SOURCE: Orr, Bridget. “The Maori House of Fiction.” In Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, pp. 73-95. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Orr discusses Maori writing in the context of New Zealand's writing history, remarking on the lack of critical analysis of indigent Maori texts by mainstream critics.]

1

In 1973, Witi Ihimaera published Tangi, the first novel by a Maori writer. In the twenty years since that first text emerged, many other novels by Maori, including Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Heretaunga Pat Baker, and Alan Duff have appeared, achieving recognition not only in Aotearoa/New Zealand but internationally. Although it is problematic for a variety of reasons to identify the texts produced by these authors as “Maori novels,” the combined oeuvre provides a clear challenge to the dominant narrativization of New Zealand history and society.¹ Until recently, settler literature and historiography figured colonization as largely benign, celebrating the country's relatively harmonious “race relations,” high rate of intermarriage, and lack of formal discrimination as an aspect of the national progressive liberalism that guided the creation of one of the earliest welfare states and first gave women the vote. The novelistic contestation of hegemonic colonial or settler myths by indigenous writers is a phenomenon observable in a wide band of postcolonial cultures: what is striking in the New Zealand context is the rapidity with which the texts that question the complacent assumptions of the settler majority have assumed a broad, cross-cultural authority. This authority is primarily legible in the public and mass media reception of the novels rather than in the literary-critical community. Keri Hulme's success in winning the Booker Prize for The Bone People (1984) is widely known and helped make her novel a best-seller, while Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors not only was a popular success but has been made into a film that has broken local attendance records. But in a literary academy almost completely occupied by Pakeha—or Europeans—in which reading practices have until recently been governed by New Critical or slightly historicized Leavisite principles, predominantly formal and ethical modes of analysis have proved largely ill equipped to address the broader cultural and political import of these texts. The result is an often vociferous public debate in the press over the novels and near silence by professional critics.²

This paucity of comment is not produced simply by the inadequacy of formalist modes of analysis in the face of the political charge of Patricia Grace's Potiki (1986) and Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch (1986). Pakeha criticism often seems to sway between the poles of aggression and anxiety.³ This unease is generally linked to a more pervasive sense of illegitimacy in the settler—or what Simon During (1985) has referred to as the “post-colonising”—community, one rendered peculiarly acute by engagement with texts that not only challenge cherished settler myths of racial harmony but assert the values of a “different,” but local and authoritative, cosmology and epistemology. The problem for Pakeha critics is that monocultural commentary—which is all that most can provide—is likely to fall into the familiar traps of an appropriative interpretive “assimilation,” the cultural equivalent of policies of racial “integration.” This has tended to involve making aesthetic judgments in accordance with specifically and culturally inadequate European criteria or else anthropologizing Maori writing: treating it primarily as fictive ethnography.⁴ The poststructuralist contribution to the debate has taken the form of suggesting that it is the obsession with the settler-other binarism that is itself the problem and that approaching texts by both Maori and Pakeha as postcolonial hybrids destabilizes the oppressively essentialized notions of identity that such binarisms sustain.⁵ And the standard response to such celebrations of hybridity—usually made under the sign of “the political”—retains a certain cogency here; hybridity can all too easily end up looking like assimilation under another name. Cultural commentators such as Leonie Pihama (1994), in a position shared by a number of Maori critics, question the validity of the term “postcolonial” (and the unsettling of binary structures it implies) in the context of a settler society in which independence from the imperial power is nonetheless accompanied by the continuing, specifically colonial oppression of indigenous people.

These dilemmas are hardly specific to Aotearoa/New Zealand but inform the whole field of postcolonial studies and, to a lesser extent, colonial discourse analysis as well. Maori nationalists have invoked arguments over nativism from the discussions of Anglo- and Franco-phone African literature in order to contest novelistic practice and reception (Poananga 1986, 1987), and recent celebrations of cultural “cross-pollination” draw on postcolonial adaptations of poststructuralist positions (Hubbard and Craw 1990, 1992). But the kinds of analyses developed offshore always require a certain amount of adjustment to local conditions. In a recent essay pondering the epistemological and political implications of formalist and historicist approaches to African literature, Kwame Anthony Appiah's elegant deconstruction of the Eurocentric universalism lurking in the heart of nativism is followed by a suggestion that “we give up the search for Mr. Right; and speak, more modestly, of productive modes of reading” (1991, 158). Useful as his suggestion is, the example he offers, which contrasts appropriate ways of approaching African literature in American and African contexts, depends on the distance that informs the difference between the two locations. In a settler culture such as New Zealand/Aotearoa, there is difference but no distance. Separate realms exist, but there is always overlap; very few classrooms will contain a homogeneous set of interests. The tension this engenders in cultural analysis seems remarkably absent from another discussion of an arguably comparable problem, namely, Arnold Krupat's attempt to develop an “ethnocriticism” that allows for “progressive translation” between cultures (Krupat 1992). Krupat's primary concern is the relation between European Americans and Native American literature, and his cultural ideal is a radical cosmopolitanism that can produce a “polyvocal polity.” Democratic as this Bakhtinian vision may be, it is articulated from a position of no doubt about the cultural—and sociopolitical—domination of Euro-Americans in the United States. It is in fact a classically pluralist model, one that seeks to make space for the cultural expression of an oppressed minority without seeing such expression as a political threat to the dominant order. That kind of certainty about the current and future primacy of their own authority is singularly lacking in recent Pakeha cultural production and commentary. During the 1980s, it was made clear to European scholars that historical and anthropological research on Maori topics was unacceptable without full agreement from the Maori concerned: one Pakeha historian was targeted by a firebomb planted by radicals. Newly conscious of the limitations of their perspective on New Zealand society, in a culture attempting to adjust political, judicial, and educational institutions to incorporate Maori customs and practice, settler academics and artists have tended to focus on specifically Pakeha experience and to eschew attempts to represent the cross-cultural encounters of the past. The anxiety this reflects stands in contrast to the pervasive articulation, the continuing experience of oppression notwithstanding, of Maori (and Polynesian) confidence. As Irihapeti Ramsden has put it, “Our time of Maoritanga is exciting. We are recovering from colonisation” (1993a, 349). The sense on the part of Maori that they possess the cultural initiative is bound up with their increasing ability to reshape New Zealand society as a whole. That kind of specifically political power, with its clear and already effective challenge to the settler establishment, gives cultural debate a kind of urgency simply not imaginable in accounts such as Krupat's.

