“It’s Like That with Us Maoris”: Māori Write Connections

“Ua malamalama”: Apirana Taylor

Apirana Taylor’s 1986 multigenre literary collection He Rau Aroha: A Hundred Leaves of Love contains the short story “Pa Mai.”1 To place the collection in context, He Rau Aroha appeared around the same time as three major works of Māori fiction: Hulme’s the bone people (1984), Grace’s Potiki (1986), and Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986). While these texts gained wide and ongoing acclaim, they offered three very different ways of apprehending the ongoing impacts of Māori encounters with colonialism and put forward three particularly 1980s visions of rural-focused decolonization. Whereas a novel both suggests and requires structural wholeness, Taylor’s multigenre collection of poetry and short fiction implies a diversity of experience—including apprehension of colonialism in its many forms, decolonization, and Māori centrism—without needing to produce the continuities between these various experiences or between each experience and a broader national history. This is not to suggest that He Rau Aroha shies away from speaking to the national context; rather, it is a collection of short fiction and poetry that contains various strands and narratives and leaves room for the reader to determine how these different elements might connect. The broader intervention made by the collection and, indeed, by Taylor’s work more generally, especially given the wide distribution of his now iconic earlier poem “Sad Joke on a Marae,”2 is that he foregrounds and nuances urban Māori experiences. “Pa mai” introduces perhaps the first developed Pasifika character in a fiction text by a New Zealand–based Māori writer.

Written entirely in dialogue, the humorous story recounts a casual, fast-paced conversation between two men drinking in a pub: one is Māori and one is Samoan. Because the story is not told from the perspective of a narrator, the reader participates by figuring out details as they are revealed through dialogue. The men are already familiar: they know each other by name (“You imagine things, Harris”; “Sione mate”3) and refer to previous experiences they have shared together (“And there’s us sittin’ in the lounge”4), and these details confirm that this is not a moment of “first encounter” between them. In this way, Taylor represents a Māori–Pasifika friendship that extends beyond the present temporal frame of the immediate narrative. Over the course of the story, which is a mere three pages in length, the men articulate a series of differences between Māori and Samoan communities, reflect on their shared experiences of racism and colonialism, and conclude with a discussion about their collective cultural and linguistic heritage.

The opening lines of the story are uttered by Harris (“here’s me, a Maori”5), who immediately foregrounds the distinctions as well as continuities between Māori and Samoan treatment in the racist context of New Zealand by talking about the service he receives at the bar. Harris is both knowledgeable and naive about racism. On one hand, he can recognize and read the treatment aimed at someone on the basis of his appearance (“that Pakeha bar girl slops my beer all over the place and just about throws the change in my face”), but on the other hand, he acknowledges that “[he has] noticed something [he] never noticed before.” He suggests that he is receiving the treatment “’cause she thinks I’m Samoan,” which points to the layers of racialization that take place in the story. Although the conversation between Sione and Harris focuses on their own experiences and thereby, over the course of the story, elaborates a picture of their respective families and communities, from the point of view of the bartender, their proximity renders them indistinguishable from one another (“she thinks I’m Samoan”). At this point in the story, the two men are careful to describe each other as “you”: “here’s me, a Maori, drinkin’ in the bar with you Samoans”; “all you Samoans”; “you Maoris”; and so on.

After acknowledging the experience of racism in the context of the bar, Harris extends his observation to the national sphere:

I notice she treats all you Samoans like that. Imagine that, eh? You come all the way from Samoa to New Zealand and spend the rest of your life gettin’ the beer chucked in ya face.6

Harris’s reference to Samoan migration to New Zealand provides Sione with an opportunity to make a comparison between Māori and Samoan mobility: he does this by cracking the oldest joke in the book, which reappears in countless television shows, books, and verbal conversations:7

You Maoris came over here on your canoes. Then came the Palagi on their canoes, but we Samoans got smart. We waited for two hundred years and then flew over on Air New Zealand.

