Pacific-Based Māori Writers

“Ocean of Possibilities”: Vernice Wineera

In 1978, the first book of poetry in English by a Māori woman was published. The first published work of Māori creative nonfiction had appeared in 1951 (Rewiti Kohere’s The Autobiography of a Maori); the first book of poetry in English by a male Māori writer had been Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun in 1964; and the first books of fiction by a Māori man (Witi Ihimaera’s Pounamu Pounamu) and by a Māori woman (Patricia Grace’s Waiariki) appeared in 1972 and 1975, respectively.2 It remained for a Māori woman to publish a collection of poetry in English. However, when Vernice Wineera’s Mahanga: Pacific Poems was published in 1978, it did not as loudly enter the list of firsts as the others had.3 To be frank, if the poetry had been published but was a little ho-hum in terms of poetic quality, this quietness around its publication might be understandable, but Wineera’s collection is packed full of rich, lively, compelling poetry. The themes of the collection are wide ranging: family, maternity, childhood and children, location and place, teaching and knowledges. Wineera’s ongoing residence in Hawai‘i prevented her publication from being hooked into the worlds of New Zealand literature by the usual means of literary geography, and this has dropped her out of the dominant Māori literary horizon as well.4 Ironically, this distance from New Zealand and from Aotearoa may be precisely what enabled her to achieve publication in 1978, when Māori women poets at home could not.

Inside the front cover of Mahanga, bibliographic notes suggest the multiple spaces in which Wineera and her work had already circulated: her poetry had previously appeared in Te Ao Hou (Māori), Marae (Māori), Kula Manu (a Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i student–staff creative magazine based in Hawai‘i), and Ensign (a Mormon creative writing journal). Mahanga is subtitled Pacific Poems, and in the preface, Wineera is described as “a sensitive, soul-searching Pacific poet” as well as “of Maori, English, and French ancestors.”5 In her own introductory poem, she writes,

The Maori has always been an artist and poet, and

I hope herein to convey in

English my respect for Maoritanga and

the Polynesian heritage which enriches my

twentieth-century life.

Even though the slippage between Pacific and Polynesian is rightly contested, what I am interested in is the inextricability of the specific term Māori (“The Maori,” “Maoritanga”) from the regional configuration of the Pacific (“Pacific poet,” “Polynesian heritage”). The year after Mahanga was published, Wineera edited a literary collection, Ka Po‘e o La‘ie,6 in which her writer’s statement echoes Wineera’s articulation of the “Pacific heritage” described in Mahanga and looks forward to the “vast [Pacific] marae” from a yet unwritten poem we will explore later:

My Polynesian heritage is the vital element in my work. I see the Pacific as an extended marae that is rich in culture and experience and I want to express this in poetry that will reveal the universals in human experience.7

Wineera’s work oscillates between an Aotearoa-consciousness and a Pacific-consciousness, perhaps because she is a diasporic writer based in La‘ie, Hawai‘i. Rather than journeying out from Aotearoa to consider the rest of the Pacific, Wineera’s poetry journeys home from one part of the Pacific (Hawai‘i) to Aotearoa.

Mahanga includes a number of poems about Aotearoa, and these often imagine returning home through memory or physical travel. In “Toa Rangatira,” Wineera reflects on a visit to her home marae and articulates the possibility of ongoing connection with Aotearoa and “Maoritanga”:

“I am home,” I said

to a whip of playful wind

that trailed my words

and flung them

at the wide-eyed tekoteko.

He gave no sign

save that carved out

of defiance.

Nor would he prance forth

to lay at my feet

the fern-leaf symbol.

The speaker of the poem literally speaks—“I am home”—but the agency lies in the many entities that make up this “home”: the wind and the tekoteko.8 Whereas the speaker’s actions are simple and passive (“I said,” “my words,” “my feet”), the wind and tekoteko are more active and described through physicality: the “playful wind” “trailed” and “flung” the speaker’s words; the tekoteko is “wide-eyed” and capable of “sign,” “prancing” and “laying.” The reciprocal relationship between the speaker and the entities of home—visible, as in the tekoteko, and invisible, as in the wind—is initiated by the speaker’s return and utterance but requires response.

Lest we read this as a withheld response and therefore draw conclusions about the impossibility of continued connection when residing as far away as Hawai‘i, we might look more closely at the way in which the “I” of the poem describes the inaction as action. The voice of the speaker has been wrested away, and yet she does not understand herself to be voiceless. Rather than the wind rendering her silent, it “playfully” repositions her “words,” first quietly “trailing” but then “flinging” them at the tekoteko. In this act, then, the wind supports her claim—“I am home”—by carefully and forcefully repositioning it. Reading this poem alongside Apirana Taylor’s well-known 1979 “Sad Joke on a Marae” is immensely compelling because they both focus on a self-proclaimed dislocated individual engaged in the act of approaching a familial marae. In both poems, the claim of ignorance expressed overtly by the poem’s speaker is simultaneously undermined by the speaker’s knowledgeable articulation of what is not apparently known. The speaker betrays her knowledge about the tekoteko, anticipating specific action—“pranc[ing] forth to lay at [her] feet the fern-leaf symbol”—even as she recognizes that the tekoteko himself is not forthcoming in this instance. Also in both poems, the reciprocal relationship between the marae (especially the tekoteko and other whakairo) and the individual is unmediated by the presence of other people.9