A certain defensiveness in Aotearoa/New Zealand's settler community is not unique. On the broadest front, it may be seen as symptomatic of the ongoing renegotiation of relations between the West and the rest produced by the dismantling of empires, the emergence of neocolonialism, and related intellectual developments, such as postmodernism and postcolonialism, which to some extent deprivilege European knowledge and cultural authority. More specifically, Alan Lawson (1993) has argued that while the continuing tendency to ground claims to authentic identity in terms of autochthony works to secure the legitimacy of both (imperial) metropolitans and indigenous peoples, it leaves the settler subject in a peculiarly problematic position. J. G. A. Pocock (1992) has come to a not dissimilar conclusion—by a radically different route—in a provocative essay suggesting that while both Maori and Pakeha intellectual traditions deplore vagrancy, it can be argued that both peoples, being explorers, navigators, and settlers, are what he terms tangata waka, or people of the canoe. This account questions the moral and political authority that attaches to aboriginality in both Maori and Pakeha traditions, and the concomitant cross-cultural assumption that the Maori have a special status as first inhabitants, arguing instead that it is the shared tradition of exploration and colonization that characterizes both kinds of New Zealanders. Pocock's view is a minority one, however, and the primacy of the position of Maori as tangata whenua, or people of the land, is becoming institutionalized in legal and bureaucratic discourse—without much visible settler dissent. Those without a comparable name—or, arguably, identity—are Pakeha, about whose status, as inhabitants of Aotearoa/New Zealand by virtue of the Treaty of Waitangi, argument continues.

The current renegotiation of power between Maori and Pakeha in the cultural sphere is an aspect of a multifaceted resurgence of the tangata whenua, or indigenous inhabitants, which has been called the “Maori Renaissance.” From the early 1970s on, Maori have mounted a series of challenges to the dominant settler order through political action and the judicial system. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed by some two-thirds of Maori chiefs in 1840, and the primary instrument of legitimation for British colonization, has emerged as a crucial site of contestation—and possible settlement—between the two peoples. Through the seventies, many Maori nationalists decried the Treaty as a fraud: in the eighties, however, as revisionist historiography began to suggest its possible utility as a means of redressing grievances, the call came to “honour the treaty.” A Tribunal has been established to hear the literally hundreds of claims relating to land, fisheries, and other resources, while the constitutional implications of the Treaty have shaped official policies of “biculturalism” that emphasize a notion of partnership between Maori and Pakeha.⁶

It is difficult to overstate the importance, politically and culturally, of the emergence of a Treaty discourse: as one Maori commentator put it recently, “the last twenty-five years of this century will probably be known as the Treaty years” (Jones 1994). And the kinds of debates over power, history, and identity that the revaluation of the founding contract—“New Zealand's birth certificate”—has produced (and of which it is symptomatic) are nowhere more apparent than in the domain of literature. The sites of greatest dispute are anthologies and novels, each of them generically burdened with a representative function in relation to a unified notion of national identity that seems increasingly anachronistic. Novelistic narration may have been vital in producing what Benedict Anderson (1983) calls the “imagined communities” of late-eighteenth-century European and twentieth-century Third World nations, uniting disparate groups of people through an appeal to a sense of shared history and interest, but recent novels from Aotearoa—a country uncertain even of its name—deconstruct rather than consolidate such a myth of nationhood.

Up to the 1970s, “New Zealand literature” was a substantially Pakeha project, in which Maori functioned as the objects rather than the subjects of representation. The initial period of colonization saw the emergence of a mythicization of Aotearoa/New Zealand as “Maoriland,” with novelistic production that mimed the colonial genres of other settler cultures. Popular forms included romances set in a sentimentalized pre-European Maori context; stirring tales of settler hardship in the bush and in the Maori Wars of the 1860s; and comic sketches of rugged colonial characters and incompetent metropolitan “new chums.” Toward the turn of the century, writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Jane Mander began ringing changes on these forms from a distinctly female perspective, while Roderick Finlayson inaugurated a tradition of “sympathetic” accounts of contemporary Maori life. Much of this literary production was intended for consumption abroad, whether in Australia or Britain, and much of the material was therefore concerned with exploiting New Zealand's exoticism rather than explaining the country to its new inhabitants. Much slower than neighboring Australia to develop any degree of anti-imperial feeling in the settler population, New Zealand witnessed the emergence of cultural nationalism among Pakeha only in the 1930s. The dominant writers of this movement, such as Frank Sargeson and Robin Hyde, did draw on overseas models such as Sherwood Anderson, but the regional realism they adopted provided much more satisfactory ways of representing local speech, manners, and ways of life than the sentimental or exoticizing modes used earlier. The search for an authentic literary discourse, ideally expressed in a Great New Zealand Novel, persisted through the fifties and sixties and established a preference for large-scale family dramas of provincial life and historical novels still noticeable in the novelistic practice of several leading Pakeha writers who came of age in the postwar period. The 1970s saw an end to this relatively homogeneous literary scene, not just because women and Maori writers rose to prominence, but also because realism began to lose its preeminence.⁷