Sione includes Pākehā in his version of the joke but calls them “Palagi” in this conversation with a Māori man in the mid-1980s, which speaks to his ability to assume that Harris is familiar with the term. Also, although Palagi in the cliché usually arrive in ships, here they arrive “on their canoes,” which connects them to “Maoris . . . on your canoes” and produces “we Samoans” as the distinctive group. Also, when Sione names the specific airline Air New Zealand, the national carrier and therefore a symbol of the relation between the New Zealand state and Samoan migration, and also a reminder of the close connection between nation (New Zealand) and business (Air New Zealand), Sione highlights the link between Samoan migration to New Zealand and the labor needs of private companies.

Harris and Sione banter about recent migrants from Sāmoa, including Sione’s Uncle Fauma, who has recently arrived in New Zealand. The story focuses on Uncle Fauma’s unfamiliarity with English and establishes language as a line of humor—and connection—that will continue throughout the story. Harris responds to this first anecdote by linking it back to the theme of racism with which the story opened:

It’s stuff like that, Sione, what gets you fellas a bad name. Makes people call Samoans ignorant.8

The word ignorant is countered by Sione’s response—“It’s not ignorance really. It’s innocence”9—and the men relay stories about their families, and later themselves, adjusting to new situations. They start with Sione’s mother and her naivety about marijuana—“I know you been drinking the Marijuana”—and then discusses her naivety about the English language: “I know you been smoking the pots and the pans.”10 This memory prompts early memories about language, and at this point, the experiences of the Māori and Samoan characters start to align more closely.

After laughing about Uncle Fauma’s, Sione’s, and Sione’s mother’s use of English, Sione relates his own experience at school:

I came out from Samoa when I was ten and apart from a few words, I couldn’t speak English. Samoan is my mother tongue. I had to learn English at school.11

Sione continues to outline his own experience not long after this admission, but before he continues, Harris interrupts:

That’s a bit like what happened to us Maoris. I remember one of my uncles telling me about how it was when he was a little boy.12

The distinction is retained between the two communities (“us Maoris”), but a clear link is made between their similar experiences of school when it came to the English language. Harris implies that although his own generation has not interacted with English for the first time at school, he is able to point to a parallel to Sione’s experience in the generation before him. This articulation of shared experience (“that’s a bit like what happened to us Maoris”) is the first direct comparison in the story. Up until this point, Harris’s and Sione’s connections were based on proximity (“a Maori, drinkin’ in the bar with you Samoans”; “and there’s us sittin’ in the lounge”), but Harris had merely observed the Samoan experience rather than connecting it with the experience of him or his own family: “I notice she treats all you Samoans like that.” Now Harris recognizes a point of connection, and even if the generational distinction between Māori and Samoan experiences of compulsory English-language classrooms means that connection is not derived from his own lived experience (“one of my uncles [told] me about how it was when he was a little boy”), it has become a communal memory that provides a basis of connection for himself (“us Maoris”) as well.

Sione and Harris swap funny stories about children (Sione himself and Harris’s uncle) misunderstanding or misusing English at school, which extends the scope and form of the bartender’s racism into the school space, while it also quietly confirms the presence of another language in both families. A discussion about Māori and Samoan experiences of racism and marginalization transitions into the connections between the languages both young boys (Harris’s uncle and Sione) spoke when they went to school. At this point, Sione tells a story about Sāmoa that steps away from the language question for a bit, focusing instead on the matter of practice or tikanga. He tells a funny story about another uncle’s first wife who died and would come back to harass his second wife. After describing his uncle’s successful remedy, and the punishment he suffered for carrying out his plan to interfere with his first wife’s bones, he concludes,

The funny thing about it is the local church Minister found out about what my uncle had done and told my uncle off. And later the police came round and beat up my uncle for rearranging the bones. So that’s the conflict. The old wha Samoa versus the new law.13

On one level, this conclusion to the story pertains to the connection that has already been explored earlier: the negotiation of cultural change in the specific context of colonial institutions (school, church, police) that insist on introducing “new law.” Sione rightly describes this negotiation as a “conflict,” and we can reflect on the multiple ways in which negotiating new circumstances has been an important aspect of all the anecdotes shared.

