeo and Tusi, the family—and their so-called racial purity—is headed and guarded by a single woman. Throughout the play, the Tufifi family is preparing for their performance at a family reunion they are attending in Sāmoa, which demonstrates diasporic anxieties of how to perform at home at the same time as it confirms their familiarity with social and cultural expectations in Sāmoa. The play is, after all, called Once Were Samoans and so presents itself through the conceit of identity crisis: resonating with Donald’s comments from the Nesian Mystik track, the title (and the Tufifi family) implicitly asks, they once were Samoan—but are they still? Additionally, the title echoes (as does the title of this book) Duff’s Once Were Warriors, gesturing toward the place of Māori in the play and, indeed, in the family.

Taihape Morgan is, like Anaru, a Māori boy who lives next door to the Samoan family. Taihape is mates with the Tufifi brothers and participates in family occasions. However, whereas Taihape can be a friend to the Tufifi boys, going with one of their sisters is not condoned. Interestingly, by 2007, there are new Māori stereotypes: Taihape is a famous golfer, referencing Michael Campbell and Phillip Tataurangi, who had recently brought media attention to Māori success in the primarily white, middle-class sport of golf. His last name, Morgan, quietly references Tukuroirangi Morgan, who earned public notoriety as a politician who misspent public money on luxury personal goods. Despite this success in his career, class and certain forms of success cannot default one out of race, and the brothers continue to ridicule Taihape with the other, more established stereotypes about being Mauli (Samoan for “Māori”). In an interesting reversal—or perhaps extension—of Romeo and Tusi’s suggestion that these matters may be viewed differently by different generations, the grandfather is the only member of the Tufifi family who agrees to the relationship. However, in the family structure—especially with Mrs. Tufifi, the domineering, larger-than-life Samoan mama—he has little power.

Although the Tufifi family takes seriously the need to protect Moa as a Samoan girl from being contaminated by Taihape and his Mauli blood, it is blood that ultimately undermines the family’s objections. Near the end of the play, Mrs. Tufifi reveals that her earlier story about the Pasifika father of the children was a lie. Specifically, in a hilarious sequence, she describes her participation in the early hip-hop scene in Auckland and her relationship with a Māori man! In a dramatic turn, the children realize that they are in fact Māori as well as Samoan, a result that not only explains the heightened anxiety around the purity of Moa’s blood on the part of Mrs. Tufifi but also the grandfather’s singularly ambivalent attitude to the relationship. On another level, the actor who has played Taihape during the various seasons of the play, Fasitua Amosa, is not himself Māori, and so the audience (or at least the knowing audience) has already consciously racialized a character in one way despite knowledge of blood. In this way, knowing members of the audience are complicit with an act of deliberate amnesia in a way that is not actually all that different to Mrs. Tufifi.14

The play ends when the whole Tufifi family is in Sāmoa, performing their item at the reunion. Taihape has accompanied the family and joins in the item as well. In this way, the experience of the Samoan family in New Zealand is inseparable from its experience in Aotearoa. The family cannot separate its performance of New Zealand–based Samoanness from its engagement with tāngata whenua in a number of different, although related, ways. Firstly, the Tufifi family—which, after all, once was Samoan—recognizes that it is connected to Aotearoa through its Mauli blood. Second, like Wendt’s The Songmaker’s Chair, the play points to the large number of Māori–Pasifika mixed families by foregrounding two Māori and Samoan intimate relationships: Moa and Taihape but also the mother and father of the kids. Third, the play gestures toward a long legacy of Māori and Pasifika connection through shared artistic performance and, perhaps, activism when Mrs. Tufifi reveals her participation in the 1980s hip-hop scene. Fourth, Māori people “once were Samoans” too, according to the histories of navigation in the region, and so Taihape’s performance with the family is both an immediate reunion (through his relationship with the Tufifi family) and an historical reunion (through his Polynesianness). Finally, echoing the next-door-neighborness of Anaru and Tusi, the Tufifi and Morgan families are connected through shared economic and spatial (and specifically urban) location.

Ultimately, whereas Romeo and Tusi elaborated a blood connection between Māori and Pasifika communities in a regional sense (“Aotearoa is an island in the Pacific”), Once Were Samoans points to shared blood in a more immediate, recent, and literal sense. Indeed, while the Tufifi family may once have been Samoan, and may have understood itself as engaging in first-encounter connections with Māori through the character of Taihape, the specter of Mauli blood, which turns out to have a more-than-ghostly presence in the family, emphasizes more complex and long-standing connections between Māori and Pasifika than we might take for granted.