The Pakeha domination of New Zealand literature existed alongside, but mostly in ignorance of, substantial and continuous Maori oral and written cultural production (McRae 1991; Ihimaera et al. 1993). After two decades of Anglophone publication by Maori writers in all the major genres, that domination is eroding, not least because the newly visible Maori writing has highlighted the thoroughgoing Eurocentrism of the legitimating institutions of literature. Witi Ihimaera commented in this regard in 1990 that “I look forward … for discussions of New Zealand literature to move from this European-biased and based analysis” (1). With rare exceptions, however, Pakeha critics prefer to remain silent about the significant area of Maori literary production, in a way that tacitly acknowledges their inability to make authoritative judgments in this domain. One can certainly argue that Pakeha critical silence is no bad thing—a series of controversies between the self-appointed standard-bearer of traditional European literary values, C. K. Stead, and other commentators who write with recognized authority about Maori culture has made it very clear that monophone Pakeha readers with limited knowledge of Maoritanga, or things Maori, however distinguished in their own context, lack the requisite knowledge to make informed judgments.⁸ One interesting development in Maori studies has been the establishment of protocols to regulate relations between researcher(s) and subject(s), ensuring knowledge production is informed by two different epistemologies.

Novels occupy a somewhat different space and call for different strategies. The most cursory survey of recent work in the postcolonial field reinforces one's sense that the novel is still the genre in which struggles over cultural and political identities and authority are most acute.⁹ As is obvious in the Aotearoa/New Zealand context, these kinds of textual conflicts are not simply a matter of a content unsettling to a settler or metropolitan reader; rather, they raise questions over the legitimacy of hitherto dominant reading practices and, by extension, the authority of the institutions that license and approve interpretive activity. In the face of these dilemmas, it is unsurprising that Bakhtin has emerged as the theorist of choice in so much postcolonial analysis. Bakhtin's emphasis on the novel as heteroglossial, a site in which the voices of many conflicting social groups interact, seems to provide a useful way of recognizing that these texts not only are internally divided but make a divisive address to a heterogeneous readership (Bakhtin 1981). Bakhtin's etiology of the novel, suggesting that the precedent epic was a specifically imperial narrative mode that displaced various types of tribal discourse, discourses that reemerge in the subversive form of the novel, reinforces the attractions of his account.

Developing this Bakhtinian emphasis on discursive difference and identity in the novel in relation to the categories of race and gender, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson suggests that the complex subjectivity of the black woman writer allows her to enter simultaneously into what she calls familial or testimonial and public or competitive discourses—both of which affirm and challenge the reader simultaneously. Thus she argues that black women writers enter into testimonial discourse with black men as blacks, with white women as women, and with black women as black women: conversely, they enter into a competitive discourse with black men as women, with white women as blacks, and with white men as black women. Novels such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) produce a plethora of reading positions that are themselves complex and internally divided (Henderson 1994).

The notion of polyvocality and multiple addressees that Henderson develops is highly suggestive. In one sense, the strongest reason I would adduce for critical engagement with the work of writers such as Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera from the Pakeha side is that their novels seem to solicit such a response; their texts are, precisely, polyvocal. That is not to say that Pakeha readers are of primary concern to either of these novelists—both have made it clear either explicitly or implicitly that their main addressees are Maori—but Pakeha do appear to be among the readers addressed, whether directly or obliquely.¹⁰

Mark Williams has already argued, in fact, in Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists, the only major monograph on the New Zealand novel published for some time, that Keri Hulme, author of the highly successful The Bone People, has internalized and reproduces an essentially European projection of Maori culture as unified, harmonious, and organically rooted in Aotearoa, thus providing Pakeha as well as Maori with an idealized human origin for New Zealand society that can supplement, or substitute for, the messy, fragmented realities of history (Williams 1990, 110-38). Hulme's The Bone People is an account of a triangulated relationship between Kerewin, a successful but doggedly solitary Maori woman artist cut off from her people, Simon, a young Pakeha boy orphaned in a shipwreck, and Joe, Simon's rescuer, adoptive father and abuser, and, like Kerewin, Maori. The novel can be read allegorically, as a figuration of the alienation of contemporary Maori and Pakeha from themselves and from each other, with violence as much as love informing the relationships. It concludes with a lengthy, almost phantasmagoric sequence in which ancient Maori magic is invoked to resolve the characters' problems. It is this sequence that critics such as Williams have generally found least satisfactory. Rather than simply dismissing the episode as overblown romanticism, however, one might read it as symptomatic of the difficulties Hulme faced in bringing an extraordinarily painful analysis of New Zealand domestic and racial conflicts to a hopeful conclusion. The shift to a fantastic register implicitly acknowledges the problematic nature of such optimism. Williams is not quite as dismissive of Witi Ihimaera's most ambitious novel, The Matriarch, but he is extremely critical. He suggests that Ihimaera's preference for the heroic and unified world of the epic renders his relation to the “ironic form” of the novel thoroughly ambivalent and results in a text marred by “overblown” prose, “structural incoherence,” and “distortions of history” (Williams 1990, 87). However acute may be Williams's views on the settler guilt that helped make The Bone People in particular so popular among Pakeha as well as Maori, his failure to pay systematic attention to the structure, language, or thematics of Hulme's and Ihimaera's novels seems to display the same cultural incompetence that Michael King (1993) has located in C. K. Stead's reading of Maori poetry. Williams's failure to offer a close reading of the texts in the terms they themselves propose—a procedure that stands in striking contrast with his careful exegeses of novels by major Pakeha writers such as Maurice Gee and Janet Frame—suggests that in addressing texts written by Maori, it is their apparent cultural effects Williams wishes to engage rather than the novels themselves. This would not be problematic per se if it weren't so obvious that the critical double standard at work here reinscribes Pakeha texts as embodiments of novelistic excellence, while Maori writing is treated, in the end, as the aesthetically unsuccessful epiphenomenon of cultural conflict.

