Suffering and Survival

Suffering and Survival Body and Voice in Recent Maori Writing 1 JANET WILSON Introduction HE MAORI TODAY LIVE between two cultures, the Polynesian and the European. Contemporary Maori literature is about realign- T ment. Positioned between English and Maori languages, between the rural, pre-contact past and the urban, bicultural present, between the spiritual realm of traditional Maoritanga and the global world of corporate capitalism, the writers of the Maori Renaissance inscribe some of the values of bicultural- ism – two peoples, one nation – in a way that Pakeha literature, inevitably more monocultural and eurocentric, does not. Speaking from this in-between place, their voices proclaim marginality as a contested position. The political consciousness of such writing, in foregrounding ethnic marginality, relies on a celebration of the corporeality of the body to affirm the interconnectedness between members of the community and the common identity between the individual, whanau and the land. This is central to Maori identity as tangata whenua (people of the land). In the more politically energized climate of New Zealand from the late 1970s through to the present, writers such as Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera abandoned earlier, pastoral representations of Maori society in favour of a revisionary framework of self-representation. This period can be described in terms used of the shift in race relations in Britain in the 1980s: 1 An earlier version of this article appeared under the same title in New Windows on a Woman’s World: Essays for Jocelyn Harris, ed. Colin Gibson & Lisa Marr (Otago Studies in English 9; Dunedin: Department of English, University of Otago, 2005), vol. 2: 425–38. 268 J ANET W ILSON ½¾ from “a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself.”2 The radical revision of race relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa which the disputes over land rights and issues such as education, language and economic survival introduced is reflected in the more polemical spirit of Maori Renaissance writing. As “bodies partly constitute the symbolic system of thought, movements and actions within the network of social relations,”3 a bodily presence when it becomes a contested site can force an intervention in the dominant discourse; such presences interrupt the symbolic order, thus con- tributing to a politics of resistance and pointing to survival and renewal. This is equally true of Maori as of other indigenous writers who aim to reposition their cultures in relation to the mainstream. Of particular interest is the thema- tic convergence between Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), both of which introduce a ghostly child, a dis- locating yet sometimes comforting presence; this might, in Freudian terms, re- present the uncanny return of the repressed, or, in allegorical terms, those voices which became invisible during slavery and colonialism. The gifted yet unpredictable child is one of the key figures of the Maori Renaissance; through the child’s corporeal presence, recuperative energies are harnessed and released. The importance of “material bodies” to the project of contemporary Maori writing reflects the agenda of much Third-World writing today, to rewrite colonial and precontact indigenous histories by drawing on lost or forgotten cultural resources. In the case of the Maori these include memory, oral stories, Polynesian mythology and spirituality. As Toni Morrison says, the aim is “To bear witness to a history that is unrecorded, untaught, in mainstream education, and to enlighten our people.”4 This includes critiquing those nineteenth- century imperialist discourses that draw on stereotypes of the native as Other, as primitive, a savage, or a child – as epitomized in Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden”: “your new caught, fallen peoples / half devil and half child” – by introducing more complex, empowering images of indigeneity. Recent Maori writing continues to redefine the image of the nation of Aotearoa/New Zealand. By making visible the suppressed history of their culture under colonialism and in repositioning the dominant language of English with the alter- native Polynesian linguistic system – superimposing on English the rhythms, 2 Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley & Kuan–Hsing Chen (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 442. 3 Ian Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity (London: Sage, 1999): 106. 4 Toni Morrison, quoted in Gina Wisker, “‘Disremembered and Unaccounted For’: Read- ing Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar,” in Black Women’s Writing, ed. Wisker (London: Macmillan, 1993): 80. .

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