The Market

A Romeo and Juliet story hit television in 2005 on TVNZ, although because the state broadcaster buried the show at 10:25 P.M. on Monday nights, it did not achieve a wide audience until it was replayed by Māori TV in 2008.15 Rene Naufahu, widely known in New Zealand as the Tongan actor who played Sam the ambulance man in the first years of the iconic Kiwi soap Shortland Street, and who was therefore already deeply embedded in New Zealand’s representational politics, was heavily involved in the publicity around The Market, which he cowrote with Brett Ihaka. Certainly this discussion could also sit alongside the Māori–Pasifika collaborations treated in chapter 4 because many prominent and highly skilled Māori and Pasifika actors and crew participated in the project. In this Romeo and Juliet story, two families are not explicitly opposed because of residual and ongoing tensions between the Māori and Pasifika communities but instead because of a very specific incident between two of their family members.

The show is called The Market because its central setting is the Ōtara flea market in Auckland, a famous market held every Saturday morning in the predominantly Māori and Pasifika neighborhood named on Daniel Maaka’s fated sweatshirt from the Te Papa publicity materials discussed in the introduction to this part of the book. The Ōtara markets (and Avondale markets on Sundays) provide social and cultural space for many Māori and Pasifika families in Auckland, along with the opportunity to buy and sell goods not readily available through the usual shops. For both families in the show, the market is their main source of income: the Limas have a vegetable truck, and the Johnsons sell hangi and watercress. The Johnsons’ youngest son, Tipene, who is the Romeo figure, also runs a stand with his best friend, at which they sell T-shirts they design under their label “Brown Brother.”16 In this way, as in Romeo and Tusi and Once Were Samoans, but also as in “Pa Mai,” the relationship between Māori and Pasifika families is tied to physical proximity in specific urban neighborhoods. As well as referencing the flea market, however, the title foregrounds the many markets at play. Over the course of the show, an entangled series of transactions links the characters. Through prostitution, illegal loans, affairs, and illegal fighting rings, the show suggests that anything is up for sale: bodies, friendships and marriages, and communities.

The first episode opens with an extreme close-up of two graffiti artists applying spray-paint to create an initially obscured image on an unidentifiable surface. One, who we later recognize as Tipene, turns to the camera and sprays paint over the viewer’s frame of view, as if the screen were part of the surface being painted. The sounds and visuals of the graffiti starkly announce the intervention in which The Market is engaged. The perspective of the tagger is marginalized by mainstream television, which prefers to center those audience members who automatically and indignantly align themselves with the suffering of any property owners in the case of tagging incidents. Focusing on graffiti at the moment of production foregrounds the creative, active dimension of the art form, interrupting the representation of tagging as destructive, already-there-when-you-wake-up-in-the-morning, artist-less, and community-less. Centering the tagging, therefore, centers a new audience and new perspectives. The proximity of the camera—and, as the screen is blacked out by paint, the audience—to the tagger, paint, and surface suggests that the show will be up close to people, activities, and forms that are marginalized, ridiculed, resented, and feared by mainstream television audiences. After the opening credits follow the tagging sequence, the Johnsons unveil a memorial picture of their dead son, Ritchie, which may or may not be the artwork produced by spray paint in the opening. This ambivalence about allocating responsibility for the creation of the memorial establishes a pattern of ambiguity about tying specific deeds to specific characters.

Five years before the narrative of the television show begins, Sef Lima (Samoan) and Ritchie Johnson (Māori) were best friends involved in a fight in which Sef killed Ritchie. We learn through various revelations that Sef refused to talk in court about what had happened and mutely accepted his prison term of five years for the murder. The first episode of The Market is set on the day that Sef is released from prison, the same day his younger sister Julia arrives back in Auckland after living with their grandmother in Sāmoa for five years. Yes, Julia is indeed the Juliet figure in the series, and like Moa in Once Were Samoans, she is characterized by her innocence; unlike Moa, this extends beyond sexual and political innocence to include naivety about her own family. Having been taken to Sāmoa in the aftermath of the events five years earlier, she has no idea about her adored big brother Sef’s imprisonment.