The limits of Williams's Eurocentric formalism are legible not simply in this scholar's seeming inability to produce plausible readings of texts by Maori writers but also in his apparent incuriosity about the status of “the novel” in Maori terms. The categories of art and literature, national literature, and novels all have a specifically European provenance but have been transformed by their appropriation in various non-European contexts (some of which include traditions of lengthy prose narrative). These transformations cannot be understood simply, in formal or immanent terms, as changes of content, structure, imagery, characterization, and so on. The role of what in European terms is known as aesthetic discourse is also crucial in particular reconstructions of the cultural work that novels perform. While some non-Western cultures have long-established traditions of connoisseurship suggesting that cultural production operates within paradigms that seem relatively familiar, such is not always the case. If knowledge of what Terry Eagleton calls the “aesthetic ideology” that informs any literary text is necessary for the plausible interpretation of European writing (1978, 60-63), such knowledge will be no less, and arguably more, important in reading literature from non-Western cultures. Maori accounts of the function of cultural production suggest that novels might be understood as communal possessions—treasured objects, displays of skill, and sources of knowledge binding a people together—but also as challenges to non-Maori, occasions for debate, and even for revenge.

This, however, is the point at which the Scylla of ethnographic reductionism meets the Charybdis of Eurocentric formalism. A number of Maori artists have made forceful objections to having their work analyzed in terms that privilege “traditional” Maori culture, in that such analyses tend to reify and archaize their work, denying them modernity (Hubbard and Craw 1990, 1992). Others are equally emphatic about the necessity for critical familiarity with Maori culture.

Henderson's extrapolation of Bakhtinian dialogism seems to offer the most effective way of cutting this particular Gordion knot. Reading The Matriarch or Potiki, Pakeha readers will find themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, cultural outsiders in the world presented. But their position is not that of a distant spectator: for both these texts are intensively performative and undertake in turn to educate, to welcome, to argue with, and to accuse such readers. Performativity certainly figures in Ihimaera's accounts of his work: in one interview, this author suggested that theater was a form more suited than the novel to Maori culture given that culture's intensely communal nature (1985, 104-5). Writing more generally about the role of Maori artists, Hirini Moko Mead and Irihapeti Ramsden suggest that while objects or performances are produced by a particular creative individual or group, the origins of such work lie in the communal cultural work of the iwi, or tribe, and gain much of their meaning within that context (Mead 1993, 199-209; Ramsden 1993b, 320-22). This does not, however, limit the implied or possible audience of a given text; in one recent discussion, Ihimaera remarked in relation to The Matriarch's use of European historical sources: “I visualised these as people with whom one could have a dialogue with [sic], a korero, on the nature of history and on their way of seeing it” (1990, 1).

Seeing The Matriarch as korero, or discussion, obviously emphasizes the work's performative and dialogic nature, and so does another of the terms Ihimaera has used to describe it. His early novels and stories Ihimaera has described as waiata—songs that are associated with love (waiata aroha) or mourning (waiata tangi) as well as greeting, farewells, and daily work. The Matriarch, however, he has said, can be understood as a haka—and a feminocentric haka at that (Ihimaera 1994). Among Pakeha, haka has usually been thought of as a war dance: in fact, it is performed without weapons, and although extremely various in its functions, it is not, strictly speaking, a war dance. Timoti Karetu's recent account (on which my remarks below are dependent) cites approvingly a definition of haka as an expression of “the … identity” of the Maori (Alan Armstrong qtd. in Karetu 1993, 25). Haka names all Maori dance but is currently associated with “that part of the Maori dance repertoire where the men are to the fore with the women lending support in the rear” (Karetu 1993, 24)—although the first kapa haka (haka troupe) is said to have been female (15). The number of people involved in a performance varies from a dozen or even fewer to over a hundred. Every part of the body is used: legs stamping and jumping, arms brandishing or shaking, eyes rolling, tongues thrusting in gestures and effects that are carefully calculated and expressive of eloquence and masculine power. There are some haka women who perform alone, but Karetu suggests that their traditional role was at the side of a troupe—armed—to protect the men. The spectacular visual effects—which early European observers compared to “the Saxon traditions of our ancestors, or any of the Gorgons whose looks were reputed to change into stones those on whom they cast a glance” (Joel Samuel Polack, qtd. in Karetu 1993, 28-29)—are accompanied by lyrics. Different forms of haka serve to welcome and entertain guests, to establish reputation, to express hatred, to prepare for conflict, to mourn the dead, and to comment on current problems—one recent prize-winning haka urged its audience to give up smoking and drinking. Haka texts are written by individuals but are usually associated with a particular tribe: in the case of kaioraora, however, a haka composed by women to express deadly hatred, the lyric is generally preserved by the tribe who are the butt of the composition, it being considered a great honor to have inspired such loathing (Karetu 1993, 47).

Haka were frequently remarked on by early European visitors to Aotearoa/New Zealand and have assumed a role in one of the most important areas of cultural overlap, namely, rugby. High schools often performed more or less bowdlerized versions of famous haka, and the national side, the All Blacks, always begins international test matches with a haka. Haka has more specifically political dimensions as well: during the protests against the South African rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981, I saw a Black Power group perform a haka to defy police outside the stadium where a test match was in progress. The performance of haka is now in fact carefully controlled: in the early eighties, a group called He Taua forcibly intervened, after years of fruitless requests, to prevent engineering students at the University of Auckland from including a desecration of haka in their graduation celebrations.