In her poems about Hawai‘i, Wineera focuses on the ocean itself, and her descriptions of the Pacific waterscape are particularly rich. Prophetically supporting Hau’ofa’s not-yet-written essay “Our Sea of Islands,” she writes about the ocean as a being: multiple, lovable, active, promising. In “Watching the Limu Pickers,” for example, she describes “the sea’s unruffled skin.”10 Her longer reflection on Pacific voyaging in her description of the launch of an oceangoing waka, “Hokule’a,” describes an “ocean of possibilities,” “an ocean of hospitality,” and “an ocean of welcome,” countering the idea that the vastness of the ocean is either threatening or empty space. Indeed, this relationship with the ocean comes out of intimate and affectionate connection between people and the ocean: “knowing already the fragility / of the sea’s soft skin.” Both poems focus on ocean-related activities: subsistence in the case of gathering limu (edible seaweed) and navigation in the case of Hokule’a. At the same time, the position and voice of the poet are slightly outsider in these poems; in both, the speaker deliberately and mindfully watches rather than participates.

In “Pacific Note,” the ocean is central to the poet’s worldview. This is a significant intervention in Māori writing because ocean-centricity (as opposed to land-centricity) is uncommon in writing by Māori based in Aotearoa, perhaps because the sheer size of the islands has led to an affinity with geographies and metaphors of land more so than water and perhaps also because—at least until the Seabad and Foreshore Act 2005—Māori have needed to defend themselves from a Crown that was more intent on alienating land than ocean. The poem starts with the production of an “us”—a Pacific “us”—whose common denominator is the ocean:

It is a curious fact

that some of us have

lived all of our lives

at the ocean’s curled edge

—have breathed with every breath

we ever took, salted air.

“Our” shared ocean-centrism is underscored by comparison with “others / living out their days / without ever comprehending this fact.” The ocean provides the basis for a collective, relational identification between those who share a relationship with the ocean in this way. Furthermore, the “edge” of the ocean marks it as presence rather than absence, which undermines the view of the Pacific as an empty space (available for atomic testing, available for South Sea fantasies, producing no texts or theories worthy of studying in world literature or postcolonial literature courses). The presence of the ocean as an entity produces the sense of an oceanic identity, despite the lack of interest that continental people have in the Pacific as a region and the unique perspectives of its people (“and should they / ever confront it, would shrug, / and say something like / ‘so?’”). The poet sharpens her insight into her “Pacific” perspective by attempting to imagine living on a continent: “I would suffer from / claustrophobia.” This fear of claustrophobia directly reverses a common continental perspective on living on islands.

The ocean both manifests and produces history (“For where would I hear / the surf’s steady song / rolling out of the depths / of time?”), an idea that anachronistically reminisces Caribbean writer Derek Walcott’s famous poem “The Sea Is History.” Rather than being overwhelming, the vastness and depth of the ocean (both in time and space) is a constant toward which the poet returns to refocus after petty human interactions:

And how would I stand

week-long wrangles

among my like-kind,

without the evening

joy-giving

tranquillity

of wind,

sand,

rock,

sun,

pacific,

ocean?

The ocean is not solely a body of water but a framework for all the elements; sand, rocks, and the sun are included in the “ocean,” just as the islands are included in Hau’ofa’s Oceania. The poem produces the history of the Pacific’s naming as a pun, drawing attention to the original denotative meaning of the term pacific as a parallel to tranquillity. However, despite Magellan’s external observation of a passive and “calm” (pacific) ocean, the ocean itself is the active agent, and the calm (the pacific-ness) is something that is sought—and attained—by the Pacific “I.”

A more explicitly Māori position is asserted in “Heritage,”11 in which the speaker of the poem challenges the reader to engage in the very individualized and intimate act of literalizing the “marks” of Maoriness by carving them onto skin. The poem directs the reader to “take,” “carve,” “let,” “rub,” and so on, and thereby the reader is commanded to apply the tattoo to the face of the poet. The poet is aware of the various and reciprocal ways she is represented as Māori—“Carve upon my face the marks / of Maoritanga”—and elaborates the complexity of Māori representation and creative production. Although the poem is readable in multiple ways, I am most interested here in how a poem so invested in specifically Māori representation ends with the words “I am taking my place / on this vast marae / that is the Pacific / we call home.” In important ways, the poem resonates with Wendt’s essay “Tatauing the Postcolonial Body” because both turn to a specific localized practice and history of tattoo to engage with questions of representation, literacy, and aesthetics at the local and regional levels.

One reading of the poem would identify the tattoo as a metaphor for representation in all forms, and from the very first word of the poem, “take,” the reader is forced to actively participate in, and therefore become complicit with, the act of tattooing as well as the creative production of the poem. The first instruction to the reader is to pick up certain implements and prepare them for an unknown use:

Take the sharpened pipi shell,

piece of paua, bird bone,

razor blade if you like.

