27 Short Story from the South Pacific: The Maori and the Pakehas

Mr. Sayantan Mondal

Content  

• Introduction

• The Beginning and the Stereotypes

• Transit and Transition

• Explicit Political Voice

• The Pakeha Short Stories

• Conclusions

Introduction:

Introducing short fiction by Maori writers in the Spring 1993 issue of Commonwealth (Dijon), Lydia Wevers asserted that as we are taking notes of the short stories written by Maori writers in the last decade of the twentieth century, we should also take note of the fact that this is something “ …that has been in existence for forty years, a body of work which is both a response and a resistance to a larger national literature mostly written by people of European descent, and also, and just as importantly, a response to and continuation of a much older, originally oral literary tradition composed by Maori in Aotearoa since their arrival from the islands of Polynesia.” To understand the early days of short fiction by Maori writers, therefore, one may have to begin with the inception of the journal Te Ao Hou, which was published under the aegis of the Department of Maori Affairs since 1952. Announcing itself to be a journal of the Maori people, the aim of the journal was set on creating an awareness among the new generations about the fast decaying traditions and ways of the Maori. Such an initiative found its resonance in the coming years through other journals which took up the onus of reviving and reproducing Maori literary values in print upon themselves. Some of those are – Te Kaea, Te Maori, Tu Tangata.

1950s, more generally the post-war years have been identified by the scholars of New Zealand literature as a time when short story as a genre developed and was gradually popularised. However, there remains multiple fissures that compartmentalise those short fictions into separate categories. The English or Pakeha writers’ concerns, as expressed in the short story mostly centred around rugby clubs, racing, army or pub life (Lydia Wevers). Maurice Duggan and A P Gaskill are the forerunner in this aspect. Whereas Maori writing was more about retaining the soul of Maori being in the writing. One may wonder how conscious such a division was as far the writers’ intention were concerned and how did it complicated the emerging picture of New Zealand’s national literature a section of which was getting published, read and written from London. Patricia Grace, in one of her 2003 interviews, shades some light upon this issue as she was recollecting her school days in 1930s New Zealand. According to her, schooling was hardly about learning or knowing one’s literature as she and her classmates hardly read anything written by a New Zelander. Rather it was a period of training how to sit straight, pronounce English and read aloud. And it was later in her college days in late forties, reading authors like Frank Sargeson or Amelia Batistich, she discovered a breather. For the first time she identified something as New Zealand’s language, voice (Calleja, Paloma Fresno. 2003). The evolution of Maori writing is perhaps a pursuit to find this identifiable dictum, te reo in which expressions can be translated. As prose-fictions from the Maori writers kept coming forward since 1950s, this question and pursuit got more chequered. In 1992, Patricia Grace suggested in one of her interviews that “Though New Zealand is multicultural, you wouldn’t know that from our literature.” (Kedgey, Sue. 1992) In the coming sections through thematic and language analysis, we will try to see how this evolution became a response, a resistance to New Zealand’s national literature and a continuation of the Maori iwi’s oral traditions.

The Beginning and the Stereotypes:

As the middle of the twentieth century witnessed an emergence of the ethnicity oriented post- colonial literary surge in the south pacific like many other parts of the world, a process of stock taking and resistance to Pakeha-imposed stereotypes was only an expected and timely literary tendency that made its mark simultaneously. Such a resistance is perhaps the hallmark of any counter literary production process in their nascent years and Maori literature was no exception in this regard. In 1952 though an institutionalisation of Maori literary platform, in the form of the journal Te Ao Hou, a much needed platform was achieved. And works emerging out of it directly challenged the stereotypes about Maori population which was already in the language, in the stories and poems of New Zealanders. Years of Pakeha writings about ‘the’ Maori has piled about images after images of their stupidity, cunning character, ruthlessness and anger. A glimpse into that world and a subtle refusal of it have been provided to us in a brilliant anthology of short stories – Where’s Waari? A History of the Maori through the Short Story by Witi Ihimaera (2000).

