The Representation of Trauma and the Therapeutic Effect of Spirituality and Narrative in Patricia Grace's Cusins (1992), Baby No-Eyes (1998) an Tu (2004)

2020 96 David Sánchez Aparicio The Representation of Trauma and the Therapeutic Effect of Spirituality and Narrative in Patricia Grace's Cusins (1992), Baby No-Eyes (1998) an Tu (2004) Departamento Filología Inglesa y Alemana Director/es Herrero Granado, María Dolores Reconocimiento – NoComercial – © Universidad de Zaragoza SinObraDerivada (by-nc-nd): No se Servicio de Publicaciones permite un uso comercial de la obra original ni la generación de obras derivadas. ISSN 2254-7606 Tesis Doctoral THE REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA AND THE THERAPEUTIC EFFECT OF SPIRITUALITY AND NARRATIVE IN PATRICIA GRACE'S CUSINS (1992), BABY NO-EYES (1998) AN TU (2004) Autor David Sánchez Aparicio Director/es Herrero Granado, María Dolores UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA Filología Inglesa y Alemana 2018 Repositorio de la Universidad de Zaragoza – Zaguan http://zaguan.unizar.es THE REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA AND THE THERAPEUTIC EFFECT OF SPIRITUALITY AND NARRATIVE IN PATRICIA GRACE’S COUSINS (1992), BABY NO-EYES (1998) AND TU (2004) David Sánchez Aparicio PhD Thesis Supervisor: Dr. María Dolores Herrero Granado Department of English and German Philology University of Zaragoza 2018 The Representation of Trauma and the Therapeutic Effect of Spirituality and Narrative in Patricia Grace's Cousins (1992), Baby No-Eyes (1998) and Tu (2004) David Sánchez Aparicio A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy PhD Thesis Supervisor: Dr María Dolores Herrero Granado Department of English and German Philology University of Zaragoza 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this Thesis has required a lot of time and effort, but my work has been made easier by many people. To begin with, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my supervisor and mentor, Dr. María Dolores Herrero Granado. This Thesis would not have been accomplished without her stimulation, encouragement and astute advice, guidance and invaluable comments during the whole process. It is difficult to express how fortunate I have felt to have had her guidance for the past four years. Thanks are also due to Professors Susana Onega and Celestino Deleyto, and Doctors Bárbara Arizti, Marita Nadal, Constanza Del Rio, Sonia Baelo-Allué, Jessica Aliaga, Francisco collado, Silvia Martínez Falquina and Mónica Calvo for their expertise and formative courses on literature written in English. I am equally grateful to the rest of members of the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza, too numerous to mention here, who have always been supportive. They have given me the chance to learn different aspects about critical theory and methodology to carry out an academic analysis of English culture, literature and cinema. I should not forget to thank my colleagues Dr. Maria Pilar Royo and Dr. Ana Beatriz Pérez for their moral support and help. My final and most special thanks are for my beloved Beatriz, whose patience, reassurance and constant support whenever I felt tired and demotivated made the writing of this Thesis possible. I should also express my thanks to my two daughters, Diana and Beatriz, for their unconditional generous love. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – Patricia Grace and the Rise of the Māori Renaissance in the Land of the Long White Cloud 27 The Origin of Aotearoa and the Construction of New Zealand 27 The Māori Renaissance 46 Patricia Grace 51 Chapter 2 – Insidious Trauma, Blood and the Healing Function of Aroha and Resilience in Patricia Grace’s Cousins 61 Insidious Trauma: Histories of Disempowerment and Denial 61 Blood and the Construction of a Dark Shadow of the Self 73 The Power of Aroha and Mythology: From Te Kore to the World of Light 92 Pride of Race through Resilience and Political Commitment 114 Chapter 3 – The Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, Identity and Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes 129 The Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma within Colonized Communities and the Need for the Scholar of the Future 129 Evil Goodness and Stories of Shame as the Main Source of Māori Fragmented Identity 150 Māori Language and Activism as Sites of Resistance 177 Chapter 4 – Traumatic Lack of Recognition, Postwar Annihilation and the Therapeutic Effect of Narrative in Patricia Grace’s Tu 203 Māori Struggle for Recognition in the Fringe of the Empire 203 Postwar Annihilation and the Stagnation of the Māori Collective Identity 210 To escape the evils of blame 232 The Therapeutic Effect of Narrative 258 Conclusion 275 Appendix: Resumen y Conclusiones 297 Works Cited 315 Electronic Sources 329 INTRODUCTION First of all, I would like to explain my background and why I decided to accomplish the difficult task of tackling the Māori situation in New Zealand during the period of British colonization and afterwards. My first academic contact with non-western literatures occurred at the University of Zaragoza in 2011. I was doing the degree in English Studies, and Dr. Dolores Herrero taught the fifth-year