The reader is directed to choose from instruments used for cutting, and although the first three are natural elements, the razor blade is not from the same series. Indeed, whereas the shells12 and bone are all remnants of other lives, the razor blade is manufactured and rarely associated with life. Turning the decision over to the reader about which tool to pick up—“if you like”—is at once a false gesture (the voice of the poet completes the poem regardless) and recognition of agency about the forms of representation with which people choose to engage.

After selecting a tool, “Carve upon my face the marks / of Maoritanga” reveals the act on which the rest of the poem depends. The task is impossible partly because it is an arresting idea to carve someone’s face as she stands in front of you. The reader is trapped: having selected a tool, the choice is to “carve” or walk away. If the reader “carves,” the process will be bloody and cause massive pain—and risk of death—for the speaker of the poem. However, walking away will be difficult because the poet has spatially located the reader at no more than arm’s length from the “face,” which reinforces their mutual proximity. Likewise, when it comes to representation, one must decide whether to engage, and risk causing deep, irreversible, and possibly irreparable indentation, or not to engage, and thereby render the poet—the subject, the object—invisible. “Carving” also seems impossible because the application of the moko is highly ritualized, so the poet forces the reader to assume a specific expert role that (most) readers would know themselves to be unable to occupy and that is dependent on the person being tattooed for instruction. In a literal sense, once the “face” is cut, the speaker will have a difficult time providing instruction; likewise, any attempt at representation cannot help but be inflected by the always already shredded and bleeding language available.

Comparing the “marks / of Maoritanga” to “the moko of the old women / wrapped in blankets round the cooking fire” historicizes the art of tattoo but also links the wearing of moko to ancestry. In this way, collective memory is a form of self-representation. Significantly, the poet does not compare herself to the “old women” but instead compares her “marks” to their “moko.” Rather than placing herself in the same position as the women, she elaborates a link between the processes of acquiring such “marks”; the strict comparison is between her “blood” and their “moko”:

Let the blood spurt

and dribble down my chin

like the moko of the old women

Her “blood” may literally “dribble down [her] chin” and thereby mimic the appearance of tā moko, but “blood” could also refer to whakapapa in which tā moko portrays specific genealogical meaning.13 A further reading is possible when we consider the double meaning of moko, which is most likely to be understood as “tattoo” in the context of this poem and yet is also a widely used affectionate shorthand for mokopuna, or “grandchild.” In this case, the poet is claiming her place as a descendent of the kuia—a “moko of the old women”—as well. The speaker’s acquisition of moko is simultaneously about genealogy and inherited familial position and thereby underscores the slippage between past and future that is central to the whole poem and that provides the foundation for a vision of Māori connection to the Pacific region that is not restricted to historical migration.

Having selected a tool and “carved” the “face” of the poet, the poem continues through the process of applying a tattoo. Although the rest of the poem deserves much closer attention, it is worth noting the suggested link between writing and tattoo: “Rub the juices in the wounds, / Charcoal, vegetable dye, India ink.” The act of “carving” becomes a tattoo when it filled with an appropriate dye, a painful process that will ensure that the “marks / of Maoritanga” are legible across time. As with the sharp tool, the reader is offered a choice of “juice,” and again the precontact technologies are joined by “India ink,” which explicitly gestures toward the act of writing.14 The poem shifts in pace as the poet coaxes the reader to “make beautiful the design” with aesthetic and artistic forms sourced from a distinctively Māori cultural context. After “the old women,” the poet acknowledges her koroua (grandfather) and a “proud cloak,” “karanga,” “nose flute,” and “tekoteko” as other Māori forms that engage and embody memory and inheritance. Identifiers from Māori and non-Māori worlds add to the pattern “carved” onto the skin:

Cut statistics on my face:

name, age, place of birth, race,

village, tribe, canoe.

Like “razor blade” and “India ink,” “statistics” jolts the imagery of the poem, but this time the word is co-opted by the poet. “Statistics” includes the details of “age, place of birth, race” required for legitimacy in the context of the state, but the “statistics” of “village, tribe, canoe,” invisible to the European statistician, provide the mechanism by which citizenship can be determined and elaborated in the Māori world. Like the karanga, the tekoteko, and “the moko of the old women,” this second series of “statistics” requires and makes visible another kind of literacy.

The poet also explains why the tattoo must be applied: “Carve deeply, erase doubt / as to who / I am.” The existence of doubt—acknowledged for the first time here—suggests that this act of representation is not innocent but is underpinned by an existing “doubt / as to who / I am.” “Doubt” is linked to the face-without-moko, suggesting why the memory of “the old women” is so warm and why the poet insists on being “carved.” That the doubt is not mentioned until the ending section of the poem could suggest that the doubt is less important to the poet than the “marks / of Maoritanga” named much earlier, or it could suggest that after splitting the “skin, membrane” and rupturing the barrier between self and other, a deeply held sense or fear of “doubt” can be revealed.