Alfred A. Grace’s “Te Wiria’s Potatoes” written in 1901 is a fairly symptomatic example of what could be called the high colonial representation of Maori and is the first story of the collection Where’s Waari? A History of the Maori through the Short Story. It begins with a picture of the trusting and tolerant old settler Villiers (“Te Wiria”), who lives on good terms with his neighbours the Ngati-Ata. Villiers speaks what the narrator calls “the Maori lingo”, cares for “his” tribe when they are sick, buys their kumara at exorbitant prices, and helps with their land transactions with “the grasping Pakeha.” He is a type recognizable by the dismissive 19th-century term “philo-Maori”: a Pakeha who is naively sympathetic to Maori causes and way of life. Villiers is hardworking, and has turned the fertile land around the abandoned pa in which he lives to good account: the wonderful crop of potatoes he has grown is ready for harvest, but his sons have gone off to the Thames gold-fields, and there is no one left to help. Enter the Ngati-Ata. Villiers’s eyes fill with tears of gratitude: he believes all his efforts to help the Maori may at last have become a mutual relationship. But instead, the Maori bring in the harvest, feast on the food he provides, and then return in the night to steal the bagged crop. Villiers goes to their village to find out what happened, and finds the tribe and their chief feasting on pork and Te Wiria’s potatoes. The chief makes a great show of ignorance of the theft, fulsomely reprimands the miscreants, and calmly resumes his interrupted meal (Sarah Shieff, REPRESENTING Maori-Witi Ihimaera’s Where’s Waari?,2006).

Did this story attempt to lay blame for this failure in cross-cultural communication? Did it criminalise a whole ethnicity just too simply? Whatever the answer stand, one can always argue that the new anthology wants to convey us that while Villiers may be hardworking, he is also a romantic fool; it also wants us to know that the Ngati-Ata are cunning and lazy but smart enough to survive in a hostile country where he and his family members are reduced to labours in their own lands. It further suggests that Villiers has been the author of his own misfortune: his sentimental view of Maori and his generosity towards them have led directly to this situation. The implicit moral is that Pakeha values of fair play and generosity do not translate in a country where the natives only understand greed, deceit and self-interest.

Resistance to such stereotypes had just not been an end itself. It firmly declared that identities as such are not agreeable and cannot be given, imposed. However, the struggle had to steer further; deconstruct such images and reconstruct an identity of one’s own in many levels – personal, political, social, ethnic, national and so on. Post 1950s, Maori short fiction through the pen of Witi Ihimaera, Patrcia Grace graduated toward such a long journey.

Transit and Transition:

As more and more Maori writers emerge on the New Zealand literary scene after 1950s decade, their voice matured from stocktaking of stereotypes and showed an array of imaginative ways to counter them. In a 1959 short story by Tirohia which won the short story competition, we get a picture of an ageing grandmother who tries to dissuade her grandson from leaving for the city. She tries to suggest that home is where one land’s is. But there is no land. In the fading memory of that grandmother, the writer finds an avenue to reflect the suppressed history of disenfranchisement of the Maori. The plundering of land, of power, of health by the Pakeha not only peeps out of the fading memory of the grandmother but shows also the road that the new generations of powerless Maori are to follow – the road to uncertainty, to the Pakeha city, to alluding employment. Perhaps this was the beginning of a transition. Transition in literary terms where the Maori letters found the courage to trespass into Pakeha domain of print and also literally, as most of these stories concern themselves with the continuous exodus of Maori people to city spaces in search of employment and security.

In this same phase one would find another contemporary writer who published regularly in  Te Ao Hou, J C Sturm. However, one may find her stories to be bit different from the tone and temper of explicit loss as with other stories of the journal (Lydia Wever). With characters mostly quiet, sitting in the dark, unable to come to terms with their Pakeha given identity of ‘Maori’, which breathes racial segregation and exploitation simultaneously, Sturm’s prose is a stark reminder of the Ralph Emerson’s craft of invisibility which he used to portray the ‘American negro’. An apt example could be found in the short story “First native and Pink Pig.” But what made Sturm’s stories more significant according to Lydia Wever is not only this sense of alienation or incompleteness but a kind of “…buried shock, which has the effect of drawing attention to the readers’ own racism…and it illustrates not just her position in the white-dominated world, but also what is happening in the Maori world, for Sturm’s fiction demonstrates a loss of context, a crucial absence what mirrors what is happening in Maori as they move away from rural communities to the town.”

Such artistic exploration of one’s own community’s plight without compromising the history of exploitation also found expression in two of the most prolific Maori writers of the time – Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Their writing carefully captured the ever-widening chasm between cultures, races and generations without exoticising them and simultaneously grafted in their stories the erasure of traditional support system and a cultural identity. Ihimaera’s first collection of short story is Pounamu Pounamu (1972). Let us take a short story “The Halcyon Summer’ from Witi Ihimaera’s collection of stories titled Dear Miss Mansfield. With three children sent to village to stay with their grandaunt as their parents go to Auckland, this story enacts a journey back home for its readers. Leaving the Pakeha city, the children’s journey take the readers along to the old village, to the elders, to the nature. However, there remains a lot unsaid, hinted. Beneath the picture of this journey back, there lies a discomfort of that unuttered, hinted turth. The eldest child, Tama realises during his stay that something is going wrong. “Out of the corner of his eyes he would see a cliff face crumbling, or a stone falling into the sea, or a dead fish floating on the surface of the sea.  Nani Puti was cut by a broken bottle in the sand. Just little things, but both Nani and Karani saw them also but seems powerless to stop them happening.” (op cit Lydia Wever P: 28)The traditional living place, the ‘pa’ was evicted. But behind this apparent consequence of loss, the story served a cathartic moment for its readers who made the journey back home to the ‘pa’ and realised along with the children the joy and the unease and was finally evicted. Was there a way still to romanticise the loss? Was there a way still open to go back? One would go on contemplating such questions.