However, a further level of this comment from Sione is found in the phrase “the old wha Samoa,” a phrase that refers to fa’asāmoa14 but that is written in Māori (i.e., wh instead of f and no glottal stop) on the page. In this way, Taylor produces a rich contradiction: “wha Samoa” and “fa’asāmoa” sound identical to the ear and yet are transcribed differently because of the different styles of orthography preferred by the missionaries who worked with each language. (This is only an aural resonance; as far as meaning goes, the Māori cognate for the prefix fa’a- is whaka-, not wha-.) Indeed, as a result of orthographic specificities in various places, some sounds are pronounced more differently now across Polynesian languages than they were before they were written down. Perhaps this gestures toward orthographies not only of language but of the nation. Echoing Spitz’s formulation of Pacific people having been “made different,” aspects which were previously more similar may now be more deeply differentiable as a result of differing national orthographies. When the concept of fa’asāmoa appears as “wha Samoa” on the page, although Sione is speaking, it is the Māori orthography that is preferred. This is the realm of koura after all.

This reference to “wha Samoa”—and the nonverbal particularity of the slippage between fa’a and wha—provides the opportunity for Harris and Sione to reflect on the linguistic connections between Māori and Samoans apart from the shared experience of English at school. Harris is explicit about the “Polynesian” basis of their connection:

It’s like that with us Maoris quite a lot. We’ve got a lot in common. We’re Polynesian. You say paepae, I say paepae. You have a malae, I have a marae. You say malamalama, I say maramatanga. Ua malamalama.15

This discussion of language brings Harris to introduce the collective “we” for the first time since the men recalled spending time together on a previous evening. This “we” is more inclusive than just the two individuals, though: after telling all their stories, Harris and Sione have rhetorically populated their time together with various family members. We might also note that the linguistic and cultural connection is described in much stronger terms (“it’s like that with us Maoris quite a lot”) than the experiential connections mentioned earlier (“that’s a bit like what happened to us Maoris”). Harris goes through several key conceptual words and phrases with identical or very similar pronunciations in the Māori and Samoan languages. He then finishes his comparison with a phrase that appears only in Samoan: “Ua malamalama.” Significantly, Harris makes this comment about understanding or comprehension in Samoan rather than in Māori (or English). As they recite shared concepts and closely related words that speak of regional historic connection (“we’re Polynesian”), they also demonstrate more recent and ongoing connections between the communities as exemplified by their mutual knowledge of Samoan words and their cognates in Māori.

Finally, the two aspects of experience and language come together in a single phrase. Unlike the previous words, which pertained to symbolic structures and knowledges, the final phrase is practical and links with the everyday of the men:

Last night when we were on the grog, Saina says to me, “E Harris, pa ma le awhi.” I laughed ’cause I knew what he said. We say pa mai te ahi, which means: Have you got a light. Cheers mate.16

Harris’s reference to another friend, Saina, confirms the broader network of Māori–Pasifika friendships in which the men are involved. In this anecdote, as in the comment about “wha Samoa,” a Samoan phrase is written down according to Māori spelling conventions. “Pa mai le awhi” would usually be spelled “pa mai le afi” in Samoan; awhi has another meaning in Māori altogether. Unlike when Harris’s uncle, Sione’s uncle, Sione’s mother, and Sione encountered English and found themselves belittled and marginalized by the experience of the new language, Harris and Sione find great pleasure and richness in their experience with each other’s languages, and they experiment with each other’s phrases. The story ends with the men trying out this new pairing on each other:

E Harris, pa mai te ahi.