2

The reading that follows will attempt to suggest what might be at stake—for the Pakeha reader in particular—in thinking of haka as a governing metaphor for the cultural work performed by The Matriarch. The novel's eponymous heroine is Artemis Riripeti Mahana, head of a confederation of tribes from the east coast of Aotearoa. A figure of great beauty, power, and accomplishment, a priestess of the Ringatu faith (a Maori adaptation of Christianity), like other “women warriors,” she has become famous for her efforts to recover land and sustain her people in the struggle against the disasters brought by the Pakeha. The novel's hero is Tama Mahana, who has been chosen by the Matriarch to take up her role but who can do so only after an exhaustive search into his family's and his people's history, while also ultimately confronting and defeating a rival for the position of leadership.

The novel's structure revolves around a central scene—in which the Matriarch fights to establish Tama as her heir at a particular hui, or meeting—a scene set up, revisited, and brought to a resolution only by threading it through a series of mythological, historical, and contemporary narratives that provide three different, albeit interrelated causalities for understanding the conflict. While the invocation and juxtaposition of mythological and realist modes of narration may remind readers of magic realist practice, The Matriarch's schema is in fact determined by specifically Maori views of time and history. Thus the novel begins with a whakapapa, or genealogy, which provides the broadest possible frame—indeed, a cosmic one—for understanding the action that unfolds; then follow five “acts,” the first, third, and last of which focus on Tama's upbringing, his developing relationship with the Matriarch, and his fight to maintain the right of succession; the second and fourth acts deal with Te Kooti and Wi Pere, nineteenth-century religious-military and political leaders respectively. These leaders' struggle with the Pakeha informs that of the Matriarch and Tama and reframes the contemporary conflict yet again. The novel's spiraling structure thus embodies in narrative terms a chronology that positions its subjects, as Ranginui Walker has put it (1994), so that they back forward into the future, facing a past populated by a multitude of ancestral figures.

The novel's structure is describable in terms both of modernist narrative and Maori historiography, but the distinction itself emphasizes a polarity that the text renders questionable. As the division into “acts,” one named “The Song of Te Kooti” suggests, The Matriarch's performance is as much informed by opera as by haka. The novel's invocation of a plethora of forms and practices both “Maori” (whakapapa, haka) and “Pakeha” (arias, parliamentary records) problematizes attempts to establish its “meaning” through reference to a single cultural origin. What remains irreducible is the text's mobilization of these heterogeneous representational strategies in the service of a particular politics; a project that, again, cannot be exhausted through either a Marxist or conservative formalist suspicion of the literature of commitment. Recognizing the novel as a haka—a form of address with which Pakeha readers are at least minimally familiar—renders transparent the Eurocentrism of the distinction between tendentious and “fine” (or avant-garde) writing while suggesting the inadequacy of critical judgments made in such terms of reference. Haka are often, though by no means invariably, “political” in theme and occasion, but they are performed with meticulous, often highly competitive concern for excellence in composition and effect. So while the Pakeha reader might wish to take issue with the text's account of the topics canvased—or even criticize the actual management of the narrative—complaints on the grounds that the novel is simply “too political” are to a large degree meaningless. What such criticism suggests, in fact, is a desire to displace the highly personalized but political confrontation established through the reading process by shifting into a familiar register of aesthetic assessment, rendering consideration of the substantive issues at stake moot.

The Matriarch establishes a range of reading positions, through discourse both familial and competitive, to invoke Henderson's terms. It is not always clear in the novel, however, who is performing for whom. Bakhtin's emphasis on the heteroglossial nature of novelistic discourse takes on a different valence in a context in which the textual metaphor of haka implies a communal cultural production—readers might at points perform with the text, as it were. Sometimes, as when the narrative invites the reader ceremoniously into Rongopai, the famous painted meeting house that provides the focus of life for a particular iwi, or people, the reader is treated as an honored guest but distinctly a stranger. At other points, when Tamatea's ancestors or immediate relations are addressed, the reader's position will depend on his or her own sense of recognition or relationship. This is not just a question of recognizing a particular rhetorical (and performative) practice transformed into novelistic discourse but an issue of identification and participation. While Maori readers generally are most likely to understand the symbolic implications of a particular rhetorical choice, their positions will vary in respect of their relationship to the characters represented. Given the historical nature of the novel, readers from different tribes would have quite different perspectives on both the “real” and the fictional characters, a common understanding of the terms of representation being invoked regardless.

My primary concern, however, is with another kind of reader. Certain sections of The Matriarch are explicitly and angrily directed at a Pakeha reader, conceived of adversarily. This is not, I would suggest, a generalized address to all whites but a haka directed at a specific group—the settler population of New Zealand. “The Song of Te Kooti,” chapters 7 and 8 of The Matriarch, retells the story of the Matawhero Retaliation. The incident concerns the attack made by Te Kooti, the prophet and warrior chief of the Ringatu church and an ideological and military opponent of British power, on the small Poverty Bay settlement of Matawhero. Ihimaera has said that he was instructed by a kaumatua, or elder, to write about Te Kooti, who is a major figure in the pantheon of Maori resisters to colonial rule. During the mid-nineteenth-century British attempt to establish domination in Aotearoa, different Maori tribes adopted varying strategies to ensure survival or vanquish the invaders. These ranged from cooperation with the colonizing power to military and cultural resistance—the latter including the development of specifically Maori adaptations of Christianity. Te Kooti, who was missionary educated and began his military career fighting on the British side, is renowned for both his military prowess and his status as a prophet.

