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‘That’s My Stuff’: Pasifika Literature and Pasifika Identity By Courtney Wilson A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2013 Abstract Pasifika literature is an expanding, dynamic field which, like other Pasifika creative productions, is often seen as representative of exciting new directions, and reflective of a nascent generation of young Pasifika who are firmly established in New Zealand. This thesis considers the relationship between Pasifika literature and Pasifika identity, tracing some ways that Pasifika literature articulates, references, and mediates Pasifika identity through the creative work of two prominent New Zealand-born Pacific scholar-poets: Karlo Mila (Tongan, Palangi, Samoan) and Selina Tusitala Marsh (Samoan, Tuvaluan, French, English). Both these women are highly acclaimed, award winning poets and academics who are well respected in their respective Pacific communities. Reading their creative works firstly as examples of a mixed-race Pasifika literature and then as Pasifika feminist texts offers compelling insights into their worlds as young ‘brown’ women in New Zealand. Their work makes a significant contribution to Pacific literature and New Zealand literature, and offers many points of entry for exploring what it might mean to be a Pasifika person in Aotearoa today. This work is furthered in a final chapter, which gestures towards a new generation of Pasifika writers. By referencing some of the new writing being produced by young Pasifika, in particular the work of Grace Taylor and Courtney Sina Meredith, I illustrate how Mila and Marsh’s writing has opened up necessary creative spaces for Pasifika voices to be heard and their senses of identity to be affirmed. Ultimately, the connections between Pasifika literature and Pasifika identities that have been explored in this thesis continue to be strengthened and developed by a new generation of young Pasifika writers, who continue to affirm identities that are fluid, open, and progressive. 2 Acknowledgements This thesis has travelled a long way, for a long time. First thanks must go to my long-suffering but always patient supervisors: David O’Donnell, for your comprehensive feedback and encouragement, and April Henderson, for sharing your Pacific knowledge and insightful commentary. So many thanks for guiding me on this journey. Also heartfelt thanks goes to Alice Te Punga Somerville, who introduced me to Pasifika literature and nurtured me in the early stages of this project (and also lent me many books that I never returned – sorry!). Fakaue lahi. Much aroha to my various awesome whānau who have nurtured me at different stages of this journey: Nanabear, Tracy and Josh; the Blaikies; Te Whare Atawhai whanau (especially you Laura! But you know you can still fold my washing, right?). Thanks also to Granny and Gramps who baby-sat generously. To my incredible friends…. well, what can I say. Rosie, Klariske, Hannah, Anna, Esther, Monique, Ruth, Tim and Mel. Arohanui, you guys are the realest. And Dan. You get mentioned in your own sentence because you are that special. To my church communities in various stages: St. Michaels, Ramsey House, and most especially St. Aidans and St. Georges. Thank you for your support and help. Also, Aidan. Thanks for offering your support at different stages of this project. This is dedicated with huge awhis to my little girl, Hana. Here’s to a future where you have a whole bookcase filled with your stuff. 3 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………….2 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………3 Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………………4 Introduction: See the Girl…………………………………………..……………………………..5 Chapter One: Theorizing Pasifika……………………………………………………………….17 Chapter Two: The Caramello Generation…………………………………………………..40 Chapter Three: Mana Tama’ita’i Pasifika…………………………………………………..87 Chapter Four: Fast Talkers and Rushing Dolls…………………………………………..148 Conclusion: That’s Our Stuff………………………………………………………………………170 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………………….176 4 Introduction See the girl ‘I’ve always had this dream’ Karlo Mila writes. ‘I’ve always had this dream. that one day some young Pacific girl would go into a library and get my poetry book out and read it, and think, “Oh that’s my stuff, I know her. I know how she feels, that’s my stuff”’ (Sperber 2005:68). ‘See the girl’ Selina Tusitala Marsh writes. See the girl never seeing herself ……………………. never seeing her face in the ‘literary mirror’ …………………… see the girl see the mirror see me.1 When I first encountered Mila, she was sitting flat, black, slanting slightly left, squashed between heavyweights of Indigenous, Pacific, and Māori literature. It was in my stage 3 tutorial, where the lecturer instructed us to find page 395 in our 1 Excerpt from Selina Tusitala Marsh’s poem ‘girl’ (Marsh 2005) 5 course notes. Flicking past the Native American voices of Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo; the Pacific voices of Haunani-Kay Trask and David Gegeo; Māori voices like Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Merata Mita, all calling boldly for attention, for understanding, for action. Page 395, Karlo Mila, in her black cracked type, talking about Paul Holmes and different flavours of chocolate2. No, not just flavours. Colours. Sitting in that tutorial, I dimly sensed that the words were opening themselves up to me in a way that Chaucer’s or Spencer’s had never done. The day after, I was avidly reading her recently published first book of poetry Dream Fish Floating at the expense of an essay due the following day. Back then, I could not have known how much of an impact her work would have on me, but I felt already that here was a woman I trusted. I knew she was one hundred percent genuine, because she was saying stuff I knew about already. I knew what it was like being brown, but white, but brown. Suddenly, I held a kinship with a Tongan/Samoan/Palangi woman who didn’t know I existed. Or maybe she did. ‘That’s my stuff’. Pasifika3 Girl Reading I think my experience discovering this kind of poetry throws up many important questions. Why was I so impacted by a mixed Pasifika/Palangi woman’s poetry? What made me instinctively feel that it was more accessible than any other poetry that had come my way? How did it allow me to open myself in turn? Is that, as a response to poetry, supposed to happen anyway? I was a Kiwi girl wrapping up 2 The poem in question is Karlo Mila’s ‘Eating Dark Chocolate and watching Paul Holmes’ Apology’ (Mila 2005). 3 The descriptive term Pasifika—a term with increasing salience and frequency of usage in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a key term for this thesis—will be explored in detail in Chapter One. 6 three years of tertiary education, whose life experience widely differed from that of many young people growing up in Aotearoa, and, I felt, even more from the majority of the young Māori or Pasifika who were my contemporaries. How, then, this moment of recognition? These are all questions that, once encountered, break into further queries about identity, and about belonging, branching to other moments of recognition that reflect different selves back at me. I looked into the literary mirror and in so doing, entered into a complex web of connectedness between reader and words. My particular set of experiences generated several different readings of the texts – inflected primarily by culture, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, and age. Stuart Hall refers to this as a process of encoding and decoding; a process by which a writer writes from their particular set of experiences, translating them into words which we, as readers, translate again into a new understanding (Hall 1973). The reader will never see in its entirety what the author had in mind, but this in itself is an essential part of the reading process. Recognising something meaningful within the text is what makes the reading of literature so compelling. Māori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville explores this idea in an essay written upon the death of Hone Tuwhare, referencing her students’ varied interpretations of the notable Māori poet’s work: One student wrote about the way Tuwhare describes the ownership of the beach in the 1982 poem and misrecognised it as being about the 2004 Seabed and Foreshore legislation. This anachronistic reading produced something more generative than wrong. The anachronism was only ‘wrong’ if we insisted on a singular linear historical reading of a text: if the text, like the Māori lecturer, is limited to being a reliable Native informant. This wasn’t at all like the wrongness of mispronunciation about which I had written at another time: it was, instead, the small moment of literary bliss when a student recognises something in a poem beyond what the writer could have imagined: something meaningful, urgent, relevant and complex. (Te Punga Somerville 2008:n.p) 7 This is what I mean by the moment of reflection, of discovering new ways of understanding the world and themselves. What happened when I started reading Karlo Mila’s work? Like the student reading Hone Tuwhare, I recognised something, despite coming to this literature knowing little of Pacific culture. What I started to understand from reading Pacific literature was that my experience of gaps and absences in knowledge was also a part of ‘the Pacific experience’ here in Aotearoa. I am a part Niuean, part Māori, part Palagi girl who has experienced marginalisation and disconnection from Niuean and Māori culture – what Pacific or Māori person hasn’t experienced this in some way in New Zealand? My own distance stemmed from a complicated blended family. I grew up in a large mixed/ split family, where there were clear delineations between those with a different father.

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