Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania

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

· 123 ·· CHAPTER 5 · “It’s Like That with Us Maoris”: Māori Write Connections When Witi Ihimaera’s TangiwasreviewedalongsideAlbertWendt’s Sons for the Return Homein Rongo, there was a striking difference between the presence of Māori in the Pasifika text and the absence of Pasifika in the Māori novel. It is unproductive, uncurious, and intellectually bossy to admonishtextsfornotbeingwhatonehopesthemtobe,andcertainly Tangi madeasignificantcontributionnotonlytotheworldof Māoriliteraturebut also to New Zealand literature. At the same time, it does feel unfortunate that Māori creative production still tends toward representing experiences that are solely Māori or Māori–Pākehā rather than Māori–Pasifika. Because most Māori live in urban areas and a sizeable proportion of Māori children are of mixed Māori–Pasifika descent, we can assume that many members of Māori and Pasifika communities interact regularly and in close proximity. In spaces like schools, sports teams, workplaces, and church organizations as well as in the rather more intimate space of family life, Māori and Pasifika individuals and families develop and elaborate long-standing relationships. So it is, to be frank, astounding that there are so few treatments of Māori– Pasifika connections in the corpus of published Māori writing in English. This section foregrounds texts by Māori writers who engage in representing the relationship between Māori and Pasifika communities in New Zealand. Inthiscontext,thesetextsbyTaylor,Grace,andGrace-Smithareparticularly significantbecausetheytakeforgrantedthattherelationshipbetweenMāori and Pasifika people is a part of the Aotearoa they represent. “Ua malamalama”: Apirana Taylor ApiranaTaylor’s1986multigenreliterarycollectionHeRauAroha:AHundred Leaves of Love contains the short story “Pa Mai.”1 To place the collection in context,He Rau Arohaappeared around the same time as three major works 124 “IT’S LIKE THAT WITH US MAORIS” of Māori fiction: Hulme’s the bone people (1984), Grace’s Potiki (1986), and Ihimaera’sThe 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 collectionof poetryandshortfictionimpliesadiversityof 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 experiencestheyhavesharedtogether(“Andthere’sussittin’inthelounge”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 “IT’S LIKE THAT WITH US MAORIS” 125 and read...