Pa mai le awhi, Sione.17

Again, a Samoan word is spelled according to Māori orthography (“awhi”), and this time, each man speaks each other’s language. Indeed, because awhi means “to embrace” in Māori, the men simultaneously ask for a lighter and for recognition of their close connection. Furthermore, their sentences themselves perform an awhi of sorts when Sione uses the Māori definite article te with the Māori word ahi, while Harris uses the Samoan definite article le with the Samoan word afi, which Taylor has spelled “awhi.” Although the story opened with the generalized “me, a Maori” and “you Samoans,” by the end of the conversation, the men use each other’s personal names and languages. This both specifies and humanizes them: the contexts of racism (treatment at the pub) and colonialism (treatment at school) are sidelined by their own excitement that they have “got a lot in common.”

“Everybody Danced”: Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace’s second children’s book, Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street,18 is located firmly in Cannon’s Creek, a neighborhood of Porirua, a predominantly Polynesian suburb of Wellington that enjoys similarly narrow and negative representation in mainstream discourse as does Ōtara of the Te Papa photo discussed earlier. The premise of Grace’s book is that a magic tuna,19 who dwells in the nearby creek, visits children in houses on Champion Street and invites them to pull things out of his magical throat. The children extract various musical and cultural items specific to their own ethnic groups and end up leading their communities in a dance on Champion Street “all day and all night.” Grace’s writing and Robyn Kahukiwa’s illustrations work in combination in Watercress Tuna, one of the first books to represent the children and physical environments of New Zealand’s large brown neighborhoods.20 Not only does the book highlight invisibilized ethnic groups, it also centers the urban working class (there are Pākehā children on Champion Street as well). Although my reading focuses on the ethnic dimension of the text, colonialism, racism, and class are inextricably linked.

Watercress Tuna starts with Tuna leaving Cannon’s Creek (the stream after which the neighborhood gets its name21) and journeying through a series of familiar landmarks, each of which bears the (European) name of the creek:

over Cannon’s Creek tavern,

over Cannon’s Creek shopping centre,

over Cannon’s Creek primary school

and on to Champion Street.22

Each of these landmarks is a marker of a local landscape, but each also speaks to the impact of colonialism: alcohol and dependency on capitalistic acquisition of goods and schooling, respectively. The second part of the book recounts Tuna’s interactions with different children from different Pacific backgrounds who live on Champion Street. These interactions are described in a parallel structure, and on the first page of each interaction, the child reaches into Tuna’s throat and retrieves an item:

Tuna bounced into [names of child]’s house and opened his mouth wide.

[Name of child] reached in and took out [an item].23

On the second page of the interaction, the child uses the item “and [begins] to dance.” Several children, material items, and backgrounds are introduced: Kelehia takes out a kie, Karen takes out “buckled shoes,” Hirini takes out a piupiu, Tuaine takes out a pate, Roimata takes out a poi, Kava takes out a hau, Nga takes out a pareu, Losa takes out an ula, Jason takes out a paper streamer, and Fa’afetai takes out an ailao afi. The names of the children are from their languages of origin, which reinforces their location within their respective communities but doesn’t perhaps reflect the use of English-language names in many Aotearoa-based Pacific communities; there are no Māori kids called “Natasha” or Samoan kids called “Faith” in this configuration.24 The third section of the story brings the children from the family-centric–origin-centric space of the private house out into the public space of Champion Street. Along with Tuna, they “danced and danced. Everybody danced.” Each child retains her own style and yet joins with others in a common space for a shared purpose. This section of the book privileges a shared public space, the illustrations depicting a dancing crowd with a diversity of generations, cultural groups, and genders. On the final page, the children are all sleeping in their own beds, with the treasures they extracted from Tuna’s mouth at the ends of their blankets. Far from depicting a beige-inducing melting pot, then, the shared action of dancing in the shared space of the street is both enabled by and supports the maintenance of cultural distinctiveness in the family space.

Although one possible reading of Watercress Tuna would focus on its multicultural politics, I argue that the place of the Tuna in the structure as well as the narrative of the story compels another, perhaps additional, reading. Whereas the children “dance” with the material culture and style of movement relevant to their own family backgrounds, their continued connection relies on a meaningful relationship with a Māori structuring—perhaps spiritual, perhaps governmental—presence. While the two Māori children (Hirini and Roimata) are a part of the crowd and have the same overt interaction with Tuna as the other children, the central role of Tuna compellingly suggests that the lingering and vibrant Indigeneity of local Māori is a source of, and mechanism for, the dance in which the children and their communities participate. This vision resists the version of multiculturalism that empties out Indigenous difference and gestures instead toward a treaty-derived relationship between tāngata whenua and manuhiri, providing room for Pasifika as well as Pākehā acknowledgment of Māori in Aotearoa.

