Aotearoa-Based Māori Writers

Whāngārāmai Papua New Guinea: Whale Riding around the Pacific

One of the most widely distributed images of Māori in the last decade is the feature film Whale Rider, written and directed by Niki Caro, which was released to global audiences in 2002–3.9 Based (very loosely, in parts) on Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 novella The Whale Rider,10 the film was made with the help of the first batch of New Zealand government funding to support the production of local feature films.11 Like all widely viewed films about non-mainstream communities, especially films that bear such a heavy burden of representation,12 much could be said about the representational politics of the movie.13 This discussion does not focus on the film, but it is worth noting that key differences between The Whale Rider and Whale Rider are the result of expunging the most innovative contributions The Whale Rider makes to Māori writing in English and, in this case, to Māori articulations of connection with the Pacific. Within the context of this chapter, and with a nod to Hau’ofa, whereas the film’s Whāngārā might be described as an “island in a far-flung sea,” the novella locates Whāngārā and the events and characters of the narrative within a “sea of islands.”14

Although the narrative of The Whale Rider is deeply rooted in the oral traditions and territory of real tribal groups and a real town on the East Coast of Aotearoa, Ihimaera pushes the scope of the story beyond Whāngārā to Australia, Papua New Guinea, nuclear testing sites in the French Pacific, and, ultimately, Hawaiki.15 This locates very specific Māori-centric events and struggles within a wider regional framework: Pacific connections are reaffirmed when Māori recognize their links with other Pacific people through shared cultural concepts and similar colonial histories. The whale story that parallels the human story in the novel makes the issue of nuclear testing in the Pacific visible and prompts an orientation of political energy toward Pacific (rather than metropolitan16) politics. Additionally, in the original edition of the novella, six illustrations by John Hovell track stages of the story with stylized art forms from cultural groups around the Pacific.17 The navigational capacities of these “Pacific” Māori, at once adamantly Indigenous and confidently mobile, are emphasized by the appearance of an authorial endnote immediately after the text in its first editions: “New York, 14 August 1986.”18

Kahu’s uncle Rawiri narrates the human narrative19 in The Whale Rider, and this generational distance from the main character, Kahu, secures a third-person narration of events throughout the novella and introduces the Pacific context for the events at Whāngārā. In the space of a few pages early in the novel, Rawiri describes his travels outside Aoteaora while Kahu—the future whale rider—is still living with her mother’s family:

The next year Kahu turned four and I decided it was about time I went out to see the world.20

He travels to Australia and then to Papua New Guinea before returning to Whāngārā, and the expectation he will return is emphasized during his departure at the airport:

“Give Kahu a kiss from me.”

“Ae,” Nanny Flowers quivered. “Ma te Atua koe e manaaki. And don’t forget to come back, Rawiri, or else—”

She pulled a toy water-pistol from her kete.

“Bang,” she said.

I flew to Australia.21

Rawiri spends a year in Sydney, meeting up with relatives and forming a close friendship with his “buddy” Jeff. After a year in Sydney, his older brother Porourangi calls, and Rawiri considers returning home, but his journey is not yet complete. Rather than simply traveling to Sydney to restitch diasporic Māori into the wider narrative of the novel, Rawiri has yet to establish whakapapa connections and historical relationships with other Pacific people.

Porourangi’s phone call is not isolated; Rawiri and Jeff both receive calls from family asking them to come home, foreshadowing the different familial directions in which they will eventually be pulled. By this time, Rawiri is living with Jeff, who is not racially positioned until they move to Papua New Guinea together after Jeff’s parents ask him to return to their house there:

Jeff was a friendly, out-front guy, quick to laugh, quick to believe and quick to trust. He told me of his family in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, and I told him about mine in Whangara.22

Although Rawiri’s description of his friend’s background parallels his own, Rawiri is about to discover the difference between residence in the Pacific on the basis of continued colonial exploitation (“his family in Mount Hagen”) and identification with the Pacific on the basis of Indigeneity (“mine in Whangara”). Jeff’s whiteness is made explicit for the first time when he is summoned by his parents:

His mother called from Papua New Guinea to ask him to come home.