Until its final turn, the poem could have been written by a Māori poet based anywhere and with little interest in asking whether we once were Pacific. However, Wineera closes the poem not by further introspection or by an appeal to a Māori cultural space or, indeed, to a New Zealand national space but rather by turning the focus back out to the broader Pacific region:

. . . Lacerate

my legacy upon me

where all who read will perceive

that I am taking my place

on this vast marae

that is the Pacific

we call home.

These last lines clarify the main purpose of the moko for which the poet has dictated instructions. More than this, though, it affirms that the moko is dependent on legibility and literacy: like the readers of things written with India ink, those “who read” moko draw on specialized skills. The poet assuming her “place / on this vast marae / that is the Pacific” does not depend on these reading skills, or even on the moko itself, but the moko—her “legacy”—provides a text by which her act of “taking [her] place” can be understood.

Because Wineera’s articulation of Māori connection with the Pacific is intimately tied to her location in Hawai‘i and her career-long commitment to regional activities, this turn to the Pacific is not a deflection but a deeper center; indeed, describing “the Pacific” as a “vast marae” is a particularly rich image. Certainly it reframes the Pacific region according to a specifically Māori spatial concept. A marae is a meeting space that is linked to connection, belonging, negotiation, and specific roles and rituals carried out by those for whom that marae is “home.” Finally, the focus of the poem shifts here from the reader to the speaker. Whereas the first act of the poem is the reader’s (“take the sharpened pipi shell . . .”), the poet (“I am taking my place”) and the collective (“the Pacific / we call home”) conduct the final actions of “taking” but also “calling.”15 However, to extend this a little, the Māori concept of the “marae” is itself a pan-Pacific (certainly pan-Polynesian) idea. That the Pacific is a “vast marae” gestures toward the great marae Taputapuatea, located in Opoa on Ra’iatea (yes, Tupaia’s own home island and the Rangiātea in the epigraph to this book), which was the central space for spiritual and intellectual exchange and from which major acts of Polynesian exploration and ongoing navigation took place. If the “vast marae” is Taputapuatea, the “we” of Wineera’s poem (“this is the Pacific / we call home”16) includes all of those who link to that marae, that is, all Polynesians. Wineera does not lessen the specificities of Māori identification because of her region-focused sensibility, and vice versa, and in this way, she confirms that “the Pacific / we call home” is simultaneously regional and specific.

“Holding Back Ocean Barriers”: Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan

Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan is the only Māori poet published by the SPCAS. Like Wineera’s Mahanga, her collection contains an explanatory subtitle: Opening Doors; a Collection of Poems by the Maori Poet Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan.17 Patuawa-Nathan was an active member of the early Māori writing scene; the introductory notes mention that she worked with Harry Dansey and Hone Tuwhare in trying to set up “a Maori Writers Society,” which was unsuccessful but is now manifest in the organization Te Hā.18 Patuawa-Nathan lived in Sydney at the time of publication, and much of the poetry in Opening Doors deals with Australia, the Tasman Sea, and Aotearoa. Indeed, very little of the book explicitly engages Pacific connections at all, with the exception of “Omamari,” which draws attention to migration histories, and yet her collection’s inclusion in the SPCAS series absorbs the work into the scope of Pacific writing.

In “Omamari,” the ocean is figured as a place of mobility and circulation, historicizing and normalizing Māori migration:

At dusk, with the tide running out

and gulls leaving the cliffs

in noisy packs

to worry uncovered flotsam,

then, history stirs me.

The temporal in-betweenness of “dusk” parallels the spatial in-betweenness of the shore, and Patuawa-Nathan places this luminal time in the context of multiple currents and trajectories: “the tide running out,” “gulls leaving the cliffs,” “uncovered flotsam.” The in-betweenness is reinforced in the second stanza:

And again on windy mornings

at first light

while a heavy surf

pounds the shore line

“Again,” the spatial liminality of the “shore line” finds a parallel in the temporal cusp of “mornings / at first light,”19 and the lines between these zones are both reinforced and blurred: “windy mornings” and “heavy surf / pound[ing] on the shore line.” Rather than a generalized “stirring” of (or by) “history,” the speaker is reminded of the specific history of her ancestral waka20 and this specific place:

. . . I remember that

my ancestral canoe,

Mamari,

foundered

on this beach.

That the “history” is a memory of an “ancestral canoe” collapses the dominant limits of “history” to include memory and “ancestral” entities. The movement in the poem is tidal: the “surf / pounds the shore” while “gulls leav[e] the cliffs . . . to worry uncovered flotsam,” while her “ancestral canoe” is described as having “foundered” on that beach. This zone of messy yet cyclic encounter complicates the relationship between land and sea (again, like Wineera, this anachronistically echoes Walcott and Hau’ofa), and this is where “history” emerges. To the speaker of the poem, history is not a structure or overlay by which she frames the place she is in but rather is itself an agent. History is a constant by which the speaker is “stirred,” placing the speaker in the same category as the “flotsam.” For Patuawa-Nathan, as for Wineera, the sea is at once text, agent, and mnemonic device, recounting and prompting recognition of Pacific connections.