The particular incident concerning Te Kooti retold in The Matriarch occurred within Witi Ihimaera's tribal territory and is remembered locally (in popular memory)—and nationally (in scholarly accounts)—in different ways by two communities. For Pakeha, it is recalled in the familiar tropes of settler myth as a massacre of the innocents, women and children slaughtered in their beds, an act of excessive cruelty without strategic military value, comprehensible only as unrestrained savagery.¹¹ The novel provides another view, one that emphasizes both the role of utu, or revenge (a fundamental concept in Maori culture concerned with conflict and recompense), and holy mission in Te Kooti's decision to attack the home of his chief settler persecutor, Major Reginald Newton Biggs. Given that the Ringatu identified themselves as the last tribe of Israel, and the colonial government as Egypt, the blending of the desire for utu with an Old Testament understanding of divine justice as vengeance is shown to produce a powerful and legitimate motive for action against Biggs and his family and neighbors.

The narrative does not, however, effect its revision simply by focusing on a single Maori consciousness or providing “authoritative” contextual information. Rather, the chapter that precedes the account of the Biggs incident dramatizes the variety of perspectives on the event by providing a full narrative of Te Kooti's life from the lips of the hero's grandmother, the Matriarch herself; by quoting from a variety of contemporary Pakeha eyewitnesses; by rehearsing the extant historiographical positions; and by presenting snatches of action and dialogue from the day preceding the events. All these sections of the narrative are framed and given point by the chapter opening, which shows the Matriarch teaching Tama not just how to fight with traditional weapons—both the taiaha, or spear, and historical knowledge—but how to hate. This suggests that the narrative itself, driven on by a first-person narrator who rounds on certain Pakeha characters, is operating not just as reinterpretation but as reenactment: the text itself performs an act of vengeance on the Pakeha reader. The narrator's prose takes on the biblical cadences, the incantatory variations, and the repetitions of the Matriarch, creating an effect of increasingly focused purpose:

Some historians have puzzled over this and, ultimately, have decided that Te Kooti was too afraid to attack any of the well-garrisoned settlements. But the prophet could have taken Gisborne if he had wanted to. No, the reason for not razing Gisborne itself was that Te Kooti was not interested nor directed to do this. If there was to be an act of war, let it be a small act, and let it be directed against those who had in fact fired upon the prophet and thereby on Jehovah. Yes, let it be against Pharaoh, Major Biggs, the man who had exiled the prophet to Wharekauri and then, on Te Kooti's return, had pursued him through three battles to Puketapu Mountain. And let it be against Pharoah's cohorts, the militia who, with Major Biggs, were stationed at Matawhero. Let it be between the two armies of war. Major Biggs, Major Biggs, you walked three months in the valley of death.

(Ihimaera 1986, 143)

The passage moves from the relatively detached initial reportage of the scholarly consensus to a directly partisan defense of Te Kooti's actions that quickly ratchets up the latter's mana, or prestige, by contemplating Gisborne not merely “taken” but “razed.” The narrator's identification with Te Kooti motivates the sympathetic ventriloquism of the prophet's thoughts that culminates in the rhetorical address to Major Biggs, enemy it seems of Te Kooti and the narrator both. The tone here is not furious but menacing, creating its effect through the contemplation of possibilities dismissed before the turning to a considered aim. The repetition and modification of imperatives (“Yes, let it be … And let it be … Let it be …”) in sentences of decreasing length that set the resonance of the Maori place names (Wharekauri, Puketapu, Matawhero) against the clumsy appellation “Major Biggs” marshall all the rhetorical power of Maori and biblical syntax and allusions to produce a sense of relentless purpose.

That narratorial relentlessness, and the vengeful purpose it sustains, drives the next two chapters, which focus on the Matawhero Retaliation in detail. It is a grim tale, not often told locally, but it is one, the narrator insists, that requires rehearsal:

Perhaps the reason for being tightlipped is that Poverty Bay citizens now pride themselves on their good record of race-relations, and rightly so. But they need to be told the truth.

(159)

The text recounts the deadly episode by focusing on a dozen separate killings, of Maori and Pakeha both, providing rapid sketches of the victims' consciousness of events just prior to death. Each incident takes place along a deathly timeline with rapid shifts of scene that create a sense of mounting anticipatory horror: the narration seems as relentless and efficient as the executions. The attack begins on Tuesday, 10 November, at 12:01 a.m. with the deaths of Trooper Peppard, Lieutenant Dodd, and Richard Rathbone: next, at 2:20 a.m., is Robert Atkins, who is followed at 3:05 a.m. by Pera Kararehe.

Then, like shafts loosed from a bow, they descended upon the settlement.

3:45 a.m.

Lieutenant James Walsh, 33, his wife Emma, 26, and their infant daughter, Nora Ellen, were all asleep in the main bedroom of their cottage near the lower ford. The front door was open, and the raiders slipped in quietly. They were filled with passion, so much so that when Nora started to murmur in her sleep she was instantly decapitated.

3:55 a.m.

Piripi Taketake awoke quickly at the entry of raiders into the whare.

“Who goes there?” he demanded.

He heard the muffled sounds of his three children, Pera, Taraipene, and Te Paea. He roused his wife, Harata, and she began to call to the children. Even before Piripi could stop her, she was out of bed and on her way to them. But before she got to the door she was axed.

(162-63)

It is not until the Matawhero killings cease that the narrator pauses to moralize. At this point the “they”—which refers specifically to the Pakeha of Poverty Bay—becomes “you,” and the reader addressed in the account becomes Pakeha in general. Reflecting on the violence suffered by the white victims, the narrator asks:

All dead, and to what purpose? To serve the vanities of man or God? And who among you is ready to cast the first stone and say “Te Kooti is to blame?” … And do I hear you protest at the detailed descriptions of death? Again, your protests fall on deaf ears.

(170)

The implied reader here is the shocked Pakeha, whose responses are anticipated and dismissed. A page later, that reader is named explicitly:

The curtain was coming down, but the show was not yet over. You, Pakeha, required a public sacrifice to be made, a symbolic killing, through which your feeling of horror about Te Kooti's retaliation at Matawhero could be transmuted into satisfaction. You didn't have Te Kooti himself, but, ah, you had caught one of his followers, hadn't you, at the fall of Ngatapa?