After the memorial picture is unveiled, “Māori Elvis,” a local man who reappears as a wise yet ridiculous jester (perhaps Puck) figure throughout the series, supports the family by singing a waiata. Significantly, he sings “Ngā Iwi E,” which is very well known and gestures toward local Indigenous politics and, specifically, Māori struggle.17 However, the waiata itself includes the repeated line “Kia kotahi rā te Moananui a Kiwa,” a call for unity of the whole Pacific region. The song is an awkward prophecy: in the context of the family feud that is revealed shortly afterward, the kotahitanga of Te Moananui a Kiwa seems a remote possibility. This meaning is only available, of course, to audience members who understand enough of the Māori language to recognize the vision of pan-Pacific unity intoned in its lines. Furthermore, although the composition is strongly identified as a Māori song, the melody is borrowed from the Kanak resistance struggle in New Caledonia and was brought to Aotearoa through Māori and Kanak activist connections.18 Just as the Tufifi family in Once Were Pacific discovers the legacy of previous Māori–Pasifika connections, this waiata subtly commemorates—in the very moment a memorial of a more recent dispute is unveiled—much more long-standing and oceanwide connection.

Ritchie’s mother, Ngaire, and younger brother Mike are unable to forgive Sef for his actions, and both seek revenge in blood. Mike, who idolizes his older brother Ritchie, is a street fighter and participates in illegal fights involving high-stakes betting, looking to meet up with Sef in the same circuit. These fights are partly organized by a relative of the Limas’, Uncle Ronnie, and while Mike participates in these events as a fighter, Ngaire conducts a sexual affair with Ronnie in exchange for him fixing the fight so that her son kills Sef.19 The series leads up to this ultimate fight, and along the way, the Limas continue to function as a family, while the Johnson family slowly implodes. The Limas’ moral stamina and the Johnsons’ moral decline are paralleled by the Limas’ son Sef, who makes his sexual relationship legitimate by asking his regular prostitute to be his girlfriend, while the Johnsons’ son Mike is banished from the boxing ring for losing his temper and turns to illegal fighting and street fighting instead. These trajectories of moral regeneration and decline seem paradoxical given that the Johnsons are the family whose son is understood to be an innocent victim and that a Lima has been judged guilty of murder.

As the show works toward the final fight, a relationship develops between Tipene, the youngest of the Johnsons’ three sons, and Julia. Their relationship is innocent and yet forbidden. Having met each other in the market the day Julia returns from Sāmoa, without initially recognizing which family the other is from, they conduct their relationship undercover, receiving both help and hindrance from siblings and friends along the way. Like the grandfather in Once Were Samoans, Tipene’s father Chris is supportive of the relationship but incapable of standing up to Ngaire. However, unlike the cases of Anaru and Tusi or Taihape and Moa, this prohibition is explained by a recent rupture in the family relationships (Ritchie’s murder) rather than by a historically derived sense of prejudice between the two families as Māori and Samoan people.

The series oscillates between previous connections and present disconnections, which points to the proximity and familiarity of the families—and perhaps the communities—beyond the sphere of the market. For example, when Ngaire meets Sef for coffee, she finds it difficult to extricate the past five years from a deeper, longer sense of being another mother to Sef for all the years of the boys’ friendship. Similarly, when Ngaire visits Ina to attempt a truce, the two women recall their earlier close friendship. Indeed, it is tempting to propose that these multiple connections “outside the market” suggest the possibilities for Māori and Pasifika communities to recognize forms and histories of connection outside the market (capitalism), outside the economic struggle that I argue has underpinned and exacerbated much of the prejudice between the communities.

Despite the fatal fight being the immediate source of the feud, neither family lives outside of broader narratives about Māori and Pasifika communities. Indeed, the unveiling and waiata of the first scene are interrupted by a confrontation between the two matriarchs of the Lima and Johnson families when the Limas come to pay respects. When Ngaire realizes that the Limas have turned up, she is angered, and Tu’u reassures Chris that they will not stay for long. These men have little impact on the sequence of events, however, because Mike bowls over, yelling, “You’ve got a lot of cheek,” and Ina starts yelling at Ngaire, who responds in kind:

“You think you’re so high and mighty aye—you’re not the only victims here. . . .”

“You murderers—get back to your own country where you belong—go murder your own. . . ”

“You bloody Maulis might have the foreshore—but these jandals will go over any part of the market they f—damn well please. . . .”