“Your father’s too proud to ring himself,” she said, “but he’s getting on, Jeff, and he needs you to help him run the coffee plantation. He’s had a run of rotten luck with the workers this year, and you know what the natives are like, always drinking.”23

Jeff’s mother’s racism collapses all Indigenous people into a singular type (“natives”24), and this links the specific situation in Papua New Guinea to colonial racism globally, including New Zealand, in which Rawiri is himself a “native.” Additionally, the link between Papua New Guinea and a wider colonial structure is underscored by the crop Jeff’s family produces, coffee, which is consumed by and profits the bourgeoisie both in Papua New Guinea and its (unofficial, since so-called independence in 1975) colonizing power of Australia25 but also throughout the global system of capitalist imperialism that exploits “native” land and labor to produce cash crops.

As Jeff and Rawiri discuss Jeff’s imminent departure, a comment about loyalty to family26 prefigures the impossibility of his escape from other kinds of loyalties, allegiances, and privileges once the two men are in a more explicitly colonial context:

“But it looks like all my chickens are coming home to roost,” Jeff said ruefully.

“Family is family,” I said.27

Rawiri decides to accompany Jeff, and while he could have immediately recognized a “native” identification there, in a romantic moment of regional Pacific solidarity, “family is family” for Rawiri too. When he announces his intention to move to Papua New Guinea, Nanny Flowers humorously but problematically calls up a set of racist stereotypes that rival Jeff’s mother’s:

“E hika,” she said. “You’ll get eaten up by all them cannibals. What’s at Papua New Guinea”—I mouthed the words along with her—“that you can’t get in Whangara?”28

Later, Kahu repeats this joke to her uncle on his return:

“Did you like Papua New Guinea? Nanny Flowers thought you’d end up in a pot over a fire. She’s a hardcase, isn’t she!”29

For Māori to be Pacific, then, we first need to rethink our exposure to, and participation in, years of racism that has been directed toward Indigenous people from around the Pacific.

Despite Rawiri’s apparent equality with his friend in Australia, over the course of two years in Papua New Guinea, Jeff’s family redraws the boundaries of their relationship, aided by and responsive to explicit structures of white settler racism and its exclusive institutions such as “the Bridge Club.” He first encounters Jeff’s family at the airport, where he meets Jeff’s mother:

Although Jeff had told her I was a Maori it was obvious I was still too dark. As soon as I stepped off the plane I could almost hear her wondering, “Oh, my goodness, how am I going to explain this to the women at the Bridge Club?”30

Rawiri immediately recognizes her attitude toward him as racism that, for white Australians in Papua New Guinea (as represented by Jeff’s family and their “offscreen” community), is tied to skin color. At the same time, his own comment about relative complexion belies his own initial ambivalence toward the Indigenous people in Papua New Guinea (“although Jeff had told her I was a Maori”31) and Nanny’s racial othering (“them cannibals”). Ihimaera does not present a grotesquely simplified version of Aussie racism, and Jeff’s father is portrayed as a more complex figure:

Tom, Jeff’s father, was another story, and I liked him from the start. He was a self-made man whose confidence had not been shattered by his long and debilitating illness. But it was clear he needed his son to help him. He was standing on the verandah of the homestead, resting his weight on two callipers.32

Although Rawiri describes him with admiration (“I liked him from the start”), this is complicated by the context in which Tom lives and prospers. After all, Tom is actually the opposite of “self-made”; his “success” is directly attributable to the hierarchical system of exploitation in Papua New Guinea to which his status as a white Australian man allows him privileged access. In this case, however, it seems the center cannot hold.33 Although Tom’s physical health was not cited by Jeff’s mother as the reason for his “rotten luck” at the plantation, preferring to blame deficiencies on the part of the “natives,” Tom leans on “two callipers,” crutches that metaphorically undermine his being “self-made.” “It wasn’t until weeks later that [Rawiri] discovered the [Parkinson’s] disease had not only struck at his limbs but also had rendered him partially blind,”34 an image of colonial decay in which the gradual inability to function is accompanied by a (less apparent) degeneration of vision. His blindness could be to the inequalities of the colonial system, although Rawiri’s admission that Tom is an ambiguous figure and Jeff’s mother’s emphasis on visual differentiation racism (“I was too dark”) allows that Tom could be increasingly unable to distinguish between “natives” and his own kind, an extension of “going native” as a result of proximity that would be seen as a form of degeneration by the colonizing community. The ability to see becomes crucial later, at the climax of the section, when the difference between the white community and those who are “too dark” is placed in sharp contrast.