Also like Wineera, though, Patuawa-Nathan foregrounds the struggle between being home in the Pacific and being home in Aotearoa. “In the Beginning” relates the story of a young Māori man, Manu Te Waaka, who moves to Australia (“Living in King’s Cross”) and whose homesickness and tortured exploration of his sexuality get him involved in drugs that ultimately prove fatal. The discoveries and freedoms associated with distance from home enable an exploration of sexuality beyond the normative restrictions of (at least some sectors of) the Aotearoa-based Māori community:

He changed his life style,

changed his sex,

had hormone shots,

became cosmopolitan

and very very chic.21

Manu Te Waaka’s individual freedom and expression provides him with

Moved with a crowd

of other transvestites

absorbed in their own particularity

Walked with ease in a

society that accepted

the fates of the extraordinary[.]

Sydney is associated not only with freedom and community but also with mobility (“moved,” “walked”), implying that Aotearoa is linked to stagnation or incarceration. This oscillation between homesickness and the imagined impossibility of meaningful return is echoed in Patuawa-Nathan’s poem. The beginning of Manu’s demise is due to homesickness (“he . . . needed to dull the worries / of family ties left behind”), and yet reversing its effects by returning home is also impossible:

Home-sickness was not stronger

than fear of returning

to face humiliation

and intolerance.

His “fear” of “humiliation / and intolerance” literalizes the meaning of homesickness in which home is the source of sickness, and so he seeks healing by staying away from, rather than returning to, home.

However, the ending of the poem, although relieved of explicit moral judgment, suggests that this healing from homesickness is impossible. Although the narrator seems to be a dispassionate third-person observer through most of the poem, merely listing off a series of events (“In the beginning,” “he became,” “He changed,” “Worked at,” “Moved with,” etc.), the relationship between the narrator and Manu is clarified near the end of the poem. Although Louise’s “fear” of “humiliation / and intolerance” keeps her from “returning,” she ultimately ends up being taken care of by relatives (“other Northerners”22) in death. At this point, the narrator enters the narrative of the poem and claims a familial connection to Manu, “descendent of Northern chiefs”:

We followed the coffin,

myself and other Northerners . . .

we found

an elder to perform

traditional rituals.

After death, Manu is relieved of the burden of mobility and his “fear of returning” to Aotearoa; instead, “other Northerners” move toward him. His final migration is in his casket as he travels with, rather than to, his relatives. In death, then, both communities are present, and Manu–Louise is claimed by both of them: “friends of Louise,” who “dressed up / a sad funeral into a / gay wake” and thereby affirm sexual identity, and “Northerners” who affirm genealogical location.

At the moment of death, then, Louise is finally buried in Australia but is oriented outward toward “the sea”:

He rests now in the cemetery

at Botany

On a hill overlooking the sea.

Despite “overlooking the sea,” Louise is buried far from “the North.” The fast pace of the poem, with short lines in long, narrow stanzas, is abruptly arrested by this squat, separate stanza. In death, then, Louise gets to “rest” from struggle for the first time. Alongside the articulation of sustained—if foreclosed—longing for home, the decision to identify as Māori in Sydney is tricky. When “Manu te Waaka” becomes “Louise Santos,” the new name suggests an alternative brownness that secures a new gender identity but deflects attention away from being Māori.23 Certainly it is tempting to suggest that shedding the name “Manu” (literally, “bird”) symbolically clips wings and secures Louise as an exile. At the same time, the poet consistently uses the pronoun he (“he rests”) despite Manu having become Louise over the course of the poem; it appears that after death, Louise’s gender identity is reassigned by those who bury her. The burial “at Botany” returns our attention to the place of the ocean in Māori identification. In death, the diasporic exile Louise is still (and ultimately) foreclosed from returning home physically yet remains oriented toward home as represented in the poem, Pacifically enough, by “the sea.”

“I Meant This to Be a Poem about Aotearoa, So Forgive Me”: Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kai Tahu) lived in Hawai‘i for a year in 2001–2 and returned to live there with his family in 2004. He has since returned to Aotearoa in 2010. After his first two collections, Piki Ake and Jazz Waiata, he worked on the feat of Star Waka, a collection of 101 poems (100 in the book and 1 on the cover) and 2001 lines. Published in 1999, this number of lines peeks over the new millennium and, thereby, the space and time beyond popular focus:

IN 101 POEMS

STROKING Y2K

STANZAS PEOPLED WITH STARS AND WAKA

AND SEA STROKING PAST TWO THOUSAND LINES24

Paying close attention to the detail of numbering evokes the precise mathematical foundation of navigation. Each poem retains internal integrity in terms of topic and form, and yet they are all tied into a broader structure in very particular and carefully counted ways. This reminds us of navigation, then, but also of whakapapa, a reference reinforced by the “peopled” poetry along with the image of “lines,” which refers to lines of poetry but also lines of whakapapa. The slippage between poetry and genealogy, produced by the word “lines,” suggests that poetry itself might function as a form of genealogy. Next came Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002), the lyrics for an opera that Sullivan was commissioned to write, in which he brings together two major explorers of the Pacific: Māui and Cook.25 Rather than Cook and his voyages being understood as singular and precocious, they are tied into a broader context of navigational feats around the Pacific. Likewise, while each written poem marks a shift in perspective or time, the dominant narrative is located at the level of the whole book rather than at the level of each poem. Rather than demonizing Cook, Sullivan subsumes him through incorporation into a Pacific-derived story that is under the creative and metaphoric control of the Pacific. The collection voice carried my family came out in 2005 and is another kettle of fish. Structured by four sections rather than by an overarching logic, the collection roams in very specific ways between Aotearoa and Hawai‘i, and it foregrounds a range of ways in which that roaming is both prophesied and underpinned by earlier connections and feats of navigation. In three consecutive collections, then, Sullivan explores three distinct ways of articulating Māori connections with the Pacific: the originary26 and ongoing telling of the waka traditions; the founding stories of Pacific exploration at the regional level, with a dual focus on Cook and Māui; and reflection on the multiple sites and spaces of Māori contact with the Pacific, including late-eighteenth-century European and Polynesian navigators and more recent formulations.

Before focusing on voice carried my family, we will return for a while to Star Waka, which has been treated elsewhere27 and is taught widely, and which demands consideration as a predecessor to voice in the context of this discussion. Star Waka centers Māori voyaging out from Aotearoa; otherwise, it would be called by vaka or va’a instead of by the Māori waka, which appeared only after Māori had landed in Aotearoa and spent some time reworking the Polynesian language.28 This is confirmed by the speaker of the poem, “Waka 89,” who directly introduces himself as the Polynesian trickster demigod Māui and asserts, “Without me the waka would be a vaka.” In his explanatory note to Star Waka, Sullivan points out that “each poem must have a star, a waka or the ocean,” and in this way, the collection focuses on the voyages but also on the knowledges of navigation and the wider context in which those make sense. Although star, waka, and ocean are interchangeable, the ocean is silent in the title of the book and in the first poem, “He karakia timatanga,” in which Sullivan repeatedly directs his attention toward star and waka:29

I greet you in prayer oh star oh waka . . .

and pray for your combination here.

He Karakia mo korua, e te waka, e te whetu o te ao nei.

Star and waka, a prayer for you both.

Despite not being named in the karakia, the ocean has the capacity to exceed any boundaries and can stand in for star or waka in the other poems.

Sullivan reflects on Māori as ocean people: voyagers, navigators, travelers, deeply embedded in specific land because of, not despite, previous migrations. He draws close connections between Pacific migrations and whakapapa: “what belongs to ocean belongs to blood” (“i”), “we all belong to a waka” (“xxxii herenga waka”), “there is a Kupe in all of us” (“waka 70”). In the final poem of the book, “Waka 100,” he writes about “each person / of waka memory . . . / waka names.” In the second poem of the book, “i,” Sullivan describes the physical act of traveling by waka but also challenges assertions that the art and science of Māori navigation are diminished by affirming the continuation of waka traditions through the ongoing articulation of those journeys. Just as he later writes about the possibility that ahi kā30 is maintained through linguistic as well as physical occupation of specific space in “Ocean Birth” (treated later), in “i,” Sullivan describes the maintenance of voyaging and navigation:

In ancient days navigators sent waka between.

Now, our speakers send us on waka. Their memories,

memory of people in us, invite, spirit,

compel us aboard, to home government, to centre:

Savai’i, Avaiki, Havaiki, Hawaiiki, from where we peopled

Kiwa’s great sea . . .

This poem moves across time and space: from the physical–past (“navigators sent waka”) to the poetic–present (“speakers send us on waka”) and back to the physical–past (“from where we peopled Kiwa’s great sea”). Rather than simply producing a one-way process of moving from literal to metaphoric voyaging, Sullivan establishes and affirms an ongoing oscillation between physical and poetic mobility. The poetic–present articulation of mobility is sandwiched between references to historical physical migrations. The “we” of the poem, however, exists across time: while “our speakers send us on waka”31 in the present day (“now”), “we peopled Kiwa’s great sea,” demonstrating the understanding that ancestors live on through successive generations. Furthermore, the desire to move is simultaneously derived from “[speakers’] memories” and “memory of people in us”: “memories” of historic events (when “we” peopled the Pacific) coexist with “memory” of people from those times (ancestors who live “in us”) as it is experienced by “us” in the present. As in Patuawa-Nathan’s “Omamari,” the act of navigation in this poem is both an historical event and a rhetorical and literary gesture.

Sullivan views the Pacific in voice carried my family from Hawai‘i as well as from Aotearoa. Rather than seeming confused or disjointed, however, this shifting of perspective is immensely generative: Sullivan newly draws links between Aotearoa, Hawai‘i, and the broader Pacific to emphasize connections and disconnections between all. The collection is structured by four sections: “For Gods and Waka,” “For Shadows,” “For the Ocean of Kiwa,” and “For Fires.” Whereas the first two sections seem to continue the work of Star Waka and feel New Zealand based, the third section, “For the Ocean of Kiwa,” has a regional focus and foregrounds the historical figures of Mai and Tupaia, and Sullivan adds Koa and Te Weherua to their memories. The title of this section not only emphasizes the Māori name for the Pacific (Te Moananui a Kiwa) but, like the Māori word waka in the title Star Waka, also names an originary Polynesian navigator as he is remembered by Māori speakers (Kiwa), and through this name, Sullivan claims the navigation of the Pacific as a Māori activity. The section, which seems to come out of Sullivan’s own experience of departing Aotearoa and moving to Hawai‘i, is thereby itself a return of sorts.