Ina’s comment that “you’re not the only victims here” pertains to Ritchie’s death and Sef’s incarceration, and Ngaire takes exception to the idea that the Limas should seek to compare their experiences. At this moment of extreme stress, however, Ngaire and Ina draw not on personal attacks or references to the situations of Sef and Ritchie but on broader racism, referring to each other in the plural as members of their ethnic collectivities (“you murderers,” “you bloody Maulis”). Specifically, Ngaire extends a racist appeal for repatriation of Pasifika families, telling the Limas to “get back to your own country where you belong,” implying that they do not belong in New Zealand. Ina replies to this generalized racism with some of her own (“you bloody Maulis”) and refers to the prominent issue of the Seabed and Foreshore Legislation, which suggests an additional layer to the earlier comment “you think you’re so high and mighty.”

After Ina and Ngaire shift the frame of reference to national concerns (migration, Indigenous rights), Ina brings the focus back to the space of the market itself. By doing this, she sets up the market as the microcosm for the negotiation of national questions and, significantly, reframes the nation because this space is dominated by Māori and Pasifika communities.20 However, if the nation is allegorized by the market, their shared proximity is also accompanied by shared experience: “you’re not the only victims here.” Indeed, Ina could be suggesting that Māori are not the only victims to have suffered at the hands of the New Zealand government; Sāmoa was under the colonial power of New Zealand for much of the twentieth century, and Pasifika communities suffer economically and socially as a result of overt and institutionalized racism in New Zealand. Ngaire’s desire to expunge the family is played out in further allegorical form when she directs Chris to arrange for the Lima family to be banned from the market. Chris, however, quietly responds, “That’s a big thing . . . they’ve been here a long time,” doubly acknowledging that the Lima family but also Pasifika communities have deep roots in Aotearoa.

The connection between the two young lovers Tipene and Julia appears to parallel Ritchie’s and Sef’s own earlier friendship, and the final episode clarifies the extent of this comparison. Although the entire series deserves far more thorough treatment of multiple strands that fall outside the scope of the immediate project, for the sake of the present discussion, we will fast-forward to the final episode. Chris is somewhat ineffective throughout the series, sidelined by his wife Ngaire’s focus on her desire for revenge and alienated from his family after turning Mike over to the police for a particularly brutal street fight, and he has been emasculated both by his wife’s affair and his own refusal to deal with matters head-on. However, in the final episode, Chris goes into the changing room to see Mike and starts, “This ain’t a fight. It’s a death match,” underscoring the parallel between Ritchie’s death at Sef’s hands five years earlier and Mike’s fight with Sef today.

In a dramatic twist, Chris reveals that Ritchie had come out to him a week before he died. Refusing to accept that his eldest son was gay, Chris had kicked Ritchie out and did not see him again until after his death: “I laughed at him. I laughed. The hurt in his eyes when I told him no son of mine is queer.” Mike, who has pursued a fight with Sef to gain retribution for his brother’s hypermasculine reputation as a fighter, on which he had been modeling himself, rethinks the terms of the fight after hearing that his adored bother was gay. He replies, “Is that why he bashed him? ’Cause he was a poofter?” and continues, after a moment’s further reflection, “He’s still my brother.” Although his loyalty to his brother after this revelation is impressive, it doesn’t feel like it fits with Mike’s characterization in the series. Regardless, Mike decides still to fight Sef to avenge his brother’s death.

The fight starts with both men taking opportunities to show their talents in the boxing ring. This is illegal fighting, though, and both suffer bloody injuries as the fight goes on. Sef ends up pinning Mike to the floor and repeatedly bashing him, and just as it looks like he will inflict serious harm on Mike, he is distracted by his own father’s yelling and looks back to Mike but sees Ritchie’s face instead. The flashback causes Sef to withdraw and declare the end of the first round. While Chris tends to Mike, he talks more about his brother’s final revelations:

When Ritchie told me he was in love with someone he told me he was in love with Sef. It was Sef he was in love with—his best mate.

When the fighters return for the second round, Mike asks Sef directly, “Did you kill my brother ’cause he was in love with you?” Sef replies,

It was an accident Mike. He went f—crazy when I rejected him. I loved your brother—but not in the way he wanted me to. Mike—come on man it was an accident.

At this point of climax, Mike and Sef both withdraw from the fight. Significantly, the person most upset that the fight has been discontinued is Alby, the white entrepreneur who organizes the fights (and other illegal money schemes throughout the series, including as a loan shark and a pimp), which emphasizes again the context within which Māori–Pasifika relations take place and suggests that refusing to operate as expected has the power to undermine that system’s dependence on brown bodies to keep it running.