Rawiri first articulates his identification with Papua New Guinea when he works on the land. As he describes the work of “putting the plantation back on its feet,”35 he first identifies himself with Jeff’s family and their project of domesticating (“taming”) the landscape:

Putting the plantation back on its feet was a challenge which the countryside really threw at us; I have never known a country which has fought back as hard as Papua New Guinea. I doubt if it can ever be tamed of its temperatures, soaring into sweat zones, or its terrain, so much a crucible of crusted plateaus and valleys, and its tribalism. But we tried, and I think we won some respite from the land, even if only for a short time.36

Including Indigenous people (“its tribalism”) as a part of the “countryside” is a particularly colonial configuration, and the inclusive plural pronouns (us, we) make Rawiri an ally. However, he draws on a particularly Māori view of their effect on the “countryside,” and this is the first time he differentiates himself from the colonial project:

Man might carve his moko on the earth but, once he ceases to be vigilant, Nature will take back what man has once achieved to please his vanity.37

Although he is committed to the project of “taming” (“I’ve always been pretty good at hard work, so it was simply a matter of spitting on my hands and getting down to business”38), Rawiri recognizes the “vanity” that will ultimately be undermined by “Nature.” Furthermore, because the moko is a form of tattoo that reflects genealogies and histories, labor and the physical structures of the plantation become an expression of identity and history. Echoing Wineera’s poem “Heritage,” the additional meaning of moko as descendents supports a vision of genealogical as well as economic future in the “tamed” plantation space. Rawiri recognizes, however, that the carving of this genealogy and history will be ultimately resisted by the landscape when “Nature . . . take[s] back what man had once achieved.”

Eventually, Rawiri identifies further links between Papua New Guinea and Aotearoa. At first he describes his observations of Papua New Guinea politics as an outsider:

I used to marvel at the nationalism sweeping Papua New Guinea and the attempts by the Government to transplant national identity and customs onto the colonial face of the land.39

This idea of marking “the colonial face of the land” gestures to the “moko” described in the plantation context, linking the colonial plantation with “the Government” but also implying that their efforts will be futile. (“Nature will take back what man had once achieved”). Furthermore, despite Rawiri allegedly “marveling” at the process of nationalism, the metaphor of “transplanting” suggests that “national identity and customs” are introduced from outside and, in the context of plantations, that the purposes served by their “transplantation” will also be foreign. Rawiri turns to Māori terminology to outline the barriers to this “transplantation” and thereby produces a slippage between Papua New Guinea and Aotearoa:

First, Papua New Guinea was fractionalised into hundreds of iwi groups and their reo was spoken in a thousand different tongues; second, there were so many outside influences on Papua New Guinea’s inheritance, including their neighbours across the border in Irian Jaya; and third, the new technology demanded that the people had to live “one thousand years in one lifetime,” from loincloth to the three-piece suit and computer knowledge in a simple step.40

While the first “barrier” to the “transplanting” is articulated with Māori words (iwi, reo41), Rawiri supports the popular perception of “one thousand years in one lifetime,” which is (especially with the use of words like loincloth) derived from the same set of assumptions as his Nanny’s “cannibals.”42 Later in the chapter, however, Porourangi writes to Rawiri and describes the contemporary changes to the Māori communities in Aotearoa:

[Porourangi] had gone with Koro Apirana to Raukawa country and had been very impressed with the way in which Raukawa was organising its youth resources to be in a position to help the people in the century beginning with the year 2000. “Will we be ready?” he asked. “Will we have prepared the people to cope with the new challenges and the new technology? And will they still be Maori?”43

Porourangi’s questions about “technology” echo the claims about “steps” taken by the Indigenous peoples in Papua New Guinea. The pairing of these two conversations about technology and preparedness for certain kinds of futures suggests a closer relationship between Papua New Guinea and Māori than Nanny Flowers’s stereotyping would initially admit.