“The Great Hall,” the first poem of the section, describes the position of Māori, and specifically Sullivan, in the representational logic of the settler nation:

Stained-glass figures: Cook and Marsden,

a WWI veteran, foundational figures of Canterbury,

and the launch, launching Cook’s caulked vessel—CC

in the underworld—

Sullivan names the dominant masculinist genealogies of any colonial settler nation: explorer (“Cook”), missionary (“Marsden”), soldier (“WWI veteran”), and pastoralist–trader (“foundational figures of Canterbury”). New Zealand is distinguished from other settler nations through the specific details of “Cook” (Englishness), “Marsden” (Anglicanism), “WWI veteran” (Gallipolli and its “birth of the nation” mythology), and “foundational figures of Canterbury” (the nineteenth-century provincial system and the specific alienation of land to produce a primary economy). This settler genealogy, depicted in “stained glass,” is fragile and translucent yet fixed and authoritative. The poem reflects on the occasion of his previous book launch and suggests a quiet unease with the same old colonial story:

Still, I feel like I’m with the Endeavour

making repairs off the Great Barrier,

fothering the hull with the sails of the story[.]

Although the national story may have produced space for certain kinds of conversation and articulation, including Sullivan’s own previous collection (“CC in the underworld”), it is not enough: another perspective is craved (“we had . . . a problem, / a problem that scratches the sails as they form their skin / of tar”).

This poem, then, located as it is in the beginning of the second half of the collection, marks a shift not only in physical location but also in focus, as Sullivan explicitly seeks an alternative narrative and set of relationships:

And so I bring a new lens, two, a pair of eyes

for the mission: Tupaia’s, and another pair, Mai’s,

two other pairs: Koa and Te Weherua’s. Polynesian eyes

on Cook’s several crews.

Describing the new perspective as the “bring[ing of] a new lens, two, a pair of eyes” suggests a literal, and quite deliberate, decision about perspective. The poet is the agent in the poem: he “brings” the new perspectives rather than simply looking through them or considering them. This is about conscious and purposeful selection of “a new lens” and “pairs of eyes”: Sullivan’s choices are as careful and productive as the quadripartite configuration of the settler nation from which he has just signaled a decision to shift away. Seeking an alternative genealogy to that offered by the nation as memorialized in a space like “The Great Hall,” the poet names Tupaia, Mai, Koa, and Te Weherua as another cast of symbolic ancestors. Reminiscent of the memories and genealogies that move across time and space in Star Waka, these “eyes” are marked as historical “eyes” (“Polynesian eyes / on Cook’s several crews”) at the same time as they are available to Sullivan to become his eyes today both figuratively and, perhaps, literally through inheritance. Because the “eyes” are “on Cook’s several crews,” however, the meaning of “eyes” extends beyond mere perspective and becomes about witnessing and, perhaps, surveillance. The “Polynesian eyes” do just accompany Cook: they are “on” him and his “several crews,” which might include not only his literal crews but all those other figures of colonialism who arrived after. The “eyes” that the poet “brings” make possible a form of intergenerational witnessing, in which “Cook” and his “several crews” are simultaneously under the watchful eye—and thereby in the record—of mobile “Polynesians” not only in their own time in the past but also through Sullivan’s own “Polynesian eyes” in the present. The major features of New Zealand colonial–settler history may be fixed in specific and generic “stained-glass figures,” but the witnessing of “Polynesian eyes” is just as enduring.

In the final section of the poem, Sullivan moves from the generic “Polynesian” to Māori:

I looked at the stained glass

in Canterbury’s Great Hall, and noticed

one unidentifiable Maori at the lowest right

on whose shoulders stood all the others.

Taking his “Polynesian eyes” to “look” at “Cook’s several crews” as represented in “the stained glass,” the poet sees something new. Sullivan’s decision to shift his focus from the settler nation to the regional Pacific means that an “unidentifiable Maori” becomes visible. Significantly, this decision to name and look at—and literally through—a regional Polynesian genealogy (Tupaia, Mai, Te Weherua, Koa) produces the poet’s ability to see this Māori figure for the first time. The “unidentifiable Maori” is not elsewhere in the hall but is found in the very “stained glass” with which the poem began. Indeed, the only “unidentifiable” figure in the hall is this one, the one closest to the poet both in terms of genealogy and physical proximity. Once the Māori figure is finally “noticed,” after all the other figures have been identified, the poet realizes that all the others are entirely dependent on the “unidentifiable Maori at the lowest right” after all. This realization shifts the focus of the whole poem, and we step back and realize that all of the weight of the poem rests, concretely and on the page as well as historically and conceptually, on these “shoulders” in the final line.