The illustrations in Watercress Tuna are typical of artist Robyn Kahukiwa’s style: vivid, with an emphasis on color and action. The demeanor of the children is confident and active, which challenges the widely distributed image of urban Pacific youth and children as lazy, violent, oppressed, nihilistic, disadvantaged, and so on. Throughout the text, the children exhibit confidence in their own cultural backgrounds, and the environments in which they are raised—as made most visible perhaps by the homescapes in which each child is visited by Tuna—further support the experiences and cultural orientations of their families. So houses are decorated with a woven fan on the wall, a shelf with old bowls on it, poutama-design wallpaper and a bookshelf with a carved gourd, island-style fabric at the windows for curtains, a framed picture of an ancestress and a wakahuia, island-design cushion covers, a small wooden carving on a shelf and a wooden ceremonial object on the floor, a woven mat pattern on one wall, a cabinet with a clock and animal ornaments, and tapa.25 The maintenance of culture despite location within an urban environment directly challenges the mythology of urban areas,26 and the material culture standing in for cultural values and mores has extra significance because the houses themselves are all so-called state houses.27 Perhaps the personalization of each house to reflect the background of its residents suggests how Aotearoa-based Pacific identities might operate within the national (or nation-sponsored or nation-subsidized) space.28

“Hibiscus-Coloured Shirts instead of Black”: Briar Grace-Smith

Briar Grace-Smith’s short story “Te Manawa” appeared in the 2006 compilation The Six Pack, produced by the organizers of New Zealand Book Month.29 The visually distinctive book contains writing by six New Zealanders, five of whom were selected by a team of celebrity judges and one of whom was chosen by public vote on the Book Month Web site. The Six Pack was widely available in New Zealand for a price of six dollars (in New Zealand, a standard fiction paperback usually costs between thirty and fifty dollars), and its publication was designed to get the public excited about books. One of the most interesting things about the Six Pack competition, which ran three times (producing Six Pack 2 and Six Pack 3 as well), is that the selection was blind (authors’ names were removed for judging) and most of the judges were well-known people in areas other than the literary arts. In 2006, the judges were John Campbell, current affairs television presenter; Maggie Barry, gardening expert; Sarah-Kate Lynch, ex-editor of the New Zealand Women’s Weekly who has turned her hand to popular fiction; Tom Beran, bookseller; and David Kirk, ex-captain of the All Blacks national rugby team and medical doctor. These “inexpert” judges, the people’s vote, and the blind judging meant that the competition offered a chance for novice writers to win literary kudos. There can be quiet suspicion of literary prizes and awards, especially in a place as small as New Zealand, and this competition offered a democratic chance for all. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in all three years of the competition, the winners were a mixture of published and new writers. In the first Six Pack book, one of those writers was Māori playwright, fiction writer, and screenplay writer Briar Grace-Smith.

“Te Manawa” tells the story of a Māori woman who undergoes a heart transplant after illness and receives a heart from Mele, a Samoan female donor who has been killed in an accident. The story is about hearts of all kinds—literal hearts, figurative hearts, emotions—and this is made all the more complicated by the cross-cultural bodily transaction. Each of the three male characters struggles with the depth of love he has for one of the female characters, a wife or sister, and by the end of the story, each finds a way to make peace with the intensity of his feelings and the difficulty of letting go. The recipient of the heart, who is unnamed throughout the story, finds that Mele’s heart propels her like “a giant horseshoe magnet”30 out of her own house and along to Mele’s previous home, where she would “peer in at the man called Spencer and his children, sleeping.”31 Spencer suffers from horrific nightmares as a result of losing his wife, and she hears him struggling in his sleep while she walks around the house, both Mele (“tak[ing] the spare key from its hiding place”32) and not Mele (“the man,” “his children”). Meanwhile, the recipient’s husband, Eru, realizes that she is sneaking out each night and is convinced that she is having an affair but cannot bring himself to confront her directly: “as Eru draped a blanket over her he prayed that she had at least included him in her dreams.”33 Finally, her brother Tem visits after her recovery from the operation, before which he had gone hunting in desperation for his sister’s needed heart and had returned to the hospital with an impossibly still-pumping pig’s heart, which the doctor had ridiculed and which Tem planted under a young kauri tree, only to witness the buried heart miraculously pump soil to the surface every day.