After including himself in the colonizing “we” who attempt to “tame” the “countryside,” then recognizing the local “iwi” and “reo,” Rawiri finally considers the relationship between Papua New Guinea and Aotearoa, recognizing some of the key differences but also suggesting the articulations of the two “communities”:

In many respects the parallels with the Maori in New Zealand were very close, except that we didn’t have to advance as many years in one lifetime. However, our journey was possibly more difficult because it had been undertaken within Pakeha terms of acceptability. We were a minority and much of our progress was dependent on Pakeha goodwill. And there was no doubt that in New Zealand, just as in Papua New Guinea, our nationalism was also galvanising the people to become one Maori nation.44

As he recognizes similarities between Aotearoa and Papua New Guinea, Rawiri becomes newly conscious of the situation at home. The differences between the two places (“except that we didn’t have to”; “however, our journey was possibly more difficult”) also sharpened his awareness of the situation in Aotearoa. Finally, Rawiri realizes the local possibilities of Pacific regionalism:

So it was in Australia and Papua New Guinea that I grew into an understanding of myself as a Maori and, I guess, was being prepared for my date with destiny.45

Significantly, Rawiri does not lose his sense of being Māori when he begins to identify with Papua New Guinea, but these connections enhance his “understanding of [him]self as a Maori.”

Unsurprisingly, Rawiri’s enhanced identification with the Indigenous people of Papua New Guinea does not bode well for his relationship with Jeff or his family. After a year and a half, Jeff and Rawiri have a conversation about Rawiri’s position there:

“You’re getting homesick, aren’t you Rawiri?” he said . . .

“A little,” I replied. Many things were coming to a head for me on the plantation, and I wanted to avoid a collision. Jeff and I were getting along okay but his parents were pushing him ever so gently in the right direction, to consort with his own kind in the clubs and all the parties of the aggressively expatriate. On my part, this had thrown me more into the company of the “natives,” like Bernard, who had more degrees than Clara had chins, and Joshua, who both worked on the farm. In doing so I had broken a cardinal rule and my punishment was ostracism.46

Rawiri’s connection with “the natives” in Papua New Guinea is longer general but is quite specific; he names individual Indigenous people and has a sense of their lives and histories. The humorous juxtaposition between Bernard’s multiple degrees and Clara’s multiple chins points out the irony of claims that the “natives” are lazy and that Europeans are industrious. Rawiri’s friendship with Jeff is complicated by the actions of Jeff’s family (“family is family” indeed), and as Rawiri starts to change the pronouns by which he describes himself (throughout the section, “we” is a very unstable term as Rawiri claims membership in multiple groups with shifting parameters), Jeff is more closely aligned “with his own kind in the clubs and all the parties of the aggressively expatriate.” Rawiri’s in-betweenness (“Although . . . I was a Maori . . . I was still too dark”) had posed a risk to the social structure in Papua New Guinea since he arrived at the airport, and his ostracism from the “expatriate” scene has “thrown [him] more into the company of the ‘natives,’” which “[breaks] a cardinal rule” of the colonial structure. Jeff and Rawiri hold their conversation beside the water, and Rawiri continues to narrate the scene:

I had picked up a shining silver shell from the reef. I had taken it back to the beach and was listening to the sea whispering to me from the shells’ silver whorls. . . . I placed the shell back to my ear. Hoki mai, hoki mai ki te wa kainga, the sea whispered.47

Interestingly, for this Pacific reading of the novella, at the end of this episode with Jeff, it is not Jeff’s acceptance of his departure (“if you have to go, I’ll understand”) that speaks most deeply to Rawiri but rather the sea. Furthermore, the sea now speaks Māori.