subject titled “Other Literatures in the English Language.” The title aroused my curiosity and I decided to enroll in the subject. After some classes, students realized that this subject belonged in the field of postcolonial studies and that the name had been properly chosen, because the syllabus of this subject was made up of literature produced by people who had their origins in colonized places, in other words, these writers were considered to be the exotic “others” from a western perspective. Then, we realized that this subject dealt with a literature that aimed at countering the influence and hegemony of the western literary canon. Reading novels such as Midnight Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie and Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) by Mudrooroo Narogin was a very gratifying literary experience, because they described historical events from a passionate, humorous, critical and undoubtedly alternative point of view. These stories clearly offered a peripheral perspective which had not been taken into consideration in the official version of history, but which was just as important to articulate a fairer account of what had actually happened. The more versions and stories we are offered of any event, the better we will be able to have a reflective and balanced opinion. 1 One year later I took the decision to enroll in the Master in Textual and Cultural Studies in English at the University of Zaragoza, as my interest in this kind of literatures had increased. Doctors Susana Onega and Dolores Herrero taught the subject “Trends in Contemporary British Fiction,” which included units on non-western literatures in which students had the opportunity to learn about relevant critical theories and authors from different geographical and cultural backgrounds. These novels examined, among other things, the way in which colonial power/knowledge had oppressed colonized peoples and their cultures with the help of metropolitan language (English in this case) and discourses. The colonization process represented a point of no return in the life of indigenous populations, as the novels analyzed in this subject clearly brought to the fore. Eventually, I chose to analyze David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978) in my MA Thesis because this novel, in tune with postcolonial criticism, questions western ideas about linguistic and cultural hegemony. It was my interest in these ‘ex-centric’ literatures and my wish to question the ethics of contemporary western culture that finally led me to write this PhD Thesis. When I started reading the novels of Māori authors such as Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace, I felt hooked by their language and the antipodean context out of which they had emerged and, although this literature was particularly demanding, as it belonged in a world that was entirely unfamiliar to me, I also felt that in Patricia Grace I had discovered a writer from whom I could learn a great deal. I therefore entered a cultural universe made up of complex characters whose motivations were mainly marked by their losses and longing. Not only did they live in communities very different from our western nuclear families, but they also dressed, talked and thought differently, which triggered my curiosity even further. This Māori literature reflected, not only the different cultural practices of this community, but also the oppression and marginalization to which these people had been 2 subjected. Among other things, these novels show how the descendants of the colonizers killed indigenous peoples with absolute impunity in order to grab and take control of their lands. One of my main reasons for writing this Thesis was, therefore, the belief that the traumas inherent to the processes of colonization and decolonization are by no means over yet. As is well known, the word “trauma” derives from the Greek word meaning “wound,” which alluded to the physiological injury resulting from an external event. The concept of trauma, a western construction, was coined in the late nineteenth century; trauma acquired additional significance when survivors and witnesses of industrial and railroad accidents began to show symptoms, such as mutism, amnesia, tics, paralysis and recurrent nightmares in the absence of any observable physical injury. Later on, in the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud published his seminal work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which he defined traumatic neurosis as “a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli” (2015: 25). Freud related “traumatic neuroses” not only with industrial accidents, railway disasters and other accidents involving any life risks, but also with the First World War. He argued that, in the case of “war neuroses,” the fact that the same symptoms sometimes came about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force seemed at once enlightening and bewildering. One of the most important features of these neuroses was, according to him, the inability of the victims to recall the episode that provoked it, together with a simultaneous sensation of its recurrence in the present.

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