“Te Manawa” examines the strong link between bodies and memory. Rather than gradually losing its memory of being in a Samoan body, the recipient’s heart recalls being a part of Mele more strongly as time goes on. Eru notices small changes—“hibiscus-coloured shirts instead of black”34—and she begins to cook Samoan food (“sapasui”35) and to speak Samoan. Meanwhile, her visits to Mele’s previous home become more invasive, and she indulges her senses there through smelling, touching, hearing, looking, and—a giveaway for Spencer, who knows Mele’s favorite food is apricots, which he leaves out and finds nibbled each morning—tasting. The recipient’s body inherits Mele’s bodily memories and desires, but these do not override its prior nature, and it records its own memories of the recipient’s nighttime sojourns, which she then discovers when she wakes up back in her own home, dirty and sore-footed from walking on the streets with no shoes and with hives from her allergy to apricots. Her use of Mele’s language increases, and simultaneously, her recollections of her pretransplant life fade until Tem visits her one day and she violently rejects his customary horseplay and only speaks in Samoan to him, a doubly unfamiliar situation to which he responds by leaving, “feeling hurt and confused.”36 Tem sails to the South Island, reflecting on his interaction with his sister and quietly “rub[bing] the scar that ran in a thick and raised cord from his knee to his ankle,”37 which he had acquired from the boar whose heart he had seized in his failed attempt to provide for his sister. Eru, too, suffers bodily transformation as a result of the circumstances, although unlike his wife, whose body inherits the memory of its new heart, and Tem, whose body bears the mark of a past event, at the point of deciding to leave his wife, Eru suffers an imaginative physical distortion in which he pictures himself turned inside out as a desperate outward sign of the agony he feels inside.

Finally, the recipient is in the kitchen at Mele’s house one evening, having found herself incapable of consciously resisting “the beat of this strange new heart which now smacked inside her chest,”38 and for the first time, Spencer wakes while she is there. She puts on Mele’s clothes and, through her body, recalls more of Mele’s memories: “The wrap she had bought at the Ōtara Market when she had visited her sister in South Auckland for Christmas. Feeling the cool wash of its cotton against her skin she remembered the last time she had worn it.”39 The narrator refers to the recipient as “Mele” when she ties the lavalava in a familiar way, and she finds the bowl of apricots Spencer has left for her. Spencer confronts Mele, who talks about her experience of death and bids him a loving farewell, giving last instructions before she leaves the recipient’s body. Immediately, Spencer is freed from his mourning and is able to let Mele go, and at the same time, the recipient gets her own body back, including consciousness of its familiar responses: “The first thing she felt was an unpleasant sting. Raising a finger to her face she felt the hard sting of hives.”40 The recipient realizes that “she is in a house that [is]n’t hers”41 and with a man she does not know. This transition is not an exorcism: a tinge of Mele’s memory is left in her body (“she knew without doubt he had a raised mole on the back of his neck”42) but she is free to leave and returns home.