The imminent “collision” is one of three events that convince Rawiri that he “should be homeward bound.”48 Rawiri attends a wedding reception for a “young expatriate couple,” and although Clara assumed he wouldn’t attend, “Jeff said I was ‘one of the family’ and insisted that I accompany them.”49 At the reception, Rawiri overhears Clara:

“He’s a friend of Jeff’s. You know our Jeff, always bringing home dogs and strays. But at least he’s not a native.”

Her laugh glittered like knives.50

This comment confirms that Rawiri is neither one of them (“dogs and strays”) nor “a native,” an in-between position from which he is forced to make a choice on the way home that evening when the “collision” he has feared turns out to be literal:

We . . . were driving home to the plantation. Jeff was at the wheel. We were all of us in a merry mood. The road was silver with moonlight. Suddenly, in front of us, I saw a man walking along the verge. I thought Jeff had seen him too and would move over to the middle of the road to pass him. But Jeff kept the station wagon pointed straight ahead.51

Rawiri is one of the occupants of the vehicle, shuttered from the outside environment and protected by the encasement of the car, and yet he also has a special view of the surroundings. Perhaps an allegorical reading is possible here, in which Jeff’s family keeps “pointed straight ahead” toward the “plantation” despite the literal presence of the Indigenous body. Rawiri’s view of the “countryside” is no longer from the position of the “we” it had been a moment earlier, and he realizes that his view is fundamentally different to Jeff’s. The “collision” has disastrous circumstances for the “man walking along the verge”:

The man turned. His arms came up, as if he was trying to defend himself. The front bumper crunched into his thighs and legs and he was catapulted into the windscreen which smashed into a thousand fragments. Jeff braked. The glass was suddenly splashed with blood. I saw a body being thrown ten metres to smash on the road. In the headlights and steam, the body moved.52

To follow our allegorical reading, after the body is struck by the car, it obstructs the view of the occupants; significantly, the glass is not only “splashed with blood” but also breaks “into a thousand fragments,” one perhaps for each year of so-called progress brought about by colonialism. (Of course, one would not want to follow the “collision” too closely as an allegory, given that this episode would suggest the impossibility of modernity—indeed, a fatal impact—for the “iwi” of Papua New Guinea.)

Finally, Rawiri is forced to reckon with the impossibility of continually occupying a middle space within the sharply binarized hierarchy of Papua New Guinea’s colonial context—he must stay in the blood-splattered car, or he must get out:

Clara screamed. Tom said, “Oh my God.”

I went to get out. Clara screamed again, “Oh no. No. His tribe could be on us in any second. Payback, it could be payback for us. It’s only a native.”

I pushed her away. Tom yelled, “For God’s sake, Rawiri, try to understand. You’ve heard the stories—”

I couldn’t comprehend their fear. I looked at Jeff but he was just sitting there, stunned, staring at that broken body moving fitfully in the headlights. Then, suddenly Jeff began to whimper. He started the motor.

“Let me out,” I hissed. “Let me out. That’s no native out there. That’s Bernard.” A cous is a cous.53

Rawiri recognizes the rhetoric justifying the maintenance of the position inside the car (“payback,” “you’ve heard the stories”), and he also realizes that he finds Jeff’s paralysis (“he was just sitting there, stunned”) and weakness incomprehensible: “I couldn’t understand their fear.” When Jeff “start[s] the motor” of the car, in effect agreeing to the racist, exploitative, and literally violent terms—as well as the “fear”—by which he will go on to inherit the legacy of the plantation (“The station wagon careered past me. I will never forget Jeff’s white face, so pallid, so fearful”), Rawiri takes his departure. The colonial system in Papua New Guinea operates to protect the hierarchies in place, and the inquest decides:

It was an accident, of course. A native walking carelessly on the side of the road. A cloud covering the moon for a moment. The native shouldn’t have been there anyway.54