Patricia Grace, till 90s, had come up with three short story collections – Waiariki (1975), The Dream Sleepers (1980) and Electric City (1987). Known for her brilliant style and ability to translate spoken rhythm, pattern of New Zealand language on paper, Grace had been a true champion of documenting life. Though one of the most interesting aspects of her writing has always been the language, her stories are equally interesting if not more for the number of voices she could register in them. The Maori found a voice in her. Not the community as a general whole but the children and their inhibitions, shames; the old and the wry humor; the adolescent and their anguish blossomed in the pages of Patricia Grace’s stories. To elucidate her writing, let us take an example of her story -” A Way of Talking’. This is the first story of her collection Waiariki and situated between two sisters. The elder sister of the story teaches the younger how to listen and train oneself to speak, how to put thoughts into words. There had been age old literary stereotypes about how Maoris talk and do not talk. But here we have a story where the Maoris are trying to train themselves in the most beautiful way, sister to sister, elder to younger, in talking, listening and talking back. Interestingly for Patrcia Grace, this talking does never gets overburdened with one’s opinion. Many crowds the scene and the collective waits to be formed, waits for another voice to be heard, to be added.

Explicit Political Voice: 

In this section, following Lydia Wever’s analysis, we will try to understand how during the turbulent years of 1980s, Maori writing shifted gears and expressed itself in more confrontational terms that we have witnessed in the earlier decades. However, one needs to understand that none of these developments ceased or even resisted earlier Maori writings. All these literary currents rather formed or strived to form a a clique of their own by co- existing and learning from one another. We will discuss three particular writers in this section- Apirana Taylor, Bruce Stewart and Ngahuia Awekotoku.

Apirana Taylor’s first collection, He Rau Aroha/ A Hundred leaves of love is an amalgamation of stories focusing on Maori life and its human connection with the world at one hand and on the other stories that emphasize the vulnerability of the Maoris in the contemporary world. In one of the stories of this collection, ‘Casey and Sarah’, we find a mixed race couple who has fallen out of their jobs. Casey goes to fishing to fend for his family but in his absence someone broke into his house and probably murdered his wife. The world that this couple inhabit has no regard for their hard labour, their choices. It is violent and contrary to their survival. Even without the occasional violent raids, their world is limited by the Pakeha surroundings. The sea is becoming ungiving everyday due to frequent dredging and their is no job. And thus Taylor inaugurates a violent picture of the contemporary Maori life. (Lydia Wever)

Bruce Stewart’s story ‘Broken Arse’ is set in a prison where the Maori outnumbers the Pakeha. In this story we see a role reversal. The majority Maori are cleverer and they possess a greater power as they stand united. However, the change of setting can be interpreted in ways more than one. It can be understood that at least given an opportunity to unite among themselves, the Maoris may shed away all the imposed tags and may look more suave and ominous to the Pakeha power. On the other hand it will simultaneously remain a mockery since this is happening nowhere but inside the guarded walls of the jail.

According Lydia Wever, both Bruce and Taylor’s stories suggest that no future can be“…imagined in Pakeha terms and the only way out offered, which Ihimaera has described as accountability, is in the recuperation of the older culture, a reconstruction of Maori not just as the opposing term to Pakeha, but as something built from the past.” This urgency of reconstruction seems to be also woven in the stories of Ngahuia Awekotoku. In the collection, Tahuri (1993), stories thus present us glimpses of Maori childhood brought up securely among women; glimpses of teenagers whose home have disintegrated and who are  at constant threat of sexual violence and of police. These stories which are the register of 1980s political turmoil are filled with the depiction of violence. Violence that originate from alienation, powerlessness, dispossession, isolation and poverty. They are racially motivated, emotional, sexual, child abuse/neglect, self-directed, institutional. But ultimately they are an expression of the hopelessness and hope; hopelessness at the realisation of the unbreakable shackle of Pakeha domination over their lives and hope of getting rid of it even at the cause of their death and destruction.