Much of the book’s section “For the Ocean of Kiwa” historicizes and reflects on the configurations set up in this first poem. The poems range from narrating events that are perhaps unknown to many readers (“Koa was 10 years old amid topmasts and mainstays . . . Polynesian”32) to considering the ethics and limits of Sullivan’s own decision to write about non-Māori Polynesian historical figures (“You’re in the public domain . . . but I can’t. I just can’t take the middle of your throat. / Who would I pay for the privilege?”33). The section reinforces the links between contemporary, “recent,” historical, and originary migration. The poem “Ocean Birth” journeys around—and centers—the various origin stories of Oceania. The poem starts, appropriately enough, in Aotearoa, and the speaker of the poem retraces the steps to Hawaiki alongside those who journey there after their lives in this physical world have ended:

With the leaping spirits we threw

our voices past Three Kings to sea—

eyes wide open with ancestors.

As the babies of the Pacific (these were the most recently settled islands, according to archaeological and genealogical evidence34), a journey into the Pacific is simultaneously a journey home and a journey back in time along the routes of the navigators who brought Pacific people to Aotearoa in the first place. In this sense, the “sea,” the “Ocean of Kiwa,” is full of “ancestors”: those who have journeyed there after passing away here and those people who come from earlier bloodlines and continue to inhabit the islands from which we departed. “Ocean Birth” names the originary stories of Rapanui, Tahiti, Hawai‘i, Aotearoa, Sāmoa, Tonga, and beyond to the Lapita people.35

After imagining Mai and Tupaia, along with Māori travelers Koa and Te Weherua (“the first Maori ever / to leave Aotearoa that way”36), as precedents for his own journey across the Pacific, Sullivan is finally able to talk about Hawai‘i. Near the end of the section, “Pearl Harbour” begins “I meant this to be a poem about Aotearoa / so forgive me”37 and focuses on the process by which the United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and continues to overthrow the Hawaiian people. After considering various mobile Polynesian figures, perhaps the “I” of the poem hoped to identify the “unidentifiable Maori” by writing “a poem about Aotearoa.” However, reflecting on the Pacific makes it impossible to write about Aotearoa without recognizing the broader context, starting where Sullivan’s own feet are located. For one poem (“a poem about Aotearoa”) to morph into the other (a “poem about” Hawai‘i), the two places must be rendered substitutable. The boundary between “Aotearoa” and “Hawai‘i” is permeable because of “waka memory”—Polynesian whakapapa—but also because of shared colonial experience. “Kuki/Cook” is one example of this shared colonialism, and the slippage between Aotearoa and Hawai‘i is further gestured toward in Sullivan’s corrective when describing the “Queen”:

. . . arrested the Queen. Not Victoria.

Nor Elizabeth. Lili‘uokalani . . .

The poet’s intervention (“not Victoria. / Nor Elizabeth”) suggests that the imagined reader will wrongly assume which “Queen” he is writing about. The English Queens Victoria and Elizabeth stand in for the past and present colonial context in Aotearoa; the likelihood that the reader will misrecognize the Queens (the poet “means” Lili‘uokalani, after all) supports the similarity between the two contexts of Aotearoa and Hawai‘i at the same time as the colonial contexts (Queens Victoria and Elizabeth vs. “Congress . . . Pearl Harbour . . . America”) are contemporarily distinct. “Pearl Harbour” articulates the dual position of Hawai‘i and Aotearoa in relation to one another: substitutable and distinct. For Sullivan, although this is “meant” to “be a poem about Aotearoa,” the poem is about Hawai‘i, and this, in some ways, makes it about Aotearoa after all.

Pacific-Based Māori Writers

What happens when the Māori people travel to the regional Pacific, either through physical mobility, poetic treatment, or place of publication? In her preface to Ka Po‘e o La‘ie, Wineera writes,

One does not stop being Maori or Samoan or Haole because one is now living in La‘ie.38

Although this comment is part of a larger point she makes about “the La‘ie experience,” in relation to the place of culture in that uniquely heterogeneous town, it also speaks to the relationship between “being Maori” and place. Because Māori are fixed to Aotearoa (through Indigenous claims to land), which is in turn fixed to New Zealand (through the occupation of the nation-state of New Zealand, which covers the same geographical area as that understood as Aotearoa), the Māori person venturing to the Pacific is departing New Zealand. In this way, the Māori person departs from an originary home. But at the same time, because Māori genealogies and cultural and linguistic traditions are fixed to the Pacific (and, most locally and especially, Polynesia), the Māori person venturing to the Pacific is retracing migration routes, seeking genealogical and cultural sources and tributaries. In this way, the Māori person returns to an originary home. It seems that, at least for these three writers “of waka memory,” writing in the Pacific region produces a quite different view of the region from writing by those “of waka memory” in Aotearoa. In this double-directional mobility between departure and return, Wineera’s, Patuawa-Nathan’s, and Sullivan’s poetry not only extends the scope of the Māori literary canon but also—significantly—articulates and challenges our thinking about the relationship between Māori, the Pacific, and Indigeneity.