The decision relies on a deliberate distortion of facts in which it is the “native” (not a named “native”; “natives” are infinitely substitutable) who is “careless,” and the moon is covered by a cloud “for a moment” despite the clear descriptions of the light in the area, both from the moon and the car, and Rawiri’s own clear view of Bernard before and after the “collision.” Later, Rawiri confirms that that moment signaled Jeff’s inextricability from the colonial structure (“I don’t blame you. . . . You can’t help being who you are”55), and he admits his own “sadness that a friend I thought I had would so automatically react to the assumptions of his culture.”56

It is important, for the sake of the claims I am making in this chapter, that Rawiri’s reason for getting out of the car is twofold:

“Let me out,” I hissed. “Let me out. That’s no native out there. That’s Bernard.” A cous is a cous.57

First, he does not see a “native” but instead his friend Bernard, and the tragedy that the specific man they have struck is his friend who had been highly educated in the Western system is not lost on Rawiri, who ponders later,

All I could think of was the waste of a young man who had come one thousand years to his death on a moonlit road, the manner in which the earth must be mourning for one of its hopes and its sons in the new world[.]58

However, Rawiri asserts not just a familiar but a familial connection: “a cous was a cous,” exactly the same words he used in Sydney to explain his connection to relatives in King’s Cross. This familial claim articulates an Aotearoa-inclusive Pacific, privileging and mobilizing whakapapa relationships to recognize and subvert the context of colonialism. Having arrived in Papua New Guinea using the language of “tribalism” and viewing work on the plantation as “hard work” and “getting down to business,” Rawiri becomes aware of the racist and violent hierarchies that underpin the situation there. He connects with the “iwi” in Papua New Guinea in a completely opposite way to that which sees them as “natives”—“a cous was a cous”—and this leads him to a realization that despite his own claim of difference on arrival (“although Jeff had told her I was a Maori”) and despite the in-between status he had precariously occupied during his time there (“at least he’s not a native”), his “[being] a Maori” makes him a “cous” indeed:

And would I be next? There was nothing further to keep me here.59

Rawiri realizes that his connection with the “iwi” in Papua New Guinea makes him “a native” and therefore interchangeable with any other “native,” and having made this connection with the Pacific, he heads home.

Kanohi ki te Kanohi: Hinewirangi

Hinewirangi’s collection Kanohi ki te Kanohi was written in the 1980s and published in 1990, the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and fifteen years after the Land March and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal. A precocious collection, exploring the possibilities of articulating connection with other Indigenous peoples when most Aotearoa-based Māori writers were still writing exclusively about the Māori community in terms of connection with Pākehā, Kanohi ki te Kanohi is structurally divided into four parts: the Great Turtle, Hawai‘i noa, Aotearoa, and Asia. Roughly covering four geographical areas, Hinewirangi explains the order of the four sections in her introductory comments:

So many questions of when [sic] the Maori came from. It has always been my belief that we left Egypt, then to the Americas, on the islands of the Pacific and finally here to Aotearoa.60

Her section on the Pacific—“Hawaii noa”—contains eleven poems and moves through a series of points of connection. In her introduction, she explains her sense of connection with the people and place of Hawai‘i:

I first went to Hawaii, romantic and lonely, found the native Hawaiian people, and was soon lost to their struggle for one of their sacred islands.

The feeling of having been to this island before was very strong. I recognized places, met with kuia who see her people in my colouring, in my body. The tikanga was so strikingly similar, and I knew that my geneologies led me here.61

Hinewirangi’s language shifts while she describes her time in Hawai‘i, from a borrowed outsider perspective near the beginning (“Hawaii, romantic and lonely”) to an incorporation of Māori language (“kuia,” “tikanga”62) and a focus on points of connection unique to Māori and Hawaiians near the end. The final sentence relies on the reader knowing the meaning of tikanga, which redistributes the power so the insider reader is privileged, and she finally suggests that her travel to Hawai‘i is the result of a previously unrecognized genealogical imperative.