(172)

This is an uncomfortable moment, I think, for the Pakeha addressee, imaginatively brutalized by the accounts of the Matawhero deaths but, equally, implicated in the injustice that gave rise to, and followed, the events. The resistant reader may dismiss the account of the Retaliation as “a distortion of history” or an inappropriate incursion of political polemic; but such responses seem transparently evasive in the context, just another symptom of the uneasy repression in the settler community described at the beginning of the chapter. The passage just quoted above aggressively fractures the identificatory contract that usually negotiates novelistic transactions: the Pakeha reader is not accorded the position of impartial witness or sympathetic observer, sharing in the narratorial perspective. Nor are the disconcerting effects he or she experiences the literary sleight of hand of a playful or amoral unreliable narrator. Rather, the textual sequence addressed to the Pakeha operates in accordance with another set of protocols; like haka, this rhetorical address to an adversary taunts, probes, and challenges.

The killing of innocents, Pakeha. The blood is on your hands. Yes, Pakeha, you remember Matawhero. Let me remind you of the murder at Ngatapa.

(172)

The onslaught is unrelenting, as the narrator, singing for, if not with, the prophetic and fierce Te Kooti, breathes with the force of Tumatauenga, God of Man and War.

My point here is emphatically not that the invocation of a single “traditional” Maori category can function as the hermeneutic key to a complex text like The Matriarch; it is rather that thinking about the text as a haka emphasizes the performative dimension of the novel and the particularly challenging relation it establishes with Pakeha readers.¹² Other novels by Maori, particularly Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors, might well also be seen as haka, but in the latter instance the addressee is certainly primarily other Maori, who, unlike the Pakeha invited to korero by Ihimaera, have not been slow to reply to its challenging account of contemporary Maori life.¹³

The extraliterary controversy over the historical, political, and cultural validity of Ihimaera's and Duff's texts bears witness to the extent to which their remarkably forceful reworkings of novelistic discourse have changed the nature of the cultural work done by this genre in Aotearoa. One extraordinary index of this is C. K. Stead's recent publication of a novel entitled The Singing Whakapapa. Stead's novel is a self-conscious vindication of the Pakeha presence in New Zealand, a playful variant of the historical detective story and family saga that contests representations of the early settlers as opportunistic land-grabbers. Given the role he has played in recent cultural debate, Stead's titular invocation of whakapapa, and his use of genealogy as a structural device, while presumably intended to reflect his own sense of having a hybrid cultural inheritance, cannot, as he is doubtless aware, avoid raising the question of cultural appropriation. Conscious of this, at least one, sympathetic, commentator has called Stead's gesture “mischievous” (Smithyman 1994, 6). It is possible, however, to refigure the writer—here, in an exemplary sense the Pakeha Novelist—less as the fully self-conscious agent of a recuperative settler discourse and more as a defensive participant in cultural practices he does not fully understand but, equally, cannot ignore. It is difficult not to see The Singing Whakapapa as Stead's haka as well as his whakapapa.

Novelistic practice as haka is forceful, often combative. Patricia Grace's Potiki offers another central metaphor for narrativization, one that also significantly refigures novelistic relations. Grace's novel tells the story of a small hapu, or subtribe, whose community is threatened by the attempts of developers to build a holiday resort on their land, thus disrupting their whole way of life. The conflict is framed by the life histories of all the Tamihana family—eschewing a single protagonist, the text nonetheless assigns great importance to the eponymous Potiki, who is a Maui and Christ figure both. The prologue to this novel focuses on the man who carved the wharenui, or meetinghouse, which serves as the center of the Tamihanas' lives. We are told that the role of the carver is to provide “a house for the people” (Grace 1986, 8), where the carving of ancestral figures tells the story not only of the iwi but also of human and divine origins:

The people were anxious to have all aspects of their lives and ancestry represented in their new house. They wished to include all the famous ancestors to which they were linked, and also to include the ancestors which linked all people to the earth and the heavens from ancient to future times, and which told people of their relationships to light and growth, and to each other.

(10)

Later, discussing the role of the wharenui in the context of the Tamihanas' dissatisfaction with the dominant modes of schooling, knowledge, art, and media offered, Roimata, one of the main narrators, remarks:

We could not afford books, so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in books. It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives.

But our main book was the wharenui which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a taonga. And we are part of that book along with family, past and family yet to come.

(104)

While most emphasis is placed on the role of carving in the wharenui's symbolic embodiment of the people's history and values, tukutuku, or paneling, and weaving also play a part:¹⁴

I would sit comfortably in my chair close to the tukutuku frames, often with my sister Tangimoana on the opposite side, and taking the strips of pingao or kiekie, crosswork the half-round sticks to the backboard. As the strands worked to and fro, so did our stories, what we had in our hearts and minds. We sang to and fro, latticing down and along the strips of black, red, white and gold, which had become the strands of life and self.

(144)

The linkage between carving, tukutuku, and storytelling, between books and the wharenui, encourages us to understand the novel as analogous to these other arts. As is the case with The Matriarch, Potiki recapitulates the origin stories of Maori cosmology, and the characterization, structure, and language are all shaped not only by recent historical events but by creation myths and genealogy. Like the wharenui, Potiki is not simply a “story” but also a “history, … a study, … and a taonga.”

How does the figuring of the novel as wharenui position us as readers? As with The Matriarch, one recognizes an immediate complication in the novel's address. For tauiwi, or strangers, the novel provides an educational introduction to crucial aspects of Maori life, past and present. Sometimes implicitly (as in Roimata's meditation on the way in which the original sibling hostilities of the gods still inform human conduct) and sometimes explicitly—as in the explanations of the role of the wharenui cited above—the novel welcomes and informs cultural outsiders as manuhiri, or guests, directly communicating central aspects of its characters' lives.