In the final scenes, Sef comes into Mike’s changing room—this liminal space functions literally as a “changing” room, in which Chris tells Mike, and then Mike and Sef talk further, and Sef confirms that Ritchie had declared his sexual attraction to him that same week five years ago. Although Sef spurned his sexual overture, he did not retract his friendship, but Ritchie was embarrassed, and things got out of control. (It might be useful to note that Sef’s heterosexuality is highly visible and thereby secured: throughout the series, his physical relationship with a woman he initially engages as a prostitute is boldly represented on-screen.) The cause of Ritchie’s death during his fight with Sef is not ultimately clarified. It could have been a form of suicide—or assisted suicide—or a genuine accident in the context of heightened emotion. Whatever happened, Sef was so devoted to his friend that he preferred to go to prison for five years rather than reveal details that would have compromised Ritchie’s privacy about his sexuality.

Indeed, Sef’s commitment to Ritchie demonstrates a form of connection that we find in utopic representations of romantic love. When Ritchie confronts Sef in the changing room and asks, “How come you didn’t say anything before?” Sef replies with a declaration of commitment:

Ritchie made me promise. It’s the last thing he said to me. Didn’t want anybody to know. All he was worried about was how people—especially you, Mike—would remember him. I couldn’t tell you.

Does this loyalty suggest that their connection, like that of the original Romeo and Juliet, is more pure than the limitations of social forces around them but ultimately compromised by those same forces so that central characters make rash choices—to the point of death—of their lovers? From the first episode of the series, fighting is linked to sex: in an early scene, Mike’s fight at a local boxing ring is intercut with shots of Sef engaged in sex. This sets up an inverse relationship between Sef’s process of regeneration and purification (by asking the prostitute to be his legitimate girlfriend, but perhaps also through sex itself) and Mike’s regression from competitive boxing to illegal fighting. Furthermore, the images of the two men engaged in their respective physical activities resonate visually. If fighting is symbolically paired with sex, another reading of Ritchie’s and Sef’s previous friendship, based as it was on fighting together, is possible.

The real Romeo and Juliet of the series, Tipene and Julia, do not function as central characters, despite being vital to the marketing of the series. They are not essential to the emotional configuration of the series; they have little impact on the direction of the narrative; and rather than their innocence setting them above the grittier realities of the rest of the characters, it seems simply to set them aside. Their meeting at the Brown Brothers T-shirt stall in episode 1 is coincidental and brief, but Julia returns soon afterward because she realizes she has lost her favorite bracelet and goes to retrieve it, explaining that her big brother gave it to her. This link explicitly ties Julia and Tipene, who are supposedly the Romeo and Juliet figures, with the shadowy—and yet more central—pairing of Sef and Ritchie. From this perspective, it seems that Sef and Ritchie are the star-crossed lovers after all: star-crossed not because of a preexisting family feud but because of their variant sexual orientations.

It is difficult to be confident about the resolution of the series, especially alongside Romeo and Tusi and Once Were Samoans, which clarified their resolutions almost to an extreme.21 Because the plot of The Market is driven by the mystery of Ritchie’s final hours, it feels surprising—and maybe even misleading—that so few clues throughout had pointed to this explanation for the murder. Perhaps this resolution feels ambiguous because a revelation of homosexuality is unexpected within the logic of the plot, Pasifika cultural production, or, indeed, mainstream New Zealand television. Surely the revelation is at the service of politics, but which politics? Is Sef’s cover-up a demonstration of mateship that has the capacity to override the limits imposed by homophobic individuals, families, or communities? Or is Sef’s claim of loyalty to Ritchie a smoke screen for a deeply entrenched homophobia in which five years in prison is preferable to the risk that such a revelation would have implications for his own sexuality? Does The Market really suggest that the only possible outcome for a gay Māori man in Ōtara is the blurred line between suicide and murder? The final act of the series echoes the opening scene, and this time, Mike sprays paint over the portrait that memorializes Ritchie, which was unveiled in the first episode. As in the opening shots, the paint is finally applied to the camera–screen itself. When Mike covers his brother’s portrait with fresh paint, is he finally allowing him to rest as a sign of recognition that it is time to move on? Or is he erasing Ritchie from public memory, now that his homosexuality has been revealed?