The Pakeha Short Stories:

As far as the Pakeha writings is concerned, one has to invariably begin with Katherine Mansfield. Most of Mansfield’s writing career took place in England, where she went to live in 1908 at the age of 19. In 1912 she published ‘colonial’ stories in the avant-garde magazine Rhythm, including ‘The woman at the store’ and ‘How Pearl Button was kidnapped’. It is Mansfield’s famous stories set in Wellington – ‘Prelude’, ‘The garden party’, ‘At the bay’ and ’The doll’s house’ – that most readers know. These stories centre on the Burnell family, who resemble Mansfield’s own family (the Beauchamps), and they describe the Wellington places in which she lived as a child. Mansfield began writing these stories after the death of her brother Leslie in 1915 during the First World War, as a deliberate act of homage. They form the core of her work and are expressive of late colonial society seen from shifting viewpoints, which include Mansfield’s fictional self-portrait as the child Kezia. Mansfield’s evocation of local landscapes, extended families, a child’s point of view and complex emotional psychology established a pattern for later short-story writers like Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame and Owen Marshall, but the brilliance of her writing has never been equalled. (https://teara.govt.nz/en/fiction/)

Frank Sargeson :

Frank Sargeson’s first sketches were published in Tomorrow, a left-wing Christchurch journal, in the 1930s. The brief stories in his collection Conversation with my uncle and other stories (1936) were praised for their social realism and distinctive New Zealand idiom and mood. Mostly about single men, they depict a puritanical society full of semi-articulate people, like the laconic, working-class homosexual narrator of his novella That summer (1946). Sargeson’s Kiwi vernacular was much imitated by later male writers. In 1945 a collection of short stories edited by Frank Sargeson called Speaking for ourselves was published. It marked a new moment of literary self-confidence about a distinctive New Zealand voice. Janet Frame, then a patient in hospital, said that the stories in the collection ‘overwhelmed me by the fact of their belonging.’ (https://teara.govt.nz/en/fiction/)

It should also be reminded at this point that short story became the dominant form of fiction in New Zealand after the Second World War. Maurice Duggan, A. P. Gaskill, John Reece Cole, Greville Texidor, James Courage, Roderick Finlayson, Dan Davin, O. E. Middleton and G. R. Gilbert all adopted the short story as their preferred fictional form. This is partly attributable to the impact of Sargeson’s stories, though it is notable that the impact was not as visible on women writers. Many male writers focused on masculine environments – the rugby club, racecourse, manual labour, army and pub – or on families seen from the point of view of a male child. Sargeson’s stories questioned the social assumptions of New Zealand culture, but the work of his successors was less questioning. The exception is Maurice Duggan, whose stylish poetic and literary language sits in contrast to the colloquial style and social realism of his contemporaries.

Conclusion:

In concluding this discussion on short stories of South Pacific, particularly by the Maori, we would like to point out the trajectory in which the growth of the genre flowed. Starting in the early years of twentieth century with strong repression and voicelessness, Maori writing provides us with a recipe of organised literary resistance. While it is inevitable to imagine a beginning before taking stock of the existing stereotypes, misrepresentations and resisting them, such a move needs to be substantiated by a literary force that would provide voice to voiceless. And not imagination or exoticisation, what the generations of Maori writers did was documentation of the tongue, of the lives, of hope and despair across the generations.

And finally such consolidation provided them with a literary context to push the boundaries and be courageous to delineate boldly the uncovered face of everyday violence that had been their company for centuries.

Concluding this discussion, one also needs to allude to the process of institutionalisation of literature and literary practices. Short fiction in Maori, its journey with the journals, individual authors, publishing enterprises, competitions, awards is a testament in itself , it is testament of a modern literary resistance. The following excerpt from the New Zealand govt. website gives us a glimpse of a careful institutional support system that helps to hold this organised resistance of letters together. –

Fiction in te reo Māori

Most fiction published by Māori writers is in English, but some of the Pikihuia Awards categories encourage fictional writing in te reo Māori. There is an award for the best short story written in Māori and a similar award for secondary-school students.

Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira’s Māori-language novel Ngā waituhi o Rēhua (2012), a science-fiction tale of four teenagers living on another planet, won the 2013 NZ Post Māori- language book award.

Fiction by Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace has been translated and published in te reo Māori.

Ngā Kupu Ora Books Awards

In 2009 Massey University established the Ngā Kupu Ora Book Awards to mark Māori Language Week. A fiction category was added in 2011.(Holman, Jeffrey Paparoa. Māori fiction – ngā tuhinga paki, https://teara.govt.nz/en/Maori-fiction-nga-tuhinga-paki/print)”

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