The 'Marae on Paper': the Meeting House in the Anglophone Fiction Of

The ‘Marae on Paper’: The Meeting House in the Anglophone Fiction of the Maori Renaissance By Sarah Byrne Thesis Submission in Fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Maynooth University, Department of English February 2017 Head of Department: Professor Colin Graham Supervisor: Dr Íde Corley Abstract The Maori literary renaissance was period of intense literary and cultural activity that coincided with a protest movement surrounding Maori rights in New Zealand during the 1970s and 80s. The Anglophone Maori fiction that flourished during this period raised important social questions about contemporary Maori identity, the historical and continuing decline of Maori ownership of their ancestral lands, and the social, cultural and political relationship between the Maori and Pakeha [New Zealanders of European descent] communities. This dissertation considers the work of four Maori writers who address these themes: Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme and Alan Duff. More specifically, it explores the role of the Maori meeting house – and the material arts it houses – as both a formal and thematic influence in their fiction. The meeting house is a wooden apex structure that traditionally symbolises the collective body of a Maori community and narrates their history through the imagery that is carved into its internal walls and supporting structures. It is strongly associated with storytelling and historical record keeping, while also acting as a meeting place for both formal and informal gatherings within the community. For each of these four writers it is subject to numerous and varying interpretations and although it features as a physical structure and site of the action in their fiction, it also shapes each author’s approach to narrative strategy. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s account of the relationships between aesthetic regimes and sensory perception, I emphasise the importance of perspective and the relationship of perception to the sensible world in the fiction. I show how some Maori authors deployed the Maori meeting house to disrupt the aesthetic protocols and mimetic practices shaping bourgeois national culture, while others inadvertently promoted assimilation instead. Acknowledgements I would like to begin by extending my sincere thanks to Dr Íde Corley for her guidance and support throughout this long period of study. As an undergraduate student, Dr Corley’s lectures sparked my interest in world literature and postcolonial studies, and I am grateful for her continued generosity of spirit and willingness to share her knowledge and expertise with me in the years that followed. I would also like to thank Dr Oona Frawley for reading a draft of this thesis, and for supporting my research in a myriad of different ways since it began. I appreciate the English Department and An Foras Feasa’s provision of a research space, and thank Amanda Bent and Tracy O’Flaherty for their patience and time. I would not have been able to see this process through to completion without the support of my parents Ray and Michele, and husband Aidan. However, if I were to list their individual acts of generosity, kindness, and love I could fill another volume, so a simple “thank you” will not do. Instead, I hope that in the ordinary and the extraordinary events of our shared story, I can return all that they have given to me. Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 1. “Separated from the world”: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Maori Meeting House in Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch ................................................................... 29 2. The Claim to a Standing Place in Patricia Grace's Potiki and Baby No-Eyes……71 3. “No marae for beginning or ending”: Defamiliarising the Tropes of the Maori Literary Renaissance in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People ......................................... 118 4. Cultural Revival and Social Consensus: The Parallel Spaces of the Courtroom and the Meeting House in Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors ........................................ 168 Notes ........................................................................................................................ 218 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………..251 Introduction This dissertation examines the work of four Anglophone Maori writers who were instrumental in shaping what is now described as the Maori renaissance: Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme and Alan Duff.1 The Maori renaissance was a period of intense literary activity that began in the early-to-mid 1960s but peaked during the mid-1980s when Maori writers began to engage more directly with the increased public discourse surrounding Maori rights in New Zealand. In the following chapters, I trace the relationship of this new, politically engaged Maori writing to traditional forms of Maori art and architecture, focusing on one of the most structurally significant structures within Maori communities – the meeting house. As I explain later more fully, the meeting house is a physical structure at the centre, both literally and figuratively, of traditional Maori communities. Typically, the internal walls of the house are decorated with a series of elaborate carvings that tell the story of the community’s collective history, while the apex structure symbolically represents the community’s collective body. As Patricia Grace points out in Potiki, many Maori communities regard their meeting house as their “main book”, which “is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a taonga [treasure]” (117). The house is therefore strongly associated with storytelling and historical record keeping, while also acting as a meeting place for both formal and informal gatherings within the community. In my chapters, I pay particular attention to the form of each writer’s work and argue that although the meeting house is represented in the novels as a physical structure, it also shapes each writer’s method of storytelling in ways that have political potential. 1 I do not wish to suggest that Maori writers directly imitate the forms of storytelling that shape meeting house art. Instead, I argue that the meeting house inspires a model of aesthetic practice that influences Maori mid-renaissance literature in ways that are diverse and varied. For instance, in The Matriarch (1986), Ihimaera captures and redeploys some of the formal and stylistic qualities of Maori figurative portraiture in his revisionist account of nineteenth century politics, while in Potiki (1986) and Baby No-Eyes (1998), Grace engages with meeting house practices in her descriptions of silence and communicative failure. For both writers, the carved ancestor figures and curvilinear motifs of meeting house art sustain Maori self-expression in situations where communication between Maori and Pakeha communities breaks down. While Hulme, too, is interested in the historical role of meeting house art in The Bone People (1985), she describes the gradual construction of her three characters’ shared history over the comparably contracted course of a year. Her novel extends the metonymic qualities of Maori carved arts to the material objects exchanged by the protagonists amongst themselves so that the objects come to function as a record of their new shared history. Alternatively, in Once Were Warriors (1990), Duff’s interest in the meeting house as an institutional meeting place leads him to pair it with the Pakeha courtroom, inadvertently subordinating its history to a programme of Maori cultural assimilation. As these brief examples show, these writers share an interest in the meanings of Maori identity and traditions but engage with the social and aesthetic practices of the meeting house in different ways. Although I focus on Maori novels here, the literary renaissance can be traced back to early bilingual publications like Te Ao Hou/ The New World. Te Ao Hou was published by the Department of Maori Affairs between the years 1952 and 1975 and 2 intended as a “marae on paper” (Allen 45). Historically the term “marae” described a courtyard situated in front of the meeting house, where formal speeches were performed to welcome guests into the community.2 The fact that the Department of Maori Affairs described Te Ao Hou as a “marae on paper” established the publication as an early forum for Maori written cultural expression and suggested that it was itself a “meeting place” for Maori communities across New Zealand. However, although its readers considered Te Ao Hou to be a Maori text, Chadwick Allen points out in his important analysis of the publication that it was often proscriptive and assimilationist in its goals. In fact, Allen argues, it “promotes the virtues of at least some level of assimilation into various aspects of Pakeha life and it endorses a level of subordination of local Maori independence to the greater needs of the predominately Pakeha nation” (44). Despite this, Allen later acknowledges, “in Te Ao Hou’s pages, […] writers explored, set, and challenged the early parameters in the battle over the representation of contemporary Maori identity” (72). This “battle” continued in the early years of the Maori renaissance and although the writing of this early period did not overtly address the inequality of New Zealand’s social order, it offered a subtle critique of the effects of colonialism on traditional Maori communities. As a result, the works of this early period should not be underestimated,

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