Whereas Māori–Pasifika dis-connection in Romeo and Tusi and Once Were Samoans was motivated by a fear of blood mixture, in The Market, the anxiety is around homosexuality and, perhaps, masculinity. In some ways, The Market does not fit as easily with the two live performances Romeo and Tusi and Once Were Samoans. Indeed, one could argue that The Market does not thematize Māori–Pasifika relationships at all. However, this series trades on, extends, and reinforces existing discourses about Māori–Pasifika connections through its deliberate use of Romeo and Juliet as a shorthand for the family tension between the Johnsons and Limas. Much of the advertising material about the series foregrounded the innocent relationship between Tipene and Julia and the rift between their respective Māori and Samoan families, even if the series itself did not focus on disconnection between Māori and Pasifika communities apart from the opening moment in which Ngaire and Ina attack each other. Perhaps, echoing Grace-Smith’s “Te Manawa,” rather than failing to deliver on a promise of exploring disconnections between Māori and Pasifika communities, The Market opens up space for elaboration of complex, nuanced, and multilayered connections between the communities, connections which take place on the basis of physical and experiential proximity.

When Romeo Met Tusi

There are questions to be asked about genre here. Because all of the texts on which this chapter focuses are performed, they are already necessarily collaborative and are fixed in place and time; if you do not attend the theater at the right time (or know how to source a play script) or watch the television show (or have access to a DVD copy), the representation is inaccessible. Interestingly, I have struggled to find references to Māori–Pasifika disconnections in written forms like poetry or fiction, and this might be because poets and fiction writers are not aware of the disconnections, prefer to focus on something else, or are unable to bring texts about this disconnection through to publication. This could also be about generation, place, time; both Māori and Pasifika communities are different in various times and places. Karlo Mila has talked publicly about her experience growing up Tongan in the predominantly white town of Palmerston North, in which the only brown people to whom she could gravitate were Māori. She has wondered if her experience of Tonganness would have been different had she been raised in Auckland, and I wonder if her experience of Māoriness would have been different too. Each of these texts can be understood as liminal, and this could explain how their creators have gotten away with representing disconnection as well.

The politics of gender demand consideration here. Surely it is no coincidence that the major instigators of these family feuds are the mothers. While the fathers are both present in The Market, Tu’u Lima and Chris Johnson are effectively emasculated by their wives (Ina and Ngaire, respectively) and powerless to stop them. When Ngaire is having a talk with her son Mike one day, she comments, “We’re lucky that Tu’u Lima’s as spineless as your father. What is it with the men around here?” In the midst of this clear statement about a crisis of Polynesian masculinity in this urban space, Mike attempts to assert himself as an exception: “Not all of us.” Ngaire reminds him that she is his mother, which disallows Mike from simply assuming his father’s position and secures her own position as matriarch.22 In all three texts—Romeo and Tusi, Once Were Samoans, and The Market—the mothers could be understood in several ways: they could be strong characters, recognizing the inherently powerful role of women in Māori and Pasifika families; they could be strong characters by default, recognizing the very high proportion of Māori and Pasifika families that are solely headed (or financed) by women; or they could be caricatures of hysterical, unreasonable, ignorant, bitter women.

As long as Māori and Pasifika communities insist that their primary relationship is with the New Zealand nation-state, relationships between these communities will struggle to function beyond the narrow parameters that state provides. Tāngata whenua may well subsume Pasifika communities into the broad category of “not Indigenous”: these communities are not Indigenous to the current configuration of the nation-state. (Although the cases of Tokelau, Niue, the Cook Islands, and, historically, Sāmoa are a little complicated here because while they are not Indigenous to the North and South Islands, they are Indigenous to land areas under the political control of New Zealand, in some ways a parallel, for example, to American Samoan and Chamorro Indigeneity in the U.S. empire. Another parallel with that empire in this regard is the Moriori, a community that is perhaps comparable to Hawaiians in the U.S. context: not the dominant Indigenous communities of the nation-state and yet Indigenous to land that is no less part of the nation-state than that with which American Indians are connected.)23 Conversely, migrant communities can tend to focus on their relationship with the visa-granting nation rather than other, Indigenous, coexisting nations that occupy the same land. In the light of these mutual failures to render each other visible, it is difficult to reconcile the rapturous response to the arrival of tapa and the moments of present-day prejudice and suspicion treated in these Romeo and Juliet texts. Yet merely focusing on acts of collaboration and connection would silence many of the stories that demand to be told in the realm of the koura.