The novel's considered deliberation in regard to the portrayal of cultural outsiders is evident in the delicacy with which the Maori-Pakeha divide itself is figured. The narrative mostly eschews both terms, and in so doing reinforces the sense of the fictional space as simultaneously Maori and general: for this is a “Maori” world in the original sense of the term as ordinary or usual. (Although the word “Maori” now refers to the indigenous people of Aotearoa as a whole, that is a postcontact usage. Before contact with the West created a settler-indigenous binarism, people defined themselves primarily in terms of a tribal affiliation, not in a manner that collectivized them “racially.”) Threats to this world are presented as motivated by greed masquerading as an ideology of progress, and are resisted not only by the Tamihanas and other iwi, but also by “those not of our race.”

However, while the novel is interpretable by tauiwi, its status for those who recognize their own selves, lives, and stories within it—those who are quite clearly its principal audience—is different. Here too, the address is complex. If the wharenui is traditionally the embodiment of the history and future of a particular people, sited on ancestral land, novels seem to stand in some contrast, given that they are individually produced commodities, free-floating movable property. But while Potiki can be consumed as an exotic pleasure, a whole range of other reading positions remain. The novel might be seen as the meetinghouse of an urban marae, or tribal center, offering a welcome to those who have left, or have lost touch with, their iwi and turangawaewae—the latter being the place where you stand and are at home. The text thus provides resources to those Maori at the hard end of the colonial process: urbanized, proletarianized, or with an eviscerated relation to traditional cultural practices. Further, while Potiki can be read as hospitable, extending an invitation to strangers, including those “not of our race,” who feel welcomed as manuhiri, it is also important to register the effect of the novel's vision of future cataclysmic social conflict. Roimata's meditations on the reenactment of the struggles of the gods in her children's play suggest that such conflict is an inescapable part of the human condition, but it seems equally clear that the coming conflagration will be between the tangata whenua and the shadowy forces of “progress”—the Pakeha. As is the case in visiting a wharenui, the warmth of the welcome and the beauty of its decoration do not disguise the formidable power of the figures who line the walls of the house.

Thinking of novels as haka or wharenui may seem to run the risk of archaizing anthropologization—but only if one thinks of such cultural forms as themselves moribund, an impossibility now for Pakeha as much as for Maori. Thinking of novels as haka or wharenui does problematize interpretation—for Pakeha if not for Maori—but an incitement to discourse and interlocution remains implicit in the positioning such metaphors suggest. Maori protocol enjoins the visitor to respect the kawa, or custom, of one's hosts. If Pakeha critics want to step into the Maori house of fiction, we will have to learn to respond to the resulting challenges to our identity, our history, and our reading practices in dialogic terms, as participants in korero. This is a prospect for Pakeha as exhilarating as it is … unsettling.

Notes

1. See Mereta Mita (1984) for an argument that only novels written in the Maori language can be defined as “Maori literature.”

2. One notable exception to this is Peter Beatson, whose The Healing Tongue (1989) was one of only two entries in the New Zealand National Library's subject catalogue under “Maori Literature in English.”

3. For a useful discussion of this issue, see Lamb 1986.

4. C. K. Stead is the critic most unabashed about invoking European criteria to assess Maori writing, as in his discussion of the inclusion of translations of Maori poetry in an anthology of New Zealand verse (Stead 1985). One of the most careful commentators on Witi Ihimaera's work has been Trevor James—based in Australia—who has provided a series of close readings of Ihimaera's novels that explore traditional categories such as theme, imagery, structure, characterization, and temporality through reference to Maori cosmology and social, political, and cultural practice (James 1988). While James's work is most helpful to those unfamiliar with Maori culture, it does have the effect of translating the novels into comprehensible European terms, a process Eric Cheyfitz (1991) regards as useful only to Westerners. The only monograph on a Maori writer to appear to date has been written, interestingly, by a Nigerian (Ojinmah 1993).

5. Christine Prentice (1991, 1993) is the strongest advocate of this view.

6. For background on the Treaty of Waitanga, see Kawharu 1989.

7. For the best recent overview, see Sturm 1991.

8. Probably the best known of these disputes occurred in the pages of Metro magazine. A (Pakeha) historian who has written extensively on Maori, Michael King, accused Stead of advocating “the ethnic cleansing of New Zealand literature”—a phrase that was withdrawn after a threat of legal action (King 1993). King focused on Stead's attack on the inclusion of translations of Maori oral poetry in The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985). Another controversy erupted over Stead's editorship of a Faber anthology of short stories from the Pacific when five prominent Maori and Polynesian writers withdrew from the project on the grounds that Stead lacked the mana, or prestige, to edit a representative collection of this kind.

9. See for example Bhabha 1990b.

10. In a review article about The Matriarch, Ihimaera is quoted as saying that “if I am writing for Pakeha as well as Maori then I am acknowledging that our history is a shared one” (Young 1986).

11. For another, useful discussion of novelistic treatments of this episode by both Maori and Pakeha writers, see Dowling 1989.

12. It is worth noting that—as Henderson's schema might suggest—The Matriarch did divide readers along gender lines. Ihimaera is emphatic that it is a “woman's haka,” but objections were made to the matriarch's characterization by Maori women critics such as Atareta Poananga (1986, 1987).

13. See for example Ranginui Walker's comments in Metro (1994, 134-35).

14. Tukutuku is an elaborate form of paneling. See Miniata 1967.

I would like to express my gratitude to Witi Ihimaera for his patience and generosity in discussing his work.

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