Does it matter that Mele is Samoan and that the recipient is Māori? It might not. Yet the story would not work as well if the recipient were not Māori because the physical links between the recipient and Mele are secured in their mutual Polynesianness. While Spencer recognizes his dead wife’s behaviors in the bites taken from her favorite fruit, he also recognizes her by the “thick strands of glossy black hair”43 found on the couch, strands that could be a sign of Samoan presence but could equally be Māori. In this way, he both recognizes and misrecognizes the recipient as Mele, and the reader has no way to know whether the hair is a remnant of Mele’s former presence before the accident or recently left there by the recipient. Did the new heart need to come from a Samoan donor? Perhaps not—although arguably, the cultural markers of a Pākehā donor would perhaps be less stark in a Māori family that cannot help but bear the marks of two centuries of colonialism: the recipient and Eru speak English to one another, and any attempt to render clothing or even food distinctively Pākehā could have been difficult without creeping toward caricature. Indeed, the story manages to trade on the convenience of Māori and Samoan phenotypic similarity, which is paired with cultural distinctiveness.

Conversely, subtle aspects of the story work particularly well because of the established and ongoing relationship between Māori and Pasifika communities. Although many Māori families have adopted sapasui as one of their own foods, this family is apparently not one of them, and so it becomes a familiar marker—for Eru, but also for the reader—of difference: “Eru, who had a lisp and hated saying sapasui, hated it even more.” Like Harris’s knowledge of “Palagi,” Eru knows sapasui well enough to call it “sapasui” (rather than its Anglicized derivation, “chop suey”), and to know that he struggles to pronounce or even eat it. Furthermore, Eru’s fear of his wife’s lover takes particular expression when he notices these changes about her, which seem to betray Pasifika contact, and he imagines his rival along quite stereotypical lines:

A smooth and handsome man from the islands perhaps. A lawyer or a dancer with a body with skin that clung to his muscles like bronze gladwrap. Maybe even a white-coated doctor who’d injected the woman with his language and given her hives just from looking at him.44

Of course, the reader realizes that the hives come as a result of her interaction with a Pasifika heart that is far more intimate than that of a lover. The story is not about being Samoan or even about being Māori. It is about a heart—“te manawa”—and whose heart is unspecified in the story: it could be the failed heart of the recipient, the homesick heart of Mele, the broken heart of Eru, the grieving heart of Spencer, the worried heart of Tem, or even the ever-pulsing heart of the boar. Three hearts literally end up outside of their original bodies—the recipient’s, Mele’s, and the boar’s—and the three other hearts are figuratively broken and healed again. In the end, Mele being Samoan and the recipient being Māori are devices for the story, but they are also central to it. In terms of the connections between Māori and Pasifika communities, the story demonstrates familiarity as well as difference and takes for granted that Māori and Pasifika live and, yes, die in close proximity.

Māori Write Connections

Taylor, Grace, and Grace-Smith are not the only Māori writers who write about the connections between Māori and Pasifika communities, and yet their contributions are significant because they are rare. Indeed, each of these three writers is highly productive, and most of their other work does not engage with Pasifika either.45 Although it is unproductive to bemoan writing that is not published, and thereby to imply dissatisfaction with what is, it is important to ask questions about why certain experiences are left off the page. (Certainly these are not the only experiences that are yet to find wide and varied expression in published Māori writing in English.) Explanations for this small number of Māori texts engaging the Māori–Pasifika “interface,” as McIntosh would call it, could rest with the writers or with the nature of publication. We can be sure that Māori people are engaging in relationship with Pasifika people: the evidence for this is plentiful. We can also assume that any community will have writers, and this is confirmed by the archives as well as bookshelves of Māori writing. This leaves us with publishing and distribution; perhaps publishers are not interested in material that treats these relationships; perhaps publishers do not believe there would be a market for this material; perhaps this material is not being produced in genres with which usual publishing and distribution mechanisms work; perhaps this writing is not making it to the front door of publishers.

Ultimately, if you were to rely on Māori writing in English to get a full picture of Māori experiences, you would be unlikely to realize the multiple long-standing relationships we have with Pasifika individuals and communities in particular spaces. At the same time, however, many Pasifika writers are actively talking about their relationships with Māori. This means that some of the most engaged representations of particular Māori experiences are in fact produced by Pasifika writers, and so at this point, Once Were Pacific hands the mic to them.