The structure of “Hawaii noa” echoes the structure of Hinewirangi’s introductory comments about that section. The section opens with “Fire-keeper,” which describes an interaction with “native Hawaiian people.” In the narrative of this poem, the poet describes a series of speakers whose conversations are not marked clearly in the text:

Sky woman, you are sky woman.

Yes I have waited so long

for you to come

I am from the island of Kaua’i

the firekeeper, the secrets

the healing fire, food fires

warmth fire, the secrets

but today

Sky woman

I have travelled

a long way to find you,

you, old you, belong to me

my genealogies.

His eyes shone sparkling . . .

At first frustrating to read because it relies on the distinctions between “I,” “you,” and “he,” which do not enable one to distinguish the various voices of the poem—is the “I” who has waited the same as the “I” from Kaua’i and the “I” who has traveled?—it is productive to move beyond fixing the voices to detect a single narrative. Perhaps the difficulty of distinguishing between the various speakers echoes the idea of “genealogies” in which identifying the boundaries between one individual and the next is less important than recognizing continuities and matrices of connection. Near the end of the poem, a gift is given: “his gift is mine / I know only an elder will / understand / his words on a modern tape.” The speaker realizes that “only an elder” will have the appropriate skills to comprehend the language (which has been identified earlier: “he speaks / he is Hawaiian”), and it is possible that it would take an “elder” to “understand” the conceptual complexity or narrative contained in “his words” or, indeed, that a Māori “elder” would have the linguistic proficiency to understand the Hawaiian language because of the close links between Māori and Hawaiian, affirming the cultural and linguistic links between Aotearoa and Hawai‘i. To some degree, the claim of situational illiteracy is ironized—or perhaps just differently contextual-ized—by the fact of the speaker’s ability to capture the words even without “understanding” (on “this modern tape”), by the poet’s voice speaking in the poem, and by the writing of the poem itself on the page.

Following “Firekeeper,” a series of poems about “struggle for one of their sacred islands” describes the poet’s time on Kahoolawe, an island rich in spiritual meaning and an important site for religious observations that the U.S. Navy alienated and used for target and weapons practice from 1941 (after the events at Pearl Harbor) until the navy officially returned the island to the state of Hawai‘i in 2003 (despite the navy’s promised cleanup being incomplete) as a result of Hawaiian insistence and activism, including constant Hawaiian pressure since 1976. Without exception, each of the poems in this series provides an opportunity to relate to Aotearoa. “Kaho o lawe,” for example, describes excitement about going to the island and acknowledges that the speaker of the poem is in the company of people from many nations “come to protest,” and yet the poem moves not to a reflection on similar protest in Aotearoa but to a sense of being “home.” The next part of the poem echoes Patuawa-Nathan’s “Omamari,” recounting how the poet came to be from Aotearoa in the first place:

my oldness remembers

this journey

waka, canoes

races

ancestors lost in the storm

am I home

did I not just leave

Uenuku

drove us from these islands

Takitimu

Kupe

Toi

Whatonga

Maru iwi

I have been here

Maui

Moving back (“my oldness remembers”) through an atavistic memory of an ocean journey (“waka, canoes / race / ancestors lost in the storm”), the poet names specific histories (as alluded to by “Uenuku”) and specific navigators (“Kupe / Toi / Whatonga”) until she arrives at the name that has the unique ability to fix her in place and no-place, time and no-time: “Maui.”

In Hawai‘i, of course, there is a unique slippage between the name of an island (Māui) and the name of an originary ancestor (Māui). The poet describes the specific time and place of her present visit to Hawai‘i (“I have been here / Maui”) and yet also uses this utterance of Māui’s name to reflect on Māui the pan-Polynesian ancestor and fisher of islands. Later in the poem, this pun on Māui (Māui as person, Māui as island) is mobilized more explicitly:

reaching the shore

when the sun begins its journey

facing Maui

Hale a ka la

Mountain

house of the rising sun

I saw Maui

climbing the mountain

with nets

to stop the sun

from revolving fast

The repetition of “Maui” draws an important connection with Hawai‘i on the basis of similarity (sharing Māui) and at the same time acknowledges the unique relationship Hawai‘i has with Māui (the sun that Māui famously slowed down rose from Hale a ka lā on the island of Māui). While the second “Maui” here (“I saw Maui / climbing the mountain” clearly refers to the ancestor, the previous Maui could refer to the man or the mountain. Hawai‘i thereby provides the poet with an opportunity to “[see] Maui”: to acknowledge the place on its own terms as distinct from Aotearoa (the island named Māui) and to see the connection between the two places on the basis of shared—in Hinewirangi’s own introductory words—“tikanga” and “genealogies.” The poem ends with an articulation of connection to Hawai‘i: “I knew this was the / place / where the stories of old / happened / yes, I belong here too.” Significantly, the space for an Aotearoa-inclusive Pacific that has been opened up through kanohi ki te kanohi connection with Hawai‘i enables the poet to include Rarotonga as well. The remainder of the section oscillates between Hawai‘i, Aotearoa, and Rarotonga, teasing out points of familial (shared “genealogies” and culture) and also familiar (colonial experience) connections.

Aotearoa-Based Māori Writers

Like the narrators in their texts, Ihimaera and Hinewirangi write from an experience of being mobile, and through their creative work, these writers provide an opportunity for their readers to experience the realm of tapa too. Ihimaera and Hinewirangi—and Dunsford, Taylor, and Tuwhare—have traveled around the Pacific; their creative work stems from their direct experience in the region, suggesting that Aotearoa-based Māori writing about the Pacific region depends on physical mobility and lived relationship. Indeed, the difference in mobility of the writers in this chapter and those in the previous chapter may be one of degree rather than of kind. Maybe the realm of tapa is most available—or perhaps most visible—to those who travel around it. But does this mean that Aotearoa-rooted Māori writers have limited capacity to imagine connections with and around the Pacific? (If connecting with the Pacific region depends on mobility around that region, the realm of tapa is going to be shaped by class and physical ability as much as by any cultural or political impulse.)

These texts, and the others named early in the chapter, represent and produce a reciprocal relationship between engaging more deeply with the Pacific and engaging more deeply with what it is to be Māori. While each text articulates specific moments of recognition in which Māori respond to aspects of the Pacific which they perceive to have cultural, experiential, familial, physical, or philosophical similarities, they take the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which connecting with the Pacific brings about new perspectives on Aotearoa. In “Kaho o lawe,” Hinewirangi acknowledges her position as a Māori person in the Pacific (specifically in Hawai‘i) on the basis of shared political aspirations, then recollects earlier connections that ultimately suggest the possibility of relationship on the basis of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity–similarity and specificity—and finally ends up in the position to speak. In The Whale Rider, the explicit racism of Jeff’s family and identification with the Indigenous people in Papua New Guinea prompts Rawiri to reorient his own allegiances and identifications away from his friendship with a white Australian and toward a renewed sense of his own location within the Pacific and also within the enduring colonial system. As in the previous chapter, however, Pacific identification does not dilute Māori identification, and his connection with other “natives” and anticolonial orientation eventually catalyze Rawiri’s physical return home to Whāngārā. Significantly, unlike most of the texts treated in this book, Rawiri’s travel to Melanesian Papua New Guinea in The Whale Rider moves beyond Māori connections with Polynesia on the basis of linguistic and genealogical links and affirms the possibility of Māori connection with the whole Pacific.

Very few new Māori poets have come into publication over the past ten years, but one writer who has made a great contribution is poet–songwriter–singer Hinemoana Baker. Baker’s second collection, Koiwi Koiwi, includes the poem “what the destination has to offer,” which is about, among other things, the migratory pattern of eels. Although the eels are at home in the Horowhenua, where Baker has tribal connections, their life cycle involves a massive trip to Sāmoa and back to the same river. The migratory cycle of eels suggestively shadows the process by which these Aotearoa-based Māori writers articulate their connection with the Pacific—the question of which end of the trip is “home” and which is “away” depends on the place from which you’re looking:

Salt, fresh, salt, he says.

The opposite of salmon.63